For U.S.-born children of Mexican parents, a paperwork barrier can cost years they can never get back. By Tracy L. BarnettFor Mexico News Daily “One thing about me, I loved school.” Lina remembers herself before her mother’s deportation as the girl who talked to everyone. She played basketball and piano, studied French, painted — and […]

Text and photos: Tracy L. BarnettFor The Guadalajara Reporter What does an immigration lawyer do when a client’s most urgent problem isn’t immigration law, but insulin? That was one of the questions confronting Mexican and U.S. law students gathered at the Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Guadalajara campus Aug. 12 for a binational exercise examining what happens […]

Text and photos: Tracy L. BarnettFor The Guadalajara Reporter GUADALAJARA — There was plenty of Tapatío humor on display at Sunday’s massive march for clean water: protesters dressed as piles of poop, a bright-red Muppet, and an elegant Catrín towering above the crowd on stilts. One marcher, covered head to toe in mud, had rigged […]

Text and photos: Tracy L. Barnett Thirty years ago, Comandanta Ramona — a diminutive Tzotzil woman representing the Zapatista movement — marched into Mexico City with her masked delegation and helped launch a national Indigenous political space that would become the Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI). This October, the CNI returned to the capital for its […]

By Tracy L. Barnett and Tran Dang Reinaldo was not supposed to be the story of the evening. The deported Panamanian U.S. Army veteran had arrived in Guadalajara from Panama City just the day before, on his way north toward Ciudad Juárez for a naturalization interview.  Nine years after being deported from a country where […]

By Tracy L. Barnett Photos: Víctor Ibarra At the Zapopan´s Agroecological Park, the renovation of six bahareque panels in the community kitchen of the Teocintle Agroecological Collective became a hands-on lesson in traditional knowledge and the joy of collectively caring for a space where, for more than 13 years, this collective has been carrying out […]

By Tracy L. Barnett Two weeks after my last trip to Mexico City, I boarded another night bus to the megametropolis, arriving before dawn. An Uber carried me through the half-lit streets to the home of Laura Kuri, a longtime force in the city’s environmental movement, who welcomed me with coffee, Lebanese breakfast and a […]

By Tracy L. Barnett On a Sunday morning when Avenida Juárez was closed to cars but humming with bicycles, skateboards, roller skates and running shoes, one tented corner of Parque Rojo invited passersby to consider something most take for granted: breathing. The first Clean Air Fair, organized by the Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco (CEJ) in collaboration […]

Tracy L. Barnett For Mexico News Daily Perhaps someone should have driven a stake through its heart. Royal Caribbean’s Perfect Day Mexico was widely believed dead in May, when Environment Minister Alicia Bárcena announced that the massive water park planned for Mahahual, Quintana Roo, would not be approved. But the massive, billion-dollar extreme water park […]

After a 12-year environmental battle and an encampment blockade now on its 89th day, the Mexican government is proposing a significant change.  Will it be enough? By Tracy L. Barnett For Water Today Along its mangrove-fringed shallows on Mexico’s Gulf of California, shrimp, blue crab and juvenile fish find food and shelter. Bottlenose dolphins move […]

By Tracy L. BarnettFor The Esperanza Project The rice paper looked almost impossibly fragile. Chef Alice Liu dipped a translucent round into water, laid it carefully on the table and began arranging slivers of vegetables and herbs across its surface. Around her, a roomful of people attempted to follow along, discovering that making a Vietnamese […]

There are stories you report, file and move on from. And then there are stories that follow you home. Topolobampo has become one of those for me. On Wednesday, I interviewed three of the people whose faces you see here—leaders of the Indigenous Yoreme-led resistance to the ammonia plant being built on the shores of […]

By Tracy L. Barnett Mexico News Daily / The Esperanza Project TOPOLOBAMPO, Sinaloa — When federal officials finally unveiled a plan last week to address the 12-year conflict over a nearly completed ammonia plant beside Ohuira Bay, Indigenous Yoreme activist, rural sociologist and law student Melina Maldonado did not feel relieved. She felt crushed. After […]

GUADALAJARA — As Jalisco officials rolled out a multibillion-peso strategy to overhaul Guadalajara’s aging water system, the head of the region’s water utility failed to appear Wednesday before state lawmakers, where residents, scientists, neighborhood groups and even SIAPA workers demanded answers about the contaminated water flowing from their taps today. SIAPA Director Ismael Jáuregui Castañeda […]

She calls herself a weychafe — a defender of life. Moira Millán is a Mapuche writer, screenwriter, and activist from the Wallmapu (Patagonia), and one of the most urgent voices emerging from Abya Yala today. Her book Terricidio: Sabiduría ancestral para un mundo alterNATIVO (Terricide: Ancestral wisdom for an alterNATIVE world) — now translated into […]

Opposition is growing in Mexico to proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects in the Gulf of California, a region recognized for its extraordinary marine biodiversity and importance to whales and other species. Environmental groups, scientists, fishers, and coastal communities warn that increased industrialization and LNG tanker traffic could threaten fragile ecosystems, intensify noise pollution, and […]

Abuela Amalia has spent a lifetime walking the chinampas of Xochimilco, carrying with her both the memory of a living lake system and more than six decades of resistance. As a child, she knew clear waters, abundant ecosystems and a way of life sustained by the floating agricultural islands that once fed Mexico City. Over […]

By Tracy L. BarnettFor Mexico News Daily Mexico’s largest freshwater lake is at the center of a growing legal battle that could test how seriously the country enforces its environmental transparency laws. Lake Chapala is the source of up to 65% of Guadalajara’s drinking water. It also supports countless fishing and tourism livelihoods and is […]

By Tracy L. Barnett For Mexico News Daily When Maya poet and activist Pedro Uc Be begins to speak about why he writes, he starts not with romance or beauty but with destruction. Across the Yucatán Peninsula, forests have vanished overnight, cenotes have been polluted and communal lands have been carved up by waves of megaprojects. […]

From traffic medians to collective milpas, grassroots growers push back against a law they say criminalizes community care of the land. On a traffic median in Guadalajara, a patch of maize has grown and flourished every summer for nearly a decade. It was planted not by a government program or a corporate green initiative, but […]

At the Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, amid crowded aisles and the buzz of new releases, the story of a small rural town in the Altos de Jalisco reclaimed the spotlight — carried, once again, by the voices of women. On Dec. 7, at the University of Guadalajara stand inside Expo Guadalajara, IMDEC presented […]

Mexico’s disappearance crisis is so vast, so scattered and so complex that traditional investigative tools have repeatedly failed to keep pace. For years, the most reliable searchers have not been state institutions but the families themselves — the madres buscadoras who learned to read the landscape through grief-sharpened intuition: disturbed soil, insects that shouldn’t be there, a patch of […]

Community leaders, academics, activists and legislators met last week in the Jalisco State Congress to challenge Mexico’s proposed reform to its National Water Law, warning that it would worsen rather than dismantle rampant inequality in the management of the nation’s water. The Open Citizen Parliament in Jalisco brought together farmers, Indigenous representatives, scientists and lawyers, […]

Eighteen women from across Jalisco were recognized by the state’s electoral institute for building networks of trust, care, and transformation. The applause echoed through the vaulted halls of the Centro Cultural El Refugio in Tlaquepaque as 18 women stepped onto the stage, one by one, to receive their plaques of recognition. Each name carried its […]