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  • Desert Race
  • Victoria Blanco (bio)

Our feet slap the pavement; our shouts of “weriga!” and “weh-mah!” sound through the streets. We are a pack of women runners, outlaws on these roads meant for men and cars.

Every evening, we run aimlessly through Colonia Martín López, past the closed shops and the dinner smells wafting from kitchen windows. I follow the Rarámuri women’s cue and focus on my breathing. Slow, steady breaths, inhaled and released with the power of a whisper.

I glance at the women around me, finding inspiration in the sight of Miroslava, who is 24 like me but is the mother of two young children. Sweat pours down her face and she is grinning. When my lungs burn and ache and I think I will collapse on the pavement like a chased animal, I grin too and shout our rallying cry. “Weriga! Weh-mah!” The women respond in high-pitched gasps. We follow the command to run faster, be stronger.

I found my way to Oasis, the largest government-funded indigenous settlement in Chihuahua City, Mexico, six months ago. I arrived in this beast of a city, my mom’s birthplace, in hopes of understanding Rarámuri lives in transition. One of the last cultures to live solely from the land, the Rarámuris today flee in droves from the Sierra Madre Occidental, where they have lived since the Spanish Conquest, to the nearby industrialized cities of the desert. Once in the city, they escape the drought, deforestation, and drug growers who have overtaken the homeland. Hundreds of Rarámuris end up in Oasis, where they join families who have already been allotted one of the 53 two-room cement houses.

Growing up in El Paso, Texas, I crossed into Ciudad Juárez weekly to visit family and friends. It was in Ciudad Juárez that I first saw the Rarámuri [End Page 13] women sitting on street corners, needles gliding through bright fabric spread across their laps. I used to roll down my window and give them spare change.

But that is the past. Today, I join them to run. We are a flash of hope in this time of annihilation.

Before the loggers desecrated the forest, before the miners exploited the land, before the Jesuits offered salvation, before the marijuana and poppy growers stole plots meant for chilies and squash, before the $300-a-night Hotel Mirador was perched on the edge of the Copper Canyon, before tourists dangled over the canyon and marveled at Rarámuris tending the last of their gardens, before the drought that never went away, before the surgeons reshaped cleft palates, before the Virgin became the mother of the ancient god Onorúame, before money invaded, before the great migration to the cities, before korima meant alms-seeking, before blessings turned into private property, Rarámuri men ran alongside deer. They ran for hours, sometimes days, until the gift offered itself to these worthy men. They bore the deer on four or five sets of shoulders back to the women, who cut their knives into the meat and boiled chunks over an outdoor fire.

The deer of the Sierra Madre Occidental, the homeland of the Rarámuris, are nearly gone. Guns have taken them at a rate too fast for the earth to replenish. The Rarámuri philosophy of korima holds that people must take only what they need and practice reciprocity, but the mestizos invade the Sierra to steal. Still, even without deer to inspire them, the Rarámuris who remain in the homeland continue to run. They run to visit neighbors just a few miles away, to share crops with friends and family. They run for sport, for exercise, to fulfill spiritual needs. They run because it is their purpose: their name means “light-footed ones.” In the homeland, the Sierra Madre, Rarámuris still run to fulfill their covenant with Onorúame.

In the beginning, Onorúame created the Rarámuris out of clay. Onorúame chose clay over air and water because he wanted to bind the Rarámuris forever to the land. He shaped the Rarámuris with two legs...

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