Abstract
Decolonial feminist theory is an important tool to counter the coloniality manifested in the control of knowledge and gender present in management studies. In this article, I use decolonial feminist theory as a framework to introduce Maya women and their communitarian organising. Maya women’s communitarian organising is a theorisation developed with Indigenous Guatemalan women. It is a way of working and organising that is built in the socioeconomic margins and oriented by the plurality of life as a Maya woman. Communitarian organising cultivates the women’s Buen Vivir through the decentralisation of power, self-management and participative decision-making based on collective, consensus-based participation by members. This article provides an empirically grounded contribution to the decolonial epistemic shift in management studies. By centring Maya women and their communitarian organising, this article enables management academics to learn from diverse epistemic encounters, engage with alternative worldviews, and think about management and organisation from the perspective and experiences of Global South Indigenous women.
Keywords
Introduction
In this article, I use decolonial feminist theory as a framework to introduce Maya women and their communitarian organising. Maya women’s communitarian organising is a theorisation developed with Indigenous Guatemalan women during my doctoral research. Indigenous ways of being, doing, and working have largely been ignored in management research and knowledge (Bastien et al., 2023; Pio and Waddock, 2021). In particular, the work and lives of marginalised Indigenous women in the Global South are located outside of the dominant, universalised Western management discourse. Little is therefore known in management studies about how these women construct their identity as women and their working/organising practices in the context of their social, cultural and historical location.
This article is based on an exploratory study seeking to understand the working and organising practices of Maya women working together in community weaving groups within the context of their gendered colonial identity. Introducing Guatemalan Maya women’s communitarian organising provides empirically grounded work that contributes to the decolonial shift in management studies. A contribution that moves beyond an academic critique of coloniality/modernity and the ‘top-heavy, theory-laden treatment of decolonisation and the ways it should be embodied’ (Peredo, 2023). Management studies is a discipline largely rooted in Western perspectives, often neglecting or marginalising alternative worldviews. Indigenous approaches offer a crucial counterpoint, broadening the scope of management studies and challenging its ethnocentric biases. They bring to the forefront the importance of addressing the intertwined oppressions of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism (Bastien et al., 2023; Lugones, 2010; Manning, 2021; Peredo, 2023).
The Maya women in this article are backstrap weaving artisans working together in self-organised community weaving groups. Their communitarian organising is a socially collaborative way of working that is orientated by the plurality of life as a Maya woman, where they inhabit a colonised world imposing an ontology of modernity while simultaneously practising their Indigenous worldviews. A decolonial feminist theoretical lens frames this article to help management scholars understand this plurality and provides a way of understanding lived experiences, forms of knowledge and ways of working beyond the limited regulations of Western epistemology and an ontology of modernity. Decolonial feminist theory is central to the decolonial epistemic shift in management studies as it requires an ‘analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression’ to ‘understand the oppressive imposition as a complex interaction of economic, racializing, and gendering systems in which every person in the colonial encounter can be found as a live, historical, fully described being’ (Lugones, 2010: 747).
Academic centres are located in the West; this is where the terms and categories of academic discourse and debate are determined, which sees management studies dominated by theories and ideas that are implicitly male/masculine, white/Western and bourgeois/managerial (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Barros and Alcadipani, 2022; Bastien et al., 2023; Girei, 2017; Ibarra-Colado, 2006, 2008; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Manning, 2021; Ul-Haq and Westwood, 2012). Decolonial feminist theory engages with debates pertaining to coloniality/modernity, Indigeneity, race and gender while providing a space for non-Western women to speak of their identities and lived experiences (Bhambra, 2014; Lugones, 2010; Maese-Cohen, 2010; Manning, 2021; Mendez, 2015; Schiwy, 2007). Sliwa et al. (2025) argue that ‘Management Learning has done a lot to explain the need for decolonising business and management knowledge’, and Cunliffe (2025), for the 55-year anniversary of Management Learning, claims that the legacy of the journal is one of being ‘ontologically, epistemologically, philosophically, methodologically and theoretically pluralist’ where the situated nature of knowledge and learning provoke management academics. Maya women and their communitarian organising provoke this pluralist learning for management academics. Moving away from an ontology of modernity, which has privileged the culture, knowledge, and epistemology produced by the West perpetuating the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel, 2009; Mignolo, 2000; Spivak, 1988) and providing space for lived experiences, worldviews, and ways of organising beyond the regulations of Western epistemology (Mignolo, 2018). Epistemic decolonisation will always be an incomplete task (Abdallah, 2024). However, in shifting the ontology of feminist theorising in management studies, Maya women’s communitarian organising interrupts the hegemony that marginalises the diverse realities of women across different social, cultural and historical contexts. Maya women’s communitarian organising is a form of alternative organising. However, unlike existing conversations regarding alternative organising, which are predominantly situated in the West, Maya women constitute their own representations of organising that promote their own values and beliefs, facilitate their needs living in the socioeconomic periphery in the Global South and cultivate their Buen Vivir (a concept deeply rooted in Latin American Indigenous worldviews, loosely translated to ‘living well’, but has a much deeper meaning relating to a way of living in harmony with community and the environment).
I acknowledge that, despite well-intentioned attempts to include Indigenous worldviews, there can be no innocent discourse about Indigenous people (Banerjee and Tedmanson, 2010). I do not claim any right to defend or champion the women; it is their agency and capacity that shapes this research, and they are the owners of their communitarian organising. This article is a space for management academics to learn from Maya women as agents and creators of knowledge. Introducing Maya women’s communitarian organising contributes to a broadening body of work that prioritises the creation of ‘a more inclusive and humane academy by respecting Indigenous peoples and their forms of knowing and organizing’ (Bastien et al., 2023: 3).
Decolonial feminist theory in management studies
Decolonial theory helps us understand that there are different worlds and other ways of worlding co-existing together (Blaser, 2013). Originating from Latin America, decolonial theorists argue that the world and all knowledges are constructed on the basis of a European ontology of modernity which erases the worldviews, ideas, institutions, and knowledge of those in the Global South (Dussel and Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Escobar, 2007, 2010; Mignolo, 2000, 2007). Quijano (2000, 2007) develops this further with his concept, the coloniality of power, which he argues is the persistent categorical and discriminatory discourse that is reflected in the social and economic structures of modern postcolonial societies. It is found in the interrelation of four domains of power and control: control of economy (e.g. land appropriation, exploitation of labour, control of natural resources); control of authority (e.g. government, institution, army); control of gender and sexuality (e.g. family, identity, heteropatriarchy); and control of subjectivity and knowledge (e.g. epistemology, education, formation of subjectivity). Bertolt (2018: 7) describes the coloniality of power as the ‘theft of history’ and argues that understanding this concept makes it possible to understand the world as ‘racialized, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, hierarchical, heteronormative, neoliberal hegemonic and Euro-American’. The coloniality of power has opened the reconstruction and the restitution of silenced histories, repressed subjectivities, and subalternised knowledges (Spivak, 1988) performed in management studies under the name of modernity (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021). The value of the knowledges that exists within non-Westernised cultures, including the colonised (Murphy and Zhu, 2012), is commonly dismissed in management studies (Bastien et al., 2023). Jammulamadaka et al. (2021) argue that the need for a robust pluriversal discussion from diverse positions is vital for multiple knowledge systems to coexist in management studies. Bastien et al. (2023) and Meyer and Quattrone (2021) call on management scholars to move beyond our ‘cognitive imperialism’ (Battiste, 2018: 132) so that we may learn from Indigenous communities and non-Western ontologies. Embracing multiple ontologies creates a space for management scholars to learn of diverse epistemic encounters that recognise and value knowledge that has been produced from the lived experience of the gendered colonial difference (Conway and Singh, 2011; Manning, 2021).
Lugones (2007, 2008, 2010) adjusts Quijano’s (2000, 2007) formulation of the coloniality of power through a deeper consideration of gender and its entwined relationship with race. She argues that Quijano’s understanding of sex/gender as defined by patriarchal and heterosexual contestations over ‘sexual access’ is a paradoxically Eurocentred understanding of gender. That is, the coloniality of power assumes that biological differences and gender roles are acquired and not socially constructed, thereby legitimising the binary conceptions of sexuality and perpetuating heteropatriarchy (Maese-Cohen, 2010; Mendez, 2015). The coloniality of power framework is thereby a further means through which the subjection and disempowerment of Global South women can be obscured. Lugones’ (2007: 186) influential work on decolonial feminism suggests that gender was (re)constituted through the practices and processes of slavery and colonisation. She argues that the colonisation of the Americas provided fertile ground for establishing ‘very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing’. The coloniality of gender has colonised the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the Global South, which produces a composite, singular Global South women – the homogenised, gendered ‘third-world’ woman needing economic development and an oppressed figure in need of Western emancipation (see the work of foremost postcolonial, decolonial and Indigenous feminist scholars and activists: Cabnal, 2010; Cumes, 2012; Cumes and Silvia Monzón, 2006; Cunningham, 2006; Curiel, 2009; Espinosa Miñoso, 2017; Hernández Castillo, 2010; Lugones, 2007, 2008, 2010; Mohanty, 1988, 1991, 2003a, 2003b; Őzkazanç-Pan, 2012; Spivak, 1985, 1988, 1999). Decolonial feminist theory thus becomes a critical tool to dismantle the racist/sexist coloniality/modernity project (Espinosa Miñoso, 2017). Jammulamadaka et al. (2021: 718) argue that decolonial feminist theory in management studies calls for ‘the transformation of heteropatriarchal, colonial, racist, epistemic, affective, cognitive and economic structures of organisation and power, and a non-expropriating revival of Indigenous knowledges and practices’.
Considered part of the fourth wave of feminism, decolonial feminism represents an important phase in the evolution of feminist discourse (Manning, 2021). It challenges existing Western conceptualisations of feminism as being representative of all women. By questioning the ‘unity’ of women, particularly unity in oppression, decolonial feminist theory argues that the triumphs of feminist movements that have proceeded it only deepen coloniality by ensuring welfare for some – primarily women of white, bourgeois privilege – to the detriment of the largely racialised majority (Curiel, 2009; Espinosa Miñoso, 2022; Mendez, 2015). Decolonial feminist thought and practice are located in various temporal and spatial locales (Figueroa, 2020). Mendez (2015), Manning (2021), Figueroa (2020), Maese-Cohen (2010) and Bhambra (2014) unpack the epistemological origins of decolonial feminism, finding that while much of this decolonial theory is built from postcolonial feminism (Mohanty, 2003a, 2003b; Spivak, 1988), this movement is developed in solidarity with other third and fourth wave feminist theorists and activists. From the Chicana feminist movement, motivated by the historical, social and cultural marginalisation of women of Mexican descent in the United States (e.g. Anzaldúa, 1999; Saldivar and Hull, 1991; Sandoval, 2000), the work of gender theorists in postcolonial countries (e.g. Connell, 2014; Oyěwùmí, 1997), black feminism and women of colour feminist politics and activists (e.g. Hill Collins, 2008; hooks, 1981; Roshanravan, 2014), intersectionality (e.g. Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Holvino, 2010; Liu, 2018; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1983) and the importance of situated knowledge and experiences as argued by feminist standpoint theorists (Haraway, 2004; Harding, 2004). Shifting away from the white Western feminist waves that preceded it, decolonial feminism emphasises the importance of centring the lived experiences and knowledges of black, brown and Indigenous women who survive the afterlife of colonialism, slavery and coloniality. Decolonial feminism has become a movement for Indigenous women to combat multiple and systematic oppressions and violence (Figueroa, 2020) and build their identities from their ontological realities and lived experiences.
I frame this article with decolonial feminist theory to argue that the ontology of modernity that is embedded in the preceding white Western feminisms in management studies largely ignores the working and organising practices of Maya women. Decolonial feminist theory thereby becomes a useful lens to counter the coloniality manifested in the control of knowledge, which is present in management studies (Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Manning, 2021). Bastien et al. (2023) argue that systemic discrimination in management studies stems from colonisation, Western hegemony and the dominance of capitalist approaches, with the most apparent outcome being the marginalisation of Indigenous peoples and their systems of knowing and organising. This is a form of epistemic blindness (Banerjee, 2022) that excludes manifestations of the coloniality of power and gender in management studies, resulting in the erasure of Maya women’s lived experiences and ways of working in our discipline. In this way, decolonial feminist theory is a tool for management learning and a means for management studies to move away from the universality of modernity and Eurocentric systems of knowledge and embrace a pluriverse of diverse knowledges and ways of working and organising that coexist (Banerjee, 2011; Ehrnström-Fuentes and Böhm, 2022; Manning, 2021).
Using a decolonial feminist methodology to build relationships through differences
The practicalities of data collection and translation
My exploratory doctoral research aimed to understand the working and organising practices of Maya women working together in community weaving groups within the context of their gendered colonial identity. This research took place in the rural Highland region of Sololá, Guatemala, for 3 months, between September and December 2013. I worked in-depth with two women’s community weaving groups, interviewed women from two additional community weaving groups, and interviewed workers in four local Indigenous social foundations that commission backstrap woven textiles from the groups. The women work from home making their backstrap woven textile products for the group, and I commuted several days a week to the rural, remote communities where they live. I interviewed the women in their homes and was a participant observer during my time with them. I also attended their group meetings and accompanied them on product order deliveries and to purchase weaving materials in larger towns and nearby cities. This totalled 14 weeks of immersive fieldwork with 45 interviews, attending 10 group meetings, and 38 days of direct participant observation with the women in their homes. Various forms and combinations of interviews, dialogue, field notes, documents, photographs and observations were all brought together as data collection methods.
I had previously lived in Guatemala and worked with one of the Indigenous social foundations. This non-profit social foundation connected me with the women’s community groups. At the time, I had conversational proficiency in Spanish. This enabled me to immerse myself in the community and culture; however, many of the women, particularly the older women with no formal education, did not speak Spanish, only their local Mayan language. I worked closely with Luisa, a young Indigenous woman from a neighbouring community, who was my Spanish–Kakchiquel–K’iche translator during much of my data collection. We agreed early in the research process our understanding of translation as an in-between space with multiplicities, exchanges, and renegotiations that disturb linear flows. Luisa became part of the research. We had lengthy informal conversations following our time with the women in their homes and groups to unpack the interviews, conversations and observations. The following vignette captures Luisa’s motivation for participating in this research as well as how she helped me understand some cultural nuances: We sit on small plastic chairs at a bus stop market stall, eating a tostada and talking about our day in the Chuacruz community. I ask Luisa for her thoughts on the daily lives of the women. Luisa replies: “There are very few opportunities for women here, and it’s hard for these women because they are poor and live in faraway (remote) communities. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. It’s like that as soon as you leave school, and for some, this is from a very young age. But these women are trying to do something different. They are creating a community for themselves in their weaving groups. Getting to know these women and their lives with you helps me learn more about the women here (in the Sololá region). I took this job (translator) because I needed the money. But I’m here because I also want to do something that helps my family, my community and eventually my country. … With the money from this job, I can help my family. I am saving this money to pay for my university education, where I will be able to become a professional and earn more money to support my mother and sisters. But with this job, I am also able to help my community. I get to know these women too, learn from them and help to make their voices heard. No one listens to women in Guatemala, especially poor Indigenous women.”
Developing a decolonial feminist ethnography
As a white Western researcher in an Indigenous community in the Global South working with a translator, there are lots of power dynamics that I had to negotiate. First, I must recognise my privilege and positionality. As a white Irish woman, I cannot and do not speak for the Indigenous women with whom I worked in partnership, nor do I presume to share their lived experiences. However, as a woman from a formerly colonised country, we share a different yet connected history of colonial violence and oppression. Despite our connection through gender and coloniality, I acknowledge I am a relatively privileged white academic from the Global North working with Indigenous women living in a socioeconomic periphery within the Global South.
There are asymmetrical relationships between Indigenous people and Western academics. Indigenous academics argue that ‘knowledge production is socially situated, reflecting different realities’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2011: 413) and research is a tool for coloniality and ‘a significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of knowing of the Other’ (Smith, 2010: 2). In this, there are deep-seated complexities for non-Indigenous academics undertaking research with Indigenous persons. I draw on Banerjee and Tedmanson (2010: 152) to acknowledge that many may ask what right I have to undertake this research and ‘any endeavour to make audible that which is often rendered mute will be fraught with ethical risks’, but my aim is to speak out loud with Maya women, so their voices are heard and their organisational lives visible.
To help me navigate this tension, I employed a decolonial feminist ethnography. A decolonial feminist methodology explicitly aims at dismantling coloniality through centring perspectives and lived experiences of the oppressed (Sandoval, 2000; Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021). This is a non-extractivist methodology that respects and values different worldviews to contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge (Agu Igwe et al., 2022). It is an approach to research that draws attention to differences, inequalities and otherness. I built this methodological approach on the foundations of a critical ethnography. A critical ethnography provides space to engage with the voices, perspectives and narratives of those who have been marginalised (Foley, 2002; Guba and Lincoln, 1994; Kincheloe, 2001; Kincheloe and McLaren, 2005; Madison, 2012), while creating a dialogical relationship between the researcher and participants (Foley, 2002; Madison, 2012) by fostering conversation and reflection (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2005). Reconfiguring critical ethnography to recognise the coloniality of power and gender builds a methodological approach that exercises critical reflexivity, respects participant agency and self-determination, and embraces otherness and other ways of knowing, doing and working (Manning, 2022, 2018; Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021). This helped me understand the ethical and political implications of research and knowledge production. The impetus of this methodology is to attempt to restructure power relations in the research process and respect the Maya women’s knowledge and worldviews. I do not consider the Maya women participants as an ‘object of study’ but rather adopt the perspective of a decolonial activist researcher that seeks to build a collaborative learning process through a dialogue with the women about their work and organising practices. This methodology helps me work towards epistemological decolonisation by engaging in research that acknowledges, but also works towards challenging, inequality and domination in the research process (Misoczky, 2019). This research approach advocates for researchers to consider the political and ethical implications of their research and encourages a dialogic performance between researcher and participants where power is shared and knowledge produced together (Manning, 2022, 2018). This is what decolonial feminist Lugones (1987: 637) refers to as ‘world travelling’ and ‘loving perception’: The reason why I think that travelling to someone’s ‘world’ is a way of identifying with them is because by travelling to their ‘world’ we can understand what it is to be them [sic] and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes. Without knowing the other’s ‘world’, one does not know the other, and without knowing the other one is really alone in the other’s presence because the other is only dimly present to one. Through travelling to other people’s ‘worlds’ we discover that there are ‘worlds’ in which those who are the victim of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, resisters, constructors of visions even though in the mainstream construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceived and are pliable, foldable, file-awayable, classifiable.
I take a ‘border dialogue’ approach (Blaser, 2010), which helps me write the Maya women’s lived experience through a collaborative learning process and an ethical commitment to articulating different worlds in equal terms, instead of reproducing knowledge hierarchies.
As a white non-Indigenous researcher, reflexive work on positionality is imperative (Eriksen, 2022). The researchers’ identity, privilege, and power in fieldwork affect all aspects of the research process. As such, it was important for me to acknowledge personal voices/narratives and subjective standpoints in the process of decolonising my research and writing against the othering of the Maya women participants (Krumer- Nevo and Sidi, 2012; Gill et al., 2012). A starting point was engaging in critical reflexivity and explicitly exploring power relations and representational practices (Manning 2022, 2018, 2016; Őzkazanç-Pan, 2012). Allen and Girei’s (2023) work on confronting whiteness for decolonial reflexivity argues for embracing discomfort. This requires confronting privileges and marginalisation, of ourselves and those around us, to help us understand the racial identities we inhabit and the power and privilege we have. The many social, economic, and cultural differences between myself and the Maya women placed me in an irreconcilable position of difference, and I had to regard myself as the other and reflexively question the situated, socially constructed nature of my self and the Maya women’s selves. This is particularly important in the context of research with multiple axes of difference, inequalities, and geopolitics (Sultana, 2007). There are clear ethnic, social, and cultural dichotomies of privileged-poor, educated-unschooled, rural-urban, and white-brown that greatly influenced my relationship with the women participants. I was never going to be able to remove the physical and socio-cultural differences between the women and me. Recognising our differences and embracing this discomfort formed a key part of my reflexivity, but, moreover, for building our relationship, whereby we talked about our differences.
Building relationships through differences
I approached my research and relationship with the Maya women participants with a fair degree of humility (Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021). I didn’t know to what extent the women would be comfortable with me in their homes, nor how we could build a relationship until we met. The following abridged reflection after my first week provides insight to these experiences.
I was incredibly nervous about my first meeting with the women of the Chuacruz group. I feel out of my depth doing this research, and I still don’t know how I can, or should, do research of this nature with these women. I asked Luisa before our first meeting with the women to please emphasise that I’m here to learn from them and they can be involved in this research as much or as little as they like. . . . The women were already gathered for a group meeting, and we arrived towards the end of the meeting. After initial introductions, the women asked questions focused on why I was doing this research, what it was for, etc., but the questions soon turned to a ‘so what’ and ‘what’s the point’ perspective. I didn’t know what to say, but eventually said, ‘I think your work is important and I’d like to get to know you and your work lives, if you’ll let me’. There was some murmuring. Yolonda, one of the younger group members, and daughter of Antonia, the founder of this group, says something that will always stay with me – ‘Good! People stop to take our picture and hear our stories, but don’t get to know the realities of our lives. The lives we lead and the stories we tell are different’. When I asked what this means, she replied, ‘tourists just want to take photos of us in our traje [traditional dress] but never care to know who we really are’. . . . Maria invites me to her home after the group meeting. But before we can chat, she needs to start preparing dinner. I didn’t know what to do and stood around awkwardly for a while. The meal was being cooked entirely from scratch, and she was starting with the ground corn to make tortillas. After watching her roll and prepare the tortillas, I asked her if I could help. She laughed, invited me over, and after a few attempts, I was crafting imperfectly disc-shaped tortillas with her. The atmosphere became more relaxed, and she began asking me about my life, the food eaten in my country, and how I prepare meals at home. We moved around the kitchen. I took my cues from Maria on when to chip in or step back. A dialogue emerged. Luisa translated into my recording device. . . . This was the approach I needed to take. With the permission of each woman, I would move with her in her home and try to create an informal dialogue.
Trying to build a relationship through our differences and decentring myself from a position of power during the data collection and analysis became central to my research process. I used the embodied performances of listening and moving to build a collaborative relationship with the women participants (Manning, 2022). As a woman, I could participate in their gendered division of labour that occupied a considerable amount of their time. There is fluidity and flexibility in the women’s work and home lives. The women live an agrarian life with a daily routine consisting of cooking, cleaning, childcare, weaving, maintaining livestock and meeting with each other to discuss matters relating to their weavings and product orders. The men are usually out of the home, maintaining their agricultural crops. During my time in the women’s homes, I moved with them, worked with them and cooked and cleaned with them. Differences remained between us, but little actions that may even seem mundane can be significant in building relationships. This fluidity in our movement together also helped to shift the focus for the women; they are not concentrating on providing the ‘correct’ answer in an interview but are engaged in informal conversations in their homes.
A collaborative learning process
Informing, empowering and listening are the first steps in legitimate participation in the research process (Agu Igwe et al., 2022). Although I am leading the research process and authoring this article, my methodology can be understood as a collaborative partnership. The women were involved in the planning, scheduling and evaluation of the research. In terms of data collection, I coordinated with each of the women when I could visit their homes and when I could attend group meetings, or other activities or events relating to their group work. After each visit, we arranged a further follow-up visit. For some women, we agreed immediately when this would be, for others it took time for them to consider and coordinate, and some were content with just one visit. During our time together we explored: (1) various aspects of their weaving group, from their origins during the Guatemalan civil war to practical aspects of governance and how they organise, (2) how the women benefit from their participation in their weaving groups as well as the challenges of working together, (3) their perceptions of Indigenous identity and their current socio-cultural environment and (4) where the women were happy to share, we also discussed aspects of their personal life including their family structure and home life, education and access to education, and personal finances relating to their group work. I transcribed and reviewed all interviews, dialogues, field notes, and observations after each visit. This was an intensive, iterative and ongoing process from which I could refine my scope of questions from broad to specific. For example, questions about Indigenous identity were refined to conversations about how backstrap weaving is an embodiment of Maya gendered identity and an act of cultural resilience.
Intensive daily transcription and review of data also helped me engage in provisional data analysis and validation while working with the women. I initially engaged in broad, data-driven open coding, identifying themes and ideas emerging from the data. This was an iterative, messy process happening at the same time as data collection. My questions, ideas and insights were refined with each engagement, and we began working out meaning together. On return visits to the women’s homes, as well as at group meetings and first visits that happened later in the data collection process, I would share with the women the provisional data analysis categories with descriptions of each of the ideas/themes emerging. Different women were interested in exploring further different categories. For example, when we are teasing out reasons regarding the pricing, cost, and design of their backstrap woven products Rosa was interested in exploring the concept of Fair Trade and how/if this related to their group work, Yolonda wanted to unpack the challenges of working in a group in a community where women are usually confined to the home, and Alisia helped me understand the evolving identity of Maya women where women blend Indigenous values with Christianity. This repetitive process of exploring, discussing, creating and agreeing made the data collection and analysis process highly collaborative.
I continued to engage in data analysis in the months after I left Guatemala and returned to my university. Data analysis is an iterative, lengthy process, and themes became more refined with some merging and splitting. However, I remained committed to the broad categories identified and the ideas we had produced together. To help me with this, I continued to engage in critical reflexive practices. When exploring the data, I questioned what I was seeing and why I was seeing it. I wrote notes about themes as they evolved and the context in which they had emerged, and the conversations I had with the women about them. I acknowledge that I write this article from a position of privilege, but this knowledge is co-laboured with the Maya women participants. The findings that are presented in the next section interweave reflexive observations, vignettes, and interviews, but they are localised and grounded in the Maya women’s meaning of themselves and their work.
Maya women’s communitarian organising
Maya context and the plurality of women’s lived experiences
There is so much colour in Maya women’s traje (traditional dress), particularly their huipil (blouse). The blouses are backstrap woven by the women. At each visit or in group meetings, the women explain that the different designs and colour patterns represent their different communities and Maya ethnicities. The province of Sololá is primarily Indigenous, so it is more common to see women wearing their traje than not. Maya cultural identity is visible in the preservation of the traje made and worn by Maya women. When discussing this, Mercedes notes that ‘it’s our [women’s] responsibility to preserve and maintain our culture’. The traje, particularly the huipil, and the backstrap woven process to make it, are some of the ways the women retain what remains of their cultural heritage and identity. The Maya backstrap loom serves as a connection to their Maya identity. This is an ancient Maya art form passed on through generations of women. In the postcolonial period of Guatemalan history, Maya identity became synonymous with subaltern. The Indigenous Maya population was dominated, murdered, and marginalised (Gere and MacNeill, 2008; Montejo, 2023), culminating in the Guatemalan civil war (1960–1996). Referred to as La Violencia by the women. A brutal campaign of unprecedented terror inflicted severe violence, specifically against Indigenous communities.
Backstrap weaving is the Maya skill that the women used to survive the civil war. The groups were established in the mid-to-late 1980s by women, mostly widows, during the most brutal and repressive years of La Violencia as an imperative for survival to overcome extreme poverty and as a collective form of community resistance. The women collaborated for their collective needs, pooling resources and knowledge. Yolonda explains that the group started with five women, because of the war. The men, during the war, were hiding in the mountains. If men were found in communities during the war, soldiers would take them and kill them. So, the men had to hide, and the women had to provide for their families.
Antonia explains that the groups provided an opportunity for women to earn an income, but it also became a space where women created their own community. ‘I wanted to create a community for women where we could better the future of our children by having an income, but also as a place where we could better ourselves’.
Throughout their post/colonial history, Maya women have struggled for communal conceptions of life and survival. Generations of post/colonial repression result in Maya women suffering from triple discrimination as poor, Indigenous women. Each of the women speaks of their disenfranchisement, different levels of literacy and lack of educational opportunities, their silencing in public settings and their fight for inclusion in the formal economy. ‘Indian’ is a common derogatory term the women are repeatedly referred to by Latino and white Guatemalans. The coloniality of Maya women is found in the discriminatory discourse and practices reflected in social and economic structures. In conversation with Anna, she sums it up by saying: There are three types of discrimination here in Guatemala. First, there is discrimination against the poor people. The Maya people, we are poor. We are poor because of our history in Guatemala and the political system that discriminates against us. . . . The second form of discrimination is against Indigenous women. Many people think that we can’t do anything and that we don’t have value. Many people say this about Maya women, and a lot of women believe this. The third form of discrimination is against the woman; how men discriminate against women in Guatemalan society. Many men say that women can’t do anything and that women should just stay in the home.
The women have been gendered and racialised. The coloniality of power and gender imposed upon the women a hierarchical, patriarchal and racist society, which confines Maya women to their homes. The women are primarily domestic agrarian workers, and their involvement in the agricultural process is controlled by patriarchal power relations; that is, men are responsible for the agriculture and women simply assist them with the process. Together with this, the women’s work in the home is also unrecognised. Carmen explains that the men receive payment for the work they do. If he works for another man or on another person’s land, they pay him. Even if a man has been working in the fields all day or out in the mountains searching for wood, at the end of the day, he comes home with food or wood. I work all the time, cooking, cleaning, washing, weaving, caring for the children, but I don’t get paid, and nobody recognises this work.
The women are expected to care for their families; yet, their financial and social standing constrain their ability to provide food, shelter, clothes or an education.
Their rural, remote communities embrace conservative Christian values, which prize domesticity and patriarchy. The women accept their gendered division of labour but blend it with Indigenous values of community and collaboration. The women see no incompatibility between Christianity and basic elements of Maya spirituality. The coexistence of Maya spirituality and Christianity for Maya women is the result of generations of negotiating identity and tradition. Rather than experiencing these worldviews as contradictory, Maya women draw from both. This is part of the plurality of the women’s lives; the blending of Christian patriarchal and hierarchical values with the practice of community and social solidarity, such as Buen Vivir. Alicia clarifies that ‘Maya is our identity. The religion of the women doesn’t matter to the group. And the religion of the people doesn’t matter to the community’. Women are confined to the home, yet their lived experience in a world in-between modernity/coloniality and Indigenous worldviews, domesticity and maternity are not opposed to participation and social solidarity. Their domesticity is reconciled with community and income-generating work. In each household, generations of families live together in open compounds. Mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters/daughters-in-law work collectively in the home and share their many responsibilities.
Arriving at the women’s homes, I’ve become accustomed to seeing the many women of the home strapped into their backstrap weave tied to a pillar or tree in their courtyard. The younger girls are busy helping their mothers or sisters by organising the threads and materials. All the women of the home are working together and supporting each other. Later in the day, some will prepare lunch, others clean, and others attend to their livestock. Whenever men, husbands, fathers, or brothers arrive home, they are tended to, fed first, and don’t participate in any of the housework. Marisol explains this by saying, ‘It’s very hard being a woman. You need to organise your time. The role of Indigenous women means we have many things to do. . . . We are responsible for everything. And the women of the home work together to achieve this. . . . We all live together, so we have to support each other. Family is so important here’.
The women are working towards restoring the Indigenous values of community and collaboration beyond the home and into their communities through their weaving groups. Women leaving the confines of their homes to collaborate are an unusual affair in rural Indigenous communities. Yolonda explains that in our communities, people usually work alone, women care for the home and children, and men work the land. . . . In the beginning, people in the community found it very strange that women were working together; they thought they were wasting their time going to meetings. Now it is quite a usual way of working. . . . Being in the group has changed the lives of many of the women. The women in the group can now go out, go to meetings, and we’ve acquired more knowledge, so we’re more confident.
Reconnecting with Indigenous values, the women respect each other and reclaim the value of community, where they are at one with the community of the home and the community of their weaving group under conditions of equality and solidarity.
Communitarian weaving groups
The groups were established during the brutality and repression of La Violencia and sustained through coloniality conditions where Indigeneity and gender subordinated Maya women. And yet, their practice is rooted in their lived experience of modernity, marginality and Indigenous ways of doing. Communitarian values are the guiding principles around which the groups have evolved in practice as a collective, in tension with the values introduced through coloniality/modernity. Communitarianism underpins the groups’ decision-making and collective self-governance. While the groups are fundamentally organised around the goal of securing a financial income for the women, this modern/colonial/capitalist value of individual capital accumulation is balanced by the practice of reciprocity and the rotation of duties. The groups are informal, democratic, member-based, built on social collaboration and all women have responsibilities in the group. Authority is delegated but cannot be used to appropriate collective decision-making capacity, as those leading the group can only lead by obeying the collective. That is, the women perform their duties without privilege since all positions are rotated and unpaid, and they can only implement or represent decisions that are made by the group.
An important mode of organising happens through dialogue and consensus. Depending on their capabilities and personal circumstances, each woman is given a role in the group by the group. Every 2–5 years, or as deemed appropriate by the group, three to five different women are elected to lead the group. These directoras (directors) arrange group meetings, coordinate with the social foundations, manage orders and payments, and lead the group through any problems they may be encountering. In addition, there are representantes de órdenes (representatives of orders) in each group. Each representative works with a social foundation that commissions textile orders from the groups. These women, for example, manage the order specifications and deliver complete orders to the social foundations. Other roles in the group include monitoring and measuring sample product orders to ensure consistency in quality. The group understands that elderly members (usually the founders) or a woman with young children will have a limited capacity to engage, and these women will be given lesser responsibilities, for example, they make tortillas and atol (a corn-based hot drink) for when the group has visitors.
In their homes, women work together and share their many responsibilities, and their work together in their group reflects this collective way of working. Working from home is part of working in a group, and making product orders in the home is part of the women’s work in their homes. Maya women working in groups must balance their home life with group participation, and to support this, the groups are organised such that they understand the personal situation of each woman and encourage the support of female family members in their participation. Maria explains this blurring of women’s work: It’s more difficult for me. I can only take a few [product] orders because I have no one helping me in the home, my mum is too old to help, and I’m responsible for most of the chores in the home. . . . It’s easier for the women with large families and daughters and daughters-in-law. . . . Carmen took more orders last time because she has her daughters helping her in the home and making the products. Santa (Carmen’s eldest daughter) also attends group meetings for Carmen when she cannot make them; it’s better when you have women in the home helping you.
Cooperation and reciprocity in their working together means the organising of the groups is a very fluid process. This can be understood in Matea and Elena explaining that ‘It’s not up to the directors to do everything in and for the group, all the women have to help, this way we learn’, and ‘I’m a director, but I can’t write or read, so the women of the group help me’. While their participation is voluntary, it is a requirement to be actively involved in the group to receive a textile order and thereby receive payment. All work in the group is unpaid; the women only receive a payment per textile produced. Of payment received per textile, 5% is retained by the groups. This is used, for example, to pay for bus fares to meet with social foundations and deliver products, to pay for women’s lunches when they are away for the day engaged in group activities, to maintain an inventory of thread and raw materials to use for product orders, etc. There are disagreements between the women regarding their organising together and the use of funds invested in the group. Although their groups are well established and the women are used to organising together, this is still an unusual way of working for women whose communities adhere to strict colonial conceptions of gender roles and power relations.
Group meetings are held in the courtyard of different women’s family compounds. Although one of the groups had received funding to build a centro de grupo (group centre) in their community. Group meetings are lengthy, sometimes upwards of three hours, and they never start on time. This surprises me as the women are always so busy with the demands of the childrearing, housework, and weaving, and many have complained to me about having to attend these time-consuming meetings. But the more group meetings I attend, the more I understand them not only as a space to work out details of group orders and payments, but also as a space to share ideas, exchange knowledge, and enjoy some local gossip. This is an informal space away from the grinding responsibilities of the home. The women better their craft as weavers by sharing knowledge of different designs, patterns, and types of threads and materials, and they motivate each other to participate, make good quality products, and experiment with different designs. But they also share cooking tips and recipes, advice on different markets in larger towns and different communities, as well as how to get there, and they talk about more serious topics like town meetings, managing their household finances, and community workshops they have attended on topics including domestic violence and indigenous rights. When I talk to the women about this, many still complain about the long, meandering nature of their meetings, but they also praise it as a space to learn and gain confidence. As noted by Caterina and Elena in saying, ‘being in the group has changed me; I know a lot more now and I’m more independent’, and ‘it’s beneficial for women to work together in groups. For example, if a woman is working alone, she can’t talk to anyone if she has a problem. In a group, we come together to discuss and solve problems, and different people have different ideas’. The income earned from their work in the group is the primary income coming into the majority of the women’s homes, and this income, a scarce resource in remote communities with little economy, is the main reason why women continue to join the groups. And yet, the groups are more than just a means of earning an income. By leaving the confines of the family compound and working together, they support each other, share information, and blur the boundaries between conservative Christian identities and Indigenous communitarian values.
In contrast to modern/colonial/capitalist values of individualism, the women’s communitarian organising creates a space where they belong to a community and their belonging to the groups has become a significant constituent of their identity. Underpinning the communitarian perspective of Maya women’s organising is the contention that the self is largely constituted by the community. The women organise in their groups based on Indigenous communitarian logics that promote collaboration over competition and understand community as an organising principle of society, which extends to economic organisation, decision-making and collective self-governance. As opposed to individual power, their groups are enacted through redistribution, reciprocity, and rotation of duties. Instead of capitalism and the accumulation of individual wealth, the women engage in an ontology of being collectively in awareness of their interdependence with each other and their community.
Discussion: understanding communitarian organising in the Abya Yala pluriverse
The concept of communitarianism is a distinctive Indigenous worldview of Abya Yala – the Indigenous decolonial name for the Americas landmass. Communitarian values are deeply connected to Buen Vivir, an understanding of wellbeing emanating from Indigenous societies across Abya Yala (Lang, 2022), which encapsulates the notion of ‘living well with me and with you’ and centres on fostering harmony between humans and nature, quality of life and conviviality (Lang, 2022; Ytrehus, 2019). Buen Vivir can be understood as a political project aimed at social, cultural, economic, environmental and epistemological change to create the material and spiritual conditions for the construction and maintenance of well-being (Lang, 2022; Simbaña, 2011). Across Abya Yala, Buen Vivir can be seen in Indigenous resistance against modern/colonial/capitalist modes of living as well as in communitarian organising practices. Buen Vivir seeks to build epistemologies and ways of living outside the singular ontology of modernity with shared imaginaries from decolonial Indigenous spaces located in contemporary socio-cultural locations (Lang, 2022; Zaragocin, 2017). Much like Maya women’s communitarian organising, which is an enacted pluriversal space that interweaves selective dimensions of Indigenous worldviews within their lived experiences of modernity/coloniality.
Maya women’s communitarian organising is one of many types of Indigenous organising. Indigenous organising is highly diverse (Peredo, 2023), and it can be understood as a means of enacting Buen Vivir. It has multiple social, cultural, ecological and political goals in which economic activity is immersed in social and cultural values and the drive for self-determination (Peredo, 2001), is a path towards recovering and building self-determination and resilience (Peredo and Chrisman, 2006; Pio and Waddock, 2021) and defending a way of life and livelihoods (Gomes, 2012). Often established as community collectives and community-based enterprises, Indigenous organising is often understood as an alternative organising (Peredo and Chrisman, 2006). Indigenous organising can be viewed as alternative organising because they are usually community-owned, place-based initiatives self-structured by community members on the principle of solidarity and self-governance and signify an alternative to the top-down, growth-driven approaches of the current economic system (Barin Cruz et al., 2017; Bhatt et al., 2024). Peredo (2023) highlights that the implication of this perspective is the interweaving of Indigenous and communitarian organising with the work of authors such as Gibson-Graham (2006) in disturbing the Eurocentric views of economic life that have prevailed in management studies. Indigenous organising as an alternative form of organising encounters severe constraints from the dominant system and is often repressed by or co-opted within the modern/colonial/capitalist structure (Bhatt et al., 2024; Gibson-Graham, 2006).
It is precisely because of the co-option of Indigenous organising that theorisations developed with/from Indigenous persons, such as Maya women’s communitarian organising, and discussions of Indigenous alternatives must stay rooted in their social, cultural and historical location. The diverse alternatives that Indigenous organising presents, including communitarian organising, help challenge the orthodoxy of mainstream management studies, but drawing on decolonial theory reinforces the need for Indigenous ways of working, organising, seeing, doing and knowing to remain distinct from Western systems of power and control. Alternative organising offers a promise and hope for prefiguring autonomous, non-hierarchical and emancipatory organisational practices and economic systems centred on community and cooperation (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Zanoni et al., 2017). However, this approach to organising emerged in the Global North in a reaction to increased socioeconomic and ecological pressures from a neoliberal system, and much of its current theorisation and practice remains in a Western ontology. To say that Maya women’s communitarian organising is a form of alternative organising co-opts it and imposes Western management studies terminology and ways of understanding organising/organisation upon the women and their weaving groups. I argue that the Maya women experience their organising from their lived experience of the gendered colonial difference. Their gendered colonial difference can be understood as Maya women building their agency from their experiences of otherness and using their knowledge traditions to create their communitarian organising (Manning, 2021). This gendered colonial difference is vital for historicising, understanding and re-appropriating decolonial thought and practice in management studies (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021). Having no formal education and no direct engagement with Western organisations or management studies to orient them towards a particular mode of organising, the Maya women have created their own way of working and organising. As noted by Ibarra-Colado (2008: 934), many marginalised Indigenous communities in Latin America have learned how to survive in the worst conditions and how to create something from nothing; this is the ‘real art of management and organization’.
Maya women’s communitarian organising is an intersection of their gendered and Indigenous identity, and their working together helps cultivate their Buen Vivir. Acting on the basis of communitarian values, the women autonomously govern themselves and embody the practices of solidarity and reciprocity. The women live and work in a pluriversal space filled with ambiguities and contradictions. Communitarian organising draws on selective dimensions of modernity/coloniality that suit the women’s needs, for example, working together primarily for monetary ends and organising their work around their domesticity and gendered division of labour. Combined with Indigenous communitarian principles to create the conditions of wellbeing, such as Buen Vivir, for example, promoting collaboration, understanding community as a principle of decision-making and collective self-governance, and the enactment of reciprocity and the rotation of duties. Individualism, which promotes the breakdown of communal life, was propagated to the colonies, but it is through community that Indigenous communities forge their path towards self-determination (Maher and Loncopán, 2024).
Communitarian organising is built in the socioeconomic margins through collective labour to produce a common and autonomous form of working (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2019) and cultivates Buen Vivir through the decentralisation of power, self-management and participative decision-making based on collective, consensus-based participation by members. It unfolds in an in-between space that balances the tensions and contradictions of Indigenous communitarian worldviews of collective self-organising in a postcolonial and patriarchal society (Altmann, 2017; Lang, 2022). This is an embodiment and practice of decolonial feminist theory. Decolonial feminism comprises of women who, beginning with their own history of colonisation, adopt decolonial feminist practices and weave them into their own indigenous struggles, experiences and worldviews (Bastian Duarte, 2012). Decoloniality is relational and can be understood as an everyday practice and process of nurturing the idea of a potential alternative form of existing and organising within the margins, borders, and spaces between the structures supporting modern/colonial/capitalist hegemony (Maher and Loncopán, 2024; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). Decoloniality involves delinking from manifestations of the coloniality of power and gender (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) by embracing ontological conflicts that questions the assumptions that we are all modern and that the cultural differences that exist are between perspectives on one single reality rule out the possibility of multiple ontologies (Blaser, 2013; Mignolo, 2018). Many Global South women live in the borders, an in-between world, a world full of uncertainties, ambiguities and contradictions; a space between Indigenous worldviews and contemporary social and cultural life constructed by modernity/coloniality (Lugones, 2007, 2008), and in this pluriversal space Maya women build their communitarian organising. Maya women’s communitarian organising is not separate from the modernity/coloniality project but built from it. Not ‘cognitively bound’ to Western norms and values (Banerjee, 2022: 1076) but an episteme and practice of decolonial feminism intrinsic to decoloniality that disrupts prevailing senses of social organisation and the social-political-economic order (Espinosa Miñoso, 2017).
Conclusion
This article provides empirically grounded work to contribute to the decolonial epistemic shift in management studies. Management studies primarily draw on Western knowledge, which acts like a powerful gatekeeper and has been the universal standard against which all other systems of knowledge are compared (Mignolo, 2000). This article centres Maya women and their place-based communitarian organising practices and conceptualisations of their Buen Vivir. Drawing on Baggini (2018: 6), it is ‘by gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding’. This is connected to what decolonial feminist Lugones (1987) calls ‘world-traveling’, which is actively engaging with diverse perspectives to move beyond one’s own perspective to enable us to grasp the interconnectedness of various forms of oppression and resistance in management studies.
Decolonial feminist theory becomes central in this decolonial epistemic shift. Using a decolonial feminist lens, we can begin to understand communitarian organising as a form of resistance from Maya women whereby they organise against colonial and patriarchal practices and construct their own ways of working and organising. First, centring Indigenous knowledge and practices, communitarian organising values collective decision-making, reciprocity and the rotation of duties. This supports an alternative system that prioritises cooperation over competition and collective well-being and community-led organising over modern/colonial/capitalist practices of individualism and wealth maximisation. The Maya women and their communitarian organising understand work on the basis of a web of relations between the self, family and community. Second, in organising and working together, Maya women have created a space to build and demonstrate their agency, challenging colonial and patriarchal oppressions that have discriminated against their position as poor, Indigenous women. Communitarian organising is a space for the collective reflection of women to recognise their experiences of exclusion as Maya women and to exercise self-determination. And third, their communitarian organising is centred on maintaining and reclaiming their Indigenous identity through the intergenerational Maya art form of backstrap weaving and producing textiles with Maya-inspired designs.
Decolonial feminist theory seeks to build epistemologies outside the singular ontology of modernity from the diverse lived experiences of Indigenous women located in contemporary socio-cultural Global South locations (Curiel, 2009; Espinosa Miñoso, 2022; Figueroa, 2020; Mendez, 2015). It is a means for disrupting the dominant politics of knowledge and for championing social and epistemological change (Fotaki and Pullen, 2024). Bastien et al. (2023) and Jammulamadaka et al. (2021) argue that there is a need for robust pluriversal discussions from diverse positions and lived experiences for multiple knowledge systems to coexist so we can enact the epistemic decolonial shift in management studies. Embracing pluriverse perspectives is not a means to replace dominant Western epistemologies, nor is it a move towards anti-Western essentialism, but aims to help overcome the hierarchical dichotomy between the West and the ‘rest’ (Grosfoguel, 2009). To conclude, I draw on bell hooks (1990: 341) and see the Maya women’s lived experiences in the margins as a privileged space of epistemological possibility, I was not speaking of marginality one wishes to lose – to give up or surrender as part of moving into the centre – but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes ones’ capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.
