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The translation of this interview consists of extracts only.



The information in this interview is quite difficult to understand, in part because only extracts are available. During one year’s festivities for the Day of the Dead, fighters in the Mexican Revolution apparently entered the narrator’s village, helping themselves to the untouched, specially laid-out meal intended to honour dead family members.

Teófila notes that significant changes to the village have occurred within her lifetime, highlighting the increase in population and the receding of the forest. “Forest! There was almost nothing but trees on the mountain, just that. I was alive for some years before they built the highway, they cleared it and cut the trees. I was here then, when the people came from the other side.”

Social change is also mentioned, with Teófila believing that young people no longer work as hard as her generation. She recalls her own participation in agricultural work. “I used to go to weed the fields with [my husband], I used to work with the animals - in front of the bulls. I sowed the field with my feet like this.” She also comments that people now use stoves instead of cooking by fire, and sometimes buy tortillas (maize-based flat bread) instead of making them. Footwear, too, has become commonplace: “. . . that’s how we went about [in the past], without shoes. . . Life has changed a lot because there were only poor people, rags, but you don’t see this now, it’s changing with the time.”

detailed breakdown

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