Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal

ISSN: 2380-2014 (Print) 2379-9978 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtwt20

From Nahua migrants to residents in Sonora,

Mexico

Alex R. Castellanos Domínguez & Anne W. Johnson

To cite this article: Alex R. Castellanos Domínguez & Anne W. Johnson (2017): From Nahua
migrants to residents in Sonora, Mexico, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2017.1347058

Published online: 06 Jul 2017.

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 Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2017.1347058

From Nahua migrants to residents in Sonora, Mexico

Alex R. Castellanos Domíngueza and Anne W. Johnsonb
a
Unidad Académica de Antropología Social, Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, Tixtla de Guerrero, México;
b
Departamento de Ciencias Sociales y Políticas, Universidad Iberoamericana, Lomas de Santa Fe, México

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The ritual of the Holy Cross celebrated by ‘outsider’ Nahuas from Received 23 November 2016
Guerrero has caused conflicts between conservationists, migrants and Accepted 22 June 2017
local indigenous groups such as the Tohono O’odham (Pápago), who
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KEYWORDS
also consider El Pinacate part of their sacred landscape. In this text, Nahuas of Guerrero
we analyse the place-making practices of Nahua migrants in Sonora Sonora
as one of the means by which collective social actors navigate the place-making
complexities of a modernity characterised by mobility, economic ritual
precariousness and ecological degradation. Institutional development indigenous migration
policies, we argue, rarely consider the diversity of the populations they development tourism
are meant to serve, or the diversity of these populations’ approaches
to well-being.

Introduction
This article focuses on how Nahua families who have migrated from the southern state of
Guerrero to Rocky Point, Sonora, México have recreated a symbolic geography based on
sacred mountains in their new territory. In the ‘Halfway Mountain’, one of the three sacred
mountains that mark this sacred space, Nahua migrants perform their celebration of the
Holy Cross, ritual activity initiated 27 years ago, after a supernatural being appeared to one
of the migrants in a dream.
However, the Halfway Mountain is located inside El Pinacate, a biosphere reserve which
is home to nearly one thousand plant and animal species, some of which are in danger of
extinction, and is considered unique in the world for its geological similarity to the surface
of the moon. El Pinacate forms part of the network of ‘Man and the Biosphere’ reserves
sponsored by UNESCO, and was recently named a World Heritage Site. The Mexican govern-
ment has designated the area a priority for conservation and development as a destination
for ecotourism.
The ritual of the Holy Cross celebrated by ‘outsider’ Nahuas from Guerrero has caused
conflicts between conservationists, migrants and local indigenous groups such as the Tohono
O’odham (Pápago), who also consider El Pinacate part of their sacred landscape. In this text,
we analyse the place-making practices of Nahua migrants in Sonora as one of the means by
which collective social actors navigate the complexities of a modernity characterised by
mobility, economic precariousness and ecological degradation.1

CONTACT  Anne W. Johnson  anne.johnson@ibero.mx

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2   A. R. CASTELLANOS DOMÍNGUEZ AND A. W. JOHNSON

What follows is the product of an intense and productive collaboration. The ethnographic
research on which this article is primarily based was realised by Alex Castellanos, who worked
with Spanish-speaking or bilingual Nahua migrants from Guerrero in the municipality of
Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, for several long periods between 2009 and 2013. Alex is primarily
interested in practices by which migrants reconstruct a sense of space in new territorial
contexts. The theoretical argument about cultural policy, identity and spatiality, as well as
the discussion of comparative religious practice was derived in conversations with Anne
Johnson, whose research centres on historical memory and cultural practice in the region
of Teloloapan, a municipality in the northern region of Guerrero which borders the towns
from which Nahaus have migrated to Sonora (Johnson, 2016). She has worked in this area
since 1999. Both authors have fieldwork experience in the central part of the state (Tixtla-
Chilapa), where Nahua agricultural practices continue to have a strong ritual base.

Development, spirituality and territory

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This article attempts to demonstrate how ‘development’, ecology, culture and territory are
related in complex, and often contradictory ways. Studying the experience of Nahua migrants
to Sonora has allowed us to question the common belief that ‘development’, as a discourse
of ‘economic progress’, is somehow separated from, if not opposed to, cultural beliefs and
practices rooted in religion or spirituality. In fact, as several recent authors have shown, magic
is not always the flipside of modernity, but may in fact function as its constitutive shadow.
In a collective volume about witchcraft in Africa, Moore and Sanders argue that the ways in
which practices and accusations of witchcraft in Africa must be understood, not as ‘primitive
survivals’, but instead in terms of local strategies for dealing with modern economic and
political processes.2 Ethnographic examples abound. James Brow writes of the ways in which
the inhabitants of an agricultural village in Sri Lanka manage the conflicts that surround
government development projects by means of demonic possession and witchcraft accu-
sations.3 And in her study of poverty in Puerto Rico, Raquel Romberg shows how some
shamans and curanderos have become experts in the policies of the ‘welfare state’ in order
to help lawyers, employees, single mothers and corporate managers deal with bureaucratic
ad legal paperwork.4
Magic and religion may be seen as responses to the pressures and anxiety caused by
living in the modern world, or they may be understood as a vital part of the modern political
and economic apparatus. In the case of Nahua migrants to Sonora, religious ritual, intimately
tied to territory and sacred geography, is one of the fundamental ways of managing the
cultural upheavals that result from migration, itself a response to modern economic and
social pressures. As we hope to show, Nahua religious ties to the Pinacate, which are not
officially recognised as part of the bioreserve’s ‘cultural value’, are distinct from those of the
Hia Ced O’odham, although for both groups, the geological features of the reserve function
as geosymbols and sources of religious experience and cultural identity.
From the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, social change
on a global level has been deeply involved in experiences of time and space. Space is now
a key concept, not only in the field of geography, but in the social sciences and humanities,
as well, thanks to intense debates surrounding the concepts of territory and territorialisation,
place, borders and transnationality, among others. From distinct perspectives, some theorists
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL   3

have alluded to ‘the spatialization of social life’, while others have declared the present cen-
tury to be ‘the space century’.5
This interest in space ‘from’ and ‘towards’ geography can be conceived as a new ‘turn’ or
movement that reflects a growing interest in spatiality and territory. On the one hand, we
can speak of a ‘turn’ because the preoccupations and reflections of other social sciences
begin to curve towards geography. But this ‘turn’ also implies recognition of the complexities
that characterise the modern world, a new vision that emerges from geography’s need to
construct a new theoretical edifice able to dialogue with other social sciences that have
demonstrated an interest in space. Human geography, the theoretical perspective from
which we write this article, is one field in which it is possible to clearly observe one such
dialogue between geography and anthropology.
In Geographie sociale et territoires, Di Meo proposes a particularly interesting exploration
of geographic space, which he describes as intermediate between Kantian space as the form
of the sensible world, and Durkheimian space, product of human representations and
actions.6 For this author, the human ecological space is transformed by means of the cultural
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systems, economic practices and new technologies that characterise the society that occu-
pies it. In this way, Di Meo contributes to the conception of geographic space as fundamen-
tally social.
At the same time, Di Meo suggests certain categories that make up geographic space:
that which is produced, perceived, represented, lived and socialised. These categories can
be understood in terms of different modalities of geographic space: the modality of spatial
action produced by society, the modality of spatial perception, knowledge and representa-
tion and the modality of human lived spatial experience. According to Di Meo, these three
categories ‘are forged in the encounter between special form and produced space, by living
objects and those objects of consciousness, opened up by the paths of territory’.7
Along with the concepts of lived space and territory, the notion of territoriality expresses
a series of connections created by members of social groups in relation to their environments.
Fundamentally, territoriality spatialises society.8 Authors such as Di Meo emphasise the dis-
tinction between territory and territoriality, as territoriality refers to a particular and multi-
scaled mental structure or representation.9 On the other hand, Brasilian geographer Rogério
Haesbaert articulates territoriality with the ways in which human groups construct their
senses of identity.10
For the case of Puerto Peñasco, this brief synthesis of the theoretical contributions of
human geography has been key for the understanding of how ethnolinguistic groups which
inhabit zones frequented by tourists, create a sense of territoriality which is strengthened
through the creation of myths, images or other representations which emerge out of daily
spatial interactions, but are also sustained by the memories of these groups’ places of origin.
However, the social relations established in these places are not neutral; rather, they express
the conflicts generated by the different political positions inhabitants occupy. Our space of
study, in this sense, is constituted by a dynamic combination of lived, imaged and dreamed
places-turned-territories.

The Pinacate Bioreserve and its ‘native indigenous’ inhabitants

The Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve is located in the state of Sonora,
Mexico. It covers more than a million and a half acres, and is made up of two separate
 4   A. R. CASTELLANOS DOMÍNGUEZ AND A. W. JOHNSON

ecological niches: the dormant volcanic Pinacate Shield of black and red lava flows and ten
large, circular steam blast craters, and the Gran Altar desert, with sand dunes that can reach
more than 650 feet in height. Because its surface is like that of the moon, Nasa scientists
were sent to train there in the 1960s. Aside from its geological interest, the reserve is home
to a great variety of plant and animal life, with many species endemic to the Sonoran Desert,
and some threatened by extinction. These include more than 540 plant species, 44 mammals,
more than 200 birds and over 40 reptiles.
The Tohono O’odham, specifically the Pinacateño band of the Hia C-ed O’odham, are the
most recent native inhabitants of this desert region (if one does not count the indigenous
migrants to which we will return below), which was first occupied some time before the
beginning of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago.11 Like previous inhabitants, the
Tohono O’Odham were nomadic hunter gatherers that ranged all over the desert in search
of food. These bands tended to establish their camps near tinajas, or depressions formed in
bedrock that serve as a source of surface water storage. Although there are records of
European explorers in the area from the sixteenth century, its inhospitable terrain and climate
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has insured its relative isolation.12

The Tohono O’odham, also known as Pápago, are a binational indigenous group that
speaks a Piman language and has lived in the desert of Arizona and Sonora for thousands
of years. For the Hia Ced O’Odam, or Sand Papago, Pinacate Peak is the site of the creation
of the universe. It is the principal home of I’itoyi, the deity who created the world and those
who populate it. According to Servando León, Pápago governor of Puerto Peñasco, ‘these
lava flows are the flows of Pápago blood; these winds, they are all that is left of the breath
of our ancestors’.13 Sites of a sacred geographical imaginary, El Pinacate and the Celaya and
El Elegante craters continue to be used annually by the Hia Ced O’odham in religious cere-
monies. Because of the foundational role that El Pincate and its surroundings play in Hia Ced
O’odham cosmology and ritual practice, they have fought hard to be recognised by the
Mexican government as important participants in the management of bioreserve resources.14
El Pinacate was first designated a ‘protected area’ in 1979. In 1993, along with the Gran
Desierto de Altar, it was declared a Biosphere Reserve. The site is now managed by Mexico’s
National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONAMP), part of the federal Secretariat
of the Environment and Natural Resources, in collaboration with the state of Sonora and the
Tohono O’odham indigenous group. As a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage
Site since 2013, the region is considered of ‘Outstanding Universal Value’, according to the
UNESCO website. Paradoxically, however, increased tourist traffic to the site, due in large
part to its recognition by UNESCO, has contributed to a series of problems that threaten its
biological integrity, including ‘increased traffic, which creates ecological disturbance, littering
and wildlife roadkills’, as well as the pressures that result from tourism-related water con-
sumption, the expansion of roads and the use of off-road vehicles.15 According to reports
from the organisation Geo-Mexico, 6000 tourists visited the reserve in 2000. In 2010, the
number had risen to 17,500.
Citing Hia Ced O’odham cultural practices, the Mexican government has declared the
bioreserve to be ‘of great historic and cultural value’ on the CONANP website. However,
although they have no place in the accepted discourse of biological and cultural diversity
in the region, other indigenous groups also perform religious rituals in and around Pinacate’s
volcanic peaks. In what follows, we describe how Nahua migrants from the southern Mexican
state of Guerrero, drawn by the economic opportunities which have resulted from tourist
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL   5

development in Sonora, have come to resignify their new environment in terms of their own
ancestral symbolic geographies.

Indigenous Southern migrants and tourist development in Puerto Peñasco

As of 2016, of the 44,875 inhabitants of the municipality of Puerto Peñasco, 679 speak an
indigenous language. Of these, 644 are speakers of Nahuatl, while the rest speak Mixteco,
Yaqui, Zapoteco, Tarahumara, Mayo, Purépecha, Cora, Maya, Papago or Huichol.16
These facts clearly reflect the cultural diversity that characterises the municipality, the
result of migrations that came about because of the possibility of finding work in the tourism
sector. The majority of indigenous citizens come from a handful of states: Baja California,
Guerrero, Oaxaca, Sinaloa and Sonora. It is important to note that the ethnic group with the
most inhabitants is speakers of Nahuatl, mainly migrants from Guerrero. During the fieldwork
which forms the base of our research, it became evident that in the Colonia Obrera, the
chosen site of fieldwork, most native language speakers are indeed Nahuas whose place of
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origin is the subregion of the Balsas basin in Guerrero, specifically the towns of San Juan
Tetelcingo, Maxela, Ahuehuepan, as well as the towns of Copalillo and Tlamacazapa in the
northern part of the state. The economic life of these communities largely centres on the
cultivation of corn and the elaboration of local crafts. Nahua craftsmanship has served these
migrants well, as they have been able to sell their ‘curios’ to foreign tourists in Puerto Peñasco.
As we mentioned above, Puerto Peñasco has become an important tourist destination
in Mexico, and consequently a preferred zone for real estate investment. Large and small-
scale entrepreneurs have come to turn to the marine coast of the Altar Desert, as its federal
lands and ejidos, or community-held properties are virgin territory for business, especially
that connected to tourism activities. The majority of tourists that visit the region come from
near-by Arizona, New Mexico and California.
It is important to remember that in Mexico until the New Agrarian Law of 1992, territories
that had been designated as ejidos could not be sold or rented; however, thanks to a process
of ‘regularization’ in which inhabitants of these communities have gained 742 individual
titles to their lands, surface land has become available to purchase to outsiders.
This phenomenon suggests a segmented land market in which prices have increased
dramatically, and in which municipal planning strategies have revolved around the consid-
eration of formerly community-held lands as the main source of territorial reserve. In 2005,
after urban land became largely unavailable, the Municipal Urban Development Plan of
Puerto Peñasco (PMDUT-PP) targeted the ejidos of San Rafael and Las Lágrimas as objects
of concentrated expropriation as a means of increasing the reserve land bank.
Now, the physical space occupied by the urban area covers almost 4028 acres, and in
2007 the municipal government solicited the disincorporation of another 742 acres of com-
munity lands to be added to the territorial reserve. In a similar vein, the suburb of San Rafael,
which does not have access to public municipal services, has expanded as the local govern-
ment began to offer lots expropriated from the ejido San Rafael. In this way, another 779
acres were added to the city’s territorial reserve.
It is in this context of urban growth that increasing numbers of migrants from different
regions of Mexico have come to Puerto Peñasco looking for work in the construction and
other tourism-related industries.
 6   A. R. CASTELLANOS DOMÍNGUEZ AND A. W. JOHNSON

Looking for a better life: the voyage and the arrival in Northeastern Mexico
Indigenous families that arrive in Puerto Peñasco in the state of Sonora follow a series of
trajectories that form the migration cycle. Of course, each trajectory and each of the cycles
that these families follow has unique characteristics as a result of the local and historical
contexts of their origins.
As can be seen in Figure 1, Nahua families began to migrate from Guerrero to Sonora in
the 1960s and 1970s. The first Nahua migrants to Puerto Peñasco came from the town of
Ahuehuepan, followed by families from San Juan Tetelcingo, Copalillo and Tlamacazapa,
near the city of Taxco in northern Guerrero. As we have noted, in their communities of origin,
these Nahuas rely on the elaboration of crafts and the cultivation of corn. In Guerrero, as in
many parts of Mexico, the agricultural cycle is tied to a ritual cycle that is said to ensure the
successful process of planting and harvesting. We will return to the importance of this cycle
and its reproduction in Puerto Peñasco in a moment.
After a series of crises in the 1940s threatened their economic survival, the Nahuas of
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northern Guerrero were forced to look for alternative economic opportunities: work as day
labourers in the harvesting of sesame or in the sugarcane fields of the neighbouring state
of Morelos, work loading trucks or other manual labour in Iguala or Chilpancingo, or as
braceros (migrant agricultural workers) in the United States. An option for others was the
sale of crafts in the tourist zones of Acapulco, Zihuatanejo and Cuernavaca.
Without a doubt, the strategies for social and economic reproduction employed by Nahua
craftspeople must be seen in the context of the worldwide growth of the tourist industry.

Figure 1.  Nahua migration from Guerrero to Morelos, the Federal District, Puebla, Oaxaca, Cancún,
Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán, Baja California and Sonora, Mexico, from 1970 to 1999. Map elaborated by
Alex Castellanos.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL   7

In Guerrero, the cities of Acapulco and Taxco have been the historic destinations for national
and international tourism which, for Nahua artisans, represented an important
opportunity.
In the 1990s, the port of Guaymas in Sinaloa and Los Cabos San Lucas in Baja California
came to rival Acapulco as tourist destinations, due in large part to the arrival of families from
the United States and Canada, as well as ‘snowbirds’ from colder regions who come to Mexico
in order to escape the northern winters. Following the routes of these tourists to new des-
tinations, Nahua families began to form family and other community-based networks that
allowed them to create commercial platforms for the sale of their crafts.
Puerto Peñasco is not the exception to this dynamic. This border and coastal municipality
has been the beneficiary of immense investment in infrastructure, including services, hotels
and other real estate, which has made Peñasco a preferred destination for many tourists
from Arizona, especially since it marks this state’s closet route to the ocean (the Sea of Cortés).
Consequently, Peñasco’s traditional fishing and shrimping economy has been radically trans-
formed into an economy based on tourism and real estate.
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Nahua families began to arrive in Peñasco before 1995, continuing the pattern of com-
munity networking that had served them well in other ports and tourist destinations in the
Mexican northwest. As one migrant from Tlamacazapa put it, ‘I have countrymen (paisanos)
everywhere. In Morelos, Puebla, Morelia, all over. Really, there is no place where I don’t have
paisanos. I’ve been here [in Peñasco] for fourteen years, and when I got here there were
already other paisanos …’17 (see illustration 1).

From migrants to residents: the settlement of Nahua families in the Colonia

Obrera
The basis of what we are calling ‘settlements’ is the appropriation of the geographic spaces
that go from being spatial containers based on use value to becoming life and living spaces.
In this sense, the emergence of socioterritorial attachments allows Nahua families to trans-
form a place of work into a place of belonging.
Around 300 families live in the Colonia Obrera, of which approximately seventy can be
considered of indigenous origin. Sixty of these families are Nahuas from Guerrero. For the
last fifteen years, migration towards Sonora and Puerto Peñasco as part of an ambulatory
craft sales route oriented toward the foreign tourist market has meant that many young
people have grown up far from their places of origin, following a route from the Balsas region
in Guerrero, to Morelos, Mexico City and north towards Jalisco, Sinaloa and finally Sonora.
As a result, these communities have ‘grown old’, as José Toribio testifies:
Well, there must be some fifty paisanos from my town, and other paisanos from other towns, so
yes, there are a lot of my paisanos here. Now those who stayed behind are mostly older folks,
since all the young people are here or on the other side.18
As we have mentioned, many of the artisans and their families that reside in the Colonia
Obrera come from the towns of Ahuehuepan, San Juan Tetelcingo, Copalillo or Tlamacazpa.
A distinction between these migrants may be made based on their economic activities:
Nahuas from Ahuehuepan and San Juan Tetelcingo tend to dedicate themselves to making
crafts made of plaster, seashell and leather, while those from Copalillo and Tlamacazapa
concentrate on commercial activities. Due to their town’s proximity to Taxco, migrants from
Tlamacazapa are known for selling silver jewellery and other objects.
 8   A. R. CASTELLANOS DOMÍNGUEZ AND A. W. JOHNSON

One of the principal motors of Nahua migration in the 1990s was the passing of NAFTA,
the North American Free Trade Act, which, among other things, promoted tourism as a
potential economic activity in Puerto Peñasco. For Nahua families, the sale of crafts repre-
sented a highly-remunerated activity, given that they could charge between twenty and
one hundred dollars for each piece. Thus, the production and sale of crafts were the factors
that permitted Nahua migrants to seek their fortune in the north, instead of suffering eco-
nomic precariousness in their places of origin.
Although the arrival of each of the Nahua families was mainly to the lack of work in their
home towns, the ways in which each family appropriated their new places in the Colonia
Obrera allows us to establish a series of differences that express the cultural richness with
which geographic space may be marked.
The first families to arrive in Peñasco were originally from the town of Ahuehuepan.
Esteban Calixto, the head of one of these first families remembers that it was a neighbour
from Ahuehuepan that took his brother with him to the ‘norte’, and then it was Esteban’s
turn to travel. He went straight to Puerto Peñasco in 1987. In the early days, it became cus-
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tomary to migrate seasonally between Puerto Peñasco and Ahuehuepan, living in the north
during the months in which sales to tourists were high: between March and June, later in
the summer, and then around ‘Turkey Day’ in November. When times were good, according
to Esteban, fishing and tourism were at their high points. Many ‘gringos’ came to Puerto
Peñasco, and sales were excellent. Between ten and fifteen families from Ahuehuepan,
including that of Esteban, eventually decided to stay in Puerto Peñasco full time.
The next wave of migration by the Nahuas of Guerrero came from the town of San Juan
Tetelcingo, around 1998. These families agree that craft sales were very good in the 1990s,
thanks to the arrival of tourists who traveling to Puerto Peñasco to participate in sport
fishing.
Look, here in Peñasco en ‘98, my sister came in ‘97 and I was living in Zihuatanejo, in Ixtapa19,
and well, not much was going on there, but here there was a lot of tourist movement, and we
sold well, better … actually, you’re called to where you sell the most, so you come here. (Joaquín,
San Juan Tetelcingo)
Although many have been living in the Colonia Obrera of Peñasco for more than fifteen
years, Nahua families not only remember, but return to visit their home towns. Aside from
return visits, language has been one of the fundamental factors in the process of cultural
reproduction, as well as the formation of social networks that reconstitute a diverse space
of community. Therefore, we may say that a new southern indigenous territoriality has
emerged in Mexico’s northwest.
The daily movement between the Colonia Obrera and the beach where Nahua migrants
sell their crafts has been one of the most important practices that has permitted these
families to convert their new territory into vital space. The trajectory, which takes about
twenty-five minutes, takes them from their working class neighbourhood to the hotel zone
– the Beautiful Siren, the Sonora Sun, the Sonora Sky – dotted with palm trees, white houses
and, finally, the sandy beach and Pacific waters. Once at the beach, members of each group
walk up and down the beach – about twelve miles long – offering the crafts that characterise
their towns of origin. Many sellers have repeat customers, their ‘friends’ who have come from
Canada or the United States, especially during major holidays on both sides of the border.
The tourist high season lasts between May and December.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL   9

However, during the last several years, the sale of crafts has plummeted, since this eco-
nomic sector depends heavily on international tourism, an activity which has been in decline.
The combination of fears of violence and an economic crisis affecting the United States
shows the vulnerability of the Mexican economy in relation to the economic situation of its
neighbouring country to the north. As tourism is the principal activity in Puerto Peñasco,
the decline of income due to a decrease in tourism has affected its population drastically,
especially its indigenous population dedicated to the production and sale of crafts. In Sonora,
institutional public policies have largely been oriented towards assisting the ‘original’ indig-
enous populations (Seris, Yaquis, Pápagos and Mayos), since Nahua families from the south
are considered migrants rather than indigenous, and therefore have difficulties accessing
the institutional support offered by the National Commission for the Development of
Indigenous Peoples (CDI), or that offered by the Center for Attention to the Indigenous
Peoples of Sonora, known as ‘la CAPIS’, but now formally called the State Commission for
the Development of the Indigenous Peoples of Sonora (CEDIS). It is important to mention
that both institutions offer services and support to migrants; however, there is no policy or
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programme dedicated to the sector of the indigenous population which can no longer be
classified as migrant, as its members have settled in their new places of residence, building
dynamic collective lives. In many cases, these families no longer work as agricultural labour-
ers, which also made it impossible for them to access social and economic programmes
meant to protect migrant farm workers.
Although we registered very little, if any, face-to-face interaction between Nahua migrants
and Pápagos in Puerto Peñasco, at the discursive level, the liminal status of non-native indig-
enous groups has been a source of friction. For some time, only recognised Sonoran indig-
enous groups like the Pápago were considered by the state to possess special status based
on their claim to being the region’s ‘original’ inhabitants. The link between culture, ethnic
identity and territoriality is profound, if not always clear. Although the very term ‘indigenous’
refers to life forms (plants and animals) which are considered endemic to a particular place,
political discourse in Mexico has differentiated between ‘native indigenous’ (a tautology)
and ‘migrant indigenous’ populations, the latter term referring to Native American popula-
tions which are considered indigenous to Mexico, but not to the specific place of residence.
When culture is seen as being bound to a particular place, both by collective social actors
like the Pápago and by those in charge of writing governmental cultural policy, to be a
‘displaced migrant’ may lead to being viewed as being culturally irrelevant and, consequen-
tially, marginalised from the economic benefits that derive from representing Mexico’s cul-
tural diversity (largely conceived to be the domain of indigenous groups).
Only in the last few years have migrant indigenous groups been able to assert their cultural
rights, thanks in large part to the creation of grassroots political organisations. When the
so-called ‘People of the South’ arrived in Puerto Peñasco, the tourist sector provided many
economic opportunities, so that Nahua merchants and artisans had no need to solicit gov-
ernment aid. But after the recession and economic crisis, support from government agencies
became the only way to continue the production and sale of crafts. This situation of uncer-
tainty has fomented unrest in the indigenous population of settlements like the Colonia
Obrera and has resulted in the formation of political groups or labour unions for street sellers,
like the Union of Indigenous Sellers Emiliano Zapata and the Fireworks Union. Residents’
struggle to protect their rights has been an important part of the construction of an ethnic
territoriality in Peñasco. In February of 2011, the state of Sonora approved the Indigenous
 10   A. R. CASTELLANOS DOMÍNGUEZ AND A. W. JOHNSON

Law (ley indígena) which refers to those groups of indigenous inhabitants that, even if not
originally from Sonora, have established themselves as permanent inhabitants. Their rights
as residents are now taken into account, even if only on paper.
Well, for those of us who are now here as residents, this law… we’ve been working on it for years.
There was a consultation, and we participated so that they would stop labeling us as migrants
and begin to use the word resident. So the category became residents, migrants and transients
who are just passing through, and we added some things that go with our culture, our traditions
[usos y costumbres], and so they took into account, it’s been approved, a lot of protections that
in some cases we don’t even have in the places we are from. (Francisco Belén, Tlamacazapa)
For Nahuas in Sonora, being considered ‘residents’, formal inhabitants rather than transient
migrants, implies that state authorities recognise that this indigenous group has formed a
meaningful relationship with their new territory. Nahuas also emphasise the importance of
cultural traditions, called uses and customs (usos y costumbres) as part of their officially
recognised identity.
Nahua residents of Peña Peñasco have engaged in a series of daily actions that contribute
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to the construction of a vital space and sense of belonging. These actions include the main-
tenance of relationships with close friends and family members who ease the transition from
migrant to resident, the struggle for land, the organisation of working groups into unions,
the daily visit to the beach of Playa Bonita where artisans sell their crafts, the use of the
Nahuatl language to communicate with paisanos, and participation in the drafting of Sonora’s
indigenous law which recognises these families as residents instead of migrants, allowing
them to participate institutionally in the struggle for their rights as a group.
But aside from the political and quotidian actions that permit Nahuas from Guerrero to
‘inhabit’ new territories in Sonora, the realisation of collective rituals has been one of the
most important ways that these former migrants have created a sense of territoriality that
maintains a southern Nahua identity, even in a completely different geographic and social
environment.

The halfway mountain and the celebration of the Holy Cross

The Obrera neighbourhood is spatially divided between families from Ahuehuepan and San
Juan Tetelcingo and those from Tlamacazapa who settled farther away from their fellow
Nahuas, although both groups live near the street that leads to Sandy Beach, a street lined
with commercial locales, some of which are owned by these families. A giant cross, ritually
celebrated every year, delimits the residential space of Nahua families, but also separates
sacred from profane space.
More than twenty years ago, families from Ahuehuepan instigated a ritual that has
become the clearest example of ethnic territoriality shown in Peñasco by Nahuas that
migrated from the South. Esteban Calixto of Ahuehuepan, founder of the ritual of the Holy
Cross in what is known as the ‘Halfway Mountain’, affirms that this celebration, which involves
climbing the mountain located halfway between Peñasco and Sonoyta on May first, has its
origin in a theophany:
There used to be a chapel down there. I used to buy ironwood (palo fierro) figures, and when I
went over to Sonoyta to buy the figures, always in the chapel at the halfway point, the chapel of
the Virgin of Guadalupe, we always passed by there because we’re believers, and one day, well,
I gathered some stones that I was going to use and I went up the mountain, all the way up to
where the cross is, and, well, there was the image. I didn’t know exactly whose it was, a saint, San
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL   11

Judas Tadeo, and a little wooden house, and there he was. Well, that same night I dreamed of
him, with his white robe and a beard. And, like we’re talking now, there we were on the mountain
where I went to gather stones, there we were, sitting and watching the carts pass, watching
the carts, and he said, well, ‘I can speak for you all, I can ask, whatever you want, just tell me,
but you can come visit me when you like, when you come up here you can come and see me.’
After this experience, Esteban kept buying ironwood figures in Sonoyta. One day, near the
chapel that marks the halfway point, he clearly saw the image that he had dreamed of some
days before. He stopped his car and climbed up the mountain, and again saw a cross and
the figure of San Judas Tadeo. He remembered having dreamed this place, and that the
being in his dreams had asked for an offering.
And now I honor him there, and I said I would celebrate the Holy Cross there. I made a base for it,
and I also asked permission of the owner of that cross, a man who was a communal land holder
there, and he said, ‘Well, yes, put it there if you want’, but later that man had trouble with the
men who look after the whole property, the ones from the Pinacate Reserve … they wouldn’t let
me use cement or anything, nothing like that. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘I’ll make just a little base, where a
candle will fit’, and my paisanos cleaned up the rest. They made it a little bigger, the ones from San
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Juan, yes, those from San Juan … a lot of people started to go up there, and even the priest …
Once a small altar dedicated to the Holy Cross and San Judas Tadeo had been installed,
families from San Juan Tetelcingo also started to contribute to the offering. Now, up to two
or three hundred people participate in this event. In order to accommodate this many people,
participants attempted to construct a larger cement slab; however, guards from the Pinacate
Biosphere intervened to stop these changes, since the mountain is located inside the bound-
aries of the Biosphere. One day in 2007, when a group of Nahuas climbed the mountain to
leave their offering, they found, to their surprise, that the cement slab had been broken, the
crosses thrown down, and past offerings destroyed, presumably by the reserve’s guards,
displeased by the erection of a permanent concrete structure that marred the Pinacate’s
untouched natural environment. The destruction of the altar is just one example of the
tensions between cultural practice and ecological preservation, and between the differential
rights granted by the state to native and non-native indigenous groups. While Sonoran
Pápagos and members of the Tohono O’Odam nation who reside in Arizona are permitted
to undertake pilgrimages and realise rituals in the Pinacate Reserve, Nahua practices that
are perceived to threaten the natural environment are not viewed with the same tolerance.
It should be noted, however, that Pápago rituals do not imply the construction of permanent
altars, and Nahua residents have not included the right to participate in biosphere manage-
ment as one of their demands.
Certainly, the relation between each indigenous group and the Sonoran ecological land-
scape is markedly different. While Pápagos, originally nomadic ‘people of the dessert’, view
the arid landscape as intrinsic to their cultural identity (Salas, 2006, 9), Nahuas have had to
translate the religious practices that formed part of their experience as sedentary agricul-
turalists in the southern Sierra Madre20, to a radically different setting.
In Guerrero, the ritual of the Holy Cross takes place within a year-long cycle of symbolic
and practical activities that revolve around the process of planting and harvesting corn. The
year is divided into two seasons: dry (October to May) and wet (June to September), and
uncertainty surrounds the arrival of enough rain during the wet season to ensure a successful
harvest. Therefore, periodic ritual activity is necessary to maintain proper relations between
humans and supernatural beings linked to rain, the sun, the earth and the wind, among
other forces (Hémond y Goloubinoff, 2008, 133). One of the most important elements in the
 12   A. R. CASTELLANOS DOMÍNGUEZ AND A. W. JOHNSON

ritual cycle is the festival of the Santa Cruz, which is celebrated during the first days of May
as a means of petitioning supernatural entities and Catholic saints for the arrival of plentiful
rains. The festival includes the preparation of traditional food, collective prayer, processions
and ritual offerings at locations considered to be places of encounter between human and
supernatural worlds.21
Although Nahua migrants in Sonora no longer plant and harvest corn, they have contin-
ued to celebrate the Holy Cross each May as a way of reaffirming their re-territorialized
indigenous identity. Families from Tlamacazapan celebrate the Cross they erected on a street
corner at the edge of their neighbourhood in the Colonia Obrera. Nahua residents of San
Juan Tetelcingo and Ahuehuepan originally made pilgrimages to each of the three mountains
that make up the sacred Sonoran landscape. But after the destruction of their altar in the
Halfway Mountain, the Calixtos erected a new, large, white cross in their neighbourhood, in
the chapel of the Holy Family. For a few years, these families continued to make pilgrimages
to each mountain. However, it is more common now for them to climb only one of the
mountains. The ritual process begins with the preparation of traditional foods, commonly
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tamales with chicken and mole sauce, whose ingredients are often brought from Guerrero.
The next day, participants from both towns undertake the arduous climb up the Halfway
Mountain, where they leave an offering at the smaller blue ‘water cross’ that still stands.22 In
addition to honouring the cross, they ask for continued success in their economic endeavours
in Puerto Peñasco.
The celebration of the Holy Cross has been unmoored from its origins as part of an agri-
cultural ritual, but it continues to play an important role in the maintenance of social relations
between Nahuas, between Nahuas and supernatural entities and between Nahuas and their
environment.

Final reflections
In this article, we try to imagine and comprehend how experience becomes spatialised by
the social actors with whom we work. Ethnic identity is one of the factors involved in these
processes of spatialisation, as it allows for the emotional or affective connection of human
groups with their environments. The image of a common ancestor or background, an
imagined primordial bond which manifests itself in a sense of loyalty and belonging, in a
familiar archetype, myths of origin, territories of origin. This image allows us to affirm that
there is, in fact, a process of reterritorialisation in the places of migrant arrival. The affective
and symbolic aspects of reterritorialisation permit migrants to transform themselves into
residents. The label ‘indigenous migrants’ evidences the territorial ambivalence that marked
Nahuas’ early experience in Puerto Peñasco. Now, ‘People from the South’ and ‘Residents’
serve as markers of identity that express the struggle for recognition that these former
migrants have undergone. Little by little, the spaces that were once strange become
familiar.
The process of ethnic territorialization in Sonora incorporates imaginaries and practices
based on places of origin and places of arrival in a socio-territorial system based in a complex
network of power and social relations, in which practical struggles around territorial juris-
diction, religious imaginaries grounded in space and daily experiences in particular places
combine to convert work spaces to life spaces and, finally, to lived spaces.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL   13

To sum up, we have mentioned that the territoriality of ethnolinguistic Nahua groups is
made of three spaces in particular: the Obrera neighbourhood, the beach (‘La Playa’) and
the three mountains where the Holy Cross is venerated, the system known as the Halfway
Mountain. In these places, the passages and trajectories that form the spatial dynamic of
daily life are made meaningful. The ways in which Nahua families construct meaningful
places are particularly bound up in the links between these places and notions of the sacred.
As we have argued, this new ethnic territoriality is created and sustained by such cultural
practices as the blessing of sales and the sales season, the pilgrimage to the Halfway
Mountain, the preparation of the ritual offering and the celebration of the Cross.
There are interesting analogies between these practices and the rituals that are tradition-
ally performed in Guerrero: the importance in Sonora of the blue cross, which in Guerrero
symbolises the ‘water cross’ to which campesinos offer the corn seeds that will be sown during
the agricultural cycle, for example, or the system of mountains of the Pinacate Biosphere
which mirrors the sacred mountains of Guerrero’s southern Sierra Madre, which are also a
pilgrimage destiny during the first days of May. In Sonora and in Guerrero, the sacred
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Mountain is considered an analogue of the biblical Golgotha, or the Aztec Crown of the
Earth. In both the old and the new territories, ethnic spirituality is expressed through the
diverse ways in which the Holy Cross is celebrated, the conception of the differences between
crosses in terms of their relationships with sacred space: the cross of the Halfway Mountain
is not the same as the cross in the chapel, or the cross that marks the edge of the Obrera
neighbourhood.
The strategies undertaken by Nahua families that now reside in Peñasco have to do with
the consecration of a new, intimate space that receives with open arms all those who reside
in or move through it. That said, the Nahuas are but the latest in a line of indigenous groups
that consider the landscape of El Pinacate to be a fundamental part of their sacred geo-
graphical imaginary. But while Hia Ced O’Odam traditions and social actors have been taken
into account, at least discursively, as sharing in the cultural and historical inheritance of the
Pinacate and El Gran Desierto del Altar Bioreserve, Nahua ritual practice is officially invisible,
when it is not considered a threat to ecological conservation.
The experience of these migrants-turned-residents makes visible the contradictions inher-
ent in new patterns of movement and activity in modern Mexico. First, it exemplifies the
tensions between ‘native’ and ‘migrant’ indigenous populations, whose discursive and prac-
tical relations with culture and territory are necessarily different. Second, it highlights the
conflicts that emerge from the confrontation between those social actors who support con-
servation of ecologically valuable territory and those whose ritual practices create symbol-
ically meaningful territory.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Alex Castellanos has a PhD in Anthropology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, an
MA in Rural Development from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Campus Xochimilco, and a
BA in Social Anthropology from México’s National School of Anthropology and History. He has worked
on participatory rural planning issues and sustainable development in the ethnically mixed areas of
 14   A. R. CASTELLANOS DOMÍNGUEZ AND A. W. JOHNSON

the Federal District and the state of Veracruz. He is currently working on the reconstruction of social
and ethnic identities in areas of large-scale tourism. He serves as director as the department of Social
Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Guerrero.
Anne W. Johnson has a PhD in Social Anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin (2009). She
is a full-time professor in the graduate social anthropology programme of the Department of Social
and Political Science at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Her research interests include
collective memory, performance studies and the ethnography of Guerrero. Her most recent publication
is Diablos, indios e insurgentes: Política y poética de la historia en el Norte de Guerrero (INAH-2016), and she
has edited special journal issues on magic and modernity, as well as performance studies in Mexico.

Notes
1. We greatly appreciate the comments made on an earlier draft of our text by anonymous
reviewers, who challenged us to rethink some of our suppositions and provide more in-depth
analysis of our case study.
2.  Moore and Sanders, “Introduction,” 14–15. See also Comaroff and Comaroff, Modernity and its
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Malcontents.
3.  Brow, Demons and Development.
4.  Romberg, Witchcraft and Welfare. For other examples, see Johnson, “Introducción.”
5.  Gould, cited in Lindón and Hernaux, Tratado de geografía humana, 8.
6.  Di Meo, Géographiesociale et territoires, 26.
7.  Di Meo, Géographiesociale et territoires, 34–5.
8.  Lindón and Hierneaux, Tratado de geografía humana, 384.
9.  Di Meo, Géographiesociale et territoires, 77.
10. Cited in Lindón and Hierneaux, Tratado de geografía humana, 385.
11. Garduño et al., “Shuk Toak,” 244.
12. Ibid., 248.
13. In Ibid., 256.
14. See Chester, Conservation Across Borders, 53–134.
15. UNESCO, “El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, Statement of Universal
Value.” 2013. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1410/documents.html.
16. www.nuestro-mexico.com/Sonora/Puerto-Peñasco. Consulted 20/09/16.
17. Translations from the Spanish by Anne W. Johnson.
18. By ‘the other side’, José is referring to the US side of the border.
19. Coastal towns in Guererro.
20. Although it is interesting to note that the nahua groups who now inhabit Guerrero were
themselves originally migrated to the Altiplano from the northwestern part of the country in
the thirteen century. Within a wider historical scale, their migrations to Sonora could be seen
as a return.
21. See Good and Broda (2004) for more on these rituals in Guerrero. Johanna Broda, in particular,
draws interesting parallels between contemporary Nahua rituals and prehispanic agricultural
practices (Broda, 2003).
22. In Guerrero, the ‘water cross’ refers to a blue cross to which campesinos offer the corn seeds
that will be planted that year to be blessed.

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