The Asen-timientos: Pluricultural spaces for the study of a new ethnic territoriality in Sonora, Mexico

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical-methodological proposal that refers to the ethnographic study of the places where indigenous migrants have settled in areas of sun seekers and beach tourism, and of export crops in Sonora, Mexico. For more than 25 years, Nahua, Triqui and Zapotec families arriving from the southeast of our country and settling in Sonora (Puerto Peñasco and Estación Pesqueira), have established labor, interethnic and spatial appropriation relations in these places; processes that allow us to speak of a new ethnic territoriality in the State of Sonora, Mexico. Through in-depth interviews, tours, participatory observation and various field visits between 2008 and 2015, it was possible to investigate the process of appropriation of the geographical space in which migrants and families, now calling themselves "radicantes" or "gente del sur" (residents or people of the south), establish new asentimientos, hereafter called settlements. A grammatical contraction or "crasis" is used to refer to these appropriate spaces; in such a way that, instead of calling them settlements, they are referred to as Asentimientos. The settlements are then a new spatial and territorial ethnic phenomenon that links the geographic space with emotivity, thus constructing what some authors call socio-territorial attachment or ethnic multi-territoriality.