UC San Diego

This dissertation is about the relationship between Indigenous people’s efforts to create conditions in which communal life was possible, which I term worldmaking, and the world capitalist crises that strove to incorporate them and the people of southern Mexico as a new racialized labor force along the US/Mexican Pacific Coast from 1968 to 1994. I argue that Indigenous people from Oaxaca enacted collective processes of worldmaking which transformed their placed-based communal life of their pueblos into a key source to confront and expose the overlapping histories of racial capitalism between Mexico and the United States. Indigenous people built new relationships among each other and with other racialized groups they met along the way while they also transformed the spatial organization of their specific local context that they found themselves in. The years between 1968 and 1994 are chosen to denote an era of ongoing capitalist crises in which Oaxacan Indigenous people confronted the forces of globalization, specific to their regional contexts, that reverberated across different populations and vast regions in Mexico and the world. Yet as I show, the emergence of the particular migrant circuit from Oaxaca was never inevitable. Some Indigenous people and nonindigenous campesinos through worldmaking activities challenged the changes in their local economies that disrupted communal life in Oaxaca, others left their homelands and struggled across multiple landscapes of Baja California and California, all while they attempted to create new worlds for themselves that provided alternatives to imperial borders and the divisions reinforced by the expansion of racial capitalism during this era.