Q: For those people who don’t know who the Rarámuris are, could you tell us about them and their tradition of running?

A: The Rarámuris are native peoples of northern Mexico, in the state of Chihuahua in a place called Copper Canyon. They call themselves "the people," the Rarámuris. Other people know [them] as the Tarahumaras. They believe that running is part of the cycle of life, and they actually run to continue that whole cycle of life. And if they were to stop, then the Earth and the world would stop rotating. They usually run [wearing] three-pronged thongs on their feet, kicking a hard wooden ball--about the size of a tennis ball, to give you an idea.
They've been evaluated medically and scientifically for, oh, the last hundred and fifty years. And the Rarámuris have the capability of running up to four-five hundred miles, non-stop. They usually have torch bearers and other people supporting them when they do these runs. Some of it, actually, is a way that villages show their strength, by [pitting] their best runner against [another village's] runner. They cover tremendous distances. In a day, a Rarámuris, or a Tarahumara, will cover, probably, sixty to seventy miles a day, just in regular activities, visiting friends, harvesting corn, gathering water. So, the Tarahumara is the only tribe in the Americas--and that goes all the way from Tierra Del Fuego to Alaska--that is still growing. The population of Tarahumara has increased over the last hundred years. There is no other tribe in now North or South America that is growing. These are the only native peoples that have been growing.

Q: Do you know why they make that run to Mesa Verde?

A: I have no evidence why the Rarámuris were running to Mesa Verde in the North. I do know more about their runs to the South. Traditionally, we know that the Rarámuris would end up at a place called, Jale Catorce, which is the same place that many other tribes would head for [because of] the peyote fields. So there [are] religious pilgrimages that take place on an annual basis, and the Rarámuris would follow the Sierra Madre all the way south, to areas that are, today, in San Luis Potosi, of Mexico.
[In reference to] running up to Mesa Verde in the North, we know that Mesa Verde was a really important religious place. But it’s not clear right now to a lot of us what actually took place there. But it looks like the Rarámuris also were running to the North and meeting other tribes in North America.

Q: The ancient books say that some of our ancestors talk about coming from the North. How do you interpret that?

A: The controversy’s always been in Native American circles, as to where the peopling of the Americas come from. My interpretation of all the literature is that our origins are from Central Africa, Kenya, and that we migrated North as a people, [to] places like [the] Bering [Straits] up in Kamchatka. We crossed the Bering Straits in two waves, based on two glaciation periods, fifty-sixty thousand years ago, maybe even ninety thousand years ago. We [were] coming from areas of the Bering Straits or Berinia. My belief is that that’s why Mayans look like Eskimos and Hopi and so forth--because we really came from the North. We came through a corridor, a very very narrow corridor, during those glaciation periods.


Q: What do you think is the significance of the Southwest in the migration story?

A: Well, I believe that in the migration story, the first group of people really aren’t in the Southwest. The first group of people that come from the deep deep North, above Alaska and the Bering Straits, I think, the first native peoples, or the first explorers, the first hunters, gatherers--probably worked all the way to Tierra Del Fuego because of a very tight corridor [during] a glaciation period. And so the Southwest couldn't have been a Southwest, [because] it was under ice. So these early people all are on the coastal fringe down through South America all the way to Tierra Del Fuego. I think as people start developing culture, religion, and so forth, over thousands and thousands of years, and the glaciation period starts to recede, then I think the Southwest starts to flourish. And I think that people then start moving to the East. They move from the West into the East. And some of these, then, create the great religions of the Southwest. But the greater religions--and greater is a subjective term--the temple-builders were probably first in the Meso-American parts, because those places were under ice less than they were in the northern part of the continent.


Q: Going back to the your logo, could you describe it to us in detail?

A: Aztlán [Track Club], when it was started in 1974, by some runners here in East Los Angeles, created a logo, and everybody still kind of jokes about the logo. "The corn runners," they call us. There [are] three components to the logo. Aztlán being our motherland, whether mythical or real.

The corn [is] really important to us. Most myths of all of the Americas refer to corn, that we are "the corn people," that we were made from corn, and that life ceases when corn ceases. From an anthropologic science point of view, corn is food. It's a carbohydrate. We can't run without carbohydrates, not very far. Plus, the other component is that it looks like corn had to be domesticated. You don’t find wild corn that’s edible. So that means that human beings, many thousands of years ago, before they knew anything about genetics and plant manipulation, made hybrids of this plant, and made it an edible source of food, which today is found all over the world. Most of Europe would have died of hunger if wasn’t for food staples from the Americas. And corn was one of them. Potato crops were the other ones. So these native peoples probably helped save the world, and yet, they haven’t been given that credit. To the Aztec, to most native peoples, the sun is life. It’s energy. Without the sun, we cease to exist.

So the symbol basically says homeland, science, the corn and food, and the sun is energy. And those are the reasons that we run. We run for those three reasons.