Working as a researcher, expert witness, and refugee shelter worker quickly raises questions of whether such engagements are reinforcing institutions and structures of power that reproduce racism, economic and social inequality, militarization of our borders, and foreign and immigration policies of violence and exclusion. At the same time, engaged methods of research inside institutions such as U.S. immigration courts and refugee shelters offer a portal onto how such institutions might be reimagined and changed. I explore my own research through expert witnessing and working in a shelter to focus on two interrelated themes: the limits and possibilities of expert witnessing in the U.S. asylum system, and the limits and possibilities for critical knowledge production in what some have termed the humanitarian industrial complex and accompanying solidarity efforts. I conclude by suggesting ways that research and engagement can provide ideas for innovation of the U.S. asylum system.

Indigenous Guatemalan refugees passing through Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. move in the space of a larger transborder territory created over the past six decades in response to U.S. foreign policy in Central America, historical patterns of labor movement and retreat from violence in the region. I frame this larger territory within the larger settler colonial politics of dispossession and elimination as carried out by the U.S. Mexican, and the Guatemalan states, albeit in different ways and at different stages, that often result in the fragmentation of human and social bodies. I look specifically at how Mam women navigate this transborder territory to escape gendered violence and seek safety for themselves, their families, and communities, and reconstitute themselves as Maya communities in diaspora. I suggest how the bodies of Mam women who have sought redress for gender violence through the process of seeking asylum in U.S. immigration courts are fragmented into discourses, narratives and forms legible through state loci of biopolitics. Finally, I suggest how Mam women refugees seek reintegration of their human and social bodies through reconstitution in shared transborder communities.

Reviewed by: Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women's Transborder Activism by Maylei Blackwell Lynn Stephen (bio) Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women's Transborder Activism by Maylei Blackwell Duke University Press, 2023 THE DECOLONIZATION of Western knowledge is a tall order, but one that Maylei Blackwell successfully fills in Scales of Resistance. Centering conversations on how Indigenous women's activism brings Indigenous cosmovisions, balance, and relationality to the table, Maylei Blackwell pushes us to rethink categories of colonialism, the settler/Indigenous binary, and the ways that gender permeates local, regional, national, and global Indigenous organizing. Blackwell's book is driven by a multigenerational accompaniment of Indigenous women, social movements, Indigenous and other intellectuals, and activists. Blackwell incorporates scale into the structure of the book. She begins with a focus on Indigenous women in Mexico and in diaspora who are engaged in national movements for Indigenous autonomy and explains how they organize to preserve autonomy in their homes, communities, and through local forms of justice and governance. As the author notes: "Indigenous women moved the struggle for autonomy from a discourse of rights to a practice of autonomy by scaling down to the levels of the community, the home, and the body." (42). Blackwell then explores how women from the Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Indígenas (CONAMI), founded in 1997 in Oaxaca City, also began to participate in hemispheric spaces of women's organizing such as the Enlace Continental de Mujeres Indígenas de Ayba Yala (ECMIA). Blackwell centers the concept of Abiayala but also the tensions that emerge from using it as an organizing concept. "Abiayala forges a trans-Indigenous political frame that names an alternative sense of relations and responsibility to one another and a way in which Indigenous actors at multiple scales root their own nations' and communities' struggles to broader international Indigenous rights frameworks and practices of solidarity" (109). Abiayala became, however, unscalable in Blackwell's scheme of multiple scales as women moved simultaneously between local, national, transnational, international and trans-Indigenous and transborder scales of organization—also producing new identities, kinds of consciousness, and strategies. As global consumption, tourism, and different forms of extraction ramped up in the 1990s [End Page 137] and 2000s, weaving, as well as medicinal and agricultural knowledges, for example, went from local discussions to national and global arenas. Simultaneously, Indigenous women engaged in intense confrontations with hegemonic Western feminism centering Indigenous women's knowledges and their own sense of gender justice bound to collective rights and autonomy. Women also engage in their own forms of gender-based advocacy to shape community decisions from the bottom up. Long-standing practices of comunalidad have been key to women's success in empowering themselves. Through deep analysis of the life histories and testimonies of Indigenous women leaders in Oaxaca and Guerrero, Blackwell documents how communal work, kinship, ritual life, and assemblies have been used by women to empower themselves locally and regionally. These structures are rooted in long-standing Indigenous forms of governance. Blackwell uses her multidecade relationship with women in the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB) to illustrate how the Indigenous male and female leadership worked across colonial and national borders to increase women's and youth leadership. Trying to change discrimination against Indigenous women and empower them as communal leaders across a binational organization is a major challenge. The election of the FIOB's first binational female leader, Odilia Romero Hernández, in 2017 marked a shift in the organization; however, she bore the marks of many years of debates, doubts, and incredibly hard work in her body and biography. Indigenous Los Angeles bears the ongoing structures of multiple colonialities, Tongva territory, a large population of "relocated" and "detribalized" Native Peoples from the U.S. because of U.S. government policies of termination, and a large diaspora of Indigenous Peoples from Latin America and Oceania. How do you theorize diasporic Mesoamerican (and other) Indigenous Peoples in the tribal homelands of others using Indigenous concepts? Seeking to avoid the settler/Indigenous dichotomy, Blackwell uses the Tongva concept of Kuuyam/guest to refer to the three hundred thousand Indigenous Oaxacan and Mayan Indigenous Peoples in diaspora in Los Angeles. Being a guest focuses...

According to Danielè Dehouve (2015, 28), migrations created the roots of pre-Columbian Indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, those lengthy pilgrimages in search of new lands turned into exoduses due to forced displacement and relocation in order to work forcibly under Spanish colonialism and its continuation through Criollos in independence. Centuries after those foundational and enforced displacements, well into the twenty-first century, Indigenous mobilities challenge the geography of mestizo/Ladino nationalist maps. We are witnessing great diversity in Indigenous peoples’ displacements and mobilities that question the typical concepts and approaches used to characterize urban marginalization and rural Indigenous peasants. In addition to mass labor-related displacements, others are due to expulsion or people fleeing violence, or because of the transformation of how younger generations conceptualize their lives, futures, and possibilities. At the same time, the dispersion and fragmentation of Indigenous peoples are accompanied by new territorialities, and new forms of coexistence and communal relationships. This special issue brings together a set of articles on contemporary Mesoamerican Indigenous mobilities in Mexico and the United

This article contributes to scholarly and policy conversations about diasporic Indigenous peoples from Mexico and Guatemala and forms of discrimination, through lack of attention to language and culture, that result in differential health and economic outcomes for Indigenous workers. In tandem, it emphasizes the ways that Indigenous farmworkers attempt to compensate for this discrimination by establishing forms of community care: emotional support, mutual aid of many kinds, and the integration of care work into daily life. I conceptualize Indigenous farmworkers as integral parts of families and communities built on relational connections and circuits of care linked across many borders. This article is based primarily on quantitative and qualitative findings from the Oregon COVID-19 Farmworkers Study (COFS), which included surveys with three hundred farmworkers, qualitative interviews with forty-eight of them, and identified twenty-nine Mesoamerican languages in Oregon.

This essay reviews the following works:

This article focuses on how to use ethnography and theory to disrupt binaries between "state" and "non-state" actors and violence and "private" and public" actors and violence. I also touch on expanded use of the political opinion basis for asylum in relation to women resisting violence and immigrant rights activists who are undocumented.

This article focuses on how to use ethnography and theory to disrupt binaries between “state” and “non-state” actors and violence and “private” and “public” actors and violence. I also touch on expanded use of the political opinion basis for asylum in relation to women resisting violence and immigrant rights activists who are undocumented.

We explore how formal mandates associated with Guatemala's 2008 ‘Law against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence against Women’ and with specialised violence against women (VAW) courts have encountered significant challenges due to state-imposed constraints. Drawing on courtroom observations, analyses of case files, and interviews, we find that while formal mandates incorporated feminist understandings of violence against women, which were often internalised among court officials, in daily practice specialised courts reproduced tendencies to depict violence as interpersonal, fragment people's experiences and enact narrow forms of justice that do not incorporate the full intent of the 2008 VAW Law and institutions intended to support it. This case study thus illuminates how and why legal solutions alone are not sufficient to reduce gender-based violence and feminicide, particularly in the face of uneven and openly hostile challenges posed by governments.