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Primitive accumulation in indigenous Mexico

Ana Julia Cabrera Pacheco

To cite this article: Ana Julia Cabrera Pacheco (2017) Primitive accumulation in indigenous Mexico, City, 21:3-4, 503-519, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2017.1335476

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1335476

Published online: 15 Jun 2017.

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Primitive accumulation in indigenous Mexico The contested transformations of the Maya solar of Yucatán

Ana Julia Cabrera Pacheco

This paper analyses the transformation of the Maya solar in relation to the contested Marxian theory of primitive accumulation. The Maya of Yucatán are part of the Maya indigenous populations of south-east Mexico and Central America. Their solar, a house and garden plot that has historically supported an intricate indigenous system of land, live- lihoods and identities, is today under threat along with the way of life it once sustained. The paper argues that a spatial – temporal reworking of primitive accumulation that draws on both a decoloniality perspective and critical geography can help us better under- stand both the historical and contemporary significance of the solar’s plight. Using this theoretical framework, the paper shows how the solar has in fact been historically con- structed through different cycles of enclosure, dispossession and resistance in Mexico. The Spanish colonial period (1542 – 1821) enforced its ‘rationalisation’ in ways that dis- rupted space and time of native populations; the hacienda period, before and after inde- pendence (1821), constrained the solar within the accumulation of Maya land and labour by oligarchic powers; the post-revolution (1910) period saw its strengthening alongside land (re)distribution policies that were nevertheless bound up in forms of primi- tive accumulation; and most recently, the neo-liberal turn under the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) has directly undermined it through politically imposed processes of marketisation and commodification at every scale. Through this same historical lens, the paper also shows how Maya populations in Yucatán have been able to, following Bayat (2000. ‘From “Dangerous Classes” to “Quiet Rebels”: Politics of the Urban Subal- tern in the Global South.’ International Sociology 15 (3): 533 – 557), ‘quietly’ resist primi- tive accumulation by re-encroaching on their solares and reconstituting forms of commons to support their way of life. In this perspective, the same dialectic of dispossession and re- creation of commons can be detected amidst the extensive and ongoing commodification of Maya land, livelihoods and identities taking place under neo-liberal globalisation pro- cesses today.

Key words: : Maya solar, Yucatán, primitive accumulation, decoloniality, quiet resistance

# 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CITY, 2017 VOL. 21, NOS. 3 – 4, 503 – 519, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1335476

Introduction

P atricia lives with her husband and two children on her part of the family solar1 in Espita, a small urban settle-

ment in the state of Yucatán in south-east Mexico. The solar is a plot of land inhabited by Maya families like Patricia’s with a tra- ditional Maya house, a wattle-and-daub building with palm roof, as the hub of a wider configuration of reproductive spaces including a kitchen, orchard and henhouse (see Estrada Lugo, Bello Baltazar, and Se- rralta Peraza 1998; Chico Ponce de León 1995). Nowadays, however, the specific way of life that Patricia’s solar once sustained, as part of a complex system of land, livelihoods and identities, is slowly dying. A major factor is the enforced sub-division of solares as a condition for certain government subsidies, such as sanitation programmes, leaving much smaller plots that support far fewer crops and poultry. As Patricia explained to me,

‘ . . . when my father gave me a section of the solar for me to build my own house, he was not left with much. It is better when one has space in the solar because one can grow herbs and vegetables and save money’. (Interview: Patricia, 11 March 2015)

Before its division, the family solar was a large plot measuring 925 square metres with common spaces shared with her extended family in the traditional Maya way. Patricia’s ability to grow food has been further hit by government policies encouraging the homogen- isation of crop production and herbicide use in the surrounding communal fields that are also being subject to privatisation pressures. She even struggles to fix the traditional palm roof of her house as the Guano palms previously grown in solares are fast disap- pearing, partly due to their exploitation by the region’s ‘touristification’ of Maya culture.

My encounter with Patricia’s family took place in March 2015 during fieldwork explor- ing the transformations of land, livelihoods

and identities of the Maya within urbanising spaces of Yucatán. Far from an isolated story, this vignette is emblematic of a wider social trend in Yucatán and other Mexican states. Currently, the Maya solar, a key site of indigenous Mexico, is facing gradual extinction through processes synonymous with the Marxist concept of ‘primitive accumulation’. In Marx’s original formu- lation, primitive accumulation captured the transformation of existing social relations to land—in his case, peasant communities sub- sisting under feudal modes of production— into capitalist social relations through the gradual enclosure of land and proletarianisa- tion of its occupiers (Marx [1867] 1990). This paper shows how primitive accumu- lation is transforming the Maya solar of Yucatán in the form of state-imposed neo- liberal policies specifically enacted through the 1994 North American Free Trade Agree- ment (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada and Mexico. NAFTA has subjected the Maya’s land-based livelihood systems to unprecedented capitalist logics through three key mechanisms: reforms driving the spread of private property relations through previously communal lands; temporary state subsidies supposedly to ‘protect’ farmers as they transition into NAFTA’s economic free trade zone that subvert indigenous agri- culture; and various initiatives, such as disas- ter-based programmes and tourism initiatives that are commodifying, modernising and urbanising the solar and its traditional housing. The significance of these processes lies in their assault on the solar’s pivotal his- torical role in supporting the Maya’s sustain- able and resilient self-subsistence mode of production and land use forged over nearly 2000 years in Yucatán’s harsh physical environment (Garcı́a de Miguel 2000).

However, the paper also argues that primi- tive accumulation within the solar is neither new nor definitive for the Maya of Yucatán. Influenced by both critical geography and decoloniality perspectives, an alternative reading of both primitive accumulation and the historical struggles of the Yucatán Maya

504 CITY VOL. 21, NOS. 3 – 4

is presented that shows how this contempor- ary top-down, state-led commodification of the solar is connected over time and space to cycles of resource plundering, disposses- sion and resistance underway in Latin America since at least the colonial invasions of the 16th century. The paper uses this theoretical framework to show how the Maya solar has in fact been historically con- structed through different cycles of enclo- sure, dispossession and resistance. The Spanish colonial period (1542 – 1821) enforced its ‘rationalisation’ in ways that dis- rupted the space and time of native popu- lations; the hacienda period, before and after independence (1821), constrained the solar within the accumulation of land and labour by oligarchic powers; and the post-revolution (1910) period saw it strengthened alongside land (re)distribution policies that were never- theless bound up in forms of primitive accumulation. Using this historical lens, the paper shows how Maya populations in Yucatán have been able to, following Bayat (2000), ‘quietly’ resist primitive accumulation by re-encroaching on their solares and recon- stituting forms of commons to support their way of life. In this perspective, the Maya way of life and the solar we now see as under threat have themselves been con- structed through these drawn out processes of dispossession and re-creation of commons, and this same dialectic can be detected amidst the extensive and ongoing commodification of Maya land, livelihoods and identities taking place today under neo- liberal globalisation processes.

The primary research for this paper draws heavily on the peri-urban settlement of Espita where 51% of the 11,551 population are Maya by official language records (INEGI 2010). An economic and cultural stronghold during Mexico’s hacienda period, Espita fell into decline after the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Today, the local population mostly relies on agriculture, specifically corn production (SEFOE 2002). Fieldwork was conducted between 2013 and 2015, including participant

observation of local Maya communities going about their daily lives, followed by in-depth interviews with both selected Maya families, whose names have been changed, and Yucatán state officers, who are identified only by the agency they rep- resent. It is important to acknowledge that these accounts are neither representative nor exclusive with respect to ‘the hundreds of Maya communities in the Peninsula of Yucatán [who] differ from one to another in history, subsistence ways, “acculturation” levels, organisational complexities, identity representation, characteristics of their relation to the dominant society, and other factors’ (Quintal et al. 2003, 369). My own positionality was also an important dimen- sion in these encounters as someone born and raised in Yucatán and of Maya heritage but whose interactions with people were influenced by other subjectivities, such as returning to the region as a student of a British university as well as my age and gender. These ‘differences’ made me feel as an ‘outsider’ and as this feeling was shared with the local populations, my ‘locality’ was only established after engaging in con- versations with them. Even when I did not share their realities as a local, I could fully relate.

The paper proceeds as follows. A first section discusses primitive accumulation’s contested theoretical and empirical develop- ment in Europe before introducing a reworked conceptualisation that draws from Latin American scholarship and specifically the ‘decoloniality’ perspective. A second section constructs a historical periodisation of the Maya dispossession and resistance from the colonial period up to the present neo-liberal turn, arguing that Maya people have utilised self-subsistence as a quiet form of resistance. A third section focuses on the current processes of primitive accumulation and resistance in and around the Maya solar. The conclusion emphasises the relevance of enduring alternative ways of living under overwhelm- ing neo-liberal processes.

CABRERA PACHECO: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION IN INDIGENOUS MEXICO 505

Decolonising primitive accumulation theory

The concept of primitive accumulation emerged in the context of mid-19th-century industrial Britain in which the urban and industrial development of laissez-faire capital- ism was materialising alongside the enclo- sure of the countryside. It was defined by Karl Marx ([1867] 1990) in Capital, Volume I, as ‘the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production . . . [thus transforming] the social means of sub- sistence and of production into capital [and] the immediate producers into wage labourers’ (874 – 875). Marx saw capital’s birthing through this process of class separ- ation as dependent on extra-economic mech- anisms or, what he sarcastically called the ‘idyllic methods of primitive accumulation’ such as the ‘spoliation (plundering) of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circum- stances of reckless terrorism’ (895). In classi- cal interpretations of Marx’s theory, primitive accumulation refers only to the initial transition towards capitalism as a series of ‘one-off’ acts that gradually conquer different geographies for capital until it becomes dominant (see Sassen 2010 for a contemporary application; and Zar- embka 2002 for a discussion). Opposing this classical approach, scholars within the Open Marxist tradition have more convincingly theorised capitalism as involving an everyday social struggle in which the extra-economic forces of primitive accumulation are continu- ally required to maintain the separation of workers from productive resources. These extra-economic forces are also required to prevent land, labour and subjectivity from escaping or undermining capitalist logics (De Angelis 2001; Midnight Notes Collective 1990).

Incorporating aspects of both classical and Open Marxist approaches, and drawing on

Luxemburg’s ([1913] 2003) notion of the dual nature of capital accumulation that incorporates the global spatial relations between capitalism and non-capitalist modes of production, Marxist geographer Harvey (2003) developed the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. While acknowledging the continuous nature of primitive accumulation through old and new mechanisms, Harvey argues that the ever-growing crisis tendencies of global capitalism are seeing a new mode of accumu- lation in which global capital, backed by imperialist governments in the Global North, requires continuous and persistent ‘violent processes of dispossession’ of what lies ‘outside of itself’ for its expanded repro- duction (see Hodkinson 2012). These ten- dencies take different forms in different contexts. For example, in the Global North, accumulation by dispossession is led by the privatisation of state industries and assets so as to release public or common assets and resources into the market for investment, upgrading and speculation with over- accumulating capital. In contrast, the Global South is primarily dispossessed through the geo-power games of international trade forced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, backed by the United States and Europe (Harvey 2003).

Critiques from the Global South

This theorising of primitive accumulation as ‘continuous, contemporary and global’ (Glassman 2006, 615) enables us to better understand how it ‘can be extended tem- porally and conceptually to account for the existence of other kinds of coercion in the present’ (Brass 2011, 8); as well as to histori- cal and geographical spaces wherever people are forced into ‘a greater dependence on the market’ (Perelman 2000, 34). In this vein, the history of Latin America, especially since European colonialism began, is a history of ongoing primitive accumulation.

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There have been ‘classical’ shifts in the mode of production from subsistence to capitalist, and agrarian to urban that continue today, following Harvey, under the NAFTA-style agreements of neo-liberal globalisation; as well as examples of ‘disaster capitalism’ (see Klein 2007), where Latin American govern- ments and transnational companies utilise natural or social disasters and their chaotic aftermaths to impose neo-liberal policies, such as privatisation schemes, under the dis- guise of top-down reconstruction.

However, Marxist approaches to primitive accumulation have been subject to important critiques in relation to the Global South and Latin America in particular. Harvey’s ‘accumulation by dispossession’ theory has been critiqued by Gudynas (2015a, 2015b)2

for its abstracting, globalising and generalis- ing portrayal of global capital and the new imperialism that deflects the responsibility of national governments within Latin America for ‘predatory practices of appro- priation of Latin America’s natural resources, the usurpation of [indigenous] lands and their lives, and the imposition of conditions of oppression’ (Gudynas 2015a). These practices are understood, not as primitive accumu- lation, but as ‘neo-extractivism’—a new wave of colonial extractive processes, namely, mineral extraction, and large-scale agricultural, biofuel and timber production, for the benefit of the centre (and periphery’s elites) and with small profit redistributions in the form of social programmes by so- called progressive governments (Svampa 2012; Gudynas 2009).

Primitive accumulation has been subject to further critiques, including its failure to address changes of living conditions or types of dispossession over time and space (Levien 2015). Its emphasis on both immedi- acy and inevitability have also been critiqued, specifically when it discards processes that can take a long time to mature or materialise or that impact other spaces (Kelly 2011), and when it considers as a normative develop- ment processes bringing ‘backward’ indigen- ous communities into capitalism (Coulthard

2014). Critics have also argued that complete dispossession as implied by primitive accumulation is not required to force depen- dence on the market (Hall 2012). As part of its failure to properly engage with either resistance or racialised subjects (Mollett 2016), it does not acknowledge the struggles of indigenous communities ‘to preserve their traditional livelihoods and to protect global commons’ (Veltmeyer 2012, 61). Finally, due to its rootedness in Eurocentric socialist thought and context (Veltmeyer 2005), it does not acknowledge the role of the Americas as the racialised form of land appropriation, labour exploitation and mass commodity production which turned capital into capitalism (Mignolo 2005). These factors evidence why its use in Latin Ameri- can settings has hitherto been highly problem- atic and theoretically incapable of capturing the specific realities of accumulation and dispossession.

A decoloniality perspective for primitive accumulation

At the heart of the disjuncture over primitive accumulation between Eurocentric Marxism and its Global South discontents is a pro- found ontological dissonance that Fanon (2001) has addressed as the ‘colonial problem’. This can be exemplified by the classical Marxist approach of Bartra (1993, 85) who argued that the ‘destruction of com- munal property in Mexico followed paths similar [my emphasis] to those taken by the process of primitive accumulation in Europe’. As Córdova (1989) has shown, the notion that primitive accumulation took place separately overlooks the intimate geo- graphical and temporal relationship between land enclosures in Europe and European colonisation of the Americas during the 16th century. This intimate connection is illu- minated through the ‘decoloniality approach’ that re-thinks post-colonial theory from the Latin American experience through incor- porating world-system and dependency

CABRERA PACHECO: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION IN INDIGENOUS MEXICO 507

theories (Castro-Gómez 2005). The decolo- niality approach highlights the long-term effects of ‘coloniality’ as the historical denial of power, knowledge and being to native societies, and its ongoing reproduction through contemporary neo-colonial and imperialistic practices of control, domination and exploitation based on racial inferiorisa- tion (Castro-Gómez 2005; Dussel 1994). This means that such processes which origi- nated in the Americas by European invasion continue to this day still based on racial hier- archies by which ‘backward’ populations are brought into ‘modern’ settings, for example, self-provision into wage labour.

By using this decoloniality framework, I argue that primitive accumulation can be applied to Latin America, to indigenous peoples’ histories and to the Maya of Yucatán more specifically, in three ways. First, by theorising the European colonisa- tion of the Americas as producing the first periphery of a capitalist world-system, we can understand how the exploitation of ‘free’ indigenous labour and natural resources represented a ‘primitive accumulation’ for the world centre in which wealth was extracted from Spanish and Portuguese colonies and transformed into capital in England (Galeano 2011; Di Muzio 2007; Mignolo 2005; Dussel 1999). In this light, the colonial conquest of Latin America did not need to usher in capitalist social relations to be part of historical and geographically expansive processes of primitive accumulation. Second, the history of Latin America also shows that primitive accumulation is not inevitable. As Moore (2004, 92) has rightly cautioned, ‘peripheral processes of primitive accumulation . . . co-exist with other modes of production around the world’—some of these processes ‘develop’ into capital but others ‘stall’ permanently. This argument is particularly apt when applied to Latin America where subsistence forms of pro- duction, both currently and historically, coexist with capitalist relations, sometimes even within the same household (see Waller- stein and Smith 1992), breaking expected

‘paths’ of development and discarding com- plete processes of dispossession. Linked to the non-inevitability of primitive accumu- lation is a third aspect of decoloniality, namely, the re-centring of a continuous resistance from indigenous groups over their oppressions, which have occurred through- out the history of primitive accumulation in Latin America since colonial times (see Velt- meyer 2005). One of the more well-known indigenous/peasant movements, the Zapatis- tas in Chiapas, Mexico, is part of a longer his- torical cycle of resistance towards ongoing exploitation and dispossession of Maya populations (Hall and Fenelon 2008). Using this decolonised theory of primitive accumu- lation, the rest of the paper will historically analyse the construction and transformation of the Maya solar in Yucatán through differ- ent cycles of enclosure, dispossession and resistance in order to situate the contempor- ary assault on the Maya way of life under neo-liberal globalisation not as the beginning of primitive accumulation, but as its latest cycle.

Conquest, slavery and resistance: the historical construction of the Maya solar in Yucatán

This section explores the struggles of the Maya of Yucatán to retain their way of life and collective subsistence practices in the face of different regimes of power and domi- nation over time. Scholarly understandings of land use and ownership within the Maya civi- lisation in Yucatán are unclear and imprecise; however, some scholars (see Villa Rojas 1961) believe they were attached to a social organis- ation that included nobility, commoners and slaves, that is, a form not dissimilar to feudal- ism. Family production, within households and town lands, was used for self-sufficiency, for exchange within communities and for paying tributes to the ruling class (Tourtellot and Sabloff 1972). Flanked by polyculture agriculture under slash-and-burn, a system called milpa3—used extensively in the

508 CITY VOL. 21, NOS. 3 – 4

region—in communal farmlands, the solar was where Maya extended families lived and engaged in additional crop growing and animal husbandry. The organisation of their towns was based on scattered patterns of family plots which appeared as ‘disorganised’ to Spanish colonisers (Terán and Rasmussen 2009; Garcı́a de Miguel 2000). The following sections show the historical construction of the Maya solar through processes of dispos- session and re-creation of commons to support their way of life. This will be evi- denced in relation to three distinct eras of primitive accumulation—colonial times, hacienda periods and the post-Mexican Revolution.

The violent ‘rationalisation’ of the solar in colonial Yucatán

The Spanish domination of the Maya of Yucatán (1542 – 1821) encompassed many of what Marx called the ‘idyllic methods’ of primitive accumulation but within a colonial setting. Chief among those were land enclo- sures by which the scattered Maya villages were depopulated—through the violent destruction of houses and means of subsis- tence, extended families disintegrated, and indigenous people put together into Indian Congregations to be better controlled in smaller spaces and make their land available for settlers (Terán and Rasmussen 2009; Sulli- van 1996; Farriss 1978). It was, paradoxically, through the colonisers’ spatial rationalisation that the solar itself became formalised and physically configured within the organisation of towns in square grids and the standardisa- tion of housing plots around a central square following Spanish regulations for its colonies. Even more, its name was borrowed from a Spanish word and there are no records of an equivalent Maya term (de Pierrebourg et al. 2012; Restall 1999). These changes did not bring the proletarianisation of Maya and other native populations; but it was neverthe- less a violent and racialised transformation of an internal hierarchy for an external one

where the accumulation of land, labour, resources and wealth buttressed colonial power within a wider emerging capitalist world-system (Mignolo 2005). Even with their tightly policed conditions, Maya families developed sustaining strategies based on livelihood diversification in their solar and by controlling the land that was available to them: ‘ . . . maize farming, arbori- culture, herb and vegetable growing, water extraction, weaving, apiculture, cattle rearing, horse keeping, and other kinds of animal husbandry’ (Restall 1998, 368). Violent struggle also surged within resistance strategies. In 1761, a major Maya rebellion led by Jacinto Canek intended to take back control of political and religious authority lost to the settlers—it was, however, ulti- mately unsuccessful (Patch 2003). Overall, whenever colonial control relaxed or declined, Maya populations gradually took control of their ways of living by migrating towards the east of the Peninsula and reorga- nising into their well-known pattern of scat- tered settlements (Farriss 1978).

The oligarchic accumulation of land and people

The commercial production of corn, sugar and fodder in Yucatán only began in the late 18th century, but extended beyond the formal end of colonial rule in 1821. This pro- duction responded to growing demand, from both local consumption resulting from popu- lation growth, and from foreign trade especially with the ports of New Orleans and Havana. This new agriculture production was only possible because of the accumu- lation of land by settler families in both ‘regions’ of Yucatán: the west owned and controlled by Spaniards, and the east con- sidered as ‘refuge’ territory for Maya groups. The accumulation of land meant that masses of Maya people became dis- placed, and again clustered and controlled, because they were forced to work in large plantations in return for enough land to

CABRERA PACHECO: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION IN INDIGENOUS MEXICO 509

work their milpa. After 1856, major Mexican land distribution reforms were overturned by oligarchic powers, who took control over Maya populations and their land, just as in racialised colonial relations. While Maya people initially pressured peacefully for access to land, their demands gradually esca- lated into an armed insurrection known as the Caste War (1847 – 1901), in which the Maya lower class (mostly from the east region) were eventually defeated. Oligarch families took back control of insurgent-occupied Maya land and their labour and established large-scale henequen plantations. The ‘hene- quen boom’ (1880 – 1915) responded to the international demand for hard fibres, and Maya populations were violently incorpor- ated into a world-system of extractive capital- ism where Yucatán haciendas depended on the United States as their sole market (Peniche Rivero 2003; Wells and Joseph 1996; Aboites 1985). Hacienda workers received ‘the right to occupy milpa lands, a house to live in, medical care’ (Peniche Rivero 2003, 572); house and land, however, were the first debts Maya people incurred under a debt-peonage system, a form of slavery. These added to small debts from the hacienda general store, their only source for household supplies, which were all deducted from their meagre weekly wages. When milpa production became harder to combine with their ‘waged’ labour in hacien- das due to the lack of land and time, a critical strategy for subsistence was the intensifica- tion of household agriculture and animal hus- bandry in the solar (Hernández 2014), which became a place of resistance within hacienda lands and helped to develop a form of collec- tive identity.

Land reforms, from distribution to privatisation

The Maya of Yucatán had no apparent role in the 1910 Mexican Revolution against oli- garchic power. Rather, its outcomes were ‘imposed’ in the region and ushered in a

new political economy of land redistribution and a ‘return’ to a more autonomous, self- dependent way of life that meant ‘to sow on their own account, to build their own houses, to grow orchards in the solares of their houses, to enrol their children in schools’ (Aboites 1985, 84). Land redistribu- tion was institutionalised after the revolution in the creation of the ejido. Codified by Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, the ejido refers to state-recognised common land in Mexico and provided landless peasant and indigenous populations the right to perpetually benefit from the land as an agricultural provider. It was designed to carry on traditional community organisations oriented to mutual insurance, collective labour and labour exchange, under an ideal complete autonomy and self-management. Ejidatarios (individuals with full rights to use ejido in common with others) could work the land, guard the forests or exploit other resources for their own and their com- munities’ benefit, but not use it for selling, renting or mortgaging, putting this land legally off-market (Barnes 2009; de Janvry, Gordillo, and Sadoulet 1997; Guerrero 1975).

However, as de Janvry, Gordillo, and Sadoulet (1997) argue, the ejido was full of contradictions, as a compromise between a temporary form of land ownership that would eventually lead to full private prop- erty, and a distinct and permanent form of collective property. Under the Presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 40) nearly 18 million hectares of hacienda lands were expropriated, formalising the redistribution of ejido land. By the end of the 20th century, ejidos covered 52% of the total land of Mexico. The solar was legally recog- nised as the ejido’s urban and private counter- part (Barnes 2009; Jones and Ward 1998). In Yucatán, the solar fostered cohesion to the family unit and the wider community through the diffusion of indigenous knowl- edge, such as plant benefits, crop improve- ment and palm-roof building. Furthermore, it facilitated household-based livelihood strategies consisting of polyculture milpa in

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ejido land, solar activities, the production of honey and handcrafts, and wage labour for extra cash (Aké Gómez, Jiménez-Osornio, and Ruenes Morales 1999; Warman 1985). However, land reforms also triggered the incorporation and assimilation of marginal- ised and racialised social groups, such as former hacienda workers, into a homogenous national Mexican state (Aboites 1985). As part of its contradictions, the creation of ejidos was, as we shall see in the next section, an important prelude to the neo- liberal turn from the early 1980s onwards in Mexico, where the ejido has been considered to be a pivot of ongoing primitive accumu- lation in the expansion of capitalist forms of agricultural production (Morton 2010).

Primitive accumulation under neo-liberal globalisation: the contemporary Maya struggles

In this section, I explain how primitive accumulation and the unfolding practices of coloniality are underway in Yucatán led by the neo-liberal state, on an unprecedented scale and in ways somewhat distinct from his- torical processes. Neo-liberal ideas arguably first emerged in Mexico after the 1982 econom- ic crisis with reforms to Article 27 in 1983 which ‘renewed’ the process of agrarian privatisation, towards ‘rural modernisation and growth’ (Durand Alcántara 1993), fol- lowed by an agreement with the World Bank in 1988 that resulted in agricultural credits to compensate for failed programmes, accompanied by familiar market liberalisa- tion conditions (Robles 1992). The decisive neo-liberal breakthrough came in January 1994 with the signing of NAFTA, a trilateral agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada designed to guarantee ‘free’ trade and investment across borders. The reforms required by NAFTA in Mexico meant priva- tisation and deregulation of the economy; international investment and trade opening; and, most importantly, the cutting loose of traditional protections and supports for the

workforce, especially in agriculture (Barkin, Ortiz, and Rosen 1997). While indigenous resistance to these neo-liberal processes is most famously seen in the rise of the Zapatis- tas against the implementation of NAFTA, the Maya of Yucatán have also resisted the incursion of capitalist social relations into their lives particularly through the use of silence ‘not as a sample of weakness and apathy but as a strategy in their political struggle against a long history of breached accords, empty promises, simulated supports and deceiving programmes’ (Duarte Duarte 2013a, 6). My analysis, drawing from field- work in Espita, identifies the main actors, institutions and processes of contemporary primitive accumulation, and the ways Maya people contest them.

Commodification and individualisation of common land

One of the first and most important incur- sions of neo-liberalism into the Maya of Yucatán came in the form of the recommodi- fication of land through the privatisation and individualisation of common property. This began with a further reform of Article 27 and its regulation under the 1992 Agrarian Law, designed ‘to end the process of land redistribution and to open the ejido lands to the market’ (Otero 2004, 12). The law in effect paved the way for the sale of lucrative plots to agro-industrial interests and develop- ers, setting free the ‘production potential’ of the ejido into the world market system (de Janvry, Gordillo, and Sadoulet 1997, 11). It was followed in 1993 by PROCEDE (Programa Nacional de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Solares Urbanos), a national programme for cataloguing all common land and solares that would enable ejido land to be privatised and prepare the ground for market liberalisation under NAFTA. After certification, ejidatarios could decide between keeping the ejido in common or sub-dividing their common holding into individually owned plots that

CABRERA PACHECO: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION IN INDIGENOUS MEXICO 511

could then be sold, rented or mortgaged to non-ejidatarios, as well as opened up to con- tracts with local and foreign private compa- nies (Barkin, Ortiz, and Rosen 1997). My interviews with Yucatán government officers supported the view of existing scholarship that this programme was controversial in its objectives, methods and outcomes, with the Environment officer (Interview, 19 January 2015) describing it as ‘deadly, because it has been dispossessing . . . the Maya people . . . and sending them into extreme poverty and to become peons again’.

And yet, in keeping with the Maya’s his- torical resistance to enclosure, Yucatán was one of the few states in which a majority of ejidos remained as common land after PROCEDE (Pérez 2004). In Espita, ejidata- rios proudly recounted their decision to keep the ejido in common and reject PROCEDE’s intentions:

‘ . . . most ejidatarios said “we do not want parcels, we want [the land] free”. Three times they repeated [the process] . . . and we said again: “we want freedom to work the land, we do not want any abuse with these parcels, we do not want this” . . . We signed that the ejido land will remain of common use for 30 years.’ (Interview: Ulises, 5 February 2014)

This refusal to privatise the ejido was motiv- ated less by idealism and more by the prag- matic reliance on land cultivation; the Comisario Ejidal (the representative of the ejido in Espita) stressed the importance of prioritising future generations:

‘ . . . this way young people can keep working the ejido, because if it was parcelled, with each of our needs, people would sell it and it is over, there is no more ejido . . . We want to keep it as it is, as common use.’ (Interview, 5 May 2014)

By refusing or stalling the process of commo- dification and individualisation of the ejido, Maya people are able to maintain the connec- tion to land beyond their own solar. Fire- wood, trees used for construction, and fruits and vegetables found in the local market

come from the surrounding land even for non-ejidatarios. Private ownership of a frac- tion of the ejido as proposed by the govern- ment is at odds with traditional agriculture systems strongly connected with the environ- mental conditions of the region, and further government programmes have put more stress on the land and on Maya people’s livelihoods.

Suppression of alternative forms of agricultural production

A second front of primitive accumulation under neo-liberal globalisation has been the destructive impact of NAFTA’s temporary, market-adjustment subsidies on indigenous agricultural systems. In 1994, the government launched PROCAMPO (Programa de Apoyos Directos al Campo) as a temporary agricultural subsidy programme to support campesinos (peasants) while they adapted to NAFTA (it continues today under the name PROAGRO). Described as ‘a hybrid between compensation, welfare and adjust- ment’ (Sadoulet, de Janvry, and Davis 2001, 1054), 3 million producers received annual monetary support calculated by the number of hectares they had cultivated in any of nine basic crops in the years preceding 1993, but also for livestock, forestry or specific environmental projects (Sadoulet, de Janvry, and Davis 2001; SARH 1994). Although pri- marily aimed at smoothing the way for devas- tating neo-liberal structural adjustment of agricultural production, Yucatán state offi- cials (Interviews: Environment, 19 January 2015; Indigenous Development, 6 February 2015) revealed that this subsidy system caused land degradation by encouraging large surfaces of corn monoculture, the use of herbicides which prevented other crops and suppressing alternative land uses such as polyculture-based milpa.

Interviewees again emphasised how the Maya have sought to resist these interven- tions by covertly growing their milpa as tra- ditional polyculture in small areas, hidden

512 CITY VOL. 21, NOS. 3 – 4

from inspection of their subsidised pro- duction of corn monoculture. Nevertheless, the impacts of neo-liberal reforms have com- bined with the damaging effects of climate change on rain patterns to undermine campe- sinos’ ability to subsist. Maya families in Espita explained how the land has ‘become tired’, damaging their corn production and impelling the need to earn cash to buy food, or to apply for subsidies from the govern- ment (Interviews: Patricia, 11 March 2015; Don Genaro, 19 March 2015). In this context, the pressure to sub-divide and sell ejido land is becoming increasingly irresist- ible for more Maya, while further undermin- ing their own future survival as subsistence farmers by enabling the land to be used for cattle-ranching, export crops such as soya and sorghum (Interview: Agrarian officer, 19 January 2015), and the penetration of mul- tinational corporations and genetically modi- fied food. Maya people are thus being dispossessed of their lands only to then be further exploited as wage labour, as explained by a local ejidatario:

‘Many have rented out their land but the majority sold it . . . That land, a rich person manages it now . . . These poor people settled on “lending” the land [for a fixed amount of money] but then they realised they signed away their land. What are they going to claim back? . . . Thus, the slavery returns . . . Around 9000 hectares of land have been knocked down . . . and people get tired because it is a constant work . . . You cannot do it your way because it is for growing mahogany and cedar . . . It is slavery because one is not free, your workload is measured.’ (Interview: Ulises, 5 May 2014)

Livelihood options outside of agriculture are scarce; some of my interviewees in Espita drive moto-taxis or manage small shops (Interviews: Martha and Doña Karla, 10 March 2015; Valentina, 25 March 2015). But as Alonso-Fradejas (2012) argues, these non-farm livelihoods are not boosted by the coerced selling of lands; if anything, this only prevents Maya families from regaining

access to land. The solar and the multiple activities conducted in it prove to be a major source of livelihood for Maya people, as exemplified by Doña Renata’s account— her family grows vegetables and keeps pigs and chickens for self-subsistence and selling on her market stall, but they also make crafts from plants and trees, and prepare tra- ditional medicinal remedies (Interview: 4 February 2014). However, this way of living is also being transformed by undermining land value while contradictorily commodify- ing its Maya-ness.

Undermining and commodifying indigenous housing and identities

While the previous mechanisms of primitive accumulation have undermined the solar by attacking the larger system of land and liveli- hoods, the final main front is the neo-liberal assault on the Maya solar itself. The solar and the traditional ways of life it sustains are perceived as ‘backward’ and set to disap- pear amidst processes of modernisation within a ‘rural to urban’ transition (some- times ‘stalling’ in peri-urban conditions) (Cabrera Pacheco, forthcoming). According to the Environment officer (Interview, 19 January 2015), ‘the solar is the reflection of the social, economic, cultural, environmental and administrative deterioration that Maya people are suffering with these politics of market, free trade and private property’. The gradual disappearance of the solar is partly understood through what Klein (2007) has called ‘disaster capitalism’, using the chaotic aftermath of a ‘disaster’ to impose neo-liberal policies. Using the crisis of Hurricane Isidore (September 2002) in Yucatán, which severely damaged or comple- tely destroyed large numbers of Maya houses, the Mexican state created relief programmes in which reconstruction aid was tied to the individualisation and commodification of the solares. The main vehicle for this primi- tive accumulation was the FONDEN (Fondo de Desastres Naturales [SHCP

CABRERA PACHECO: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION IN INDIGENOUS MEXICO 513

1999]), through which ‘pies de casa’ (small concrete rooms—Figure 1(d)) were built, considered as basic habitat units (Cabrera Pacheco 2014). ‘Pie de casa’ has no literal translation—it is supposed to be an initial building to which families can build upon later to make a ‘proper’ house (Angelotti Pasteur, personal communication, 12 July 2016) but through FONDEN families only received one-room buildings some of which were never finished (Angelotti Pasteur 2014). On paper, FONDEN regulations stipu- lated that these new houses had to respect the customs and traditions of the region (SHCP 1999); evidence shows that this was not the case in Yucatán, even when recipients of new housing asked for their traditions to be considered. The custom of extended families sharing a single large solar plot was under- mined through the requirement to legally and physically divide the plots to receive more than one ‘pie de casa’.4 According to the Social Development officer (Interview: 10 Feb- ruary 2015), the legal division of the solar, which enables private ownership, has since become an important requirement for having access to further government subsidies which require evidence of individual ownership. One of the downsides of this plot division is the space reduction, undermining self-pro- vision. According to Doña Karla (Interview: 10 March 2015) ‘the solar used to be enough’.

Beyond the individualisation of urban land ownership, what emerged from the inter- views was the undermining of the Maya house as a viable option even for extreme meteorological conditions and was discarded by the government based on perceived safety and costs. Even today, government pro- grammes subsidise concrete rooms while lab- elling them as ‘safe’ and ‘durable’ (Interview: Housing officer, 23 February 2015). The Maya house (Figure 1(c)), one of the symbols of Maya identity, has evolved by adapting to the environmental conditions of the region, including hurricanes and high temperatures. Its resistance to hurricane winds has been tested (see Angelotti Pasteur 2014; Centeno Lara, Cerón Cardeña, and

Rodrı́guez Pérez 2005), and hence its weak- nesses could be improved. One of the main benefits of the Maya house is its traditional palm roof, which provides relief from high temperatures. This is not achieved in ‘pies de casa’. One of the consequences of dividing solares is the loss of tree coverage as more space is needed to compensate for the loss of shared activities. Solares then lose much- needed shade for carrying out certain social and everyday life activities in temperatures averaging 32.8 degrees Celsius. Figure 1(a) shows an undivided solar with enough space for developing livelihoods and social activi- ties as well as a large tree covered area, while Figure 1(b) shows a divided one with arguably less livelihood options attached to the solar; Figure 1(e) shows the trend of new housing developments, far smaller than traditional solares. As hurricanes are not an everyday occurrence in Yucatán, but high temperatures usually are, local housing alternatives should be recognised as a digni- fied option for living.

Against this background, building a Maya house is becoming ever more difficult: there is no government support, traditional knowl- edge is being lost and materials, such as the Guano palm, are becoming scarce and expensive—a ‘luxury’ even. While the Maya house is now considered a symbol of poverty, the prices of the palm have gone up and can only be found in specific milpas and sold for specific uses (Cabrera Pacheco 2014). Credits are being offered for building Maya houses to offer tourists a Maya ‘experi- ence’ (Interview: Tourism officer, 16 January 2015). Moreover, as part of touristic develop- ment plans (2007 – 12), some ejido lands were catalogued as ‘inadequate’ to be used in agri- culture and offered to companies, while eji- datarios were offered employment on their own land (Duarte Duarte 2013a, 2013b). In Espita people are already hearing about this appropriation of resources:

‘ . . . and companies and people with money come and [local people] become employees again. The process is repeated. [. . . These

514 CITY VOL. 21, NOS. 3 – 4

people say] “You give us the land, I put in the supplies, you work for me and I will give you 100 pesos daily.” The employee is the campesino, the owner of the land.’ (Interview: Alfredo, 26 March 2015)

Tourism has thus joined non-food crops, cattle-ranching and the exploitation of forest resources as a direct threat to the Maya way of life, as their solar and its traditional elements have no value unless they can be commodified under the label of ‘Maya tradition’. This trans- formation in which the only people benefiting from Maya houses are now tourists, especially international ones, represents the ultimate primitive accumulation of Maya life through the commodification of the solar as a represen- tation of the Maya culture to be consumed.

Conclusions

As argued, the Maya solar forms part of a complex system of land, livelihoods and iden- tities. Contemporary processes of primitive accumulation are leading to critical transform- ations of the meaning and practices of the solar by undermining this system through several mechanisms. Common land is being commodi- fied and individualised under neo-liberal reforms spreading private property relations. Further, alternative forms of agricultural pro- duction are being disrupted as a consequence of NAFTA’s unequal terms, putting Maya household strategies at risk and putting pressure on the relevance of the solar as a space for self-subsistence. Moreover, the

Figure 1 Fieldwork locations with solar and housing diversity(Sources: Modified from INSEJUPY [2012 – 2018] [a, b, e]; Author [2014, 2011] [c, d]).

CABRERA PACHECO: PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION IN INDIGENOUS MEXICO 515

solar itself is subject to unprecedented and contradictory pressures from disaster-based programmes and ongoing housing pro- grammes, which are transforming traditional ways of life into ‘modern’ and ‘urban’, at the same time that tourism initiatives are commodifying such traditional ways of life for international consumption.

However, transformations of the solar and the way of life it sustains under primitive accumulation are not new. The solar itself was historically constructed through waves of dispossession, resistance and recuperation of environmental, social and cultural resources for profit. From the period of colonial domi- nation to the post-independence era of hacien- das, Maya people were violently separated from their means of existence, and clustered and reorganised in ways that were alien to them. Yet they managed to develop strategies to adapt, resist and contest these processes, especially by ‘quietly’ re-encroaching on their solares and reconstituting their way of life, as part of the diversity of resistance move- ments in the world, understood as complex and even ‘messy’. Maya people have resisted in historical ways, as Duarte Duarte (2013b, 271) has argued: ‘[older Maya people] speak from a world that neither the conquest, the pacification, the colonisation, the paternalism, the liberalism nor the free market have been able to eliminate’. But as they face overwhelm- ing processes of incorporation to free market economies, resisting by quietly living in a solar might not be the same as pushing neo- liberal policies and the state out of commu- nities. At some point, active roles would be demanded of Maya populations in order to ensure they are able to make decisions over their own ways of living.

In order to be able to (re)produce alterna- tive ways of living as viable options for indi- genous populations, shifting our world perspectives is required. This paper’s contri- bution to primitive accumulation debates is to bring ongoing ‘coloniality’ to the fore- ground. The transformation processes of the solar and the Maya way of living cannot be explained only through the concept of

primitive accumulation, in the sense pre- viously understood by scholars. Along with other similar concepts, such as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, primitive accumulation must be decolonised, in the sense of being reinterpreted, contested and reworked under the specificities of Latin American and other experiences from the Global South to draw a more comprehensive historical and contem- porary analysis. This paper is therefore a nascent look at historical and contemporary struggles by ‘stretching’ a Marxist concept under the decoloniality perspective. Of course, more is left to do.

Finally, even when in urban and peri-urban environments Maya life in the solar is disap- pearing, it still serves as a reminder that not all regions of the world have become incor- porated into the hegemonic mode of pro- duction, and their resistance, even if under the quiet everyday life of self-provision, is an indication that they want to keep it that way—as a different way of living life.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my supervisors, Stuart Hodkinson and Sara González; and for their comments on previous ver- sions of this paper, I would like to thank Paul Waley, Paul Chatterton, Jorge Blanco, Claudia Villegas, Ricardo Apaolaza and Nela Gallardo. I would also like to acknowledge the editors of the special feature and two anonymous referees for their supportive and criti- cally constructive comments. Mirna Molina Chalé and Nancy Silva Solı́s were helpful in providing assistance during fieldwork, as well as the people in Yucatán whose participation was most valuable for the develop- ment of this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

My doctoral studies, from which this paper stems, was supported by Conacyt-Gobierno del Estado de Yucatán (2012 – 2016) and by a Marie Curie International

516 CITY VOL. 21, NOS. 3 – 4

Research Staff Exchange Scheme Fellowship entitled ‘CONTESTED_CITIES’ within the 7th European Community Framework Programme [FP7-PEOPLE- PIRSES-GA-2012-318944].

Notes

1 Some words are used in Spanish due to a lack of an accurate term in the English language that fully describes the meaning of the term.

2 Gudynas’ critiques sparked tension and controversy within critical geography debates, amongst others, around the use of ideas and concepts from the Global North as a form of ‘colonialism’ in Latin American geographies along with the role of global and local capitals in the extraction of resources mostly from indigenous lands and territories. See Mollett (2017) and Wilson (2017) for further analyses derived from different sides of the controversy.

3 Derived from the Nahuatl phrase used for ‘corn field’. 4 Much of this evidence was presented and discussed

in the symposium ‘Past and Present of the Mayas’ House’ during the Third International Conference of the Maya Culture (Simposio Pasado y presente de la casa de los mayas. 3er Congreso Internacional de la Cultura Maya) held in Mérida, Mexico, 2011.

ORCID

Ana Julia Cabrera Pacheco http://orcid. org/0000-0003-1740-7299

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Ana Julia Cabrera Pacheco recently obtained a PhD from the School of Geography in the University of Leeds with the thesis ‘The Maya Solar of Yucatán: Transformations of Land, Livelihoods and Identities in Peri-Urban Settlements in Mexico’. Email: [email protected]

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