Mneina, Esma2015-07-272015-07-2720152015http://hdl.handle.net/10393/32578http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-4233Mining conflicts in Guatemala “provide sites for exploring how things that used to be fused together [including] identity, entitlement, territoriality, and nationality are being taken apart and realigned in innovative relationships and spaces” within neoliberal contexts (Ong, 2006, p. 5). The municipality of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, is currently home to a nearly decade-old mining conflict between Indigenous communities against mining development, and a Canadian-owned mining project, the Marlin mine. The primary objective of this thesis is to highlight the reasons why Indigenous people still resist mining development despite corporate efforts to engage with them through corporate social responsibility measures and corporate citizenship practices. The ethnographic fieldwork pursued in the Maya-Mam communities surrounding the Marlin mine revealed how Indigenous political actors imagine and navigate experiences with mining development. The resistance of Indigenous actors to mining in this study is strongly linked to a lack of consultation, environmental damage, and an increase in inter-community conflict. These issues have made the presence of the mining company to be seen by Indigenous actors as a barrier to the full realization of both their rights as political citizens and their own development interests. This thesis hopes to contribute to understandings of corporate power and corporate-Indigenous engagement by adding a new dimension to understandings of citizenship and political rights between corporations, communities and the state: the meaning that the emergence of the corporate citizen in Mayan Guatemala takes from the perspective of historically marginalized, yet politicized, Maya-Mam actors.enThesis