After at least a thousand years of transformations in the Oaxacan isthmus, the Huave people are entering the 21st century facing deeper and more vertiginous changes than ever before. Their terrestrial and sea environment, their fishing, their food, their bodies, their festivals and their cosmovision, give a real-time account of a tidal wave driven by both internal and external factors. This tidal wave encompasses the most dissimilar elements, such as the new fishing gear that challenges the cayuco and the atarraya, the advance of the evangelical churches, the local economy around beer consumption, the struggle of midwives against medicalised childbirth, a language that renews itself to continue existing, and the promises of development and destruction of megaprojects such as wind farms or the Interoceanic Corridor. The epoch in which these changes are situated is the Technocene, a stage of life on Earth in which technologies reproduce unequal exchanges, and whose unjust social relations, established since the Conquest, are now hidden under techniques and instruments. What happens to ways of life, identities and subjectivities at a time when the relentless extractivist economy influences most of the Huave existential processes, from the moment of birth to the way they die, increasingly from complications of diabetes? These 13 essays, conscientiously written by researchers who have devoted a good part of their lives to understanding the ikoots/ikojts/konajts, wrapped and macerated in rigorous bibliographic research, offer us a glimpse into this new moment – a defining one – in the lives of these lagoon peoples. The questions they address, in the end, challenge all of us.

Click on the picture to access the book.