In Remote Oaxacan Village, Basketball is Possible Ticket Out for Boys and Girls Nick Miroff - The Washington Post
go to original October 16, 2013

Triqui girls prepare to play a game of basketball in the early morning in Rio De Venado, Oaxaca. Sport has become a way out for kids from this dirt-poor town in southern Mexico. (Dominic Bracco II/The Washington Post)

RIO VENADO, Mexico — No one is really sure who put up the first basketball hoop in Rio Venado. Big chutes of mud wash down the mountainsides when it rains, so it wouldn’t have been a good place for a soccer field anyway.

The town has five basketball courts today but only about 400 residents, most living in brown mud-brick huts along a steep dirt road. One court functions as Rio Venado’s town square, and it is where boys and girls learn the fundamentals of being an ethnic Triqui: speaking the Triqui language, wearing the elaborately woven huipil dress (for girls) and playing hoops, usually barefoot.

“If someone steps on your toes, you just keep playing,” explained Melquiades Ramirez, a 10-year-old boy who goes by the nickname “Kevin Durant,” but who, at 4-foot-1, is considerably shorter than his NBA idol.

The Triqui (like “TREE-key”) are among the dozens of indigenous peoples who live in the pine-forested mountains of southern Mexico’s Oaxaca state, and for the past few decades, growing up here has involved fairly predictable rites of passage. Teenage boys would follow their fathers and brothers north to pick grapes in California and berries in the Pacific Northwest, saving their money for a patch of land, a dowry and maybe even a used pickup. Girls can be sold to suitors at age 13 or 14.

But in recent years, crossing the U.S. border has gone from difficult to dangerous to nearly impossible, and this has thrown the Triqui world out of whack. Fewer Triquis go north. Those already on the other side are stuck there. The ones who remain behind — often grandparents and children — live by hard-luck farming and government handouts.

What’s left is basketball.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

Related: Shoeless Trique Indian Boys from Mexico Win Basketball Tournament

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