A Stitch in Time

Every morning, Paula Holguin, a forty-six-year-old Rarámuri woman, turns the lock on the corrugated metal door of the sewing workshop she founded within Oasis, the government-funded Indigenous compound she arrived at nineteen years ago with her husband. Inside, she sits at one of the six sewing tables. She takes a strip of fabric to attach to the main body of a skirt, places the fabric on the sewing plate, and presses lightly on the foot pedal. Head bent slightly over her work, she glides the fabric across the plate as the needle vibrates. The room is silent except for the hum of the sewing machine. Light filters in through the barred windows, casting a sheen on the cement floor. Holguin often leaves the door slightly open to listen to the sounds of her neighbors coming and going from the small cinder-block homes that line the corridors of Oasis. A woman’s plastic sandals shuffling across pavement. A small child throwing a ball against a wall. Water flowing from one of the utility sinks. Holguin and her husband left for the city when the seeds they planted failed to sprout in the hard land. Throughout the Sierra, the Rarámuris’ homeland, semi-arid land was turning to dust. Mothers and fathers walked out of the mountains, their children dying in their arms, to find help in nearby mestizo villages. Women could no longer nurse their babies. In Oasis, Holguin gave birth to six children: four daughters and two sons. Because they had arrived at Oasis as a young couple, and because her husband had earned a reputation as a strong construction worker throughout the years, her family had achieved greater food security than perhaps any other in Oasis. She returned to the mountains several times a year to visit relatives and bring food to the Rarámuri people who remained. For Holguin, the rectangular concrete building that houses the workshop is a physical manifestation of the resistance that’s built each time Rarámuri women sew. Since she and her husband fled the small wooden house and plot of land on which they once grew corn, squash, and beans, this is the space in which Holguin has felt most in control of her and her people’s future.

In Oasis, a place named for the nearby arroyo and the water it holds during the summer months, Rarámuri people are no longer starving. But they suffer persistent food insecurity and racism. On the streets of Chihuahua, the city in which Oasis is located, mestizos hurl insults at Rarámuri women, who stand out in their bright, ankle-length dresses. Child traffickers and cartel recruiters visit the compound on a regular basis, and mestizos come by to sell paint thinner to children. Holguin understands these new dangers intimately—one of her sons became addicted to sniffing paint thinner as a young teenager—but she says that a return to the conditions of the Sierra is impossible for her people. Thriving in the cities is their only choice, and Holguin’s plan is to grow the Rarámuri workshop that employs women in her community to make commissioned garments. This way, Rarámuri women can gain control of their time, labor, and income. They can spend less time standing at city intersections or at the entrance of stores, hoping that mestizos will give them enough coins to buy that day’s food, and can focus instead on creating the traditional dresses that are central to the Rarámuri rituals their people are trying to keep alive so far from their mountains.

Oasis is the oldest and largest of the nine government-funded compounds in Chihuahua. It’s home to about 500 Rarámuri people. Most of the people I know in this community believe that Onorúame, the Rarámuri god, withholds rain clouds out of anger. Onorúame is angry, they say, because the mestizos continue to invade the mountains to steal silver, limestone, and water. They plant the “bad crops”—as a Rarámuri woman named María Refugio calls marijuana and poppies—which take too much water and do not feed people. Onorúame gave the Sierra to the Rarámuri people as a refuge after the Spaniards invaded the Chihuahuan Desert, the Rarámuris’ original home. Onorúame intended for the Rarámuri people to grow their own food on the land he had given them. But the lack of water, and the enslavement of their people by mestizo drug growers (and, previously, American miners), is causing Rarámuris to abandon the mountains. They walk through forest and along a two-lane highway to reach the compounds the state government began building in the 1950s to house those fleeing the mountains. In the Sierra Madre of western Mexico, years of persistent drought have driven