Possessing Land, Wind and Water in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the connection between Indigenous women’s bodies, their relationship to land and resistance to resource extraction in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. First, I explore the processes and practices through which natural resource extraction is expanded into the Global South to demonstrate that Indigenous lands are produced as wastelands that only acquire value through settler states’ imposition of land uses and ownership. Second, I show how Indigenous relations to land are simultaneously central to Indigenous struggles against territorial dispossession and Indigenous women’s struggles against gendered violence. Operationalising the concept of ‘body land’, I illustrate how relationships to territory are constituted and fragmented over time, shaping Indigenous women’s embodied experiences and transformational political capacities.