Indigenous Women Refusing the Violence of Resource Extraction in Oaxaca

Altamirano-Jiménez examines mining in Oaxaca through an Indigenous feminist framework that refuses to separate body from land or human life from water, plants, animals, and community relations. Extraction is not only the removal of minerals. It reorganizes communal property, redirects water, divides institutions, invites coercion, and exposes women defenders to gendered threats.

The article combines document analysis, place-based narratives, recorded testimonies, and interviews with Indigenous activists. Its concept of body-land makes visible how colonial and capitalist violence travels between international finance, state concessions, local governance, households, and embodied safety. It also corrects accounts of femicide and environmental harm that erase Indigenous women by treating gender or territory as isolated policy sectors.

“Refusal” is more than protest against a single mine. It sustains relationships and political worlds that extraction declares expendable. This emphasis prevents women from appearing only as vulnerable victims and avoids romantic claims that they defend nature by instinct. Their action is grounded in sovereignty, collective decision-making, knowledge, and the material work of maintaining Indigenous life.