OUT OF THE SIERRA

An affecting work of “participatory research” delves into the life of an Indigenous Rarámuri family who was forced out of their native region in Mexico by environmental degradation and colonization.

In 2009, Blanco, then on a yearlong Fulbright fellowship to collect oral histories of the Rarámuri people living around Chihuahua City, Mexico, met and befriended the Gutiérrez family. Displaced to El Oasis, a “settlement filled with subsidized housing for Indigenous peoples,” in the city several years before due to drought in the northern Sierra Madre, the family had fallen on hard times, as many similar families had. Martina and Luis had moved to live near other family in the city, and in the process, they had to give up the traditional practice of korima, the sharing economy that had sustained them since ancient times, and accept the capitalist market system, which ensured their impoverishment. Working as a day laborer, Luis was often extorted out of his wages, while Martina contributed by sewing. After school, the children were often required to ask for money or sell gum and other items among the cars at KFC. The oldest son, Jaime, became addicted to meth, “scouring the house for extra coins, shaking and nervous between pills, and one of the daughters, Lupita, who was sent to boarding school, ultimately got pregnant and was kicked out (though her boyfriend was allowed to stay). The cycle of poverty finally broke when Martina joined a cooperative market to sell Indigenous goods, saved money (a fact kept from her husband), and bought a piece of land to build a house. Throughout the poignant, sometimes heartbreaking text, Blanco intimately captures the details of this family’s practices and dreams, making the narrative read as fluidly as a novel.

A painstakingly recorded, sensitively presented work of a unique “lived experience” in northern Mexico.