Decolonizing Food Systems: Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Revitalization, and Agroecology As Counter-Hegemonic Mov..

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Decolonizing Food Systems: Food

Sovereignty, Indigenous
Revitalization, and Agroecology as
Counter-Hegemonic Mov...
Leonardo Esteban Figueroa Helland, Abigail Perez Aguilera
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Perspectives on Global Development PERSPECTIVES
ON GLOBAL
DEVELOPMENT
and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201 AND
TEC HNOLOGY
brill.com/pgdt
Decolonizing Food Systems: Food Sovereignty,

Indigenous Revitalization, and Agroecology as
Counter-Hegemonic Movements
Leonardo Figueroa-Helland
Westminster College, Salt Lake City
Lfigueroa-helland@westminstercollege.edu
Cassidy Thomas
cgt0120@westminstercollege.edu
Abigail Pérez Aguilera

aperezaguilera@westminstercollege.edu
Abstract
We employ an intersection of critical approaches to examine the global food system

crisis and its alternatives. We examine counterhegemonic movements and organiza-
tions advancing programs of constructive resistance and decolonization based on
food sovereignty, indigenous revitalization and agroecology. Food system alternatives
rooted in intersectional critiques of the world-system open spaces for materially-
grounded, commons-based socioecological relations that make just, sustainable, and
equitable worlds possible beyond a civilization in crisis.
Keywords
agroecology – decolonization – food sovereignty – food system – global crises –

indigeneity
* We would like to thank Westminster College and its Institute for Mountain Research for the
research grants that enabled field research for this project.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/15691497-12341473

174 Figueroa-Helland, thomas and Aguilera
1 Introduction: Planting the Seeds of Renewal beyond a Civilization

in Terminal Crisis
These are times of global food crisis (Gonzalez 2015; McMichael 2017). Almost
1 billion people suffer from hunger and two billion more from malnutrition,
though the world produces enough food for over ten billion, the population
expected by 2050 (Altieri and Nicholls 2012). The food crisis is part of a global
convergence of crises, examined increasingly as a world-system, planetary,
and/or Anthropocene “crisis of civilization” (Ahmed 2017, 2010; Burke et al.
2016; Figueroa-Helland and Lindgren 2016; Moore 2016; Robinson 2014). These
crises include global food, water, environment/climate, economic inequality/
financial instability, energy/mineral/resource depletion, livelihood/health,
displaced populations/migrant/refugee, and (in)security crises. Add the po-
litical volatility, marked by the legitimacy crisis of (neo)liberal and global
governance, coupled with increasingly consolidated transnational counter-
hegemonic movements, and on the other hand, rising reactionary neo-
fascisms seeking to restore the declining hegemony of anthropocentric, het-
ero/patriarchal, euro/western-centric, (neo)imperial, capitalist, industrial,
technocratic, and nation/state-centric modernity. Here we focus on the food
system crisis and how food-related movements and organizations advance
counter-hegemonic alternatives to make other futures possible.
The food system crisis largely results from a globalizing, modern-industrial
food system, increasingly consolidated through transnational corporatization
and financialization. This predominantly capitalist and state-supported sys-
tem is characterized by concentrated ownership coupled with overproduc-
tion of poor nutritional quality foodstuffs through unsustainable, energy- and
resource-intensive industrial methods with devastating environmental, cli-
mate and health effects, added to grossly unequal misdistribution perpetuating
food injustice. For over five centuries of colonialism, imperialism, “moderniza-
tion,” and globalization, this increasingly dominant food system has destroyed
and displaced small-scale producers. These small farmers and land defenders
have relied on more sustainable and equitable models of indigenous, small-
holder, and “subsistence” agriculture, agroforestry, aquaculture, gathering,
fishing, and hunting. These commons-based alternatives are often rooted
in non-anthropocentric cosmologies, agroecological farming methods, less
androcentric land-tenure, and generally congenial relations to non-human
nature. Yet they’ve been increasingly displaced by “modern natural resource
management” and industrial food production, both reliant on technocratic,
urban-centric, market-driven, and corporate/bureaucratic structures—which
perpetuate human and ecological dislocation. Recent decades have seen the
Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

Decolonizing Food Systems 175
globalization of this food system, buttressed by historically-continuing struc-

tures of power, including anthropocentrism, coloniality, patriarchy, capital-
ism and developmentalism, coupled with updated modes of accumulation by
dispossession, like neoliberal restructuring and land/water/ocean grabbing.
Besides failing to feed the world’s people, this food system propagates environ-
mental degradation, climate change, biodiversity/agrobiodiversity loss, health
problems, cultural erosion, and mass displacement/forced migration from
rural to urban areas across the Global South and to the North. Consequently,
its structural violence reinforces other crises.
We examine the intersecting structures of power underpinning the global
food system and explore how the food sovereignty movement challenges them
through alternative food systems employing small-holder, labor-intensive, and
energy-efficient diversified farming methods rooted in decolonial, indigenous
and agroecological knowledge-praxis. We support our analysis with exemplary
cases of food sovereignty movements/organizations. These cases address the
convergent crises via their social-environmental commitment to defend so-
ciobiodiversity, decolonize food systems, and nurture communal land-based
alternatives.
We first critique the hegemonic food system, employing decolonial, indig-
enous, post-development/degrowth, world-systems ecology/eco-Marxist, eco-
feminist, and posthumanist theories (Figueroa-Helland and Lindgren 2016;
Systemic Alternatives 2017). Second, we address food sovereignty, agroecology
and indigenous revitalization movements. Third, addressing themes of con-
tentious politics, resistance, and revolution we argue that counter-hegemonic
movements must not just contest and deconstruct power structures, but also
advance constructive resistance programs to open spaces for alternative/new
social relations that are radical in three senses:
a. Movements/organizations must aim towards alternative modes of social

relations that enable autonomist and commons-based livelihoods rooted
outside/beyond anthropocentric, modern, colonial, capitalist, and heter-
opatriarchal civilizational frames.
b. Movements/organizations must be (re)rooted in the land: “grounded” in
materially-viable and ecologically-sustainable Earth-based/land-based
metabolic cycles of socioecological reproduction, so they contribute to
regenerate the planet’s life-systems by interweaving human and other-
than-human into non-anthropocentric communities.
c. Movements/organizations must be (re)rooted in indigeneity: movements
must defend Mother Earth, (re)valorize indigenous peoples/cultures/
knowledges, and decolonize praxes by (re)indigenizing “all our relations”

through relationality and communality (Fenelon 2015; Maldonado et al.

2010).
We illustrate with movements/organizations advancing constructive programs

that creatively “prefigure” and devise “parallel” praxes/institutions articulating
alternative socioecological relations rooted in food sovereignty, indigenous re-
vitalization, and/or agroecology.
We conclude by reflecting on the need to look “beyond resistance” if we are
to overcome this civilizational crisis. What the constructive program of decolo-
nization, indigenous revitalization, food sovereignty, and agroecology teaches
is that to succeed in making other worlds possible, we not only need to resist
and deconstruct hegemonic systems, but also plant the seeds and nurture the
roots of alternative, ecologically-balanced viable lifeways.
2 The Global Crisis of the Modern-Industrial Food System
Despite some improvement since the 1980s and 1990s, world hunger increased
from 2015 to 2017 (FAO 2017). Globally, 795 million people suffer from hunger
(FAO 2015; Vivero 2016), two billion suffer from malnutrition, and increas-
ing numbers suffer the “diseases of globalization” (Harris and Seid 2004)—
including obesity and type 2 diabetes (Gonzalez 2015; McMichael et al. 2015;
Menser 2014). Yet hunger and malnourishment do not result from global food
shortages: we already produce 4600 kcal per person of edible food harvest,
enough to feed 12-14 billion (Vivero 2016).
The global food crisis should thus be analyzed through distribution pat-
terns. Most of the hungry and malnourished live in countries that are net food
exporters. Eighty percent of the undernourished reside in developing coun-
tries that produce over 70 percent of global food supply (Gonzalez 2015); “70%
of the hungry are themselves small farmers and agricultural laborers” (Vivero
2016). Women, indigenous peoples, and children are particularly vulnerable.
“Nearly half of all deaths in children under five are attributable to undernutri-
tion;” this entails “the loss of about three million young lives” annually; addi-
tionally, “one in four children under age five worldwide [have] stunted growth”
(UNICEF 2017). Sixty percent of undernourished persons globally are women
or girls—something particularly unjust since women produce most of the
world’s food, and undertake most unpaid care labor in homes or informal sec-
tors (Gaard 2015; Park and White 2015; Watson 2015).
The globalized modern-industrial food system not only fails to feed large
segments of the population; it also destroys ecosystems, soil fertility and

biodiversity, drives climate change, displaces communities, and erodes cultur-

al diversity. By 2012 genetically homogenous “modern” monocultures already
covered roughly 80 percent of global arable land. Moreover, the agro-industry’s
reliance on pesticides is increasing—resulting in 2.6 million tons of annual
pesticide use (Altieri and Nicholls 2012). Reliance on artificial inputs has
countless deleterious effects including biodiversity and topsoil loss, destruc-
tion of aquatic ecosystems, and insects’ development of resistance to pesti-
cides. In the twentieth century the proliferation of industrial monocultures
resulted in the loss of 75 percent of world food crop biodiversity; currently just
twelve crops supply 80 percent of global plant-based dietary energy (Gonzalez
2011). This is alarming because high (agro)biodiversity strengthens agricultural
and ecological resilience to pests, climate change, and protects farmers from
food market fluctuations (Altieri et al. 2015; Chappell et al. 2013; Gonzalez 2011;
Raworth 2012; Rosset 2011). Moreover, exposure to pesticides is linked to cancer,
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, hormone disruption, and developmental disorders
(UNHRC 2017).
The globalized food system relies on fossil fuels and greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions. The FAO (2015) calculates that at least one fifth of total GHG emis-
sions comes from agriculture, forestry, and land-use change, but acknowledges
that when incorporating other factors like fertilizer, farm equipment produc-
tion, and food transportation, emissions figures substantially increase. Others
even attribute 50 percent of GHG emissions to industrial farming (Thematic
Social Forum 2012). The expansionary industrialized food system also affects
the Earth’s ability to absorb GHG emissions. The Earth’s forests are carbon sinks,
absorbing between a quarter and third of all carbon emissions, thereby regu-
lating the Earth’s climate cycles (Adelman 2015b). Through land-use change,
industrial agriculture increases GHG emissions and weakens the Earth’s capac-
ity to absorb/mitigate them.
This expanding modern-industrial agriculture has disastrous effects on vari-
ous peoples, particularly indigenous cultures. This globalizing system relies on
incorporating new lands, which not only undermines ecosystems and biodi-
versity, but also cultural knowledge and social diversity. By incorporating new
land into the dominant food system indigenous people are often displaced
from lands that have sustained livelihoods for centuries/millennia. Depriving
communities of their land base erodes indigenous culture. What is lost are inti-
mate long-term relationships with traditional land bases fostering worldviews/
cosmologies, knowledges, and social structures attuned to local conditions.
Toledo (2001) underlines that the “remarkable overlap between indigenous ter-
ritories and the world’s remaining areas of high biodiversity” is due to “indig-
enous views, knowledge and practices in biodiversity conservation” (Pg. 451).

Indigenous knowledges and practices not only maintain, but restore, nurture,
and enrich biodiversity (Berkes 2012; Gadgil et al. 1993). Hence, “the … urgent
need for … a … bio-cultural axiom: that global biodiversity only will be … pre-
served by preserving diversity of cultures and vice-versa” (Toledo 2001:451).
Finally, while distribution patterns and inequities are currently larger prob-
lems than agricultural yields, this doesn’t mean we couldn’t face catastrophic
global food shortages resulting from deteriorated agricultural lands, ecosys-
tem destruction, biodiversity loss, climate change, and declining diversity of
agricultural knowledges and techniques. In sum, the hegemonic food system,
underpinned by unequal power relations, fails to end hunger, perpetuates mal-
nutrition, deteriorates environments, undermines diversity, triggers food cri-
ses, and endangers human-ecological resilience. Another food system is not
only possible, it’s necessary.
3 Counter-Hegemonic/Decolonial Food Movements: Food

Sovereignty, Indigeneity, Agroecology
“Food sovereignty” was popularized at the 1996 World Food Conference by La

Via Campesina (LVC)1—a decentralized international movement of food jus-
tice, indigenous, and peasant organizations. LVC defined food sovereignty as
“the right of each nation to maintain and develop its … capacity to produce its
basic foods, respecting cultural and productive diversity.” By 2001, they substi-
tuted peoples for nations because many indigenous and peasant populations
antagonize nation/state governments. Food sovereignty entails certain key
principles and demands: food as a basic human right, genuine agrarian reform,
protecting natural resources, restructuring food trade, ending the globaliza-
tion of hunger, social peace and justice, and democratic control of food sys-
tems (Fernandez et al. 2013).
Through these, food sovereignty organizations not only challenge the
modern-industrial food system, but also the international coloniality of
political-economic power embodied in the World Bank, IMF, and WTO. Their
neoliberal policies have advanced capitalism’s colonization and financializa-
tion of agriculture, facilitated industrial “Green Revolution” technologies, and
enabled corporations (often subsidized and/or supported by states) to grab/
exploit lands—mainly in the global South—in favor of the world’s most pow-
erful investors and economies. Food sovereignty responds through decolonial
indigeneity:
1 See https://viacampesina.org/en/.

… the … food sovereignty movement [expands] beyond the … bundle

of rights … attach[ed] to production and consumption, since the resur-
rection of Indigenous traditional foods and food systems is inextricable
from a … general Indigenous cultural, social, and political resurgence.
An examination of food sovereignty alongside Indigenous struggles …
reveals … that food sovereignty is the continuation of anti-colonial strug-
gles in ostensibly postcolonial contexts.
Grey and Patel 2015:433
Food sovereignty also addresses gender. Women, especially affected by a glo-

balizing food system underpinned by patriarchalism, have been at the fore-
front of resistance. LVC reflects this:
In 1996 … LVC created a Women’s Working Group (later … Women’s

Commission) to promote the participation and representation of
women … At the Rome World Food Summit (1996), women constituted
almost 40% of LVC’s delegates. They … demanded that women be grant-
ed ‘greater participation in policy …’ In 2000 … LVC committed … to …
50% participation by women at all levels …, and … decided that each …
region would … be represented by one man and one woman.
Navin 2015:90-91
LVC launched a “global campaign to stop domestic and structural violence

against women,” partnering with the World March of Women. LVC advances a
concerted effort to empower women, and challenge patriarchalism and capi-
talism, which profit from women’s social/reproductive/agricultural labor. LVC
and the food sovereignty movement combine anti/decolonial, feminist, and
anti-capitalist resistance with a constructive program of alternatives. Two such
alternatives are indigeneity and agroecology.
The close, indeed spiritual, connection between indigenous peoples and
the non-human world underpins relational non-anthropocentric cosmologies
that radically differ from Western worldviews, which view humanity as sepa-
rate from and/or superior to nature (Adelman 2015a; Cajete 2000; Fenelon 2015;
Figueroa-Helland 2012; Figueroa-Helland and Raghu 2017; Grim 2001; Pierotti
and Wildcat 2000; Stewart-Harawira 2016). Indigeneity entails an inextricable
connectedness with Mother Earth, “non-human persons,” and ecosystems.
This familial relatedness connects non-human and human animals, plants,
spirit-forces, and other manifestations (wind, water, soil, mountains, rocks,
etc.) through reciprocal relations of mutual dependence constituting webs
of non-anthropocentric communality. This communality is woven together

by the bio-metabolic and cosmic cycles, which continuously re-cycle vital en-
ergy (“spirit-force”) into infinitely diverse, yet transitory material(ized) mani-
festations. Indigenous cosmologies thus dissolve any ontological boundaries
(supposedly separating “beings,” “spaces,” and “times”) into dynamic relation-
al webs interlaced by flowing cycles of energy-spirit in continuous transfor-
mation. This cosmological connectedness fosters a responsibility to nurture
Mother Earth’s regenerative cycles so as to sustain and enrich the “Land, Air,
Water and Spirit-energy.”
These cosmologies reflect indigenous peoples’ attention to ecosystemic
interactions, leading to careful observations collected over millennia of gen-
erations living intimately with local ecosystems. These knowledges have fos-
tered diverse indigenous food cultures with gathering, hunting, agricultural,
exchange, and recycling methods suited to local environments, and feeding
sizable populations while nurturing biodiversity and ecosystem health. Hence,
agro/biodiversity and sociocultural diversity are codependent: “the preserva-
tion of traditional agroecosystems must occur alongside the maintenance of
the culture of the local people. The conservation and management of agrobio-
diversity is not possible without preserving cultural diversity” (Altieri 1989:xi).
Moreover, cultural deterioration can come with gendered impacts—e.g., as pa-
triarchal Abrahamic coloniality and patriarchal capitalist modernity imposed
themselves on indigenous Abya-Yalan cultures (Connell 2005; Lugones 2010;
Maese-Cohen 2010; Smith 2015).
Indigenous ecological knowledges have historically been dismissed as
“primitive” and “outdated.” Yet indigenous knowledges can be more sustain-
able than knowledge gathered through Western methods of “modern science”
due to the former’s cosmologically-rooted, land-based, context-responsive,
evolving and adaptive character. As opposed to modernist Western epistemol-
ogies historically built on an anthropocentric, techno-rationalist, and univer-
salist “mastery of nature” (Adelman 2015a; Cajete 2000; Gonzales et al. 2010).
Indigenous knowledges have informed complex agricultural practices:
For centuries the agricultures of developing countries were built upon …

local resources …, local varieties and indigenous knowledge, which have
nurtured biologically and genetically diverse smallholder farms with …
resilience that … help[s] adjust to … changing climates, pests, and dis-
eases. The persistence of millions of agricultural hectares under ancient,
traditional management [as] raised fields, terraces, polycultures (with
various crops … in the same field), agroforestry …, etc., document a suc-
cessful indigenous agricultural strategy and … a tribute to the “creativ-
ity” of traditional farmers … Indigenous technologies [and practices] …

reflect a worldview and … understanding of our relationship to the natu-

ral world that is more realistic and … sustainable than … [the] Western
European heritage.
Altieri, quoted in Figueroa-Helland and Lindgren 2016:456
Indigenous knowledges are often discussed alongside agroecology. While in-

digenous farming is often agroecological in its effects, the term “agroecology”
comes from a critique of modern agriculture from the margins of Western eco-
logical science. Agroecology was popularized after World War II in response
to the environmental impact of industrial agriculture. Originally, it set out to
explore environmentally-friendly food production methods through Western
ecological science. Early agroecology recognized that industrial agricultural
methods would degrade environments, rendering food production unsustain-
able, yet it still framed food as a technical issue. What separated agroecologists
from Green Revolution promoters was merely that the latter’s methods/tech-
nologies were unsustainable. Agroecologists still viewed nature as a resource
mostly seeking more “efficient” and “sustainable” exploitation.
By the 1970s and 1980s, agroecology embraced rural development studies, ge-
ography, anthropology, and indigenous agricultural knowledges. This resulted in
the integration of values like biodiversity preservation, food system resiliency,
energy efficiency, and social justice. Indigenous farming, it became obvious,
wasn’t “backward” as it uses agroecological techniques (e.g., diversified farm-
ing methods, inter-cropping, polycultures, multi-crop rotation cycles, complex
agroforestry techniques, etc.). However, while agroecology drew from indig-
enous techniques, it sidelined deeper indigenous cosmologies and communali-
ties. Today some agroecologists highlight these deeper dimensions (e.g., Altieri
and Toledo 2011) but agroecology still needs the critiques of Western philosophy,
capitalism, and hegemonic standards of civilization coming from decolonial
and indigenous perspectives. Hence we explore efforts combining indigeneity,
agroecology, and food sovereignty to find constructive resistance and decoloni-
zation programs advancing alternatives beyond a global system in crisis.
4 A Food System Revolution?
What makes food sovereignty, agroecology, and indigenous revitalization

movements distinctive is the principle that life and autonomy depend on land
and livelihood. A world beyond this civilization in crisis is possible only through
constructive programs that revitalize/(re)create food systems, which ecologi-
cally and equitably ensure the long-term viability of alternative lifeways.

Indigenous resistance hence grows from the defense of Land/Earth as the

sacred basis of life and freedom—thus the Zapatista’s “Tierra y Libertad!”2 No
counter-hegemonic resistance can sustain long-term struggle without firm
roots on the grounded necessities of material social-ecological reproduction.
Re-indigenizing entails the active and defiant restoring of our ancestral knowl-
edge that Mother Earth is the giver of life. In sum, to succeed, movements must
be radical—able to secure alternative livelihoods by (re)creating parallel in-
stitutions/praxes able to sustain themselves autonomously; and must foster
re-indigenizing cultures of resistance that defend these alternative livelihoods
against/beyond hegemonic structures.
Anticipating the global convergence of crises, counterhegemonic social
forces have solidified their challenge against the anthropocentric/patriarchal/
(neo)colonial/capitalist world-system. LVC and affiliates like Brazil’s Landless
Workers’ Movement (MST),3 or others like the Zapatistas (Chiapas, Mexico), tie
food sovereignty to defending Mother Earth, decolonization, depatriarchaliza-
tion, and indigenous revitalization (McKeon 2015; Safransky and Wolford 2011;
Starr et al. 2011). They advance creative, land-based resistance strategies/tac-
tics. For example, MST deploys sophisticated land occupation tactics preceded
by lengthy preparations to quickly establish agroecological communities—
sometimes overnight. Food system alternatives also flourish around indige-
nous paradigms like Suma Qamaña/Sumaq Kawsay, (“Vivir Bien/Living Well”)4
(Systemic Alternatives 2017). Their efforts strengthen other counterhegemonic
efforts by providing material support and organizational blueprints.
These movements/organizations advance a commons-based alternative
to address the structural drivers of multiple crises, adapted contextually to
sociobiodiversity: food sovereignty rooted in indigenous revitalization and/or
agroecology isn’t merely an alternative “food system.” While it produces “food,”
it fosters (agro)/biodiversity, polycultures, closed metabolic cycles and eco-
system restoration, coupled with labor and decision-making based on com-
munality, reciprocity, consensus, equity, and intersectional social justice. It
addresses biodiversity loss by relying on complex polycultures that nurture
complementary interactions between myriad species and ecosystems. It tack-
les the climate crisis by (re)vitalizing agro/biodiverse ecosystems that stop the
climate-related damages of monocrop/industrial agriculture, and constitute
2 “Tierra y Libertad!” often translated “Land and Liberty!” also means “(Earth) Mother and
Liberty!”
3 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (http://www.mstbrazil.org/).
4 “Vivir Bien” (Spanish)/‘Living Well” oversimplifies the indigenous Suma Qamaña (Aymara)/
Sumaq Kawsay (Quechua) (Pradanos and Figueroa-Helland 2015).

carbon sinks. It confronts the inequality crisis by enabling dispossessed peoples

(peasants, indigenous peoples, women, fisher-folk, landless rural populations)
to recover livelihoods, and ensure viable futures for their communities, start-
ing with land sovereignty. It restores dignified work by fostering communities
that control what they produce. It addresses the energy, water and resource
crises by delinking food systems from fossil-fueled industrial mechanization.
It delinks food production from industrial mining by employing natural fertil-
izers integral to closed nutrient cycles; not relying on mineral extraction (e.g.,
oil, gas, rock phosphate) on which agro-industry depends for its mechanized
processes, pesticides and fertilizers. It confronts the displacement/migration
crisis: if indigenous revitalization can succeed people will secure livelihoods,
thereby facing less pressures to leave, which counteracts the rural-to-urban
and Southern exodus. It addresses the health crisis faced by oppressed popula-
tions resulting from deprivation of sustainable, healthy and self-sufficient live-
lihoods. In sum, food sovereignty enables alternative socioecological relations
thereby tackling the convergence of crises (Altieri et al. 2015).
We now present organizations and movements for food sovereignty. They
exemplify radical counter/post-hegemonic efforts advancing grounded, land-
based programs that challenge hegemonic institutions and systems. They
open alternative spaces for revitalizing subjugated and indigenous knowledge,
deploying them to prefigure just and sustainable social-ecological relations,
which can establish the long-term material bases for responsible, commons-
based living within Mother Earth’s cycles.
4.1 Unitierra: Oaxaca

Unitierra5 is a community-based, knowledge-building space. As a parallel
institution challenging the hegemonic school/university system, Unitierra is
an autonomist alternative to modern educational institutions. Community
members, social movements, and organizations pursue collective learning and
research useful to social/environmental struggles. The curriculum isn’t hierar-
chically established. Inspired in radical democratic practice, courses/seminars
are horizontally co-created, in solidarity with the social/land/environmental
struggles of youths, indigenous peoples, peasants, women, workers, teachers,
activists, artists, and LGBTQ communities.
Unitierra emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century to resist/oppose
the modern educational system—an ideological state apparatus of coloni-
ality, capitalism, and the nation-state which, as Bonfil Batalla (2004) argued
5 We visited Unitierra—Universidad de la Tierra (Mexico, http://unitierraoax.org/) in 2013 and

2014 with student-researchers Pratik Raghu, Tori Pfaeffle, Willy Palomo, and Taylor Goldstein.

in Mexico Profundo, has employed bureaucratic-modern institutions

to de-structure indigeneity by dismantling its communal identity, non-
anthropocentric cosmologies, traditional food practices, and communal labor
and governance systems. Unitierra seeks not only to re-indianize, but also
provide horizontal, grassroots collective-learning alternatives built upon con-
sensually-formulated curricula that valorizes inherited knowledge and roots
learning in the needs of local peoples.
Unitierra gears grassroots collaborative learning towards radical systemic
transformation. Inspired by the Zapatistas’ mandar obedeciendo (“com-
mand by obeying”), Unitierra lets people decide what’s important to learn.
It reciprocates by facilitating that knowledge through collaborative learning/
praxis aimed at commoning. Commoning restores and updates ancestral
commons, and also enacts new socioecological commons based on radical
democracy and the “convivial mode of living” (Esteva 2014).6 Thus, Unitierra’s
solidarity in revitalizing indigenous comunalidad (Maldonado 2010) is inter-
culturally combined with social-ecological ways of learning and living where
the dignity and livelihood of each is affirmed through nurturing relations with
all others.
Unitierra has many programs, among them Unitierra’s collaboration with
the Zapatista Circle of Autonomous Paths and CIDECI-Unitierra Chiapas,7
Unitierra-Huitzo, Unitierra-Puebla, Unitierra-Califas (California), the Oaxaca
Water Forum, the Autonomous Center of Intercultural Creation of Alternative
Technologies (CACITA), and the Oaxacan Autonomous House of Solidarity
with Self-Managed Work (CASOTA).
We visited Unitierra-Huitzo. Huitzo is a majority Zapotec community in
Oaxaca State maintaining indigenous practices like reciprocal and cyclical
communal labor, and the consensus-based communal assembly—an indig-
enous system of shared burdens where community governance relies on rota-
tional, compulsory and non-compensated service to the community requiring
the participation of all residents (Maldonado 2010). Unitierra-Huitzo endeav-
ors to maintain and revitalize indigenous agriculture, for as Gonzalez (2001)
explains in Zapotec Science:
… possible solutions to twenty-first century agriculture might be found

among the Zapotec. They’re extraordinarily efficient consumers of food
who derive the … majority of their nutrition from maize while consum-
ing few meat products. They enjoy … high … food security because nearly
6 See http://unitierraoax.org/quienes-somos/.
7 See http://seminarioscideci.org/.

all their food is grown locally, using little fertilizer and virtually no pesti-
cide. [Their] subsistence/semisubsistence agriculture … unlike conven-
tional factory farming … [employs] local farming systems … [using] …
tried and true techniques for controlling pests without chemicals …,
managing droughts without irrigation …, feeding people without poi-
soning them, and … preserving high levels of biodiversity in and around
farms. Cutting-edge scientific work by agroecologists … researching local
[and indigenous] ecological knowledge is testimony to an interest in pro-
ducing nutritious food … sustainabl[y]—an activity … the Zapotec have
successfully engaged in for more than 5,000 years.
Pp. 24-25
Governed by a majority women council of local residents, Unitierra-Huitzo’s

constructive program advances depatriarchalization and localization. They
run workshops and courses responsive to community demands/needs, in-
cluding sustainable water capture/management, indigenous farming meth-
ods, food sovereignty, community and family gardens, ecosystem restoration,
eco-techniques, indigenous and ecological architecture, autonomy and land
defense (including institutional and non-institutional tactics), indigenous
cosmology, women’s community empowerment, etc. The “campus” is an open
space constructed by community members through communal labor, with
local materials based on eco-building techniques. It’s a practical learning space
not primarily of classrooms, but of direct relations with Mother Earth and each
other.
As a counterhegemonic space of strategic alliances among diverse move-
ments, Unitierra was integral to the 2006 Oaxaca Rebellion and its umbrella
coalition, the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO—Popular
Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) (Esteva 2011). APPO took over Oaxaca
City, establishing an autonomous commune lasting months with its own food,
labor, health, transportation and decision-making systems. APPO confederated
teachers, workers, women, youth, students, peasants, and indigenous commu-
nities, movements, and organizations throughout Oaxaca State, as they mobi-
lized to declare autonomy, expel the state, and restore syndicates, autonomist
and indigenous-style, communal self-government, including communal as-
semblies, communal labor, the rotational system of burdens, and indigenous-
based agroecological food sovereignty:
In 2006, Indigenous People, teachers, and workers in … Oaxaca rose …

against the government. They set up barricades, kicked out the police,
held assemblies and indigenous cultural festivals, and liberated villages.

Much of Oaxaca was autonomous for six months … The rebellion was
one of the most … successful … at seizing space and putting new so-
cial relations into practice, questioning government authority, capital-
ism and privatization, sexism, and the racism of colonization. They …
practice[d] … horizontal … self-organization, and … employed commu-
nal or collective ways of feeding and taking care of themselves. Many
[such practices] … were indigenous in origin.
Gelderloos 2015:973-974
After 2006 Oaxaca periodically experienced turbulent episodes of contentious

politics with organized resistance, rebellions and revolutionary aims of sys-
temic change. Unitierra continues facilitating spaces for counterhegemonic
solidarity, combative strategizing and alternative social relations grounded in
cultures of resistance underpinned by land-based understandings of socio-
ecological reproduction.
4.2 IMAP: Guatemala

IMAP8 advances a food sovereignty program revitalizing indigenous agro-
ecologies alongside permaculture and eco-techniques. IMAP emerged from in-
digenous Maya resistance following the genocidal civil war (1960-1996) waged
by the US-supported Guatemalan regime (Cohn et al. 2006; Engebretson
2015; Grandin 2010).9 It is part of a coalition of Mesoamerican indigenous
and peasant organizations committed to rebuilding land-based communi-
ties. IMAP is in Lake Atitlán, a stunning volcano-encircled Maya sacred lake
embodying Mother Earth’s fertility, located in the neotropical highlands of
Mesoamerica—a biodiversity hotspot. This biodiversity has been nurtured for
over eight millennia of indigenous land-based knowledge. IMAP is a beauti-
ful agroecological garden-workshop with modest buildings and sustainable
infrastructure, combining traditional eco-knowledge with innovative eco-
techniques. It’s an open classroom dedicated to building a network of com-
munities that revitalize the Maya cosmovision (Figueroa-Helland 2012;
Lenkersdorf 2006, 2008), and recuperate complex indigenous practices like
“Maya forest gardens,” “Maya food forests,” or the “Maya milpa” (Engebretson
2015; Ford and Nigh 2015). In these practices hundreds of plants and animal
species interact according to the “Maya complementarity principle” (IMAP
8 In 2014 and 2016 we (Leonardo Figueroa Helland and Abigail Perez Aguilera) visited the
Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (Mesoamerican Institute of Permaculture, http://
imapermacultura.org/).
9 See Films 2012a, 2012b.

2015b:4) in long-term multi-stage cycles of regeneration that nurture biodi-

verse ecosystems, provisioning communities with sustainable and healthy
food sources and materials for medicine, building, clothing, etc.
Ford and Nigh’s (2015) The Maya Forest Garden explains how Maya farmers
are the “spiritual caretakers and co-creators of the Maya forest” through the
milpa system. The milpa (from Nahuatl millipan: “cultivated place”) is a form
of perennial multi-cropping and multi-stage cyclical agriculture/agroforestry
centered on maize and at least 90 other Mesoamerican plants.
For millennia the milpa ([Maya-]Yukatek ‘kol’) has been … crucial …

in managing the neotropical woodlands of the Maya area and has
shaped and conserved forest ecosystems. The ‘high-performance
milpa’—sophisticated, intensive agroforestry—was widely practiced by
Mesoamerican[s] … The Maya milpa forest garden-cycle … entails a rota-
tion of annual crops with a series of managed and enriched intermediate
stages of short- and long-term perennial shrubs and trees … It culminates
in the reestablishment of long-lived mature canopy trees on the once-
cultivated parcel … The integration of the milpa cycle into neotropical
woodland ecology transformed the succession of plants … [forming] the
Maya forest [as] a garden where more than 90% of the dominant tree
species have benefits for humans … The traditional Maya farming system
recorded today—the complex agroforestry polyculture milpa … reflects
the sustainable agricultural strategies of the [Maya] people who [have]
lived in the forest for 8,000 years …
Pp. 41, 47, 43, 157
The term “Maya” comes from “may” (cycle), also root of mays (maize). The
Maya are “the people of the cycle (may)” (Figueroa-Helland and Raghu 2017).
The forest garden cycle was renowned among Mesoamericans, who called
Maya areas “Land of Trees”—or “Quauhtemallan,” which Spaniards altered
into “Guatemala,” and the Maya today re-appropriate as Guatemaya. Ford and
Nigh (2015) continue,
The skills and practices of the traditional Maya … provide valuable op-
tions for conservation … of the forest and its people. It is the … disap-
pearance of Maya forest gardeners—with their …traditional ecological
knowledge—that … threatens the Maya forest … If we take the … human
and ecological costs of industrial agriculture … and … compare them to
the … Maya milpa, we find that the milpa … is positive for human health
and the environment. Food produced by the milpa is of high quality, as

it is based on the natural fertility maintained in the forest garden cycle,

where regenerated woodlands continually restore minerals and organic
matter. High biodiversity assures that pesticides are unnecessary and
all wastes are recycled in the field. Water is managed by the conserva-
tion of vegetation and by the infiltration of rainwater stored in the soil.
A healthy and natural relationship is fostered for animals … attracted
to the secondary vegetation of the milpa forest garden, resulting in a …
semi-domestication based on the landscape. Dependence on fossil fuel
is nonexistent, and, far from contributing to greenhouse gas emissions,
the Maya milpa creates … long-term store[s] of carbon in the soil …
[T]hey represent … greater potential for increasing food production
through indigenous agroecological methods than industrial agriculture,
which is reaching limits … and threatening … food security.
Pp. 159, 167
IMAP’s (2015b) agro-calendar based on Maya-Kaqchikel cosmovision states:

“[t]he milpa system … vindicates the ancestral knowledges of Maya peoples,
evidencing how Maya practices … based on indigenous science … harmonize
with … ecology and … care for Mother Earth.” (Pg. 2). IMAP collaborates with
Guatemaya’s southern highland communities to foster autonomy by shifting
from cash-cropping and export-oriented agriculture, towards indigenous agro-
ecological forest-gardens and the milpa system to regenerate agrobiodiversity,
create carbon sinks, and build food sovereignty.
IMAP works at different altitudes and micro-climates to revitalize the preco-
lonial indigenous system of complementary reciprocity among communities
using vertical and horizontal zonation. It also protects seed diversity through a
communally-sustained openly accessible seed house/bank and catalog (IMAP
2012)10 alongside many initiatives to protect the sacred seed—“Q’anil” one of
20 Nahuales (sacred spirit-force-guardians) in Maya cosmovision:
Q’anil means seed, life, creation and continuation of the vital cycle, prin-
ciple of life’s unity, fertility of all living beings. We must preserve the
seed … as … natural and communal patrimony …, the originary basis of
peoples’ autonomous food sovereignty. Seed preservation … counteracts
monocultures, transgenic seeds and the contamination and depredation
of Mother Earth.
Pg. 1
10 See IMAP video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGxCi7e3MWY.

IMAP’s (2015a) initiatives to reintroduce native seeds add:
The invasion and colonization of the Americas meant for indigenous

civilizations not only socio-political domination, but … food-related
domination. European colonizers sought to exterminate native crops like
Amaranth/Bledo (Tzetz) and Chan given their significance, spiritually
and for nutritional/food self-sufficiency … For millennia Mesoamericans
considered these and other native seeds sacred.
Pg. 9
IMAP adds criticism of patriarchal arrangements imposed through Christian-

ization to enable women to reclaim spaces through indigenous Maya cos-
mology, which sees “gender” not as dichotomous hierarchical binary, but as
complementary duality of relational forces based on co-dependence for nur-
turing life and reproductive cycles. IMAP supports female land tenure through
organizations like the Association of Maya Women “Oxlajuj E.” IMAP also
joins other organizations in land-redistribution struggles, peasant resistance,
mobilization, and direct action, like the Comité Campesino de Defensa del
Altiplano (CCDA), adding indigenous-rooted agroecological food sovereignty
to strengthen resistance. Through hands-on participatory learning IMAP edu-
cates local, international, and city-dwelling visitors on revalorizing indigene-
ity, adopting land-based agroecological autonomy, rejecting racial, urban, and
Northern prejudices, and questioning industrial civilization. It also partici-
pates in transnational indigenous organizing.
4.3 PRATEC: Perú

PRATEC11 is a network of organizations and communities dedicated to revital-
ize indigenous knowledges/practices as sustainable food sovereignty alterna-
tives. Founded in 1987, PRATEC responds to the structural violence brought
by modernist developmentalism upon Andean-Amazonian environments
and indigenous/peasant populations. PRATEC’s constructive indigenous
revitalization program advances food sovereignty, agroecology, agrobiodi-
versity, self-sufficiency/autonomy, intercultural education, environmental
justice, climate mitigation/adaptation, and indigenous “living well.”12 PRATEC
11 In 2016 we (Leonardo Figueroa-Helland and Abigail Pérez Aguilera) visited PRATEC
(Proyecto Andino de Technologies Campesinas—Andean Project of Peasant Technologies,
http://pratecnet.org/wpress/inicio1/) and associated communities/organizations.
12 See PRATEC’s publications at their Documentation Center (http://pratecnet.org/wpress/
centro-documentacion/).

collaborates with others, like Unitierra, Oaxaca, and the exemplary Bolivian
AGRUCO (2011).
PRATEC works with communities across the Andean-Amazonian region
through its networked Nuclei of Andean Cultural Affirmation (Núcleos de
Afirmación Cultural Andina—NACAs). There are 19 NACAs13 across Peru, each
organization a node among numerous communities. NACAs revitalize indig-
enous “economies of nurturance,” which foster the exceptional “biocultural
diversity/sociobiodiversity” of the Andean-Amazonian region where over 80
percent of the world’s different types of ecosystems are present (CEPROSI
2015; Rengifo 2011; Van Kessel 2006). The central Andean-Amazonian region—
from Ecuador to Bolivia—has Abya-Yala’s largest indigenous populations,
ancestrally co-integrated with an impressive array of dramatically different,
yet astoundingly proximate environments. A trip from the dry Peruvian and
Atacama Desert Pacific Coast, east-northeast towards the humid Amazon
Rainforest travels through the most diverse ecosystems, biomes and climates,
including snowy peaks and glaciers, and myriad valleys at different altitudes
and latitudes showcasing a cornucopia of soil-types, micro-climates, plant and
animal species, and then to globally vital hydrographic basins—like the
Amazon and Orinoco:
The central-Andean countries are the world’s most megadiverse: with

25% of the planet’s biodiversity … The Andean Community of Nations’
territory concentrates … 16.8% of the birds, 10.5% of the amphibians
and 10.3% of the mammals from the world’s total of each … species. This
megadiversity … results from converging geographical and climatic fac-
tors favoring … a … variety of biomes, ecosystems, and habitats. This …
facilitates … the impressive biodiversity … embedded in our ancestral
Indigenous knowledges…. This, our culture’s birthplace … has … indige-
nously-nurtured vegetable species … essential for the world’s nutrition—
potatoes, maize, and 40 other essential foods constituting about 40%14 of
the plants consumed by humanity …
CAOI 2014:2, 5
The region’s indigenous peoples have historically nurtured this eco-biological

diversity (Gonzales and Gonzalez 2010), heeding vertical and horizontal zo-
nation to determine settlement patterns. Small agroecological communi-
ties (ayllus) are dispersed across diverse “ecological floors”—or “ecological
13 See http://pratecnet.org/wpress/nacas-redes/.

14 Yampara et al. 2005:130.

archipelagos,” each responsible for nurturing (agro)biodiversity therein. An

ayllu is an extended family including non-humans on equal terms with hu-
mans; it’s a community of mountains, rivers, soils, plants, humans and ani-
mals, and “natural elements” mutually tied through codependent relations of
reciprocal and complementary sociobiodiversity and through Mother Earth’s
(Pachamama’s) metabolic cycles of regeneration. Humans’ role is to labor
communally—in mutual aid as caretakers so as to nurture the cyclical regen-
eration of the lush agro/biodiverse fertility and the plentiful vitality (sumaq
kawsay/suma qamaña) of Mother Earth’s ecosystems. Ayllus are mutually-tied
through communal and reciprocity-based exchange networks of “complemen-
tary interzonal ecosymbiosis” (Delgado and Delgado 2014), forming webs of
sociobiodiverse co-dependence rooted in indigenous biocultural adaptation
to the region’s megadiversity. Within the indigenous cosmoexperience, ayllus
celebrate “mutual encounters” to communally share and exchange seeds and
products without claims to property or profit.
The colonizers, racist and ignorant of this cosmoexperience, sought to—
literally—reduce indigenous peoples into concentrated villages (reducciones)
to facilitate subjugation. PRATEC’s constructive resistance program counter-
acts coloniality by revitalizing the economy of nurturance, its celebration of
agro/biodiversity, the ayllus and networks of interzonal ecosymbiosis. We trav-
elled with NACA organizations like CHUYMA ARU (Puno) and CEPROSI (Cusco)
to various communities, which are solidifying food sovereignty, agroecol-
ogy, communal labor, communal governance, intercultural/decolonial educa-
tion, and depatriarchalization. For example, CEPROSI (Center for Promoting
Intercultural Knowledges/Wisdoms)15 helps revitalize the Watunakuy cer-
emony in Raqchi-Cusco, a paradigmatic example of interzonal ecosymbiosis.
The Watunakuy is a spiritual and material annual celebration of reciprocal and
cyclical exchange of seeds—the Mothers of life-energy—among ayllus in dif-
ferent “ecological floors” (CEPROSI 2015; CEPROSI et al. 2015; Rengifo, PRATEC
and CEPROSI 2010):
Watunakuy in Quechua means time/place of (re)encounter wherein we

voluntarily create bonds of reciprocal endearment … through visits of mu-
tual learning, sharing and exchange … It’s an ancestral Andean ritual … of
complementary exchange of seed diversity, which contributes … to the …
nurturance of biodiversity … and increases the seed variability in farmers’
15 CEPROSI—Centro de Promoción de las Sabidurías Interculturales.

chacras …,16 thus strengthening Nutritional Sufficiency in the context

of climate change … The Watunakuy … flourishes from our roots … re-
vitalizing … with strength, love, wisdom, care and respect, the path of
equilibrium with Mother Earth; thus it helps regenerate life and vitality
(Sumaq Kawsay/Suma Qamaña/Living Well) … The Watunakuy—ritual
of the Mother Seed (Kawsay Mama) for the rebirth of spirituality and
biocultural diversity—helps mitigate the ecological crisis … and joins
other intercultural efforts … in facing global challenges. Such efforts start
with revalorizing local knowledges and ancestral cultures to equilibrate
productive systems with nature and strengthen organicity to restore our
sacred relation to Pachamama …
CEPROSI 2015:5, 11, 61
Alongside the Watunkuy is CEPROSI’s work in intercultural/indigenous edu-

cation for biocultural diversity, climate change mitigation, revitalization of
indigenous geographies, and community-based indigenous film,17 all intersect-
ing with food sovereignty (CEPROSI et al. 2015). PRATEC—and the NACAs—
exemplify how to revitalize and prefigure alternative socioecological relations
radically underpinned by indigeneity, agroecology, and food sovereignty.
PRATEC’s efforts embody a constructive resistance program that materializes a
blueprint of life beyond resistance, towards Pachakuti: a turning, or revolution
of the world into a new cycle—one where other worlds are materialized.
4.4 Detroit
Detroit has faced incredible hardship at the hands of industrial capitalism.
During the 1950s, Detroit housed two million people and was one of the largest
car manufacturers globally. Since then, the city has witnessed a mass exodus
of people and capital. Today, Detroit’s population is 672,000. This exodus was
racialized, as most often whites with resources and capital could move from
the ailing city to the suburbs.
While economic decline was well underway, the 2008 economic crisis
marked industrial capitalism’s nearly full-scale abandonment of Detroit.
Estimates in 2008 placed its unemployment rate at 30 percent—nearly three
times the national average. In some neighborhoods, over two-thirds of adults
were unemployed.
16 “Chacra”: space where diverse human, non-human, and spiritual community members
complementarily interact to (re)produce vitality, nourishment, and livelihood (CEPROSI
et al. 2015; Rengifo 2011).
17 See Watunakuy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evZkH4cCRw.

Detroit’s downturn has resulted in reduced social services, increases in

crime, housing foreclosures, and little access to healthy food (White 2011).
Almost 80 percent of Detroiters have to purchase food at “fringe food retailers,”
including liquor stores, gas stations, dollar stores, etc. Black women have been
especially impacted:
52.9% of black women are defined as obese, a precursor for other

diet-related illnesses, compared to 37.2% of black men and 32.9% of
white women. Black women are two to three times more likely than white
female[s] to be diagnosed with hypertension …, [which] often leads
to cardiovascular disease … [B]lack women are diagnosed with Type 2
diabetes at twice the rate of white women and at 1.4 times the rate of
black men.
Pg. 1518
As Detroit was abandoned, a landscape of vacant lots and buildings emerged,

providing space for resistance. If only half of this vacant land were agroeco-
logically cultivated, it could provide two-thirds of Detroit’s fresh vegetables
and 40 percent of fresh, non-tropical fruit. Black women have seized this
opportunity to grow food for their communities and simultaneously resist
capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. Agroecology, besides providing fresh pro-
duce, helps reclaim Black histories and African indigenous cultures. One in-
terviewee stated, “Resistance started before enslavement ended. When our
ancestors were kidnapped … they stowed seeds … native to … areas … they
were taken from. These foods are staples in our diet … they were holding on to
their culture … to home” (quoted in White 2011:20). Another interview shows
spiritual thinking comparable to Abya-Yalan indigeneity: “My father had just
passed and I came … to D-Town [Farm]. The women told me, ‘you need to get
in the dirt.’ I needed to literally … connect with … the original mother [Earth]”
(White 2011:23).
In 2017 we19 visited some of Detroit’s exemplary food sovereignty organi-
zations: D-Town Farm,20 Feedom Freedom,21 and RaizUP. Conversing with
Malik Yakini, founder of Detroit’s Black Community Food Security Network
(DBCFSN),22 D-Town Farm, and former Black Panther, we learned of this
18 Source: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005-2006.

19 Leonardo Figueroa-Helland and Abigail Perez Aguilera—alongside James Perkinson.
20 See http://www.d-townfarm.com/.
21 See https://feedomfreedom.wordpress.com/about/.
22 See https://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/.

project’s roots in African Diasporic history, struggles against slavery, and efforts
to recover African indigenous knowledges to create decolonial Afrocentric al-
ternatives by connecting people to land via healthy, ecological community
labor. Yakini emphasized that restoring healthy relations to land is particu-
larly challenging but powerful for Black people whose ancestors were ab-
ducted from their indigenous lands. The specter of slavery and the plantation
is a major obstacle to overcome when seeking to restore African-American
peoples’ relations to land and food. D-Town and the DBCFSN open spaces for
black communities to restore these relations through historically critical and
emancipatory Afrocentric food sovereignty. This recovery of indigenous roots
and land-relations for Blacks requires both revitalizing African-American links
to Africa and nurturing relations to indigeneity in the Americas. Black food
sovereignty thus requires the radical reconfiguring of Black relations to agri-
culture, marred by enslavement histories, and ongoing colonial, racial, gender
and class oppressions. Beyond food sovereignty, DBCFSN is an anti-racist, anti-
imperialist project against ongoing racialization. D-Town Farm is not just rich
in agroecological knowledge, it’s a space of emancipation, autonomy, and dig-
nity attuned to historically-ongoing struggles.
D-Town Farm/DBCFSN exemplify how US agroecology movements can
overcome the lack of deeper critiques of Western worldviews, philosophies,
and lifestyles. Some “alternative” food projects are touted as providing “jobs”
to struggling communities by attracting new income, capital, and resources to
produce market-friendly commodities. Ironically, this can facilitate capitalism’s
expansion into a new industry/market—smallholder/urban/community agri-
culture. But the cultural revitalization and spiritual reorientation of D-Town
farmers suggests that deeper critiques of capitalism, patriarchy, and anthro-
pocentrism are possible within certain enclaves of US society—particularly in
marginalized communities.
Wayne and Myrtle Curtis of Feedom Freedom underline that the alter-
natives Detroiters are planting lay blueprints for the future of other urban
(post)industrial centers in the face of energy descent/transition. Afro-Latinx/
Chicanx artist-turned-urban-agriculturalist Antonio Cosme of RaizUp notes
that decolonial projects, like food sovereign urban agriculture, lay the ground-
work for sustainable futures beyond a modern-industrial urban civilization
facing epochal decline. Detroit’s so-called “(post)industrial apocalypse” cou-
pled with Mother Earth’s power to reclaim space, aided by radical grassroots
movements, may foretell the future of urban industrial centers as we face en-
vironmental and capitalist crises coupled with political upheavals. In Detroit’s
constructive resistance we find the “Mother Seeds” for blossoming futures.

Finally, decolonizing food demands revitalizing local indigeneity. While in

mashigaame—Ojibwa for “land of big lake(s),” root of “Michigan” (Avila 2016),
we learned that urban food sovereignty projects nurture relations with local
indigenous revitalization projects (Whyte 2015), like the Great Lakes Intertribal
Food Summit hosted by Jijak Foundation23 at Gun Lake Tribe. Jijak’s 2016 Food
Summit program statement summarizes the spirit of constructive resistance
through indigenous agroecological food sovereignty:
Jijak … was established with the … idea that cultural values and tradi-
tional knowledge, carried by those for generations before us, hold the so-
lutions to the challenges we face …Food is the … link between ourselves
and the land. It is … critical … [to] our identity, spirituality, community
relationships, health, environmental wellbeing and sovereignty. In recog-
nizing the importance of food to our community …, [we] place … food
sovereignty … at the … center … We are proud … that our … steps in re-
storing our community’s traditional food-ways are … part of a broader …
indigenous foods movement.24
5 Conclusion: Beyond Resistance, Everything
The globalized food system is built upon a complex intersection of deep power
structures: anthropocentrism, patriarchy, coloniality, eurocentrism, structural
racism, industrial and developmental modernism, capitalism (including its lat-
est stage—neoliberalism), and the Westphalian nation-state system (Adelman
2015a; Figueroa-Helland and Lindgren 2016; Moore 2016; Peterson 2010). These
infrastructures underpin a mode of civilization whose aggressive globaliza-
tion has sought to colonize the planet by subjecting both humans and nature
to a world-system that accepts no alternatives. Indeed, it works actively and
oppressively to undermine and destroy alternatives, often under the guise of
“civilization,” “progress,” “modernization,” “development,” and “globalization”.
Yet, these infrastructures underpinning the world-system and its totalizing
logic rely on exclusionary and exploitative logics that exhaust the planetary
and human metabolisms, the two main sources of reproductive and produc-
tive labor on which the world-system depends. This triggers the “two major
contradictions of capital” where capital erodes what it ultimately depends
23 See https://iacgreatlakes.com/tag/jijak/.

24 See https://iacgreatlakes.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/summit-program_online.pdf.

on: the labor of Mother Earth and humanity. This causes the epochal cluster
of systemic disruptions, the global convergence of crises, the planetary crisis of
civilization (Foster et al. 2010; Moore 2016; Salleh 2010).
The global food crisis also results from these infrastructures, reinforced
through complex feedback loops. These systemic crises signal a transitional
period marking the social-ecological limits to a world-system—and indeed,
a civilizational epoch inevitably coming to an increasingly turbulent end
(Ahmed 2010, 2017; Figueroa-Helland et al. 2016; Garcia-Olivares and Sole 2015).
The role of counter-hegemonic movements and organizations advancing food
sovereignty alternatives based on indigeneity and/or agroecology is to plant
the seeds of resilient, land-based, communal alternatives. Such efforts enable
grounded, materially-viable, energy-efficient livelihoods. They go beyond resis-
tance through constructive programs articulating alternative socioecological
relations outside anthropocentric, modern/colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist
frameworks. They demonstrate that to make other worlds possible, we must
invest our energy and creativity not only in resisting and deconstructing he-
gemonic structures, but also in proposing, revalorizing, prefiguring, creating,
and securing alternative, socially-just, ecologically-balanced and materially-
viable alternative lifeways. As Arundhati Roy stated, “another world isn’t only
possible, she is on her way.” So we cry, with the Zapatistas, from the roots of
over 500 years of indigenous resistance: “Beyond Resistance, Everything”
(Subcomandante Marcos 2014).
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Polit ical Agroecology in Mexico: A Pat h t oward Sust ainabilit y

Decolonizing Food Systems: Food Sovereignty,

Abigail Pérez Aguilera

We employ an intersection of critical approaches to examine the global food system

agroecology – decolonization – food sovereignty – food system – global crises –

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/15691497-12341473

1 Introduction: Planting the Seeds of Renewal beyond a Civilization

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

globalization of this food system, buttressed by historically-continuing struc-

a. Movements/organizations must aim towards alternative modes of social

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

through relationality and communality (Fenelon 2015; Maldonado et al.

We illustrate with movements/organizations advancing constructive programs

2 The Global Crisis of the Modern-Industrial Food System

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

biodiversity, drives climate change, displaces communities, and erodes cultur-

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

3 Counter-Hegemonic/Decolonial Food Movements: Food

“Food sovereignty” was popularized at the 1996 World Food Conference by La

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

… the … food sovereignty movement [expands] beyond the … bundle

Food sovereignty also addresses gender. Women, especially affected by a glo-

In 1996 … LVC created a Women’s Working Group (later … Women’s

LVC launched a “global campaign to stop domestic and structural violence

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

For centuries the agricultures of developing countries were built upon …

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

reflect a worldview and … understanding of our relationship to the natu-

Indigenous knowledges are often discussed alongside agroecology. While in-

4 A Food System Revolution?

What makes food sovereignty, agroecology, and indigenous revitalization

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

Indigenous resistance hence grows from the defense of Land/Earth as the

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

carbon sinks. It confronts the inequality crisis by enabling dispossessed peoples

4.1 Unitierra: Oaxaca

5 We visited Unitierra—Universidad de la Tierra (Mexico, http://unitierraoax.org/) in 2013 and

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

in Mexico Profundo, has employed bureaucratic-modern institutions

… possible solutions to twenty-first century agriculture might be found

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

Governed by a majority women council of local residents, Unitierra-Huitzo’s

In 2006, Indigenous People, teachers, and workers in … Oaxaca rose …

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

After 2006 Oaxaca periodically experienced turbulent episodes of contentious

4.2 IMAP: Guatemala

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

2015b:4) in long-term multi-stage cycles of regeneration that nurture biodi-

For millennia the milpa ([Maya-]Yukatek ‘kol’) has been … crucial …

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

it is based on the natural fertility maintained in the forest garden cycle,

IMAP’s (2015b) agro-calendar based on Maya-Kaqchikel cosmovision states:

10 See IMAP video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGxCi7e3MWY.

Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17 (2018) 173-201

IMAP’s (2015a) initiatives to reintroduce native seeds add:

The invasion and colonization of the Americas meant for indigenous

IMAP adds criticism of patriarchal arrangements imposed through Christian-