Scales of Resistance
Indigenous Women's Transborder Activism
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In Scales of Resistance Maylei Blackwell narrates how Indigenous women's activism in Mexico and its diaspora weaves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales. Drawing on more than seventy testimonials and twenty years of fieldwork spent accompanying Indigenous women activists, Blackwell focuses on how these activists navigate the blockages to their participation and transform exclusionary spaces into scales of resistance. Blackwell shows how activists in Mexico and those in the migrant stream that runs from Oaxaca into California redefined women's roles in community decision-making. They did so by scaling down Indigenous autonomy to their own bodies, homes, and communities; grounding their political claims within Indigenous epistemologies and the gendered nature of social organization; and scaling up to regional, national, and continental contexts. This allowed them to place themselves at the heart of Indigenous resistance and autonomy, decolonizing gender hierarchies and creating new scales of participation. Blackwell reveals the importance of moving across different types of scale and contrasting colonial divisions of scale itself with Indigenous conceptions of scale, space, solidarity, and connection.
About this Author
Maylei Blackwell is Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, author of ¡Chicana Power!: Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement, and coeditor of Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era.
Reviews
"The strength of the theoretical argument lies in the interaction between the various case studies explored in the chapters, as well as in their interrelation among struggles, allowing for an exploration of the different scales of indigenous women's organization and considering them as interconnected rather than separated by national or political borders. ... While the opening up of the concepts of scale and boundary remains a major theoretical contribution, [Scales of Resistance] also subtly showcases the strength of indigenous women's movements and their repertoire of rich, diverse, and unique actions, constituting an equally important empirical contribution."
"The book will appeal to researchers in both social movements and those working on transborder issues. However, just like its concept of scale, the author broadens the scope of the term 'transborder' to challenge colonial borders, colonial power systems, and settler colonial
structures aimed at eliminating indigenous populations. Therefore, it could also be of interest in the field of critical indigenous studies."
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