Indigenous Women Refusing the Violence of Resource Extraction in Oaxaca

Altamirano-Jiménez does not treat mining as an abstract question of “impact.” She focuses on conflicts around gold and silver extraction in San José del Progreso, Oaxaca, and asks a more basic set of questions: who gets to decide how land is used, where water flows, and whose bodies and ways of life are made to absorb the costs of development? Her Indigenous feminist analysis treats extraction as more than the removal of minerals. It can alter land relations, access to water, the terms of community decision-making, and the conditions under which everyday life is sustained.

The article’s narrative methodology places stories grounded in place alongside documentary analysis. Altamirano-Jiménez considers government and policy materials, news and reports, narrated videos made with an Indigenous community-support organization connected to the Oaxacan Collective for the Defense of Territory, and interviews with Indigenous activists at forums and gatherings. She is careful not to treat a community as a homogeneous unit: different stories meet, pass one another, and sometimes conflict. That methodological choice matters. A mining dispute cannot be understood through corporate promises, government documents, or aggregate statistics on gender violence alone; it also requires attention to how people experience territorial change, how they narrate it, and why they choose to resist.

“Body land” is neither a decorative metaphor nor a claim that land is simply an extension of women’s bodies. It names a relational understanding that does not divide people from land, water, and other forms of life. Necropolitics helps the article examine how power distributes exposure, survival, and disposability, but an analysis centered only on human bodies cannot fully account for damage to water, land, and nonhuman life. Women’s refusal therefore goes beyond opposition to one project: it challenges an order that turns land into an asset, water into an input, and some lives into people who have no place in decisions. Refusal is generative in this account; it also makes room to sustain relationships, continue living, and imagine futures.

The San José del Progreso case gives these concepts a specific history. The article describes water pressure, community division, and disputes over land negotiations as the open-pit gold and silver mine expanded. Residents attributed contamination, violence, and changes in daily life to mining activity; these are presented as claims and experiences within a conflict, not as an independent legal finding. Altamirano-Jiménez also records women’s increased participation and voice in community assemblies after organizing against the mine. At the same time, women activists faced risks tied both to extractive conflict and to gendered norms within the community. To turn this history into a simple story of “women’s solidarity equals liberation” would erase their labor, disagreements, and exposure to harm. To portray them only as victims would erase their political judgment and agency.

The analysis also brings care and territorial defense into the same frame. Water scarcity is not an abstract environmental indicator: it enters the practical work of obtaining water, managing households, caring for others, and keeping daily life going. Collective rituals and practices of reciprocity are not cultural decoration; the article reads them as ways of affirming responsibilities among humans, land, and the more-than-human world. Indigenous feminism here is not a moral pose of speaking for “nature.” It asks readers to see who is expected to sustain life, who has the authority to define development, and who is made to bear its bodily and ecological costs.

This is a qualitative study rooted in one community and its historical conditions, not a general account of all Indigenous women, all Zapotec communities, or every extractive project. The differences within the community are a reason not to imagine “community consent” as automatically unanimous, or to romanticize land defense as a natural, conflict-free bond between women and nature. The article’s feminist contribution is to change the unit of analysis: gendered violence, dispossession, water governance, care work, and collective politics are not separate issues. Read through that connection, refusal does more than stop a form of harm; it defends a way of organizing life around relationship rather than possession. Read the article