Maize and Memory: Maya Cosmology and the Refusal of Cheap Nature in Zapatismo

• In Event: Sovereign Stories: Indigenous Medias and Narratives

Abstract

This paper examines how the Popol Vuh and Zapatista storytelling articulate K'iche Maya ecological worldview as an ongoing refusal of capitalism’s rendering of land as “cheap nature.” Contemporary ecological crisis is inseparable from extractivist logics that require land to be treated as passive, infinitely available, and stripped of agency. Against this ontology, Indigenous cosmologies across Mesoamerica articulate relational understandings of land grounded in reciprocity and more-than-human agency. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s archive/repertoire framework, I treat the Popol Vuh as an archival survival produced under colonial rupture and Zapatista storytelling as repertoire that reanimates similar cosmological grammar under neoliberal conditions. Through close reading of creation narratives, the Hero Twins, and key Zapatista stories, I identify three shared ethical commitments: maize-being and reciprocity, recognition of nonhuman agency, and humility over domination. Together, these commitments challenge extractivist ontologies by centering land as communicative, relational, and ethically binding. Rather than claiming direct textual transmission between the Popol Vuh and the EZLN, I theorize cosmological resonance to explain how regional Mesoamerican relational horizons are activated in Zapatista political pedagogy and ecological practice. Extending Taylor, I argue that within Maya relational ontologies land itself functions as an archive, and narrative performance becomes the means through which ecological memory is continually brought into the present. In this framing, resistance appears not as episodic rupture but as the perpetuation of relational worldmaking across colonial and neoliberal forms of extraction.

Author

• Ashley Garcia, Binghamton University