Territorio-tierra: A community feminist perspective on land by Indigenous Xinka women from Guatemala

Dear Maudy and Gilberta, thanks for joining us for this interview. We are excited to learn about land and food from an Indigenous community feminist perspective. Can you first give us some background on the association of AMISMAXAJ?

Hello Charlotta and Sarah, it’s a pleasure to meet you and converse with you. The women’s association AMISMAXAJ was founded in 2004 by Xinka women from eight different communities in the mountains of Santa María Xalapán in Jalapa, the eastern part of Guatemala. None of the women were academics, but they started analyzing their own experiences as rural, Indigenous, impoverished women, who experienced a lot of violence and were subject to many systems of oppression. Gender-based violence was normal and women’s participation in community politics was not desired. It was an absolute taboo in the communities to talk about the physical, psychological, and emotional violence women suffered. They did not even know where to go to denounce these violent experiences or to ask for support. That was when they decided to organize themselves to learn how to defend their rights and those of other women and to become aware of the systems of oppression in which they lived. At first, they met secretly, under the pretext of doing handicrafts, while using the space to organize politically. As a second step, they began to learn about humanity’s relationship with the earth, with nature, the land, and how their territory is connected to their bodies. At that time, they also became aware of the extractive companies and mining projects in the region. Since then, AMISMAXAJ has been dedicated to transforming the living conditions of the women that live in the region, to defend the Indigenous land against transnational companies, and to fight for a good life for everybody.

Thank you Gilberta, for this short synapsis of the association’s foundation. We are especially interested in your perspective on, and relationship with, land. What does land mean to you and how do you relate to it?

As Xinka communities we live on the land of our ancestors in the mountains of Santa Maria Xalapán. For the majority of the Indigenous families, the land on which they live is also their means of subsistence, they use it for living, reproducing, and working. Many of the families sustain themselves with the food they grow on their milpa² or from the sale of agricultural products. Then, land, or as we say the “territorio” (territory) (for further discussion of the meaning of the “territorio” see Sippel, 2023), which goes beyond land, also means community for us. As a vital space for the coexistence of humans and nonhuman beings like animals, plants, and the cosmos, the land is at the center of the Xinka cosmovision of our ancestors. Therefore, the territory is a spiritual place. It represents knowledge, wisdom, and culture. As Indigenous women we practice a spiritual exchange with our ancestors or the “spirits” of Mother Earth on our land. Finally, the territory is an important historical place, where the memory of our ancestors lives on. And, of course, there is the emotional dimension, the feeling of connection. Personally, I feel connected to the Xinka territory, not only to Santa Maria Xalapán but to the whole region. I am proud of the land where I live with my family, where we eat, where we live with the animals, and with which I feel so close.

This emotional and spiritual dimension of land is very different from the Western understandings of land, where land is mostly seen as a resource for exploitation, as a commodity that can be bought and sold, or as an asset to speculate on. Can you further explain the specific place that land holds within the Xinka spirituality and cosmovision?

In our cosmovision, we as Xinka women explicitly distinguish ourselves from a Western worldview characterized by rationality, belief in progress, and a linear understanding of time. The Xinka cosmovision is based on the pillars of complementarity, reciprocity, respect, connection to the ancestors, belonging to the cosmos, and harmony with Mother Earth. In the Xinka cosmovision, humans are part of the cosmos, and everything in the universe is interconnected and interdependent. Nature can live without us—we are the ones who need nature. For this reason, harmony, balance, and respect between humans, nature, animals, and spirits are very important to us. Without Mother Earth, we as humans cannot exist, because we receive everything from Mother Earth, we need to live from Mother Earth. Our cosmovision also influences our activities as individuals and as an organization. For example, we greet the water before taking a bath in the river, and we reject the exploitation of the land and natural resources beyond our own needs. Our goal is to protect the land according to our cosmovision.

Territory means life for us. It means to put the life in the center. Our territory is where we were born and where we grew up. The territory protects us, it nourishes us, it is our energy, and it strengthens us when we are sad as well as when we are happy. We want to live in harmony in our territory, but unfortunately there are extractive projects that threaten the life of the land, the lives of many people, and the biodiversity that exists in the territory. When we celebrate ceremonies with the Xinka altar (see Figure 1), we thank Mother Earth for giving us life. These ceremonies give us the strength to continue fighting and defending our land against the neoliberal invasion and extractivism.

The Xinka altar looks very beautiful and colorful. Do these different colors have a specific meaning within the Xinka cosmovision?

In our cosmovision, we have five colors and each color has its own meaning, which is represented by the candles in the Xinka altar. The yellow candle stands for the sunrise and the seeds. Yellow also represents childhood and youth, the birth of life, and the yellow corn. We have the color black, which has to do with resting and night, with the wisdom of grandfathers and grandmothers, with spirituality, and with our ancestors. Then there is the green candle, the color of nature. We realize that nature is part of our life, and we have to protect our territory, because we belong to it, it gives us life, food, and water. Red represents women, since women are the ones who are invisible on a social level, although humanity would not exist without women. Red is also the color of blood, of murdered women, and the menstrual blood; therefore, red also represents the defense of our bodies as women. Finally, the white candle represents humanity and the equilibrium between the different energies represented by the other four candles.

The Xinka cosmovision does not only point to the exploitation of the land or the territory, but it also refers to the violence against your own bodies, which is equally rooted in the same capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial system. Can you explain this close connection between territory and body?

For us women of AMISMAXAJ, the territory earth is connected to our own body. Our body is like our first territory, which—just as the land—we need to defend against exploitation by capitalism and patriarchy. We are convinced that it is not possible to speak or think separately about the body and the land, because there is a connection between the two. Let me give you a simple example: consuming food that has been treated with pesticides harms one’s own body, just as pesticides harm the land and Mother Earth. If the land is healthy, also our bodies will be healthy.

Conquest of land was a main goal during colonialism, as a result of which millions of people were dispossessed of their land. Have you been involved in land rights struggles in order to reclaim the land, and how did you manage to get access to the land you currently have?

I have heard from our grandparents that they fought for the land and that only small plots were given to each family. The families worked hard to get access to the land, they were not compensated for the expulsions but had to buy the land of their own ancestors. And even then, they only gave land to men, not women. That’s why many women don’t have land in their own name. Patriarchy has always prevailed in the communities. There is still this idea that women will get married and they don’t need the land. But a man apparently needs the land. Today, we are still in the process of defending and fighting to get the land back for the common use of the Xinka communities.

There is almost no communal land left that belongs to the Xinka communities. The land was appropriated by the colonizers and descendants of the Spanish and is now owned by landlords who live in the big cities. These people have a lot of political and economic power in the country. They claim to have official property titles and deeds, which is very difficult for us because the Indigenous communities have never used this system of private ownership of their land, rather all the land was communal. But every time, there are more and more people claiming to own the land. And every time more and more supposedly official titles appear. There is a huge conflict over the land, and there have even been deaths. Today, most Xinka families have a small piece of land on which the families cultivate their own milpa. However, these plots of land are very small and, in most cases, have been bought back by the families.

As you just said, historically the Xinka communities did not have land property titles, but that the notion of private property was a concept which came from the West. Can you explain why you as Indigenous communities reject the property logic?

We reject private property because we believe that the land has no owner. It belongs to the people who take care of it, who sow it, who cultivate it for their own sustenance, for sustaining their lives. But unfortunately, these Western practices of treating land as property have arrived. They put up fences so that nobody enters, or only with the permission of the owner, they have created a lot of paperwork to possess the land. But we believe that the land is free, it cannot be privatized because we are a part of it—we can’t own the territory because we belong to it.

What do the big landowners use the land for and how is it cultivated?

Most of them use the land for their businesses, their commercial and private crops. They have their coffee and tomato farms. However, the tomato is a crop that needs a lot of chemicals. This is worrying because large areas of land are cultivated, and this land becomes very contaminated. We only sow in the same place for two years, and then the land has to be left to rest so that it can recover all that it has lost, its minerals, its nutrients. But the large producers don’t take care of this, they only want their profit. There is also the sowing of ejote (green beans), another product that is grown on a large scale and that requires a lot of work, which is very tiring and which is done by people from the Xinka communities. It’s cheap labor, people suffer a lot of exploitation, especially women and children come to these places to work. This work is very hard and very poorly paid. And the workers do not receive the necessary equipment, so they are exposed to chemicals directly on their skin and run the risk of getting sick. The big landowners produce a lot of things, but they don’t take care of the people who work there, nor of the environment.

And this is exactly what we do in our work with AMISMAXAJ. We identify the roots of the exploitation of the land and of us as women in this capitalistic and dehumanizing system. We try to connect the land with our own bodies. Women have historically been subjected to many systems of oppression, just like the land. There are many consequences of colonization: Women’s bodies have been appropriated, they have been subjected to the care work at home and have been denied being political and intellectual subjects, of having the same rights as men. And we see the same happening with the land, that is, exploitation and submission. But after all this, the land speaks to us through natural disasters, there are floods, hurricanes, extreme droughts, the land sends us signals that we are not treating it well. It’s the voice of nature telling us that it can’t take much more pollution.

What activities does AMISMAXAJ organize in relation to Indigenous land and food?

In line with the Xinka cosmovision, the women of AMISMAXAJ advocate for collective land practices in the form of communal milpas or huertos familiares mixtos (communal family gardens—see Figure 2). We felt it was necessary to create our own gardens so that ancestral practices of cultivating would not get lost. We have been developing collective gardens in each community. We plant the gardens together, take care of them collectively, and, if necessary, in times of drought we water and harvest the gardens together. The fruits of the work are then shared equally. If there are people who have not participated in the work and want to buy the vegetables, we sell to them at an affordable price so that they do not have to go to the market in town. The goods from the gardens can also be exchanged. For example, if one community grows radishes, and another one grows onions, we exchange products so that we don’t have to buy them. In this way, we get a little bit of everything. The collective gardens have been a step toward increasing the food sovereignty of the communities, and a way of confronting the capitalist and consumerist systems by growing our own healthy food for better family nutrition.

Instead of producing monocultures, AMISMAXAJ promotes crop diversification to maintain the soil’s fertility and increase food security. In our milpa, maize is one of the staple foods that has a long history and, in its meaning, it is very powerful for us. Along with beans, maize is our daily food. Our grandparents used the milpa system, which means growing a variety of products together, such as maize, beans, cassava, tomatoes, herbs, chard, and lettuce. The milpa has a long tradition, it has been used for a long time and it is still maintained by many families in the region, who cultivate the milpa in the traditional way, growing a variety of vegetables on their land. For example, when the coffee plant is still small, they use the spaces in between the small plants to grow maize, beans, and pumpkins for their own family consumption. And it’s very nice because when you go to the field, you don’t just go for one product, you can harvest many vegetables and fruits. What is more, all the fertilizer we use is organic. This is particularly important because our communities increasingly struggle with soil erosion and desiccation as a result of climate change, as well as with soil contamination from the mining projects in the region.

My grandparents didn’t eat anything chemical, they had everything in their gardens. And everything they had in their family gardens was organic. My grandmother says that in the old days you just put the seed in the ground and it didn’t take much work for it to bear fruit. But now we have to take a lot of care and nurture the plants because the soil is not as fertile anymore. My grandmother grew a wide variety of crops in her milpa, including maize, beans, pumpkins, yucca, coffee, avocadoes, pineapples, cardamom, and herbs.

Cultivating the milpa and living in harmony with the land and Mother Earth represent important parts of your cultural practices as Xinka. What other practices do you try to revive and revitalize as part of your Xinka identity?

Living in harmony with Mother Earth is indeed a pillar of our cosmovision as Xinka. In addition to vegetables, we also grow medicinal plants in the milpas and the huertos familiares mixtos. The use of medicinal or healing plants is an important part of the Xinka cultural heritage, as well as being part of our traditional foods. In order to share our knowledge of medicinal plants with other women, we organize medicinal plant seminars (see Figure 3). In the seminars, we explain the collection or cultivation of medicinal plants, the effects and uses of the plants, and how to make natural tinctures, ointments, and oils out of them. We are still learning how to use the medicinal plants from our grandmothers. Among the most common medicinal plants are basil, rue, and mint. Our elders used them to make tea to ease stomach pain. There are different ways of using them. When they are fresh, we use them to make tea, but we also dry them to then make ointments or capsules.

My mother told me, that when I was crying as a baby, she would get plantain and about seven other little plants, she would cook them, crush them, and put them in a handkerchief. The handkerchief was then used as a pacifier, it calms babies. And there are many more medicinal plants that can be used in a variety of ways. Rosemary is one of those plants that is not only used for medicinal purposes but also for hair and skin products. When our grandparents were sick, they never went to a pharmacy to buy chemical medicine, they only used natural plants as medicine. We don’t know much about all these things anymore today. Sometimes, we have the plants at home as ornaments and we don’t even know what medicinal effect they have. That is why we are trying to recover all this traditional knowledge and see this as a part of our lucha.³ When we see that some families now have their own family gardens with food and medicinal plants, we are proud of our work because we have been able to increase awareness around these important topics.

In addition to recovering knowledge about medicinal plants, you also promote and teach about traditional foods. Can you tell us more about your activities surrounding traditional foods?

Just like medicinal plants, the traditional dishes are important for us as Xinka. We organize gastronomic festivals so that we don’t lose our culinary customs but remember traditional foods and relearn how to cook them (see Figure 4). The traditional dishes that are still cooked in almost every family are tamales, frijoles, and corn tortillas. By cooking with our homegrown food from the milpas and eating together at the gastronomic festivals, we want to make more traditional dishes become known again and tasty to the young people.

One of the traditional dishes is called pinol, it is very old. This dish is based on corn. The corn has to be cooked twice. After cooking it in water, you have to dry it a little so that it contains no water anymore. Then you brown it, after browning you grind it, and after grinding you start to dilute it in water so that it comes out like coffee, and you add seeds, pepper, garlic, onion, and coriander. Our grandparents used to make it with rabbit, but today there are not many rabbits anymore, and if you see them, it’s not easy to catch them, so the rabbit has been replaced with chicken.

An example of a traditional drink that is still consumed today is Chocolate, which is a corn-based drink. It is not consumed with processed sugar, but with sugar cane, which is made locally and grown in the traditional way—not like the sugar cane monocultures that are planted large scale and with a lot of chemicals. In some of our communities, they produce it naturally and we use it to gain strength, because it gives a lot of energy.

You mentioned earlier that you have been struggling for many years to protect Indigenous land rights and forms of land management beyond Western understandings of property. What could activists in the Global North learn from your struggles? Do you have some advice for them if they want to challenge the current land property regimes in the Global North and establish land relationships that are not based on notions of private property?

I think in the Global North you have a very individualized view of land. You seem to see land as a commodity, as well as everything that lives on it, right? For us, land is not a commodity, it is life. Historically, the land and our nature were defended by our ancestors. We are the guardians of the water, of the rivers, and of the forests. As Indigenous people in Guatemala we have a lot of connection with our land, the nature, and the whole cosmos. In the Global North, you would have to learn about our perspectives in Central America, our ways of living, so that you can start understanding the strong connection that we have with the land, and especially the connection that we as Indigenous women have with nature and our territory.

Thank you very much for sharing your perspectives with us. Your passion and commitment to the fight for the rights of the Indigenous Xinka communities is both moving and inspiring.

Many thanks from me as well. I hope we can contribute to creating a greater understanding and awareness of the concerns of Indigenous people regarding their ancestral land.