In Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Indigenous Yucatec Maya land defense movements have risen up in resistance to ​​a thousand-mile railway megaproject: the Maya Train. The Train and its accompanying assemblage of tourism, agroindustrial, and energy projects have catalyzed diverse eco-territorial conflicts between Mexican authorities, corporate interests, organized crime, and Indigenous Yucatec Maya communities. In this thesis, I examine how Maya land defenders perceive and problematize the material and epistemic dispossessions that the Maya Train provokes. 

Drawing on five years of ethnographic engagement with a grassroots Maya land defense organization and the results of 47 semi-structured interviews conducted in the summer of 2024, this multi-sited political ecology infrastructure analysis finds that land defenders view the Maya Train as an imposed and extractive megaproject that disrupts multispecies relational ontologies, violates Maya peoples’ right to self-determination, and exacerbates environmental injustice and socio-ecological precarity on ancestral Maya territories. I frame Maya land defenders’ resistance to the megaproject as ontological struggles in defense of territory and life.  This thesis supports a growing body of political ecology research that explores how knowledges born in struggle can inform alternative approaches to environmental governance in the Anthropocene-Capitalocene.