Taking over Indigeneity: Sovereignty as Negotiation in Mexico

Abstract: This article examines the 2020 takeover of the main building of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) in Mexico City by a Zapatista organization known as the Otomí Community. Going against culturalist understandings of what in Mexico is called “Indigenous autonomy” (which see it as a fight against the state), I suggest that in the case of the Otomí it is possible to see the quest for sovereignty as materially grounded in the demand for basic infrastructures. Sovereignty is here rooted on a navigation of relations with the Mexican state—it is not an opposition to statist development altogether.