Community organization and socio-environmental conflict in Indigenous communities in Mexico

By Carlos Alberto López Arcadia

Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) across Latin America have challenged static, strictly physical definitions of landscape. Instead, they understand landscapes as relational and dynamic, continuously shaped by lived experience, collective labor and complex interactions with both internal and external actors. However, these relational landscapes are increasingly under pressure. Extractivist projects and conservation initiatives often treat local landscapes as empty spaces for exploitation or protection, disregarding local governance systems, culture and well-being. In response, IPLCs are designing and enacting alternative territorial models rooted in ecological justice, self-determination and their own ways of living.

Supported by the Landscape Research Fund, this project investigates how community organization unfolds within socio-environmental conflict matrices in two distinct Indigenous contexts in Mexico: the mountainous Sierra de Zongolica in Veracruz and the karst plains of the Yucatán Peninsula.

Background and Context

Socio-environmental conflicts emerge when development interventions exacerbate local struggles by reshaping landscapes and altering the conditions in which people make a living. However, these conflicts often act as catalysts that reshape community organisation, leading to the formulation of territorial alternatives that negotiate with or directly confront the power structures that triggered them. Rather than viewing conflict solely as a site of disruption or a single, isolated event, this study examines conflict as a complex matrix constructed over time and across broader spatial scales. The two study sites illustrate contrasting yet interconnected socio-spatial dynamics:

• Sierra de Zongolica (Veracruz): A high-altitude, topographically complex landscape where Nahua communities navigate historical and present-day pressures related to coffee production, their main source of livelihood.
• Yucatán Peninsula: A karst ecosystem where Maya communities face rapid land-use transformations driven by historic production regimes (such as henequen haciendas), industrial farming expansion, megaprojects, and conservation models that impact local livelihoods.

In both regions, community organisation continuously responds to both extraterritorial forces (such as state policies, global commodity chains, or development programs) and territorial practices grounded in everyday life and local governance.

Participatory Methods and Movement-Based Tools

To examine how socio-environmental conflicts are constructed across space and time, and how community strategies are shaped by both conflict and local aspirations, we used participatory and movement-based methods. These tools ensure meaningful, non-extractive, and participatory knowledge production. Furthermore, as we discovered during fieldwork, they provide the flexibility needed to respond organically to the fluctuations of local organisational processes:

• Circles of dialogue: Structured group conversations guided by community protocols of respect and collective decision-making. They serve as spaces for collective reflection, deliberating on historical and current conflict, and articulating territorial aspirations.
• Walking interviews: Conducted directly on the land, these embodied interviews allow researchers and community members to rediscover and “story” the land together, uncovering histories embedded directly in the landscape.
• Participatory mapping: Group sessions using maps, spatial data, and oral histories to synthesise spatial relationships, traditional land uses, and zones of conflict or mobility.

Key Findings

The Landscape in Constant Motion

Walking through the land revealed a layered landscape in which past and present stories of transformation are interwoven. Moving through it alongside local residents uncovered stories of spatial change, showing how landscapes are continually shaped by economic and political shifts and how socio-environmental conflicts develop across time and space.

The Triple Movement within Landscapes

Implementing movement-based methodologies we identified three interconnected shifts relevant for landscape research:

1. Bodily movement: Moving physically across the landscape helps to reveal embodied knowledge. As one participant noted during an interview, it was more natural for him to talk while walking than in a traditional interview or workshop setting. Walking brought to mind stories and insights that otherwise would not have surfaced.
2. Historical movement: Moving through the landscape brings landscape elements, such as landmarks, trees and other plants, and paths, into focus, uncovering stories of past transformations embedded within the land.
3. Epistemic and ethical movement: Walking through the land in the company of community members transforms the researcher’s gaze, shifting from static expectations of landscape and organisation toward a more dynamic and complex understanding. This re-framing allows conflict to be understood as a long-term construction spanning temporal and spatial scales far beyond the immediate present and local boundaries.

Among these shifts, we found that state-owned companies regulating cash crops — such as coffee in Zongolica and henequen in Yucatán — had an immense influence on community organisation and land-use dynamics prior to the 1990s. Subsequently, neoliberal policies dismantled these state enterprises, forcing communities to adopt new organisational strategies involving extra-local strategic alliances and transforming patterns of human mobility in the process. Community organisation, therefore, is not static, but a process continuously negotiated with and against external forces and informed by local aspirations.

Implications for Landscape Research

This study highlights the importance of adopting flexible, movement-based methodologies in landscape research. By stepping away from rigid, top-down analytical frameworks and walking alongside communities, we were able to better understand how land governance is continually negotiated and practiced within conflict matrices. Claiming space for communities to listen to, map, and govern their own landscapes on their own terms remains essential for achieving spatial, ecological, and epistemological justice.

Acknowledgments

This project was developed in collaboration with Tlacaélel Rivera Núñez, Jaime Paneque Gálvez, Martha Bonilla Moheno, Malena Oliva, Damián Xotlanihua Flores, and U Yich Lu’um A.C. We express our sincere gratitude to the Landscape Research Group for making this project possible.