Indigenous Autonomies in Latin America in the Face of Contemporary Capitalism: Overview,Perspectives,and Dilemmas: Part 2

This issue of Latin American Perspectives continues Part 1 that was published in July 2024 on the same topic. That volume contained a comprehensive introduction on the current state of research on Indigenous autonomies in Latin America with articles grouped into three subthemes: 1) genealogies and categories of autonomy projects and their interactions with states; 2) the historical context of identity formation specific to Indigenous peoples and campesinos; and 3) the various interpretations of the concept of development arising from the body of thought about—and practices of—autonomy in the region.

Here In Part 2, a fourth group of articles considers the tensions between the practice of self-government within autonomy projects and the state’s efforts to subordinate, assimilate, or condition these autonomies. Shenkin’s case study of Bolivia reveals how, even in the Americas’ foremost example of formal recognition and institutionalization of the Indigenous right to self-government, the hierarchies of the central administration and the colonial tendencies of dividing and co-opting Indigenous peoples continue to be reproduced almost identically. The author warns that the promotion of parallel structures of Indigenous leadership limits the development of grassroots democratic processes and coherent strategies to resist the advance of neoliberal extractivism. Solís Cruz and Cosh Pale reach a similar conclusion in their study of an Indigenous municipality in Chiapas, Mexico, where formal recognition of rights led to a de jure self-government that established “a multicultural hegemonic policy.”

The fifth group of articles in this double issue focuses on the process of forming new political subjects capable of fighting to defend their land and territory. Gasparello analyzes the mobilization of anti-mining resistance in the Montaña de Guerrero, Mexico, where Indigenous groups bring together material goods (struggle for the commons), the community as a collective subject, and their particular systems of norms and values to resist the dispossession carried out by megaprojects. Sáenz underlines the process for the formation of a collective subjectivity within the Zapatista movement through a “pedagogy of planting seeds” that sows territory-based struggle reaching beyond the specific geographies of the Mexican southeast. Aquino Centeno studies Zapotec peoples in Oaxaca and examines another example of de facto autonomy in which the local construction of communal economies reinforces the sense of communality and the structures of self-government, which enable resistance to the centralizing imposition of the neoliberal state. Pérez Ochoa also examines the relationship between the territorial struggle and the process of political subject formation in the case of the Zoque people of San Miguel Chimalapa, Oaxaca. Their long-term perspective on experiences of struggle and conflict, along with historically renewed communal and political practices, helped internalize the sense of their right to reclaim territory in the face of a variety of land grabbing corporations.

The sixth and final set of articles examines the organizational processes of resistance to two capitalist megaprojects promoted by the supposedly progressive government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico. López-Barreto et al. study the “Maya Train” and the conflict between the neoliberal development model and the biocultural values of the Maya peoples in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Communities there are mobilizing around their onto-epistemological vision to counterpose their alternative way of life against the limited vision of the transnational capitalist class. They strategically combine the discourses of self-determination, environmental sustainability, and food sovereignty, with the anti-colonial perspective of defending a “politics of place,” without foregoing recourse to national and international legal frameworks. Hoffman examines another megaproject in Mexico, the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca. She highlights the importance of territoriality for the Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in resistance, their roots in the land and nature, as well as their history of organizing to defend their collective rights to land, as key elements in opposing agribusiness projects and global extractivism.

Indigenous (and Afro-descendant and campesino) autonomy represents an important framework for conceptualizing and instrumentalizing resistance against contemporary forms of capitalist depredation in the region. U.S. scholarly attention is still lagging behind the burgeoning Latin American literature on autonomy movements. This double issue (July/September 2024) aims at furthering the Latin American Perspectives tradition of translating and bringing into dialogue these bodies of work.