Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Milpa Alta, a rural, southern municipality
of Mexico City, this thesis focuses on local understandings and contestations surrounding
“violence against Indigenous women”, while questioning the meaning of “violence”,
“Indigeneity”, and “femininity,” and the relationship between these concepts. I argue for
rethinking violence, as present interventions in Milpa Alta may contribute more to
perpetuating than alleviating it.
Newly circulating discourses of human rights and women’s rights, and high
numbers of femicide and sexual trafficking victims in the region, have made Milpaltenses
aware of the issue of violence against women. Paradoxically, many acknowledged it to be
widespread, while insisting that women and men are equally powerful: Local ideologies of
work and love emphasise complementarity and interdependency in marriage. In practice,
interdependent work and love contain within themselves potential for violence.
Instead of directly discussing “violence”, Milpaltenses often spoke of “order” and
“chaos”: They interpreted certain acts as maintaining or changing embodied states and
the social order. Violence was also often likened to love, as one may find expression in
the other, and both engender transformation. Instead of viewing women as “victims”, a
pejorative epithet, they were frequently lionized as “strong women”, “hard workers”,
“strugglers”, and “warriors”, protecting their families and communities from all kinds of
harm. Historically, women have fought alongside their men in the communal struggle to
defend the local forest against the interests of mining companies and paper factories.
In sum, my analysis of local discourse, life history interviews, historical and mythic
narratives, religious practice, and gendered work shows that violence against Milpaltense
women can neither be understood in terms of “culturally legitimate violence”, nor in
terms of patriarchal oppression alone. Thus, anti-violence strategies promoting an
individualist notion of women’s rights are not only inefficient, but also risk socially
isolating the women accepting this approach. I conclude that intervening to save women
from “cultural violence” and imposing a particular understanding of violence, is
ineffective. Development initiatives would be more likely to meet women’s needs if they
built on local understandings, which link love and violence, rather than oppose these
