Browsing by Subject "Indigenous autonomy"
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Item Beyond legal truths : impunity, memory, and Maya autonomous justice after the Acteal massacre(2017-06-28) Chavez Arguelles, Claudia; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Speed, Shannon, 1964-; Stahler-Sholk, Richard; Strong, Pauline; Visweswaran, KamalaThis dissertation analyzes the production of impunity in Mexico and its long-term, transgenerational effects for the victims of state violence. I study the creation and circulation of top-down narratives about the Acteal massacre (Chiapas, Mexico, 1997), juxtaposing them with the marginalized trajectories of survivors’ testimonies toward embodied practices of memory. Departing from the analysis of prosecutors’ legal construction of the massacre I examine the role of racism in the distortions, manipulations, and mediations of survivors’ testimonies. By tracing the routes of this and other representations of the massacre and its actors in the judiciary, media, academia, and across advocacy networks, this research historicizes the process through which the “legal truth” about the Acteal case has been constructed and theorizes the erasure mechanisms of this process through the concept of “judicial limpiezas.” I argue that various actors within these realms of knowledge/truth production have paradoxically laid the foundations for the operation of impunity while simultaneously attempting to protect indigenous rights. This paradox, I suggest, finds its origins in the insidious continuities between settler colonialism and the politics of humanitarianism. My research proposes to understand impunity, not as an absence or inaction, but as productivity that reinscribes colonial difference through the lines of race and gender, and the silences that impunity actively creates, as embodied, racializing discourses. For this purpose, I explore the multilayered encounter of the Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) ministers’ positivist ideas about truth and justice with those of Maya survivors, and of their mestizo human rights lawyers. By analyzing the Acteal case’s itinerary through the SCJ as a process of judicialization of politics, my dissertation theorizes the ways the state has found in the judiciary an undemocratic but legitimized space to constrict—and sometimes erase—the rights of dissident indigenous peoples precisely at the moment when they are trying to invoke these very rights in the courts. I contend that this process has both actualized a new authoritarian dimension of neoliberal multiculturalism—in which humanitarian solidarity is complicit—and produced innovative, radical responses from Maya survivors struggling to devise an autonomous kind of justice based on memory.Item Constructing alternatives to western modernity : CONAMAQ's struggle for indigenous autonomy in the Bolivian Altiplano(2015-05) Footit, Bridget Kelsey; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ali, KamranHow are indigenous peoples negotiating their cultural, political, and economic autonomy in twenty-first century Bolivia? This thesis explores one iteration of that struggle, through a case study of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu, CONAMAQ). I provide a historical overview of how highland indigenous peoples have resisted centuries of exclusion and forced assimilation through state and non-state avenues in order to create spaces for their autonomy to flourish. In particular, I emphasize CONAMAQ's efforts to revalorize traditional political, juridical, economic, agricultural, and spiritual practices. I frame these efforts within a larger epistemological challenge to hegemonic notions of Western modernity and liberal citizenship. The Plurinational State of Bolivia under president Evo Morales has accomplished profound institutional shifts in an effort to respect indigenous rights. However, I argue that the (neo)liberal understanding of a homogenous indigenous subject continues to drive this Proceso de Cambio (Process of Change). In order to realize the goals of a plurinational state (in practice, not just in title), the Bolivian government, and non-state actors, will need to acknowledge and respect the distinct identities and goals of different subjectivities throughout the country (indigenous/non-indigenous, urban/rural etc.). I demonstrate complex relationships amongst members of CONAMAQ, the Morales government, and transnational companies, through a series of land and mining conflicts that ultimately led to CONAMAQ's decision to break away from a historical Unity Pact of civil society organizations in 2012. This discussion helps us understand the complex struggle for indigenous rights in Bolivia, why an indigenous movement has retracted their support of a supposedly pro-indigenous government, and how these struggles are tied to a larger effort to harvest alternatives to Western modernity.