TERRITORY, SUBJECTIVITY AND WORK: KEYS TO A GEOGRAPHICAL READING OF THE COMMON

Abstract

In the context of indigenous and peasant struggles and territorial conflicts in several regions of Latin America, the image of "common goods" or "common lands" appears as a suggestive element of the mobilization rhetoric and a factor of differentiation and characterization of territorial identities. In the processes of struggle for the defense or recovery of territories, where conflicts are expressed in the collective reappropriation of expropriated or threatened material wealth, and the regeneration of unconventional political forms, the common is now claimed as a central aspect of the reproduction of life. In this sense, the idea of ​​"common" is not something established, but an instituent process; Placing the centrality of the action of "making-common", as a verb, helps to understand the phenomenon from the practices that build it. Understanding the processes that involve the multiplicity and coexistence of community social forms as instituent processes/subjects, also leads us to break with the notion of common as a static object, as has been treated from the idea of ​​"common good". Based on the analysis of the daily basis production of non-capitalist work in Mexican indigenous communities, especially in the region of the Sierra Nororiental de Puebla, this work seeks to contribute to a geographical reading that goes beyond the metaphorical sense of "common" in the territorial processes until their understanding in historical-geographical terms, in order to contribute to a radical attitude to face the structural crisis that we are going through.