Commoning Xela: Negotiating collective spaces around a Central American intermediate city

This exploration is based on joint fieldwork conducted by an interdisciplinary research team in the city of Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala. It uses the notion of commoning as an analytic lens to understand social transformations in this intermediate city, and in contemporary Latin America at large. The interplay of commoning, de-commoning and re-commoning processes draws attention to the cocreation and collective production of tangible and intangible resources happening at different scales. The proposed commoning perspective further aims to critically assess the binary contrasts and presumed dualisms that inform academic and policy approaches to social change, in order to create a better understanding of the drivers, interactions and practices of transformation in intertwined rural-urban contexts.