Regenerating Maya-Mam ways of governing, Indigenous emancipatory politics in the age of the extractive imperative

Abstract

The literature on the recent exponential growth of the extractive industry in Latin America and beyond has documented the various processes through which this sector has been empowered to expand its frontier, as well as the strategies that affected communities employ to resist it. However, in this article we instead focus on how some Maya-Mam residents of San Miguel Ixtahuacán understood and addressed the divisive effects of the Marlin Mine, which operated between 2005 and 2017 and was Guatemala's largest open-pit mine. Drawing on ethnographic and oral history research, we uncover the resilience of Maya-Mam ways of thinking and engaging with politics, in addition to the challenges they faced in their endeavors. As we will see, in the face of Guatemala's deeply engrained “culture of corruption,” the tactic of appealing to others’ conciencia (critical awareness and moral integrity) rather than offering monetary rewards to garner political support proved to be too ambitious.