The midwives of Guerrero who made a home birth count on paper

<strong>Hermelinda Roque García</strong> has caught children in the hills of Guerrero the way her elders taught her, with her hands and a knowledge no clinic issued. For years those children arrived without proof they existed. Now the state accepts a birth she attends as a birth that happened.

Roque García works alongside Apolonia Plácido Valerio, Inés Porfirio Montalvo and María Neri Flora, and with collaborators Esperanza Sánchez Francisco, Marina de Alma Rodríguez and María Lidia Melodialma. Between them they attend pregnancy, birth and recovery in Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities across the mountains and the coast. An audio documentary by ZonaDocs traces how their practice survived and what their organising won.

The obstacle was a piece of paper. Mexico's Certificado de Nacimiento, a single national form introduced in 2007 and demanded by every civil registry, was in practice a hospital document. A child born at home, in a house with no birth certificate behind it, could struggle for years to obtain legal identity. The midwives pressed for that to change. A reform to the General Health Law now lets traditional midwives issue the certificate themselves, and requires the form to be written in language suited to the midwife's own culture and identity.

Much of the organising runs through the Casa de la Mujer Indígena y Afromexicana "Nellys Palomo Sánchez" in San Luis Acatlán, which opened in 2011 and marked fifteen years this May. It serves women from San Luis Acatlán, Malinaltepec and Cochoapa El Grande, who speak na savi, me'phaa and ñomndaa. Its team includes parteros — men who practise the same craft. Staff there have reported harassment.

The knowledge passes from an older woman's hands to a younger woman's hands, and nowhere else.

The parteras describe their work as a defence as much as a service: against obstetric violence, against the racism women meet in formal health settings, against the plain distance between a mountain village and a hospital bed. Guerrero's maternal mortality sits above the national average, and its health system does not reach everywhere. What reaches everywhere is the midwife.

The house is named for Nellys Palomo Sánchez, who was born in Montería, Colombia, and founded an organisation she called Kinal Antzetik — land of women, in Tzeltal, a Maya language spoken far from Guerrero. She died in 2009. The women who carry her name forward teach what they know to the next ones, hand to hand, in territories where no other teacher is coming.