Megan Ybarra
Biographic Data
| ID | 91692 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Megan Ybarra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Megan |
| FAMILY NAME | Ybarra |
| SIGNATURE | YBARRA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3074-5006 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Reorienting Knowledge Production Through Storytelling and Collaborative Practice
Human geographers have long engaged in place-based research, and a growing number of scholars have grappled with the contradictions that arise in upholding our place-based values. This Focus section highlights challenges for geographers engaging in community-based work, focusing on power relations in ways of knowing within and beyond academic knowledge production. These interventions in earth writing take shape through accountable methodologies l…
Radical placemaking is a verb
How might the practice of radical placemaking make new lifeworlds possible? In this commentary, I respond to Kass and Dunlap's argument that procedural abolitionism bears responsibility for counterinsurgency in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion. While I appreciate the urgency of critically examining strategies for abolition, I come to different conclusions than the authors’ divide between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous stra…
The Datafication of Environmental Injustice
Indigenous to where? Homelands and nation (pueblo) in Indigenous Latinx studies
Site Fight! Toward the Abolition of Immigrant Detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and Everywhere Else)
This paper theorises the spatialisation of White supremacy through the siting and expansion of a US immigrant detention centre, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). This case reveals the spatial relationship between the detention centre’s displacement with the Seattle‐Tacoma region’s increasing wealth, highlighting the role of detention and incarceration in the spatialisation of White supremacy. If White advantage maps onto whiteness as propert…
On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place
This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define com…
We are not ignorant: Transnational migrants' experiences of racialized securitization
This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders-from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants' tes…
Deploying Difference: Security Threat Narratives and State Displacement from Protected Areas
State actors are increasingly treating protected areas as sites of security threats and policing resident communities as though they are the cause of this insecurity. This is translating into community eviction from protected areas that is authorised by security concerns and logics and hence not merely conservation concerns. We ground this claim by drawing upon empirical work from two borderland conservation areas: Mozambique's Limpopo National P…
Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: Sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation
This paper examines the significance of historically sedimented military practices for conservation in contemporary Guatemala. During a 36-year civil war, the military represented the lowlands as dangerous jungle that had to be tamed to justify its counterinsurgency campaigns, thus positioning the jungle's inhabitants as suspect citizens or potential insurgents. Also during the war, international conservationists coalesced to successfully lobby f…
Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest
Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest. This book reveals that the process of protecting lands has been one of racialized dispossession for the Indigenous peoples who live there. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and how this is part of a larger national effort to make Indigenous peoples…
We Don't Need Money, We Need to be Together: Forced Transnationality in Deportation's Afterlives
As US deportations and repatriations climbed to unprecedented levels, half of Mexican immigrants deported have at least one family member who is a US citizen, and one in five have at least one child who is a US citizen. This paper applies the analytic of forced transnationality, extending its scope beyond one person’s deportation to reveal cascading effects of travel and trauma for families remaking lives across the US-Mexico border. To do so, ou…
Introduction to themed issue: “Green security in protected areas”
Blind passes” and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border
You Cannot Measure a Tzuultaq'a”: Cultural Politics at the Limits of Liberal Legibility
In the past two decades, many Latin American nations emerged from twin crises of debt and dictatorship towards an uncertain marriage of fragile democracies and neoliberal policies. The focus of this article is on recognition for a limited set of rights for indigenous peoples known as neoliberal multiculturalism. Through a case study of a sacred place declaration by Q’eqchi’ Maya activists in rural Guatemala, I show the limits of liberal legibilit…
Slashed and Burned: The Debate Over Privatization of Q'eqchi' Lands in Northern Guatemala
The Guatemalan state offers lowlands Q'eqchi' Maya two land titling options: communal or individual. With the same goal of bequeathing land to their children, different communities make strategic choices regarding legalized property regimes. In interviews and ethnographic case studies, Q'eqchi' respondents rejected the state's two options because neither juridical form of land tenure affords the assemblage of rights and responsibilities that they…
Privatizing the Tzuultaq'a? Private property and spiritual reproduction in post-war Guatemala
This study considers how Guatemalan genocide survivors mediate their identities through property relations on a former development pole, or strategic hamlet built on the ashes of a scorched earth massacre. It traces the historical trajectory of a lowlands Q'eqchi' community's land tenure, from a land conflict with a plantation owner that sparked a military massacre to their resettlement under army auspices. I conclude that the community did not c…
Violent visions of an ownership society: The land administration project in Petén, Guatemala
On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place
This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define com…
Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: Sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation
This paper examines the significance of historically sedimented military practices for conservation in contemporary Guatemala. During a 36-year civil war, the military represented the lowlands as dangerous jungle that had to be tamed to justify its counterinsurgency campaigns, thus positioning the jungle's inhabitants as suspect citizens or potential insurgents. Also during the war, international conservationists coalesced to successfully lobby f…
Introduction to themed issue: “Green security in protected areas”
Blind passes” and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border
Site Fight! Toward the Abolition of Immigrant Detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and Everywhere Else)
This paper theorises the spatialisation of White supremacy through the siting and expansion of a US immigrant detention centre, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). This case reveals the spatial relationship between the detention centre’s displacement with the Seattle‐Tacoma region’s increasing wealth, highlighting the role of detention and incarceration in the spatialisation of White supremacy. If White advantage maps onto whiteness as propert…
We are not ignorant: Transnational migrants' experiences of racialized securitization
This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders-from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants' tes…
Privatizing the Tzuultaq'a? Private property and spiritual reproduction in post-war Guatemala
This study considers how Guatemalan genocide survivors mediate their identities through property relations on a former development pole, or strategic hamlet built on the ashes of a scorched earth massacre. It traces the historical trajectory of a lowlands Q'eqchi' community's land tenure, from a land conflict with a plantation owner that sparked a military massacre to their resettlement under army auspices. I conclude that the community did not c…
Violent visions of an ownership society: The land administration project in Petén, Guatemala
Indigenous to where? Homelands and nation (pueblo) in Indigenous Latinx studies
We Don't Need Money, We Need to be Together: Forced Transnationality in Deportation's Afterlives
As US deportations and repatriations climbed to unprecedented levels, half of Mexican immigrants deported have at least one family member who is a US citizen, and one in five have at least one child who is a US citizen. This paper applies the analytic of forced transnationality, extending its scope beyond one person’s deportation to reveal cascading effects of travel and trauma for families remaking lives across the US-Mexico border. To do so, ou…
You Cannot Measure a Tzuultaq'a”: Cultural Politics at the Limits of Liberal Legibility
In the past two decades, many Latin American nations emerged from twin crises of debt and dictatorship towards an uncertain marriage of fragile democracies and neoliberal policies. The focus of this article is on recognition for a limited set of rights for indigenous peoples known as neoliberal multiculturalism. Through a case study of a sacred place declaration by Q’eqchi’ Maya activists in rural Guatemala, I show the limits of liberal legibilit…
Slashed and Burned: The Debate Over Privatization of Q'eqchi' Lands in Northern Guatemala
The Guatemalan state offers lowlands Q'eqchi' Maya two land titling options: communal or individual. With the same goal of bequeathing land to their children, different communities make strategic choices regarding legalized property regimes. In interviews and ethnographic case studies, Q'eqchi' respondents rejected the state's two options because neither juridical form of land tenure affords the assemblage of rights and responsibilities that they…
Radical placemaking is a verb
How might the practice of radical placemaking make new lifeworlds possible? In this commentary, I respond to Kass and Dunlap's argument that procedural abolitionism bears responsibility for counterinsurgency in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion. While I appreciate the urgency of critically examining strategies for abolition, I come to different conclusions than the authors’ divide between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous stra…
The Datafication of Environmental Injustice
Violent visions of an ownership society: The land administration project in Petén, Guatemala
Slashed and Burned: The Debate Over Privatization of Q'eqchi' Lands in Northern Guatemala
The Guatemalan state offers lowlands Q'eqchi' Maya two land titling options: communal or individual. With the same goal of bequeathing land to their children, different communities make strategic choices regarding legalized property regimes. In interviews and ethnographic case studies, Q'eqchi' respondents rejected the state's two options because neither juridical form of land tenure affords the assemblage of rights and responsibilities that they…
Privatizing the Tzuultaq'a? Private property and spiritual reproduction in post-war Guatemala
This study considers how Guatemalan genocide survivors mediate their identities through property relations on a former development pole, or strategic hamlet built on the ashes of a scorched earth massacre. It traces the historical trajectory of a lowlands Q'eqchi' community's land tenure, from a land conflict with a plantation owner that sparked a military massacre to their resettlement under army auspices. I conclude that the community did not c…
You Cannot Measure a Tzuultaq'a”: Cultural Politics at the Limits of Liberal Legibility
In the past two decades, many Latin American nations emerged from twin crises of debt and dictatorship towards an uncertain marriage of fragile democracies and neoliberal policies. The focus of this article is on recognition for a limited set of rights for indigenous peoples known as neoliberal multiculturalism. Through a case study of a sacred place declaration by Q’eqchi’ Maya activists in rural Guatemala, I show the limits of liberal legibilit…
Blind passes” and the production of green security through violence on the Guatemalan border
Introduction to themed issue: “Green security in protected areas”
Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest
Global conservation efforts are celebrated for saving Guatemala’s Maya Forest. This book reveals that the process of protecting lands has been one of racialized dispossession for the Indigenous peoples who live there. Through careful ethnography and archival research, Megan Ybarra shows how conservation efforts have turned Q’eqchi’ Mayas into immigrants on their own land, and how this is part of a larger national effort to make Indigenous peoples…
We Don't Need Money, We Need to be Together: Forced Transnationality in Deportation's Afterlives
As US deportations and repatriations climbed to unprecedented levels, half of Mexican immigrants deported have at least one family member who is a US citizen, and one in five have at least one child who is a US citizen. This paper applies the analytic of forced transnationality, extending its scope beyond one person’s deportation to reveal cascading effects of travel and trauma for families remaking lives across the US-Mexico border. To do so, ou…
Deploying Difference: Security Threat Narratives and State Displacement from Protected Areas
State actors are increasingly treating protected areas as sites of security threats and policing resident communities as though they are the cause of this insecurity. This is translating into community eviction from protected areas that is authorised by security concerns and logics and hence not merely conservation concerns. We ground this claim by drawing upon empirical work from two borderland conservation areas: Mozambique's Limpopo National P…
Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: Sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation
This paper examines the significance of historically sedimented military practices for conservation in contemporary Guatemala. During a 36-year civil war, the military represented the lowlands as dangerous jungle that had to be tamed to justify its counterinsurgency campaigns, thus positioning the jungle's inhabitants as suspect citizens or potential insurgents. Also during the war, international conservationists coalesced to successfully lobby f…
We are not ignorant: Transnational migrants' experiences of racialized securitization
This paper examines the dynamics of racialized securitization for transnational migrants across multiple borders-from Central America toward Mexico and the United States. Rather than a singular process where US policies, funding, and attitudes toward border security direct Mexican immigration enforcement, I argue that Mexican state collaboration redirects US xenophobia away from Mexican migrants and toward Central American migrants. Migrants' tes…
On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place
This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define com…
Site Fight! Toward the Abolition of Immigrant Detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and Everywhere Else)
This paper theorises the spatialisation of White supremacy through the siting and expansion of a US immigrant detention centre, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). This case reveals the spatial relationship between the detention centre’s displacement with the Seattle‐Tacoma region’s increasing wealth, highlighting the role of detention and incarceration in the spatialisation of White supremacy. If White advantage maps onto whiteness as propert…
Indigenous to where? Homelands and nation (pueblo) in Indigenous Latinx studies
Reorienting Knowledge Production Through Storytelling and Collaborative Practice
Human geographers have long engaged in place-based research, and a growing number of scholars have grappled with the contradictions that arise in upholding our place-based values. This Focus section highlights challenges for geographers engaging in community-based work, focusing on power relations in ways of knowing within and beyond academic knowledge production. These interventions in earth writing take shape through accountable methodologies l…
Radical placemaking is a verb
How might the practice of radical placemaking make new lifeworlds possible? In this commentary, I respond to Kass and Dunlap's argument that procedural abolitionism bears responsibility for counterinsurgency in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion. While I appreciate the urgency of critically examining strategies for abolition, I come to different conclusions than the authors’ divide between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous stra…
The Datafication of Environmental Injustice
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Political economy (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (6 works) · Geography (6 works) · State (computer science (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works)