Tag: Guatemala

Following the Man in the Maze

Will Baynard This past semester, after three years of coursework and preliminary research, I became a doctoral candidate in the UW–Madison Anthropology department. In my doctoral research, I explore concepts of sovereignty and governance expressed by members of the Tohono O’odham, an indigenous group with communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. My proposed …

Notes from the Field: Everyday Performances of the Guatemala-Mexico Border in the Selva Lacandona

Alicia Barceinas Cruz Early one morning in June, I joined a group of volunteers to work on a potrero (a piece of land with cattle pasture) neighboring the Guatemala-Mexico border. We spent the previous afternoon carefully packing seedlings of tropical trees in a rustic nursery in the Selva Lacandona, in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. …

Food, Medicine, or Poison?: Understanding Relationships Between Apazote (Dysphania Ambrosioides) and Communities Across Guatemala

Tabitha Faber One of the hallmarks of colonialism, and of Western hegemony embedded within colonialism, is the impulse to essentialize in order to assimilate. Ideas, technologies, and lifeways from other cultures are broken down to their smallest parts to more easily integrate them into one totalizing Western framework. One framework, though, cannot hold the vast …

Regresando a las Raíces: Lecciones Aprendidas de un Intercambio de Campesino-a-Campesino en Guatemala

Claudia Irene Calderón, Margaret Baker, Otilio Marcelino Bravo Roblero, Gaby Nathaly Castillo Valle, Carlos Humberto Ramírez Santiago Motivados por un afán de trabajar de forma recíproca con nuestros colaboradores en Guatemala decidimos organizar un intercambio de Campesino-a-Campesino (iCaC) coordinado y financiado por varios fondos de la Universidad de Wisconsin-Madison y en colaboración con miembros de …

En Tiempos de Pandemia: Guatemalan Campesinos Revalue Bartering as a Traditional Practice

Anika M. Rice The global spread of Covid-19 in early 2020 led to travel and market restrictions that impacted food systems across Latin America (FAO & ECLAC; Tittonell et al.). Guatemala’s nation-wide curfew and myriad restrictions on movement created a distinct economic shock, shaping this pandemic era, or ‘tiempos de pandemia.’ In a study on …