• 00:01 We are Maya, we are not Indians
  • 00:39 Intro
  • 03:16 The ontology of the colonial process: Indians as servants
  • 07:23 Mechanisms of subjugation and ongoing plunder. Racism: species and races
  • 11:27 Whites who go to Latin America to rule. Racism: ethnic groups
  • 15:43 War and the Indian genocide in Guatemala
  • 17:15 We are no longer Indians, we are Maya.
  • 21:30 We need to rename what is happening: violence, domination, and ongoing colonial plunder.
  • 24:25 Decolonisation. Dismantling that which brings about our subjugation
  • 25:52 Polytheism and plurality. The Popol Vuh
  • 32:14 What was going on with the Europe that made its way to Latin America? Inquisition. Patriarchy. Violence. Colonialism. Subjugation
  • 37:16 Capitalism is inseparable from colonialism and patriarchy
  • 41:05 There is a feminism that transmits racist colonial aims in its struggles
  • 43:49 We Mayan women fight as a people and a community
  • 46:07 San Miguel Ixtahuacán and the Marlin mine
  • 52:40 The cement factory at San Juan Sacatepéquez. The Xinca people and the San Rafael mine. Colonialism is now
  • 55:47 Knowledge that has made the life of the indigenous people possible
  • 60:19 We weave our own clothes. Mayan forms of justice
  • 61:02 Midwives. The system denies and persecutes knowledge
12/09/2019 66' 54''
Spanish

Aura Cumes is a Maya Kaqchikel researcher, teacher, writer, and activist from Guatemala. Her defense of the social and political rights of indigenous peoples is based on dismantling the three major systems of domination, plunder, and expropriation that have been used to subjugate Latin American societies since the 16th century: colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Aura Cumes defends a Maya identity that goes beyond the bounds of the strictly cultural in order to create a political, collective "we" that can consider what the Maya want to be now, while also recovering the capacity to write their own history. In this podcast, Aura Cumes charts a lucid historical path through colonial processes, analysing the mechanisms of control, violence, and dispossession that have perversely shaped the identity of the native-servant, relegated in favour of the progress and well-being of white men, their families, and their capital. Racism and sexism thus progress side by side, in a web of exploitation in which hierarchies often overlap.

Aura Cumes also talks about the ontological multiplicity that stems from the "Popol Vuh", the sacred book of the Maya; she discusses the particularities of the struggles of indigenous women, who cannot simply add their own demands to those of white feminism which reproduces the scourges of colonial racism; and she recounts some of the resistance strategies being used by the Maya peoples –particularly Maya women– to defend their lands, their natural resources, and their ways of life.

Son[i]aAura Cumesindigenous movementsmost listened podcasts 2019anti-racism

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