More-than-Human Witnessing? The Politics and Aesthetics of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth) in Transnational Agrarian Movements

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, appeals to “Madre Tierra” [Mother Earth] have united activists and campesino [peasant] networks globally as part of political claims of food sovereignty and agrarian rights. Positioning this paper as a contribution to feminist theory, here I explore what Madre Tierra does in political-aesthetic terms, specifically within situated struggles in Central America. Seen from (white) eco-feminist perspectives, the rise of Madre Tierra could be seen to perform new kinds of exclusions: in this resonant figure diverse indigenous cosmologies seem to collapse; agrarian struggles are rendered “feminine,” and both women and land-workers are placed in the realm of nature—which is to say, far from meaning-making. However, when the everyday practices of agrarian activism are thought through Latinx and Chicanx theories of queer kinship and black womanism, a more radical, and specifically decolonial, vision emerges. Through ethnographic vignettes I illustrate the ways that masculinity/femininity, nature/culture, and the relationships between them are being reworked.

<AB>20世纪90年代中期以来,“地球母亲”的诉求召集了全球的活动家和农民组织,成为粮食主权和土地权利等政治主张的一部分。本文旨在开展女权主义理论研究,从政治美学角度去探讨“地球母亲,”特别针对了中美洲的情境斗争。从(白人)生态女权主义者角度来看,“地球母亲”的崛起是新的排斥:各种本土宇宙学似乎都由于这个引起共鸣的主题而消散;土地斗争变得“女性化,”妇女和工人被置于自然中(即,远离意义构建)。然而,在采用拉美裔和墨裔亲属关系和黑人女性主义的理论去思考农业行动主义日常活动时,一种更激进的、去殖民化的愿景出现了。通过一些人种学片段,我阐明了男性气质和女性气质、自然和文化及其关系的改造方式。</AB>

<AB>Desde mediados de los años 1990, las invocaciones a la “Madre Tierra” han unido globalmente a activistas y a las redes de campesinos como parte de los reclamos políticos de soberanía alimentaria y derechos agrarios. Al posicionar este escrito como una contribución a la teoría feminista, exploro aquí lo que hace la Madre Tierra en términos político-estéticos, específicamente dentro de las luchas situadas en América Central. Vista desde perspectivas ecofeministas (blancas), la llegada de la Madre Tierra a estos escenarios podría verse como la realización de una nueva clase exclusiones: en esta figura resonante parecen colapsar diversas cosmologías indígenas; las luchas agrarias se tornan “femeninas,” y tanto las mujeres como los trabajadores de la tierra se ubican dentro del reino de la naturaleza –esto es, alejados de la construcción de significados. Sin embargo, cuando las prácticas cotidianas del activismo agrario se piensan a través de las teorías latinx y chicanx de la parentela homosexual y del feminismo negro, surge una visión más radical, específicamente descolonial. Por medio de viñetas etnográficas, ilustro las maneras como se está reelaborando la masculinidad/femineidad, la naturaleza/cultura, y las relaciones entre aquellas.</AB>

Key Words:

• aesthetics
• agrarian movements
• Central America
• eco-feminism
• Madre Tierra
• 美学
• 农业运动
• 中美洲
• 生态女权主义
• 地球母亲
• América Central
• ecofeminismo
• estética
• Madre Tierra

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Julian Brigstocke and Günter Gassner for organising the symposium on space, politics and aesthetics from which this special issue originally grew; also for their coordination of the excellent papers in this collection. Claire Blencowe, Leila Dawney and Franklin Ginn also read earlier drafts of this paper and helped shaped the ideas that are written here. A version of this paper was also presented at the University of Bristol Environmental Humanities seminar and I would like to thank the audience for their enthusiastic and informative insights. Finally, the anonymous reviewers from this journal provided exceptionally helpful comments that helped inform the eventual shape of this article and I am very grateful for their generous spirit.

Notes

1. Guadelupe was crowned the Patron Saint of New Spain and the Queen of Mexico in the mid-eighteenth century, while Malinche became known as “la Chingada” after the Mexican Revolution; the violated, “fucked” mother of the first mestizo population, and ancestor of the superstitious, demonized native woman’s part of the legacy of decolonial imagining initiated by Chicana artists, such as Ester Hernandez in the 1960s and Yolanda Lopez in the 1970s, the Chicana-feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa was among the first writers to theorize about Tonantzin Guadalupe from a Chicana feminist perspective.

2. Growing initially through the support of international non-governmental organizations [INGOs], the movement foregrounded local leadership and existing agrarian movements, and prioritized teaching campesinos how to test and share practices they were already familiar with. These were so successful that further exchanges were organized between indigenous farmers and campesinos, first in Guatemala, and later in Nicaragua. The model grew rapidly during the late 1980s when heavy flooding exposed the difference between traditionally terraced farms, and modern farms, which were stripped of topsoil. INGOs subsequently supported village-level projects through into the early 1990s throughout Central America in conflict-affected areas. Projects centered on sharing long-standing principles for agriculture that were being eroded, such as recycling biomass, minimizing nutrient losses, and restoring degraded soils (Altieri 1995). Bilingual campesinos were also trained as farmer “extensionists,” and used simple instruments—a machete, a tape measure and an apparato A (a simple apparatus for measuring land gradients) to communicate with other farmers.

3. Permaculture leans on the principles of tree ecology set out by Joseph Russell Smith (1929) in his book Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, as well as developing concepts of agroecology (the application of ecology to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems) and agroforestry.

4. The civil war was itself partly brought about through agrarian issues and injustices. Before the civil war, the liberalization of the state and a period of intense capital accumulation in the 1920s had led to varying degrees of proletarianization and dispossession throughout the country (Cabarrús 1983). Meanwhile, the advance of agrarian capitalism had devastated the material basis of indigenous communities and contributed to a widespread rejection of indigenous markers from this point onward, such as language and dress (Gould and Lauria-Santiago 2008). Particularly poignant in collective memory is La Matanza: a massacre of more than ten thousand people in 1932 that marked increasingly brutal tactics to suppress growing social unrest, as well as the emergence of an oligarchical alliance between fourteen powerful, land-owning families sought to liquidate blacks and Indians whilst establishing coffee as the country’s principle export. Meanwhile, between the late 1940s until the 1980s the number of campesinos forced to rent plots [microfundias] to make a living rose considerably, with rents increasingly demanded in advance. Elections were tightly controlled, and in some places sterilization was practiced as an imposed form of birth-control (Roseberry 1991). The long struggle, which ended in a land retribution programme mandated by United Nations Peace Accords,^⁠ led to democratization of the national government, and brought issues of race and historical marginalization firmly to the center of agricultural concerns.

5. Indigenous populations do survive in El Salvador—a small minority of the Nahua-Pipil population still live in the south-western region, and there are smaller populations of Lenca and Cacaopera in the Eastern regions. However, most permaculturists are not themselves “indigenous” in this sense, nor do they have traceable Mayan ancestry.

6. This reflects a phenomenon scholars have called “compassionate repression,” where the situation of undocumented migrants, specifically in the European Union, has mobilized widespread activism and support, but, in its visual politics, has consolidated binary categories of a “good victim,” void of agency, and a “bad migrant” who should be defended against (Fassin 2005). The implication is that the icon of an absolute victim, especially as captured through theological tropes of Madonna-and-child, risks silencing those with whom activists mean to identify.

7. Escobar does also trouble the legal recognition of nature as a political actor, however, noting that recognizing the voice of nature in legal frameworks may end up silencing “earth beings” by requiring them to make their claims in juridical terms, to submit to the policing logic of the nation-state, and to occupy only one side of the nature-culture binary that they offer to unsettle. If the constitutionalization of nature proves to be effective in building an identity politics, its simplification of the terms in play may prove detrimental to the complexities of indigenous thought and expression.

8. This labor is of course complicated by the fact that postcolonial ecology is ‘an untranslatable historical record of a fight without witnesses” (Glissant 1989, 177)—which is to say, it is the nature of colonial powers to suppress history of their own violence.

9. I call landscapes and Madre Tierra “syncretic” because both are composed by elements of many traditions rather than one, and, as such, form the basis for new kinds of composite cultural and agricultural practices. However, I wish to acknowledge that syncretism has a violent history in Latin America and is a highly political term. The survival of many indigenous traditions in recomposed forms of Roman Catholicism demonstrates the persistence and capacity of collectives to resist and rework colonialism. However, many indigenous forms of practice were violently suppressed, and the new aesthetic symbols acquired dominance through force.

10. CODECA organizes campaigns and demonstrations across Guatemala in relation to abuses of human rights for those trying to protect the environment. They also work to improve the situation of the rural poor in Guatemala, focusing on issues such as the wage conditions for farmers, land reform and nationalization of electric energy in the country. Here I refer to the regional branch of CODECA, which operates across the Petén.

11. Because of their work, members of CODECA have suffered repeated threats, harassment, persecution, and kidnappings. On 11 July 2012, human rights defender Enrique Linares, a member of CODECA, was shot dead in Zacapa in Guatemala. Furthermore, in the January before this demonstration took place (in June), Antonio Cruz Jimenez, community defender of Human Rights from Vancia Jutiapa, had been hit by a truck on his way to a demonstration the previous week. Cruz Jimenez was the leader of the central core of the organization.

12. MSF was founded when doctors and journalists returning from Red Cross service war and famine in Biafra, Nigeria became frustrated with its policy of silent diplomacy and neutrality. The founding collective, who had participated in the failed revolutions of 1968 in France, felt that the brutal effects of governmental policy on the lives and deaths of hundreds and thousands of civilians needed to be communicated to a global audience, so they combined their commitment to providing aid in war zones with a commitment to speak out about what they had seen. This distinctively political form of assistance was a founding moment in the history of western humanitarianism, and, indirectly, in the elaboration of an industry of INGOs.

13. The Q’eqchi’, whose land was given away to European colonists, had long been framed as “less indigenous,” because they lived on lowland plantations owned by colonists, as opposed to the Maya-K’iche and Kaqchikel of Guatemala’s highlands, more likely to speak Spanish, who were consistently favored by military planners. As international conservation schemes were established in the neighboring Petén, Q’eqchi’ agricultural practices, involving mixed swiddens with long fallow periods, were framed by international actors like the World Bank as “nomadic squatting” instead of knowledgeable stewardship—and as potential threats to conservation practice (Ybarra 2017, 36,40).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Naomi Millner

NAOMI MILLNER is a political and feminist geographer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. She explores the knowledge politics surrounding the making and management of global “environments” in the context of changing agendas for sustainability and changing terrains of conflict, as well as philosophical themes of politics and aesthetics. Major themes in her work include citizenship rights, legal aspects of tenure and displacement, environmental expertise, and the construction of sustainable futures – especially in relation to the movement of new paradigms for biodiversity conservation around the world. She is particularly interested in how ancient and indigenous ideas come together with new technologies and transforming economies in emerging contexts – for example, in the use of drones by rural communities in Guatemala, or the way that Madre Tierra is becoming an icon for increasingly transnational peasant movements. Geographically, Naomi’s work focuses on transforming rural environments in Latin America, especially Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador. She is very interested in emerging paradigms for inter- and transdisciplinary research and for thinking in between literary, arts, biophysical, and social scientific approaches to problems.