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When I had finished working on the final version of this book, with some fear and trepidation I decided to get in touch with Jesús’s brother, who is called Matsiwa in the book.This is a plot-driven narrative, just as my previous book, AWar ofWitches, was. It is ethnographically accurate , based on notes and tapes, but as in any good tale, the plot, tension, and drama of the story take precedence.The events of the life of Mad Jesus have been selectively cut and pared,spliced into the context of the telling of the tale and grafted onto the aftermath of the shoot-out that eliminated his little band on the coast of Nayarit. I wondered how the man I have called Matsiwa would react to my assertion of his guilt in the demise of his brother. In reality none of the players were individually guilty, yet all played a part in the demise of Mad Jesus. Matsiwa is a very sophisticated artisan with two wives and seven children . He has traveled to Europe and Southeast Asia to sell his work. He has spent considerable time studying English both in Mexico and in Los Angeles.When we finally got together, I explained to him what I was trying to do with the book and I began reading passages to him, sometimes translating, sometimes not, from the first chapter to the end of the book.We reminisced about Chucho. He wept for his brother. Crying is not a demonstration of weakness for Huichol men,but rather a demonstration of emotional power. When we finished the book he told me,“Well,perhaps,perhaps what you have said is true.It is not what I did,but perhaps in a way it is more true. It is the story of my brother, Chucho Loco.” Matsiwa was in the end quite pleased with the tale of Mad Jesus that I had forged out of years of pondering how to tell such a tale. There were so many people involved in the telling of this tale that it is hard to think of them all. My Huichol friends, some of whom told 258 | afterword me of Chucho,and others who would not even mention him,were my prime inspiration.Doris Heyden,Thelma Sullivan,Paul Kirchhoff,Karl Heidt, and Bill Sweezy encouraged me early on. Juan Rulfo was a superb editor. Guillermo Bonfil, Mercedes Oliviera,Arturo Warrman, and Margarita Nolasco showed me an example to follow.All of my colleagues at the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, especially Ignacio Bernal, Juan Comas, Antonio Pompa y Pompa, and Alfonso Villarojas, the grand old men of Mexican anthropology, and my friends who were becoming grand old men,Alfredo Lopéz Austín and Andrés Medina,as well as our visiting scholars,Bill Bright,Norman McQuown, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Linda Schele were invaluable. Rosa María Blanca, Bob Walls, and Peter Wolfe listened to the tale early on and helped me give it structure while I was working with Juan Rulfo. Laurence Ferlinghetti, whose comments helped me more than he could ever know, and Jenine PommyVega, a very special muse with an ear for the right word and a craftsman’s sense of poetry,showed me that a piece was never finished until it was perfect. Gregory Corso, Ed Sanders,andAllen Ginsberg,who always had time to talk,were an inspiration . Claire Ritter, Pedro Lujan, Edwina Williams, Guillermo Contreras, and Barbara Radin in NewYork listened to many versions of this tale,but it was Peter Shotwell,my collaborator in AWar ofWitches, who, working off of an earlier attempt at telling this tale by Juan Rulfo and myself,developed the thematic structure of the first section of Mad Jesus. His conversations with Francisco Pimentiel and with various mara’acames through Anne-Marie de Badereau during Semana Santa in Santa Catarina in  helped him to integrate tales of Santo Cristo by Benitez and Zingg. Unfortunately, Shotwell’s third-person version of the tale had many dramatic problems and at his suggestion I went back to the earlier versions.Shotwell’s help was invaluable in earlier versions of Mad Jesus in working out the moral ambiguities of the tale. Durwood Ball of the University of New Mexico Press made invaluable suggestions, as did an anonymous reader from the Press. My students Juan Olza Coyotzi and Lori Eldridge put together the last version of this book.Ted Coyle made substantial suggestions on the final version of this tale...

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