{"id":25793,"date":"2026-02-06T11:22:22","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T11:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/?p=25793"},"modified":"2026-02-23T11:25:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T11:25:26","slug":"interview-with-ramon-vera-herrera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/issue-5\/interview-with-ramon-vera-herrera\/","title":{"rendered":"Pedro Urano – Interview with Ram\u00f3n Vera-Herrera"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n\r\n\t
\r\n\r\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> Download PDF<\/a>\r\n\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Interview conducted by Pedro Urano (pedro@pedrourano.com) on 10 April 2025.<\/p>\n

On a sunny afternoon, I met with Ram\u00f3n Vera-Herrera, who served as one of the judges for the London iteration of the CICC<\/em> and presented the lecture \u2018<\/span>Territory as a place of encounter and meaning<\/span><\/a>\u2019 at the <\/span>CICC School<\/span><\/em> a few days after the court sessions were wrapped up. Writer, editor and co-founder of Ojarasca magazine, a vital platform for Indigenous issues in Mexico, Ram\u00f3n uncovers, in the following conversation, the profound distinctions between Indigenous worldviews and the extractive logic of modernity. From the milpa\u2019s teachings of interdependence to the rejection of colonial epistemologies, he offers a vision of resistance grounded in regeneration and long-term survival.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pedro Urano: Yesterday, at your lecture at the CICC School<\/em>, I was particularly struck by its profoundly visual nature. Could you elaborate on how significant images are for advancing the struggle for climate justice?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ram\u00f3n Vera-Herrera:<\/strong> Visual representations are fundamentally important \u2013 indeed, indispensable \u2013 across all contexts. When I speak of images, I refer not merely to pictorial elements, but to entire visual relationships that one can meaningfully engage with. These relationships possess a remarkable power to draw viewers toward new understandings \u2013 to illuminate truths that might otherwise remain obscured.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 2: In the Tarot de Marseille, the Strength card depicts a woman gently taming a lion. Card XI La Force<\/em> from the Nicolas Convert Tarot deck (1760), reprint by Reality Publishing (2020). Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

PU: Among the images in your presentation, the Strength tarot card stood out as an unconventional protest iconography. What makes this an effective symbol for peasant and Indigenous struggles?<\/strong><\/p>\n

RVH:<\/strong> The Strength tarot card serves as a powerful metaphor for the quiet, enduring resilience at the heart of peasant and Indigenous struggles. Unlike conventional depictions of force \u2013 muscular, aggressive or visibly straining \u2013 this card reveals true strength as something innate, effortless and deeply rooted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The woman gently holding the lion\u2019s jaws speaks to a different kind of power. It indeed reconfigures conventional notions of strength. True strength needn’t perform exertion \u2013 like the serene woman depicted, whose mastery renders force unnecessary.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For movements resisting extractivism and dispossession, this imagery is profoundly resonant. It challenges the performative brutality of states and corporations that must constantly prove their \u2018strength\u2019 through violence and ecological plunder. Meanwhile, peasant and Indigenous communities \u2013 often dismissed as fragile \u2013 exhibit a different kind of might: the strength to persist, to nurture and to outlast empires without becoming what they fight against.<\/span><\/p>\n

PU: \u2026the idea embedded in this image seems to stand in stark contrast to contemporary geopolitics, where so-called superpowers visibly strain to assert dominance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

RVH:<\/strong> This is what theatre theory terms<\/span>\u00a0\u2018<\/b>amplification\u2019 \u2013 the compensatory over-performance of a role when one fails to embody its essence authentically. The woman calmly holding the lion\u2019s jaws exemplifies the antithesis of this: her power requires no theatrical exertion precisely because it is innate. In contrast, those desperate to project power resort to<\/span>\u00a0<\/b>gesticulaciones<\/span><\/i>, <\/b>as we say in Spanish \u2013 those superfluous gesticulations that betray the void between impoverished spirit and aspirational image. The card’s allegory speaks profoundly to our moment: authentic sovereignty operates through calm assurance, not theatrical displays of might.<\/span><\/p>\n

PU: Could you provide a panorama of the current Indigenous situation in Mexico?<\/strong><\/p>\n

RVH:<\/strong> The situation is dire \u2013 catastrophically so. Indigenous communities have been systematically abandoned to face overlapping crises alone. Rampant violence permeates their territories, with criminals encircling villages and coercing residents into becoming \u2018carne de ca\u00f1\u00f3n\u2019 [cannon fodder]. These groups operate with chilling efficiency: running training camps where they forcibly recruit adolescents and young adults \u2013 Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike \u2013 into their paramilitary ranks. No one is safe. Age, gender or ethnicity offer no protection \u2013 if you inhabit these regions, you\u2019re vulnerable to conscription. The violence has become so normalised that even children are viewed as \u2018useful\u2019 to their machinations. The state\u2019s absence creates vacuums filled by cartels, while Indigenous bodies become disposable instruments in others\u2019 wars.<\/span><\/p>\n

Communities are confronting the reality of their abandonment. The illusion of state protection has fully shattered, particularly since the neoliberal structural reforms of the late 20th century revealed governments not as guardians, but as complicit partners with corporations and capital. This collusion has birthed a monstrous hybridity where capitalism and criminality converge. Businessmen adopt delinquent tactics, while cartels emulate corporate structures \u2013 a mutual corruption that erases any meaningful distinction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, the defence of territory becomes criminalised. Those protecting their lands are systematically branded enemies \u2013 of the state, of institutions, of capital \u2013 and face disappearance, incarceration or murder. The numbers are staggering: 50,000 killed and 125,000 disappeared in Mexico alone over a decade. Violence becomes total: no region is spared, as this engineered chaos serves extractive agendas.<\/span><\/p>\n

The international legal order, subsumed by economic interests, offers no recourse. We are left with the stark realisation: the \u2018failed state\u2019 is now the universal condition. In this vacuum, autonomy and self-governance cease to be ideological choices \u2013 they become existential necessities for traditional communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

PU: Could you speak more about contemporary Indigenous territorial autonomy movements in Mexico \u2013 particularly the emergence of federations uniting diverse groups? How does this reshape sovereignty and state relations in Latin America?<\/strong><\/p>\n

RVH:<\/strong> These autonomy movements reveal a strategic paradox: while deeply interconnected, Indigenous and peasant communities consciously resist forming only one unified national front. Such institutionalisation, they understand, would inevitably be co-opted by the very systems they oppose. What they are trying to do is stay attuned to each movement\u2019s battles, ready to step in with support at critical moments. Like trees in a forest \u2013 connected at the roots yet growing at their own pace \u2013 they offer shelter to others while reaching skyward on their own terms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Their resilience lies in acting collectively when needed, while maintaining the slow, patient work of cultural-territorial reconstitution. It is not about seizing state power. Their self-reparative model revives territorial knowledge which capitalism sought to erase \u2013 not through revolution, an idea that I think is dead, but through Indigenous timescales. It\u2019s about thinking in 10,000-year cycles rather than electoral terms. As John Berger noted, if we think in terms of 2 or 3 years, we might assume peasant and Indigenous farmers will vanish. But if we consider the 10,000-year history of peasant and Amerindian agriculture, it\u2019s clear it will endure \u2013 and thrive for another 10,000.<\/span> This is resistance as regeneration, with full awareness that no government can overcome the globalised system. Liberation now means building from below \u2013 not to take power, but to outlast it.<\/span><\/p>\n

PU: This issue of autonomy reminds me of a question raised by the public at your talk at the CICC School<\/em>: autonomy from what? Because while you\u2019ve identified capitalism and neoliberalism as primary forces of dispossession, in your talk you also confronted the modern nation-state itself as an apparatus of control, irrespective of its ideological branding.<\/strong><\/p>\n

RVH:<\/strong> The point here is that, for me, the idea of autonomy means that you define yourself in your own terms. It’s not really that you are autonomous from someone, but that you understand yourself in your own terms. Thus, at its core, autonomy represents this radical act of self-definition \u2013 not merely liberation from oppressive systems, but the positive assertion of one\u2019s own terms of existence. As Fanon exposed, capitalism\u2019s gravest violence is epistemic: it convinces the oppressed of their own inadequacy, their incapacity for self-determination. So, true autonomy begins when we refuse these imposed verdicts and instead construct our own frameworks of judgment \u2013 grounded in communal histories, Indigenous cosmologies and lived experiences of justice.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Mexican state\u2019s offer to recognise communities as \u2018subjects of rights\u2019 reveals the trap: these are always its rights, its laws. The revolutionary imperative lies precisely in rejecting this conditional inclusion, this bureaucratic hook that maintains dependency. Real emancipation emerges when we cultivate our own juridical imaginaries, our own collective terms of worth \u2013 untethered from the state\u2019s monopolisation of legitimacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

PU: In your opinion, what fundamental difference distinguishes traditional Indigenous communities from the modern world, particularly concerning their intrinsic values and priorities?<\/strong><\/p>\n

RVH:<\/strong> What fundamentally distinguishes these communities from the modern world is their embedded culture of care \u2013 entire systems and daily practices devoted to reciprocal nurturing. Here, care isn\u2019t an activity but a <\/span>way of being<\/span><\/i>: a respect that extends to all existence. As Winona LaDuke [<\/span>American environmentalist, writer and activist with Indigenous Dakota ancestry]<\/span> articulates regarding wild rice \u2013 whom she calls a \u2018companion\u2019 deserving shared agency. We might say the same of maize in Mexico.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In Mexico, maize \u2013 and the milpa system of polycultural cultivation it anchors \u2013 is understood not merely as a crop, but as humanity\u2019s first teacher of community. The milpa\u2019s very logic \u2013 where diverse plants like beans, squash, and chillies are grown together with maize \u2013 models the strength found through interdependence. 1<\/a><\/sup> As campesinos across Mexico attest: it was maize that taught humans how to live collectively.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not only plants. It\u2019s animals. It’s fungus. It’s everything. It’s water. It’s the rainfall. It’s the different ways of water because it’s not only one water. There are many forms of water, and each one has a different energy. Mesoamerican cosmologies map these relationships with precision. Take their calendrical systems: they don\u2019t merely track time, but the arrival of specific energies \u2013 whether wind, heat, or particular waters \u2013 that interact dynamically with human lives. To share a day with these energies is to participate in a vast, animate web of reciprocity. What outsiders might call \u2018spirituality\u2019 is, in truth, an intricate ecological science of interbeing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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  1. Interviewer’s note: The Amerindian \u2018milpa\u2019 is a traditional, biodiverse and highly sustainable Indigenous agricultural system used throughout Mesoamerica and distinguished by the simultaneous cultivation of multiple crops in the same plot. The most well-known combination is the \u2018Three Sisters\u2019, where squash spreads low to the ground, shading the soil to retain moisture, suppress weeds and deter pests; maize provides a natural trellis for climbing beans, which in turn help stabilize the cornstalks and fix nitrogen in the soil through their root nodules, enriching it for the other plants. This example, however, risks being overly simplistic unless we underscore, as Ram\u00f3n does below, that a milpa typically comprises hundreds of different plants, bacteria, fungi and animal species. Its extraordinary diversity means it effectively operates as a small-scale but complex ecosystem, like a tiny forest. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Download PDF Interview conducted by Pedro Urano (pedro@pedrourano.com) on 10 April 2025. On a sunny afternoon, I met with Ram\u00f3n Vera-Herrera, who served as one of the judges for the London iteration of the CICC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":25794,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"Figure 1: Ram\u00f3n Vera-Herrera. Image credit: Pedro Urano","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null},"categories":[187],"tags":[154,180],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25793"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25793"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25837,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25793\/revisions\/25837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}