Abstract

Guatemalan Maya workers have been subjected over the past two decades to government decentralization, the privatization of public industries and services, and an increasingly export-oriented economy. Nontraditional export agriculture, transnational textile factory production (maquilas), international tourism, and wage-labor migration have become central to the Guatemalan economy as the government, businesses, and workers have adjusted to the globalization of capital and free-trade agreements such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Even the traditional export sectors of coffee and sugarcane have been caught up in new marketing schemes and labor reorganization to make them more competitive in the world market. These structural-political and economic changes have affected the ways indigenous individuals, families, and communities work and organize. In this global economy, Maya workers have developed new strategies for earning a livelihood and organizing for more equitable working conditions. The articles in this issue focus on these strategies, contextualizing the labor relations within local political and economic settings by attending to the new forms of organization and resistance that workers employ. In large part, the ethnographic analyses of economic practices provided by Jennifer Burrell, Edward Fischer and Sarah Hamilton, Liliana Goldin, Walter Little, and Sarah Blue draw inspiration from Laurel Bossen's (1984) economic ethnography of four structurally different Guatemalan communities, which situated laborers within the economic spheres of the 1970s. This research provided a benchmark for understanding the dramatic economic changes that have occurred since its time. Bossen's ethnography looked specifically at the ways in which the expansion of capital affected the economic relations between genders by comparing structurally different segments of Guatemalan society: Maya peasants, plantation laborers, urban poor workers, and middle-class professionals. Today, although Maya peasants and plantation laborers persist, alternative economic strategies have emerged in

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