In Northwest Mexico, the Western Sierra Madre Mountains rise like giants from the coastal wetlands of the Gulf of California to the Central Mexican Plateau. Indigenous communities have long found shelter in these isolated lands, and the space to maintain their culture and way of life.

Some of my most treasured childhood memories happened in or near a river. I can still feel the cold water on my feet, and the current that pulled me smoothly past rocks and branches. I remember vacations with my cousins, throwing ourselves into the river near my aunt and uncle’s country house, leaping from the tops of rocks or swinging from the branches of a tree. I remember summer road trips, driving down seemingly endless bridges over the great rivers of southern Mexico.

GUADALAJARA — As commissioner of public lands for the indigenous Wixárika territory of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán, Miguel Vázquez Torres was at the forefront of the legal fight to recover 10,000 hectares of indigenous ancestral lands from surrounding ranching communities. He was among those who repeatedly urged the federal and state governments to intervene to prevent violence in the increasingly tense region that had been the subject of land conflicts for more than a century and, more recently, an increasing presence on the part of the drug cartels.

"The human avalanche began to flow from the ridgetop of the Sierra de Los Pajaritos around 10 am on Thursday, September 22: 500 indigenous Huichols, heirs to the old lords of the mountains, descended in a quiet tide into the valley Huajimic, in search of historical justice. The expectant landholders, who had succeeded them in the domain of these lands, observed them worriedly as an ominous sign.