Abstracts Political Science

Growing Resistance: An Ecofeminist Analysis of Seed Sovereignty in Xoy, Yucatan

by Megan Griffin

Despite political-economic pressures to adopt hybrid seed (Chambers and Momsen, 2007), the Maya of the southern Mexican state of Yucatan have managed to preserve indigenous maize varieties (Gonzalez-Valdivia et al, 2016). They have accomplished this through ancestral seed saving practices, participatory plant breeding and seed exhibitions (Llanes-Ortiz, 2015). This achievement is doubly-complicated by the tension between Maya subsistence agricultural traditions, high social and economic vulnerability in the region, and local government plans to commercialize agriculture (Plan Municipal de Desarrollo de Peto Yucatan). The survival of indigenous seed has important implications for the genetic diversity of maize, economic and climate resilience, and Maya sovereignty of cultural plant genetic resources (Bellon, et al. 2015). Few studies have examined the role of Maya women in the maintenance of traditional landraces, particularly in opposition to the challenges posed by climate change and rapid commercialization. However, a gender analysis fits this context given the endemic division of agricultural labor between men and women (Lope-Alzina 2007; de Frece and Poole 2008). This thesis examines the roles, motivations, and successes of Maya women and men in maize agriculture and seed saving, as well as how social stratification by gender moderates food sovereignty in the region. Its analytical frame integrates ecofeminism into critiques of the political-economic, technological, and social relationships between humanity and agriculture introduced by teleological modernity, and explores alternative approaches to food production, community development, and the sciences thereof. Using an ethnographic case study comprised of participant and non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews sited in Xoy, Yucatan, I find that while men overwhelmingly dominate the labor, decision-making, and activism of seed saving and renewal, there are several moments throughout the maize and seed lifecycle in which women intercede, and their participation in the cultivation, processing, and saving of seed is necessary for it to endure. Discrimination by gender undermines local efforts at seed sovereignty—women occupy a key position in the viability of native seed conservation, providing a social glue that helps to maintain Xoy’s cultural practices, knowledge, and very existence.