La documentación de la tradición oral entre los pima: el diablo pelea con la luna

Abstract

Oral tradition among the Pima Bajo has scarcely been studied, although it is one of the languages with the oldest grammatical studies in existence in Northwestern Mexico. This study is known as Arte de la lengua névome que se dice pima, propia de Sonora, published for the first time by Smith [1862], although it was originally written in the 17th century. This paper has three aims: (i) to provide a general scenario of the oral materials from the Pima Bajo, (ii) to provide a description of the main rhetorical structural devices used in the Pima Bajo verbal art, and (iii) to demonstrate some of these features from a storytelling tradition perspective of this people, originally located in Mexico, whose insights could be considered a way of understanding other oral traditions, not only Mesoamerican but also Judeo-Christian narratives, which refer to the existence of an alternate world of humans, including a ‘world below’, whose inhabitants can be dangerous if they travel to the ‘world above’.