Northern Mexico Culture & Language

Northern culture is frontier culture, and its most distinctive elements belong to peoples who were never fully absorbed.

The Raramuri

Known outside Mexico as the Tarahumara, they are famous for running — rarajipari races in which teams kick a wooden ball along canyon trails for distances that can exceed a hundred and fifty kilometres over a day and a night, in sandals cut from tyres. It is a communal event with betting and drinking rather than a sport, and the attention it has attracted from foreign runners is regarded with mixed feelings. Their religion combines Catholic and older elements, most visible at Easter.

Paquime pottery

The ceramic tradition of Casas Grandes was revived at Mata Ortiz from the 1970s by Juan Quezada, who taught himself from potsherds; the village now produces hand-coiled, hand-painted pots of remarkable fineness and the work sells internationally.

Music

Norteno — accordion, bajo sexto, and narrative corridos — and banda sinaloense, a brass ensemble of some fifteen players. Both are northern, both dominate, and the corrido tradition of singing the news has a long and now controversial life.

Charreria

Mexico’s national sport is a set of horsemanship events descended directly from the working practices of the northern haciendas — roping, reining, bull-tailing and a pass in which a rider leaps between two moving horses. It is UNESCO-listed, performed in a keyhole-shaped arena in formal dress, and it is taken most seriously here, where the ranching that produced it is still the economy.

The Yaqui deer dance

Performed in Sonora at Easter, with a dancer wearing a deer’s head and gourd rattles.

Spanish is the language, in a northern variety that is faster, flatter and more clipped than central Mexican Spanish, with a great deal of distinctive slang and English borrowing near the border.

English is common in Monterrey’s business world and in the border cities, and much less so elsewhere in the north.

Raramuri is spoken by tens of thousands in the Copper Canyon, many of them with limited Spanish, and Yaqui, Mayo, Tepehuan and Guarijio are spoken elsewhere in the northern sierras.

Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect, is the everyday language of the Mennonite colonies in Chihuahua and Durango.

Useful Spanish: buenos dias, gracias, por favor, cuanto cuesta. Northern Spanish uses ándale and órale constantly and they mean roughly everything.