(Dis)placement of Anthropological Legal Activism, Racial Justice and the Ejido Tila, Mexico

Abstract

Through an analysis of a land‐dispute case involving indigenous Ch´ol community members in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, this article critically examines the role of anthropological knowledge in the production of the judicial arena as a terrain through which are disputed not only collective rights claims but also a sense of justice. The case of the Ch´ol ejido, or communal land holding, of Tila reached Mexico's Supreme Court in 2010. Yet five years later, tired of the excruciatingly slow pace of the judicial apparatus, Ch´ol ejido authorities rendered their own verdict by way of an assembly decision that reclaimed the 130 hectares under dispute as their own. This para‐state legal verdict unsettled the pre‐ascribed role of different political actors—the state judicial apparatus, human rights organizations, and anthropologists—whose interplay grants certain cohesion and sediment to the current judicial arena in the country when indigenous communities are implicated. The assembly decision and subsequent actions in the ejido Tila displaced these actors, including the Supreme Court judges, and in doing so rendered visible the racialized hierarchies that neither human rights organizations nor anthropologists were effectively able to subvert. [legal activism, cultural expert witness reports, Indigenous territorial claims, racial justice, Latin America]

In Mourning: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2020

“…Equally salient is the political potential unearthed by peoples and groups similarly interpellated by security regimes waging tactical disorder. This is not necessarily achieved through the exertion of countervailing violence but instead can take the form of "unarmed militancy," as in Bolivia (C. Bjork-James 2020); cynical humor in Ghana (Daswani 2020); or in the case of Indigenous struggles in Chile and Mexico, the refusal of the premises of law itself out of a commitment to manifest alternative political horizons (Hale 2020;Mora 2020). Even when the exertion of violence is not featured in the tactical approach, to pursue a life out of the terms of order is to be legible by the state as a potential threat to national security.…”

Inhabiting Identities: On the Elusive Quality of Indigenous Identity in Mexico

“…17 For example, among the most recent anthropological scholarship, an automatic association between "being indigenous" and "community property" of the land continues to appear as an indication of an ancestral practice (cf. Mora 2020). In contrast to this identity norm, which is generally more presupposed than demonstrated, Gabriela Torres-Mazuera (2018) finds a double diversity in her ethnography of ejidos who identify as "Maya" in southern Yucatán: that is, of forms of land tenure and of social uses of the land property.…”

“…The third coordinate, which I call axiomatic alterity , consists in presupposing the singular identity of the indígena subject as determining of—or even as an explanation for—social interaction. For example, in her analysis of a land‐dispute case in Chiapas, Mora (2020) addresses a double object: on the one hand, a critical comment on the work that she developed as an expert before the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice; on the other hand, a description of the social conflict that provoked the Supreme Court intervention. For the former, Mora concludes that the “cultural affidavit” she presented in court ended up being irrelevant for the resolution of the conflict.…”

“…Significantly, despite this last point, when she exposes the conflict, only two stable and opposing groups appear: indigenous and mestizo. This division seems to be more complex, as Mora notes: “When I use the phrase ‘mestizo privilege’ I am not referring exclusively to mestizo actors, but rather to the conglomeration of alliances between a sector of Ch'ol and Tseltal community members and local elite families” (Mora 2020, 609). Far from offering an analysis of why these categories are relevant to order the conflict, or how these categories were overtaken by local alliances, the limits that separate the “indígena” from the “mestizo” collectives are integral to structure her interpretation: The conflict was “part of the contentious terrain throughout which indigenous communities struggled to reconstitute a sense of communal property” (610; italics added), by disputing a fraction of land to the mestizo elite.…”

Adaptación al cambio climático: narrativas y desacuerdos. Miradas desde los márgenes [Climate change adaptation: narratives and misunderstandings. Sigths from the margins]

“…A pesar de la urgencia y radicalidad del problema, son pocos los trabajos elaborados no solo en Latinoamérica, sino en México (Mora, 2020;Gudynas, 2016;2018a;2018b). La lucha en defensa de los territorios y los bienes comunes.…”