In this article, the researcher analyzes the challenges of preparing cultural expert opinions in defense of indigenous justice systems, in contexts marked by violence and the criminalization of social movements. She uses her experience in preparing an expert report in the defense of a woman member of an indigenous security and justice system as an example, where she reflects on the limits and possibilities of expert opinions in contexts in which law has become a tool to justify state violence and repress indigenous autonomic projects.

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In this article, the author reflects on her experience as part of the Research Group on Social and Forensic Anthropology (GIASF) in following the search for relatives of the disappeared. The work with “Las Buscadoras de El Fuerte” is analyzed, an organization that, like many in Mexico, is made up mostly of mothers and wives of disappeared persons who, given the inability of the Mexican State, have given themselves the task of searching for human remains of their relatives in clandestine graves. Based on testimonies and ethnographic registration, the limits and possibilities of feminist legal anthropology are analyzed for the co-production of knowledge that are useful in contexts of multiple violence and impunity.

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This article corresponds to the introduction of the special issue of AbyaYala, where the authors try to share their reflections on the challenges and possibilities of building epistemic and political bridges, between social anthropology and forensic science. Based on their own collaborative research experiences with groups of relatives of the disappeared in Mexico, they reflect on the methodological strategies and theoretical perspectives that they have developed as members of the Research Group on Forensic and Social Anthropology (GIASF).

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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.

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Publicación del Proyecto de Fortalecimiento Democrático del PNUD – Bolivia
No. 6, Julio – Octubre 2012

In this article, the author intends to share some reflections arising from the Mexican experience on the tensions between the collective rights of peoples and the rights of women, with the purpose of rethinking from a gender perspective the policies of cultural recognition of human collectives. The intensification of migratory flows from the south to the north and the emergence of important indigenous movements in the Americas have put the issue of cultural and political rights of these human groups on the table in recent decades and have come to question the universalist and liberal vision of citizenship. The demand for the cultural recognition of these groups and the reforms of the State to recognize the multicultural character of nations has reopened old anthropological debates about cultural relativism and conceptual universalism.

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REVISTA TRACE 57: Junio 2010

In this article, the author reflects on the contradictory process that she has witnessed over the last decade in Mexico: on one hand there is a successful foreign policy on human rights at the international level, in which several international instruments have been ratified against of discrimination and violence against women, yet in parallel, an internal policy in which state violence is justified in the name of “social peace” and is used against female activists and members of social movements.

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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.

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This article opens an ethnographic window to observe the new border crossings that thousands of indigenous people live in Latin America. To examine the complexity and political potential of transnational and translocal identities, the article starts with a case study: the reality of the indigenous Mames of Chiapas, a Mayan town in southeastern Mexico. The Mam people have experienced different migratory processes and border crossings in search of life alternatives. Their historical experience of continuous mobility across national, regional and religious borders has influenced their different conceptions of community, without necessarily transcending the territory because, as this article will show, references to the place are always present in their identity narratives

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With the interest of analyzing the forms of institutional violence deployed against migrant and indigenous sectors from both sides of the US-Mexico border, the authors decided to investigate the experience of indigenous women imprisoned in migrant detention centers in Texas, and in female prisons in different regions of Mexico. They consider that the experience of indigenous women in seclusion is a privileged space to analyze the contradictions that exist between the rhetoric of recognition and the real spaces of justice of the neoliberal States that, in the name of “national security,” impose the logic of criminalization against these subjects. This is a crime permeated by gender and race differences. For those who are interested in the problem of justice and equity from the experience of women, it is important to ask, in what sense does structural racism also mark the way in which crime is constructed in cases of racialized indigenous female subjects? With these concerns in mind, the researchers have launched two simultaneous investigations on the subject: one by Aída Hernández in Mexico and another by Shannon Speed ​​in Texas.

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