9th International Critical Geographies Conference (ICCG)
Universidad Autonoma Nacional de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City
October 23-29, 2023
Title: "'That was their idea, to exterminate us’: Usos y costumbres guiding re-existencia in Mixteco Geographies after the Nochixtlán Massacre of 2016"
Author: Elybeth Sofia Alcantar
Track: "Geografías racializadas: colonialismo, desposesión y resistencias"
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) 2023
University of Toronto, Canada
May 11-13, 2023
Track: “Re-existencia: Indigenous Knowledges and Methodologies as tools for Liberatory Healing and the Restoration of Life from the Abiayala’s cuerpo-territorios”
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting 2023
Denver, CO, March 23-27, 2023
Title: Formulating Indigenous Methodologies in Mixteco Geographies: Contemplations from a
Geographer
Author: Elybeth Sofia Alcantar
Track: "Telling Our Own Stories? Collaboration and Contingency in Knowledge Production"
"Towards an Indigenous, Feminist, and Diasporic Geography of the Mixteca."
Author(s): Elybeth Alcantar and Liliana Sampedro.
Conference: Feminist Geography Conference.
Panel: “Decolonial Epistemologies and Ontologies.”
June 15, 2022.
Invited Discussant
Mariposas del Campo Screening
Cine Las Americas, ATX
June 8-June 12, 2022
From the Ponyhighways Website: "Mariposas del Campo shares the stories of indigenous Mixtec, Zapotec, and Purépecha teenagers from Mexico striving to change their families’ destinies in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, California. Through a stormy year of sanctioned racism and anti-immigrant policies, the documentary captures their journeys—with help from the characters’ own intimate videos—as they navigate cultural identity, parental expectations, economic challenges, and the justice needs of their migrant farmworker community. For young people whose lives have always been steeped in uncertainty, it takes a leap of faith to chase a dream."
On June 10, 2022, I along producers Bill Yahraus and Robin Rosenthal, shared the stage for an evening of Q&A. I did mention in the discussion that although I may not speak from the same exact place as many in the film who are field workers, as Mixtec kin we do share many similar experiences. The place I could speak from was coming from a mixed status family impacted by immigration policies, as well as being a first-generation college student from a Mixtec community. Mixtec identity, cultural reproduction, and festivities is so varied and it is beautiful to explain and highlight that. Thank you who all came to cry, enjoy, and share in emotion!
Latin American Studies Association (LASA) 2022
A Oaxacan Radical Tradition: Notes from Oaxaqueñes in Diaspora
Participants: Xochitl M. Flores-Marcial (CSU Northridge), A.S. Dillingham (Albright College), Jorge Ramirez (Dartmouth College), Liliana Sampedro (UC San Diego), Inî G. Mendoza (University of Chicago) and Elybeth Alcantar (UT Austin).
ABSTRACT: This panel ruminates on the possibility of a Oaxacan Radical Tradition. Building from the urgency of the late Black studies scholar Cedric J. Robinson, we propose a Oaxacan Radical Tradition to theorize ideas of Indigeneity and liberation in the context of migration, dispossession, exploitation, and political repression. A Oaxacan Radical Tradition encompasses the rich traditions of knowledge, language, and memory that emanate from Indigenous Oaxacan communities; the ways of being and knowing such as reciprocity, comunalidad, and tequio that extend beyond the Oaxacan state; and the practices of communal life that are utilized by these communities to transform their worlds as acts of self determination and autonomy. As scholars connected and committed to the Oaxacan Indigenous experience in Oaxaca and in diaspora, the Oaxacan Radical Tradition enables us to ask: what kind of politics, alternative worlds, and solutions do Indigenous people assert in a world in crisis? From the collective memories forged in the Mixteca Alta amid state violence, the language-based community making practices of Indigenous people in diaspora, to the North-South Indigenous relations and their worldmaking activities, we invite LASA to join us in conversation with a panel of differing historians, geographers, linguists, and interdisciplinary scholars who frame their research along, with, and among Oaxacans in the state and within the diaspora who are engaging in a praxis of a Oaxacan Radical Tradition.
May 8, 2022
American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting 2022
Abstract:
On June 19, 2016 a violent conflict erupted in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca, Mexico in which the Mexican Federal Preventive Police (FPP) attacked the Nochixtlan Blockade established by teachers of the Sección 22 union, Mixtec community members, and Mixtec peoples. This conflict, now regarded as the Nochixtlán Massacre of 2016, occurred within a racialized and militrized landscape, other wise known as a ‘geogrpahy of terror’ (Oslender, 2008). In this article, I propose the framework of ‘Geographies of terror’ to understand how the Nochixtlán conflict revealed conditions of control, deterritorialization, but also reterritorialization and spatial resistance and transformations of sense of place in the landscape. I demonstrate in this paper that Mixtec people, and Seccion 22, engaged in radical traditions of community engagement informed by comunalidad, to renegotiate their militarized landscapes and become agents of spatial resistance. The community’s driven power to do so exemplifies that Mixteca Alta geographies are not rigid, rather, the Mixtec community and their allies provide new spatial possibilities for dignity after the Massacre of 2016.
Keywords: geographies of terror, spatial resistance, comunalidad, Oaxaca
Keynote Address: "Indigenous Reflections on Eco-feminism Guided by Care and Responsibility"
By: Elybeth Alcantar
On November 13, 2021, I provided the Keynote Address for the 23rd Annual Womxn's Conference: "Intersectional Ecofeminism" hosted by the Gender, Sexuality, and Equity Coalition (GSEC) at California State University, Chico. I began this Address by asking that we approach this day, our research, and our everyday actions with a Feminist ethics of care (hooks, 1999 ; Lawson, 2007). I reflected on my experience as a First-Generation Mixtec student in academia, and how my experiences have shaped my research. I specifically shared a story about my time interviewing Seccion 22 teachers in Oaxaca in 2018, and being invited to attend an elementary school science fair. It was at this science fair, where I saw a 3rd grade class project (image picture behind me on the podium), where the children hand-drew the repercussions of pollution. El Agua Es Vida, or "Water is Life," is emboldened across the brown butcher paper poster. I reflected on how this connected with the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests in Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2016, as well as the current Line 3 Resistance camps in Ojibwe Territories. This Address also considered mining projects, and the creation of climate refugees, as well as incarceration as all tied to the Climate Crisis. I offered a framework of Feminist Political Ecologies and Feminist Geopolitics to consider how we can listen, create, and support a critical approach to how we consider environmental issues and the effects it has on territory and the body (Faria & Mollett, 2007; Torres, 2018; Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021).
Body Mapping Workshop: "Indigeneity, Territory, Body Mapping and Possibilities for the Future"
By: Elybeth Alcantar
On November 13, 2021, following the Keynote Address for the 23rd Annual Womxn's Conference: "Intersectional Ecofeminism" hosted by the Gender, Sexuality, and Equity Coalition (GSEC) at California State University, Chico, I offered a Body Mapping Workshop. Body Mapping is a method can be used to share stories of trauma, healing, and other visceral emotions that is useful for planners, community-projects, truth & reconciliation efforts, and more (Sweet & Ortiz-Escalante, 2014). In this workshop, I began it as an introductory space to learn Body Mapping. Although I did provide critiques in contemporary Feminist Geographies, I wanted to provide this method as a tool that participants could learn from to devise how they perceived themselves, their feminism(s), and their relationship to the environment. As a Feminist and Indigenous Geographer, I found it crucial in explaining my own community's ontologies to land, and how important it was for Indigneous epistemologies to be considered in Environmental Justice. Borrowing from Zaragocin and Carreta's method of Cuerpo-Territorio, I was able to begin planting this seed in the participants' minds of how land and body were intertwined (Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021). As mentioned previously, this was an introductory workshop and I provided materials for the activity as well as Guided Questions to have the participants reflect on their position to Ecofeminism. Below are some pictures of the workshop, courtesy of GSEC at Chico State.
More on the Workshop and Activity
Workshop
November 13, 2021
I delivered the workshop in-person and through Zoom. Participants did listen to a short 15 minute introduction of Body Mapping and the main concepts. Consequently, they were given 35 minutes to engage with the activity. Materials such as large white paper, and colored markers were provided by myself. This activity varies across method and motivation. For example, some people use paint or other colorful mediums.
Activity
November 13. 2021
Here, participants had the opportunity to listen to guided questions as they drew their body map and possibilities of the future. Participants were encouraged to be creative and to draw as abstract as they felt they needed to. Some of the questions included: "Outline your body, or draw on the sheet how you envision your body: This can be an outline, or an abstract object, or anything else that comes to mind!" as well as, "Now, let’s turn to our “ini” (inside): What is guiding your feminism? Use images, words, colors to express these motivations." These questions were all devised by Elybeth Alcantar.