Elvia León, the youngest of seven children, wanted to leave Bomintzhá back in 1987. “I told my mother that I didn’t want to live in that kind of poverty, and she supported me.” Her father was less pleased with her plans to abandon their small community in Mexico’s Hidalgo state to study in the city of Querétaro. “The culture here is that women are meant to be at home, doing domestic chores.”