How lessons from plurinationalist movements in Latin America ground the four initiatives of PLRCAWG — and why building campesin@ viability in California is inseparable from the long project of agrarian reform from the base.
California's food system is dominated by industrial agriculture — organized through monopoly control over markets, land, and inputs. This structure does not simply crowd out small farmers: it actively produces their dispossession. Small, diversified campesin@ producers are pushed toward monoculture or out of farming entirely, not because their practices are inferior, but because the economic and legal infrastructure surrounding them is designed for corporate agriculture at scale.
The consequences are ecological as well as social. Agroecological farming — which builds soil, protects water, sustains biodiversity, and reproduces community life — cannot survive without the economic conditions to make it viable. When farmers lack secure land tenure, fair markets, and technical self-sufficiency, even the most ecologically sound practices cannot be sustained across generations.
This is not a problem that can be solved by better technology, improved market access alone, or piecemeal policy reform. It requires building the collective infrastructure — economic, technical, territorial, and political — that allows campesin@ communities to sustain themselves with dignity on their own terms. That is the project of PLRCAWG.
"Ultimately, struggle is the generative site of new theories of how to free ourselves — it is how you resolve the contradictions, and it is how you innovate in the face of reactionary counter-offensives."
PLRCAWG draws its political framework from plurinationalist movements in Latin America — particularly the organizational and ideological innovations that allowed indigenous-peasant movements to advance genuine agrarian reform where others failed. This is not a framework borrowed wholesale, but one studied closely for its lessons and adapted to the specific conditions of California.
Plurinationalism recognizes that multiple nations exist within the boundaries of a single state — challenging the hegemonic myth of one nation inhabiting a polity. In settler colonial contexts like California, this means acknowledging the persistence of indigenous nations alongside migrant campesin@ communities, farmworker populations, and urban working classes — each with distinct relationships to land, labor, and sovereignty, all of whom are dispossessed by the same system.
Plurinationalism is not multiculturalism. It does not merely recognize cultural difference within existing state structures. It proposes alternative forms of governance rooted in collective territorial control, community self-determination, and the social function of land — rather than its treatment as a commodity.
A political vehicle created by and accountable to mass social organizations — not a traditional party that disciplines movements, but a structure that translates organized community power into institutional force without dissolving the autonomy of its constituent parts.
The concept that societies like Bolivia — and California — are not homogeneous formations but heterogeneous ones: multiple modes of production, temporalities, and cosmovisions coexisting across indigenous peoples, peasants, workers, and urban communities. Reform must work with this plurality, not against it.
The revolutionary nationalist model that sought an inclusionary monocultural national identity through economic nationalism and land redistribution. Its failure to address genuine plurality — in Bolivia, in Mexico, across Latin America — is a central lesson: inclusion without structural recognition of difference reproduces dispossession in new forms.
Community-based governance mechanisms that enable collective self-management of territory, resources, and political direction — the organizational form that keeps institutions accountable to the communities they serve.
The coalitional form through which diverse indigenous, peasant, and worker organizations articulate common demands and coordinate action — without erasing the distinct identities and specific struggles of each constituent group.
A legal doctrine recognized in many Latin American constitutions establishing that land ownership carries social obligations — that land which lies fallow, is held speculatively, or is managed destructively can legitimately be subject to reform. A principle PLRCAWG advances in California through mapping, advocacy, and organizing.
"The role of the political instrument serves to coalesce various peoples, groups, organizations, and movements into an articulated front that uses the same language and targets the same issues — prior to, not after, any institutional confrontation."
PLRCAWG's four initiatives are not separate programs. They are an integrated material base — the infrastructure that makes campesin@ viability possible and, in doing so, creates the conditions for a durable agrarian reform movement in California.
Each initiative addresses a distinct structural barrier that prevents small farmers from staying on the land. Together, they form the economic, technical, territorial, and political foundation of the working group's theory of change.
Industrial agriculture maintains its dominance through interlocking mechanisms: it controls markets (locking out small producers), captures land (through speculation and absenteeism), extracts through inputs (seeds, equipment, technology), and reproduces itself politically (through policy, subsidies, and the defunding of alternatives). PLRCAWG's four initiatives are designed to interrupt each of these mechanisms at the community level — building counter-infrastructure rather than demanding reform of existing systems.
The four initiatives operate in a reinforcing logic: each one creates conditions that make the others more viable, and together they constitute the material basis for organized campesin@ political power.
Create stable, fair demand outside corporate supply chains. When farmers have reliable buyers at fair prices, they can plan, invest, and stay on the land. Markets are the economic floor.
Lower production costs and build technical self-sufficiency. When farmers own their tools and infrastructure — rather than renting them — margins improve and dependency on corporate inputs shrinks.
Secure the territorial base. Economic viability without land tenure is precarious. Research, legal support, and acquisition work converts viable farmers into farmers with roots — communities, not renters.
Scale through formation, not expansion. Organizers trained in the political and technical logic of the first three initiatives can replicate this infrastructure in new territories — building the statewide movement capacity that makes reform durable.
When campesinos stay on the land, when land tenure is secured, and when agroecological farming becomes economically viable through collective coordination, the environmental outcomes follow — not as a program goal, but as a natural consequence of communities sustaining themselves with dignity. This is what PLRCAWG means by building from the base.
Political education is not a supplementary initiative — it is what makes the other three reproducible. Drawing directly from the lesson of el instrumento político, PLRCAWG understands that infrastructure without formation is fragile. Organizers who understand the political economy of land dispossession, the history of agrarian movements, and the technical logic of each initiative are the ones capable of planting this model in new communities, adapting it to local conditions, and defending it against co-optation or displacement.
The Land Reform School — with its Summer School, Winter School, and ongoing formation programs — is the institutional expression of this commitment.
PLRCAWG emerges from comparative research on plurinationalist movements across three case studies — Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile. Each offers distinct lessons about the organizational and ideological conditions that determine whether indigenous-peasant movements can advance structural reform, and what happens when those conditions are absent.
Bolivia's 1952 National Revolution attempted to create a unified nation through land redistribution and nationalist economic policy, but failed to address the fundamental plurality of Bolivian society. The indigenous movements that emerged in the 1960s–70s — Indianismo, Katarismo, the CSUTCB — built independent organizational power over decades. The cocalero movement, organized through the Coordinator of the 6 Federations, developed effective resistance and eventually formed the MAS-IPSP (Movement Toward Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of Peoples) in 1998.
The 2000 Water War and 2003–05 Gas War demonstrated the organizational capacity of indigenous-peasant coalitions. The Pacto de Unidad — a coalition of indigenous, peasant, and worker organizations — articulated unified demands that led to the 2009 Plurinational State constitution.
Decades of base-building, autonomous organization, and coalition formation through a political instrument — not electoral opportunity alone — created the conditions for structural change.
Guatemala's revolutionary period (1944–54) was violently suppressed by a US-backed coup, followed by decades of civil war and genocide against Maya peoples. This history of extreme repression debilitated indigenous-peasant organizing in ways that differentiate Guatemala sharply from Bolivia. CODECA (Committee for Peasant Development), organized across 3,000 communities, and its political instrument MLP (Movement for the Liberation of Peoples) represent the most significant push for a plurinational constituent assembly.
Yet Guatemala's movement struggles with NGO-ization following the 1996 Peace Accords, divisions between indigenous authorities and popular organizations, and sustained USAID influence promoting reformist rather than structural approaches. Rural-urban divides between plurinationalist demands and liberal reformism remain unresolved.
External funding, NGO frameworks, and liberal reformism can fragment and demobilize movements — political education and organizational independence are necessary defenses against co-optation.
The 2019 social uprising (estallido social) opened a constituent assembly process, but plurinationalism was ultimately rejected in two consecutive constitutional referendums. The Mapuche communities were not organized as a cohesive political bloc; no political instrument had socialized plurinational concepts to the broader population before the assembly began; and sectors like CAM rejected plurinationalism in favor of full territorial reconstruction of Wallmapu. This left the concept vulnerable to a sustained misinformation campaign.
Chile demonstrates that the moment of institutional opportunity — a constituent assembly, an election, a policy window — cannot substitute for the years of political formation that must precede it. Without prior articulation among diverse sectors through a shared political instrument, plurinationalism became a polarizing abstraction rather than a living coalition.
Coalition-building and political formation must precede, not follow, institutional confrontation. The political instrument is what prepares the ground.
California is a settler colonial context with persistent indigenous nations, a large and geographically diverse migrant campesin@ population, a massive landless farmworker class, and urban housing movements with shared material interests in land and community control. It is, in Zavaleta's terms, a motley social formation — plural, stratified, and riven by histories of dispossession that require plurinational, not monocultural, solutions.
The lessons from Bolivia, Guatemala, and Chile are not transplanted directly. They are studied for their organizational logic and adapted to the specific conditions of California's land system, legal framework, and movement landscape. PLRCAWG identifies five structural lessons that shape its work: