Out of the Sierra

Starred review from May 15, 2024
Mexico's Indigenous Rar�muri people have often been mythologized (and exoticized) as the "superrunners" of the Sierra Madre. Whereas many outsider accounts of Indigenous people end up privileging the colonizers' perspective, even inadvertently, Blanco is meticulous about showing the world through Rar�muri eyes. She draws on her years of fieldwork and participatory research in the El Oasis community of Chihuahua, Mexico, a settlement of subsidized housing. Forced by drought, hunger, and threats from drug cartels to leave their home in the Sierra, the Guti�rrez family came to El Oasis determined to maintain their community, their connection to the land, and their core values of sharing and reciprocity. As the family grapples with poverty, harassment, addiction, and violence, parents Martina and Luis must find ways to reconcile their values with the pressing need to keep their children safe and fed. Along with their community, they continue to hold fiercely to Rar�muri stories and identity, depending on community races, traditional dances, religious ceremonies, and sewing circles to resist assimilation into the cultural mainstream. At once painfully intimate and staunchly unsentimental, Out of the Sierra welcomes readers into the Rar�muri world and invites us to count the human costs of climate change, capitalism, and anti-Indigenous prejudice.

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April 22, 2024
A displaced Indigenous family adjusts to radical disruptions to their way of life in this moving debut study. Drawing on a decade of field work among the Rarámuri people of Chihuahua, Mexico, Blanco begins by recounting the Rarámuri origin myth, which in her telling gains powerful metaphorical significance, since in that account, the Rarámuri were likewise displaced—by white settlers stealing their land—leading their deity, Onorúame, to create the Sierra Madre mountains for them to hide in. There, in both myth and reality, as Blanco reports, they established a mutualistic and consensus-driven culture. She goes on to profile the Guttierezes, a Rarámuri family who in 2005 were forced by drought to leave their communal life in the Sierras for the town of El Oasis, where they struggled to preserve their traditions in the face of poverty, hunger, discrimination, extortion from drug cartels, and other challenges. Through vivid character portraits and novelistic storytelling, Blanco captures what it’s like for the Rarámuri to endure such severe cultural upheaval—“to exit a system that is bound with the natural world and enter one that is actively working to destroy it.” It’s a potent examination of the nearly impossible choices Indigenous peoples are forced to make.