Community, dispossession, and ethnic rearticulation in Mexico and Guatemala

Abstract

ABSTRACT When neolberalism turned onto extractivism in Latin America, Indigenous populations suffered anonslaught against their territories. In general, resistance mobilization has emerged from community government institutions updated by indigenous peoples who areaware of their rights, and communities are transforming in this process of political action. I propose understand indigenous subjects to be historically active political subjects, and the ‘indigenous community’ as an ethnic construction. Mexico and Guatemala represent an ideal space to study these dynamics, for indigenous communities have characterized much of the social and political behavior of indigenous peoples in these countries, and are now the ones rising up to defend themselves from the dispossession of their territories and ways of life in both countries.