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Don Patricio’s Dream
is that he was talking; he was speaking in English. And I wanted
to talk with him, and he did not speak to me. He turned and went
away from me, over the top of the hill and out of sight.” (Field-
notes, April, 20 , 1998 )
I heard this dream as the expression of Don Patricio’s ambivalence,
his desires and fears, about working with me. In trying to understand
the dream sequence as a whole, I find that certain elements appear
transparent if we view the imagery presented in each of the three ep-
isodes as referring to that contained in the others in the development
of similar or contrasting themes. From the outset, we can gain in-
terpretive purchase on this dream if we first also take into consider-
ation the more obvious features of Mazatec symbolism in its mani-
fest content.
The dream begins with Don Patricio cutting firewood, a condensed
symbol of his labor to provide for his home, a morally appropriate ac-
tivity free from ambiguity or conflict. The second part of the dream
appears to express both his moral qualms and his subsequent rejec-
tion of them. “Suddenly” he finds himself picking coffee. Coffee, the
chief export commodity grown in the Sierra, is, for the Mazatecs,
the most powerful image representing exchange value (as opposed
to the use value of firewood in this case) and access to the accumula-
tion of hard cash, much like the money Don Patricio continues to re-
ceive by working with me. This association is made especially com-
pelling by what immediately follows in the dream, which appears in
contrast to the fact that in waking reality Don Patricio owns the land
where his coffee trees grow. Therefore, the relationship in this epi-
sode of the dream must refer to something other than that between
Don Patricio and a landlord in the strictly literal or mundane sense. I
contend that the “master/owner of the land,” who shows up to warn
him against harvesting the coffee, represents what we might under-
stand to be a kind of cultural conscience, opposing Don Patricio’s de-
sire to take something of value from the land to exchange with out-
siders for money.
Don Patricio refers to this figure using the same phrase convention-
ally used by Mazatecs to refer to Earth Lord spirits of the mountains,
