Indigenous Men With Disabilities at Work: Corpospatial Reconfigurations in/of a Changing Rural Mexico

Abstract

This article is part of the special issue Laboring from Ex-Centric Sites: Disability, Chronicity and Work, Anthropology of Work Review 46(1), July 2025, edited by Giorgio Brocco and Stefanie Mauksch. Over the last century, indigenous rurality in Mexico has undergone profound sociocultural and economic transformations. Peasant activities have declined, racialized forms of employment have emerged, and chronic conditions have skyrocketed, mirrored in the increasing numbers of people living with disabilities and for longer time spans. In such a context, disability and masculinity are simultaneously active shapers of spaces and embodiments of larger corpospatial transformations. Focusing on the work/disability experiences of three indigenous men of rural origin, we explore how being at work despite physical restrictions implies a rearrangement of how the body inhabits space and relates to working objects, including those which are culturally considered more “feminine.” By employing the concept “corpospatiality” we depict a set of dynamics that interlink gendered bodies, spaces, and objects in sociohistorically shaped fields. We understand these work/disability corpospatial (re)configurations as individual and collective responses to the conflict caused by shrinking environments due to disability. The intersection of disability and “work”—a mediating and transforming activity between humans and their surroundings—constitutes a privileged locus to think about changing masculinities.