Enclosed

This impassioned and rigorous analysis of the territorial plight of the Q'eqchi Maya of Guatemala highlights an urgent problem for indigenous communities around the world - repeated displacement from their lands. Liza Grandia uses the tools of ethnography, history, cartography, and ecology to explore the recurring enclosures of Guatemala's second largest indigenous group, who number a million strong. Having lost most of their highland territory to foreign coffee planters at the end of the 19th century, Q'eqchi' people began migrating into the lowland forests of northern Guatemala and southern Belize. Then, pushed deeper into the frontier by cattle ranchers, lowland Q'eqchi' found themselves in conflict with biodiversity conservationists who established protected areas across this region during the 1990s.The lowland, maize-growing Q'eqchi' of the 21st century face even more problems as they are swept into global markets through the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and the Puebla to Panama Plan (PPP). The waves of dispossession imposed upon them, driven by encroaching coffee plantations, cattle ranches, and protected areas, have unsettled these agrarian people. Enclosed describes how they have faced and survived their challenges and, in doing so, helps to explain what is happening in other contemporary enclosures of public "common" space.A Capell Family BookWatch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTLvmg3mHE8

Insightful, comprehensive, and authoritative . . . Grandia has made a significant contribution to environmental anthropology and to our understanding of neoliberalism and contemporary land and labor issues in Latin America., This is a passionately written and often angry book, and the conclusion reaches a crescendo of critical outrage. Grandia is personally engaged in working with Q’eqchi’ groups seeking to resist the policies and processes that alienate people from the land and the independent livelihoods of small-farming or peasantry. [This book is a] powerful means to those ends., The book is well crafted and clearly written . . . a significant contribution to environmental anthropology and as an important ethnography about the Q’eqchi’., Enclosed would be so useful for undergrad and graduate classes in anthropology, geography, history, and sociology….Grandia and the press should be congratulated for producing this important work that will be of great utility for many years to come., A rich anthropological account of continuity, change, and contestation over vital material and social resources…[with] thought-provoking contributions to debates over the roles and applications of anthropology and anthropologists in the processes they study.

Liza Grandia is assistant professor of Native American studies at UC Davis.