Indigenous Young People, Preserving Community Life from Their Universities.

Indigenous Peoples in Mexico are currently facing the intensification of socio-environmental conflicts from historical development and extractive projects that generate dispossession, and the impossibility to remain and sustain life in the indigenous lands (Soto, 2021). Grassroots and community owned universities - like ISIA and Unixhidza-, have been built as devices whose systemic role is to generate and strengthen various processes that converge in the objective of favouring the permanence of the communities in their territories, within their ways of life, production, relation with environment, organization and the pursue of autonomy.

Since the origin of these universities are processes of social organization, and the demand and exercise of Rights – Indigenous Peoples (UN, 2007); Peasants and other people working on the rural areas (UN, 2018)-, indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and system of knowledge are present and in permanent tension with the geopolitics of hegemonic knowledge and power systems.

Thus, indigenous young people experience, studying in these universities, becomes interweaved within the historical and geopolitical processes of organization, territory defence and resistance of their communities. They use their own traditional ecological knowledge (TEC) to create and synthetize their experience - their life in community and as students of the university - in order to create projects, that being done in face of current events, they also construct life projects for their future.

The objective of this presentation is to discuss how the projects done by the indigenous young people, students in these universities, involving research and intervention, are part of the social, generational and environmental justice claims from the communities that they are part of.

The methodology used for this research is Action Research (Soto, 2021), done by the author through the orientation and support in the creation of the student’s projects in two universities – ISIA and Unixhidza- from 2017, to date.