Mixtec Activism in Oaxacalifornia: Transborder Grassroots Political Strategies (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
In the context of the globalization of capital and the increased mobility of labor across inter-national borders, this article analyzes the experience of indigenous migrant workers from the state of Oaxaca who have formed permanent communities in northern Mexico and in California. It focuses specifically on the experience of the Mixtec transnational community whose participation in the Frente Indígena Oaxaqueño Binacional has strengthened and changed the ethnic identities that hold together these communities across a fractured geog-raphy of different borders (at the local, state, and international levels) and has served as one of the bases to organize across these transnational borders. This analysis contributes to an understanding of how the activism of transnational political organizations promotes the construction of new political alliances along ethnic lines in a post-melting-pot California and the consolidation of indigenous migrant organizations within the context of increasin...
In this paper I argue that members of Oaxacan Indigenous “transborder communities” of Mexico and the United States are entitled to a freedom of movement right between these two countries. First, I explore the vital role that migration across the Mexico-US border plays in maintaining Oaxacan transborder “societal culture.” Second, I explore the implications of Will Kymlicka’s views on collective rights for this phenomenon. On the one hand, Kymlicka’s argument that just states must protect the societal cultures of minority groups within their territory would seem to support such a right for Oaxacan “transmigrants.” On the other, Kymlicka’s categorical distinction between “national minorities” and “voluntary migrants” cannot, as it stands, capture the lived experiences of Oaxacan transborder communities and similar transnational groups. However, I argue that there is a reasonable extension of Kymlicka’s view that can, indeed, account for the phenomenon of Oaxacan transborder communities by allowing for this freedom of movement right.
Journal of Festive Studies, 2022
This article explores what work the disfrazados (jester characters) do to sustain and promote the construction of contemporary cultural identities and senses of belonging among the members of the Indigenous Mixtec community of San Juan Mixtepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. Disfrazados are poignant examples of what anthropologist Peggy Levitt termed "social remittances," key elements for creating social and cultural capital in this transnational migratory community. The article extends theoretical discussions about Indigenous peoples in Mexico beyond traditional analyses of economic remittances by exploring their "non-monetary contributions to development," specifically regarding the construction, maintenance, and practice of cultural identities and senses of belonging through performance.
Building Migrant Civil Society: Indigenous Mexicans in the US
Iberoamericana, 2005
This paper is based on Fox/Rivera-Salgado (2004a). 2 See López/Runsten (2004). Besserer documented that this municipality received remittances from 171 locations scattered across 7 states in Mexico and 15 states in the United States (2003: 67-69). 3 "Hablábamos en mexicano y no nos entendían, de esa manera pudimos organizarnos aunque estaba prohibido y luchamos por un pago justo. Hicimos la huelga en mexicano." Testimony of Florencio Martínez Hernández, from Tlaxcala, cited in Ramírez Cuevas (2003: 11).
This book describes the short history of the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO) in 2006. It consists of nine chapters and conclusions, accompanied by a website: http://faceofoaxaca.uoregon.edu which contains twenty-six testimonies and a wide collection of photographs, thus directly presenting the reader with the participants of this movement. Click the following address for a free copy TF. http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Vt3qeB4kGGEAEXeNaaPR/full#.VNuY3kITqF0
2020
Immigration is one of the most divisive topics in the United States. One aspect of this complicated theme is economic migration. This migration is different from asylum/refugee status or other forms of protected relief. The people who are migrating are not facing imminent threats of political violence or other types of violence, but are living in conditions of poverty. Their livelihoods depend on migration, and money earned in the United States that is sent back to their communities. The first part of this paper will focus on people who migrate for this economic-based reason, specifically examining two communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Both communities have high levels of economic migration. The positive and negative consequences on the communities will be analyzed through ethnographical research in San Simón Almolongas, Miahuatlán and San Bartolomé Quialana, Tlacolula, both located within a few hours of Oaxaca City. Then, in the second part of the paper, the observed impacts on the...
Oaxacalifornia: Indigenous transnational spaces as Grassroots Cosmopolitanism
MEDIACIONES
Paradoxically both immigration and indigeneity are common conditions for exclusion from full citizenship in contemporary settler nation-states. Marginalized populations such as immigrants and Indigenous groups, resist the homogenizing rules dictated by dominant notions of culture and citizenship deployed by settler colonial states, entailing often hegemonic practices of control from institutions, such as the school and media. This essay discusses the creation of a transborder space between Mexico and the US named “Oaxacalifornia”. This “deterritorial” space was named and is maintained by Mexican Indigenous migrants from the state of Oaxaca who spend their daily lives interacting through communicative and civic practices of resurgence and solidarity. These practices enable the interaction with multiple locations and groups of people, fostering grassroots cosmopolitanism, or a worldly engagement challenging the oppressive forces of globalization, such as the state, the dominant cultu...