photos from the edge 32 - DANCING IN DARK TIMES

photos from the edge 32 - DANCING IN DARK TIMES
By David Bacon
Contexts - Sociology for the Public - Journal of the American Sociology Association
Volume 25 Issue 1, Winter 2026
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15365042261417628?utm_source=selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rac_awa_awab_oth_cyc-published-author-care-journey-v02&utm_content=25u1580054_c&utm_term=&m_i=kTPIgXNZzA43rr2jJFpwXtb1n6Tk8J0w7iVXJNAJxWrf_7q_yrilb6PSNalcs%2BRCGs1DjTcR8vN2HORqOb%2BoEz0JyuqQZgTK2L3aRd&nbd=72460462&nbd_source=slgnt&M_BT=2625270471780297#con

In many agricultural fields on the West Coast, you're more likely to hear Mixteco and Triqui spoken than Spanish. Both are common languages among the indigenous people of southern Mexico, many of whom now pick apples in California's century-old orchards or grapes for prestigious Napa and Sonoma County wineries. Without their labor, rural economies would collapse.

Yet Mixtecos and Triquis are targeted by ICE in immigration raids terrorizing rural communities. In farmworker families, mothers and fathers now give their children the phone numbers to call in case their parents get picked up on the way to or from work. It can be an act of bravery simply to walk to the store or drive at night.

Against this backdrop, when Healdsburg's Triquis and Mixtecos came out to celebrate the unique culture they brought with them on their two-thousand-mile journey from Oaxaca and Guerrero, it was an act of resistance. They call their festival the Guelaguetza. It includes a fabulous display of dancers in elaborate masks and tall headdresses performing to brass and woodwinds playing music from home. Every indigenous town in Mexico has its own dance; the Guelaguetza brings them together in all their riotous variety.

The largest Guelaguetza is held in Oaxaca itself, but over the last four decades, the population of Mixtecos, Triquis, Chatinos, and other indigenous peoples in the United States has grown so large that there are now at least seven Guelaguetzas north of the border. Indigenous communities organize dance troupes, partly to show off their culture and partly to give young people growing up here a chance to learn the language and steps to the dance-and to imagine a home they may have never seen.

The act of simply dancing in public on a Sunday in the town plaza was a way of saying, "Aqui esta-mos, y no nos vamos" ("We're here, and we're not leaving").

When Healdsburg's Triquis decided to do a Guelaguetza, it would be, as one organizer said, a Guelaguetza de Resistencia: a Resistance Guelaguetza. The act of simply dancing in public on a Sunday in the town plaza was a way of saying, "Aqui estamos, y no nos vamos" ("We're here, and we're not leaving"). Even Healdsburg's mayor and one of its council members came to respond, "We know who you are, and we are all welcome here."

The late Mixteco community leader Rufino Dominguez Santos explained that dances and language are not just ways to celebrate identity-they are an essential glue that keeps communities together, helping them survive in a hostile environment. "Beyond organizing and teaching our rights," he told me, "we try to save our language. Even though 500 years have passed since the Spanish conquest, we still speak it. We are preserving our way of dancing and rescuing our lost beliefs-that nature is something sacred for us, just as it was for our ancestors."

In the accompanying photographs, Healdsburg's indigenous community activists show their deep roots. The photos illustrate that despite fear and racism, the cultural traditions of their small hometowns in Mexico have been reproduced and are now celebrated in California, two thousand miles north.