A living space: The relationship between land and property in the communityGuest EditorialAlivingspace:Therelationshipbetweenlandandpropertyinthecommunity“Perhaps all of my hopes are nothing more than unfoundeddreams.”Letter From Ricardo Flores Magón to Miss Ellen WhiteI belong to the community of Santa Cruz Yagavila, in the Sierrade Juárez in Oaxaca. My umbilical cord is buried there, as are thoseof my grandparents. Perhaps I should say: I am the community. It istrue that I belong to it as it belongs to me. But each and every one ofus is the community. The community is nothing more than weourselves, it only exists in what we are.We are a culturally specific collective, structured in a fabric(tejido) of social relations that is based on the principle of reci-procity. It is a collective that occupies its own territory in a perma-nent manner. The web of our relations becomes even more denseand complex through our participation in tequios – communallabor, assemblies and celebrations. It is an open but obligatoryparticipation, one that affirms us as members of the community.In this way, we are a community in a communal territory, cyclicallyreiterating our belonging by participating in the collective, and byfulfilling our responsibilities and obligations to it.Land has been disputed across history because it is a communalgood and one of the most important means of production and life.To speak of the land means to think about how over the last fewdecades capital has sought to appropriate the forests, the land,the water, and minerals in a way that can only be compared tothe age of colonial extraction. In colonial times, we offeredcontinued resistance. Domination came packaged in a new religionand new political institutions. For us, both the packaging and itscontents were expressions of strange foreign powers that tried toexercise their dominion over us. We endured them for centuriesas they occupied our territories in different ways.Our territory constitutes the natural space of life and is conceivedas the ecological base for the construction of various expressionsand political practices. Territory is the foundation of self-determina-tion for our peoples, this natural space of life is the source of wisdomand knowledge, of culture, identity, traditions and rights. Because ofthis, our vision of our territory is intimately tied to the enactment ofour collective rights and our self-determination.In the community we distinguish between two ways of under-standing and using natural resources: one is for the production ofcommunal or subsistence goods and the other is for the productionof those capitalist goods on which modern life depends. Today westand before a process of worldwide reorganization, where land isfirst measured and then alienated, where its resources are firstdocumented and then appropriated, to be used for a new cycle ofinvestment and accumulation. Facing this situation, it is importantto ask: what do these new processes of accumulation offer us andwhat good, if any, can come of them? What progress and develop-ment have we received from them? What are the cultural, social,technological and economic benefits for our people? These aresome of the many questions we can ask in an attempt to under-stand the interests behind the México Indígena: Bowman Expeditionsproject that came to work in our community of Yagavila in 2006.The researchers and students led by Peter Herlihy came beforethe General Assembly of our community in August 2006, claimingthat the objective of México Indígena was to conduct participatorymapping in order to understand the impacts of PROCEDE(the Program for Certification of Rights to Ejido Lands) in indige-nous communities. They assured us that “our purpose is to improveunderstanding in the United States of foreign territories and popu-lations with the goal of reducing disagreements and for the peace-ful resolution of conflicts.” After hearing these claims, many peopleasked specifically about the project’s financing, to which theresearchers replied “The financing of the AGS Bowman Expeditionscan come from any source, public or private.” It was not explicitlystated that financing came from the Foreign Military Studies Office(FMSO) and we were not informed that the data they obtainedwould be given to the FMSO of the U.S. Army.Aside from the rumors of inappropriate conduct or the lack ofinformed consent from the communities, this situation worries usbecause we have always seen a strong link between geographyand the interests of the military industrial complex, especially inrecent attempts to create worldwide property databases. TheMéxico Indígena project subscribes to a political–military strategy.We cannot forget that this mapping occurs in the midst of thedebate over a package of military financing from the United Statesknown as the Mérida Initiative. The control and displacement ofindigenous communities is intended to prevent potential conflictsin “hot spots”, contribute to the military control of the region,and finally free up natural resources for the benefit of the govern-ment and its transnational allies.A good example of this is the state of Chiapas with its “ruralcities,” where, in the most faithful rendition of the colonial tradi-tion, the state government, under the pretext of providing services,has evicted indigenous communities from their lands and concen-trated them in new areas so that the government can freely exploittheir resources. Today the police serve the function of guardians ofthese natural riches, making it more difficult to recover them as thecommunal goods they once were. But before relocation andContents lists available at ScienceDirectPolitical Geographyjournal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo0962-6298/$ – see front matter ! 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.09.003Political Geography xxx (2010) 1–2Please cite this article in press as: Cruz, M., A living space: The relationship between land and property in the community, Political Geography(2010), doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.09.003exploitation, there is always a plan, a plan which today requiresdigital data. The purpose of the México Indígena project is to takelocal knowledge from the community and convert it into the primematerial needed to model geographic information systems, whichare then used as tools for this type of planning.We know that maps are powerful tools that can be used to exploitor to