An indigenous Mexican woman once described as the "ugliest woman in the world" has returned home to Mexico for a Mass and burial 150 years after her death -- a memorial of her life spent at circuses around the world, displayed as a freak of nature.
Julia Pastrana, born in 1834, suffered from hypertrichosis and gingival hyperplasia, rare genetic disorders that gave her excess facial hair and a thick-set jaw, The Guardian reported. When she was 20, she left Sinaloa with U.S. showman Theodore Lent, who took her around the country and the world on display as a freak, according to The Guardian.
She and Lent married and had a son, but Pastrana developed a fever related to childbirth, so she died along with her baby in 1860 in Moscow -- and her remains ended up at the University of Oslo in Norway, according to The Guardian.
"Imagine the aggression and cruelty of humankind she had to face, and how she overcame it. It's a very dignified story," Mario Lopez, the governor of Sinaloa state who lobbied to have her remains repatriated to her home state for burial, told The Guardian. "When I heard about this Sinaloan woman, I said, there's no way she can be left locked away in a warehouse somewhere."
Pastrana's repatriation is part of a trend, in which museums send the remains gathered during the European colonization of Latin America, Africa and Asia back to their countries and tribal lands, according to The Guardian.
Mexican ambassador Martha Bárcena Coqui, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, formally received Pastrana's coffin at a ceremony on Feb. 7 at Oslo University Hospital before the coffin was flown to Mexico.
"You know I have mixed feelings," the ambassador said. "In one way, I think she had a very interesting life and maybe she enjoyed visiting and travelling and seeing all the places, but at the same time I think it must have been very sad to travel to these places not as a normal human being but as a matter of exhibition, as something weird to be talked about."
Jan G Bjaalie, head of the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Oslo, said he was happy Pastrana's life finally was able to have a worthy end.
"Today, it's almost incomprehensible that a circus used corpses for entertainment purposes," Bjaalie told The Guardian. "Hers was used in a way we today would consider to be completely reprehensible. It's important that we now have a clear end to the way she was treated."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
