For Maya peoples, the region we often refer to as Mesoamérica is much more than a space demarcated by geopolitical borders, defined by contemporary academic thought, or historicized by scholars. Well before invasion, Indigenous peoples in the Western hemisphere were already moving through the land, exchanging goods and ideas, sustaining communities, and imagining themselves in the world. While we cannot reconstruct such realities and imaginings, we can rethink Mesoamérica using the work of contemporary Maya thinkers and practitioners (artists, weavers, and poets) and propose other ways of understanding the region. Through examples in contemporary Maya art, literature, and philosophy we reflect on notions of space and time to help us envision alternatives to models that have endeavored to define, describe, and prescribe the original territories of Indigenous people. What happens when the world is reoriented, and when past, present, and future are in constant dialogue in this reorientation?
Speaker
Rita M. Palacios is a queer refugee settler and language professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Her work examines contemporary Maya literature and art from a decolonial cultural and gender studies perspective. Her co-authored book Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (University of Arizona Press 2019, 2022) with Paul M. Worley, received an honorary mention for best book in the humanities by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association for its ground-breaking approach to the study of Indigenous literatures from the Americas. During 2025–26, she is a visiting scholar at Massey College at the University of Toronto. Her current project is a proposal for Abiayala-specific Indigenous research methodologies in the humanities.