Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines how settler colonialism continues to shape the occupied territory known as Mexico through the ideology of mestizaje.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines how settler colonialism continues to shape the occupied territory known as Mexico through the ideology of mestizaje. Often celebrated as a discourse of racial harmony, mestizaje functions instead as a tool of racial and spatial domination, erasing Afro-Indigenous presence and legitimizing the ongoing dispossession of their lands and waters. By tracing how mestizaje operates as both a state policy and an everyday practice, this paper argues that it sustains anti-Black and anti-Indigenous structures of power that normalize violence against racialized territories and the communities that inhabit them.

Grieving Geographies are spaces of collective mourning that emerge from the intertwined loss of human and more-than-human life. Engaging with critical race theory, feminist geography and anthropology, and political ecology, this paper explores the intersections of gender, race, and environment along the Coast of Oaxaca. In this region, Black and Indigenous women grieve lagoons dying before their eyes—ecosystems collapsing under governmental neglect, pollution, and neoliberal extractivism. Their mourning also extends to the loss of community members to the pervasive violence accompanying racial and territorial dispossession.

Yet amid grief, these women organize to defend life, livelihood, and the lagoons that sustain them. Through everyday practices of care, solidarity, and resistance, they cultivate affective and material relations that challenge settler colonial logics of annihilation. Grief, in this context, becomes an ethical and political force—a means of reimagining survival and belonging beyond the colonial state.