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What is Maya, What Is To Be Maya?
The word Maya is like the seed of maize falling on fertile soil or some stony place, full of thorns, where some hungry birds lurk, desperately looking for a light breakfast in the morning. The seed that falls on fertile soil is what some call pre-Hispanic, Mayanists classify it as a so-called preclassic, classical, or…
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Independence
FROM THE EDITORS: The Mexican state celebrated the country’s bicentennial independence with a strange mix of a military parade and pre-Hispanic mischaracterizations of indigenous peoples. The day of independence in many countries has in fact become to represent forced assimilations and territorial theft in the creation of these “new republics,” in the name of nationalist…
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Traditional Zapotec Homes to Rise and Resist
SOURCE: This essay has been translated in collaboration with the Tzam: Trece Semillas Zapatistas project, with permission from the author. Tzam is a long-term project that seeks to feature the work of 130 collaborators during 13 months between May 2021 to May 2022, based on 13 Zapatista demands for justice (13 is a sacred number…
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Mexico: 500 Years of Dispossession
FROM THE EDITORS: To understand the reality of Mexico we must first understand that the Mexican State was created as a colonialist, racist, patriarchal governmental body of control. The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) may be shaded leftist, but the developmentalist megaprojects, political persecutions, and murders continue. We see, for example, the struggle…
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Truth Commissions, Lessons Learned from Initiatives in Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced in June the Federal Indian Boarding School Truth Initiative at the Department of the Interior to investigate human rights violations at these institutions. According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is also expected this summer to reintroduce legislation in Congress…
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The Neocolonial Mayan Train
Marxist theory is built upon a critique of the accumulation of capital in the hands of the bourgeoisie, through the exploitation of workers, for which Karl Marx visualizes a solution of redistribution of capital, now in the hands of the socialist state, with the support of the proletariat. However, within the “worker exploitation” concept and…
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Language Is Not Culture
For many indigenous peoples, land is a specific physical entity, but the notion of territory includes life associated with that land and the cultural manifestations linked to that physical entity, the sense of belonging and the way in which we relate to it. Territory, it has been said emphatically many times, is not just land.…
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The Right to Voluntary Self-Isolation
Voluntary self-isolation has been practiced for millennia by uncontacted peoples, so as not to be victims of the devastating consequences of Western civilization and progress. Several intergovernmental organizations have recognized this legal right and survival strategy of peoples to protect their land and territory, as a way of protecting themselves against genocide, colonization, and the…