Indigenous women often fall through the cracks of social justice movements. Middle-class feminists seldom attend to problems that rural indigenous women experience, while indigenous movements often emphasize tradition and unity in ways that make it difficult for indigenous women to address gender inequalities. Multiple Injustices elaborates on these tensions in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia, and it demonstrates how indigenous women respond to and challenge these limits by engaging the politics of representation. By examining feminism from indigenous perspectives, and indigenous movements from women's perspectives, Hernández Castillo presents both women's rights and social movements as diverse rather than homogenous.

Hernández Castillo's decades-long experience as a scholar-activist permeates both narrative and analysis in this book. The first two chapters provide an overview of activist research and the rise of indigenous movements in Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia. In addition to outlining important developments in anthropology and indigenous movements, these chapters also relate how and why Hernández Castillo became professionally and personally committed to cultivating horizontal rather than vertical ties with the indigenous women whom she studies. Chapter 1 explains the development and methods of activist research. Hernández Castillo asserts that collaborative research not only does a better job of helping indigenous women achieve their goals, but it also helps anthropologists to move beyond Western-centered analysis. Chapter 2 explores how indigenous women's politicization was shaped by the contexts in which they found themselves. Struggles with the state, leftist politics, feminism, and Liberation Theology all influenced indigenous women's emerging activism, but in different ways in each of the countries studied.

Each subsequent chapter explores a particular problem or development regarding indigenous women's relationships to law and rights. Hernández Castillo does a particularly fine job of building complex, sensitive analyses of how the forces of race, class, and gender intersect in indigenous women's lives and activism. One sees this in Chapter 3 with her carefully balanced discussions of communitarian justice, where she avoids the pitfalls of identifying indigenous customary laws as either fully harmonious or simply patriarchal. Instead, she shows how indigenous communitarian justice sometimes benefits men at women's expense, while at other times it benefits the whole community. Indigenous women's responses to communitarianism have been complex: some women challenge harmful practices such as forced marriage, while others prioritize community defense over gender equality.

Indigenous women's agency remains in focus throughout the book. Examples can be found in Chapter 4, which follows the stories of Inés Fernández Ortega and Valentina Rosenda Cantú. These two indigenous women were raped by soldiers and brought their cases to international courts of justice when the Mexican court system failed them. This chapter explores the interconnections of gender violence and racism, and it shows how their experiences led both women to denounce sexual violence in national and international venues. The overlapping themes of gender, violence, and racism are continued in Chapter 5, which examines how the expanding penal system in Mexico has affected indigenous women. Racism, rushed trials, and poverty have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to being imprisoned for minor (often drug-related) infractions. Hernández Castillo helped to establish a “Life Histories” workshop in which incarcerated women not only found therapeutic relief by writing their life stories, but through which they also developed a commitment to denouncing racism and patriarchal violence.

Hernández Castillo could occasionally do a better job of providing sufficient context for the specific problems she explores. For example, in chapter 5 she does not clearly explain the process by which the Mexican government criminalized social movements. The book is also more centered on Mexico—specifically southern Mexico—than the title or introduction suggests. These, however, are minor limitations of a very good study. Multiple Injustices offers an astute analysis of the diverse ways in which indigenous women have worked to advance their own needs and those of their communities. This book is an important read for scholars (and graduate students) interested in Mexican politics, indigenous movements, and Latin American feminisms.