The Reclamation of Colonial Cattle Haciendas for Yucatec Maya Environmental Justice with Chelsea Fisher

As part of its open house on Wednesday, October 14, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology invites you to a talk by Chelsea Fisher (University of South Carolina), entitled The Reclamation of Colonial Haciendas for Yucatec Maya Environmental Justice. The lecture will take place from 6:00–7:00 pm in Fowler A139. For more information, please see the abstract below.

Abstract:

When grants of agricultural land (ejidos) were distributed in rural Yucatán following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), many Indigenous Yucatec Maya communities inherited the ruined remains of colonial ranching estates (haciendas). This talk uses archaeology to examine how cattle haciendas, once leveraged to dispossess Indigenous lands, have been reclaimed as sites for collective Yucatec Maya environmental justice. Based on ongoing archaeological fieldwork and analysis, I offer a long-term view of hacienda reclamation at Cetelac, a colonial cattle hacienda founded on the site of a precolonial Maya city and now owned collectively by the Yucatec Maya community of Yaxunah. I examine how reclamation practices at Cetelac – such as the rehabilitation of colonial corrals, experiments with wildlife conservation, and the rejection of a neoliberal road-building project – have transformed the hacienda into a site of future-oriented liberation, even as Yaxuneros face modern campaigns to privatize their lands. I explore how the reclamation of haciendas galvanizes collective commitments to Yucatec Maya land sovereignty by creating possibilities for plantation afterlives – and how archaeology can help us understand the long-term dynamics of these environmental justice movements.