Concordia University Department of Geography
The Making of Indigenous Resistance: Land Struggle and the Foreclosure of Politics
In 2011, the Indigenous Purépecha community of Cherán initiated a resistance movement against the Mexican government, a struggle that culminated in them achieving full legal autonomy by 2012. This remarkable transition prompts an examination into the factors that compelled the Purépecha to pursue self-governance. How did they achieve self-governance over their political and social structures, as well as the distribution of natural resources? How have the drug war in Michoacán—a form of violence that leaves no apparent material residue—reconfigured the social production and practice of space? I am particularly interested in understanding how violent processes unfold spatially, and how policies, practices, and subjectivities are shaped by, and simultaneously shape, the social production of space. Power, inscribed within social space, defines and materializes what’s present and what has to be erased. Absence also has a political dimension, it is negotiated and contested.
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