“We are working to ensure that the Church understands that we need the original peoples.” Sr Luz Angélica Arenas is committed to working with native communities in Mexico.  

The land dispute is one of the main causes of the persecution suffered by original peoples, who are victims of threats and forced displacement. It is an old wound, dating back to the time of colonization, when the lands of the Americas were conquered and redistributed at the expense of native communities, who were forced to lose not only their land but also the continuity of their spiritual and cultural life.

Today, that same dynamic continues in new forms: original peoples are still being dispossessed and pushed to the margins in the name of large agricultural, mining, or infrastructure projects, which treat their lands as resources to be exploited rather than sacred places to be protected.

This has been a longstanding issue in Mexico, where a nun has made accompanying original communities her mission. Her name is Luz Angélica Arenas, of the Congregation of the Carmelite Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

She was born 57 years ago in Jalisco, and chose religious life at a very young age. She has been a nun for almost 40 years, 20 of which she has spent as a missionary. Sister Luz denounces forced displacement. “Original peoples continue to organize and have fought hard to defend their territories, even though they are at the mercy of a voracious capitalist system that seeks to appropriate natural resources to exploit and commercialize them – while for their inhabitants, these lands are sacred”, she says.

For this reason, she considers it urgent to offer “comprehensive assistance to displaced persons, which, in addition to housing, sustenance, and transportation, should also guarantee access to justice and reparations for the victims of this forced uprooting”.

Sister Luz began with a project to accompany the Wixaritari people, who live in the Sierra Madre Occidental, across the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Durango, and Zacatecas.

“We used to go”, she recounts, “into the communities and shared formation processes, focused on strengthening their identity within the city, because that’s where they would go after being forced to leave their territory”. “I also lived”, she continues, “in the Tarahumara Sierra. I worked for a year and a half with the Adames, Tepehuanes, and Rarámuri peoples of the Sierra Diocese. These were powerful moments of encounter with God, who spoke to me through the silence of the mountains, through prayer expressed in dance, and through the traditional celebrations of these peoples”.

Her deep immersion in the communities allowed her to “experience a process of inculturation of the Gospel that embraced their ancestral spirituality, creating bonds of friendship among the original peoples who live in Mexican cities, surviving in truly difficult conditions”.

These experiences enriched her institutional path when she served as executive secretary of the Episcopal Commission for Original Peoples at the Mexican Bishops’ Conference from 2011 to 2025. She also engaged in pastoral work, intending to help transform attitudes that stray from the Church’s synodal calling. “We need to overcome the insistence of certain members of the hierarchy who see evangelization as a tool to make original peoples move beyond what they call paganism”, she explains.

Sister Luz emphasizes the need to open one’s heart and mind to understand that religious and spiritual expressions are integral parts of the ancestral cultures of original peoples, and therefore cannot be labelled as pagan.

Diversity is richness: “We are working to ensure that it is understood within the Church that we need the original peoples, with their face and culture. Seminary candidates should prepare themselves to embrace the reality of original peoples with the awareness that their mission is not to go into a community and change everything, believing they possess absolute knowledge of the truth. We must listen to God in the lived experience of the people, understand them, guide them – and also allow ourselves to be guided. That is what true accompaniment means”.

Luz was just 15 years old when she joined youth and prayer groups in her parish, receiving formation in the Bible, liturgy, and prayer, and becoming an active member of the community. “My grandmother was a woman of deep spiritual life. She introduced me to the lives of the saints and to reading texts like Story of a Soul by Thérèse of Lisieux”, she recalls.

“I belong to an order with very strong spiritual roots, but this charismatic path has been enriched by the spirituality of original peoples, who never separate the experience of God from the experience of life. For them, God is in everything. They find him in the journey, in the tree, in celebration, in dancing. It’s the beauty of colour, the sharpness of the senses, the richness of symbols and signs – and all of this has deepened and strengthened my own spirituality”. (Paola Calderón Gómez)