In this chapter, I would like to reflect on the way in which discourses and practices around women’s rights have played a role of globalized localisms, (that is, it is about local knowledge that has been globalized) by trying to impose visions on a free and rational individual, as a subject of law, and conceptualizations of equality and freedom, which have their roots in a specific place in time and space: in the European Enlightenment and in this sense, they can be considered as local knowledge that has been successfully globalized. Over time, they have acquired the character of localized globalisms, (that is, they have become transnational practices that impact local conditions) by becoming imperatives of international organizations that, with the intermediation of national States and Feminist Non-Governmental Organizations, have imposed a homogenizing conception of gender equality.
Author Archives: anacgaeta
Epilogue of Different Knowledge
This is the Epilogue of the collective book “Otros Saberes” (Other Knowledge). It is based on collaborative research on indigenous and afro-descendant cultural politics, where the authors take us on a tour of different regions of Latin America through the methodological and political searches of six teams of research activists who were given the task of establishing dialogue platforms to exchange knowledge, which allowed them to collectively build the chapters of this book. Each of the teams came from diverse theoretical and political backgrounds and held varying degrees of knowledge and internal cohesion, however, all are heirs of a Latin American research tradition that sees academic knowledge as a tool for the construction of social justice.
Towards a Culturally Situated Women Rights Agenda: Reflections from Mexico
In this chapter, the author shares a series of reflections based on the Mexican experience on how to rethink women’s rights by taking into account the cultural context of our feminist struggles and thereby developing a gendered perspective that promotes cultural rights. These reflections emerge from several years of research on the organizing processes of indigenous women, as well as on my own experiences as a feminist activist seeking to build political alliances with the indigenous movement in Latin America.
Indigeneity as a Field of Power: Multiculturalism and Indigenous Identities in Political Struggles
The purpose of this chapter is to build a bridge between various theoretical and political debates around indigenous identities, and this involves crossing national and conceptual borders. It is hoped that these theoretical reflections contribute to a critical re-thinking of some constructions of “being indigenous” that may be leading to new exclusions. I will first discuss the origin and the concepts “indigeneity/indigenous” historizing the transnational processes of the last five decades through which the concepts have been appropriated to create spaces of political organization in anti-colonial struggles. Then I will locate these processes in the context of the political debates on multicultural reforms and indigenous rights in Latin America. In the third section I will approach the debates on Neoliberal Multiculturalism, emphasizing the way in which organized indigenous peoples have confronted this new form of governance of the Latin American Nation-States.
Les relations entre l’État et les peuples indigènes au Mexique: les promesses non tenues de la Révolution
Idioma de capítulo: Frances
La récupération de la mémoire historique des peuples indigènes est fondamentale pour récrire l’histoire de la révolution mexicaine à partir d’autres visions, qui mettent en évidence les grandes contradictions des impacts de cet avènement historique sur un grand secteur de la société mexicaine.
Dans ce chapitre j’aimerais partager, d’une part, les résultats d’une recherche historique-anthropologique sur l’impact des politiques postrévolutionnaires à la frontière Sud du Mexique sur la population maya-mam, ainsi que la façon dont la construction d’une citoyenneté monoculturelle, avec sa rhétorique d’égalité, a nié les droits linguistiques et culturels de la population indigène. Dans cette recherche, j’ai combiné histoires orales et recherche d’archives dans les municipalités de Motozintla de Mendoza, El Porvenir, La Grandeza y Bejucal de Ocampo, de la région frontalière de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas. D’autre part, je partage une réflexion sur la situation actuelle des peuples indigènes et des propositions de construction d’une citoyenneté culturelle différenciée que l’on trouve dans les demandes d’autonomie du mouvement zapatiste et du mouvement indigène national.
Sur Profundo: Identidades Indígenas en la Frontera Chiapas-Guatemala
The book Sur Profundo brings us closer to the cultural and political dynamics of the Mexico-Guatemala border. The testimonies and experiences of the Mayan peoples, which have been divided by national boundaries, remind us that this region is an open wound. From a historical-anthropological perspective, the author analyzes how the lives of the border indigenous Chujos, Kanjobales, Mam, Jacaltecos and Mochos, have been marked by the violence of campaigns of forced acculturation, by the economic violence of the reforms that force migration, and more recently by violence from organized crime.
Feminist Activist Research and Intercultural Dialogs
In this chapter, the author discusses two experiences of intercultural dialogues that have influences the decolonization of her own feminism, and that have influenced her research-activist methodologies from a dialogical perspective.
Ayotzinapa: ¿Fue el Estado? Reflexiones desde la antropología política en Guerrero
As members of LASA, and as anthropologists who for many years have been working on issues related to violence, security, and human rights in the Mexican state of Guerrero, the members take advantage of the space that LASA Forum provides, in order to share their reflections on the state crisis that currently exists in Mexico and the role that Anthropology plays in national emergency contexts.
Social Justice and Feminist Activism: Writing as an Instrument of Collective Reflection in Prison Spaces
In this article, the author shares her experience as an activist and an academic working with incarcerated indigenous and mestizo women in Mexico, who are victims of a criminal state that criminalizes poverty and social protest. Rosalva Aida arrived at the CERESO women’s prison in Atlacholoaya, Morelos, in 2008, with the expectation that her research on the Mexican justice system would contribute to improving access to justice for women. She could have never imagined the profound ways in which the reflections and experiences of these women would change her life forever.
Female Bodies, Violence and Hoarding by Dispossession
In this chapter, the researcher proposes to reflect on the use of violence and sexual torture by agents of the Mexican State against indigenous and peasant women, as part of a patriarchal semantics of violence and impunity that is developing in different Indigenous regions of the country within the framework of accumulation by dispossession processes. From a feminist perspective, it analyzes the link that exists between the occupation through the violation of the bodies of indigenous women and the occupation of their territories and the dispossession of their natural resources.