Multiple Injustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America by Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo (review)

MULTIPLE INJUSTICES: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America is a tour de force by feminist juridical anthropologist Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, who draws on her twenty-five years of collaboration with Indigenous women in Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala to chronicle and theorize how they organize to access justice. In the context of neo liberal multiculturalism, ultimately, the author finds that organized Indigenous women "are redefining what they understand to be justice and rights from their collective struggle and daily practice" (8). These processes, she argues, "have implied not only an imposition of the discourses of NGOs and the international bodies that finance them but also a re-appropriation (what some authors call a 'vernacularization') of rights discourse (Levitt and Engle Merry 2009) or an alternative human rights ontology (Speed 2007, 2008)" (10).

Hernández Castillo's insights are based on an extraordinary depth of fieldwork in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Morelos, as well as collaborative research projects in other national contexts such as Colombia and Guatemala to analyze how Indigenous legal systems and norms are accessed and deployed within a range of contexts. Drawing from the epistemic wealth of conducting research in alliance or collaboration with social movements, in contrast to the demands of the positivist academy and antiacademic activists, she proposes that "social research can contribute to developing critical thought and destabilize the discourses of power in struggles waged by movements working for social justice" (33). Hernández Castillo worked for fifteen years in Chiapas in a feminist organization that collaborated with Indigenous women to access justice surrounding gender violence. Inspired by these research experiences and challenges, she chronicled the rise of the Indigenous women's movement in Mexico and throughout the continent. Later, in 2009, she worked with the Center for Human Rights of the Mountains of Guerrero Tlachinollan to take the case of two Indigenous women members of OPIM (Organization of the Me'phaa Indigenous People) who were victims of sexual violence to the Inter-American Court. Finally, she conducted oral histories with Indigenous and peasant women imprisoned at the social re-adaptation center in the Mexican state of Morelos.

Drawing on prior work outlining the struggle between ethnic nationalism and feminist ethnocentrism, Hernández Castillo examines the complex ways Indigenous women activists understand the gendered implications of their own cosmovisions and reject colonialism's role in constructing patriarchal dominance within and outside of their communities. While some sectors of the Indigenous women's movement have developed their own forms of Indigenous feminism, specifically, members of the Kaqla group in Guatemala and the Coordinadora Nacional de Mujeres Indígenas (National Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Women) of Mexico, many others have distanced themselves from the ethnocentrism and racist assumptions of Westernized forms of feminism. Throughout the continent, Indigenous women have debated ideas of complementarity and duality grounding their struggles within communal versus individual notions of well-being, balance, and respect. Drawing on her own long history of feminist activism and research, the author proposes constructive dialogues and political alliances among diverse sectors of the women's movement that recognize differences and distinct world visions.

In the context of continued coloniality of power in Latin America, "both the representations of the indigenous 'uses and customs' (usos y costumbres) as a colonial legacy and the claim to 'indigenous law' as an ancestral product of their own epistemologies are being used as discourses of power that limit and control indigenous autonomy" (18). Cutting through the dichotomy between racist and idealized views of Indigenous law, Hernández Castillo argues that these are ahistorical perspectives that negate the complexity of Indigenous legal spaces of justice. She finds, based on the rich experiences of collaborative research, that "the voices and practices of organized indigenous women in different parts of Latin America have come to challenge both representations by questioning those 'uses and customs' that exclude them, and...