An assembly of Maya communities defending Land-Water, promoting seedkeeping, and supporting cultural revitalization in the Mayab in southern Mexico.
About Ka’ Kuxtal
For us, as Maya, the seeds that feed us and that have accompanied our people for centuries are sacred, not only an element of production and food but a relationship with our ancestors, with the memory of our people, with our present of resistance and our future of good living.
The seeds then, represent part of our family, we are corn, corn, squash, chili peppers, tomatoes, cassava, sweet potato and dozens of other seeds, are essential for our goal as a people and as an organization we can achieve.
That is why since 2010, 24 Maya men and women from 12 communities in the region of Los Chenes, in Hopelchén, Campeche, Mexico, decided to organize and work in the defense and rescue of our native corn, because corn is the axis of our food and our life.
To achieve this we formed our organization that we named Ka’ Kuxtal Much’ Meyaj, which means “the rebirth of collective work.” We chose this name because in many of our communities collective work has been forgotten. Displaced by programs and subsidies that prioritize industrial agriculture, the collective work of our communities was considered dead, but we wanted to demonstrate, as we have done so far, that we are still here.
Mission
To build with our Maya people the educational, productive and organizational conditions towards the construction of our self-determination and autonomy.
Our first collective actions were aimed at holding native seed festivals, a space to exchange and promote seeds, the sowing of the cornfield and reflection on the problems that we live in our communities.
Over the years and due to our integral cosmovision of life, our actions have been complemented with agroecology and conservation, the defense of the territory from our rights and spirituality, economic autonomy from cooperativism, communication from below and health in the hands of the people.
We base our actions on assembly decisions and we carry them out through an operational team of young Maya people with professional training, we are proud to say that all of us in our organization are Maya. We are currently working in 17 communities in the region, encouraging community organization, calling for the defense of seeds and territory, the defense of life!
Ka’ Kuxtal Much’ Meyaj means “the rebirth of collective work” in Maya. We work in 17 communities in Campeche, Mexico, encouraging community organization and calling for the defense of seeds and territory—the defense of life!
Ka’ Kuxtal Much Meyaj Assembly
Our work together
A working group composed of representatives from the Coalition’s Structural Change Committee and Ka’ Kuxtal’s Community Assembly has coordinated joint campaigns, webinars, and strategic media outreach. A selection of these efforts include:
- A conversation on Maya-Mennonite connections, published in Anabaptist Witness.
- A series of webinars on decolonization, Indigenous self-determination, and the Doctrine of Discovery.
- Support for supply-chain accountability legislation in the European Union and member states.
- Interviews in the evangelical Mennonite Spanish-language podcast Merienda Menonita.
- Contributed essays to Die Mennonitsche Post, a German-language newspaper with readership in Low-German-speaking Mennonite colonies across the Americas.
- A joint delegation to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations in New York.
- An essay published in Sojourners Magazine.
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