Indigenous communities in the Global South face a critical paradox: renewable energy projects designed to support their development often deepen territorial dispossession and social fragmentation instead. Existing participatory frameworks fail to account for the internal complexity of indigenous communities under neoliberal pressure, producing implementation failures that go beyond technical shortcomings. This study addresses this gap through a transdisciplinary, longitudinal examination of four Maya communities in Yucatán, Mexico, where renewable energy projects intersected with active land conflicts, gender constraints, and governance crises between 2021 and 2024. Combining research and community advocacy levels, and integrating feminist political ecology, indigenous dialogue practices, and energy engineering, we developed and applied a novel methodological framework and a typology of four Socio-Energy Advocacy Routes that characterize distinct community responses to energy interventions: Collective Resilience, Conflict-Responsive Adaptation, Territorial Defense Integration, and Silent Resistance. A central theoretical contribution is the documentation of ¿social oscillation,¿ through which indigenous collective structures strategically reactivate in response to external threats rather than being permanently dismantled by neoliberal forces. Our findings demonstrate that small-scale energy systems can function as tools for territorial sovereignty, communities in Ixil protected solar infrastructure during a Category 4 hurricane and a legal land crisis, while women in Sotuta advanced environmental leadership through non-confrontational strategies within patriarchal constraints. The adoption of battery-free solar pumping systems increased agricultural productivity by 78% and eliminated fuel costs of up to $6435 USD per farmer annually. These results show that effective indigenous energy transitions require adaptive, context-responsive frameworks that prioritize social cohesion and cultural survival alongside technical efficiency, demonstrating that community-scale energy systems can serve as social catalysts for territorial defense, gender equity, and collective resilience, offering evidence-based guidance for practitioners and policymakers operating in volatile, contested territories worldwide.
