The making of Indigenous resistance: land struggle and the foreclosure of politics.

Speaker: Victor Arroyo

We all are familiar with the images of violence and the drug war in Mexico. The state of Michoacán, a strategic place for these transactions, carries also a long history of exploitation against indigenous communities and their natural resources.

In 2011, the indigenous purepechas begun a resistance movement against the Mexican government, becoming fully and legally an autonomous town in 2012.

How did they achieve self-government and self-regulation not only over their own political and social configuration, but also in the distribution of natural resources? How the drug wars in Michoacán, a crime that leaves no apparent material residue, reconfigures the social production and practice of space?

By investigating how is memory inscribed in space and how social interactions produce lived spaces and regulated territories, politicizing what otherwise would be a natural physical environment, we gain a deeper understanding on how economical punishment, social exclusion, erasure and exception actively materializes and unfold in space.