Liza Grandia

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at University of California, Davis

U.S. intervention in Guatemala’s agricultural autonomy over the past 80 years has been a toxic blend of commission and omission. From the Green Revolution on, the United States has exported both harmful pesticides and ideological frameworks to persuade indigenous and other locally rooted small farmers to abandon traditional, chemical-free agricultu...

Alongside the melting of glaciers, human bodies warn of another petrochemically driven planetary crisis. Much as climate science ignored the early warning observations of Indigenous peoples, the medical establishment has oft en dismissed the canaries struggling to survive in the mineshaft of modernity. In an aleatory Anthropocene, we know not for w...

Outdoor images predominate in cultural conceptions of “air pollution,” whilst indoor air quality (IAQ) is typically tenfold more contaminated. Recent nonprofit research revealed that “green label” carpet contains up to 44 hazardous substances. How and why do school administrators not know this? When people speak colloquially about “toxic” schools,...

James C. Scott’s (1976) classic work on the Chayanovian logics of peasant economy argued that less important than the amount taken was how little might be left. A similar awareness about the paucity of the “leftovers” (li xeel, in Q’eqchi’ Mayan) has inspired a peasant federation in northern Guatemala to embrace its indigenous identity through scor...

Outdoor images predominate in our cultural conceptions of “air pollution” even though indoor air quality (IAQ) is typically tenfold more contaminated. New modeling of LA smog in Science suggests that source emissions from indoor and personal care products contribute more to that city’s infamous poor air quality than vehicular combustion. In similar...

En este artículo, producto de investigación aplicada y comprometida, ofrece un panorama actual de la situación sociedad civil de los q’eqchi’es en Petén y su influencia en el renacimiento y reforma de una cultura q’eqchi’- petenera. Como protagonista, figura la creciente Asociación de Comunidades Campesinas Indígenas para el Desarrollo Integral de...

I chronicle here how a small country defied one of the world's largest corporations and, in the process, reinvigorated civic hopes for a more democratic future. In the summer of 2014, massive mobilizations across Guatemala forced its legislature to repeal a plant varieties protection act, dubbed the 'Monsanto Law' that would otherwise have legalize...

Informed by the snail’s pace of the Zapatista ‘‘caracol’’ process and the Slow Food movement, this contribution explores the liberatory potential of ‘‘slow ethnography’’ over two decades in the Maya lowlands of Guatemala and Belize, oriented from a ‘‘hut with a view’’. Against the unbearable lightness of multi-sited imaginaries, I describe the inte...

Following Guatemala’s 1996 Peace Accords, many international donors began to finance cadastral and land regularization projects in Guatemala’s northern Maya lowlands as a critical region for biodiversity conservation. The largest of these was a $31 million project in the department of Petén, financed by a World Bank loan between 1998-2007, extended...

From the countryside to the cubicle, this contribution explores vulnerabilities to genetically modified (GM) contamination of maize landraces in northern Guatemala following the DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement). Although some industrial farmers elsewhere in Guatemala might welcome GM seeds, in this lo...

With highlights from a recent multidisciplinary study to assess the socio-economic and cultural impacts of a $31 million Land Administration Project in northern Guatemala, this paper explores the history of indigenous migration to the northern Guatemalan lowlands and reviews the socio-ethnographic typology of collective forms of tenure developed du...

From IIRSA (Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America) to the PPP (Puebla to Panama Plan, later renamed the Mesoamerica Project), development banks are sponsoring a renewed wave of mega‐infrastructure projects across the Americas to support corporate trade and commerce. Concurrent with these are donor‐led efforts to modernize land adm...

es la tierra en Petén En el 2011, un grupo de gente universitaria –entre ellos: peteneros, guate-maltecos, "gringos" y españoles, –antropólogos, geógrafos, economistas, planificadores y otras profesiones -decidieron colaborar para realizar un es-tudio, pues se quería saber más de cómo estamos en Petén. Era como una aclaración histórica de la tierra...

This impassioned and rigorous analysis of the territorial plight of the Q'eqchi Maya of Guatemala highlights an urgent problem for indigenous communities around the world-repeated displacement from their lands. © 2012 by the University of Washington Press All rights reserved.

As a microcosm of the global livestock-climate problem, this tale of two hegemonies explores how and why two critical constituencies—development planners and conservation professionals—have failed to see the “raw hides” of cattle’s impact on the Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala. Based on ethnographic research carried out between 1993 an...

"This article explores how the different elements of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC) may not be so naturally united as implied by this slogan. I trace the history and evolution of this conservation corridor from its roots in the Central American environment movement to its transformation by the World Bank into a vague bureaucratic framew...