Arturo Arias

The Maya Movement, Postcolonialism And Cultural Agency

On January 29, 2002, various Maya organizations categorically rejected the Anti-Discrimination Law approved the day before by the Guatemalan Congress. They argued that, as it had finally been approved, this law was too general, and referred to Mayas as if they were simply one more among many groups in the Guatemalan social landscape. “(This law) typified discrimination as something generic, an issue that could affect anybody in an abstract sense, denying the existence of our peoples; those are the reasons we feel frustrated,” explained Rosalina Tuyuc, head of the Guatemalan Confederation of Widows (CONAVIGUA), a Maya organization that groups thousands of women who lost their husbands during the civil war that ravaged the country during the 1980s. In 1997, when she had been in Congress, Tuyuc had been one of the three original promoters of this law, together with Manuela Alvarado and Marina Otzoy. Other Maya organizations complained that congressmen did not consult with them, or even consider their opinion, let alone incorporate their recommendations, said Marta Lopez, head of MOLOJ, the Political Association of Maya Women.“It considers discirmination as a problem, not as a crime. It should be categorical that racism is a crime,” added Francisco Cali, president of CITI, the International Indian Treaties Council. Both this proliferation of Maya organizations, as well as their organized and extremely vocal (as well as politicized), assertive reaction to an initiative by the country’s highest legislative body, unthinkable in Guatemala’s history before the peace treaty was signed at the end of 1996, are examples of present-day Maya cultural agency. “Cultural agency” has often been used to denote concrete processes dealing with the reconfiguration of cultural spaces that enable subjects, often peripheral or subaltern, to empower themselves. Within this framework, scholars

The Woman in the Middle

Short story by a Guatemalan writer

The Ghosts of the Past, Human Dignity, and the Collective Need for Reparation

In the early 1980s the Guatemalan army decimated the Achí Maya villages in the valley of Rabinal because they had opposed the construction of a hydroelectric dam that was going to destroy their homes and their livelihoods. This article uses the villagers’ demands for reparations as a way to explore issues that link ethnic historical memory to a notion that we could label as ‘postmemory’, or, better yet, ‘postmemorializing’, a sort of restitutional justice that goes beyond a more conventional understanding of what historical memory is. I argue that postmemorializing includes not only a sense of preserving the historical memory of ‘originary terror’, but adds to it a demand for economic reparations. Moreover, it extends its mantle to broader ethical issues of human dignity and a demand for the recognition of ethnicized subalternized subjects bearing alternative epistemologies and ways of thinking.

Txitzi’n for the Poxnai: Indigenous Women’s Discourses on Revolutionary Combat

Official analyses of the Guatemalan civil war (1960–1996) shift between those that proclaim massive and/or enthusiastic indigenous participation in guerrilla organizations and those that claim that there was a manipulation of innocent, or ignorant, “indigenous masses.”1 This never-ending production of labels to designate cultural dominants about the war is not an innocuous fact: it is intertwined with the act of interpreting who won and who is to blame for the entire process. In the Guatemalan case, global and local actors from opposing academic power fields remain mired in generalities. As a result, perfunctory phrases such as “indigenous masses,” “indigenous combatants,” or “indigenous ex-URNG members” (URNG is the Spanish acronym for the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) continue to circulate in most papers written about the subject without any serious problematization of the meaning of these vague notions.2 What is more, in the midst of their mudslinging, neither side has, for the most part, spoken of gender, nor have they allowed the voices of indigenous ex-combatants to be heard directly. That is, very few people have actually interviewed indigenous ex-combatants to hear their own explanations for choosing to engage in revolutionary war, perhaps one of the most dramatic limit-experiences and demonstrations of agency in which an individual can engage.

Re-visioning Latin American Studies in the United States

In the early 1990s, an influential group of northern scholars, foundation representatives and observers of academic trends came to the conclusion that ‘Area Studies’ were in crisis. Although the critiques and calls for reformulation applied across the board to a heterogeneous array of Area Studies fields, they had particular resonance within Latin American Studies (LAS). Rooted in disciplinary and institutional developments dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, LAS came into its own in the 1950s, in the context of the Cold War. It rapidly became the largest, most well-funded and most prestigious of the Area Studies fields. For this reason, among others, LAS assumed a central role in the broader debate: should Area Studies persist in their current form? If not, what successor intellectual and institutional configurations should emerge in their place? Nearly twenty years later, this high-stakes debate has virtually disappeared. By various important measures, LAS is thriving. This essay provides what we argue is the principal explanation for this remarkable ongoing vitality of our field.

Letter from Guatemala: Indigenous Women on Civil War

Paasantzila txumb’al ti’ sortzeb’al k’u’ l, a collection of essays portraying the voices of Ixil and K’iche’ women.1 During the Guatemalan Civil War they fought with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. When the war ended in 1996, they returned to their hometowns. About six hundred of them founded the Kumool Association in 1999.2 Pelaez, an academic working for the Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences, met them in Uspantan in May 2006.3 She returned in June with her team, and by the second meeting, in July, the Kumool women chose to collaborate in the writing of a book about their experience. In the book, the women employ the word txitzi’n, an Ixil word that means “deep pain.” The term signifies not only physical suffering but also “a wounded soul,” conceptualizing an image in which a part of the subject is dead. It defines a topic at the epistemic borders of modernity, and it conveys the unnamable condition of surviving genocide (14) that anchors a discourse articulating a new relation among violence, survival, ethics, and politics. Feeling txitzi’n did not preclude the women’s agency. On the contrary, it was a prerequisite for meaningful agency, one that contextualized their struggle and constituted the former combatants as comprehensible subjects. The need to talk about profound pain, never previously articulated discursively by any of them, or by most Mayan women, was followed by the joy of being together again, by the memories of their deeds, achievements, courage, and capacity for making and executing decisions. Txitzi’n enabled them to name the past as a way of talking about the future. It made them fully conscious of their identities as excombatants and as women who continue their political struggle as indigenous subjects and as organized women who refuse to selfracialize. As they state, they lost their fear in the mountains. In social gatherings they recognized females who were excombatants, who did not stand meekly behind their husbands but spoke out with assurance and without fear: professor of latin american literature at

Personal Stories of Latin Americanism

To be a Central American author is an oxymoron. To be a Central American writer is to be a writer from a region that is not only marginalized in relation to a metropolitan hegemonic center but even marginal to other marginal centers of cultural thought. It is a marginality within a marginality. That is why our voices often go unheard, as if we were mouthing words into emptiness, or producing signs to which very few attribute any relevance. The only exception to this uncanny situation has been when we speak in the name of a revolutionary political organization that has triumphed, or perhaps, carries the hope of a potential triumph. This happened in the 1980s. However, beginning with the 1990s, our voices returned to the realm of the forgettable, to that corner which does not have any influence, nor inserts itself within what could be considered the transcendental debates of our time. A clear example is the case of Rigoberta Menchú. The debate in the hegemonic centers has not necessarily been about Menchú as a person, nor even about her distinctiveness as a Mayan subject. The debates have been, rather, about academics in the globalized center that, using Menchú as a trope, try to advance their own theoretical positions as part of a power play taking place chiefly within U.S. academic centers. The truth of the matter, in large measure, is that very few of the protagonists of this debate are genuinely interested in the daily reality of the Maya, their women, their survivors, or even their pain and suffering. What they are truly concerned about are the professional benefits they could potentially enjoy as a result of their particular theorization of Menchú.