‘Until the land title is in my hands, the land is not sold!’: land, violence, and Indigenous survivance in Michoacán, Mexico

ABSTRACT

In this article, we use a settler capitalism framework that centers racialized gender violence in the pueblo of San Miguel Nocutzepo. We tell a story about how neoliberal policy in Mexico permitted the privatization of formerly collectively held Indigenous ejido land, which resulted in selloffs to outsiders who invested in avocado production and ended up being controlled by organized crime. Specifically, we point to the intersections between the regional agricultural recomposition and the social fabric of life in Nocutzepo as we attribute the land repurposing that the avocado-producing region of Michoacán has undergone with the encroachment of settler capitalism and organized crime. We also, however, highlight narratives of survivance in Nocutzepo that shed light on the various ways people faced violence to protect their family, pueblo, and land. Finally, we focus on a mothers-led struggle for youth and community empowerment and well-being or buen vivir that lobbied for a new Indigenous bilingual intercultural school in Nocutzepo to respond to the decline of subsistence agriculture. Our findings caution that while not all Indigenous struggles result in collective victories, everyday practices of resistance form an essential basis of survival.

KEYWORDS:

• Avocado
• violence
• dispossession
• Indigenous
• settler colonialism
• Michoacán

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Speed (2017) argues that settler colonialism was the catalyst of capitalism’s expansion and continues to structure life under settler capitalism, including through neoliberalism’s imperatives of dispossession, extraction, and elimination and its racialized, gendered, and classed logic.

2. According to Vasquez-Castillo (2004, 3), ‘ejidos’ were tracts of communally owned land that were inalienable, nontransferable, and non-attachable and were, until 1992, on formal contract between the state and ‘ejidatarios,’ the rural farmers that owned them.

3. Speed (2019) defines the neoliberal multicriminal settler state as the conditions of the nation-state that structure intersectional violence and unleashed market logics that give rise to the neoliberal market society that shape the dynamics that produce networks of illegality, vulnerability, exception, and impunity.

4. This research was conducted under Institutional Review Board protocols #2007-08-0096 and #2009-08-001, in addition to oral and life histories and archival analysis. Informed consent was obtained by verbal ascent, and pseudonyms were used for all participants, except for Doña Albina Abundis, who consented to using her name.

5. See Gonzalez-Duarte’s (2021) analysis of conservation by dispossession in Michoacan’s monarch butterfly sanctuary forests.

6. People from Nocutzepo have a multi-generational migration history to Mexico City and the U.S., including as part of the Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964. Today, a large Nocuztepo diaspora outnumbers the people living in the Pueblo.

7. San Miguel Charahuén is a distinct and smaller community than Nocutzepo in the mountains. However, it is closely related to Nocutzepo due to their common historical relationship with the former Hacienda Charahuén.

8. Sierra (2021) in her collaborative work with Indigenous women in Guerrero points to how women’s perspectives are often silenced and justified as a matter of ‘custom’ because they hold the potential to defy male authority.

9. Gonzalez-Duarte (2021) states that there is a tendency to link deforestation to landless avecinados, or landless neighbors like El Topo in our research, who are stigmatized as ‘people with few environmental ethics who vacillate between licit and illicit activities with ease’ (8).

10. Nocutzepo was one of the first pueblos in the region to solicit ejido as a dotación (endowment) on February 18, 1918, and was granted 216 hectares by presidential decree under Álvaro Obregón on May 18, 1921. Nocutzepo eventually received a total of 1500 hectares of both individually assigned and collective ejido (Paredes Martinez and Terán 2003). As an ejido-based pueblo, Nocutzepo was ‘re-communalized’ through the agrarian reform of the very early post-revolutionary period since there are no Hijuelas for Nocutzepo in the XIX Century.

11. Avocado has been referred to as ‘oro verde’ or green gold for the huge profits this fruit generates in the Mexican agro-export economy.

12. Avocado varieties such as Nabal and Fuerte are native to Michoacán; however, Hass avocado orchards were introduced to the area through agricultural development programs during the 1960s. With the growth of the Hass avocado export industry, Hass accounts for 95 per cent of the avocado acreage in Michoacán (Hofshi and Reuben 2001).

13. ‘La maña’ usually refers specifically to drug trafficking, a specialty within the larger category of organized crime, but it is also commonly used to refer to organized crime in general (Morin 2015).

14. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/brief/powerful-mexico-crime-groups-got-their-start-extorting-avocado-trade-report/

15. The cartel battle over Michoacán involved Los Zetas, displaced by La Familia Michoacana, followed by Los Caballeros Templarios, Nueva Familia Michoacana, and currently Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, and others (Maldonado 2013, 2014).

16. Rodriguez-Aguilera (2021, 7) states that grieving is an anti-capitalist practice because it goes against the machinery of capitalist time and that communities collectively feel grief because of an entangled loss of human and other-than-human beings caused by interconnected forms of intersectional violence.

17. Formal schooling has always been a contentious issue in Nocutzepo since the first school in the pueblo opened in 1921 (see Urrieta 2019; Urrieta and Landeros 2022).

18. Motherhood, while a contested terrain with many meanings and contradictions, has been important in forming collective action for women and allies in Latin America. Activist-oriented discourses on motherhood have supported politically inclined women-led movements such as CO-MADRES, studied by Stephen (1997) in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America.

19. P’urhépecha identity, cultural and language resurgence has been important in the Lake Patzcuaro region for several decades. See De Jesús et al. (2022) for the case of the pueblo of Huecorio.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luis Urrieta

Luis Urrieta, a P’urhépecha/Latinx interdisciplinaryscholar, was born in Los Angeles, but with family origins in San MiguelNocutzepo and Tócuaro, Michoacán, México. Urrieta holds the Charles H.Spence, Sr. Centennial Professorship in Education at the University ofTexas at Austin. He studies Chicanx,Latinx, and Indigenous identities; Indigenous education, migrations anddiasporas, and learning in family and community contexts. Urrieta authored Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano ActivistEducators in Whitestream Schools and co-edited (with George Noblit) Cultural Constructions ofIdentity: Meta-ethnography and Theory.

Judith Landeros

Judith Landeros is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies in Education program in the Curriculum and Instruction Department with a certificate in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her dissertation is an ethnographic and decolonizing collaborative project focusing on Indigenous and Latinx girlhood, coming-of-age experiences, women’s life stages, reproductive health education, and intergenerational learning contexts.