Bodies Supporting Bodies: The Tremors of Women’s Territory-Body-Land and Feminist Responses to Earthquakes in Mexico City

https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n56.04

Paula Satizábal
María de Lourdes Melo Zurita

Abstract:

Territories are political and lived spaces, collectively represented through past and present everyday practices and interactions between humans and non-humans. Indigenous and feminist movements across Abya Yala (Latin America) refer to the plural understanding of territories, bodies, and land as inseparable and co-constituted using the concept of territory-body-land. Drawing on this relationality, we analyze the earthquakes of September 19, 1985, and 2017 in Mexico, which radically transformed the lives of thousands of people, particularly those in precarized jobs. Based on in-depth interviews with activists who participated in disaster response brigades, we focus on the experiences of the Feminist Brigade, who metaphorically and physically supported the bodies of marginalized women —and continue to do so, disrupting violent territorial configurations to demand access to spaces and justice. The brigade mobilized to protect women’s bodies not only from the material impacts of earthquake, but also from capitalist and patriarchal violence. In this context, “sorority” emerges as a collective event and as a territorial practice of coming together to resist gendered and oppressive violence, striving for survival and the expansion of habitable, safer territories for women. We argue that scholarship must adopt a relational place-based policy that challenges the separation of territories, bodies, and disasters in order to listen to, learn from, and create spaces for counter-hegemonic territorial proposals.

Keywords: sorority, territory, geopolitics feminist, disasters, Mexico.