Listening to the voices of women farmworkers not only allows us to better understand the problem: it is the only way to build solutions that truly respond to their needs.
To talk about women day laborers and their needs is also to talk about children, mobility, structural inequality and a historical debt in terms of labor rights. At Fundar, the work to improve public policy goes far beyond data analysis, budgets or desk research. In the case of women day laborers, it means going out into the territory, meeting them in the fields – both in formal companies and in informal work spaces – in their communities of origin and on their journeys, but, above all, listening to what they have to say.
The information they share is not a complement: it is the starting point. Their experiences, working conditions and ways of life directly feed the proposals we promote. But the work does not stop there. We also seek that these actions are not only directed at decision-makers, but that they return to the communities in the form of tools, knowledge and capacities that allow women themselves to exercise and demand their rights.
For almost four years, different organizations have been committed to collectively building an agenda to address the complex working conditions of women day laborers. This is how the Campo Justo Alliance was born, made up of the National Network of Day Laborers, the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center, Oxfam Mexico and Fundar. Each organization contributes its experience, but shares a conviction: it is not possible to design effective public policies without a rights-based and intercultural approach.
This effort has consisted of constant work in communities both of origin – from which the workforce comes – and in the places of destination, in which the multiple dimensions of precariousness are revealed: constant migration, lack of access to basic rights and precarious working conditions that, in many cases, they remain invisible.
The answers are not immediate or simple
Community workshops have been one of the main tools to bring us closer to these realities. In them, women have indicated two clear needs: to know their labor rights and their access to health services. We know that this knowledge can be the first step towards your demand. However, it is also clear that access to information is not enough. Collective organization is key, and building it is not easy.
How to generate community among women who spend a large part of the year migrating? How can they strengthen trust when they are only a few months old in their places of origin? How to build organization when working in different states, companies and contexts?
The answers are not immediate or simple. They have involved months of trial and error, of listening to proposals, of testing dynamics and of building, together with them, spaces that allow them to meet, recognize and think collectively.
One of the clearest lessons has been the importance of creating conditions that make this participation possible. For this reason, care spaces for children have been incorporated into the workshops. It is not only about facilitating women’s assistance, but also about recognizing that children are also part of this migrant reality. This would not be possible without the involvement of the organization ENLACE, A.C., which has taken the baton of this work and together we are systematizing the findings.
Consider both children who migrate with their mothers
In these spaces, through games, stories and creative activities, children share their own experiences: the long bus rides, the heat, the places where they sleep, the responsibilities of care, the interruption of their education which is one of the most vulnerable rights, the practically zero access to health services. Their voices reveal another dimension of the problem, one that is often left out of public discussion.
For this reason, today a fundamental part of the work is focused on building proposals around the care agenda with an intercultural approach. This implies considering both children who migrate with their mothers and those who remain in their communities of origin in the care of relatives, while their fathers seek sustenance in other states.
Listening to the voices of women farm workers not only allows us to better understand the problem: it is the only way to build solutions that really respond to their needs, make visible their labor demands and the conditions of children who from an early age suffer the consequences of public policies made far the territories.
SOURCE: Fundar, Center for Analysis and Research, by Arelhi Galicia. 3 August 2026. Translated from Spanish: https://grupoanimal.mx/opinion/mujeres-jornaleras-hijas-hijos.
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Without territories, there is no care
4 August 2026
Can we speak of a claim by the State over the Afro-descendant population when our territories are denied, violated, and dispossessed by those who should watch over them?
AUTHOR: Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute @ilsb_ac
The international recognition of racism as structural violence came about thanks to decades of struggle driven by historically racialized peoples who managed to place racial inequality on the global agenda. A watershed was the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (2001), which recognized the systemic nature of racism and, in turn, placed Afro-descendant peoples as subjects of equality and recognition policies, promoting initiatives such as the International Year for People of African Descent (2011) and the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024).
However, the tensions present since their negotiation in South Africa anticipated the difficulties in materializing these commitments. 25 years after Durban, the persistent territorial dispossession shows the limits of an agenda that expanded the recognition of rights but did not transform the conditions that violate them.
Honduras evidences this contradiction. Although the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered the protection of the territories of Garifuna communities since 2015, state dispossession continues. The eviction on July 6, 2026 against members of the Garifuna community of Tela and defenders of the territory denotes that the recognition of rights is insufficient when the State itself facilitates their violation.
In Brazil, the National Coordinator for the Articulation of Black Rural Quilombola Communities (CONAQ) documents that more than 1,600 territories remain without title and face active conflicts. It is a case that shows how constitutional recognition can coexist for decades with territorial dispossession.
Mexico reflects a similar dimension, although more diffuse. The constitutional recognition of 2019 was accompanied by a first count: the 2020 Population and Housing Census registered approximately 2.5 million Afro-Mexicans, equivalent to 2% of the country’s total population. However, this number reveals as much as it hides. Most of those who self-identified are concentrated in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Veracruz, while other communities with an equally documented historical presence remain underreported. Morelos is an example of this. Despite the broad participation of the Afro-descendant population in the historical formation of the State—from daily life on the haciendas to the struggles that preceded the Mexican Revolution—the absence of social and institutional references hinders self-recognition and, with it, access to our territorial and collective rights.
This erasure is also expressed in Córdoba, Veracruz, a territory with a deep Afro-descendant presence historically excluded by official narratives; the defense of the Patio de la Estrella Multicultural Forum shows that institutional recognition is not enough when practices of exclusion and forced displacement persist. The political persecution and criminalization of those of us who defend the territory are intertwined with processes of gentrification and dispossession driven, at times, by the same institutions that should guarantee our rights.
To speak of territory is also to speak from the territories we inhabit and in which we live the daily violence that responds to the same logic of dispossession, control and displacement. It is not only about the land, but also about the space where affections are built, ancestral knowledge circulates, memories are transmitted and the material conditions for a dignified life are sustained. For this reason, the territory constitutes a condition for the care and continuity of community life. The territory is the place where life is cared for. Likewise, to delve into care without talking about territory is to empty care of its political dimension. We do not take care of ourselves from a vacuum, we do not take care of ourselves without water, without housing, without health, without community or without memory. Nor is it possible to care when forced displacement, political persecution of defenders of territory, territorial dispossession, extractivism, megaprojects, gentrification and racism, reorganize and make precarious the daily life of black and Afro-descendant peoples.
Historically, those who have sustained care practices have been black and Afro-descendant women, as a response to sustain life in the face of the colonizing project that failed to erase community ways of inhabiting the world. As Lx Santx Rebelde proposes, marronage cannot be understood only as an escape from the slave system, but as a practice of community creation, political imagination and the production of other ways of inhabiting the world where care and collective autonomy occupy a central place. When a territory loses its rivers, mountains or forms of community organization, the conditions that make care possible are also weakened.
This July 25, International Day of Afro-Latina, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women, we remember that the creation of laws, national or international recognitions and discourses of inclusion do not in themselves transform the racist structures that violate the life of communities. At the same time, 25 years after the Durban Plan of Action, we do not fail to point out that the recognition of Afro-descendant peoples cannot be reduced to a symbolic representation while our spaces, memories and forms of organization continue to be threatened. Therefore, talking about care systems without territorial justice, racial justice and historical reparation makes invisible the inequalities that racism continues to produce.
About the authors
Alejandra Robles writes from Yautepec, Morelos, as a social anthropologist and person who self-identifies as Afro-Mexican. She is dedicated to researching and disseminating black history and theory, with an emphasis on the processes of invisibilization of Afro-Mexican populations on digital platforms, through the site “Memoria Cimarrona de Morelos” and personal accounts.
From Córdoba, Veracruz, Joss Batista writes from her walk as a defender of the territory, anti-racist activist, psychologist, criminologist and criminologist but also as part of an Afro-Veracruz community that has resisted processes of invisibility, dispossession and exclusion. Their voice is built from a territory where we are currently going through a situation of forced displacement by the government and threatens our community spaces.
This article brings together their voices as Afro-Mexican authors who, through research and defense of the territory, seek to reflect on the challenges of recognition, care, and collective rights of Afro-descendant peoples in Mexico.
1Lx Santx Rebelde “Marronage is an Afrofuturist bet that bets on life in the midst of futures of death imposed by whiteness and coloniality, marronage urges us to trace new paths.” Recovering their voice responds to the importance of recognizing the contributions of Afro-Veracruzans who reflect on marronage from their own territories. Lx Santx Rebelde is part of a new generation of Afro-Mexican voices, anti-racist artivists, defenders of the territory and content creators, who produce embodied theory and situated knowledge, questioning the centrality of hegemonic academic spaces.