The distribution of land, the organization of the peasant family and production in the municipality of Patzicía, CH, Guatemala

Abstract

This article presents and discusses, from an empirical case, one of the central elements in the concept of peasantry: the land. From this discussion, the peasant family, its production and social reproduction processes are approached. It addresses the general view of the spatial distribution of agricultural activity and, as a consequence, the access and disposition of land in the municipality of Patzicía, as they express the way in which the logic of the global capitalist market not only penetrated, and penetrates, the local communities, but it also configures and mediates the relations inside and outside the peasant unit, that is, the internal organization of the peasant unit and the bonds and relations with its social and physical surroundings. In this context, for peasants, access to land becomes difficult, if not impossible. The objective of the article is to present a contextualization about the capitalist distribution of the means of production, mainly of the land, its consequences in the precariousness and transformation of the peasant families live, but also the answers and possible alternatives that the peasants have at the communal level. The methodological perspective that followed in this study was qualitative with an ethnographic basis from a community study, where the community of study was the peasant families in the municipality of Patzicía, CH, Guatemala.