In this article, the author reflects on the contributions that Legal Anthropology can make to the contexts of enforced disappearance and the analysis of extreme violence, building an analytical link between the global processes of militarization and the contexts of impunity and the violent masculinities that make disappearance possible. The author uses the case study of relatives of the disappeared in northern Sinaloa and the challenges they face in their searches.
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.
In These Times, 2015
It is getting harder and harder to tell the US and Mexico apart these days. Both countries’ news headlines have been dominated by stories of human rights violations by police. In the US, the police killings of multiple unarmed Black men in several states, in Mexico the police abduction and handing over to cartel gangs for assassination of 43 unarmed students, most of them indigenous. In both countries, these events made obvious the disposability of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In this article the authors compare the experiences of criminalization of social protest in Mexico and the USA.
Indian Country Today Media Network, January 2015
On January 2015 Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto utilized new presidential powers of pardon on the very day that they went into effect to free Mayan school teacher Alberto Patishtán Gómez. The authors reflect on the similarities between Patishtán case in Mexico and Leonard Peltier case in the United States. Patishtán had been imprisoned for 13 years following a trial riddled with irregularities and violations of his constitutional rights. On October 31, utilizing new presidential powers of pardon on the day that they went into effect, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto pardoned Mayan school teacher Alberto Patishtán Gómez, who had been imprisoned for 13 years following a trial riddled with irregularities. Condemned to 60 years in prison for his ostensible participation in an ambush in which seven policemen were killed, his unjust imprisonment was denounced by Amnesty International and human rights organizations throughout Mexico and the world. His case is one of many in which the legal system served the interests of groups holding political power and demonstrates how structural racism continues to generate a lack of access to justice for indigenous peoples, in Mexico and throughout the Americas.
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.