An Intimate Look at Mexico’s Indigenous Seri People

A light wind laden with the scent of the sea softened the stifling heat: The temperature had reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was only 10 a.m.

Salma’s house was at the end of the main road in Punta Chueca, a small town on the mainland coast of the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, some 75 miles west of Hermosillo, Mexico. She was a young woman — 22 years old when I first met her in 2017 — with a serious face and few words. A member of the Seri people, also known as the Comcáac, she was the only woman who worked in the Indigenous group’s traditional guard, which had been protecting Seri territory for many decades.

“I like to defend my people and my land,” she told me proudly, while holding the weapon she used while out on patrol. “If we don’t do it, no one else can.”

“We are the ones who can support and defend our identity,” she said.

In late 2016, I traveled to India to cover a story about a nongovernmental organization that was training women from rural areas how to build and repair solar panels and storage batteries in their local communities. Four of the trainees were Seri women: Guillermina, Veronica, Francisca and Cecilia. They would spend the next six months in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, learning about solar engineering.

When I heard the women speaking Spanish, I went to greet them and listened as they told me their stories. Concerned about the survival of their people, a nation of only about 1,000 people, the four women had traveled thousands of miles — to a country whose language and customs were entirely foreign to them — in order to acquire a set of skills that would help them improve the conditions in their own community.