Between Hope and History

Earlier this year I stood atop a massive boulder with El Profe (The Professor) and other leading citizens of Hueycantenango, a timeworn town set on a bluff high in the Southern Sierra Madre. We looked out over hogbacked ridges, thicketed ravines and the occasional corn patch to a line of gray-green peaks in the distance. El Profe said, “This is our land. Our aim is that someday it will belong to us again.”

Hueycantenango means “place of the giant rocks” in Nahuatl. Deep in La Montana of Guerrero, a state on Mexico’s southwestern coast, it is hours from the nearest paved road. Most of the town’s thousand or so residents are Nahua Indians, descendants of the Aztecs. So, too, are the outlyin...