The Lariat - Physical and Cultural Setting

Physical and Cultural Setting

“ Halfway down the slope, a little flat, with a few Indian huts, and a small house of logs and adobe, with a chimney. Below, a condor is soaring around and around. ”
“ The Mission was a little town surrounded by a wall. Besides the church, there were the Indian quarters for the unmarried men, the Indian quarters for the girls (also called the nunnery), the pozoleria or kitchen where the mush was cooked in a great cauldron, the carpenter shop, various storerooms. One corner of the great courtyard was occupied by a crew of Indians making adobe bricks, and was known as the adoberia. ”

There is a lot of “mixing” of opposites in this story that is a direct result of the physical and cultural setting: Catholic and Animist practice, Native American and European reminiscent of Estela Portillo Trambley’s “The Burning” which juxtaposes Europe versus the New World, aristocracy and peasantry, light and dark, justice and evil. The reata (or lariat) is functionally compromised when two elements are intertwined: Fray Luis’s monk’s cord and the leather from Saturnino’s reata. The elements are metaphorically Catholicism and Animism – suggesting that the two cannot function together.

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