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Old Cultures and Conquested Texts:
Boundary Disputes in Readings of Refugio Savala
One of the most problematic aspects of contemporary literary studies is the
fundamental malleability of meaning for any particular reader. Armed with a myriad of
critical theories, historical groundings, or personal preferences, the ‘meaning’ of any text
can be argued over inconclusively for innumerable hours. Yet even aside from this postmodernist dilemma, some texts remain contestable even within a localized cultural
context. These types of ‘boundary works,’ as discussed by William Hanks, are
interpretable according to two or more distinct sets of conventions, yielding alternative
(even contradictory) readings. Hanks tends to overstate the contradictory-ness of
interpretable meanings, since by definition any boundary work would be written under
the influences of both sets of practices and would itself have to contain mediated
meanings to be justifiably read from both perspectives, and over-focuses on text to the
exclusion of here critical contexts, but his ideas are structurally sound and highly
adaptable. They lend themselves well to examining one text, The Autobiography of
Refugio Savala, which fits within three existing if inequitably valued ‘literary’/cultural
traditions which all manifest themselves at different points in the narrative and suggest
differing readings of its overall meaning. In both the style and the content of the text it is
possible to see Spanish Christian culture, traditional Yaqui worldviews, and ‘modern’
Western literary concerns influencing the telling of Savala’s story.
While Savala’s narrative, culled together from his own stories though with
debatable ultimate editorial approval of the author, itself tells a history of the Yaqui
people, as they crossed from a modernizing state where they were killed for their culture
to one where they were only confined to specific jobs and geographic areas, a broader
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historical contextualization is necessary to fully understand the complex interplays of
competing cultures inherent in the text. The conquest of what is now Mexico by the
Spanish, both militarily by conquistadors and culturally through the influence of
missionaries and transplants, from the 16th century onward, was in many ways much
more significant for the Yaqui people then their later removal across the American
border. The Yaqui would have first encountered the Spanish, likely through the Catholic
missionaries who would teach them first and foremost the language and ideas needed in
order to save their souls, in the late 16th or early 17th century, depending upon the precise
route taken and the unknowable historic location of the Yaqui. Indeed, like their
mythologized eight villages, what is presented by Savala as Yaqui culture is only what
crystallized in the face of Spanish cultural conquest, an historic remnant of cultural
accommodations arrived at during and immediately after the moment of contact. Faced
with persecution for centuries before they were forced at gunpoint out of their ‘ancestral’
homeland, the Yaqui adopted and adapted Spanish/Mexican culture for just as long, but
always using the terms and strategies they’d learned to initially survive. It also seems,
from Savala’s work that they picked up much from the literary stylings of the Spanish
conquerors. Indeed, Savala’s text reads almost exactly like a 16th century Spanish
conquest narrative, complete with running, analytically light if often insightful thickly
descriptive commentary on what is going on around him. What is particularly and
uniquely shared by this genre, rarely read outside circles of early American students, and
Savala’s autobiography is the lack of deep personal reflection on what is depicted.
Unlike much American autobiography there is little thought about and desire to convey
what one experienced, with the focus instead simply on the conveyance itself. Yet it is
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presented as an autobiography, a story of an individual life which is a distinctly Western
literary convention, while simultaneously weaving in myths long held and recently
adapted by the Yaqui, and therefore must be read in these contexts as well.
Discerning what is ‘Yaqui’ in Savala’s narrative is made difficult by this long
cultural interchange impacting the local background from which he wrote, yet a few
elements seem clearly American-Indian in nature. Savala’s interweaving of mythic
stories at significant points in the text is clearly reminiscent of broader native techniques
of storytelling for contemporary purposes. His means of describing traditional Yaqui
cultural forms in an oft-hand descriptive way here takes on another meaning, as it reflects
his total comfort and deep understanding of these practices. Feeling no need to
authorially ascribe meaning to actions he’d grown up understanding, Savala’s images are
in many ways here the purest form of descriptive anthropology. Yet if he is noticeably
Yaqui in the ways he uses stories and understatedly describes cultural practices, he is
aware through his increasing contacts with American culture and exposure to Western
literature of the boundaries of these techniques. From the perspective of modern
American literature, Savala’s story is both biography and contextualized travel narrative.
It begins with an historic placement and a brief introduction of the reader’s guide on this
richly textured history journey to and through the early 20th century Southwest, creating it
as a primary text to be written upon by scholars at the same time that it is readable within
the framework of On the Road. Like these other fringe tales of the borders of American
life, Savala’s narrative utilizes place names to mark a path and provide a descriptive
grounding, though seemingly without their serving as mythic signifiers as in other
Southwestern native contexts. It remains possible to interpret elements such as this
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simultaneously from multiple perspectives, though the ‘blended’ form of the extent text
suggests a pastiche of influences at work, rather than continuously conflicted layers of
multiple meanings.
It must be remembered of course that this blending was the result as much of the
influence of outsiders with independent agendas and outlooks as it was of Savala feeling
the ‘need’ to tell his story to the world. As such, even the book’s presentation as a
narrative of conflicting cultures needs to be problematized. Valid interpretations of the
tale as a story of Yaqui native and Western literary culture coming together in the life and
works of a precariously placed poet tends to downplay the forms and concerns of the
book itself. While readings of the work as autobiography or native ethnography are
suggested by this outlook, it wholly obscures the conquest narrative style descended from
those who first represented the Western ‘other’ to the Yaqui. Since no one reads these
conquest narratives anymore, and since they are so far removed historically from the
temporal context immediately apparent as important to the works understanding, the
strong if distant cultural relation between the accommodations of contact and those of
continued survival are obscured by even such an ostensibly complex reading. Yet the
influence of these first missionaries and their first converts is rampant throughout
Savala’s work. With the culturally adapted Catholic beliefs of his people serving as the
most meaningful mythology he inserts, much fuller seems a reading of this text as a
boundary not only between late 19th century Mexican Yaqui and early 20th century
American culture, but between a culture crystallized and Catholicised in the face of
conquest and one struggling again to find its identity in the presence of a powerful
cultural alternative with set ideas about both Native Americans and Literature.