Resumen

AQUINO-CENTENO, Salvador. Expertise and community juridification: Defense of subsoil and communal lands in Oaxaca, Mexico. Íconos [online]. 2022, n.72, pp.13-32. ISSN 1390-8065.  https://doi.org/10.17141/iconos.72.2022.5022.

This article analyzes how the indigenous community of Capulálpam defended its territorial rights by filing an injunction before a federal court to invalidate the mining concessions that the government authorized without free, prior and informed consultation. The mining companies, the court and the federal government sought to undermine rights to indigenous community identity; the mining companies argued that they had private property and land concessions, whereas the government defended the nation's sovereignty over the subsoil. For its part, the community relied on ancestral institutions, community law and its status as an indigenous Zapotec agrarian community with communal ownership and possession of land. While there has been a process of juridification of politics globally, in Capulálpam a process of community juridification took place that allowed it to reconstruct its own law, creating principles, norms and rights in relation to the colonialism and capitalism that impacted it. Methodologically, participant observation and the mapping of the injunction trial through information compiled in the community's archive stand out. It is concluded that community legal arguments undermined the federal laws of access to the subsoil as the injunction became based on the domestication of multiple legal regimes and on concepts and symbols of legal representation, territory, communal property and the subsoil itself.

Palabras clave : Capulálpam; indigenous community; indigenous rights; own rights; juridification; communal lands..

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