Emotional Management Strategies and Care for Women Defenders of the Territory in Jalisco

The struggles of several women defending their territories and lives are marked by family tensions and reactions to the overload of care tasks and community rules according to their socially established roles. In this qualitative research, we analyze and discuss the cases of three women’s collectives from different suburban and rural communities in Jalisco. Information recollected through the new ethnography approach over six years was coded and analyzed with the Atlas ti program. Results: Women’s defense of their land involvement, organizing, and social mobilization actions move to an overload of care and raise adverse reactions in their community and families in response to what is seen as a transgression of women’s roles. This increases dominant demobilization emotions: fear, sadness, loneliness, guilt, and shame. Through emotional management strategies linked with alternative forms of appropriation of space, starting with their bodies and sharing emotions and actions with their companions, the women in these collectives produced emotions of resistance: pride, hope, friendship, and anger, which led to reconfiguring their identities, family relationships, and roles within other place domains: bodies, family, and community. Conclusions: Women defenders, as principal carers of life, have produced and inherited a set of strategies that configure a growing “politics of the ordinary. “These strategies, through emotional management, subvert dominant emotions, feelings, and acting rules, gradually questioning and reinventing their roles and human and nonhuman relations in their most immediate contexts.