Liza Grandia

In her early twenties, she founded an integrated health, population, and environment program program called "Remedios" in northern Guatemala that provided reproductive health services to half a million people.  At the end of that decade, she co-founded one of Guatemala’s first environmental (and feminist) nonprofits called ProPeten and continues to serve as an emeritus advisor to its leadership.  To help inspire and support younger scholars into lives of engagement and advocacy, she founded the Q’eqchi’ Scholars Network.  While fighting cancer in her thirties, she wrote her first two books and a major study on land grabbing, which compelled the World Bank to restructure and then cancel a disastrous land privatization program.  During this period, she also served as a key expert witness two constitutional land cases in Belize that resulted in the historic reconstitution of Maya communal lands with broader implications for Commonwealth law. For the last ten years, she has served as ally and advisor to Q’eqchi’ grassroots organization in their struggles for territorial defense and restoration. Having now established almost a hundred autonomous villages across Petén, Guatemala, they are collaborating on a number of efforts including agro-ecology education, sacred site reclamation, and reforestation for climate change.

Weaving together her interests in trade, corporate power, organic agriculture, Indigenous food sovereignty, and social movements, she is currently writing a book, "Kernels of Rebellion" about resistance to GM-corn across Mesoamerica.  As a cancer survivor, she discovered her life's passion in environmental health and justice. In 2017-18 she was awarded a Mellon Foundation “New Directions” fellowship for a mid-career shift into toxicology and environmental epidemiology.  While pursuing a new line of publications on pesticides and GMOs in Guatemala, she is also researching cultural perceptions of toxic risk in everyday life at home.  For her often humorous but rigorous rabble rousing around toxics and environmental health, she has won numerous awards and civic recognition. 

With foundational training in environmental anthropology and political economy, she teaches about globalization and development threats to Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy throughout the hemisphere, with expertise in:

• agrarian dispossession, enclosure, and land grabbing;
• corporate power and hegemony;
• the politics of biodiversity conservation;
• native food and farming systems;
• ethnohistorical continuities of colonialism, nationalist liberalism, militarism and U.S. intervention, and neoliberalism across Mesoamerica; 
• pesticides, toxics, and comparative environmental justice;
• human rights and Indigenous environmental defenders.

To read more about how these interests intersect with her life story and work, continue here.