Paper short abstract:

Indigenous food sovereignty movements have achieved political change in Guatemala at the level of the nation-state. The paper focuses on more-than-human agency as implicit to the movement.

Paper long abstract:

Beyond just Maya or Indigenous movements in the Indigenous land of Iximulew, more-than-human Indigenous perspectives have entered the mainstream political discourse of Guatemala, the nation-state. This article orients the 2024 political change in Guatemala as rooted in Indigenous, grassroots, more-than-human social movements that demand restorative justice in their processes of rematriation that are fundamentally political as they decolonize from global structural systems of inequality. Pairing Lorena Cabnal’s decolonial feminismo comunitário (literal translation ‘communitarian feminism’), a decolonial feminist theoretical frame from Iximulew, with mobilizations of Indigenous ‘defensa del territorio’ struggles around Guatemala, I argue that more-than-human networks are the foundation and shared ground for Guatemala’s ‘new spring’, germinating within the election of the Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) political party. Linking Indigenous theory with the material and communal lifeways of buen vivir, practiced campesin@-a-campesin@ (Holt-Giménez 2006), I take a transect of the Indigenous food sovereignty movement to show how rematriation processes of Indigenous Pueblos such as the Maya Ixil resist neoliberal interests commodifying and selling their ancestral lands and their life systems while at the same time creating the same networks and knowledge systems that have become a fertile ground for seeding larger political and social change. The democratic election of Arévalo and the Movimiento Semilla brings together Maya cosmologies with land reform in a politics of restorative justice that shows how a diversity of actors have been able to mobilize agencies of the living economy to self-organize and self-actualize the material processes and platforms needed to decolonize and confront oppressive power structures in the performance of feminismo comunitario’s shared goal of equality.