A Rebel Song. Mujeres Cardencheras from the Sierra of Durango

Thanks to public television, one afternoon I came across a documentary, A morir a los desiertos (To Die in The Deserts, Ferrer, 2016), about a type of a cappella singing with low, sad tones capable of tearing off pieces of the soul evoking a lost love or provoking bursts of laughter because of its jokes. The images depicted a dry and sandy village, crossed by the train in the desert of the Cardencheros de Sapioriz.

That was my first approach to a musical genre with no instruments other than the voices of its performers. Today, those songs are lost amidst the drought that is affecting agricultural activity in La Laguna region. The younger generations enjoy different kinds of music and poetry, which would not be a problem if the traditional cardenche singing coexisted with the new referents in their communities of origin.

Cardenche is a traditional singing genre born in the region of the Comarca Lagunera, between the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango. However, there is also evidence of its presence in the states of Nuevo León, Zacatecas, and even in the Bajío region, in states such as San Luis Potosí, Aguascalientes, Jalisco and Guanajuato.

These are spontaneous compositions fixed in the memory with the help of rhythm. They are poetic forms that are reconfigured when songs pass from town to town and that do not obey fixed compositional canons, as the Latin Americanist scholar Minerva Rojas Ruiz (2008) points out. Instead, they are capricious and interpreted through yelling mixed with long silences, asynchronous choruses, and the power of three or four essential voices.

Originally linked to music, poetry is a vehicle for community stories. This is the case with the cardenche singing and the genres related to or influenced by it, such as corrido, alabados, and pastorelas. The best-known ensembles are the Cardencheros de Sapioriz and La Flor de Jimulco, from Durango and Coahuila’s deserts, respectively. Nevertheless, the tradition spreads out beyond the deserts.

SLAVERY, BAROQUE, AND ALABADOS
Mujeres Cardencheras (a group of women devoted to cardenche singing) has been performing and carving their own path for more than 20 years with their current line-up, although their origins date back to 1985. During their journey, the canto cardenche have been criticized at times, but still, they have been recognized for their singing, their voices, and the heritage they have preserved, both from the legacy of their grandmothers and that of the singers of their communities. They have nurtured cardenche with original compositions such as “Llegue l’aguacero” (Let the Rain Come), written by Alma Leticia Montenegro García in response to the call for the creation of the songbook ¡Por ti seré! Nuevo Cancionero Mexicano (For you, I’ll be! New Mexican Songbook) (Secretaría de Cultura, 2022):
Cardenche singing is named after the cardo, the name given to the thistles that grow in northern Mexico (Cylindropuntia imbricata), species of cacti whose thorns produce great pain when they get nailed in the skin and even greater pain when they are pulled out. The pain is so intense that it is comparable to that produced by love, exile, or death, all of them frequent topics in cardenche singing, which are accompanied by word games with subtle double meanings.

Although its origin can be traced to the voice of the laborers at the cotton fields in the haciendas, at the end of the 19th century, it probably has older roots. During the haciendas period, under Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship, the Comarca Lagunera was an important cotton-producing center and, at the same time, a place of exploitation for agricultural workers. Laborers lived in conditions of slavery, so, exhausted at the end of their workdays, they used to gather to sing, hidden from their bosses, in the dumpsters of the countryside. In the panel discussion “Canto Cardenche: dolor en la poética tradicional del desierto” (“Cardenche Singing: Pain in the Traditional Poetics of the Desert”), ethnomusicologist Héctor Lozano explained that another way of calling cardenche was canto de basurero (dumpster singing) because of this practice (Montenegro et al., 2023).

Just as the laborers of the haciendas lived in false freedom, centuries ago, during the Colony, slavery was normal. Anthropologist Nadia Cristina Romero García (2015) makes an exciting journey in her PhD thesis through the different settlers who inhabited the region of La Laguna since colonial times, including an important group of Afro-descendants trafficked and forced to work in various economic activities.

In addition to the enslavement of people of African origin, in New Spain, the native peoples were displaced to give way to settlements of Europeans and Creoles, seeking integration through Catholic religion. Romero García (2015) points out that it should not be taken for granted that cardenche singing arose through spontaneous generation among the cotton laborers, but that one should remember the work of the laborers of the Nazas River in the region, of the Chichimeca peoples, called this way out of contempt both by the Aztec empire and the Spanish conquerors, who occupied northern Mexico with the support of Tlaxcala peoples. That is to say, it is not possible to determine a pure and recent origin of cardenche singing.

In the Sierra of Durango, a first mission was founded in Tepehuanes in 1597, which introduced religious songs whose interpretation was delegated to women. These songs, called alabados (praises), later gave shape to the Serrano cardenche, which until the 18^th century was a way of singing found in the streets of mountain communities, according to the testimonial book and catalog of cardenche singer Alma Montenegro García (2020).

In the booklet included in the recording of Tradiciones musicales de La Laguna. La canción cardenche (Musical Traditions of La Laguna. The cardenche song) (INAH, 1977), anthropologist Irene Vázquez Valle mentioned a hypothesis that established a relationship between cardenche and traditions of the European Baroque and Spanish Renaissance due to its interpretative ornamentation. This article presents some of the sources for these songs of the oral tradition.

THE PAIN IS SO INTENSE THAT IT IS COMPARABLE TO THAT PRODUCED BY LOVE, EXILE, OR DEATH

THE POWER OF ONE LINE
In “La línea del ombligo” (The Pregnancy Line), Marisol García Walls (2019) starts from an observation by Rebecca Solnit in Men Explain Things to Me (2016) about how the masculine lineage can be traced through surnames, while that of women is erased through generations. Citing Solnit, Walls proposes the concept of pregnancy line to trace the interrupted path of women in family genealogies. Grandparents bequeathed songs to their granddaughters, but an umbilical line united the women of the Sierra Madre Occidental, where the oral tradition has passed from mothers and grandmothers, from great-great-grandmothers and aunts to daughters. We can hear their stories today thanks to the power of that line.
In addition to interpreting alabados in church, Mujeres Cardencheras say that they listened to these traditional verses since their childhood in kitchens, in the river when making laundry or fetching water, and while doing daily chores. Alma Montenegro learned as a teenager to sing tasajo (a sub-genre of cardenche singing) in the streets with cardenche singers. This was frowned upon because it was associated with alcohol consumption and earned her punishments at home. Fortunately, she was a rebel.
In 1985, Alma Leticia and María Guadalupe Ríos Herrera founded the group Mujeres Cardencheras in Santa Catarina de Tepehuanes, their hometown. In 2003, two more singers joined: Catalina Bañuelos Chávez, from the community of Los Ojitos, Santiago Papasquiaro, and Evangelina Núñez Soto, from San Pedro de Azafranes, Otáez.

Although alabados are a fundamental part of their repertoire, so is tasajo (name given to another cactus, Cylindropuntia arbuscula, of the same family as the thistle), which includes the songs of the street, that is, quips and pleasantries: as we say in Mexico, songs paired with mezcal in the Sierra (just as sotol was customary in the desert plain). THE FUTURE OF CARDENCHE
The need to express the stories of communities has led to the development of artistic expressions that radically unite distant nations. I think of the songs of the slaves in the cotton fields of the United States [see box], of those of British workers in the 20^th century, of the fauxbourdon of Medieval times. The laborers of the Comarca Lagunera sang collectively to tell their stories, to reach divinity, or to rejoice in life. And I think of the Chichimeca nations mentioned by Romero García, the songs we did not get to know, the languages that are dying in that region, and the songs of women that have not yet been recorded.

Given its diffuse, ancestral, and multiple origins, cardenche singing of the Sierra of Durango, like that of La Laguna plain, transforms naturally and cannot be expected to always be the same. Many times, the news have warned us that this sung genre is in its way to extinction, and that is true: the pure version of cardenche is not practiced very often. However, it continues to beat in the voices of new artists and transforms; new verses are composed, instruments are added to the voices or new choral games are created. The corrido played today in the world of popular entertainment may have been influenced by cardenche singing.

Just as radio suddenly appeared in Tepehuanes in the middle of the last century, as mentioned by Alma Montenegro, a process began in which the hegemonic popular music started to displace this ancestral way of singing. According to testimonies collected by the cardenche singer, lyrics were taken from cardenche and modified to be distributed as original pieces by famous performers. A fundamental task is to make known and offer a place for listening and promoting canto de basurero, tasajo, or cardenche singing and the genres derived from it.

A month before the presentation of Mujeres Cardencheras at the Cultura UNAM Festival, they participated in an independent festival of traditional musicians in Querétaro and then at Los Pinos Cultural Center in Mexico City. Two facts stood out: due to health problems, the fourth singer of Mujeres Cardencheras, Evangelina Núñez, was unable to travel, and at the meeting of traditional musicians, Alma, Guadalupe, and Catalina met Guadalupe Salazar, considered the last cardenche singer of Sapioriz because of the generation he belongs to. He sang the bassline, and they complemented each other perfectly Neven though their traditions come from different territories: the essence of the singing is the same.

Efforts such as that of Taller de canto cardenche de Chihuahua (Chihuahua’s Cardenche Singing Workshop), the work of the internationally recognized Cardencheros de Sapioriz, Juan Pablo Villa’s Coro Acardenchado, and the workshops held by Mujeres Cardencheras and their participation in national calls and festivals are necessary to preserve a poetic and historical oral tradition that unites us with other nations. Performances of songs such as “Yo ya me voy” (I’m Leaving) by Lila Downs, “Al pie de un árbol” (At the Foot of a Tree), “Yo ya me voy a morir a los desiertos” (I’m Leaving to Die in the Deserts) by Juan Pablo Villa, and his collaboration with the duet Ampersan; “Lo que la vida se lleva” (What Life Takes Away), the album Zaguán (Cinco canciones cardenche) (Entrance, Five Cardenche Songs) by Lázaro Cristóbal Comala, or the single estrella / nadie (star / nobody) by Nicole Horts, are, simultaneously, bridges to the traditional cardenche poetics, and a threshold to our own history and to the reflection on our relationship with that history [see the author’s Spotify playlist].

POETICS FROM SIERRA DE DURANGO
An ongoing concern at the university is to address the climate emergency at the intersection of poetry and the struggle for gender equity. From literature, we have traveled through different territories of Mexico, such as the Xitle badlands, the lava of the Paricutín, and the bed of the Ayoloco glacier in the Iztaccíhuatl, discovering poems, stories, chronicles, novels, essays, dissemination texts, epistles, and multidisciplinary logbooks such as Dr. Atl’s on the Paricutín.

With a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach, we had the opportunity to share Mixe music and narratives from the Sierra of Oaxaca with the presentation of the collective Kumantukxuxpë in the previous edition of the Festival Cultura UNAM. This group fuses the trumpet—a traditional regional instrument—with jazz, video jockeying, and Mixe language. Finally, it was time to listen to the voices of women from the desert and the mountain of the Sierra Madre Occidental.

In the 1970s, Irene Vázquez Valle had the sensitivity to record cardenche audios for the first time and contributed to the founding of the National Sound Library. The records that today constitute the collection that bears her name at the National Institute of Anthropology, the pioneering work at the National School of Music started a decade later by Héctor Lozano with his cardenche catalog, or the passionate research of doctor Romero García—who has dedicated her academic life to understand the history and development of this traditional way of singing at UNAM’s Institute for Historical Research—are examples of preservation that institutions such as our university should foresee, organize, and disseminate.

On Friday, October 20, 2023, Mujeres Cardencheras shared their story at the University Cultural Center (Montenegro et al., 2023) and offered a concert as part of Cultura UNAM Festival (Mujeres Cardencheras, 2023). Making visible the only women’s polyphonic ensemble dedicated to promoting cardenche professionally represented the opportunity to have contact with our living history, to listen to it, and to be moved by it. The voices of Alma, Lupita, and Cata allowed us to evoke how life in the countryside and mountains of northern Mexico is, leaving us with the little thorn of their singing.

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