This chapter is part of a broad project pioneered by Chandra Mohanty and Linda Carty to recover the political genealogies of feminists from the global south in an effort to decolonize feminism with the inclusion of multiple voices and experiences. The chapter presents a dialogue with Aída Hernández about her experiences in the political struggle for gender justice inside and outside the academy.
In this chapter,
the author reflects on theorizations that have emerged in the last decades in different regions of Latin America around the concepts of “Buen Vivir” or “Vida Digna” based on conceptualizations developed by indigenous intellectuals, but which are based on epistemologies from the Mesoamerican or Andean region and which have given meaning to the daily lives of the original peoples. The chapter also analyzes the backward context that is currently being experienced in the Latin American continent regarding the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples and the appropriation of these discourses by the so-called plurinational states, stripping them of their critical radicalism. Finally, the author takes a look at the way in which these conceptualizations are being vindicated by indigenous women from different regions of the continent to question gender violence and state violence that threatens the dignity of life and destabilizes the integrality of community relations.
The context of violence and impunity that currently exists in Mexico is setting in motion new methodological and epistemological challenges for social anthropology and more specifically legal anthropology. At the methodological level, long-term fieldwork in regions affected by violence brings multiple dangers to researchers and students. This forces us to seek collective research strategies from interdisciplinary teams that work collaboratively with civil society organizations. In this article, I would like to share some of the challenges and achievements that we are having in the Mexican to develop a socially committed investigation in the context of multiple violence.
Dans le présent article 1 , je me base sur mon expérience concernant l’élaboration d’expertises anthropologiques, à partir de démarches méthodologiques de recherche-action, pour réfléchir sur les possibilités et les limites de l’anthropologie juridique féministe. J’analyserai plus précisément ma participation à l’élaboration d’une expertise pour la défense d’une Autochtone prisonnière politique au Mexique, la commandante Nestora Salgado García. Cette dernière a été détenue injustement pendant plus de deux années pour avoir pris part à un système de justice autochtone qui a été criminalisé par l’État mexicain. Dans la municipalité d’Olinalá de l’État mexicain de Guerrero, Nestora Salgado García a agi comme coordonnatrice et commandante de la Coordination régionale des autorités communautaires ‒ Police communautaire (CRAC-PC), laquelle regroupe, dans un grand réseau, la majorité des systèmes de justice autochtone, connus comme les polices comm
This book recovers twenty-four years of activism and research with indigenous women’s organizations in Latin America. The author, a feminist and critical anthropologist, analyzes the context of legal pluralism in which indigenous women from Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia fight for justice. Through ethnographic research in spaces of legal pluralism, the author reflects on the possibilities and limitations of indigenous, national and international law for indigenous women, within the contexts of colonialism, racism and patriarchal violence. It concludes that the theories of indigenous women about culture, tradition and gender equity, as expressed in political documents, event reports, public speeches, and their intellectual writings are key factors in the decolonization of Latin American feminisms and social justice for all.
Recherches Amêrindiennes au Québec Vol. XLIII, No. 2-3, 2013
Dans cet article je me propose de rapprocher les lecteurs des Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec à la réalité des femmes autochtones incarcérées au Mexique et ainsi contribuer à construire des ponts analytiques pour réfléchir sur les différences et similarités qu’ont les processus de criminalisation de la population autochtone des Amériques.
Bien que les contextes mexicain et canadien soient très différents en ce qui a trait au développement économique et social, dans ces deux cas le colonialisme et le racisme ont marqué l’insertion des peuples originaires dans les projets nationaux et la manière dont la pauvreté a été criminalisée, ayant comme conséquence une surreprésentation d’hommes et de femmes autochtones dans les prisons.
Revue Tiers Monde, Febrero 2012
Cet article analyse les défis méthodologiques et politiques posés par la décolonisation de la pensée et de la pratique féministe en dialoguant avec la production théorique des études subalternes des dénommés féminismes postcoloniaux. Dans un effort pour établir des dialogues Sud-Sud constructifs et pour confronter la fragmentation politique, l’auteure propose d’aborder la production théorique des féministes postcoloniales dans une lecture de leurs contributions à partir de leur propre perspective historique et géographique, et des réalités politiques et culturelles vécues par les femmes en Amérique latine.
Genre, Postcolonialisme et diversité des mouvements de femmes Cahiers Genre et Développement no.7, 2010
The Journal of Latin American and Cribbean Anthropology – Volumen 17, no.1 : Marzo 2012
This article aims to open an ethnographic window to look at the new cross-border realities experienced by thousands of indigenous people from Latin America. To examine the complexities and political potential of transnational and translocal identities, it will consider one case study: the Mam from Chiapas, a Maya people from Mexico’s South-eastern territory. The Mam people have undergone several migratory waves and border crossings in search of survival alternatives. This historical experience of continuous mobility across national, regional, and religious borders has influenced their conceptions of community not necessarily by moving beyond territory because, as this article will show, the references to place are always present in their narratives of identity. But we can say that they are holding on to notions of place within a complex yet tangible sense of ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Vol. 32 no. 3, 2010
To speak of indigenous feminisms would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Nevertheless, beginning with the 1990’s we have seen the emergence of indigenous women’s movements in different Latin American countries that are struggling on different fronts. In many cases these indigenous women’s struggles for more just relations between men and women are based on definitions of personhood that transcend Western individualism. Their notion of equality identifies complementarity between genders as well as between humans and nature. It considers what constitutes a dignified life through a different understanding than liberal individualism of people’s relationship to property and to nature. This alternative perspective on women’s rights, which reclaims indigenous cosmovisions or indigenous epistemologies as spaces of resistance, are being transnationalized by a continental movement of indigenous women, most notably as part of an international network called Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indígenas (Indigenous Women’s Continental Alliance). In this article, the author reconstructs the political genealogies of these indigenous women and their struggles for justice.