Elias Plata

ELIAS PLATA, then a graduate student at State University of New York, Buffalo, New York, was granted funding in April 2023 to aid research on “The Politics of Encounter in the Refuge Forest: Community, State, and Market Integration in the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico,” supervised by Dr. Jaume Franquesa. In the Sierra Tarahumara of northern Mexico, the Indigenous Raramuri and mixed-race Mestizo peoples have experienced the erosion of their peasant livelihoods as a result of policies favoring the extraction of their forest and mineral resources. Based on the implementation of Sowing Life in the community of Norogachi as an ethnographic case study, the research explores the continuation of community life projects under current historical conditions characterized by a prolonged socio-environmental crisis. Despite the government program’s inability to adapt to the life projects of the Raramuri and Mestizo peoples, Sowing Life allowed its beneficiaries to cushion some of the negative effects that the neoliberal transition had on their peasant economies. The resistance to implementing some of the environmental components of the program (i.e., planting pines in the croplands) suggests its incompatibility with local models of nature. Finally, a significant sector of the indigenous population expressed concern about the collateral effects that the program could have on their life project. Specifically, it would strengthen the Raramuri’s dependency on government programs and the subordination of their social institutions to the Mexican state’s project.