14 - Radical Food Geographies Un/Settlings: The Weaponization of Food and its Discontents in Occupied Palestine and the Ch’orti’ Maya East

Summary

When acknowledged at all, dominant depictions of the Ch’orti’ Maya highlands along the Guatemalan– Honduran border portray an Indigenous pocket of famine and ‘premature death’ (Gilmore, 2007): barren ecosystems, tattered corn stalks on rock- stubbled hillsides, glaring sun, and Ch’orti’ Maya (heretofore Ch’orti’) families struggling to feed themselves. Hidden from view and blurred in memories are the centuries of colonization, forced labour, militarized repression, and the shifting racialized laws of citizenship these processes entailed that progressively pushed the Ch’orti’ onto less and less land in the farthest reaches of Guatemala's eastern highlands. These processes, and the ways that Ch’orti’ alternately fled land or donned mestizo (mixed blood) identities to survive, slowly severed Ch’orti’ lands, knowledges, and relations from the more diacritically visible and populous Maya peoples in the west.

In response, multilateral, bilateral, state- led, and NGO development programmes have focussed on providing food aid, agricultural training, and direct intervention – most recently to stem ‘climate migrants’. These programmes deny any kinship or spiritual relation between the Ch’orti’ and their lands, and leave untouched the ladino ‘settler’ appetite for river basin greenhouse vegetables, mountain coffee farms, and extractivist capital designs on subsoil minerals and hydropower. Further, they ignore the past and ongoing ways that Ch’orti’ people manoeuvre through and/ or contest the processes that erect barriers, assimilate, or erase Indigenous food knowledges, and facilitate the ongoing usurpation of Ch’orti’ ancestral lands by ladinos.

As part of their efforts to reclaim, rebuild, and renovate Ch’orti’ governance, knowledge, and practice, in October 2022 Ch’orti’ ancestral authorities met with a strong ally in international aid who was visiting the Ch’orti’ territory for the first time. Jenn attended the meeting, as co- founder of the Maya Ch’orti’ Pluriversity, a nascent Ch’orti’ initiative of higher education for rural Ch’orti’ based upon a horizontal relationship between Ch’orti’ and Western knowledges and epistemologies rooted in community research and practice. As the discussion turned to how the visiting institution might contribute to improving rural diets, Doña Juana, an elected Ch’orti’ authority, spiritual guide, native speaker, and expert on the nutritional and healing properties of flora, quipped: “We don't need somebody telling us what to plant or how; we know how to do that. What I want to know is on what land am I going to plant?”