In this paper, we will share what we are learning in coalition with an Indigenous peasant network for the transformation of land conflicts arising in a multifaith context. Through participatory action research rooted in relation as method, we explore the terrain of common freedom amidst the inherited constraints of colonialism, capitalism, and the modern state. Informed by political ecological analysis and fieldwork in Maya ancestral territory, we touch the grief that called our coalition together and consider how that grief—and the love that moves it—draws us into improbable dialogues and towards new horizons of belonging and ways of inhabiting the land.
Based in southern Mexico and spanning seven years of co-labor, our Indigenous partners invite us to surrender our perceptions of pure neutrality and to acknowledge our entanglement in ecological, political, and economic systems that condition our lives and our freedom. Grounded in Maya and Mennonite theological traditions, our partnership is centered on a shared politics of solidarity and care as the seedbed of multispecies and multiparty negotiations. From this position, we work together to elicit and map pathways through territorial conflicts towards mutual gains that forestall and mitigate protofascist ideologies.
Our work flows from liberation theological streams that nourish our Mennonite theological traditions. We are formed by study and thought about bodies, land, and race alongside scholars including Drs. Willie Jennings, Mari Jørstad, and Philippe Descola. We tend the soil of intersectional political theory in the clearing where the Combahee River Collective and theorist Olúfémi Táíwò have also gathered. We speak here in conversation with the Zapatistas and with queer Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa as we advance structural and cultural interventions that compost extractive and exploitative patterns of relation, including those undergirded by the Doctrine of Discovery. In this dialogical process, we propose and contribute as practitioner-scholars to the development of antiviolent (or abolitionist) political theologies and to ecological conflict transformation.
In this effort, we give an account of our ongoing partnership with the network of Maya seed guardians to safeguard Indigenous self-determination and tend the conditions for collective freedom. This invitation came out of their grief over deforestation and aquifer depletion at the hands of European Mennonite colonists who have migrated to Maya ancestral territory over the past 40 years. While the Maya network sees these ecosystem damages as existential threats—causing losses to biodiversity, feeding Indigenous youth migration, and harming the health of those who remain—they do not want to treat their new neighbors as enemies. Rather, they seek a future where both Maya and Mennonite communities learn to share life in the land by sharing responsibility for the wellbeing of all the beings who make homes in that place. They invite us to ask how we might conceive of freedom beyond individual interests or antagonistic positions—how we might practice the freedom found through the process of collective self-determination.
Grief, then, becomes our common native language. This herida abierta—which Anzaldúa also invites us to touch and name to one another—is the site from which our shared life flows. We expand this feeling and allow Anzaldúa’s image to take root in the tender act of grafting trees, a practice maintained by members of the Maya network. If the site of our wound became the place of our joining, what good fruit might we bear?
In this spirit, we meet with members of Maya and Mennonite communities in their homes and fields, at kitchen tables, sanctuaries, ancestral grounds, and other sacred sites. We listen and reflect their interests, values, and concerns. Over the course of our time together, we think and feel (sentipensar) our way together. What might it mean to share one land? If we were willing, how might this sharing transform us? How can we be free together?
The research we share in this paper is a process with and for our partners in Maya ancestral territory. It is informed by methodologies of participatory action research articulated by Torres and Fine, as well as methodologies of sacred relation. We know of what Shawn Price speaks when he asserts that Research Is Ceremony.
So we share this research with you as outsiders speaking with other outsiders. We offer political ecological context for the formation of both Mennonite and Maya communities and locate ourselves in relation to them. We share some of the provisional findings from our interviews with more than 70 individuals, council and congregational meetings, participatory mapping workshops, and ritual spaces both sacred and ordinary. We close by sharing the invitation we have received: to tend the common freedom we find through collective self-determination, and to participate in our own transformation through the stewardship of conflict and grief.
This paper draws on extensive fieldwork with Maya and Mennonites navigating land conflict in southern Mexico in order to map possible paths towards common freedom understood as collective self-determination. Over the past 40 years, European Mennonites have begun settling in Maya ancestral territory and have brought with them industrial agricultural practices which deplete the local ecosystem. Their large families have fed a sharp expansion in this industry while their religious and economic systems remain resistant to innovation. Nonetheless, a Maya peasant network resists animosity with their new, insular neighbors and has invited us to accompany them as they seek paths toward sharing in the land. We offer this report on these Indigenous-led processes for transformative justice and share political and theological insights we are gleaning over seven years of collaboration.