Cultivated in Migration: An Otomí Woman’s Work on Community and Land-Care
This is an installment in PLATFORM’s ongoing series on migration. Click here to read the inaugural post in this series.
The path of an Indigenous woman across landscapes of anti-colonial resistance offers invaluable lessons on land, forms of land stewardship, and how these forms contest capitalist notions of property. Her embodied experience of migration and solidarity-based mobilities—land defenders traveling to support the protests and grievances of allies—shapes teachings that propose shifting the relation with the land from ownership to protection. These teachings also challenge hegemonic definitions of belonging that associate race, citizenship, ethnicity, lineage, or religion with the “right” to a place.
The protagonist of this story is Anselma Margarito, an Otomí woman. This essay, co-written with Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy (a mestiza woman), explores land-care practices and their impact on site and region across scales: Anselma’s embodied and situated knowledges position the body as a starting point.[1] Her resistance against occupation traverses scales as she interacts with architectures and landscapes in transformative ways that can inform scholarly approaches to spatial justice. In this traversal, Anselma has gathered lessons on a relationship between humans and the land where belonging is cultivated through care, a shared responsibility that shapes solidarities in movement. These lessons help face a moment when not only are sites and selves subjected to violent separation, but when such violence becomes a form of spectacle. In its ever-growing (media) reach, such spectacle panders to groups who claim that their heritage is a right to a territory not to be shared with those who migrate (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Anselma Margarito at a protest in Zócalo, México City, 2024. Photograph by Lizbeth Hernández.
Yet migration has profoundly shaped the relationship that Anselma has established with the land. Belonging to one of the most numerous Indigenous peoples in Mexico (the Otomíes), Anselma was born in Mexico City on April 21, 2002, to parents who made the painful decision to leave their native Santiago Mexquititlán alongside dozens of other families in the past five decades. A vibrant town enriched by Otomí culture yet resource-impoverished by neoliberal rural disinvestment and privatization, Santiago Mexquititlán is located in the Ñoñho Mezquital Valley, part of the larger Otomí region where two mountain belts of the present territory of Mexico meet: the Sierra Volcánica Transversal and the Sierra Madre Oriental. Also touching parts of the Central Mexican Plateau and the Gulf Coastal Plain, the Otomí region is occupied today by eight states of Central Mexico.
The country’s capital was not welcoming to the Otomí families migrating since the 1970s. Some of the Otomíes found rental housing, whereas others established camps within vacant lots or settled in empty buildings in the upwardly mobile middle-class Roma neighborhood. The structural racism behind the multiple evictions by authorities has compounded with the day-to-day racism of city dwellers. Identifying the Indigenous language and traditional clothing, a segment of the mestizx and white-mestizx population has called the Otomí community members “invaders” who should “go back to their villages”—echoing a pervasive notion of Indigenous unbelonging in urban space as pointed out by Rebecca Kiddle.[2] In her early years, Anselma developed ambivalent feelings of belonging in Mexico City. While nurtured by a close-knit community, she was aware of being alienated in certain spaces. “I did not want to wear my Otomí attire, especially when riding public transit, as people would cast a judgmental look or avoid close proximity,” she notes.
Identified as “out of place,” Anselma’s body (and embodied self) appears as the first site of experiencing everyday racism. Her family has experienced displacement and the deprivation of housing in the city. Her community has experienced the same spatial alienation as part of the dozens of migrating Otomí families. In recent years, many of them have banded together as the Comunidad Indígena Otomí Residente en la Ciudad de México to expand their demand for a space in the city. Joining Indigenous resistances across Mexico, they demand the end of structural racism against Indigenous peoples in the country. Their struggle against neoliberal governance and capitalist dispossession reshapes architectures in immediate contact with their bodies, families, and community as much as broader urban spaces, landscapes, and regions.
Anselma has preserved strong ties with Santiago Mexquititlán, often taking a four-hour bus ride to visit her beloved ones and pay respects to her cherished, now deceased grandmother. Her love for the place is palpable: “While Santiago is quieter than Mexico City, I enjoy its festivities that bring the community together. I also appreciate the sense of freedom in its open spaces.” Anselma grew up rooted in these two seemingly disparate places. The vast prairie landscapes of her Santiago homeland, sparsely punctuated by one-story houses, contrast with the hard, dense, fast-moving urbanscape of Mexico City. Yet as a migrant, Anselma came to understand the conditions they shared. Taking different spatial forms, a visible dispossession harms both places, which become reliant on communities that protect them from capitalist devastation.
In her childhood and adolescence, Anselma lived with her parents and four sisters in a tin shed in one of the Roma neighborhood lots, on the street Zacatecas. Not until she turned eighteen did she discover how her emotional ties to family and community could connect her to the wider struggle of Indigenous peoples. Her family and friends were politically active members of the Comunidad Indígena Otomí Residente en la Ciudad de México—Otomí Community CdMx— which, at a local level, demands the right to housing in the city and, at a national level, has joined the (grassroots collective) Congreso Nacional Indígena’s resistance against dispossession, displacement, and militarized oppression. Anselma’s close ones led the takeover of a building that would change her life and worldview:
My dad is a councilmember of the Community. When he and my mom invited me to the protests, I would ask what the point was. I didn’t want to march.
My dad would show me videos of what the Otomíes and supporters did at marches in Mexico City. I pointed out that they shouldn’t spray-paint buildings and monuments because they represented us, to which my dad responded: “We paint them precisely because they don’t represent us.”
On October 12, 2020, the date governments celebrate (under a variety of forms and euphemisms) to mark Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the island of Guanahaní, the Otomí Community CdMx peacefully took over the building of the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas, or INPI. Since its 2018 founding, INPI has served as an assimilationist arm of the federal government. Since the Otomí insurgent occupation, this building has been transformed into a soundbox that houses and broadcasts urgent dialogues against state-enabled capitalist dispossession.
“A political consciousness struck me when I saw the community occupy and transform the building,” Anselma recalls. Before the takeover, her parents used to visit the INPI to request audiences with the institute’s leadership, only to find it as impervious and unengaging as the building’s white, solid façade. The ensuing October occupation powerfully changed the dynamic with Indigenous voices taking the lead in conversations on Indigenous matters and the government being pushed aside—and outside. Even if its appearance changed little, the building rose anew in the eyes of Anselma as a beacon calling for Indigenous resistance from a place that had enacted Indigenous suppression. Centering the participation of Otomí women in the struggle against colonial and capitalist dispossession, Anselma quickly became a leading voice (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Anselma Margarito and her compañerxs moments before starting the October 12, 2022, march from the Monument to Independence to the Zócalo, México City. Photograph by Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy.
As her work expanded from co-directing the communication efforts of the community to co-leading public conversations and rallies, Anselma has seen the building of solidarities with other Indigenous and allied movements. These movements include those in defense of the land and water (throughout the country and beyond); the Ayotzinapa parents demanding justice for the army- and cartel-perpetrated disappearance of students in 2014; the Searching Mothers (who have taken upon themselves the state-neglected mission of finding forced disappearance victims); as well as student, feminist, and anti-capitalist activisms.
The former INPI building, renamed Casa de los Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas, Yä nghü yä jhöy, Samir Flores Soberanes, has acted as a node where local and global efforts for social justice converge. With attendance now surging by the hundreds, events often spill out onto the street, with voices that rise beneath a canvas awning rippling through the city like a wave. The city itself has reacted to these conversations, creating supporting spaces as urban dwellers begin to see the capital city’s land as something more than a commodifiable surface.[3] Through the years, the Casa de los Pueblos’ architecture has taken on a new life, breathing and expanding beyond its footprint. Like a human body, it inhales, exhales, and stretches out. It has learned to claim space unapologetically.
The “spilling out” of these events has also taken the form of protest marches and awareness-raising rallies that further transform urban space. In these diverse sites and paths carved out in Mexico City, Indigenous peoples from all over the country have shed light on the dispossession they have borne and resisted. As a case in point, members of the Coordinación de Pueblos, Barrios Originarios y Colonias de Xochimilco (CPBOCX, Mexico City) who denounce water extraction from the land they steward have turned marches and rallies into pedagogical spaces where participants learn what a more nurturing relationship with land and its life-supporting systems means—one where these systems are no longer treated as mere resources (Figure 3).
“Anselma’s story teaches us that movement across the land can powerfully shape a nurturing relationship with it.”
Figure 3. Otomíes and allies, including Pueblos Unidos de la Región Cholulteca y de los Volcanes members as well as dwellers from Mexico City and other states, march across Santiago Mexquititlán during the Caravana por el Agua y por la Vida, Santiago Mexquititlán, 2022. Photograph by Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy.
As a migrant who broadened her stewardship practices beyond her places of origin and dwelling, Anselma has cultivated land-care relations by tirelessly weaving long-distance solidarities. She has coordinated actions that have included Santiago Mexquititlán kin and compañerxs joining protests in Mexico City as well as members of the Otomí Community CdMx coming to the defense of the water bodies of Santiago that are subject to private extractivism. She has also helped organize the traveling protests Caravana por el Agua y por la Vida, Caravana el Sur Resiste, and the semi-annual Asamblea Nacional por el Agua y por la Vida, among many other gatherings.
Added to the “slow violence” of dispossession, quick and aggressive repression has met these solidarity practices, including Anselma’s brutal arrest alongside four compañerxs who protested the criminalization of Xochimilco water defender Hortensia Telésforo (2024). For decades, the government’s violence has called for more strategic coordination and support between the Otomíes and fellow members of the Congreso Nacional Indígena. Strengthening its fraternal ties and traveling to support each other’s protests, this network of resistance becomes a reminder of the interconnectedness of places. Contesting colonial and capitalist understandings of the land as divisible and possessable, Indigenous land-care practices take upon themselves the defense of all places from capitalist occupation and extractivism. Their struggle is guided by the notion that the planet’s lands and systems—including surfaces, materials, flows, and life forms—run in continuity and mutual dependence, connected by matter, energy, and the dynamics of organic and inorganic constituents.
Anselma’s story teaches us that movement across the land can powerfully shape a nurturing relationship with it: migration connects places and can inform trans-regional solidarity and community-building. As Anooradha Siddiqi contends, the labor of those displaced (especially women) “conserves experience and memory and gathers energy towards life.” Such labor becomes a critical heritage practice that carries land-care knowledges from home and creates new ones in the site of emergency. Individuals, families, and communities being displaced teach back a lesson to the legal and administrative apparatuses that essentialize and violently dissociate identity from place. Indigenous-led awareness of sistered struggles centers the lesson on the shared right and responsibility towards the land, to which we all belong and which we are collectively obligated to steward. Anselma’s story also makes us aware that whether by forced migration or mobilization in solidarity, peoples in movement engage with the land in reciprocal ways, a lesson calling for an urgent shift in hegemonic architectural thinking: away from private property- and extraction-based understandings. Knowledges of place, self, and community developed by those who migrate become the raw materials to re-learn connections with one’s chosen, yearned for, or host land; as well as to build solidarities for the protection of lands that appear distant.
Citation
Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy and Anselma Margarito, “Cultivated in Migration: An Otomí Woman’s Work on Community and Land-Care,” PLATFORM, August 11, 2025.
Notes
[1] Anselma Margarito’s preference is to be referred to using her first name after the initial mention of her full name in this essay.
[2] Rebecca Kiddle, “Contemporary Māori Placemaking,” in Our Voices: Indigeneity and Architecture, eds. Rebecca Kiddle, luugigyoo patrick stewart, and Kevin O'Brien (Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2018), 55.
[3] Besides the years-long support to the Otomí struggle, more recently non-Indigenous Mexico City dwellers have attended and actively participated in events discussing forms of common stewardship of the land counter to private ownership.
