About the Event

Kernels of Resistance:  How Social Movements Can Win

Right before the 2014 World Cup, US trade interests pressured Guatemala’s legislature into lifting its national ban on genetically modified (GM) crops and criminalizing traditional seed saving practices. Maya elders responded with a campaign of mass civil disobedience, blocking highways until the Guatemalan Congress repealed this “Monsanto Law.” Uniting rural and urban Guatemalans, this uprising spotlighted the existential threat of GM corn to the livelihood, dignity, and cultural heritage of maize-producing milperos (small farmers) throughout Mesoamerica. Ten years later, Mexico is also facing down US trade aggression to defend a 2020 presidential ban on the import of GM corn for human consumption.

Liza Grandia chronicles how diverse coalitions in Mexico and Guatemala have defended their sacred maize against corporate threats to privatize it. Rather than just “voting with their forks” like the consumer-driven US food movement, Mesoamerican farmers and their allies have voted with their feet through direct action. In a world of interconnected trade, their victories chart a path that other food movements might follow. They also show how everyday people can demand better regulatory protections for environmental health and forge more climate-resilient agricultural systems with native seed saving.

Dramatic and timely, Kernels of Resistance celebrates this Indigenous triumph over corporate greed.

About the Author

For the last three decades, Dr. Liza Grandia (Professor and Chair, Department of Native American Studies at the University of California-Davis) has collaborated as an activist-scholar with Indigenous, environmental, social, and agrarian justice movements in the California-Berkeley in 2006. She is the author of two prior books about Maya struggles for territorial autonomy and human rights based on seven years of fieldwork. Her third book, Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power is a David and Goliath story about how Indigenous movements defied one of the most powerful corporations on the planet and won. As a survivor of cancer, Long Covid, and a campus injury resulting in multiple chemical sensitivity, she brings to her work a passion for environmental health and “canary science.” Turning these lemons into lemonade, Grandia was awarded a national Mellon Foundation “New Directions” 2017-18 for transdisciplinary training in toxicology and environmental epidemiology for her research into Indigenous resistance to pesticides and other corporate and development hazards. As founder and coordinator of the Q’eqchi ’Scholars Network, she mentors younger scholars to put their research into service of Indigenous and environmental justice movements.