Dispatches from Resistant Mexico is a series of short documentaries from southern Mexico, each depicting one of the thousands of pockets of resistance throughout Latin America that are in struggle against what the Zapatistas call “the capitalist hydra”.

These individuals and communities affirm a way life in opposition to capitalist economics and values. They fight the devastating neoliberal “development” and “mega-projects” that loot resources and land from indigenous communities and threaten forms of life that have survived despite 500 years of colonization.

The resistance shares many of the principles and goals of the Zapatistas: autonomy from the capitalist economy, communalist self-government rooted in indigenous collective traditions, an end to the subordination of women and a respectful, life-affirming, non-dominating relation to nature. Indigenous women are at the forefront of many of these ongoing struggles.

Cooking Against Capitalism: Oaxaca’s Traditional Kitchens — the third dispatch of the series — follows activists from the Indigenous Popular Assembly in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, who collaborate with the town to rebuild the ovens and kitchens where women bake the essential staples of the daily diet. Architects from Mexico City assist in recovering traditional construction methods that are better suited to the needs of the cooks, and less dependent on the capitalist market.

Dispatches from resistant Mexico

1. Think from the Heart: the National Indigenous Congress in Mexico
2. Defending Land, Ocean and Air
3. Cooking Against Capitalism: Oaxaca’s Traditional Kitchens
4. Resistance, Autonomy and Women’s Rights in Chiapas
5. All of This, We Have to Defend
6. The Women of Candelaria
7. Maya Train: Eye of the Storm
8. Marcela’s Story: Planting Autonomy, Resisting Patriarchy