The chapter is written in Portuguese.

In this text, the authors reflect on the contributions of the practices and theorizations of indigenous women in Latin America for the reformulation of a legal anthropology with a gender perspective. They consider that the critical perspectives of legal anthropology in the Latin American countries that incorporated gender analysis are the product of a dialogue of knowledge between anthropologists committed to the struggles of organized indigenous peoples and women who, have been reflecting on their rights as women and as indigenous peoples and focusing in particular on spaces of community justice. These dialogues questioned both the idealized perspectives of indigenous law and the universalist perspectives of women’s rights.

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In this chapter, the author presents ideas about the methodological and political challenges involved in the practice of a socially engaged feminist anthropology in the contemporary Latin American context. In my experience as an academic and as an activist who has worked for more than two decades in favor of women’s rights in contexts of cultural diversity, I have had to face both the disqualifications of the positivist academy and the distrust of anti-academic activism. The reflections presented here are intended to respond to these two positions claiming the epistemological richness involved in doing research in partnership or collaboration with social movements and, at the same time, stating that social research can contribute to the development of critical thinking and the destabilization of the speeches of power, thus contributing to the struggle of the movements that work for social justice.

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This chapter is part of the latest book by the Mexican sociologist Luis Martínez Andrade, in which he presents a neat and provocative navigation through some of the most incisive views of feminisms from the Global South, that South that is sometimes found in the South and which others also live in the cities of the Global North.

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In this chapter I am interested in reflecting on the impact that the so-called war against drugs is having on the bodies and territories of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Taking as an analytical window the life stories of women victims of sexual violence in militarized and paramilitarized regions, as well as the stories of exclusion of indigenous women imprisoned in the framework of the fight against drug trafficking, I want to establish a link between occupation through rape of the bodies of indigenous women, their control and imprisonment, with the occupation of their territories and the dispossession of their natural resources.

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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.

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In this chapter we will expose the criticisms raised by organized indigenous and peasant women who are making their own theorizations – based on their organic intellectuals – and who rethink not only economic policies towards Mexican agriculture but, in a broader sense, the relations of the human beings with nature and the norms of coexistence and social justice between women and men.

The voices of peasant women began to be heard in the eighties, as part of a wide range of mobilizations and struggles of urban and rural women who participated in popular movements (union, urban popular and peasant) from where they began to criticize gender inequalities and injustices. The women of the peasant movement were part of that pioneering process in the construction of a popular feminism in its rural version that had many points of tension with the so-called Mexican historical feminism – which emerged in the 1970s in urban spaces, universities, middle sectors and sometimes with a left-wing ideology – although there were also common interests that did not always converge in joint struggles. In this chapter we reconstruct the history of rural and indigenous feminisms in Mexico and reflect on their contributions to the anti-racist feminist critique.

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