I am not cold anymore.
I kept on walking after they abandoned me,
my feet were hurt and the cold went down to my bones.
Night came, I could not go on any longer,
my feet could not move forward no matter how much I wanted to,
the flesh of my feet was already dragging in the sand,
the pain was confused with the suffering of my soul;
I would not see my beloved family anymore.
I heard a whisper “Everything will be fine”
suddenly shadows of people next to me and I fell to the ground,
I looked at you as in a distant memory
and I also looked at Brunito and Amalia our children,
the weather was getting warmer
and I looked at your smile while you told me
“Everything will be fine” ….
and my feet didn’t hurt anymore …… and I didn’t feel cold either.
Alejandro Ortigoza
In the face of the humanitarian crisis we are facing due to the inordinate disappearance of people, and the absence and complicity of the governments in office, civil society has had to respond with profound and transformative actions for thousands of families searching for their loved ones. In the face of the cruelty and savagery that we are feeling on a daily basis, energies, answers, dignity, hopes and so many other things emerge that we still do not know how to name, but that come from the us that we are, because that is where our strengths lie.
A month ago I met two compas, Alejandro and Cesar Ortigoza. They are twin brothers, and from the moment I met them, they were wearing thick orange jackets that covered a large part of their bodies. Later they told us that they were called Armadillos and I immediately understood that this jacket was part of the armadillos’ characteristic shell. Alejandro and Cesar shared with us the dignified work they do to respond to the pain that thousands of families are suffering due to the disappearance of their loved ones, especially the disappearances that occur on the border between Mexico and the United States. Migrants never count, they are always invisible, forgotten, so, in this dehumanized world, no government looks for the missing migrants, that is why, the Armadillo compañerxs, forcefully state, “Not one migrant less!”
Armadillos was born on October 26, 2015, although their work and dedication began years before, where they participated in two other organizations, but since 2015, Alejandro and Cesar on their own, started their organizational journey from Vista (San Diego), California. They tell me, that these 10 years of work (2015-2025), have been years of unlearning, of throwing away the manuals and replacing them with seeing and feeling the reality. Also on their horizon, is always connecting with the community, from bringing water and food to the desert, to carrying out searches.
The Armadillos Cesar and Alejandro, do not walk alone, although the nature of armadillos is more solitary, we can say that they are more like a family of armadillos that walk the deserts, but when necessary, they also go to the mountains and coasts of Veracruz, and the cities of the northern border in Mexico and the United States. So, although they are solitary, it is known that armadillos get together to share warmth in cold weather, where they gather in their burrows, in community, because they know that, in the face of the cold, the cruelty that plagues us, we will only survive collectively, in community. Another characteristic of armadillos is that, with their claws, they dig in the grass, hollow logs and, sometimes, underground. They use their long claws to open the dry, hard earth of the desert or the cold, rigid cement of asphalt.
Although there are many superstitions that the compas buscadores are more than just humans, but also, well, armadillos, they say, the two have a story from their childhood, which motivated them to call themselves Armadillos. That story, as I was told, was from when they were children and their father captured an armadillo in the bush and took it to his house. There, they waited for him, but the armadillo soon devised his escape, and he made it. The armadillo only used its claws to get out of the cage and escape and return to its home, to its place. Cesar and Alejandro say that that moment of triumphant escape marked them and they learned from that fugitive armadillo. I believe that from that moment on they began to live and think like armadillos.
Cesar and Alex are migrants in California, but their origins are between Mexico City and the state of Puebla (what a good combination, right?).
All the armadillos are volunteers. Each one of them has a regular job, in that burrow there are teachers, paramedics, a truck driver, a maintenance man, a construction worker, a gardener, a freelance writer, and others who defined themselves as workers of various trades. All of them do the work that the U.S. and Mexican governments do not do. In Mexico, the government does not search for the disappeared because it refuses to accept the profound crisis of disappearances that plagues the country. In the United States, they do not look for the migrants or the Mexicans, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Venezuelans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, etc. that migrate to the United States, because of the racism and deep contempt that exists towards our people.
Armadillos walk, search, scratch, run in different places, mainly in Arizona, California, Sonora, Tijuana, Ensenada, Juarez, Mexicali and even Veracruz. The armadillos do not see borders or walls, they only concentrate on the search for the thousands of missing people.
Without a doubt, their work is admirable and necessary, as it is constant. In these times of profound fascism, the governments also seek to attack the humanitarian actions that are being born from who we are. But the compas armadillos, as well as the searchers throughout the country, though the governments seek to criminalize them, they shout out that “Humanitarian aid is not a crime!” And that, is now also for us another demand that we must take care of, because the groups, collectives, families that are searching for their loved ones, are being criminalized by the same government that refuses to work in the search for their loved ones.
Most of the people who seek out the Armadillos are the families who are looking for their relatives. Many of them have been kidnapped by coyotes or have been taken by organized crime, or are used to extort money from their families or are simply lost and disoriented in the deserts, so it is necessary to have someone, a group that can search for them. In addition to the families, journalists and even government authorities from both countries seek them out to ask for information.
Original text by Rocío Moreno, in Historias de la Vida en las Luchas de México published by Desinformémonos on June 27th, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.