Tejiendo palabras – weaving words liaising with the Mexican national indigenous council communities:

ABSTRACT

How do we organize as a community during times of pandemic social distancing and natural disasters? In this reflective piece we recount our experience as a community during the pandemic, what lessons we learned and how we organized to support each other. We consider how these lessons can be used as we continue to resist the dispossession of territory and the defence of the life of Earth. We reflect collectively on what is needed for us as a community to return to our ancestral ways of caring for the life of Earth.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous
• territory
• COVID-19
• dispossession
• resistance

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This message was presented as part of the international roundtable “Capitalismo y medio ambiente: La Península entre afectaciones y las resistencias I” (Capitalism and the environment: The [Yucatan] Peninsula between impacts and resistance). The roundtable was organized by the National Indigenous Council (CNI) on June 10th 2020, and it is available in Spanish at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua2wiSh0iMk

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Valiana Aguilar

Valiana Aguilar is a Mayan indigenous woman from the Yucatan Peninsula, her struggle makes sense when knowing her history, a recent history, that of her grandmothers who are oppressed for being indigenous, being poor and above all being women in a society where the system of patriarchy has been destroying the lives of indigenous peoples for more than 500 years. She is part of the collective Colectivo Suumil MóokT’aan, a group of young people returning to the land to rediscover their ways and reinvent ways of inhabiting the territory.