Category Archives: Capítulos en Libros

Towards a Culturally Situated Women Rights Agenda: Reflections from Mexico

womens-movements

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.

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Indigeneity as a Field of Power: Multiculturalism and Indigenous Identities in Political Struggles


identitiesThe 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.

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Les relations entre l’État et les peuples indigènes au Mexique: les promesses non tenues de la Révolution

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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. 

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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.

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New Political Actors in Rural Mexico: The Challenges and Achievements of Peasant and Indigenous Women

cultural-politicsIt is impossible to understand the growth of indigenous and peasant women’s participation in contemporary social movements nor the rise in their gender specific demands, without recognizing their history of struggle and resistance since colonial times (Gall and Hernández 2004) as well as the multiple dialogues of the last several decades that have influenced their political identities.  Campesino  (peasant) movements, guerilla movements, theology liberation movements, rural feminisms, international organizations as well as government programs, have all contributed to creating political spaces for peasant and indigenous women. Each of these contributed various elements to help construct a culturally specific gender based agenda for change, that rearticulates or rejects various elements of discourses about the rights of women.

The voices of these women began to be heard in the beginning of the 1980s, as part of a broader series of social mobilizations and struggles of urban and rural women participating in popular movements (labor, urban popular, peasant).  They began to develop a criticism towards the inequalities and injustices they suffered as women.  The women’s campesina movement was part of this pioneering process where a popular feminism in its rural form was constructed.

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Del Tzolkin a la Atalaya: Los cambios en la religiosidad en una comunidad chuj-k´anjobal de Chiapas

This study on the changes in religiosity in a Chiapas ejido on the Mexico-Guatemala border is part of a joint investigation carried out by CIESAS in the states of the Mexican southeast, with the aim of locating Protestantism within community life, observing its incidence in the field of social organization and cultural practices of the population.

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