Maya America: Journal of Essays, Commentary, and Analysis

Current Issue

Volume 8, Issue 1 (2026)Read More

New Essays

  • Article
    5 August 2026

    Who owns land, who owns language? Challenging the commercialization of Indigenous language data

    Matthew Riemland
    As Indigenous scholars and activists have pointed out, the commercialization of Indigenous language data resembles the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land. Using Mayan languages as a case study, this article illustrates the process by which digital advertising platforms – Google and Meta – appropriate and benefit commercially from Indigenous language data, drawing parallels with the dispossession of Indigenous land. It identifies the significant costs of this commercialization to Indigenous communities, including the lack of compensation for the Indigenous language data’s commercial value, the distortion of Indigenous communities’ linguistic and cultural representation online, and the reinforcement of extractive relationships to Indigenous land, particularly through the expansion of highly resource-intensive and environmentally destructive AI infrastructures. Finally, the paper outlines various efforts to reclaim Indigenous language data, calling for broad solidarity and support for the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement.
    Read More
  • Article
    5 August 2026

    La Violencia: Family Stories of Labor, War, and Migration

    Gabriela Merida
    Gabriela Merida, a doctoral student at the University of Albany and a child of Guatemalan Maya refugees, interviews her grandmother and father about their lives in Guatemala and their subsequent experiences as migrants in the United States. Through life history interviews with each of them, Merida examines how foreign intervention shaped the economic and political realities that compelled them to migrate. She employs Giovanni Batz’s (2024) concept of the four invasions as an analytic frame to demonstrate how the historical arc of colonization, the plantation economy, the Guatemalan Civil War, and capitalism produce compounding forms of structural and quotidian violence that disproportionately harm Indigenous Mayas, campesinos, and working-class people. The life histories of her grandmother and father demonstrate how the legacies of the four invasions are linked, creating the conditions that drive Indigenous Maya and peasants to migrate to the United States. “Yet,” concludes Merida, “just as my grandmother and father resisted through small, everyday acts of survival, I know that my responsibility now lies in resisting for my community.”
    Read More

2025 VOLUME 7 ISSUE 2

    • Front Matter5 August 2026

      Front Matter

      Maya America Editors
      Full issue of Maya America, volume 8, issue 1.
    • Front Matter5 August 2026

      Introduction: Maya Language Advocacy and Mayas’ Production of Cultural Knowledge

      Walter Little
      This introductory essay is part of the special issue Maya America, Volume 8, Issue 1, guest-edited and coordinated by the Mayan Languages Preservation Project. The 10 authors of the various research articles and commentaries represent eight of Guatemala’s 22 Maya languages. What brings these essays into relationship with each other are the pragmatic concerns of strengthening Maya languages, such as providing academic, professional, and social services contexts for using and not merely maintaining these languages but helping them thrive. Each author in this special issue has actively worked in various ways to promote Mayan language and cultural knowledge preservation. As background to the authors’ essays, Dr. Little in this introductory chapter reviews how, over the last 40 years, Guatemalan Maya scholars have increasingly been part of the academic conversation, although much of Maya scholarly production in ethno/history, cultural anthropology, and politics has been in Spanish and with limited circulation.

Readership Activity