ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how communality is mobilised to resist state sovereignty and land dispossession in Oaxaca, Mexico, and how Indigenous women’s struggles for bodily sovereignty intersect with the defence of territory. In a context of sustained colonial violence, understanding everyday communal practices as an action-oriented way of life that sustains Indigenous communities requires looking beyond Western understanding of sovereignty to centre instead the specific social relations in which such practices are given meaning. Indigenous local governance processes, communal land, cultural protocols, gender relations, and practices are the starting point for tracing how Indigenous communities and women, in particular refuse patriarchy and state sovereignty while asserting alternative ways of being in the world. Communality or the practice and ethics of being with one another, with the land, and non-human beings, is not a point of arrival but an ongoing process for building decolonial futures in which bodies are always in consensual, reciprocal relationships with territory, non-human entities, and nature.
