Urban neo-colonialism and defense of Mayan territory in the city of Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico

Although socio-environmental and territorial conflicts are expressed locally in seemingly distinct regions, their origins and consequences involve historical and global interconnections (Nash, 2001, 2005; Temper, Bene, & Martínez, 2015). In general, these conflicts in the Americas are primarily related to indigenous peoples' fight against old and new expressions of colonialism (Coulthard, 2018; Cloud and Bonniec, 2012; Composto and Navarro, 2014) or extractivism (Svampa and Viale, 2014; Garcia-Jerez, 2019).
Specifically in Mexico, the number of these conflicts has steadily increased in the last three decades at the height of the neoliberal model implemented from 1992 (Concheiro and Robles, 2014; De Ita, 2010; Toledo and Barrera-Basols, 2013). Most of these conflicts affect ancestral territories belonging to generally marginalized and impoverished indigenous communities in rural and urban areas (Angotti, 2013; Baronnet, Mora, & Stahler-Sholk, 2011; Harvey, 2004; Navarro, Fini y Castro, 2017), although few studies address urban indigenous communities (Velut, 2021).