Prisons and Colonial Continuities: Indigenous Women’s Experiences of Judicial Racism in Mexico

Prisons and Colonial Continuities: Indigenous Women's Experiences of Judicial Racism in Mexico

Written on 18 April 2026. Posted in News

BY AÍDA HERNÁNDEZ CASTILLO & DANIELA MARCIA TREJO BIZARRO FOR INDIGENOUS DEBATES

Prisons and the criminalisation of Indigenous peoples play a central role in the persistence of a colonial project that continues to dispossess Indigenous Peoples of their lands, displace them, and incarcerate the most vulnerable sectors of their communities. The experiences of Indigenous women imprisoned in a high-security federal prison in Mexico illustrate the continuum of violence that shapes their encounters with the State and a racist, patriarchal justice system. These women have developed strategies of resistance by building a sense of community within a space that otherwise fosters competition and distrust among incarcerated women.

In Latin America, the myth of mestizaje has often obscured the role of racism in prisons, reducing analysis to the criminalisation of poverty and judicial corruption while ignoring the overrepresentation of racialised bodies in carceral spaces. Yet we know that "the color of prisons is is the color of race": in Mexico, the 2022 prison census recorded 8,412 Indigenous people behind bars out of a total of 247,000. These figures are nevertheless underestimated, as they rely on linguistic criteria and fail to recognise those who lost their languages through forced assimilation and Hispanicisation campaigns.

The so-called "war on drugs" is a security strategy declared in 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, aimed at attacking and weakening drug cartels through the use of the Armed Forces. However, this strategy has only increased the criminalisation and imprisonment of Indigenous people and represents a continuation of the colonial project through territorial dispossession, the disruption of communities, and systematic violence against marginalised populations. This process has forcibly displaced Indigenous people from their communities, relocating them to distant prisons, where they experience both isolation and physical and symbolic violence.

Indigenous women in detention face specific forms of intersectional violence before, during, and after their incarceration. Although only 5 per cent of the 13,985 women held in state and federal prisons have been officially identified as Indigenous, this is widely considered an undercount, as many Indigenous women are not recognised as such because they no longer speak their languages. According to the National Chamber of Human Rights, among the women whose ethnic affiliation has been recorded, 43 per cent were detained for drug-related offences, euphemistically known as "crimes against health."

Their incarceration allows the Mexican State to present statistics showing that it is "doing something" against drug trafficking, without damaging the interests of organised crime networks. In fact, imprisoning Indigenous women involved in small-scale drug dealing or the cultivation of natural drugs has not contributed to reducing the impacts of drug trafficking networks. Rather, it leaves their children vulnerable, perpetuating cycles of cultural uprooting and youth recruitment into organized crime groups.

The Imposition of Colonial Law

Over seventeen years of work in carceral spaces, supporting Indigenous women in the writing of their life stories, we have documented that before, during, and after their detention, Indigenous women have suffered racist violence ranging from harassment and discrimination, separation from their children, physical torture, and sexual violence. The occupation of indigenous lands through the construction of prison complexes has been accompanied by the domination of their bodies through police violence.

Judicial racism operates exogenously (outside the judicial institutions) by concentrating militarisation and security strategies in poor, racialised regions inhabited by Indigenous peoples. At the same time, endogenously, we mean within the justice system that reproduces racist and patriarchal prejudices in its treatment of Indigenous women, who often lack translators and are unaware of their right to a public defender. Moreover, the enforcement of criminal justice in Indigenous territories represents the imposition of colonial law over Indigenous jurisdictions, in violation of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, ILO Convention 169, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Historically, the imprisonment of Indigenous men and women represents a continuation of colonial practices that impose the law of the colonizer in place of Indigenous forms of justice. It is not only problem of the overrepresentation of poor, racialised bodies in prisons, but the imposition of a punitive system that does not respond to the traditional forms of conflict resolution historically developed by the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico. In this way, Indigenous women imprisoned at the Federal Social Rehabilitation Centre (Cefereso 16), Mexico's largest high-security women's prison, have been displaced from their territories and condemned by a colonial justice system that has systematically violated their rights.

Michapa: Rehabilitation Centre or Colonial Enclave?

Over the Indigenous and peasant territory of Michapa rises the Federal Social Rehabilitation Centre No. 16: Mexico's first and only high-security women's prison. The centre was built by Grupo Inbursa, owned by the magnate Carlos Slim, under a public-private partnership scheme, and, like many prisons in Mexico, it was established on the lands of Indigenous Peoples. Today, the descendants of the Tlahuica people are small-scale farmers cultivating subsistence crops and tropical fruits on ejido (collectively owned) and communal lands. On these lands, vegetation was cleared to construct a vast prison complex stretching for over a kilometre of frontage, intruding upon the landscape along the isolated road from Amacuzac to Michapa.

The prison's punitive economy commodifies confinement: the private sector is responsible for designing, building, equipping, and maintaining the facility, while the State, as the service's client, pays for its full capacity-2,528 cells-whether occupied or not. At the same time, a prison-based textile maquiladora or sweatshop has been established, using cheap labour without employment benefits and using infrastructure subsidised by the State. Workers are paid 250 pesos per week (approximately USD 14.57) through an internal points system redeemable in prison stores, reminiscent of the colonial "tiendas de raya" or "company stores" on the exploitative haciendas during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911).

To enter Michapa is to traverse a territory of oppression. Before arrival, mobile signals are lost, and temperatures of over 40°C turn access into an exercise in endurance. A succession of more than twenty checkpoints form part of a strict bureaucratic-punitive labyrinth, where extreme control functions as punishment for those attempting to enter. Symbolic violence is manifested in the monochromatic, mechanical, and arid architecture, where carefully controlled vegetation greets external visitors, while the areas inhabited by women deprived of liberty contain only synthetic grass that simulates life-as if the denial of life were part of the punishment. This territory constitutes the daily reality for the prison population.

Cell Block 6.1

The conditions of torture, isolation, and lack of medical care experienced by inmates have been identified as primary factors contributing to the deterioration of their mental health. These conditions have reached an unsustainable point, pushing the emotional balance of the women to the extreme and resulting in a distressing and alarming number of suicides: 20 cases recorded in the last two years, up to January 2026. Specifically, the transfers of inmates from other detention centres since 2022 have been cited as a significant factor underlying this wave of suicides, a concern also noted by the National Human Rights Commission and the Federal Institute of Public Defence.

Among the population who have been transferred are Indigenous women from various regions: Mayas from Quintana Roo; Otomís from the States of Mexico and Hidalgo; Nahuas from Guerrero, Morelos, and Puebla; Mixtecas and Chatinas from Oaxaca; Yaquis from Sonora; Wirrarikas from Zacatecas; and one Afro-Guerrerense woman. Following the 2020 detention of Afro-Amuzga human rights activist Kenya Hernández, the Indigenous women of Michapa, guided by her leadership, requested a special Cell block where they could live together and preserve their cultural practices. As a result, Cell Block 6.1 became a multi-ethnic community comprising 18 Indigenous women, detained for federal offences ranging from theft and participation in organised crime to minor offences such as fraud or the falsification of documents.

As most of the women were accustomed to living in close contact with nature, the prison space itself constitutes a form of violence: they are confined in a grey concrete cell block. It is a circular structure, with cells arranged around a central space where all activities take place, from meals and training sessions to personal hygiene in the showers. The entire Cell block is completely covered in concrete, leaving the Indigenous women without even a single patch of earth to step on. Something as elemental as feeling the soil beneath one's feet is deeply longed for by these women, who dream of and write about the land, rivers, trees, and all the natural surroundings of their home communities.

Alongside the isolation from their communities, punitive measures such as total solitary confinement continue to be used as forms of control over the prison population. During the three years we worked in this detention centre, we witnessed one case in which a resident of Cell Block 6.1 was beaten, bound by hands and feet, and held in isolation as punishment for her "misconduct." The continuum of violence that has marked their lives since childhood now includes the legitimised violences of a colonial State, which uses the prison as a means of control, dispossession, and dehumanisation.

Writing as Resistance: Totoltin and Dissenting Voices

In the face of this colonial system of control, the multi-ethnic community has developed its own strategies of collective resistance, creating networks of care. Through the space opened by collective reflection in the Reborn in Writing workshop, the women of Cell Block 6.1 were able to share their stories, get to know one another, and reflect each other's experiences, engaging in processes of individual and collective healing through writing and the dignification of their memories.

The Hermanas en la Sombra Editorial Collective entered Michapa in 2023 to deliver this workshop across several cell blocks, based on the Identity Writing methodology, which we have developed over seventeen years of work in carceral spaces and systematised in Reborn in Writing: Manual for Feminist Intervention in Spaces of Violence. This methodology represents an exercise in reconstructing subjectivity, enabling women to recover their own voice and denounce structural logics of oppression, affirming themselves as individuals with history, memory, and agency. Engaging with writing also serves as a political tool, allowing Indigenous women to challenge the ways they are represented in official narratives, which reduce them to mere numbers and offences.

Through the written word, the women of Cell Block 6.1 explored, week by week, the themes of the manual: racism, classism, androcentrism, sorority, and misogyny; the myths of romantic love; life stories and the body; autonomy; and transformative and healing writing. These processes of dialogue and writing were accompanied by songs, rituals, readings, and exercises of introspection and reconnection with themselves. In each session, we reflected collectively on life experiences, listening to and recognized ourselves in each other. Gradually, memories were released through writing, many of them shaped by violence and oppression, both in their own life trajectories and in the histories of their ancestors and communities.

In the book we published Totoltin: Palomas. Writings by Indigenous Women Prisoners in Michapa (2025), Nido recalls her childhood in the Sierra of Sonora and relives the displacement she experienced with her Yaqui family in order to access public education: "The day came to start primary school. I remember the first day well; it was enough to present myself in the hand-embroidered outfit my mother had made me for them to laugh and say I was Indigenous and that the city girls did not understand my language. Gradually, hatred took hold of me, and to this day I drag that chain. Many times they call me 'Indian,' 'shitty Indigenous,' or sometimes 'the idiot.'"

Authors-Giving Birth to Their Stories and Pain

After the conclusion of the writing workshop, the texts were digitised, marking the start of a second phase aimed at materialising these stories in the book Totoltin: Palomas. Writings by Indigenous Women Prisoners in Michapa. The texts were selected and edited by the authors themselves. In addition, they handcrafted the endpapers, learned bookbinding techniques, and poured their hearts into every stage of the process. As several of the 18 participants spoke their mother tongues-mainly Nahuatl, Chatino, Maya, and Zapotec-but were unable to write them, most of the texts were written in Spanish. Some explained that they no longer spoke their languages because racism and discrimination had forced them to forget. In her text "I Grew Up", Lucía Ramírez, a Nahua woman from Tatahuicapan de Juárez, recounts the hardships and deprivations of her childhood:

Nej ni guella ken inon pelotzit zit cuak illek qui mel cajtek

(I grew up like little puppies abandoned by their mother),

noselti

(alone),

nictemo ken nia ni isatotik

(trying to figure out how to survive).

Ne niteki pano nochipa aun quej poins ni ciahuia pues alla ni llole catca

(I worked, always getting very tired because I was still so small).

In the final sessions, the women reflected on the transformative process they had experienced and its impact during the workshop. Leticia Pérez, a Nahua woman from Puebla, expressed: "I see the book as something we all gave birth to together, something we have been working on for months and that is now going to be released-yes, it's going to come out, comrades! It represents our stories, but also what we have suffered. I don't know how you will see it, but for me, we all gave birth to it together." The collective birth metaphor shared by "Mamá Lety" illustrates how writing strengthens community bonds and connection. By recognising themselves as authors-giving birth to their stories and pain, reframed, collectivised, and materialised in the book-object, they construct memories narrated in their own words, imbued with poetic, political, and emotional power.

It is within the prison, a hostile space designed for control, that writing emerges as a symbolic womb from which resistance and community are produced and "born." Writing allows the imagination of forms of subjectivity not defined by the punitive logic of the State, but by the capacity to create, narrate oneself, resist, and reaffirm oneself as an individual with history, memory, and agency. Through it, the authors of Totoltin share collective memories portraying the conditions of violence, exclusion, oppression, and dispossession faced by Indigenous women in twenty-first-century Mexico.

Final Reflections

Prisons continue to function as instruments of punishment, control, and territorial dispossession of Original Peoples across the Americas. In this sense, Totoltin: Doves. Writings by Indigenous Women Prisoners in Michapa can be considered part of the archives of Indigenous resistance, and specifically of Indigenous women. The continuity of the colonial project in the Americas has been denounced through various textual strategies, ranging from political manifestos to songs, chronicles, and poetry. The silence of complicity has been broken, and nothing can silence these voices.

These denunciations also include testimonies of the diverse forms of resistance that women have developed to defend life and build community, even in contexts where the violences of colonial States isolate them through laws that justify the seizure, displacement, and dispossession of their territories. We hope that this text echoes their call to tear down the walls of these colonial enclaves, disguised as Social Rehabilitation Centres. As Yanetzin Marcelo describes in the poem that gives the book its title, it is a call to continue resisting collectively:

R. Aída Hernández Castillo is Mexican, holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, and is a Full Research Professor at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She is also a member and co-founder of the Latin American Feminist Anti-Prison Network.

Marcia Daniela Trejo Bizarro is a member of the Indigenous community of Ocotepec and holds a degree in Social Anthropology from the Centre for Research in Social Sciences and Regional Studies (CICSER) at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos. Since 2020, she has been part of the Hermanas en la Sombra Editorial Collective, which she currently coordinates.

Cover photo: Presentation of Totoltin: Palomas. Writings by Indigenous Women in the Prison of in Michapa. Photo: Colectiva Hermanas en la Sombra

Tags: Asuntos Indígenas