From the Borderlands: Victoria Blanco’s Quest to Understanding Home 

Written by Office of Alumni Affairs Intern Mohammad Samhouri  

  For some, where you grew up is simply the name of a place on paper. For Fulbright ExchangeAlumni Victoria Blanco, it was the starting point of a journey to understand where her family has called home for generations.   

Growing up by an international border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico gave Victoria a unique opportunity to discover life in the Chihuahuan Desert. From a young age she felt called to write, but it was in her undergraduate studies that she discovered an interest in her family’s home on the Borderlands, which would eventually cement itself as the key aspect of her career.   

A challenge, solved  

Victoria spent nearly 50% of her life growing up next to Mexico, but that she was born on the U.S. side of the border meant most of her life was based in the U.S. — and that she had a huge gap in understanding the Rarámuri, a group of indigenous people native to the Chihuahuan Desert, whom she was conducting field research on. It was the Fulbright Program that enabled her to experience living in Mexico for the first time, which provided her with a “cultural connector” that had been missing. But she still struggled with not interacting with the group enough for her work.    

“I couldn’t write about home without leaving them out, and yet I couldn’t write about them in any meaningful way,” she said.  

Her understanding of that gap led her to apply to the Fulbright U.S. Student Program in Creative Writing, which allowed her to live in an apartment in Chihuahua City and take a daily trip to Oasis, a walled-in, government-funded indigenous settlement in the middle of the city that was home to 500 Rarámuris who were displaced from their home in the Sierra Madre Occidental because of environmental degradation and the impact of the drug trade.  

Much of Victoria’s first year of her Fulbright Program was spent establishing relationships within the community, which still mistrusted the outside world due to violence.   

Ultimately, her work from her time in Oasis — including early drafts of her upcoming book Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance — led to her acceptance to the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Minnesota.  

“Fulbright has been the gift that keeps on giving,” she said. Even after Fulbright, Victoria continued conducting her field research in Oasis with the help of grants and other outside funding.  

Community building with the help of the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund (CDAF)  

But the Fulbright wasn’t the end of her involvement with the Rarámuri community. In 2020 and 2023, Victoria sprung into action with two Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund (CDAF) grants, which enable U.S. citizen ExchangeAlumni like Victoria to better their communities by providing the tools necessary to combat issues that matter to them.  

“By now I had, you know, really close relationships, and I understood really well, the struggles and the goals of the people in that community as a whole,” she said. “And I thought, well, you know, what does writing do for them?”  

With that in mind, in 2020 she reached out to Amalia Holguin, the Rarámuri governor of Oasis, to find out what the community needed and applied for a CDAF Rapid Response Grant, creating a Rarámuri Facemask Sewing Circle project with a fellow Fulbright U.S. Student Program ExchangeAlumni.    

Their project focused on developing an informative COVID curriculum to teach Rarámuri women about the virus, incorporating Rarámuri belief systems and global practices to create culturally relevant material. They paired the curriculum with a face mask sewing circle, where Rarámuri women sewed designs that coordinated with traditional Rarámuri dresses.  

In 2023, Victoria — alongside fellow Fulbright ExchangeAlumni Lauri Valerio — was awarded funding to launch another CDAF project: the Rarámuri Cultural Reclamation Program, a storytelling workshop to teach Rarámuri children more about their culture and ancestral land. Using the curriculum developed with Amalia, Rarámuri women learned to teach their community’s children about their culture with stories in Rarámuri and Spanish.   

 “I think the CDAF, one of the best things about it, is that it fosters connection and, in general, people really want and look for that,” Victoria said. “Certainly engage your community in the development of the project, try not to come up with something that you're gonna go in and impose — figure out what they need, what they want, and then go from there.”    

As Victoria awaits the release of her book, Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance, in June 2024, she reflects on how CDAF has helped her expand her footprint in Oasis.   

“CDAF has helped me solidify my role in that community as an active supporter of their autonomy,” she said. “That is the ultimate goal of the community: to have self-determination and to route their own lives without the imposition of mestizo culture, including the mestizo government.”  

Victoria’s advice to potential Fulbrighters and ExchangeAlumni. “Don’t go it alone,” she said. “Get in touch with professors that you have a good relationship with and who understand your research interests. If your university has a Fulbright office, use that resource — use all your resources.”   

Masks created during Victoria’s 2020 CDAF project, using traditional Rarámuri dress patterns. (Photo courtesy: Victoria Blanco) 

Children sit around during a Rarámuri storytelling workshop in Oasis, Chihuahua, Mexico. (Photo courtesy: Victoria Blanco)  

Children draw during a Rarámuri storytelling workshop in Oasis, Chihuahua, Mexico. (Photo courtesy: Victoria Blanco)