Every year around the 23rd of June, Mixtec people from the municipality of San Juan Mixtepec gather to celebrate their patron saint. The music echoes between their respective gathering places in Oaxaca and Lamont, California.
The $20 billion Maya Train project in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico has sparked division among locals, who, while eager for the promised economic benefits and increased tourism revenue, are also deeply concerned about the environmental destruction that will come with the railroad’s construction. The four-year megaproject has eschewed Environmental Impact Assessments and ignored scientists who say the railroad and the trainline will have harmful environmental consequences.
On February 20, 2019, Samir Flores Soberanes was murdered. He was one of the founders of Amiltzinko community radio where he was a communicator, a member of the Peoples’ Front for Defense of Land and Water for the states of Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcala (FPDTA); a land defender against the Morelos Integral Project (PIM); and a promoter of community education and Indigenous Peoples autonomy.
San Manuel is a small Indigenous community of the Tseltal and Ch'ol speaking people, located in the first canyon that forms the first two mountain ranges in front of the plains of the Gulf of Mexico and at the height of the city of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. According to the 2020 census, the community is formed by 390 people. But in reality it has more than 700 inhabitants, because many inhabitants were not counted in the census for unknown reasons.
This is a reflection on the shared history between Na Ñuu Savi (Peoples of the Region of the Rain) and Chumash since the origin of their respective homelands in what are now Mexico and the United States. Santa Maria is an agricultural city located in northern Santa Barbara County on the Central Coast of California. It is the second home of Na Ñuu Savi migrants from Yucha Nchaa (Santa Cruz Mixtepec) in the municipality of Ñuu Xnuviko (San Juan Mixtepec), Oaxaca.
Between the Santa Marian earth and sky is a backstrap loom on which the history of people in this space is woven. The first shapes formed on this loom are Chumash, people who came from islands and established varying groups on the now Californian coast.
“The exercise of self-determination is a necessary task prior to the consultation because we have seen that many consultation exercises begin as a reaction to someone who wants to set up a project or a mine. Part of the community becomes active, but since the community is not consulted as a People, internal conflicts begin there.
YIMOM is a network of Maya Tsotsil healer women who live in the community of Nuevo Corral Chꞌen el Ángel, Chiapas, Mexico, and work towards ensuring food security and food sovereignty for their communities by taking care of their soil.
I am a Na Ñuu Savi (Person of the Place of Rain, Mixtec) born in Santa Maria, California, United States, to Nivi Ñuu Savi (People of the Place of Rain) who migrated there to work as farmers in the California agricultural economy. Ñuu Savi (the Place of Rain) is in Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero, Mexico, where many pueblos are known by names that describe our history.
Cultural Survival Youth Fellow, Fermín Morales Hilario (Nahuatl), 22, is from Kalman Nimos in the mountains of Mexico, where his family grows corn, beans, and squash. His family is Náhuatl but his mother tongue was not passed down to him as his grandparents did not teach his father and mother to speak it. Fermin has five siblings and is the only one in his family to attend university. He aspires to finish his studies.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
