Mining dispossession, territoriality and commons in the Montaña region of Guerrero

Abstract

The present essay discusses organizational experience for the defence of the territory belonging to the indigenous people in the Montaña region of Guerrero, in the face of open pit mining exploitation projects. Different territorial dimensions are characterized and mobilized in the process of anti-mining resistance, with a particular emphasis in collective structures of representation and
communal government; since the meanings granted to the territory are assumed as the foundation and the reason for the organizational process. Starting from the ethnographic findings and the anthropological analysis, the problem is defined by the concepts of commons and dispossession, in which are framed indigenous territoriality and the processes of defence of the territory,
facing material and cultural dispossession. The conceptual contribution is considered of particular interest for the anthropological debate, of which the narrative utilizes repeatedly such concept, but without an adequate problem formulation from the perspective of our discipline. Drafting a parallel between the complex indigenous territoriality and the communal assets, characterized locally and emphasizing the centrality of the cultural and symbolic dimension, which makes of these communities’ epistemological references in the political debate on this topic. In that sense, my conclusion indicates the need to think about commons and dispossession, in anthropological and political terms, in combination with the process of exclusion and construction of societal inequality (economic and of power) in order to account for the processes of erosion or cultural dispossession.