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Sociology of Agriculture and Food (SAFRIG)

Where Land Bleeds and Milpa Persists: Indigenous Agrarian Resistance and the Reconfiguration of the Plantationocene in El Salvador Andres Mayorga*, Andres Mayorga, Andrew Smolski, Kathleen Sexsmith,

In the early twentieth century, the Salvadoran planter class facilitated Indigenous land expropriation in the west through the expansion of coffee plantations. This model, sustained by capital accumulation through dispossession, later expanded eastward with sugarcane and cattle production. The resulting processes of deterritorialization generated sociopolitical tensions that escalated into a twelve-year civil war (1980–1992). This study asks how Indigenous agrifood systems in El Salvador have endured decades of violence and dispossession under the legacy of (neo)colonial plantation regimes. Drawing on the voices of Indigenous survivors of the Salvadoran Civil War and descendants of the ethnocide under the Coffee Regime, this study was based on 34 semi-structured interviews and field visits conducted during the summer of 2025. Grounded in the framework of plantation violence and interstitial resistance, this article examines how the expansion of plantation economies unfolded through a necropolitics of militarized agrarian violence. This violence manifested primarily through the burning of crops to induce hunger and through gendered dimensions of territorial dispossession enacted via the targeted killing of Indigenous men. It is within conjunctural agrarian resistance to this necropolitics, amid gunfire, temporary life in exile, and territorial persistence, that Indigenous agriculture endured. Through these processes, plantation economies were fractured, giving rise to interstitial spaces where the renegotiation of Indigenous agrarian identities, alongside the collective memory of plantation violence, continues to exist within the legacy of the Plantationocene. This study contributes to critical agrarian studies by showing how the ambivalent interplay between plantation expansion and resistance to its consolidation produces spaces of food sovereignty, navigated through the renegotiation of Indigeneity and ancestral agrarian practices.