From the hot surface of the school’s basketball court, the mountains appeared as the stories began. They rose like ancient sentinels, ridges dark with pine trees, their jagged silhouettes casting long shadows over the stone houses and caves where Rarámuri families lived. Amalia, one of the mothers, said: “When children wander too far, the ganóckos awaken and take them away. They snatch the children with their rock arms and hide them deep in their pine forests where no one can find them. Whenever a child tries to escape, the ganóckos hold the child still with their solid arms, drowning the child’s cries with the rustle of pines.” Her voice held steady against the dry wind, and the children leaned closer. Then came the scratching of crayons on paper, drawings born from her words: triangle peaks reaching toward bright yellow suns, smiling children sketched beneath in playful, uneven lines.

Later, Amalia told me the ganóckos are not meant to frighten but to protect. During colonization, when Spaniards stormed the Sierra in search of gold, Rarámuri families hid in ravines and caves. She believes the story arose as a way to keep children close, safe from being taken.

I thought of El Cucuy, the Mexican boogeyman that parents invoke when children wander too far. He has enormous ears, always listening for disobedient children. Though my mother made a point never to pass on those stories, I learned of him through friends. At night I lay awake imagining the half monster and half shadow waiting to carry me off and eat me.

But here, on the basketball court, the boundary between terror and tenderness blurred. The ganóckos were guardians, not monsters. Their awakening was a reminder of ancestral endurance, a story that reached across centuries of violence to shield children.

When the workshop ended, I stacked the drawings, mountains upon mountains. Amalia worried the stories may not resonate with city-dwelling children, many of whom have never seen the Sierra. Their fears are more concrete: poverty, hunger, drugs. But later, studying the images in my hotel room, I saw not only the Sierra Madre and smiling children but something vaster: It was the possibility of sacredness drawn by children’s hands.