Wearing an elegant black dress, Anderson Barbata, a 55-year-old artist from Mexico City, looks like she should be at a gallery opening. Instead, her supplies — a roll of masking tape, a box of charcoal, and graphite — are spread out near the granite tombstone, and she's doing a kind of dance with a large sheet of handmade paper. Even the slightest breeze will make it catch like a sail.
In Sinaloa de Leyva, population approximately 5,000, Anderson Barbata's arrival is a big to-do, and local and state officials have assembled around the cemetery's cluttered walkways. One holds a massive, rainbow-striped umbrella to shield her from the sun. Others watch curiously as she attaches sheet after sheet to the grave. At one point, the town's young, charismatic mayor, Saúl Rubio Valenzuela, takes a break from chatting up constituents and colleagues and asks for a turn. The municipal photographer dutifully snaps several photos, and Rubio Valenzuela attempts to beg off.
"Already done?" Anderson Barbata jokes.
"No, no," he says before sheepishly carrying on.
Anderson Barbata isn't sure what she's going to do with the prints yet. Still, she's compelled to memorialize what is perhaps the cemetery's most celebrated six-foot plot, the grave of Julia Pastrana, variously known as a renowned but exploited performer, a human curiosity, and, as she's often called in Mexico, La Mujer Mono, the Monkey Woman.
Freda Moon
For a brief stretch in the mid-19th century, Pastrana was a strange sort of icon, one of many famous so-called dwarves, giants, and other disabled people who, with their enterprising managers, had created a roaring global industry that offered a path to lucrative salaries, comfortable retirements, and other trappings of middle- and upper-class life. In just a few years, Pastrana — who stood at four and a half feet, was covered in dark bristle and had a distractingly pronounced jaw — had gone from a largely poor, rural section of Mexico's Pacific Coast to New York and London, to Vienna and Berlin. In Moscow, in the winter of 1860, just days after giving birth to a baby boy, she was dead.
Yet that was hardly the end. After Pastrana's husband and manager had her and the infant embalmed, they were transformed into an even stranger exhibit — an exhibit that, like a ghost, drifted around Europe for more than a century. It wasn't until a hot afternoon last February that Pastrana's body was returned to Mexico and her zinc-lined, hermetically sealed coffin was buried beneath six feet of concrete. If it weren't for Anderson Barbata, this fortress of a grave, designed to keep Pastrana "like a fly in an ice cube," as the Sinaloan ethnologist Joel Barraza put it, wouldn't exist. Pastrana would be as she was a decade ago, when Anderson Barbata first heard of her — at a university in Oslo, Norway, under the stewardship of an academic who believed her rare physical abnormalities could yield important scientific research.
One hundred and fifty-three years after her death, Pastrana remains an enigma, a woman obscured by history and as mythologized as a flamed-out rock star. Yet the biographical details that can be pieced together offer a disturbing and fascinating portrait that spans the globe and weaves through a long-gone world where extreme disability was a kind of highly profitable commodity.
In life, Pastrana was a freak show celebrity. In death, she became a symbol of colonial-era exploitation and its aftermath. This is the story of her long journey home.
The Bridgeman Art Library
Only the broadest contours of Pastrana's early life are known. No birth certificate or baptism records have ever been found. She is believed to have been born in 1834 to a tribe of "Root Diggers" — a group of American Indians described as a kind of primate-caveman hybrid. They were diminutive, hairy, and naked. They lumbered around the caves of Sinaloa, taming monkeys and subsisting on bark, grass, and roots. "This singular HAIRY WOMAN is in some respects an exception to her tribe," said one pamphlet, which is now kept in a rare book and manuscript collection at Yale University. (As with other pamphlet writers of the era, Pastrana's had a fondness for capitalization.) "She is much larger, walks erect, and has no hair on her bosom, hands, or feet; and humanity seems to predominate."
Of course, there were no monkeys in the Sierra Madre. Nor were there Indians known as "Root Diggers," a catchall term whites used in the mid-19th century to refer to American Indians in parts of the Great Basin. Once merely ignorant, "digger" evolved into a "taxonomic stigma," as a linguistic history of the word put it — a kind of shorthand for a race of bloodthirsty savages.
Exaggeration and fabrication were typical features of freak show literature. As the sociologist Robert Bodgan points out in Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, such pamphlets were designed by promoters and managers — and freaks themselves — not to offer honest biographical portraits, but to sell a product. "People who viewed exhibits were vulnerable to any tale a showman might tell about the origin of the strange creatures they paid to gawk at," Bodgan wrote. "Having never seen a giraffe or a very small person with a distorted head, one might very well believe that they were from the moon, or from the dark crevices of one of the mysterious landmasses not yet penetrated by Westerners."
The ethnologist Barraza tells me that if Pastrana was indigenous, she may have been Acaxee, one of several groups of so-called Sinaloa Indians who lived in the mountains outside Sinaloa de Leyva. Yet Pastrana's appearance was hardly common; she was unique and suffered from two rare physical afflictions that wouldn't be accurately diagnosed for more than a century.
During my visit with Anderson Barbata to the desperately poor, drug war–ravaged Sinaloan foothills, the mayor, his photographer, and a half-dozen officials decide to tag along from Sinaloa de Leyva. We rumble past girls selling sweet bread and men herding cattle in a caravan of several vehicles — including two police escorts — that look something like the mayor of New York City's. At one point, after I ask about local indigenous groups, Rubio Valenzuela reaches for the sliding door of our van. With the vehicle still in motion, he throws it open and points at several ordinary-looking women trudging along the side of the road. "Look!" he shouts. "Indígenas!"
Eventually, we arrive in Ocoroni, a largely indigenous village not far from where Pastrana's family is believed to have lived. In the mid-1800s, the community would have been little more than a few ranches. These days, it has a couple of paved roads, a Pemex station, and a central plaza ringed by cracked pavement and overgrown grass.
I talked to several people whose families had lived there for generations and who grew up hearing about the "wolf woman," as Pedro Velez, the mayor's photographer, described her. For Velez, she was pure myth: a scary story that he had heard from his grandparents and that he repeated to his friends in school. "People would say my grandparents were crazy," Velez says. According to lore passed down from great-great-grandparents, a dwarf was found in a cave a dozen or so miles from Ocoroni, in an area that has since been scarred by mining operations. She was a brought to a ranch, where she lived until a Spaniard took her to a circus. Then, says Cruz Valenzuela Ruiz, a young health department worker, "She disappeared."
The Sinaloan historian Ricardo Mimiaga tells me that other oral histories from the area suggest that Pastrana was treated like a monster at home. According to these accounts, she was not allowed to use mirrors, and after her mother died when she was young, her uncle sold her to a traveling circus.
These stories correspond somewhat with the freak show literature. The Yale pamphlet states she was not found near Ocoroni, but 280 miles south, near another small mountain town, Copala. This version weaves a tale of a Mexican woman — "Mrs. Espinosa" — being captured and held hostage by cave-dwelling Indians. When Espinosa was rescued by local ranchers, she took a young Indian child with her. "Mrs. Espinosa took her home, had her christened, gave her the name of Julia Pastrana and made her husband godfather," the pamphlet said.
Pastrana is believed to have been taken in by the governor of Sinaloa, Pedro Sanchez, who treated her as both a trophy — a curiosity to show off to dinner guests — and a child to be cared for: She was taught to read and write by Sanchez's staff of private teachers. The pamphlet suggests that she was "ill used," however, so she fled for the mountains; along the way, she met a man named "M. Rates" who, with the help of a friend, "F. Sepulveda," "induced her to go to the United States with him for exhibition."
A couple of years ago, Mimiaga uncovered a much darker story line in the writings of Ireneo Paz — the grandfather of the great Mexican writer and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz — that suggests Pastrana was not a willing participant in her departure.
Ireneo was a journalist, author, high-ranking government official, and contemporary of Pastrana who wrote about a "bear woman," as he called her, in the first volume of his memoirs, published in the 1880s. In his telling, "F. Sepulveda" was Francisco Sepulveda, a notoriously corrupt customs administrator from Mazatlán, the lush coastal city that was, at that time, the capitol of Sinaloa. Mazatlán was also a cosmopolitan hub, and Sepulveda had devised a profitable kickback scheme with well-to-do Europeans who had settled there. Sepulveda had become wealthy enough to buy lands south of Mazatlán, yet he decided that purchasing Pastrana and exhibiting her in New York would be a better investment. So he sold his real estate and made an offer. It is unclear how much she was sold for, but by the winter of 1854, Pastrana had landed in New York City.
British Library, London courtesy of Mark Russell Bell / Via metaphysicalarticles.blogspot.com
The American freak show business was booming in the mid-19th century. According to Bodgan, the scene's haphazard early days had given way to an industry that was profitable, competitive, and organized. Increasingly laid-back attitudes about entertainment had created demand, and technological advances in photography had turned the mass-produced image into a moneymaker; successful freaks who could capture the public's imagination — like Chang and Eng, the conjoined twins from Siam (now Thailand) — were celebrities of the era, and managers like the ex-grocery store operator turned showman P.T. Barnum hustled to acquire promising talent.
New York City was central in this burgeoning business. Thirteen years before Pastrana arrived there, Barnum had opened a new museum in lower Manhattan that would revolutionize the industry. Barnum was a notorious embellisher and fraudster, and this new enterprise — the American Museum — was all about entertainment. Alongside wax exhibits of Chang and Eng was a purported mermaid skeleton discovered in the South Pacific; in fact, the "Fejee Mermaid," as Barnum called it, was an elaborate hoax, a fish sewn to a monkey head. Museums across the country were modeled after Barnum's creation, and he became one of the most well-known showmen in the world.
Doctors and scientists were lured into the business too. In Pastrana's pamphlet, for instance, a doctor identified as "Alex B. Mott M.D." noted that the enigmatic origins of this "Semi-Human Indian" would "have puzzled the Sphinx. She is a perfect woman — a rational creature, endowed with speech which no monster has ever possessed. She is therefore a Hybrid, wherein the nature of woman predominates over the brute — the Ourang Outang. Altogether she is the most extraordinary being of the day." Another blurb, from a man identified as the former curator of comparative anatomy at the Boston Society of Natural History, noted, "The looks, anatomical conformation, abnormal growth of hair upon the person, sufficiently show that Julia Pastrana belongs to some of the Indian Tribes, supposed to be of Asiatic origin...She is a perfect woman, performing all the functions of the sex."
When I ask Bodgan which of Pastrana's departure scenarios made more sense — were freaks an exploited underclass or a strange kind of entrepreneur? — he tells me that generalizations tend to distort the realities of their lives. Consider, for instance, Chang and Eng. In the 1820s, their mother allowed them to be exhibited in the United States for a few thousand dollars. She apparently received only a fraction of what she was promised, but the twins went on to manage themselves once their contact expired. A decade later, they quit the freak show business, bought a plantation and slaves in North Carolina, married, and had more than 20 children. On the other hand, there was Ota Benga, the Congolese Pygmy. In 1906, after being sold into slavery, he was placed in a cage at the Bronx Zoo with an orangutan. There was considerable outrage, and Benga stayed at the zoo for only a short time; according to the authors Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, he was never able to return to Africa, and he became so grief stricken that in 1916 he shot himself to death.
