Racialized Geographies in México: Violence, Disappearance and Militarization in Indigenous Territories
RSVP: Email [email protected] confirming attendance.
Abstract: In the presentation, the speaker will reflect on the impact of the “war on drugs” on the bodies and territories of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Taking as an analytical window the life histories of women victims of sexual violence in militarized and paramilitarized regions, and the experience of relatives of disappeared persons, this presentation will establish connections between occupation through the violation and control of indigenous women’s bodies, the disappearance of racialized youth and the occupation of their territories and dispossession of their natural resources. These processes take place simultaneously and respond to the neocolonial logic of capitalism, within which gender and race inequalities are essential for their reproduction.
Speaker: Rosalba Aida Hernandez Castillo
Speaker's Bio: She worked as a journalist since she was 18 years old in a Central American Press Agency. Since she was an undergraduate she has combined her academic work with media projects in radio, video, and journalism. Her academic work has promoted Indigenous and women's rights in Latin America. She has done fieldwork in Indigenous communities in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Sinaloa, Guerrero, and Morelos, with Guatemalan refugees with African immigrants in the South of Spain, and with relatives of disappeared immigrants in Honduras. She has published twenty-two books and her academic work has been translated into English, French, Portuguese, and Japanese. Her more recent books are entitled Transcontinental Dialogues Activist Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of Canada, Mexico, and Australia and Multiple InJusticies. Indigenous Women's Law and Political Struggle in Latin America were published by the University of Arizona Press in 2016 and 2019. She is the recipient of the Martin Diskin Oxfam Award for her activist research and of the Simon Bolivar Chair (2013-2014) granted by Cambridge University for her academic work. She is presently a fellow in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University (2023-2024) where she is working on the book manuscript, “Digging for Hope in Mexico: A Feminist Ethnography in the Land of Mass Graves,” that will offer an ethnographic account of family collectives searching for their disappeared loved ones throughout Mexico.
Co-sponsors: Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University; Feminist Constellations Platform; the University Seminar on Indigenous Studies, Columbia University; Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS), Columbia University
