Rita Patiño was a Rarámuri runner who loved dancing, singing, eating and partying. She had knowledge of herbalism and went on to work as a midwife. One of her walks took her so far from her community that she, without realizing it, had left her native Chihuahua behind. Like a good Tarahumara, she crossed dozens of rivers, plains, ravines and mountains on foot. One night in 1983, police in Kansas, in the heart of the United States, found Rita in a church, tired and afraid, more than 2,000 kilometers away from her community in Urique Canyon. Without access to an interpreter, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital and improperly diagnosed with schizophrenia.
For 12 years she remained deprived of her freedom and stripped of her rights, until, thanks to a legal team that helped her, she was able to return to the Sierra Tarahumara in 1996. She managed to live the last years of her life with serious consequences caused by the medicines. poorly prescribed. With very few resources and in the midst of complex family and social conditions, Juana Osorio, her niece—who is more commonly referred to as Juanita—took care of her until her death in 2018, when Rita became a star. The stars have a key role for these natives, since according to their worldview they believe that they come from them and that when a person dies, they become one.
How did Rita get to Kansas? How did she cross the border and how did she wander through so many territories until she got there? Why didn’t anyone make the effort to understand anything other than her rage? Mukí sopalírili aligué gawíchi nirúgame or, translated from Rarámuri, The woman of stars and mountains is the documentary by Mexican filmmaker Santiago Esteinou that reviews this case of negligence and injustice, which shows exercises of racism and violence against a person incapable of communicating. The film seeks to rescue the life of a woman whom no one made an effort to really know.
The Rarámuri people live in northern Mexico and their name means runners on foot. Its roots are: Rara (foot) and muri (running). Esteinou, who began developing this project in 2016, came to Rita’s story through a book that was lent to her, Born to Run —by Christopher McDougal—, about a runner who went to live in the Sierra Tarahumara. On one of the pages I mentioned about a Tarahumara runner who traveled from Chihuahua and that when she was detained, the people at the hospital believed that what she was saying was “illogical babbling” and, in reality, she was expressing herself in the Rarómuri language, a variant of the rarámuri. They found the family’s location and got in touch to talk about what they were looking to capture in the documentary.
“What interested us was to go beyond the hospital event to understand who Rita was, to understand her as a woman, as a human. Initially we had planned an observational documentary, which would tell her story, but above all it would follow closely what was happening in the present with her life and with the life of her niece. This could not be carried out because in the initial stage of filming Rita died,” says Esteinou.
Esteinou and the production team were able to live with Rita and document her periodically from 2016 to 2018, a time during which, according to the director, “good relationships” were established based on trust. However, the commitment to make a film had already been established and there was a need to finish it, so the question arose of how to finish the film when you don’t have the protagonist.
In this way for The woman of stars and mountains Testimonies were also used from people linked to Rita’s defense in the United States, acquaintances, people from her community and, of course, the construction of the relationship, affection and care that her niece, Juanita, dedicated to her since she returned to Chihuahua. . Who also joined the project was Ángeles Cruz, a Mixtec director from Oaxaca, who contributed her experience as an actress and her knowledge behind the camera to shape another of the pillars of the documentary, which was the recreation of the journey she made through Mexico. To USA.
“We made all these images that are a little more evocative, fictional to some extent. What we tried was to make the journey that Rita could have taken from her community to Kansas. We were doing this tour by car and a little evoking things that, being there, we imagined that she could have experienced. In that sense, working with Ángeles was very enriching because she is an incredible person and also very talented,” says the director.
For this reason, it was important not only to recover and present the language, but also all its connotations that it implies, from the worldview, the ancestral, social and cultural. For this, we initially relied on the advice of Enrique Servín, a Chihuahuan writer and prominent defender and scholar of indigenous languages, who was found dead with a severe blow to the head in 2019 and whose case remains unpunished. The death of the activist left the production orphaned and trying to make sense of many elements. It was there that the figure of Adrián Moreno, head of the Department of Ethnic Cultures and Diversity of the Ministry of Culture of Chihuahua, emerged, who became interested in the project because of his view toward “making visible and strengthening attention to indigenous peoples.”
“(The documentary) calls into question the importance of language in these situations, especially here, with respect to access to justice and health,” he adds. Moreno describes it as important that the film has chosen Rarómari as the language to transmit and understand that other way of being in the world, “of interpreting and understanding reality.”
“Rita’s case may have attracted a lot of attention and was in the media at the time, but it is the situation that the vast majority of people who speak an indigenous language go through. Many times that reality is folklorized, saying ‘how beautiful they dance’, ‘how beautiful the language is heard’, but far away. Greater context of use must be generated and supported as much as possible. That there are more productions with these themes and that they be spoken in the native languages above all, not only from Chihuahua, but from the entire country,” concludes Moreno.
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