February 23, 2023

Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Ana Cristina Santos

Within the Mayan worldview and religiosity of different historical moments, the energy that moves the cosmos is associated with a complementary masculine-feminine duality and in equal conditions. This interpretation of the world allowed, on the one hand, that Mayan women of different times exercised various functions within the political, economic, social, and even military organization that rebelled against the Iberian occupations in the region. And on the other hand, it made room for the conception of androgynous beings with their respective symbolic positions within societies. Given this context and using a post-colonial and gender approach that is not necessarily binary, this doctoral thesis aims to build theoretical-empirical bridges through case studies on the becoming of people with subaltern sexualities -non-heterosexual and/or non-binary- crossed intersectionally with another of the invisible zones of non- being, that of the systematically precarious indigenous worlds, in this case the Mayan peoples of the Mexican southeast. This approach, together with the use of autoethnographic and autobiographical tools, were the basis for the contextualization, realization and analysis of the in-depth interviews carried out with people self-identified as Mayans -yucatecans-tseltales-tsotsiles- and with a wide spectrum of sexualities; who agreed to participate in the research carried out both in rural Mayan communities and in two urban centers with a strong colonial past in the Altos de Chiapas and Yucatán Peninsula regions. The study reflects the creation of specific ways of re-existing, joining various support networks and social struggles, as well as loving and living the fluid sexualities of the contemporary Mayans.

Keywords: Mayan identities; Sexualities; Post-colonialism; Yucatan Peninsula; Chiapas