Hemispheric Mexican-Origin Indigenous Farmworker Family Liberation Struggles for Land, Water, and Life

• In Event: Decolonial Theories and Pedagogies of Liberation: Resistance and Re-Existence

Abstract

Mixteco- and Triqui- speaking farmworker families from Oaxaca, Mexico have maintained a praxis-oriented mode of theorizing alongside multiple sites of liberation struggle that span across both temporalities and geographies (Velasco-Ortiz 2005; Holmes 2013; Zlolniski 2019; Madrigal 2017 & 2023). The Indigenous decolonial thought and praxis advanced by these farmworkers has been maintained in diaspora via close familial ties (parentela), a shared Indigenous worldview passed on through language, and a cultural sense of communal obligation (tequio and cargo) tied to “territorial belonging” (Velasco-Ortiz 2005, 32). For generations, they have workshopped collective principled struggle in diaspora (Velasco-Ortiz 2005, 28), utilizing pan-Indigenous frentes, community asambleas, farmworker tribunals, and transnational networks of accountability to those territories to advance planetary Indigenous rights. At the turn of the 21st century these farmworkers have formed transnational independent farmworker unions, have coordinated an international berry boycott, and have led scores of farmworkers’ strikes to lay siege on an industry dominated by multi-national corporations. The purpose of this essay is to present an example of the use of Meso-American Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) held by Indigenous transnational agricultural workers and their families to build bridges to advance a “decoloniality of knowledge, being, and power” in service of hemispheric struggles in defense of land, water, and life (Maldonado-Torres 2016). Using a coloniality/decoloniality theoretical framework, I draw upon community-driven research, oral histories, and activism to illustrate the successful disruption of the coloniality of a global fresh-fruit agricultural regime. The critical reconstruction of traditions and relationships with places of origin, communities and family was a long-term process that occurred in diaspora (in northern Mexico and the United States), over generations establishing an “ethical component of the ethnic identity project” in relation to land, self, and family was the transformative pedagogical process and praxis that has informed efforts to “protect, defend, expand, apply and pass knowledge on to others” about liberation in the 21st century (Valasco-Ortiz 2005, 151; Tuhiwai-Smith 2021, 181). Their contribution is an emerging project for Indigenous people from Oaxaca in diaspora in Northern Mexico and the United States that seeks to “bring about a community and the formation of an-other world” (Maldonado-Torres 2016, 30). The scholarly significance of this body of work is to help describe what lies beyond the coloniality/decoloniality binary and legitimates Indigenous knowledge production through proper attribution along with tracing a lineage of disruption of colonial pedagogies of erasure (Ford & Jaramillo 2023; Velasco-Ortiz 2005).

Author

• Tomás Alberto Madrigal, Independent