Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities

Mariana Mora is an associate professor and researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS). She coedited the book Luchas “muy otras”: Zapatismo y autonomía en comunidades indígenas de Chiapas.

It reveals, in particular, how women gain agency under the collective decision-making practices of mandar obedeciendo, a pedagogical component of self-governance, spurred by differences of race, class, age, and gender, allowing the community to defend itself through a morality based on cooperation and collaboration." (Pablo González Casanova, Professor Emeritus, UNAM) . By theorizing and embodying a farsighted vision of decolonized and decolonizing research, Mora renews our commitment to the idea that another academy is possible and practicable. "Kuxlejal Politics is a most eloquent testimony to the dynamic Zapatista struggle and to what an engaged academy can do when it genuinely walks along the paths of subaltern groups intent on defending their worlds. This

Mora situates the proposals, possibilities, and challenges associated with these decolonializing cultural politics in relation to the racialized restructuring that has characterized the Mexican state over the past twenty years. Over the past two decades, Zapatista indigenous community members have asserted their autonomy and self-determination by using everyday practices as part of their struggle for lekil kuxlejal, a dignified collective life connected to a specific territory. Mora's findings allow her to critically analyze the deeply complex and often contradictory ways in which the Zapatistas have reconceptualized the political and contested the ordering of Mexican society along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.. She demonstrates how, despite official multicultural policies designed to offset the historical exclusion of indigenous people, the Mexican state actually refueled racialized subordination through ostensibly color-blind policies, including neoliberal land reform and poverty alleviation programs. The result of that collaboration—a work of activist anthropology—reveals how Zapatista kuxlejal (or life) politics unsettle key racialized effects of the Mexican neoliberal state.Through detailed narratives, thick descriptions, and testimonies, Kuxlejal