Building Livable Worlds Through Agricultural and Land-Based Resistance
By Regina Baeza Martinez
Sociology
Simon Fraser University, MA
Unceded Lands of the Squamish People
Abstract
Indigenous Mayans -- who make up approximately sixty percent of the Guatemalan population -- have resisted centuries of dispossession, from the colonial era to contemporary times. During the thirty-six-year Guatemalan civil war which began in 1960, Mayan militias were targeted under genocidal scorched earth policies that decimated entire communities. Land grabbing for resource extraction has intensified since the signing of the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accords, which simultaneously signaled the end of the Guatemalan civil war and ushered in neoliberal policies. Neoliberal policies most negatively impact Mayan communities, who were left landless and in profound poverty in the aftermath of the civil war. It is in this context -- wherein the genocidal state transitions into neoliberalism -- that I ask, how do Mayans in Guatemala resist state-imposed neoliberalism in ways that recenter their belief systems and community needs? This critical literature review explores how food sovereignty (Copeland, 2019) and Mayan relations to land, including the concepts of the commons (Grandia, 2012) and Buen Vivir (Einbinder & Morales, 2020), are modes of resistance against dominant state-imposed political and economic processes. Through thematic analysis of existing literature, I emphasize that contemporary resistance to neoliberalism is a continuation of a long history of survival made possible by the vitality and creativity of Mayan agency and resistance. Mayan resistance disputes paternalistic accounts of Mayans as mere victims of colonialism and provides an alternative perspective that recognizes the political value of Mayan land-based and agricultural organizing.
Key Words: Indigenous Maya; Guatemala; neoliberalism; agricultural resistance; land politics.