In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities, Updated Edition

By Patricia Foxen

In the mid-1990s, Patricia Foxen traveled back and forth between the Guatemalan highlands and Providence, Rhode Island, to understand the migration paths of K'iche' Mayan Indians who had fled the Guatemalan civil war to work in the factories and fisheries of New England. More than two decades later, many Mayans are still migrating to the US, today part of the "border crisis" that prompted the Trump administration's ruthless immigration and asylum policy backlash. As Foxen argues, the recent surge in Mayan border crossings must be contextualized within both the longer history of violence, marginality, and exclusion that has long led Guatemala's Indigenous populations to be "survivors on the move," as well as contemporary push factors such as climate change and growing inequality that have forced people from their communities.

And yet one of the most significant drivers of continued emigration today, ironically, is the very culture of migration (described in the book) that has accelerated social change within many Indigenous communities, setting in motion a complex series of economic and cultural shifts that have compelled a continuous movement of people and generations to the US. Reading this story in 2020—at a time of massive growth in flows of irregular migrations around the world—can help us better understand the highly complex set of factors that propel long-term migrations and that shape transnational communities on both sides of the border.

In Search of Providence offers a layered, historically grounded perspective that speaks to the local specificity behind the migration experience in order to point to the universal themes and contradictions of contemporary global displacements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780826501264

Patricia Foxen

Patricia Foxen, a cultural anthropologist, is currently the Deputy Director of Research at UnidosUS (formerly the National Council of La Raza) and a Research Fellow at American University.

Book preview

IN SEARCH OF PROVIDENCE

TRANSNATIONAL MAYAN IDENTITIES

IN SEARCH OF PROVIDENCE

TRANSNATIONAL MAYAN IDENTITIES

PATRICIA FOXEN

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

NASHVILLE

© 2007, 2020 Vanderbilt University Press

All rights reserved

First edition 2007

Expanded edition 2020

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Designed by Dariel Mayer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Foxen, Patricia.

In search of providence : transnational Mayan identities / Patricia Foxen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8265-1580-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8265-1581-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Quiche’ Indians—Guatemala—Quiche’—Social conditions.

2. Quiche’ Indians—Guatemala—Quiche’—Migrations.

3. Quiche’ Indians—Relocation—Rhode Island—Providence.

4. Quiche’ Indians—Rhode Island—Providence—Ethnic identity.

5. Quiche’ Indians—Rhode Island—Providence—Economic conditions.

6. Quiche’ (Guatemala)—Emigration and immigration.

7. Providence (R.I.)—Emigration and immigration.

I. Title.

F1465.2.Q5F69 2007

305.897’42307452—dc22 2007019252

IN MEMORY OF MARILU

DEDICATED TO THE YOUNG MAYA OF THE NEXT GENERATION WHO HAVE SURVIVED THE TURMOIL DESCRIBED IN THESE PAGES AND NAVIGATED ITS AFTERMATHS WITH COURAGE AND RESILIENCE. YOU ARE AN INSPIRATION.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Preface to the Updated Edition: Mayan Migration in the Age of Trump

Preface to the First Edition: One Foot Here, One Foot There

1. Entering the Field

2. Mayan Identities through History

3. The K’iche’ of Xinxuc

4. La Costa del Norte: Transnational Social Practices

5. A Dialogue on Indianness: Maya or Mojado?

6. Memory and Guilt

Epilogue

Glossary

Appendix: Three Transnational K’iche’ Families

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I will remain forever grateful to the many teachers, mentors, co-conspirators, fellow travelers, colleagues, friends, and family in Canada, the United States, and Guatemala whose generosity of spirit, heart, and intellect have encouraged me along the road to the first and second editions of this book. My doctoral committee at McGill University included the most exceptional group of committed scholars I could have hoped for as I began my PhD studies many moons ago. First and foremost I thank my supervisor Ellen Corin for teaching me the value of rigor in the field of anthropology, and particularly for the generosity with which she helped me think through the vast, complex, and at times unsettling information collected during field work. Cécile Rousseau’s intellect, humanism, and engagement have continued to inspire me well beyond my academic pursuits; she is a guide and friend whose advice I cherish. I am grateful to Margaret Lock for having set the bar for excellence in the field and always raising it higher. Laurence Kirmayer, Allan Young, John Galaty, Kristen Norget, and the late Roger Keesing, as well as Pierre Beaucage at the University of Montréal, suggested valuable readings that helped shape my understanding of the issues broached in this book. I thank Rose Marie Stano for keeping the trains running during my graduate program. Thank you to the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a two-year grant that supported, in part, the writing of this book.

My immersion into the landscape of Guatemala began with a trip in the summer of 1996 with George Lovell, mi padre, and I thank him for the humor, warmth, and vast understanding of the country he has shared through the years. I continue to be grateful to Duncan Earle for steering me in the transnational direction early on, and thank Alain Breton, Jim Handy, Manuel Angel Castillo and Linda Asturias de Barrios for giving me a leg up during my early days of field work. I appreciate the institutional support provided in Guatemala by CIRMA (Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica), ASIES (Asociación de Investigación de Estudios Sociales), and AVANCSO (Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala). My work in the highlands would not have been possible without the accommodations provided by Anne Bourgey and the Medicos Descalzos. Many thanks to my friends France Bégin, Pierre Chouinard, Celeste MacKenzie, and Alicia Sliwinski for their companionship and support throughout my fieldwork and beyond. A very special thanks to Felipe, Eustaquia, Fransisca, Josefina, and Wilma for their contributions to the data collection and K’iche’-to-Spanish translations. My compadres Javier Toj and Cristina Toj and my goddaughter Ixalxit and her siblings all embody the resilience and tenacity of survivors, and I thank them warmly for their continued friendship. In Providence, I am indebted to Grace Ashton for offering lodgings in the West End of Providence to this rather desperate anthropologist, and for being a supportive roommate during my fieldwork there; warm thanks to Denny Moers also, whose friendship and humor I value.

My colleagues from the Transcultural Psychiatry team of the Montreal Children’s Hospital were a source of kindness and support during my doctoral years; their everyday work with victims of violence and displacement helped to shape my understandings of these issues. I thank my postdoctoral supervisor François Crépeau and fellow researchers at the University of Montréal’s Centre de Recherche du Canada en Droit International des Migrations for providing a supportive milieu that fostered stimulating discussion and research on immigrant and refugee issues. Portions of Chapter 5 were previously published in the article À la recherche d’identités au Guatemala après la guerre civile: perspectives transnationales in Recherches Amérindiennes au Québec 31, no. 1 (2001): 61–70. Parts of Chapter 6 were included in the article Cacophony of Voices: A K’iche’ Mayan Narrative of Remembrance and Forgetting in Transcultural Psychiatry 37, no. 3 (2000): 355–81, and are reprinted here by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.

I am grateful for the collegial support provided by the Vanderbilt University Anthropology Department during the final write up of this book’s first version and extend a special thanks to Beth Conklin and Ted Fischer for their encouragement during my years there. Thank you to Michael Ames for his invaluable writing suggestions, and to the anonymous reviewers whose comments on the manuscript were very helpful. I greatly appreciate the invitation of Zack Gresham at Vanderbilt University Press to publish a new edition of this book during this time of turmoil and devastation for thousands of Central American immigrants and refugees. A huge thanks to Eric Hershberg at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS), for inviting me to join a stellar group of CLALS Fellows and colleagues; I particularly value the feedback provided by Rob Albro, Carolyn Gallaher, Ernesto Castañeda-Tinoco, Anthony Fontes, and Dennis Stinchcomb on the new edition of the book.

Many thanks to the host of friends and colleagues whose encouragement, scholarship, activism, stimulating conversations, and understandings of issues relating to Central America, migration, violence, trauma, and human rights and beyond have inspired me through years of academic and advocacy work. To Debra Rodman, Catherine Nolan, Krista House and Alicia Sliwinski—with whom I shared the Guatemala bug early on—as well as Laëtitia Atlani, Dominique Behague, and Lesley Boggs, thank you for the decades of friendship, support and inspiring conversations. Many thanks to James Loucky, Andrew Canessa, Ellen Moodie, Jennifer Burrell, Brent Metz, Karine Vanthuyne, Abigail Adams, Sergio Romero, Norbert Ross, Tiffany Miller, Emilia Barbosa, Lisa Knauer, Olga Odgers, Walter Little, Alberto Esquit, Alicia Estrada, Tim Smith, Elizabeth Kennedy, Andrea Dyrness, Neil Wood, Christina Zarowsky, Maria McFarland, Sibylla Brodzinsky, Donna Stewart, Juanita Cabrera-Lopez, Silvia Tzoc, and Janet Hernandez for sharing, at one point or another, conversations and insights that undoubtedly have made me a better scholar. The vision offered by Brinton Lykes, Norma Chinchilla, Liz Oglesby, Josiah Heyman, Jean Marie Simon, Francisco Goldman, and Richard Wilson have been deeply appreciated. Thank you to Marie Delattre for providing a beautiful garden space in which I was able to finalize work on this edition. I am grateful for the opportunity to have served for six years on the board of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission (GHRC), and thank my colleagues, fellow board members, and Sister Alice Zachmann, who founded GHRC in 1982 to support communities and activists who faced violence and human rights violations during the armed conflict. As current events in Guatemala and at the US border make clear, the need for human rights advocacy nearly four decades after the war remains as critical as ever.

To my parents Richard and Hilda Foxen, who have given me such tremendous opportunity and support, I am forever thankful. Though my father is no longer with us, my memories of his careful and thoughtful reading of the first edition of this book and enthusiastic engagement with its content are ones that I value. I am also thankful for the support of my sister Theresa Timmis, brothers Richard, Thomas, and Anthony, sisters-in-law Erika and Cecily Foxen, and all my nieces and nephews throughout this process. I always remember and acknowledge Adela Toro, whose own transnational story has been such an important part of my life. Finally, I have an immeasurable gratitude and admiration for the K’iche’ who befriended me and shared with me the lives recounted in this book, and for their children, now young adults, whose perseverance and accomplishments have inspired me deeply; unfortunately, their names must remain hidden, but their spirit will not.

FOREWORD

I remember, as I strolled for the first time down side streets off Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford, Massachusetts, pausing in front of a three-decker house with a cluster of mailboxes hung on the door, with names spelled out in shiny adhesive letters: Julian Chacaj, Viviano Tzoc, Santos Tzoc, Efrain Chacaj, Lola Ajui, Sebastian Tamup . . .

Behold, the Maya of New England, I remember thinking to myself. Here in New Bedford, no less, the same storied whaling port Queequeg and Ishmael set out from. Following the nineteenth-century demise of whaling, textile mills and manufacturing preserved the city’s prosperity. Now, with its abandoned brick factory buildings and streets rowed with plain three deckers, New Bedford looks like many other old post-industrial cities and towns of the Massachusetts South Coast and Rhode Island, a landscape spread over much of the old Wampanoag homeland. For over a century, successive and overlapping waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, the Slavic countries, Portugal, and Cape Verde have filled those three deckers, originally built for factory workers. New Bedford remains one of the country’s major commercial fishing ports, and there has been a modest revival of local industry. But what were the Maya of Guatemala—almost all of them from mountains of K’iche, so far from the ocean and the seafaring life—doing in New Bedford?

I thought of that Apollinaire poem that goes, You will never really know the Maya.

Massachusetts is where I mostly grew up, the son of a Guatemalan immigrant, a middle-class ladina and working girl who, during the Arbenz years, was a bilingual secretary at the Guatemalan consulate in Boston. After she was married she became a teacher. Whenever asked to name my favorite novel, I automatically answer Moby Dick. (But at different times I have other favorite novels.) As a boy with a confusing binational upbringing, I compensated by becoming obsessed with New England colonial and revolutionary history, King Phillip’s War, the Sons of Liberty; soon after high school, I became a tour guide on the Boston Tea Party Ship. Just out of college, I went back to Guatemala, spent much of the eighties there and in the rest of Central America working as a freelance journalist while also writing my first novel; I consider that decade my true university. For all these reasons, I was fascinated when I first found out that a few thousand Mayan migrants from Guatemala were living in New Bedford. Starting in 2005, I began to visit. That was two years before the historic ICE raid on the Michael Bianco factory, a modern day sweatshop, when 361 undocumented workers, many of them women from Guatemala, seamstresses and the like, were arrested.

I knew the Guatemalan Mayans had arrived in New Bedford about twenty years before and that they’d moved there, in search of employment opportunities, from the more established community in Providence. They mostly came from the same group of K’iche’ Maya towns and hamlets where Patricia Foxen did the field work that eventually resulted in her essential book In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities. Like Foxen I also visited that area, though only briefly, which had been so devastated by the violence and oppression of Guatemala’s internal war. In a tiny tienda with a computer and internet that townspeople used to Skype relatives in New England, I saw a wall calendar with a whale illustration. I spoke to people who had relatives in New Bedford and found a handful of men who’d been deported from the US and who’d worked in fish processing houses there.

One day in a small shop of Acushnet Avenue, the owner told me about having witnessed, as a boy, a patrol of soldiers execute his grandparents. He commented that it was ironic, wasn’t it, that here he was now, owner of his own business, in a country whose government had done so much to support the soldiers who had murdered his family members. I attended a meeting where an activist from Guatemala told people how to submit DNA so that they could find out if the remains being unearthed from clandestine graves in Guatemala by forensics groups might belong to relatives murdered in the war. It was the older people in the audience who were interested in what that activist had to say. Younger people sat in folding chairs on the perimeter, not paying attention. A teenaged boy sat with a father who took my wife, a psychologist, aside to tell her how worried he was about his son, who’d witnessed horrors and was suffering from traumas caused by the harrowing recent journey he’d made up through Mexico to New Bedford. In the Community Economic Development Center (CEDC), a bustling local community advocacy center, I met Guatemalan migrants who had recently become proud homeowners, and others wearing electronic ankle bracelets who had been released from ICE detention centers on the border to rejoin relatives in New Bedford, where they would wait for their asylum and deportation hearings while also owing exorbitant high-interest bonds they’d have to pay to get their electronic shackles removed.

Most of the newly arrived New Bedford Maya look for work in the fish processing plants, the kind of cold, wet, smelly, bloody, hard, dreary, and dangerous job that epitomizes the class of work established American workers are said to now spurn. While some of the plants treat their workers fairly, others ruthlessly exploit and cheat them. A fish processing plant I visited there was displaying in its lobby the championship trophy of a local soccer league won by the team sponsored by that plant: the team’s name, printed on the trophy’s plaque, was the Zacualpa Futbol Club. Zacualpa is one of the towns I’d recently visited. Starting in 1981, when the population of Zacualpa was eighteen thousand, the town endured so many Guatemalan Army massacres that by 1983 only two families were still living there. The rest had either been killed or fled. The Army used the convent of the local parish church as a torture center. That was why, as the human rights investigator and photographer Jean-Marie Simon first reported, after people began returning to the town, they refused to attend mass in that church, as if they regarded it as having been possessed by the devil. Back in 1984, Jean-Marie took this testimony from a man who until recently had been a resident of the town: At first they killed people inside the convent, where no one could see. Eventually, however, they began to line them up in front of the ceiba tree in the main square, and simply shot people in plain view of anyone who happened to be there. Once, the army started shooting from the air: there were so many bullets flying that my aunt said it looked like beans raining down.

Adrian Ventura, a K’iche’ Maya and war survivor, is a founder of the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), which advocates for the labor rights of Central American workers whether they are documented or not; the CCT has won some significant court battles against malfeasant employers on behalf of workers, resulting in the recovery of owed and stolen wages, workplace improvements, and so on. Ventura has also become accepted into the Wampanoag tribe, with the honorary status of a chief.

I’ve met young K’iche’ men who’ve found work on New Bedford fishing boats too, grueling but adventurous and well-paying work, that old New England city’s most legendary, even honored, employment.

There is something sacred, or as poetic as history is allowed to be, in this migration of Native Americans from Guatemala to this also extermination-haunted New England land. Here, in the late seventeenth century, the sister-in-law of Metacom (a.k.a. King Phillip), the saunskwa Weetamoo, led her tribal followers—along with the famous captive Mary Rowlandson—on a march into the forests to safety to escape the colonial troops who would have killed or enslaved them. They were internal refugees just like the communities of population in resistance (CPRs) in Guatemala. There must be people in and around New England who wouldn’t exist today if their ancestors hadn’t been led to safety by Weetamoo, just as there must be K’iche’ in New Bedford who wouldn’t be there now if others hadn’t led them into the mountains to escape Guatemalan army massacres and pursuit.

I don’t know if I will ever get around to writing my New Bedford novel. Maybe I just need to find a workable vantage point that will allow me to launch from observed reality into fiction. If so, a key to sufficiently overcoming Apollinaire’s warning will have been Patricia Foxen’s extraordinarily informative In Search of Providence, a brilliant and thorough anthropological investigation guided by compassion, respect, the greatest inquisitiveness, and conviction.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

PREFACE TO THE UPDATED EDITION

MAYAN MIGRATION IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

When I initially conducted research for this book between 1996 and 1998, and even when it was first published ten years later, the topic of Guatemalan migration to the United States was hardly on the American public radar. Back then, many activists and scholars of Guatemala were focused primarily on the internal aftermath of the country’s brutal thirty-six-year armed conflict, from which the country was recently recovering. Most regional migration experts, for their part, were concentrated on the very large waves of Mexican immigrants to the United States whose numbers had soared throughout the 1990s, then began steadily declining after 2007. Little did I know that over two decades after my exploration into the early years of K’iche’ Mayan migration to El Norte—a somewhat esoteric subject to many—Guatemalan migrants, and indigenous migrants in particular, would figure prominently in the devastating humanitarian scenario referred to in daily news stories simply as the border crisis. What had started as a surge in Central Americans, in large part unaccompanied youth, from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala crossing the US border around 2014 had grown, by 2017, into a mass exodus, with Guatemalans soon becoming the largest group of migrants, numbering roughly 116,000 in 2018—twice as many as in 2017—and reaching over 264,000 (at least two percent of the Guatemalan population) in 2019 (UCBP 2019). Although no firm ethnicity data exist, smaller research studies (Wong, Bonilla, Coleman 2019), news stories, and reports from advocates working with the migrants revealed that a large portion of Guatemalan border crossers, roughly half, were Mayan Indians; most were family units (adults with small children) and unaccompanied youth seeking asylum in the United States.

Who these migrants and refugees were—why they were coming, whether they deserved to remain in the US, and how they should be labeled—became part of a highly polarized national discourse, one greatly intensified by the Trump administration’s draconian zero tolerance approach to border control and accompanying xenophobic rhetoric. Competing narratives depicted the border crossers as either economic migrants trying to take advantage of American asylum laws to usher themselves (and their children) dishonestly into the country, or, alternatively, as helpless victims of intense gang and cartel violence in their home communities and deserving of protection, or at least due process, under international law. Many depictions lumped the diverse group of migrants into an undifferentiated mass, a representation reinforced by dramatic media coverage of the large migrant caravan making its way through Central America to the US border in 2018, thus obscuring the varied, complex, and often profoundly desperate nature of the migrants’ motivations and journeys.

The Trump administration, eager to capitalize on the crisis to energize its base, issued a dizzying rash of policies and executive orders designed not only to halt the flow of migrants but also, more broadly, to reshape the American immigration and asylum system. These included the astoundingly cruel child separation policy which separated over 5,400 children from their parents;¹ the planned construction of a multibillion-dollar border wall; the accelerated rate of arrests and deportations of noncitizens; the hiring of thousands of new enforcement officers; the drastic reduction in numbers of asylum judges; the removal of asylum eligibility for victims of gang violence and domestic abuse; the ending of the Central American Minors refugee and parole program; the termination of humanitarian protections such as Temporary Protection Status (TPS); and the massive reduction in the number of overall refugees admitted. By 2019, the administration had ramped up its hardnosed approach, enacting a metering policy, cynically named the Migrant Protection Protocol, that forced asylum seekers to wait for weeks or months in Mexico before being allowed to cross into the US, usually to find out that their asylum claim had been denied. Stranded in dangerous conditions and fearful for their lives, some attempted exceedingly dangerous border crossings outside of ports of entry, at times with heartbreaking consequences (Thebault, Velarde, and Hauslohner 2019). Trump all but closed the border entirely to migrants and asylum seekers, threatening Mexico with import tariffs until that country drastically reduced the flow of migrants and foisting a series of safe third country agreements that required asylum-seekers traveling through the region to seek protection within impoverished Central American countries or Mexico first. While many of these policies have been contested in the legal realm, the net result has been the widespread return of tens of thousands of desperate border crossers to ever-more precarious conditions. By the fall of 2019, leaving no doubt as to its punitive intent, the administration enacted a freeze of $450 million in foreign aid to Guatemala, putting an end to the very programs that enabled impoverished Guatemalans to stay in their country despite the rampant poverty, food insecurity, violence, and climate-related hardships that were causing so many of their compatriots to flee (McDonnell 2019).

The shocking death in the spring of 2018 of Claudia Patricia Gómez González, a young Mayan woman who was shot in the head and killed by a Border Patrol agent as she crossed the border in Rio Bravo, Texas, followed in subsequent months by the tragic deaths of five indigenous Guatemalan children in the custody of US immigration officials, placed Mayan migrants more clearly in the US media spotlight (Hamilton 2019). More localized news stories throughout the country’s interior described the large groups of unaccompanied indigenous youth who had arrived in recent years and were struggling to balance their new school and home situations with grueling work schedules (Canizales 2015), or the predominantly Mayan poultry and meat workers who were being rounded up and detained in targeted immigration raids (Stuesse 2019; Graig, Wilson, and Miroff 2019). Far less visible were the thousands of Mayans who were being held in custody, housed in government detention centers and private shelters and prisons, and processed for asylum hearings, often confounding judges, local government workers, and border patrol officials who had little understanding of their culture, history, or language (Nolan 2019). For many of the Mayan migrants experiencing these conditions, perhaps the most tragic aspect of all was that this hardship was only the latest chapter in a very long history of suffering at the hands of a government—only this time, not their own.

Indeed, the recent surge in Mayan border crossings, rather than representing a sudden or unprecedented exodus, must be contextualized within the long history of marginality and exclusion that has led Guatemala’s indigenous populations to leave their communities (either temporarily or permanently) not only for the past few years or decades, but for centuries. Whether driven away by state-sanctioned violence or forced labor, by economic and social policies that make everyday living intolerable, or by environmental and demographic shifts that push people off their land, Mayan Indians have long deployed migration as a strategy of survival and resistance in the face of neglect at the hands of the Guatemalan state. These displacements have at times been desperate attempts to elude life-threatening upheaval, at others economic strategies to resist the downward pull of poverty—and more often than not both, since the violence and inequality underlying life in Guatemala’s indigenous communities have often been inextricably connected.

As this book illustrates, moreover, contemporary US-bound Mayan movements, which have certainly proliferated in the past few years, have also followed on the heels of more than three decades of relatively steady transnational migration from indigenous communities. The initial exodus was set in motion by the brutal US-backed war in Guatemala that reached peak levels of violence in the early 1980s; it accelerated with the high demand for cheap, unskilled labor in various US industries throughout the 1990s. These earlier displacements, documented in the book, laid the foundations for today’s migrants and refugees, in many cases shaping the ways in which Mayan transnational networks, identities, and communities have evolved over time. Indeed, the human stories described throughout the following pages—the journeys facilitated by coyotes, smugglers, and money lenders; the transnational economies produced by remittances and debt; the fluid identities and imaginaries constructed from global dislocation; the vulnerability produced by living with uncertain legal status; the profound trauma and distress resulting from chronic violence, exploitation, and racism on both sides of the border; and the various forms of culturally rooted resilience that individuals and families generate in the face of such adversity—all continue, to a great extent, to characterize the experiences of today’s Mayan migrants.

At the same time, the contexts of both departure from Guatemala and arrival in the US (and the routes in between) have been transformed in significant ways over the past twenty years. Many of these, such as the daily precarity of life in indigenous communities, the expense and danger of border crossings, and the dysfunction and injustice of the immigration system in the US, have greatly intensified and indeed come to a head today, creating a moment of reckoning underscored by the tragic images of Mayan children and youth dying in custody, being separated from their parents, or being sent back en masse to a bleak or dangerous future in their communities of origin. At the same time, well-established Mayan communities can today be found throughout the US, composed of members with varying legal statuses, years of arrival, generations, and reasons for leaving. Three decades of transnational migration have, indeed, also created some positive changes on both sides of the border, as evidenced by the families lifted out of poverty from remittances sent back home and the US Mayans who have been able to gain citizenship or see their children graduate from college, achieving a level of stability and success that few had imagined upon leaving their communities. What do the continuities, changes, and contrasting landscapes of Mayan migration look like in the present day, and how can this book help us better understand and respond to today’s mass movements?

THEN AND NOW

The forces that drive migration today, for the most part, can be seen as offshoots or transformations of some of the older forms of violence and inequality that are depicted throughout this ethnography; some, however (such as the impact of climate change or the proliferation of foreign extractive industries affecting indigenous ecosystems) have created new levels of insecurity or desperation, while others (such as enhanced debt and remittance economies or smuggler strategies) have somewhat transformed the actual practice and pace of migratory movements. Importantly, push factors often differ from region to region, or even from one town to the next; as emphasized throughout the book, such local variability has always characterized the way that Mayan communities have experienced and responded to various historical changes. The contexts of arrival in the US, also, have varied geographically and shifted through time, with some states and cities providing more economic opportunity, ethnic enclaves, or welcoming attitudes toward immigrants than others. Such complexities suggest the need for caution when describing a generalized Mayan migrant experience: indeed, the localized, in-depth, and historically rooted approach used throughout this ethnography points to the value of diving deeply into the particularities of micro-environments and dynamics in order to better understand the larger migration story.

While it would be impossible to fully illustrate here the ways in which circumstances in Guatemala and the US have evolved since this book’s original publication, it is useful to synthesize here the continuities and changes during this period, as well as the main factors that contribute to today’s continuing indigenous migratory flows.

New Push Factors

A substantial amount of scholarship from the past decade or so has described the complex postwar environment in Guatemala, much of it focusing on the legacies of state violence and the impact of a weak government structure on the insecurity of everyday citizens (Little and Smith 2009; McAllister and Nelson 2013; Smith and Offit 2010; O’Neill and Thomas 2011; Grandin, Levinson, and Oglesby 2011; Burrell and Moodie 2015). During this period, the fluctuations of governance, the expansion of new forms of social violence, and the detrimental impacts of neoliberal economic policies on community life have been interspersed with some more hopeful developments. The latter have included the achievements of the CICIG (International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala), a UN-backed anticorruption body charged with investigating and prosecuting the organized crime networks that have proliferated since the civil war (McFarland Sánchez-Moreno 2019). Among the group’s major accomplishments was the dramatic indictment, impeachment, and imprisonment in 2015 of President Otto Perez Molina on fraud and corruption charges. Other examples of progress in strengthening the rule of law and reducing the deep-seated impunity that has plagued Guatemala for decades are emblematic legal cases seeking justice for the victims of the country’s armed conflict; these include the trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt (the military dictator and mastermind of some of the most brutal wartime violence), who was convicted in 2013 of genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as the successful prosecution of some high-ranking Guatemalan military officers and soldiers responsible for wartime atrocities.² Unfortunately, these instances of hard-won justice have sometimes been short-lived or incomplete (for example, Ríos Montt’s genocide conviction was overturned on a legal technicality only a few days later, and CICIG was forced by President Jimmy Morales to end its mandate early); dozens of other less visible cases have dwindled or stalled within the justice system—if they reached it at all.³

Despite some instances of progress, the ongoing weakness and corruption of the nation’s justice system has continued to trickle down and is connected to high rates of violence and insecurity at every level of society. Although the type of wartime bloodshed that instigated Mayan flight to the US decades ago can no longer be said to drive migration, and despite a decrease in the national homicide rate over the past decade (Dalby and Carranza 2019), the legacies of past violence stubbornly persist. Organized crime in Guatemala remains prolific, ranging from highly sophisticated clandestine security apparatuses connected to wartime military structures to more rudimentary and localized criminal groups. Numerous networks throughout the country are involved in human trafficking, kidnapping, money laundering, illicit adoptions, eco trafficking, and the cultivation and trafficking of drugs (Guatemala Profile 2017). The notorious gangs, or maras, such as the MS-13 and Barrio 18, while not nearly as prevalent in the indigenous highland area as in urban areas, in particular Guatemala City (Levenson 2013; Fontes 2018), have nonetheless made their way to parts of the countryside, exposing both indigenous and Ladino youth in some communities to gang recruitment intimidation (Burrell 2013). Less organized crimes, including random instances of theft, extortion, and assault, add to the harshness and fear that still characterize life in many areas.

Perhaps most significantly in the indigenous highland area, however, is the mere threat of such criminality, which has provided local authorities with a rationale for bolstering various types of communal security enforcement. In some towns these are relatively informal committees or night-watch groups. In others (including several in the Quiché department where this ethnography takes place) such security patrols have at times taken the form of vigilante groups that engage in extrajudicial punishment of suspected criminals, including threats, illegal detentions, lynchings, and even executions (Bateson, 2013; Godoy 2002). These groups resemble, in their power dynamics and structures, the local paramilitary civil patrols (PACs) described in this book, initiated during the armed conflict and now transformed into local surveillance groups, attesting to the profound and continuing impact of wartime dynamics on communities (Sharp 2014; Burrell 2013; Bateson 2013). At the same time, efforts to deter criminals have in some areas led to a strengthening of indigenous forms of justice such as justicia Maya, a form of customary law based in community mediation and reparations, though it often also involves corporal punishment and public shaming of petty criminals by Mayan elders (Sieder 2011). In any case, it is clear that there continues to be little faith in the formal justice system, or in the capacity or willingness of the police to enforce the law in rural indigenous areas.

Another form of violence that has been amplified in recent years in Mayan communities is the persecution and criminalization of local environmentalists and human rights defenders. A United Nations report recorded an astounding thirty-nine murders and 884 attacks against human rights defenders in Guatemala between 2017 and 2019 (OACNUDH 2019), and scores of others have been unjustly imprisoned or exiled. Many of these have been indigenous leaders protecting community land rights in the face of hydroelectric and mining projects, who are seen as threatening to business and political elites. In the region described in this book, for example, Mayan environmental activist Lolita Chavez of the Council of K’iche’ Peoples for the Defense of Life, Mother Nature, Land, and Territory (CPK) has received repeated death threats and been forced into exile. For women in particular, high rates of gender-based and domestic violence—Guatemala has one of the highest rates of femicide in the world—contribute to the flight of women and young girls from intolerable situations of peril and abuse, leading many to seek asylum on this basis. Chronic exposure to the different forms of violence described above deeply affects psychological outlooks and social relations among community members, particularly youth, who in some regions find it increasingly difficult to thrive, feel safe, or place hope in their own communities (Adams 2017). Moreover, widespread impunity for most crime leaves people in danger for their lives, often without protection, and sometimes with little recourse but to leave in search of safety.

While degrees and types of violence tend to vary geographically throughout the highlands and to fluctuate through time, the predominant driver of migration across indigenous communities today clearly remains intense poverty and inequality. The distribution of income and wealth in Guatemala remains one of the most skewed in the Western Hemisphere, a legacy of conquest that persists today in large part because of a regressive taxation system staunchly supported by the country’s business elite. Despite the stated goal of the 1996 Peace Accords to improve the socioeconomic situation of indigenous populations, close to a quarter century later nearly 80 percent of the Mayan population continues to live in poverty. Due to little sustained investment by the state in infrastructure or services, including in basics such as potable water and adequate sanitation, the rate of childhood malnutrition remains elevated, and many Maya still have poor access to adequate education or health care (McAllister and Nelson 2013). Even for the growing numbers who have been able to achieve a high school education or beyond, employment in the formal economy remains minimal in indigenous communities: job prospects are few and far in between, wages are extremely low, and there is virtually no formal safety net for community members. At the same time, the growing privatization of services in recent years (such as electricity) along with rapidly rising food prices have created a high cost of living that is often unmanageable for the poor. Although the minimum wage for agricultural workers is approximately 2,900 quetzales (US$390) per month, most campesinos (rural farmers) in poor areas earn closer to US$100 (an amount they could make in a day or two working in the US), not nearly enough to feed their families (Abbott 2018).

Related to the problems of poverty and unemployment is continuing land dispossession caused by logging and deforestation, as well as population pressures created by high fertility rates in indigenous communities. Over the past fifteen years, neoliberal trade policies such as the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) have compounded these issues by facilitating the proliferation of transnational megaprojects such as mining, hydroelectric plants, and the extraction of resources such as palm oil and sugar cane, mostly in resource-rich indigenous areas (Metz 2019). The expansion of these projects has often taken place without proper consultation with Mayan communities, at times resulting in the destruction of subsistence farming, the contamination of water sources, and land depletion (as well as the persecution of Mayan environmental rights activists as described above) (Vidal 2018). In some highland areas, moreover, poor indigenous farmers, persuaded—or intimidated—for years by drug cartels to replace their traditional crops with the more lucrative poppy plant used for heroine production, have recently seen those crops obliterated by the Guatemalan government (under pressure from the US-led war on drugs). With no revenue or training to replace these crops, many have been pushed back into deep poverty, seeing no other solution than to migrate (Gonzalez 2019). In addition, the Guatemalan government has increased militarization in areas of environmental activism and suspected drug production, leading, for example, to a state of siege in 2019 in seventeen municipalities across the country during which constitutional freedoms were suspended and curfews enacted.

A newer major driver of migration—climate change—that has increasingly affected forced migrations on a global scale is also responsible for a good share of the recent spike in Mayan displacement over the past few years. Inconsistent weather conditions created by accelerated climate change and El Niño-related hurricanes and droughts, years of failed harvests, and vanishing work opportunities (in both commercial and subsistence farming) in some regions of the country have considerably increased food insecurity, hunger, and the need to migrate for survival (Steffens 2018). The dry corridor, which stretches from southern Guatemala into northern Honduras and El Salvador, has been particularly affected by climate change. In this lowland area, erratic rainfalls, high temperatures, and a harmful coffee rust have massively destroyed coffee crops, with losses of between 50 to 90 percent in the region (Diaz and Burgeon 2016). In addition, global coffee prices have dropped by approximately 60 percent since 2015, and most farmers have been operating at a loss for the past few years (Stieb 2019). Many of the poorest Mayans, as described in the book, work seasonally or permanently on such plantations, while others are small coffee growers themselves. In addition, heavy rain patterns in the highlands have led to the flooding of individual cornfields and other crops that have allowed Mayans to subsist. These erratic weather-related changes, combined with fluctuations in the global economy, have wreaked havoc on already-unpredictable agricultural cycles, creating other ripple effects such as increased deforestation (as people sell wood to survive) and heightened crime—leading to desperation among families unable to foresee local solutions, and thus contributing to further emigration.

The Culture of Migration

Most of the push factors outlined above point to the often layered physical, social, and structural types of violence and dislocation that exist in various indigenous communities, social ills that have in large part remained unremedied by the Guatemalan government but have also been reinforced by global economic forces that have increased inequality within and between communities. However, one of the most significant yet often unarticulated drivers of continued emigration, ironically, is the very culture of transnational migration that took root following the war. As this book describes in depth, the US-bound movements that began in the mid-1980s and grew massively in the 1990s accelerated social change within many indigenous communities, setting in motion a complex series of economic and cultural shifts that have compelled a continuous movement of people and generations to the US. How has the nature of transnational migrations and ties between aquí (here) and allá (there) shifted since the writing of this book, and how have these changes affected sending communities over time?

To begin with, the strengthening of post-9/11 US border enforcement and the growing deportation regimes of every US administration since then have produced a large presence of deportees and returnees in sending communities; in some cases, returned migrants have been able to bring new skills and entrepreneurship back home. All too often, however, deportees—particularly Americanized young men who have been gone for many years—have difficulty re-integrating into rural environments where they find few job prospects and are often stigmatized or even targeted by local security groups or gangs (Sharp 2014), some even entering the deportation-to-death pipeline that has sadly characterized the experience of increasing numbers of deportees (Bernstein 2019). Many have sought to return to the US, often attempting numerous border crossings if they are apprehended at the US-Mexico border and sent back. Indeed, stricter border enforcement has, through the years, reduced but not halted migration between Guatemala and the US, as the recent surge in border crossers made evident; it has however resulted in continued flows of people desperately attempting to (re)cross the border to reunite with their families and children, find safety, or continue to seek out livelihoods for their loved ones back home.

A highly securitized border has made migration routes exceedingly dangerous. First, US border militarization over the years has driven smugglers and migrants to travel through ever more treacherous routes, such as the Sonoran desert where at least three thousand migrants have died in the past two decades (Leffler 2018). Second, while many coyotes in Guatemala continue to be trusted community members (or business-minded Guatemalans who tout themselves as providing a popular service), the trek through Mexico is today mostly run by organized cartels, who store migrants in cramped and dangerous stash houses, exposing them regularly to the possibility of violence, extortion, abandonment, and death. This precarity, in fact, is one of the main reasons leading migrants from across Central America to band together in the notorious caravans, which in fact offered some degree of protection from such threats (Oglesby 2018). More recently, entrepreneurial smugglers in Mexico have offered safer express buses that bring migrants to the US-Mexico border, reducing such dangers and promising to deliver migrants within a few days (Miroff 2019). This bus route has been marketed in particular to parents traveling with children, who since 2017 have been advised by smugglers to surrender to the US Border Patrol as families and initiate asylum claims; these family units are charged lower rates since they are simply dropped off close to the border rather than needing help crossing into the US. As described in the book, migrants have long followed the advice of coyotes—whom some liken to the plantation labor contractors of yore—whether for guidance about when and where they could find jobs in the US, or about the most efficient route and manner to enter the US. The hardening of US immigration policy has resulted less in stemming migrant flows and more in both the professionalization of smugglers (who today have extensive knowledge of migration laws and conditions in the US) and, unfortunately, the strengthening of the illicit nature of smuggling organizations whose profits grow in direct proportion to the desperation of migrants.

The networks and processes that enable migration—the borrowing and lending of money and the arrangements with coyotes to whom that money is owed—have also become more sophisticated, and more fraught, through the years. The price charged by coyotes is currently anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 per person (depending on various factors), clearly a very steep cost that has reinforced debt-driven migration in many communities. Migrants and asylum seekers borrow at often exorbitant interest rates (between 2.5 and 15 percent) (Heidbrink 2019) to pay coyotes and smugglers, mortgaging any assets such as home or land if they have them and placing themselves and remaining family members at great risk if the debt is not repaid. The network of actors financing the trip al Norte has long included local money lenders and family members, but in the past decade or so the practice of taking out credit from Guatemalan banks, cooperatives, or microfinance programs (already observed during research for the book) has greatly expanded, as has the unscrupulousness of many high-interest prestamistas (individual lenders) (Sieff 2019; Stoll 2012). Ironically, the only way to pay back mounting debt at home is usually to try migrating to the US again (Johnson and Woodhouse 2018). Thus, while easy access to various sources of credit has enabled some migrants to set foot in the US, find a job, and quickly repay their debt, those who are less lucky (those who require several border crossings, are victims of theft or extortion, or are detained for long periods in the US, for example) accrue expansive amounts of debt, often becoming entangled in a vicious cycle of borrowing, irregular migration, and escalating debt that overwhelms families and increases vulnerability to abuse and exploitation (Stoll 2012; Heidbrink 2019; Trevizo 2019).

The entire migratory project—the reason so many people place themselves at such high risk—continues to be based on the hope of being able to find a job in the US and for most, to send enough money home to eventually improve one’s situation and that of one’s family. Clearly, this project has worked for many migrants. The remittance economy already described in this book has grown vastly through the years (and has doubled in the past decade), producing profound transformations in many Mayan communities. In 2018 alone, $9.3 billion in family remittances were sent to Guatemala (Guatemala Remittances 2019), accounting for roughly 10 percent of the Guatemalan GDP; one in four Guatemalan families currently receives regular money transfers from the US, though in many indigenous communities this proportion is substantially higher (Arroyo and Patiña Contreras 2018). A cursory observation of many highland towns visibly demonstrates the continuing impact of transnational money on community development: the brightly painted concrete two-story transnational homes described in the following chapters have today multiplied and often expanded in size and elaborate design. Given the massive socioeconomic inequality that still characterizes Guatemalan society, a positive outcome of remittances, thus, is the overall reduction in the severity of poverty among many transnational indigenous families—and for more successful ones, a significant step up and out of poverty—with more Mayan children being able to stay in school longer, for example. While in some communities migration al Norte is sporadic or seen as a last resort, in others (such as Xinxuc, the community described in the book, and surrounding towns) the entire balance of economic and social life has come to rely on the steady flow of transnational remittances sent from the US (Blitzer 2019).

Unfortunately, the flip side is that many of the negative repercussions already present twenty years ago are today more exaggerated, contributing (like the amplified debt crisis) to a self-perpetuating and continuous cycle of migration. For example, as some families and communities have become ever more dependent on remittances, local economic pursuits have been stifled, leading growing numbers of young Mayans to abandon traditional forms of subsistence such as milpa cultivation, or in some cases even more advanced pursuits such as teaching or accounting, often with an eye toward making their own trip al Norte. Similarly, in communities with high migration levels, the feelings of relative deprivation felt by community members who do not receive remittances and who are unable to make such money at home reinforce the constant push toward the US. In some communities, indigenous families increasingly feel that the only way to lead a decent life—to buy some land, a house, open a business, or, more basically, provide an education or even basic nutrition to one’s children—is to send family members to the US, despite the known risks. Sadly, the pitfalls and sacrifices resulting from migration, already present during my original research—the separation of families, the tensions between those who stay and those who leave, and the resulting erosion, to some extent, of social cohesion—have become more pronounced over time but have also come to be normalized as the cost of a necessary culture of migration.

The complex landscape described here complicates any notion that contemporary Mayan migrations to the US are unilinear, are motivated by any single factor, or have an inherently either positive or negative impact on communities in Guatemala. What is clear is that the socioeconomic, environmental, and psychological reasons for leaving Guatemala have become increasingly multifaceted and interconnected in the past two