The Heirs of Disaster 
The currents of change are obliging 
the people of a Mexican village to rethink 
their concept of the realm of the possible 
By John L. Gwaltney 
I remember the Mexican village of 
San Pedro Yolox when I left it in 
1964 as preeminently civil, predomi- 
nantly poor, and generally resigned 
to, but not content with, an astound- 
ing array of recurrent environmental 
trauma. “We are poor here so we drink 
our herb tea, burn our candles, make 
our vows, and hope for a miracle.” 
The seventeen years that have inter- 
vened between the termination of my 
original fieldwork and a recent return 
visit to the Sierra Juarez have wit- 
nessed massive, multifarious change 
for San Pedro. As always the torrent 
of change has proved to be an in- 
termittent stream. Many things re- 
main what they were for all that in- 
novation, but many others are pro- 
foundly, irrevocably altered. 
Margaret Mead was one of the few 
practical, positive thinkers I have ever 
known. It was her lively mind and 
common sense that were instrumental 
in first placing me in the remote vil- 
lage of San Pedro Yolox, high in the 
eastern Sierra Madre. Eighteen years 
ago the proper intellectual disposition 
of a blind, black graduate student rep- 
resented even more of a challenge to 
the imagination and humanity of se- 
nior scholars than it does now. The 
idea of sending a blind ethnologist to 
study the role and expectation of 
blindness in a village in the heart of 
the New World’s onchocerciasis (river 
blindness) zone was Mead’s response 
to that challenge. 
So in 1963, while still acquiring “si- 
erra legs,” I trudged into San Pedro 
Yolox (at that time some three hours 
of hard walking from the nearest ve- 
hicular road), ready to begin a study 
of cultural accommodation to blind- 
ness and other environmental trauma 
in that Chinantec- and Spanish-speak- 
ing Sierra Juarez municipality. 
Politically, San Pedro Yolox is a 
The author, after an absence of seventeen years, returns to the village of San Pedro Yolox. Judith Gwaltney 
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