Recipes for Recovery: The Territories and Traditions of Maya Women after a Disaster

Abstract (English)

After a deadly landslide, triggered by a days-long accumulation of rain, destroyed the town of Panabaj in 2005, 900 displaced Maya Tz’utujil families were resettled in Chuk Muk, located between Tolimán Volcano and Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. In this research project (2023-205), we worked with a group of Tz’utujil women in Chuk Muk, whose history is entangled in disaster. The research was developed as a participatory and collaborative process where the main objective was to explore, from a feminist geographical perspective, how the agrifood traditions of these women make possible the continuous (re)production of Maya ways of life in post-disaster contexts. To do that, we proposed to understand women’s experiences of (re)inhabiting a territory after a disaster, by looking at the links between memories and plants, and their agrifood knowledges. The collaborative nature of our approach allowed us to (re)structure our aims with an ambition to question our own positions as researchers and engage a decolonial approach. In this presentation, I will address our “Recipes for Recovery”, a research process built around food, plants, and the women’s journeys after the disaster. When conversing about plants and recipes, and the general process of plant growing and food making, these women reclaimed their land and their traditions by reappropriating and consolidating the knowledges from their mothers and grandmothers. Through their home gardens and their everyday embodied practices, these women are creating a continuity of their Tz’utujil ways of life.