Description
Book SynopsisIn
Scales of Resistance Maylei Blackwell narrates how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and its diaspora weaves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales. Drawing on more than seventy testimonials and twenty years of fieldwork spent accompanying Indigenous women activists, Blackwell focuses on how these activists navigate the blockages to their participation and transform exclusionary spaces into scales of resistance. Blackwell shows how activists in Mexico and those in the migrant stream that runs from Oaxaca into California redefined women’s roles in community decision-making. They did so by scaling down Indigenous autonomy to their own bodies, homes, and communities; grounding their political claims within Indigenous epistemologies and the gendered nature of social organization; and scaling up to regional, national, and continental contexts. This allowed them to place themselves at the heart of Indigenous resistance and autonomy, deco
Trade Review"In
Scales of Resistance, Blackwell rethinks scale beyond solely its colonial and masculinist forms by centering Indigenous women’s organizing and geographies. By highlighting the work that Indigenous women (sometimes migrants) do at varying scales, as well as the creation of new scales based on their readings of power in different places and their own cosmovisions, Blackwell’s book is an important corrective to scalar analyses that invisibilize marginalized actors." -- Rebekah Kartal * Antipode *
"Overall,
Scales of Resistance is an invaluable contribution to social science and humanities literature. Blackwell’s rigorous analyses and insightful observations provide amuch-needed account of the vital roles of Indigenous women’s agency and activism in the Americas and in what will always be their forever home. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." -- T. M. Montoya * Choice *
"The strength of the theoretical argument lies in the interaction between the various case studies explored in the chapters, as well as in their interrelation among struggles, allowing for an exploration of the different scales of indigenous women’s organization and considering them as interconnected rather than separated by national or political borders. ... While the opening up of the concepts of scale and boundary remains a major theoretical contribution, [Scales of Resistance] also subtly showcases the strength of indigenous women’s movements and their repertoire of rich, diverse, and unique actions, constituting an equally important empirical contribution."
-- Andreanne Brunet-Belanger * Journal of Borderlands Studies *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii
Abbreviations xi
Prelude. Walking Together: The Politics of Acompañamiento xv
Introduction 1
1. The Multiscalar Practice of Autonomy in Mexico 41
2. Abiayala as Scale 96
3. Rebellion at the Roots 143
4. Transborder Geographies of Difference 193
5. Translocal Geographies of Indigeneity 230
Coda. The Subterranean Life Seeds 258
Notes 297
References 313
Index 349
