Sam R. Sweitz

Interrogating Social Sustainability in the Biofuels Sector in Latin America: Tensions Between Global Standards and Local Experiences in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia.

Across the Americas, biofuels production systems are diverse due to geographic conditions, historical patterns of land tenure, different land use patterns, government policy frameworks, and relations between the national state and civil society, all of which shape the role that biofuels play in individual nations. Although many national governments throughout the Americas continue to incentivize growth of the biofuels industry, one key challenge for biofuels sustainability has been concern about its social impacts. In this article, we discuss some of the key social issues and tensions related to the recent expansion of biofuels production in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. We argue that a process of “simplification” of ecological and cultural diversity has aided the expansion of the biofuels frontier in these countries, but is also undermining their viability. We consider the ability of governments and non-state actors in multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI) to address social and environmental concerns that affect rural livelihoods as a result of biofuels expansion. We analyze the tensions between global sustainability standards, national level policies for biofuels development, and local level impacts and visions of sustainability. We find that both government and MSI efforts to address sustainability concerns have limited impact, and recommend greater incorporation of local needs and expertise to improve governance.

Sustainable Development for Whom and How? Exploring the Gaps between Popular Discourses and Ground Reality Using the Mexican Jatropha Biodiesel Case

In the last decade, jatropha-based bioenergy projects have gotten significant attention as a solution to various social, economic, and environmental problems. Jatropha’s popularity stemmed out from different discourses, some real and some perceived, in scientific and non-scientific literature. These discourses positioned jatropha as a crop helpful in producing biodiesel and protecting sustainability by reducing greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels and increasing local, rural development by creating jobs. Consequently, many countries established national policies that incentivized the establishment of jatropha as a bioenergy feedstock crop. In this paper, we explore the case of jatropha bioenergy development in Yucatan, Mexico and argue that the popular discourse around jatropha as a sustainability and rural development tool is flawed. Analyzing our results from 70 semi-structured interviews with community members belonging to a region where plantation-scale jatropha projects were introduced, we found that these projects did not have many significant social sustainability benefits. We conclude from our case that by just adding bioenergy projects cannot help achieve social sustainability in rural areas alone. In ensuring social sustainability of bioenergy projects, future policymaking processes should have a more comprehensive understanding of the rural socioeconomic problems where such projects are promoted and use bioenergy projects as one of the many solutions to local problems rather than creating such policies based just on popular discourses.

On the Periphery of the Periphery

The title of this book, On the Periphery of the Periphery, is a not so subtle allusion to the nature of historical relationships, first between the Yucatan Peninsula and greater Mexico, and second between Yucatan and evolving global economic, political, and social networks beginning in the late-eighteenth century. My theoretical approach to the history of the peninsula has developed out of particular research interests concerning the rise of capitalism and the modern global economy that has characterized an increasingly integrated world-system. As an archaeologist I am particularly interested in how the local, as expressed through archaeological remains and landscapes, articulated with larger global processes to create change in the lives of individuals. My approach has been at once to place both the local region within the larger context of national and world dynamics, and at the same time to elucidate the larger contexts of nation and world within the dynamics of the local. It is from this perspective – the interrelatedness of cultural systems in a global context – that I approach the study of hacienda/plantation archaeology.

Archaeological Investigations at Hacienda Tabi

The road to Tabi is not on most maps. You simply turn off the Ruta Puuc toward the small village of Yaxhom and then follow a winding track that at first passes through ordered rows of lime and fruit trees, but soon gives way to the chaotic, dense scrub brush that chokes and obscures much of the landscape on the northern peninsula. During the rainy season this narrow dirt road carved through the bush becomes a flowing river, and the bright orange soil turns into a sticky mud that stains everything it comes into contact with. Today though it is dry and you bounce along the heavily rutted course with great anticipation as you complete each curve in the road. And just when you start to think you must have gone to the right when you should have stayed left back at that big ceiba tree, you round a bend and there it is, your first glimpse of Hacienda San Juan Bautista Tabi.

The Short Term: The Implications of Archeology for Understanding Life at Hacienda Tabi

The hacienda was an acculturative force that was first accepted by the Maya because of its allowances for pre-Hispanic organization and the benefits it afforded in access to resources and relief from tributary obligations. The lunero system represented a reoccupation of the lands depopulated after the Conquest and as such represented in many ways a return to pre-Hispanic settlement patterns (Farriss 1984:213–215). However benign initial settlement on the estates seemed, it set the stage for the eventual domination of Maya life by the hacienda system and the hacendado (Patch 1993:151)

A Theoretical Context for Documenting Social Change in Yucatán: Changing Modes of Production and the Entry of the Yucatec Maya into the World System

The findings, interpretation, and ultimate meaning associated with any archaeological study are the cumulative result of the theoretical frameworks and methodological choices employed by archaeologists throughout the course of study, regardless of whether these assumptions and conditions are explicitly or implicitly recognized (see for example Hodder and Hutson 2003; Shanks and Tilley 1987, 1992; Trigger 2006). That is to say that no work of archaeological interpretation is completely objective or value neutral. This of course does not imply that we should not strive for objectivity through the use of sound theoretical and methodological frameworks and a healthy dose of self-reflection.

The Medium Term: The Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries in Yucatán

The Spanish brought to the Americas a long cultural tradition of conquest, settlement, and subjugation that had been perfected during the centuries long Reconquista. Within the cultures of the New World, they recognized tribute and service systems similar to their own tradition. There was no need to replace or create a new system; instead the Spanish merely co-opted the existing native structures of kin-ordered production and tributary organization to meet their needs. Out of this appropriation grew the coercive institution of the repartimiento, which the Spanish used to draw both goods and native production into capitalist exchange networks. This emerging system of capitalist circulation represented the first stage in the historical articulation of capitalist and noncapitalist modes of production leading to the formation of the hacienda in Yucatan.

Methodological Approaches to the Social and Economic Dynamics of Life on a Hacienda

The Annaliste or structural history approach to archaeology provides a powerful model for discussing the processes that shape human societies. This approach is especially fruitful for historical archaeology where documents can bolster information recovered from the archaeological record. The Annales paradigm traces its roots to the end of the nineteenth century when in response to dissatisfaction with the traditional approaches and methods of history, geography, and the social sciences, French scholars such as geographer Vidal de la Blache, sociologist Emile Durkheim, and historian Henri Berr began advocating a more generalizing approach to the study of society and culture.

The Long Duration: The Cultural History of Yucatán

In Annales methodology, the long duration encompasses forces that act at the longest wavelength of time. This includes the historical trajectory of civilizations and the gradual, cumulative processes of culture change. The long duration is characterized by slowly changing forces including stable technologies, ideologies, and worldviews. The previous chapter explored the long-term geological, environmental, and climatological patterns that provided the stage on which Maya culture has waxed and waned over the last four millennia. Chronologically, I focus on the most part to the cultural history of the Maya in this region during the Classic and Postclassic periods, ca. A.D. 250 to the Spanish Conquest; my regional focus will be limited to the northern part of the Yucatan peninsula.

A Historical Outline of Hacienda San Juan Bautista Tabi

Hacienda San Juan Bautista Tabi is located in the Mexican state of Yucatan, approximately 65 km south of the capital Merida, and 23 and 17 km southeast of the towns of Ticul and Oxkutzcab, respectively (see Fig. 1.1). The hacienda is located in a fertile valley between the Sierrita de Ticul or Puuc Hills to the northeast and the Sierra de Bolonchen or Witz hills to the southwest. In this fertile region the archetypal pre-Hispanic sites of the Puuc architectural style, including Labna, Sayil, and Kabah, flourished.