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"Across Latin America, Indigenous women are organizing to challenge racial, gender, and class discrimination through the courts. Collectively, by engaging with various forms of law, they are forging new definitions of what justice and security mean within their own contexts and struggles. They have challenged racism and the exclusion of Indigenous people in national reforms, but also have challenged 'bad customs' and gender ideologies that exclude women within their own communities. Featuring chapters on Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico, the contributors to Demanding Justice and Security include both leading researchers and community activists. From Kichwa women in Ecuador lobbying for the inclusion of specific clauses in the national constitution that guarantee their rights to equality and protection within Indigenous community law, to Me'phaa women from Guerrero, Mexico, battling to secure justice within the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for violations committed in the context of militarizing their home state, this book is a must-have for anyone who wants to understand the struggle of Indigenous women in Latin America"--

AbstractIndigenous claims "to speak the law" in Guatemala extend far beyond late twentieth‐century statist proposals for multicultural legal orders based on recognition of legal pluralism. Drawing on collaborative research with the Indigenous Mayoralty of Santa Cruz del Quiché and examination of public debates in the media, this article analyzes attempts to ensure the legibility of Indigenous law, including disputes over constitutional reforms in 2016 and 2017. It suggests how different conceptual framings shape methodological approaches and representations of law. While opponents of Indigenous jurisdiction frame Mayan law as violent and illegal, and thus radically incommensurable with the national legal order, for Indigenous authorities "speaking the law" is not about seeking recognition from the nation‐state. Rather, "speaking the law" is about communitarian forms of sovereignty and legality rooted in Mayan languages and cosmologies. Countering racialized tropes, Mayan authorities' representations allude to understandings of justice and forms of legitimacy that existed prior to the sovereign state and national and international laws. In this way they highlight not only the historical violence of the Guatemalan state but also the foundational violence of law itself, pointing to temporalities and ontologies of justice beyond modernist legal frames.

This essay reviews the following works: The Achilles Heel of Democracy: Judicial Autonomy and the Rule of Law in Central America. By Rachel E. Bowen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 302. $35.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316630907. Manipulating Courts in New Democracies: Forcing Judges off the Bench in Argentina. By Andrea Castagnola. New York: Routledge, 2017. Pp + 184. $54.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780367372033. Judicial Politics in Mexico: The Supreme Court and the Transition to Democracy. Edited by Andrea Castagnola and Saúl López Noriega. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv + 190. $48.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781138697829. Courts and Social Transformation in New Democracies: An Institutional Voice for the Poor? Edited by Roberto Gargarella, Pilar Domingo, and Theunis Roux. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xiv + 328. $59.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781138264540. Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin America. By Ezequiel A. González-Ocantos. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii + 342. $36.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316508800. Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America. Edited by Matthew C. Ingram and Diana Kapiszewski. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 359. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268102814.

As a researcher working within the field of collaborative or 'engaged'
legal and political anthropology in Latin America, law does very much
shape my research agenda and that of most of my colleagues. I would
also contend that anthropology does impact law throughout the region,
although to a much lesser extent. This is most evident in the legalisation,
judicialisation and juridification of indigenous peoples' collective
rights to autonomy and territory in recent decades. Yet, the influence of
anthropology on legal adjudication in the region is not only limited to
issues pertaining to indigenous peoples: engaged applied ethnographic
research is playing an increasingly important role in revealing to legal
practitioners and courts the effects of human rights violations in specific
contexts, and victims' perceptions of the continuums of violence
to which they are subjected.

Across Latin America, debates and practice around indigenous law provide a window on shifting relations between indigenous movements, states, and international actors. In Guatemala, the practice of indigenous law is a reflection of cultural difference, a response to past and present violence, and a resource for a population denied access to justice. In the postwar period, indigenous law has become a central element of contemporary Mayan identity politics. Together with the policy shift toward state-endorsed multiculturalism, this has meant it has become a highly contested and politicized terrain. This article examines attempts by indigenous activists to "recuperate" and strengthen indigenous law -- or what is now termed "Mayan law" (derecho Maya) -- in Santa Cruz del Quiche, Guatemala. Analyzing the tensions between local demands, the Mayan movement, international NGOs and intergovernmental bodies, and the Guatemalan state, it reflects on what they reveal about the limits and contradictions of the multicultural model of justice promoted since the end of the armed conflict. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]