An Intimate Look at Mexico’s Indigenous Seri People

A light-weight wind laden with the scent of the ocean softened the stifling warmth: The temperature had reached 108 levels Fahrenheit, and it was solely 10 a.m.

Salma’s home was on the finish of the principle highway in Punta Chueca, a small city on the mainland coast of the Sea of Cortez, often known as the Gulf of California, some 75 miles west of Hermosillo, Mexico. She was a younger girl — 22 years previous after I first met her in 2017 — with a severe face and few phrases. A member of the Seri folks, often known as the Comcáac, she was the one girl who labored within the Indigenous group’s conventional guard, which had been defending Seri territory for a lot of many years.

“I wish to defend my folks and my land,” she instructed me proudly, whereas holding the weapon she used whereas out on patrol. “If we don’t do it, nobody else can.”

“We’re those who can help and defend our identification,” she mentioned.

In late 2016, I traveled to India to cowl a narrative a few nongovernmental group that was coaching girls from rural areas find out how to construct and restore photo voltaic panels and storage batteries of their native communities. 4 of the trainees had been Seri girls: Guillermina, Veronica, Francisca and Cecilia. They’d spend the subsequent six months within the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, studying about photo voltaic engineering.

Once I heard the ladies talking Spanish, I went to greet them and listened as they instructed me their tales. Involved in regards to the survival of their folks, a nation of solely about 1,000 folks, the 4 girls had traveled hundreds of miles — to a rustic whose language and customs had been totally overseas to them — as a way to purchase a set of expertise that may assist them enhance the situations in their very own neighborhood.

I used to be moved by their wrestle.

Whereas documenting the work of the N.G.O., I turned shut with the Seri girls, finally promising them that, after I might, and after they had been again in Mexico, I might go to them to assist share their tales.

A number of months later, in 2017, I used to be lastly in a position to fulfill my promise.

The Seri folks dwell in a stark and unforgiving — and intensely biodiverse — nook of the Sonoran Desert, in northwestern Mexico. Most of its members dwell both in Punta Chueca or within the close by coastal village of El Desemboque, some 40 miles to the north.

Historically, their communal homeland additionally included Tiburón Island, the place sure bands of Seri lived for tons of, if not hundreds, of years. Now, the island — the biggest within the Sea of Cortez — is run as a nature and ecological protect. It stays a sacred place to the Seri, who preserve unique fishing rights within the channel between Tiburón and the mainland.

The identification of the Seri folks is integrally tied to their pure atmosphere, which in current many years has been vulnerable to an rising variety of existential threats: warming temperatures, intensifying storms, regional growth, encroachment from mining corporations, the overfishing of the encircling waters and the lack of conventional information about native vegetation and animals.

For many years, the Seri have additionally contended with restricted entry to contemporary water — although the current set up of a second desalination plant in Punta Chueca has provided some reduction.

These threats have brought about main adjustments within the Seri’s habits and customs. One consequence — the results of a decline in conventional diets that relied on fish and once-abundant vegetation, paired with the introduction of sugary drinks and processed meals — is a big enhance within the prevalence of diabetes.

The neighborhood, whose territory lies alongside a hall for drug trafficking to the U.S. border, has additionally seen a rise in drug abuse amongst its members.

And but the neighborhood stays fiercely protecting of its territory and its heritage. In 2014, for instance, a small group of Seri girls — with the help of the tribe’s conventional guard — defended themselves and their land in opposition to a mining firm that had begun prospecting at a close-by web site for gold, silver and copper. The operation, they mentioned, threatened a sacred web site the place the tribe historically gathered medicinal vegetation and cactus fruits.

Regardless of these challenges, and a relative lack of financial alternative, younger folks like Paulina don’t need to go away their neighborhood. “We’re the longer term,” she instructed me, including that she deliberate to turn out to be a lawyer so she might assist her folks.

“I gained’t go away right here,” she mentioned.

Salma echoed the sentiment, telling me that her dream was to check biology in order that she might assist with native conservation efforts.

Her final hope, she mentioned, was to guard the natural world that her folks have relied on for numerous generations.