Lisa 1 is just 26, but her body bears the strain of years labouring in the soil and living with the violences of life in Alcozauca, a mineral rich region of Guerrero. From an early age, she remembers sustained familial physical and psychological abuse, extreme poverty, and forced labour on the farm. Repeated efforts to flee, including time spent as a domestic labourer in the tourist industry, always led to her re-capture and return home. Lisa recounts interwoven and distinct experiences of sexualised violence so often normalised in patriarchal cartel strongholds: drugged and gang raped, forced to marry a much older man, devastated by the sale of her child by her own family. In this part of Mexico, the land has primarily been worked by modest small-scale farmers like Lisa and her family. The population is predominantly indigenous, including Mixtecs, Nahuas, Amuzgos, and Tlapanecos. Today it is increasingly dominated by poppy farms, lucrative crops for the cartels who rule large parts of this state and who manufacture, transport, and/or sell the opiates produced from these farms across Mexico and North America.
Rosana is also from Guerrero, one of the leading states in Mexico for feminicides and cartel violence. She remembers her community as 'a quiet place', where locals mainly worked in agriculture, livestock, fishing, and/or tourism. However, after the introduction of poppy cultivation and extractive mining, the landscape underwent radical change. Organized crime groups began to fight over the territory, and soon its citizens witnessed shootouts, armed attacks, and enforced curfews (Interview 02/20/20, Nogales, Sonora). Her husband joined one of these gangs, marking her and her 15-year-old daughter as targets by rival groups. But Rosana already lived in fear. Her husband was also abusive and she knew too well how domestic violence, even lethal cases, were typically silenced and ignored.
These are moments from the narratives Lisa and Rosana hope one day to recount to asylum officials at the U.S. Mexico border. In Guerrero, their experiences are not uncommon. For at least a decade, Mexico has suffered a serious crisis of forced internal displacement. Guerrero is one of the main areas of expulsion. The Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH) found that in 2018 and 2019 Guerrero was the Mexican state with the largest number of displaced persons (5,128 people), 59.19% of the national total (2020 and 2019). Between January 2019 and April 2020 the majority of displaced Mexicans registered by the Kino Border Initiative along the Sonora-Arizona border were from the state of Guerrero (28%), followed by Oaxaca (13%) and Chiapas (7.1%) (see Figure 1). While the accounts of Lisa, Rosana, and other women from Guerrero are harrowing, they reveal the complex and overlapping ways that intimate, state, economic, and political violences interweave through their body-territories. Yet a feminist decolonial epistemology also prompts us to move beyond 'the totalising figure of the victim' to draw new political cartographies (Gago 2019, 65), both personal and collective, and to build landscapes of resistance -or reexistence, based on desire, (self-)care, protection, and the (re)production of life outside the domain of violence. We explore and connect both processes in this article.
Using a decolonial feminist lens, we trace the scalar, spatial, and temporal-(neo)colonial relationships between body, territory, and community, mapping both the geographies of terror that bind the bodies of women and girls to contestation over land and also their efforts to forge other ways of living beyond that violence. We focus on the experiences of indigenous and mestizo women from Guerrero seeking asylum on the US-Mexico border. Their accounts offer rich insight into what scholars have begun to call re-existencia or, in English, 're-existence' (Gabbert and Lang 2019;Lozano 2017). We engage re-existencia alongside the concept of 'cuerpo-territorio' (body-territory), attending to the ways that women respond to violence, reclaim stolen ties to the land, and create new spaces of safety for themselves, their children, and their communities. Following the groundbreaking work of Cabnal (2010), Zaragocin (2018), Gutiérrez Aguilar, Noel, and Reyes (2018), Zaragocin and Caretta (2020), and others, this decolonial feminist lens offers a grounded, embodied, and intersectional approach to research that foregrounds new possibilities through temporal and spatial bridging of body-territory. It is attentive to anti-indigeneity, land theft, poverty, patriarchy, and the long histories of mestizaje colonial control that are central to the ongoing crisis of forced displacement in Central America and Mexico, as well as to the violent exclusions at the US border.
We begin by examining 'geographies of terror' (Oslender 2008) produced in Guerrero, blending data on forced displacement, homicide, and other key political-economic indicators. In particular, we highlight three related dynamics that produce violence in the region: mining extractivism; the forced change from subsistence farming on ancestral territories to intensive poppy and opium gum production; and the loss of community-autonomy in the face of shifting alliances amongst local politicians, businessmen, and organised crime. Together we show how these have produced a potent relationship of multiscalar violence, dispossession, and deterritorialisation in this southern Mexican region.
Throughout our analysis we are also sensitive to displaced women's work of re-existencia. For indigenous and mestizo women impacted by violence in Guerrero, their bodies -and those of their loved ones and community members -are the primary political 'territory'. We attend to their practices of care and (re)production of life in response to these dynamics (Federici 2013), and situate their work of 're-existencia' alongside feminist theorisations of resistance, resilience, and re-working (Grosz 2002;Katz 2001;MacLeavy, Fannin, and Larner 2021). In turn, we highlight how displaced women re-signify their life projects, gain self and societal recognition as political subjects, and 're-work' notions of territory -defying the violent bordering projects that have so powerfully structured their lives.
The data used here draws from our ongoing (2019)(2020)(2021)(2022)(2023) bi-national research project on the feminist geopolitics of Mexican displacement, migration, and asylum on the US-Mexico border. We examine forced displacement; the nexus between displacement, internal migration, and international migration; and access to immigration relief for Mexican youth, women, and families with a focus on the border regions of Sonora-Arizona and Chihuahua-Texas. The study integrates researchers from both Mexican and US universities, along with 22 members of a bi-national working group that includes lawyers, activists, and other migration professionals, and advocates. This article draws primarily on phase 1 of data collection (2019)(2020)(2021) in Guerrero, Nogales, and the wider Sonora-Arizona borderland region. The data includes approximately 265 hours of audio recordings. We conducted 63 oral history interviews with displaced families and teenagers (12-17 years), 1 unaccompanied child, 14 young adults in Guerrero, and 91 shelter staff and other key informants in the Nogales-Arizona borderlands. The primary home-region of Mexican displaced study participants was Guerrero (Torres et al. 2022). This primary empirical data was complemented with a host of secondary quantitative sources. Where possible, all quantitative and qualitative data was geolocated. Data analysis integrated critical textual, discourse, and visual analysis with feminist GIS-based techniques to best understand the dynamics of violence, dispossession, deterritorialisation, and extractivism that form the basis of forced displacement in Mexico.
In recent years, 350,000 people in Mexico have been displaced as a direct result of criminal violence (IDMC 2021). During 2020 alone, cartel violence linked to the production and distribution of drugs, as well as that committed by paramilitary groups and armed vigilantes, caused 9,700 new displacement events (IDMC 2021). Figure 1 to draws upon NGO intake interviews detail the states of origin of asylum seekers along the Sonora-Arizona border, most of whom were forcibly displaced.
Despite the large numbers of displaced people in Mexico, the state does not keep an official registry of internally displaced persons, nor is there substantive work to understand the intersections of misogyny, anti-indigeneity, and land theft that drive this phenomena. While territory, territorial violence, and conflict are typically understood in geopolitical terms, a feminist decolonial framing of cuerpo-territorio destablizes this interpretation. Instead it insists upon an embodied, interscalar, and historical conceptualisation. We see this framing embedded in Lisa and Rosana's accounts. From an early age, Lisa remembers sustained familial physical and psychological abuse. Her father beat her, and her family forced her to eat 'hard tortilla' or 'only raw dough', a deliberate practice of mistreatment and humiliation (Interview 04/01/21, Nogales, Sonora). At the tender age of 13, she fled to the city of Tlapa de Comonfort, where she found work for a while in domestic and tourist labour. When her family found her and brought her home, the violence deepened, and her father regularly beat her with sticks. Lisa's childhood experiences of violence are harrowing, but even feminist analyses of domestic aggression are too often detached from state-based and other forms of structural violence. Decolonial approaches to violence in Latin America complicate such readings, theorising the body as the centre of 'all forms of dispossession, despoliation, and exploitation that comprise the capitalist valorisation machine' (Gago 2019, 97 translated by authors). Feminist scholar Gago prompts us to interrogate the patriarchal family dynamics that justified Lisa's beating, and additionally to always link these aggressions to wider practices of land and resource theft, the uneven accumulation of wealth and poverty created by this theft, and the longer colonial histories on which licit and illicit capitalist endeavours are grounded. For this work, decolonial feminist approaches are crucial.
Latin American and Caribbean decolonial feminisms provide formative work on land theft tied to extractive economies. This research recognises the body as the first territory, pushing for analyses that connect intimate, state, and extra-state violences on the body, land, and community (Zaragocin and Caretta 2020). It dovetails with and extends feminist geographic genealogies from the global north that have long demonstrated the ways that geopolitical analyses of violence are inextricably bound up with the realm of the everyday (Faria, Massaro, and Williams 2020;Fluri 2009;Pain and Staeheli 2014). Here feminist, antiracist, and indigenous geographers have traced the intersectional racialised and classed work of violence, centring state-based aggressions of racial capitalism, environmental racism, labour exploitation, resource theft and poisoning, and migrant border containment (Daigle 2018;Gilmore 2007;Loyd, Ehrkamp, and Secor 2018;Pulido 2017;Torres et al. 2022). Latin American feminist decolonial scholars have engaged and extended this work, grounding contemporary violences of capitalism and extractivism within colonial and anti-indigenous land thefts, situating such violence in the body-territory of indigenous communities. This resonates with Black Feminist scholars' theorisations of the territorialisation of the body through colonial violence, (re)territorialisation of the body as 'home', 'refuge', and 'bridge' between lands, and the collective, cultural, and spiritual knowledges that emanate from such body-territory relationships (Ferreira 2021;McKittrick 2006;Smith, Davies, and Gomes 2021).
Approaching the body as not singular or individual but rather shared in communal, cultural, spiritual, and familial ties, Latin American feminist, antiracist, decolonial thinkers, and activists have introduced the epistemological framing of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) (Aguilar Gil 2020;Cabnal 2010). This framing has been used most often in the context of indigenous land-rights and organising in the face of ecoterrorism, resource extraction, and gender violence (Cabnal 2017;Ulloa 2016), but it might be meaningfully translocated (Zaragocin 2021) to the context of cartel violence and forced displacement. It has the potential to reinvigorate feminist geopolitical notions of scale (the body not only as a level of scalar of analysis, but as a place where multiple timescales are co-present) (Haesbert 2020;Marchese 2019), and encourages focus not only on the violences of the state against migrants, but also on migrants' active remaking of territorial boundaries through their embodied, mobilised claims. Alongside and in conversation with Black Feminist scholarship (for example see Mollett 2021), engaging this body of work multiplies 'mutidirectional crossings and movements of feminist ideas, practices, and embodiments' (Zaragocin 2021). We build from this work to better understand forced displacement in Mexico.
Following different strands of Latin American and Caribbean decolonial and communitary feminisms (Gutiérrez Aguilar, Noel, and Reyes 2018;Lugones 2005;Paredes 2010;Pisano 2010;Segato 2013), we investigate how the body becomes 'political territory' via the racialised, misogynist, and antiindigenous ideologies that justified their exploitation. We understand this 'body-as-political-territory' not only through the lens of colonial conquest and violence, but also as indigenous, originary communal space -as cuerpoterritorio, a collective construction expressing and stemming from the history, culture, and spirituality of peoples and individuals who created and belong to such ancestral lands. Recognizing the body and territory as interlinked in this way makes clear that a violation of community territories necessarily means the violation of individual and collective bodies through dispossession and deterritorialisation. As Oslender argues, deterritorialisation signals the loss of 'mental' -emotional and psychic -as well as physical territorial control through the inability to inhabit, and to (re)produce daily life, traditional livelihoods, and local forms of subsistence (Oslender 2008, 83). With the loss of land, communities also lose relationships, protective strategies, collaborative support, and networks of mutual aid and economic solidarity that make possible the everyday reproduction of individual, familial, and community life. The concept of cuerpo-territorio establishes 'that it is impossible to cut out and isolate the individual body from the collective body, the human body from the territory and the landscape' (Gago 2019, 95). Similarly, cuerpoterritorio connects past and present, with the body functioning as a site of collective memory. Feminisms that speak of body-territory subvert colonialist notions of 'possession' by framing it in terms of use, not of property. The epistemic turn then consists in speaking of dispossession, exploitation, and deterritorialisation from the standpoint of the community and experience of communality -not from the individual, private property relationship that has been built from the hegemonic-capitalist vision. This is 'what allows us to deploy a political cartography of the conflict' -and, therefore, of displacement and its causes (Gago 2019, 96).
Also central to the conceptualisation of cuerpo-territorio is the work of communities to push against dispossession, reclaiming meanings of body, community, and territory. In many Mexican displaced communities women are key actors, their embodied labour reproducing social life in multiple forms (Cabnal 2010;Federici 2020). For instance, the body-territory of Lisa and Rosana's Guerrero is not only a site of violence and dispossession but also a functional and symbolic space where life, care, and meaning are (re)produced for themselves, their families, and their extended communities in exile (Aguilar Gil 2020;Cabnal 2010). Bodies are not simply objects of political control, but are, first and foremost, sites of political possibility. As Pisano (2011, 48) writes, 'my body is the only instrument through which I touch life, and it is one of the greatest drivers of change'.
The political alternatives produced through such change are generated through the act of 're-existence'. The concept of 're-existence', coined by the Brazilian geographer Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves (2006), breaks from the binary paradigm of resistance against power. According to Porto-Gonçalves, resistance means to take an oppositional stance in relation to power, while reexistence moves us towards a logic outside of that power. It allows us to think of 'a way of existing, a certain matrix of rationality that acts in the circumstances, even re-acts, from a topoi; in short, from a place of its own, both geographic and epistemic' (Porto-Gonçalves 2006, 165).
Re-existence fits within feminist projects focused on 'inventing alternative knowledges, ontologies and pathways towards an undetermined future' (MacLeavy, Fannin, andLarner 2021, 1564), and can be partially understood through its juxtaposition with resistance, resilience, and re-working (Katz 2001;MacLeavy, Fannin, and Larner 2021). Drawing on earlier theorisations of feminist political action (Katz 2001) and feminist futures (Grosz 2002), authors MacLeavy, Fannin, andLarner (2021) explain resistance as 'a form of oppositional consciousness' with a certain degree of intentional movement against power (1565); resilience as 'strategies of endurance' meant for survival and day-to-day living within and under oppressive systems; and re-working as a 'broader restructuring of conditions in which people live' (1566), which 'implies imagining and enacting alternative forms of politicisation' beyond current systems and logics (1570). Re-existencia overlaps with these theorisations of feminist political action: like resilience, there is a focus on continuance and day-to-day survival; like re-working, there is a focus on re-inventing life, creatively, through the re-organisation of epistemological connections and paradigms of power. However, re-existencia also differs in significant ways. The need to 're-exist' is tied to colonial conquest of body-territories of indigenous and afro-descendent populations (Hernández Basante 2019). It relies on embodied, ancestral knowledges to create a bridge both to the past (sense of self and people) and to the future (anticolonial alternatives). While MacLeavy et al's notion of 're-working' (MacLeavy, Fannin, and Larner 2021) and Grosz's 'futures' (Grosz 2002) seek pathways to unprecedented futures, breaking from current and past epistemes, re-existencia values inherited knowledge and collective memory as an essential means of arriving at 'new' decolonial destinations. Additionally, re-existencia is as much concerned with the present as it is with the future: acts of re-existence 're-invent' ways of being in the world in the here-and-now, through daily practices, aesthetics, as well as spiritual engagements.
The concept of re-existencia has been taken up in recent years by various feminist, decolonial, and political ecological scholars to think beyond capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial logics (Lozano 2017;Machado Aráoz 2018;Walsh 2017), positing in their stead other possibilities of community based on alternative forms of social organisation that have persisted in the 'geopolitical Souths'. Re-existence places focus on what Silvia Federici (2013) calls the 'reproduction of life' -that is, the non-marketable and non-hierarchical sphere that allows communities to reproduce and survive. These practices are based on community logics that create balance in the collective and seek to develop mechanisms to counteract inequalities within the group (Machado Aráoz 2018). This conception of well-being is not anthropocentric, but rather includes all forms of life (Segato 2013). A relational ontology between body, territory, land, and community -but also between time, space, belonging, actions, and materiality (Hernando 2018) -might be proposed in terms of reexistence. Using this concept allows us to analyse and make visible the practices that forcibly displaced people draw upon as thinking-acting subjects, recreating -even in the context of dispossession and displacement -microgeographies of life and care. Such communally inherited practices have been used to make some of the most forceful demands against the state, its institutions, and its hegemonic norms (Gabbert and Lang 2019).
In the following sections, we draw on interconnected Black, indigenous, and decolonial feminist frameworks to examine displacement in and from Guerrero, Mexico. To do this, we attend to the past-present geohistories of violence that shape land dispossession, state-complicity, and cartel involvement. At the same time, we strive to ground such macro-geopolitical analyses in material and embodied realities of community members, recognising the ongoing forms of re-existence that occur in their wake.
Both Lisa's and Rosana's accounts connect narratives of intimate and collective violences against bodies, communities, and lands. When Lisa is drugged and raped by multiple people after a party, she finds she is pregnant. Her family responds by forcing her to give up her child, and to marry to 'save' the family's honour. Later, her new husband conspires with her family to sell the newborn and forces Lisa to work the land and harvest a newly lucrative crop: poppy. As Rosana's husband aligns with a local cartel, he puts her and her children at grave risk of retaliation with no protection by local authorities, who increasingly work alongside powerful illicit groups. Rosana and her family too are bound up in the trade of opium gum, gold, and guns that have dramatically reshaped Guerrero's history and society. In this section we detail the role of poppy/opium gum production and gold mining in driving forced displacement in the region.
Located in the southwestern region of Mexico, Guerrero is a territory characterised by a complex geomorphology and challenging land access. Of particular interest for this study are the Sierra and Montaña regions. These areas possess some of the most significant indicators of socio-economic marginalisation in Mexico (CONEVAL, 2020) and are also now significant producers of gold and poppies (Ramírez Macedonio and García Castro 2020; Remamx 2017). This relationship is not coincidental, but rather is part of a dramatic shift in land use and control linked to evolving relationships between cartels, transnational mining companies, corrupt politicians, business leaders, the police, and the state.
After Sonora, Guerrero is the second highest gold-producing state in the country (Mexican Geological Service 2020). Mining extractivism is concentrated in the area called the 'Gold Belt' located in the Mining District of Mezcala, in the municipality of Eduardo Neri, and also in part of the Cocula municipality. In 2011 the Secretaría de Economía [Ministry of Economy] granted a concession to the Zalamera and Hochschild mining companies for more than 75% of the territory of the Júba Wajiín community in the municipality of Malinaltepec, Guerrero (Tlachinollan, Centro de Derechos Humanos de La Montaña 2021, 60).
The 'Gold Belt' was one of the main regions of displacement amongst those interviewed by our research team at the US border. In this territory, the mining industry is the main cause of land dispossession, desertification, heavy metal poisoning, and widespread environmental deterioration (Navarro Trujillo and Fini 2016; Tlachinollan, Centro de Derechos Humanos de La Montaña 2021). The human rights organisation Tlachinollan, based in Guerrero for more than 27 years, has documented at least 44 mining projects with more than 142,000 hectares under concession as of 2016, 29 of which are are operating (Tlachinollan, Centro de Derechos Humanos de La Montaña 2021). Some concession periods do not end until 2064 (Tlachinollan, Centro de Derechos Humanos de La Montaña 2017). The growth of open-pit mining and the territorial dispossession it produces have been identified as the main causes of socio-territorial conflicts and forced displacement from Guerrero (Tlachinollan 2021). With mining production, local economic activities also tend to decrease (Ramírez Macedonio and García Castro 2020; Remamx 2017) and in most cases forms of subsistence and cultural customs of the local population are radically altered. As coauthor Herrera Martínez, a Na Savi anthropologist, teacher, and local activist from the region observes, this is the result of mining companies' disruption of logics of communal property. Instead, they are creating a parallel economy through which they dispossess the community via leasing agreements, effectively transferring communal territory into private hands for their benefit.
The harmful impacts of mining go beyond the exploitation of the land and its natural resources; it also disintegrates the social and ecological fabric of the community. Mining produces high levels of contamination that destroy the territory and health of local inhabitants, while also imposing new standards and ideals of life and consumption. This pushes community membersespecially younger people -to undervalue and delegitimize the peasant and community world, eventually abandoning it. Following a false model of 'progress', according to Herrera Martínez [co-author, Na Savi anthropologist and activist] 'people want work so they don't have to migrate, that's why they turn to mining, but mining is building an economy of dispossession and exploitation that will ultimately end up expelling them. The first people who identify and dare to denounce the dispossession of mining extractivism are women: those who make visible the diseases suffered by their bodies, as the result of the pollution caused by mining' (Tlapa, Guerrero, 04/22/22).
The mining industry in Guerrero has forged a series of formal and informal alliances with the two main powers in the territory: local and federal authorities, and drug cartels. Mining companies such as Equinox Gold in Carrizalillo have created pacts with cartels or exploited their presence to demobilise protests and terrorise communities and ejidos that have organised against extractivist activities (Tlachinollan 2021). A non-profit researcher specialising in Mexican displacement confirmed that 'in zones opened up for mining exploitation, criminal groups have displaced local populations to keep the land for extraction, and in some cases as a "service" to private companies that have invested in mining' (Interview, 04/17/20). This is another crucial element for understanding the dynamics of violence, dispossession, and deterritorialisation in the region.
In addition to the rise of extractive mining, and as both Lisa and Rosana's accounts demonstrate, land-cultivation has dramatically shifted to poppy cultivation to support opium-gum production. Although the origins of poppy cultivation in Mexico date back to the mid-19th century, it was during the 1970s that it began to be cultivated intensively in Guerrero due to the interruption of the supply from Turkey and the implementation of the US's 'Cóndor' operation in the main growing states of northwestern Mexico. This forced traffickers from Sinaloa to look for new cultivation areas in Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Michoacán (Ospina, Hernández Tinajero, and Jelsma, 2018). The rise of poppy cultivation in Guerrero is a paradigmatic example of capitalist dispossession based on the reconversion of the old agricultural economies (traditionally controlled by local elites) into new niches of neoliberal production through the transnational drug trade (Gaussens 2020; Le Cour Grandmaison, Morris, and Smith 2019; UNODC 2020).
Poppy production in Guerrero experienced a boom between the late 1990s and early 2000s when demand for legal opioids in the United States increased; at the same time, the strengthening of prescription laws favoured the illegal heroin trade into the US (Le Cour Grandmaison, Morris, and Smith 2019). Due to the growth in the demand for opium gum, poppy cultivation in Guerrero exploded and became an even more lucrative business for organised crime groups operating in the area. According to the testimony of one poppy farmer, Nicéforo, when the crop enters towns, it profoundly transforms the relationships between land and life. Unlike other crops such as corn, coffee, or beans, poppies require less time to be harvested and demand less exhausting work on the body, generating incomparably higher profits (Interview 05/22/ 2021, Metlatónoc, Guerrero). However, poppy cultivation requires a larger amount of subordinate labour, often assigned to women and children and often unpaid. Via its attachment to women and youth, this devaluation produces even more surplus value for growers (Glockner 2008).
Poppy cultivation has funded and encouraged the dramatic militarisation of cartel groups who control this sector. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC 2020), after Sonora and Chihuahua, Guerrero has become one of the highest poppy-producing territories in Mexico. Nicéforo noted that, with the neoliberal turn in Mexico, the introduction of this crop was extremely profitable in territories characterised by high levels of socio-economic marginalisation and campesino (peasant) rainfed agricultural economies in crisis. This explains why poppy became a central crop for SO many local economies in Guerrero (Interview, Nicéforo, 05/22/2021, Metlatónoc, Guerrero).
The rise of poppy-growing in these communities is also closely associated with state repression and militarisation in the region. In Guerrero there is a historical correlation between poppy farming, opium production, and the prolonged military intervention that occurred between the 1960s and 1980s (Gaussens 2020). It was here that one of the bloodiest manifestations of the so-called Guerra Sucia ('Dirty War') commenced: a set of repressive and counter-insurgency military operations which aimed to end political opposition movements and peasant revolutionary organisation. It is now known that during this time, paramilitary and military groups that undertook massive campaigns of repression, murder, and forced disappearance in Guerrero were financed through illegal poppy cultivation tolerated by the State (Gaussens 2020). In Guerrero Gauseens (2020) contends that the rise of [opium] gum correlates with the rise of military interventions (Gaussens 2020). Yet another cuerpo-territorio of displacement, the militarisation of the territories as a result of poppy cultivation is one of the most paradigmatic dynamics of deterritorialisation in Guerrero and a key factor in understanding the increase in forms of violence that drive forced flight.
The epistemological frame of cuerpo-territorio helps us to recognise the links between past territorial conquest and current violences against individuals and families. Intimate violences -often experienced by women -can be linked to communal disruptions caused by a traumatic colonial and neocolonial history of military intervention, the disassembling of campesino economies, and the related rise of cartel violences visible at other scales. Under the pressure of such structural upheavals, violence against women compounds. According to Mayan-Xinka communitarian feminist Lorena Cabnals, indigenous women suffer 'patriarchal re-functionalization'. This occurs where the 'original' and ancestral patriarchy, with its own form of expression, manifestation, and temporality, is reinforced by the Western patriarchal system. The interrelations between such ancestral and Western patriarchal structures become reified and re-functionalised, constantly merging and self-renewing, building a system all the more violent against women's bodies (Cabnal cited by Gargallo Celentani 2014, 22). Such complex and intersectional patriarchies surface again in Lisa's life. With her new husband, she gives birth to two boys and a girl. But her daily reality becomes unsustainable when she discovers that he not only grows poppies, but also trades in opium gum. He locks her in the house and only allows her out to work, by force, on this crop.
The Quotidian Terrors of Body-Territory: Cartel-State Alliances, Impunity, and Neglect
Cartel-state alliances are not only a fall-out of, but intrinsic to, the dispossession of local communities via mining-agreements and poppy cultivation, and the related escalation of violence (Borzacchiello 2021;González Rodríguez 2014;Paley 2018;Reguillo 2021). Rosana details the moment she realised she had to leave Guerrero with her children. She knew her husband's decision to join one of the cartel groups active in her home town would put her family at risk. Attacks on the family of rival gang members were common, and they were easy targets. Highlighting some of the cuerpo-territorios of violencehow it is made possible and exacerbated by the ingrained dynamics of corruption and impunity (Zepeda, Rosen, and Rodrigues 2020), Rosana explained: 'Who do we tell? Who are we going to tell over there [about the violence we suffer] if organised crime hangs out with [the] military, talking as though nothing happened?' (Interview 02/20/20, Nogales, Sonora). Indeed, Chava, a documentary photographer originally from Guerrero, argues that in this political system the borders between legal and illegal are blurred. In this setting, multiple criminal cartels, groups, and gangs of variable size and composition exercise different levels of control over the territory, making it 'difficult to identify who holds power and who is in charge' (Interview 05/15/ 21, Tlapa, Guerrero).
Given the impunity offered to cartels by business leaders and the state, the wealth of the land for mining and poppy production, and the long history of marginalisation of communities there, it is also no coincidence that in recent times both Sierra and Montaña regions have also become important routes for drug trafficking and wider-ranging cartel activity (Astorga Almanza 2016;Bergman 2016). Cartel activity in Mexico is deeply interwoven with violence and displacement. In its 2020 Report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC, 2020) points out that one of the largest displacement events in Mexico during 2019 took place in this state. At that time a criminal group known as 'Los Cuernudos' [The Horned] carried out attacks and looting in the community of Coahuayutla (municipality of José María Izazaga, Costa Grande region). This caused more than 1,100 people to flee (IDMC, 2020). One year earlier, in 2018, another massive internal displacement took place in Guerrero, when approximately 1,600 families from seven communities in the municipality of Leonardo Bravo were displaced by drug cartels to Chichihualco (Tlachinollan 2021).
Beyond these spectacular incidences of violence, the statistics on lethal violence mirror Lisa and Rosana's accounts. The homicide rate in Guerrero has risen measurably in recent decades, and is amongst the highest in Mexico. A recent study using government data shows a clear relationship between forced displacement and the increase in homicides in particular Mexican territories (CONAPO, SEGOB y UNFPA 2019). In the period 1990-2017, the rate of deaths from homicides in Mexico almost doubled, increasing from 13.7 to 25.3 per hundred thousand inhabitants. The study by CONAPO, SEGOB and UNFPA ( 2019) also shows that the most notable increases in homicides were registered between 2008 and 2010 (and again in 2017). During this period, President Calderón Hinojosa's administration launched the highly militarised 'War on Drug Trafficking ' (2006-2014). Amidst this, Guerrero is the only region of Mexico that has remained within the top three states for homicide rates for over a decade. For example, in the year 2000, Guerrero had the highest percentage of male homicides, as a proportion of violent deaths (41.9%), of any other state followed by Estado de Mexico (41.2%) and Oaxaca (36.5%). By 2017 the rate was 71.1% in Guerrero (CONAPO, SEGOB and UNFPA 2019).
Reflected in Rosana's fears, some studies suggest that women are particularly vulnerable to displacement as a result of these kinds of connected intimate-cartel threats of violence. One of the most valuable data sources available for studying the links between violence and forced displacement in Mexico are the statistics and sociodemographic profile of those who changed their home or place of residence to protect themselves from crime. The study by Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Población [General Secretariat of the National Population Council] (CONAPO 2019) shows that the predominance of women who changed their residence for safety from crime, is consistently higher compared to men over time. In 2019, for example, of those who changed residence for these reasons, over half (55.2%) were women. The predominance of displaced women has also been identified in other earlier studies (Deng-ONU Report, Deng 1992;Mercado Mondragón 2013). Also notable is that young people (ages 18-29), the demographic increasingly targeted by criminal groups in Mexico made up a higher proportion of those who moved to protect themselves than those who did not move.
The cartel-state and business alliances blur the borders between what is legal and illegal. Representatives of political parties build pacts and organise the territory directly with the representatives of drug cartels and transnational businesses like mining companies (Astorga 2005;Paley 2018). Margarito, an anthropologist born in the Montaña region of Guerrero and a member of the Ñu Savi ethnic group, relates how the dynamics of peasant labour around poppy cultivation changed radically in the 1990s. At that time, producers were prohibited from directly selling their harvest and communities lost the power to decide how to use and cultivate their own land. Different organised crime groups took control of the local economy and the territories. Whoever refused to accept this new system was threatened and forced to move (Interview 05/20/ 21, Cochoapa El Grande, Guerrero). What Margarito details is not a story of a 'second state'. Rather, as Rita Segato (2018) argues, this is an anthropological mutation of the State (see also Borzacchiello 2021), or 'a criminal mutation of political intermediation and the representation of the official in the local' (Gaussens 2020, 141).
Margarito's description of the political violence in the municipality of Cochoapa el Grande during the 2018 local elections helps illustrate this shift. He describes the moment when organised crime groups, in accordance with political parties, caused the disappearance of the mayor and, later, the candidate who won the elections. These events triggered a wave of violence and disputes over territorial control in the community, forcing many inhabitants to move to other cities (Margarito, 05/20/21, Cochoapa El Grande, Guerrero). It is common for political violence in Mexico to flare up during electoral campaigns 2 since this is the time when new pacts and agreements are established between the different legal and illegal powers: political, criminal, and economic (Gillingham 2021). Here, a feminist decolonial lens pushes us to recognise that community members do not experience these geographies of terror in the same ways. In fact, women constitute the majority of those affected and forced to leave their homes to protect themselves from intimate, state and cartel-related violence (CONAPO, SEGOB and UNFPA 2019). The constant shifting of alliances in the territory make it almost impossible for displaced people to be able to return home. This is exemplified in the case of Susana, also from Guerrero. She describes how, following the border closure caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, some members of her family became desperate due to the uncertainty and the prolonged waiting time. They ultimately decided to return to their village. However, three days after their return, her brother-in-law was murdered in front of his son. The child suffers to this day from the severe after-effects of such trauma (Interview 11/05/21, Nogales, Sonora).
To close here, not only are the alliances forged between the state and cartel organisations central to dispossession, but also the state-wide devaluation and neglect of indigenous communities in Guerrero (Glockner 2012). Statepromoted neoliberal ideologies -together with earnings from poppy -justify the withdrawal of support from these communities, framing ancestral practices of subsistence as wasteful and outside the economy. This means that communities in this region have faced at once the disruptive attention of extractive industries and extractive practices of appropriation and sustained neglect. We see this in the lack of data and information about violence in the region, despite repeated calls by the Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos [Inter-American Commission on Human Rights] to assess this (CIDH, 2013). We also see this interwoven with the everyday body-territory violences of the region. The story of Lukas, a teenager displaced from Las Conchitas, Guerrero, exemplifies this situation. In 2017, when just a child, Lukas witnessed his father's murder. The following year, his uncle was also murdered by a group of hired assassins who sought to hijack his land to plant poppies (Interview,11/06/20,Nogales,Sonora). Lukas refers to criminal groups as 'those who had weapons', and who, '[when] you didn't want to give them everything they wanted, killed you'. Since childhood, he faced utter inaction and a lack of protection from the state. When his father and uncle were murdered, his family did not report what had happened because, as he noted, in his town 'there is no police, there is no health centre. There is nothing like that'.
(Re)producing Life Amidst Violence: The Body-Territories of Re-Existence Lisa and Rosana's accounts of intimate and cartel violence, along with statebased collusion and neglect, teach us that the different types of violence affecting women and girls are not isolated events. Instead they are part of a continuum of violence perpetrated by multiple actors (Lagarde de Los Ríos 1993). As Segato (2018) affirms, the assault and sexual exploitation of women are acts of conquest and consumption of the body that establish a new normalisation of cruelty in the landscape. We see this powerfully at work in Guerrero, driving forced displacement within Mexico and to the US-Mexico border. And yet, a decolonial approach pushes us to trace trajectories of resilience and navigation through and around violence. While Lisa has suffered different types of interconnected violence -from domestic, to sexual, to economic and territorial violence -each one operates within a system of unequal and patriarchal structures of power producing gender violence in terms of lack of political rights, self-determination and freedom, social exclusion, and economic exploitation (Federici 2013;Lagarde de Los Ríos 1993). Nevertheless, throughout her life, Lisa has pushed back and tried to create spaces of safety. She fled several times, sought refuge with friends, negotiated daily violence to care for herself and, later, for her children.
Once Rosana began to experience domestic violence from her daughter's father, she decided to end her marriage and raise her as a single mother. But she refused to leave her home and her land, and she began to study with the hope of building alternative economic and life options. After a while, thanks to her strength and determination, she managed to secure an administrative position in the council of Chilpancingo, the capital of the state of Guerrero. Driven by her life experience, Rosana pursued both individual and community change. In this way, Rosana builds practices of life, care, and re-existence that draw a new geography of hope, (Lawson 2007).
Committed to preserving and caring for their life and that of their children, both Lisa and Rosana are eventually forced to flee to the US and seek asylum. Lisa says that it is only by fleeing the country that she can protect herself from her husband, put an end to the multiple forms of violence that she has suffered over decades, and be able to self-determine as a free woman and subject of the law. In June 2021, after waiting seven months in a shelter at the Sonora-Arizona border, Lisa and her three children successfully reached New Jersey, where she currently lives with her sister (Interviews 04/01/21 and 05/19/21, Nogales, Sonora; Pers. Communications, 06/12/21-05/23/22). Her tenacity and persistence paid off. With the assistance of legal NGOs working at the border, as she and approximately 30 families in the shelter where we conducted research were able to cross. They were able to do so under the ACLUled Huisha-Huisha class action suit. This provided exceptions for 'vulnerable families' which protected them from the Title 42 public health express expulsions (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU 2022). She is now working with a non-profit attorney to assert asylum claims for her and her children in US immigration court. Despite the trauma she has endured, Lisa insists she wants to tell her story, 'I am very proud to speak out about these bad things, and I would like to one day change my community so the same things don't happen to other girls. So they can have a childhood, enjoy school, learn. . .' For Lisa her displacement does not mean a complete rupture from her home territory. Instead it is a a potential avenue not only to improve the lives of herself and her children, but also the lives of other women and girls who remain in Guerrero.
Rosana, refusing to surrender to the vacuum of justice in her town, also 'reexists', re-shaping the body-community-land connection through her flight. Desperate for her daughter to live a free life without violence, she also managed to reach the Mexico-USA border with the intention of requesting asylum. The last we heard she was working on her case with the support of a US-based legal NGO, and likely was also able to cross under the Title 42 exception program. Remarkably, both women constructed re-existencia as refugees in the US distanced from the violence of their home territories, with new opportunities for themselves and their children. This was not simply a result of the vagaries of US immigration policies, or being at the right place at the right time. Lisa and Rosana persevered through their prolonged wait at the border, negotiating the barriers erected by Mexican and US officials for asylum-seekers to reach US ports of entry to request international Protection (Torres et al. 2022 It was through their unwavering insistence on their rights to safety and Protection that they were eventually able to cross for a chance to pursue asylum in US immigration courts. Pisano (2010) argues that women's bodies are 'political territories' since they break with systems that are simultaneously patriarchal, unequal, strongly racialised, and violent. Indeed, it is women who, thanks to their practices of re-existence, manage to transform their historical reality of oppression into a reality of reconstitution as indigenous, campesina, or currently displaced women. As is the case with thousands of other women fleeing multiple forms of patriarchal violence, Lisa's narration of events may not be sufficient for the immigration system. She possesses no document or record that can prove what took place, in part because Lisa was never able to visit any public institution to report or attest to what was happening to her (Interview 04/01/21, Nogales, Sonora). Rosana too is caught up in the system, forced to wait for the asylum process to begin for two years during the Sars-CoV2 pandemic. Nonetheless, re-existing, for Lisa and Rosana, means thinking from the body and the territory in which they live alongside other women or people in a state of vulnerability. This process strengthened the conscious construction of a community identity even in a situation of displacement (Gago 2019;Gargallo Celentani 2014). In doing so, it re-signified their historical reality of oppression into a reality of liberation, and transformed them into political subjects with reconceptualised territorial claims, articulated in their petitions for asylum. Through their bodies -and their capacity for re-existence -Rosana, Lisa, and other women like them manage to challenge a violent system, recreate peace practices, and reconstitute themselves as new epistemic and legal subjects who fight to inhabit the territory freely and safely, establishing relationships of trust and proximity with other people and communities (Gago 2019;Gargallo Celentani 2014;Gutiérrez Aguilar, Noel, and Reyes 2018).
Despite a long history of extraction dating back to colonial times, the contemporary mining industry, spearheaded by Canadian investment, has only scratched the surface in Guerrero. Mexico Business News reported in May 2022 that the Guerrero Mining Cluster, a consortium of companies that promote expansion, have set their sights on becoming 'the next pole for mining'. The state will allow extractive activity to dramatically increase, reaching levels of top mining states such as Sonora and Zacatecas (Duran 2022). While the companies' discourse is couched in rhetoric of economic development, environmental stewardship, corporate social responsibility and ethics (ProMexico 2016), our research makes clear that the prospect of intensified mining exploration and extraction does not bode well for the people, territory, and communities of Guerrero. This underscores the urgent need to better understand the relationship between extractive industries such as mining, drug cartel activities, violent mass internal forced displacement, and the growing number of Mexican asylum-seekers at the Mexico-US border.
In this article we use a feminist decolonial lens to highlight the cuerpoterritorio of forced displacement in Guerrero, Mexico: that is, the inextricable ties between body, territory, and community in the ongoing, sustained, and highly violent processes of dispossession and deterritorialisation. A decolonial feminist lens guides us in linking the industries of mining extractivism and poppy cultivation with militarisation and opium gum trafficking, and to the long colonial and neoliberal histories of indigenous devaluation and statebusiness-cartel alliances that prepared the region for exploitation. But here, rather than the typical top-down perspective, one focused on hegemonic actors, cuerpo-territorio enables us to trace the ways different but connected forms of violence impact communities, and particularly women, in distinct ways. It enables us to embody violence, too often distilled into abstract statistics or sweeping political statements and analyses. It makes clear the ways that forced displacement is caused not simply by the control of land and resources in places like Guerrero, but by the control and extraction of value of the bodies that inhabit it and which constitute the territory.
As this framing also makes clear, women and girls are distinctly impacted by this dispossession and deterritorialisation. We have shown that violence taking over the territory not only impacts and is reflected in the bodies of women, but also produces new forms of dispossession, deterritorialisation, and vulnerability that push women into forced displacement. Women's bodies suffer a continuum and a historical accumulation of different economic, political, and gender violence. Through patriarchal violence, devaluation of their traditional forms of subsistence, and undermined control over their own lives, women are experiencing the dispossession of their most important 'territories', their own bodies. In addition, with the privation of the physical and geographical territory, women also lose the capacity to (re)produce their domestic, family, and communitypublic and private-territories. They are consequently dispossesed of these vital spaces where they build and maintain relations of care and reproduction of life in its social, economic, political, and symbolic dimensions. Compounding existing patriarchal norms that victimised women and young girls, gendered and sexualised violence has dramatically escalated with the rise of cartel-statebusiness alliances. Displaced women's experiences complicate simplistic assumptions about how violence operates, tracing the links between familial and state aggressions, illuminating how patriarchy, anti-indigeneity, and poverty interweave in displacement projects, and illustrating the ways that territory, land struggles, and women's bodies are inextricably connected in contemporary Mexican migration politics.
A decolonial feminist ear also listens, in the accounts of Lisa, Rosana, and other women displaced from Guerrero, for stories of resistance through territory, for moments of place-making, for their practices of re-existencia. Instead of understanding forced displacement as a rupture with the territory, we show that displaced people, particularly women, manage to transform their body into a political territory (Pisano 2010). In doing so they continue to embody the history, culture, and spirituality of its ancestral territories (Mendoza 2006). Women's embodied experiences and knowledges allow us to go beyond passive, re/victimising, or reductionist representations to understand displacement and its effects as events where re-existence is also possible (Gabbert and Lang 2019;Porto-Gonçalves 2006). This concept, proposed by Latin American and Caribbean community feminisms allows us to signify all those practices of political and epistemic positioning that, in the face of violence, do not seek to confront it or resist it by following its logic. Instead, they seek to build new spaces, from the body and the territory, that make possible the (re)production of life and other forms of existence. This concept enables us to map and analyse the practices that people in situations of forced displacement build as subjects who defend their place in the world and the right to a future free from violence and dispossession.
1. All names are pseudonyms in order to protect the identity of our informants. 2. The data available at the national level confirms this trend at the local level: according to the Etellekt Report on Political Violence in Mexico ( 2018), the total number of homicides committed during the 2021 electoral campaign was 89 murders of politicians, compared to 118 in 2018 (Etellekt, 2018(Etellekt, , 2021)).
V. GLOCKNER ET AL.