About Tsitsiki
Weaving knowledge and resistance from Purépecha women

Instagram: @tsitsikihe @jingonhikuecha
Location: Meseta Purépecha, Michoacán, Mexico

Citlalli Tsitsiki Hernández Estrada is a Purépecha woman from the Meseta Purépecha in Michoacán, Mexico. Her parents’ support to study away from home strengthened her identity and gave her the courage to return and defend her culture and land.

For Tsitsiki, the land is both physical and spiritual: the body, the home, and the community. It lives in the streets of her town, the springs, the mountains, the milpa, the festivals, and the laughter shared with family and friends. It is also the networks woven when migration becomes necessary.

“Our land would be proud of us, because Purépecha women do not give up — we fight the battles needed to keep resisting and creating other possible worlds.”
Tsitsiki Hernández

Tsitsiki believes climate justice cannot exist without social justice. It requires confronting and transforming the structural violence of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism at their roots.

Tsitsiki’s project

In Michoacán, extractive projects and agroindustry are rapidly transforming Purépecha lands. Monocultures, deforestation, and water scarcity are displacing ancestral practices, eroding communal life, and threatening women’s health and livelihoods. For Purépecha women, the loss of water springs—once spaces for socialising, care, and spiritual connection—has meant dispossession not only of natural resources but of cultural memory and collective life.

This project will bring together 30 Purépecha women of different ages from Turícuaro (Highlands) and Cuanajo (Lake area) to reflect on the impacts of land-use change and strengthen their role in defending water and land. Through workshops, exchanges, and collective actions, participants will recover stories and strategies of resistance, share knowledge, and build networks of mutual support.

A communications campaign will challenge dominant narratives of “progress” by framing the defence of land and water as a struggle for life. The women will also create a directory of support services and allies, strengthening their collective protection in the face of violence and extractivism.

By weaving together knowledge, memory, and strategies, this project nurtures Purépecha women’s leadership, builds collective power to defend land, sustain community life, and reaffirm water as a source of abundance and dignity.

Learn more about the Amos Climate Fellowship →