Chair: Hermes Costa (FEUC) | Moderation: Silvia Rodríguez Maeso (CES)

Overview

The last decade has witnessed the deepening of the multiple violences that affect the social fabric in Mexico and Central America. Patriarchal violence, now carried out by armed men linked to organized crime, security forces or paramilitary groups, is manifest in various spaces.

We, feminists committed to activist research, face a context of serious human rights violations and a “terror pedagogy”, where forced displacements, disappearances, youthicides, femicides, kidnappings and extortions are part of the daily lives of the communities with which we work. We are inserted in contexts of unacknowledged warfare, in which the perpetrators of violence belong either to organised crime or to the government. There are new expressions of violent masculinities linked to organised crime and the struggle against it.  In some regions, the line between victims and aggressors is not clearly defined and violence is reproduced in domestic and community spaces. In this context, it is crucial to develop new theoretical and methodological perspectives to analyse the link between structural violences and extreme violences from a critical and decolonial feminism, committed to dialogue with other non-Eurocentric ways of understanding justice, dignified life and retribution.

In this lecture, the speaker would like to share some of the challenges and achievements to develop socially engaged research in the context of multiple violences, from my research experiences in Mexico and Central America, as a member of a legal anthropology team that has been working with indigenous women victims of structural violences and extreme violences and with a forensic team that accompanied the search for missing relatives.

Bio note

Rosalva Aída Hernández | Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City

Born in Ensenada, Baja California, she earned her doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University in 1996. She is Professor and Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She worked as a journalist since she was 18 years old in a Central American Press Agency. Since she was an undergraduate she has combined her academic work with media projects in radio, video and journalism. Her academic work has promoted indigenous and women rights in Latin America. She has done field work in indigenous communities in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Guerrero and Morelos, with Guatemalan refugees and with African immigrants in the South of Spain. She has published more than twenty books and her academic work has been translated to English, French, and Japanese. Her more recent book entitled Multiple InJusticies. Indigenous Women Law and Political Struggle in Latin America, will be published by University of Arizona Pres. She is recipient of the Martin Diskin Oxfam Award for her activist research and of the Simon Bolivar Chair (2013-2014) granted by Cambridge University for her academic work.

Her research interests cover ethnic studies, legal and political anthropology, postcolonial feminisms and activist research. One of her projects involves exploring the experience of indigenous women with customary law and national law. She has worked extensively in the past on exploring plural identities in Chiapas as well as the human rights of Guatemalan refugees in Mexico. She is the author of Sur Profundo. Identidades Indígenas en la Frontera Chiapas Guatemala (CIESAS-CDI 2013) , Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico (UT Press 2001) published also in Spanish as La Otra Frontera: Identidades Múltiples en el Chiapas Postcolonial (2001), and of Etnografías e Historias de Resistencias. Mujeres Indígenas Resistencia Cotidiana y Organización Colectiva (2008 PUEG-UNAM-CIESAS) and is co-editor of: Descolonizando el Feminismo. Teorías y Prácticas desde los Márgenes (Catedra 2008) Dissident Women. Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas (UT Press 2006); El Estado y los indígenas en tiempos del PAN: neoindigenismo, identidad y legalidad (Porrúa 2004), Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: the Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion (Rowman & Littlefield 2003); and The Other Word: Women and Violence in Chiapas Before and After Acteal (IWGIA 2001) among other books. She is a recipient of the Martin Diskin Oxfam Award for her activist research.

The Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in Social Sciences is organized by Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra (FEUC)