Abstract
The chronicle of Plan de Sánchez massacre survivors organizing for an exhumation in chapter one provides a powerful example of local Maya community mobilizations for truth and justice. In response to these types of initiatives, the Guatemalan army, elite interests, and some academics have attempted to represent Maya political activism as a manipulation of the Maya by the guerrillas and/or popular organizations and religious groups. These representations of the Maya tend to conflate or draw little to no distinction among these sectors, thus reinforcing the official conflation of ethnicity with political affiliation. I suggest that the perception of the “manipulated” Maya is a recovery and transformation of the official story intended to erase both community and individual memory and agency. Like the official story upon which it is based, this perception shares the same racist ideational foundation that denies political consciousness and free will to the Maya; to explain away Maya political action as a manipulation is to negate the memory and agency of Maya communities, families, and individuals. In this chapter,’ I explore testimony, official discourse, and truth in popular memory in relationship to the still-contested reconstruction of Guatemalan history. The recovery and transformation of official discourse negates the agency of the Maya in general, and especially monolingual Maya women.
We speak from the heart.
—María Maquín
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Notes
This chapter builds on previously published pieces on Guatemalan women in general and Maya women in particular. See Victoria Sanford, “Between Rigoberta Menchú and La Violencia: Deconstructing David Stoll’s History of Guatemala,” Latin American Perspectives 109, vol. 26, no.6 (November 1999): 38–46;
Victoria Sanford, “From I, Rigoberta to the Commissioning of Truth: Maya Women and the Reshaping of Guatemalan History,” Cultural Critique 47 (winter 2001): 16–53;
Victoria Sanford, “The Silencing of Maya Women from Mamá Maquín to Rigoberta Menchú,” Social Justice 27, no. 1 (June 2000): 128–156;
Victoria Sanford, Mothers, Widows and Guerrilleras: Anonymous Conversations with Survivors of State Terror (Uppsala: Life and Peace Institute, 1997). For more on Guatemalan women and their testimonies, see also
Margaret Hooks, Guatemalan Women Speak (London: Catholic Institute for International Relations, 1991); and
Ayuda de la Iglesia Norwega, Por favor, Nunca Más: Testimonios de mujeres, victímas del conflicto armado en Guatemala (Guatemala City: Ayuda de la Iglesia Norwega, 1997).
Paul Ricoeur, Husserl—An Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 211.
Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror—Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 77–83, 104.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985): 50.
Ranajit Guha, “The Small Voice of History,” in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Subaltern Studies X (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996): 11. Guha is referring to the women who participated in the Telangana movement (1946–51) in India.
Elizabeth Burgos Debray, I, Rigoberta Menchú—An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London: Verso, 1984). For a compelling testimony from the founder of the Mothers of the Disappeared in El Salvador, see
Maria Teresa Tula, Hear My Testimony (Boston: South End Press, 1994). From a peasant union leader in Honduras, see
Elvia Alvarado, Don’t Be Afraid Gringo. A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Study, 1987).
For more on the history of the reinas indigenas, see Ramon Gonzalez-Ponciano, “Esas sangres no están limpias,” in El Racismo, el Estado y la Nación en Guatemala 1944–1997 (Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico: Centro de Estudios de Mexico and Centroamérica, 1998).
“Ladino” is a term used in Guatemala to refer to non-Maya. While often compared to the Mexican usage of the word mestizo, which has been historically used to label the hybrid identity of Spanish and indigenous, the Guatemalan term “ladino” is most commonly used to refer to all non-Maya. For an interesting discussion of the history of this term and ladino identity, see Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala—A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); and
Marta Casaus-Arzú, Guatemala: Lineaje y Racismo (San José, Costa Rica: FLACSO, 1992).
The participation of women in protest is indeed a widespread, if insufficiently documented, phenomenon. On the key role of beauticians as community leaders during the civil rights movement in the United States, see Francesca Polletta, “Outsiders in Social Protest” paper presented at the American Sociological Association, January 5, 1999; and, her Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Experiments in Participatory Democracy from Pre-War Pacifism to the Present (forthcoming). On women in the Sandinista revolution, see Margaret Randall, Sandino’s Daughters. Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle (Vancouver: New Star Books, Ltd., 1981); on peasant women taking up arms in the Telengana uprising in India, see
Vasantha Kannibiran and K. Lalita, “That Magic Time,” in Kumkum Sangari and Suresh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); on African women in prison, see Asale Angel-Ajani, Negotiating Small Truths (forthcoming); on post-revolutionary women activists in El Salvador, see
Irina Carlota Silber, A Spectral Reconciliation: Rebuilding Post-War El Salvador (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2000) ; and
Lynn Stephen, Women and Social Movements in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); on the role of indigenous women in the Chiapas uprising, see
Rosalva Aida Hernandez, La otra palabra-mujeres y Violencia en Chiapas, antes y después de Acteal (Mexico City: Pangea Editores, 1998); and
Shannon Speed, Global Discourses on the Local Terrain: Grounding Human Rights in Chiapas, Mexico (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2002). See also
Marjorie Agosin, Surviving Beyond Fear: Women, Children and Human Rights in Latin America (Fredonia: White Pine Press, 1993);
Sonia Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transitional Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990);
Jane Jaquette, ed., The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994);
Elizabeth Jelin, Women and Social Change in Latin America (London: Zed Press, 1990).
Nancy Caro Hollander, Love in a Time of Hate—Liberation Psychology in Latin America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 95. See also
Ximena Bunster-Burotto, “Women and Torture in Latin America,” in Women and Change in Latin America, June Nash and Helen Safa, eds. (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985).
Rene Jara and Hernan Vidal, eds., Testimonio y Literatura (Minneapolis: Monographic Series of the Society for the Study of Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Revolutionary Literatures, no. 3, 1986): 3;
John Beverly and Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 175 and 36.
Construction of this bridge began in 1860, the same year that local and regional officials implemented labor drafts upon Maya communities, which obligated local Maya to work on coffee plantations. For more on Panzós, see Sanford, “Buried Secrets,” 45–50. For an in-depth analysis of the usurpation of Maya lands and forced labor in the late nineteenth century, see Julio Castellano Cambranes, ed., 550 Años de Lucha por la Tierra, vols.1–2. (Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1992). See also
Severo Martínez Peláez, La Patria del Criollo: Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca (San Jose, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitario Centroamericano, 1979); and
Martinez Peláez, Motines del Indios—La Violencia Colonial en Centroamerica y Chiapas (Puebla, Mexico: Cuadernos de la Casa Presno, 1985).
Dictator Jorge Ubico (1931–1944) had a very paternalistic, near-royal self-image. Ubico believed that the Maya should be conscripted into the Guatemalan army, where they would be trained to leave their “primitive” ways behind. Through the complicated Decree 1995, he legally granted free access to Maya labor as the right of large landholders. See Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil—A History of Guatemala (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Castellano Cambranes, 550 Años de Lucha por la Tierra.
For more on the Democratic Spring, the Arbenz government, land reform, and U.S. intervention, see Rafael Menjivar, Reforma Agraria: Guatemala, Bolivia, Cuba (San Salvador: Editorial Universitaria de EI Salvador, 1969);
Roger Williams, States and Social Evolution-Coffee and the Rise of National Governments in Central America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
Castellano Cambranes, ed., 550 Años de Lucha por la Tierra; Jim Handy, Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994);
Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope—The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991);
Jesús García Añoveros, La Reforma Agraria de Arbenz en Guatemala (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispana, Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericano, 1987);
Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982);
Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Specifically on Panzós, see Libro de Actas de Panzós no. 3, 1944: 83–87. On the department of Alta Verapaz, see
Richard Wilson’s ethnography, Maya Resurgence in Guatemala (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).
“Mama Maquín” was organized in 1990 by refugee women to unite Guatemalan women across ethnic, language, and refugee camp boundaries in Mexico. They were demanding women’s participation in daily camp life decision-making and their planned return to Guatemala. The organization became the space through which women could assert their needs and their goals for themselves as well as their communities. Deborah Billings offers a powerful ethnography of Guatemalan refugee women in “Identities, Consciousness and Organizing in Exile: Guatemalan Refugee Women in the Camps of Southern Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1995). For more on land struggles in Guatemala, see Episcopado Guatemalteco (hereafter EG), El Clamor por la Tierra—Carta Pastoral Colectiva del Epioscopado Guatemalteco (Guatemala City: EG, 1988). For more on rural movements in Central America, see
Marc Edelman, Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999);
Philippe Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989);
Charles Hale, Resistance and Contradiction—Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994);
Jeffrey Gould, To Die this Way—Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), and
Jeffrey Gould, To Lead as Equals—Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
William Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Orginis of the Soccer War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979).
David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998): 12, 282.
Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala Memoria del Silencio, vols. 1–12 (Guatemala City: CEH, 1999), vol. 6: 173.
Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), Guatemala Memory of Silence—Conclusions and Recommendations (Guatemala City: CEH, 1999): 40–41.
Personal conversations with CEH and FAFG staff in May 1998. At the request of the FAFG, I developed a research methodology and led the investigation for the historical reconstruction of massacres in Panzós, Alta Verapaz and Acul, Nebaj, El Quiché. The methodology was then replicated in two additional FAFG investigations for the CEH in Chel, Chajul, El Quiché and Belen, Sacatepequez. In May and June of 1998, I wrote the historical reconstruction of the massacres in Panzós and Acul and supervised the writing of the reconstructions for Chel and Belen for the FAFG report to the CEH. See FAFG, Informé de la Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala: Cuatro Casos Paradaigrnáticos Solicitados por la Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico de Guatemala (Guatemala City: FAFG, 2000).
See José Barnoya Garcia, Panzós y unas Historias (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1984);
Tom Barry, Guatemala. The Politics of Counterinsurgency (Albuquerque: Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, 1986);
George Black, Garrison Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1984);
Centró de Investigaciones de Historia Social (CEIHS), Panzós—Testimonio (Guatemala City: CEIHS, 1979);
Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, El Recurso del Miedo—Ensayo sobre el Estado y el Terror en Guatemala (San Jose, Costa Rica: EDUCA, 1991);
Gabriel Aguilera Peralta, Dialectica del Terror (San Jose, Costa Rica: EDUCA, 1981).
Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories—Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York, 1991), 69. For a compelling study of time and violence in Peru, see
Billie Jean Isbell, “Time, Text and Terror,” Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society 25, nos. 1, 2 (1997): 57–76. See also
Deborah Poole and Gerardo Enrique, Peru: Time of Fear (London: Latin American Bureau. 1992).
Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHA), Guatemala—Nunca Más, vols. 1–4, Informé Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recupaeración de la Memoria Hist6rica (REHMI) (Guatemala City: ODHA, 1998), vol. 4: 69; CEH, Memoria, 1999, vol. 6: 21; and FAFG, Informé, 57.
John Beverly, “The Margin at the Center,” in Georg Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing—Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 37.
Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 11.
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 11.
“We sing because the survivors and our dead want us to sing.” The words on the pamphlet are from Mario Benedetti’s poem “Por qué Cantamos” (Why We Sing). For more of Benedetti’s poetry, see Mario Benedetti, Inventario: poesia completa (1950–1985) (Madrid: Visor, 1990).
Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory—Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18.
Rosemary Jane Jolly, Colonization, Violence and Narration in White South African Writing André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 1996), xiv.
Mario Moussa and Ron Scapp, “The Practical Theorizing of Michel Foucault: Politics and Counter-Discourse,” Cultural Critique 33 (spring 1996): 93.
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© 2003 Victoria Sanford
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Sanford, V. (2003). The Silencing of Maya Women. In: Buried Secrets. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973375_4
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