¡Mesoamérica Resiste! A New Campaign by the Beehive Design Collective

On November 12, 2013, Sakura of the Beehive Design Collective presented ¡Mesoamérica Resiste!, the long-awaited third graphics campaign in an epic trilogy, at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. ¡Mesoamérica Resiste! is a graphic story-telling about resistance to neo-colonialism and mega-projects in Mexico and Central America.

The Bees explain their work best!

MESOAMÉRICA RESISTE is the long awaited final installment in the Beehive’s graphic trilogy about globalization in the Americas! This collaboratively produced educational illustration was created through an intensive process of grassroots research that started in 2004, when an initial team from the US, Canada, and Mexico traveled together from Mexico to Panama to meet with communities organizing against the mega-infrastructure projects of a regional integration plan then known as Plan Puebla Panama.

9 years in the making, the Mesoamérica Resiste graphic reflects the Beehive’s efforts to document and share diverse stories of communities defending their sovereignty and building alternatives to top-down development plans - especially organizing led by Indigenous peoples, who have fought back against colonialism and genocide for centuries.

The Beehive Design Collective is a wildly-motivated, all volunteer, activist-art collective dedicated to “cross-pollinating the grassroots” by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. We work anonymously as word-to-image translators of complex global stories, gathered and shared through first hand conversations with affected communities.