We are the Rarámuri and Ódami Indigenous community of Coloradas de la Virgen, together with the Rarámuri community of Tatawichi. We defend our forest, our memory, and our right to govern ourselves, against dispossession and forced displacement.
We are not an office that speaks for the community. We are the community that speaks for itself.
The Colectivo Enlace Tarahumara is born from the grassroots and the traditional authorities of Coloradas de la Virgen and Tatawichi, high in the Sierra Tarahumara. We are bound by one territory, one way of governing ourselves, and one decision not to abandon it.
Among us, justice is not handed down by a single person. It is decided by the community gathered together: the governor convenes, and the people decide. Whoever commits a wrong repairs the harm by working for the community — gathering wood or mending a road — and returns with counsel. That way of doing justice, deliberated and restorative, is what we are defending.
We come to this struggle not as victims who plead, but as a people who govern themselves.
The territory is not the plot where one sows. It is everything alive that sustains us and binds us.
Where the river runs, where the springs are, where we herd, dance, and run. We are not owners of the tree, the water, or the air: mother earth is giving them, and we are part of her.
The duty to extend a hand. Whoever reaches a house receives pinole, maize, beans. It is the web that holds up those whose harvest failed, and the first thing dispossession tries to break.
To run the mountain is, among us, like a mass. The forest that filters the water and cleans the air is the same one that teaches us how to live. To defend it is to defend life.
For decades, an armed cacicazgo has tried to turn our forest into merchandise and our people into surplus.
In Coloradas de la Virgen, dispossession has a name and a history. The illegal logging of our pines, the control of the territory by force of arms, and the complicity of the authorities have pushed entire families off their ranches. This is what we call forced displacement: leaving at night, through the mountains, carrying the children, not knowing whether return will be possible.
It is not a recent violence, nor one that came from outside. It is the advance of one same power that kills, logs, and displaces, and that endures because justice, when it works at all, tends to work for those who can pay for it.
Those who have defended the forest have paid for it with their lives. And even so the community has not surrendered: it keeps organizing, now with its young people and its traditional authorities together, to watch over its territory, record what happens within it, and defend it with its own means.
What is at stake is not only a heritage. It is a way of being a people in relation to a living land — one that does not fit within the square meters by which a court measures property.
What has happened in our territory, told by ourselves.
This is the recent memory of Coloradas de la Virgen, as the community's companions wrote it.
The Indigenous governor Guillermo Baldenegro and his family are displaced from the community, after receiving death threats and the killing of a brother-in-law.
We met in Sisoguichi with reporters and defenders from several communities, and in Creel we presented the maps made by the companions of Coloradas, so that other communities would know the dispossession we live through.
Eduardo Molina López, police commissioner of the community, is killed.
Dionisio Carrillo Valenzuela, Indigenous governor and traditional healer of the community, is killed together with his five-year-old grandson. The complaint we filed was left without investigation.
We reported the illegal logging of the forest to PROFEPA. The logging stopped for about three months and then resumed. To this day it has not ceased.
We filed an amparo to try to halt the logging of the forest and protect what remains of our pinewoods.
We are working to constitute ourselves as a collective and to seek the resources that sustain, from within the community, the defense of our territory.
Our defenders were killed. Their struggle could not be killed.
Coloradas de la Virgen has buried its defenders and has remained standing. We carry their names because memory, too, is territory.
We keep caring for what they cared for.
To go from being a people others talk about, to a people that defends itself.
We accompany the legal and public defense of the community's lands and forests, grounded in our traditional authorities and in the right of Indigenous peoples to decide over their territory.
The community itself watches over its forest: the illegal logging, the harm to the territory, the threats. With monitors trained from within the community and with their own tools, to see and record what happens at home.
That the information about our territory be held and decided by us. For years, others documented what happens to us. This is the decision to record, safeguard, and decide — without intermediaries — over the information of our own land.
We sustain those whom dispossession expelled from the territory, keeping alive the bond with the community, the memory of what was lost, and the possibility of a dignified and safe return.
We seek allies who respect that the decisions belong to the community. Solidarity, not tutelage. If your organization, fund, or collective wishes to accompany this process, let us talk.
Write to the collective.
Tell us who you are and how you would like to walk with this process. Messages reach the community directly.