Indigenous organizing for housing justice: Lessons and challenges

What are the particular challenges to organizing for housing justice in Cancún, Mexico? How has the pandemic altered strategies? In January 2023, anthropologist M. Bianet Castellanos met with Magda (a pseudonym), a Maya activist who was one of the leaders of the quest for housing justice in the Colonia Mario Villanueva in Cancún. Castellanos documented this struggle in her book Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press 2021). This conversation was an opportunity for Magda to provide an update on the status of the informal settlement’s longstanding battle to procure formal land titles to their plots. They discuss the lessons learned from this decade-long struggle in the hope that this case will resonate and inform housing struggles in other parts of the world.