Wixárika Scholarship Fund recipient, María Fernanda Ramírez Gamboa, with a sign that says, "Neither the land nor women are territories to be conquered."
This past weekend was an intense and frightening one for many here in Western Mexico — at least among the people who care about the land and Indigenous people: high-profile Wixárika land defender and attorney Santos de la Cruz Carrillo had disappeared on Friday along with his wife and two children, including a three-month-old baby.
Luego de que integrantes de la comunidad wixárika de Bancos de Calitique, en el municipio de Mezquital, Durango, iniciaran movilizaciones para exigir la aparición con vida del defensor y abogado Santos de la Cruz Carrillo, su esposa y dos de sus hijos, la Fiscalía General de Nayarit informó en las primeras horas de este domingo que los cuatro fueron localizados con vida y con buen estado de salud.
When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico half a millennium ago, they sought to convince Indigenous people that consumption of peyote, an inconspicuous cactus that contains the psychedelic drug mescaline, was akin to devil worship.
After four years of struggle, the Wixárika community of San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán in Mezquitic, Jalisco, will directly receive federal resources to manage amongst themselves without the intervention of local officials or political parties. And they will do so with women at the table under an agreement of gender parity, a rarity among Indigenous governments and, indeed, governments in general.
Mothers pushing baby carriages, grandmothers and grandfathers in their 70s and even a man in a wheelchair joined the ranks of the 200 Indigenous Wixárika people making their way nearly 1,000 kilometers along the sweltering highways of México in a generations-long battle to recover their stolen lands. The Wixárika Caravan for Dignity and Justice departed from the Western Sierra Madre on April 25 and has been walking ever since, camping alongside the highway and rising at dawn to carry on.
Wirikuta tiene muchos nombres y una entrada. La puerta se nombra Wak+ri kitenie, la puerta del Hermano Mayor Tepehuán, el paso al quinto piso del altar-mundo, nuestro templo.
Los constituyentes mexicanos decretaron que la justicia en el país sería gratuita y expedita, aspiración que casi nunca se corresponde con la realidad y mucho menos para los pueblos originarios de esta nación.
