Mesoamerica is today subject to considerable territorial and political transformations. A newly published book emerges from these deep entanglements to critically explore the region’s borderlands, remoteness, geopolitics and conservation.
The new book, The Maya Forest Waterlands: Shared Conservation, Entangled Politics and Fluid Borders, shows how transboundary conservation shapes natural resource politics and geopolitics typically based on borderings. Authored by Senior Researcher Hanna Laako at the University of Eastern Finland and by Senior Researcher Edith Kauffer at CIESAS, Mexico, the book has just been published in the Routledge Studies in Conservation and the Environment series.
The Maya Forest is a concept created by scientists and conservationists in the 1990s to protect the tropical rainforest and the Mayan ruins found within in the borderlands of Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. The book shows how the Maya Forest was built as a result of collaboration between archaeologists, anthropologists and natural scientists. As a space, the Maya Forest invites to rethink the role of knowledge production in a region actively mapped as an eco-region and a biodiversity hotspot by conservationists, as well as the Mayanists conducting long-term archaeological research in the area. The active knowledge production forms its own power relations that shape the imaginaries related to the region and also the use of lands and natural resources.
Conservation and knowledge production are entangled with other contemporary transformations related to these borderlands. At the moment, tourism urges changes related to cultures, livelihoods, gentrification and mobilities. The drug cartels and criminal groups are expanding in all the border areas of the region, complicating both conservation, lives and livelihoods. The authors shed light on how the Maya Forest, often considered peripheral and even mystical, is also a discourse to promote new developmental agendas. One example is the Maya Train, a major railway infrastructure project, inaugurated in the Yucatán Peninsula, which stirs debates and shapes geopolitics of the region.
The authors also reflect upon what is left underfoot in the Maya Forest conceptualization. Traditionally, Borderlands Studies have examined supposedly remote areas and peoples, including Indigenous people, as critical edges or counter-narratives. However, the new book suggests how easily the voices of contemporary Mayas are excluded in the Maya Forest narratives. Yet, the region includes various Mayan and Indigenous struggles: In Belize, the Maya movement has conducted counter-mapping to defend Indigenous rights while in Mexico, Indigenous people have criticized bioprospecting.
One of the most important outcomes of the book is the visibilization of the silenced history of chewing-gum collectors. Chewing-gum collectors, chicleros, have impacted the region for over a hundred years, forming new forest communities, building ecological knowledge and creating transboundary trails that are now being used by conservationists and archaeologists to safeguard the Maya Forest.
The authors also introduce a novel concept of forest waterlands, which incites to rethink the existing categories as entangled and blurred. Natural resource politics, in particular, is traditionally divided into specific units: water, forests and land use policies. However, in the Maya Forest Waterlands, these categories are fluid and entangled. The authors highlight that this kind of transboundary analysis of forest waterlands is a significant, new issue area in research concerning biodiversity.
The book is based on the long-term, transboundary and hands-on experience by its authors. There is an open access version available for this title. The authors have also produced a video related to the Maya Forest in English, with Finnish and Spanish subtitles available.
The book and the transboundary research conducted for this publication have been funded by the Kone Foundation in Finland through a grant awarded to Laako’s project “Political Forests – the Maya Forest”, as well as by the Department of Social Sciences and the Department of Historical and Geographical Studies of the University of Eastern Finland.