Abstract
Gender-based violence is a widespread phenomenon in Mexico as it is across the globe. Although there have been a series of efforts at the legislative level to address and halt the violence that women experience, these policies consistently push for punitive processes, focus on women as victims, and pay no attention to the structural underpinnings of the violence women face. Parallelly, the securitization strategies that have been implemented across Mexico have further exacerbated the violence across the country—a violence that is experienced differently by Indigenous women who are intersected by systematic forms of marginalization. Within this scenario, this article examines how P’urhépecha women in the state of Michoacán are advancing their security needs and concerns. Using ethnographic work and collaborative narrative production, it explores how the processes of acompañamiento (accompaniment) that P’urhépecha women have developed work as coalitions of support and protection to construct alternative security practices. These embodied solidarities work to develop novel security possibilities to break with patriarchal structures within their communities, to name the different forms of violence that they confront, and to work on a collective project sustained in the communal fabric.
