Mapping the Body and Territory: Black women and Inter-ethnic Alliances for the Politics of Life

• In Event: Black Women's Politics in the Americas: Emotions/Intellectual, Motherhood and Struggles for Territory.

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how Afro-descendant women, through interethnic alliances, with indigenous women, daily challenge the structures of oppression they face, through political strategies as well as others that are not considered political. In the context of necropolitics in Mexico, I am interested in exploring how Afro-descendant in alliances women struggle for personal, collective and territorial life. The struggle to potentialize community life, in the face of the surrounding structural violence, is part of more general anti-racist struggles. In a country like Mexico, where every day there are seven femicides, being a woman and being alive is an act of resistance and courage, even more as an Afro-descendant woman. Thus, I consider that in order to understand how violence is specific towards racialized bodies in a nation founded on miscegenation or Mestizo Nationalism, we need to take into account the founding anti-black and anti-indigenous racism. In this sense, I propose a decolonial lecture on how afrodescendant and indigenous women, through their struggle for life and the defense of their land, are decolonizing the national myth, but also, are decolonizing the political hegemonic practices.

Author

• Meztli Y Rodriguez Aguilera, University of Texas at Austin