For the last quarter-century, Liza Grandia has collaborated with grassroots and local nonprofits in northern Guatemala on women’s health, biodiversity, agrarian politics, and indigenous rights. She lived for almost seven years in remote rainforest communities of northern Guatemala and Belize and became proficient in Q’eqchi’, the second most commonly spoken Maya language (about a million people).

Broadly, her scholarship has focused on corporate and development threats to Indigenous people, with a focus on:

  • land grabbing and Indigenous agrarian resistance
  • the politics of biodiversity conservation
  • native food and farming systems
  • the contamination of Mesoamerican maize varieties with genetically modified corn
  • theories of the commons
  • foreign aid and US imperialism
  • pesticides and environmental justice

In 2017-19 she was awarded a Mellon Foundation “New Directions” fellowship to pursue studies in toxicology and environmental epidemiology for her new work in environmental justice and the cultural perceptions of risk about toxins in everyday life.

As a citizen, mother, and two-time cancer survivor, she leads various efforts in Woodland, CA on environmental sustainability in the public schools and the city’s climate action plan. On campus, she coordinates the Fragrance Free UCD campaign and other initiatives to improve indoor air quality and reduce pesticide use. In 2019, the Sierra Club’s Northern California chapter awarded her “best activist group” of the year.

 

Education

From Georgia public schools, she attended Yale and received her B.A. summa cum laude in 1996. After several years in Guatemala, she earned her doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley (2006) under the mentorship of Laura Nader. She was honored to return to Yale as a postdoc in the Program in Agrarian Studies 2006-7. She then spent her first years of academic life as an Assistant Professor at Clark University in the Department of International Development, Community, and Environment. In 2012, she returned to California as an Associate Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis.

 

Leadership and affiliations

At UC Davis, Dr. Grandia directs the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas, a department-affiliated institute to promote scholarship and engagement with indigenous struggles for sovereignty, autonomy, and self-determination across the hemisphere. Since its founding in 1991, IRCA has hosted numerous distinguished indigenous scholars, and community, spiritual, and political leaders at UC Davis. Under her leadership, IRCA is a virtual nexus to connect scholars, students, indigenous leaders, NGOs, social movements, and tribal governments in support of resistance and revitalization movements.

An interdisciplinary scholar, she maintains multiple affiliations across campus with (in alphabetical order):

  • International Agricultural Development
  • Community and Regional Development
  • Geography Graduate Grou
  • Graduate Group in Ecology
  • Hemispheric Institute on the Americas
  • Human Rights Studies

 

Accomplishments

As an undergraduate, her investigatory research helped halt a World Bank loan for an oil pipeline across Laguna del Tigre National Park until an Environmental Impact Assessment and a $250,000 conservation trust fund were established.

Based on Fulbright research in 1997, between 1998-2000, she founded an integrated health, population, and environment program called Remedios. Raising nearly $2 million for this connective work, fifteen years later, these programs continue to provide reproductive and maternal health services to more than half a million people in northern Guatemala. The Remedios program is credited for catalyzing efforts that lowered Petén’s fertility rate from 6.8 to 4.3 children/woman between 1999 & 2009—a demographic transition that took Guatemala more than four decades.

With her field mentor, Dr. Norman B. Schwartz, she then became a founding board member of a Guatemalan environmental nonprofit in 2002 called ProPetén to which she continues to serve as an emeritus advisor.

In 2005, she founded the Q’eqchi’ Scholars Network to be able to disseminate information about threats to Q’eqchi’ autonomy and also, over the long term, to develop innovative ways to repatriate research to Q’eqchi’ scholars and communities. Through the network, she enjoyed mentoring other young academics in pursuing engaged and activist research.

In 2007, she represented Maya communities as an expert witness in two constitutional land cases in Belize that resulted in the historic reconstitution of indigenous territorial control of the southern third of that country.

Since 2012, she has worked closely as an advisor and ally to the Indigenous Peasant Association for the Integrated Development of Petén, ACDIP in territorial defense against land grabbing, legal support for customary land management, recuperation of sacred sites, Indigenous education and the revitalization of agroecology and traditional knowledge systems. As of 2020, they have declared 39 autonomous indigenous communities with another 69 in process.

For more about the real-world impact of her books, see publications.