Primitive accumulation in indigenous Mexico

Abstract

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, livelihoods 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 understand 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 constructed through different cycles of enclosure, dispossession and resistance in Mexico. The Spanish colonial period (1542–1821) enforced its ‘rationalisation’ in ways that disrupted space and time of native populations; the hacienda period, before and after independence (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 primitive 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 Subaltern in the Global South.’ International Sociology 15 (3): 533–557), ‘quietly’ resist primitive 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 processes today.