To Remake Our World: The Struggle for Indigenous Self-Determination in Rural Oaxaca during Mexico’s Dirty War

• In Event: Ethnic rights: the struggle for identity politics and self-determination

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico took part in the national government’s Dirty War campaign against alleged dissident citizens, resulting in an increase number of deaths and disappearances. In the Mixteca region, a seemingly remote area of western Oaxaca, Mexico, the Dirty War made visible the colonial configurations towards indigenous communities like the Triqui people, with a history of intra-communal violence, and the Mixtec people of the same area. Drawing on archival material and oral histories and influenced by the work of Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, this presentation reframes these indigenous communities from victims of colonialism or of the economy and situates them as historical people who, in their efforts to retake control over their lives, shaped Oaxaca of the 1970s and 1980s. By paying attention to the everyday experiences and forms of self-activity they enacted I show the ways they transformed this period, why the Mixteca region mattered on a local and national level, and why migration became a crucial response in the aftermath. Ultimately, this talk suggests that in building a hemispheric vision of Nuestra América, listening and learning with people in struggle is as necessary as understanding the injustices and exploitation one faces. As the Triqui and Mixtec people demonstrate in the 1970s and 1980s, and prior to the large wave of migration from the area to the agricultural export fields across northern Mexico and the US, there was always another way.

Author

• Jorge Ramirez