Bodies-holding-bodies: The trembling of women’s territorio-cuerpo-tierra and the feminist responses to the earthquakes in Mexico City

Abstract

ABSTRACT Territories are political and lived spaces, collectively enacted via everyday practices and human-nonhuman interactions. Indigenous and feminists’ movements in Abya Yala (Latin America) are calling for plural understandings of territories, bodies, and Earth, as inseparable and co-constituted – territorio-cuerpo-tierra. We build on the relationality of territory to analyse the 1985 and 2017 earthquakes in Mexico, which dramatically transformed the lives of thousands of people, particularly precarious workers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with activists that participated in disaster response brigades, we focus on the experiences of the Brigada Feminista (Feminist Brigade), who metaphorically and physically held and continue to hold the bodies of marginalised women, disrupting the configuration of territories of violence to demand access to spaces and justice. They organised to protect women not only from the impacts of the earthquake, but from capitalist and patriarchal violence. Here, “sororidad” emerges as a form of collective action, the territorial practice of coming together to resist gendered violence and oppression, fighting for the survival and expansion of safer women territories. We contend that a relational politics of place in academia that challenges the separation of territories, bodies, and disasters needs to be foregrounded on listening, learning, and opening spaces to counter-hegemonic territorial propositions.