Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala

By Joyce N. Bennett

Analyzes the forced migration of Maya women from highland Guatemala and their turn toward language and Indigenous clothing in their homeland
 
Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala analyzes how Indigenous women’s migration contributes to women’s empowerment in their home communities in Guatemala. This decolonial ethnographic analysis of Kaqchikel Maya women’s linguistic and cultural activism demonstrates that marginalized people can and do experience empowerment and hope for the future of their communities, even while living under oppressive neoliberal regimes. Joyce N. Bennett contests dominant frameworks of affect theory holding that marginalized peoples never truly experience unrestricted hope or empowerment, and she contributes new understandings of the intimate connections between Indigenous women, migration, and language and clothing revitalization.
 
Based on more than twenty months of fieldwork, the study begins with an ethnographic investigation of how economic policies force Indigenous women into migration for wage work. To survive, many, like the three young women profiled in this ethnography, are forced to leave their schooling, families, and highland homes to work in cities or other countries. They might work, for example, as vendors, selling crafts to tourists, or as housekeepers or waitresses. Their work exposes them to structural violence, including anti-Indigenous slurs, sexual harassment and violence, and robbery.
 
Furthermore, the women are pressured to wear Western clothing and to speak Spanish, which endangers Indigenous culture and language in Guatemala. Yet the Indigenous migrant women profiled do not abandon their Indigenous clothing and language, in this case Kaqchikel Maya. Instead, they find inspiration and pride in revitalizing Kaqchikel traditions in their hometowns post-migration. As women attempt to revitalize Kaqchikel Maya language and clothing, they seek to earn the title of “good” women in their home communities.
 
Unpacking women’s daily activisms reveals that women attempt to retain their language and clothing and also collectively seek to make space for Indigenous people in the modern world. Bennett reveals that women find their attempts at revitalization to be personally empowering, even when their communities do not support them.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817393892

Book preview

GOOD MAYA WOMEN

GOOD MAYA WOMEN

MIGRATION AND REVITALIZATION OF CLOTHING AND LANGUAGE IN HIGHLAND GUATEMALA

JOYCE N. BENNETT

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala Pro

Cover image: Detail of antiguo cloth; courtesy of Joyce N. Bennett

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2116-1

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9389-2

For Celestino

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. MIGRATION

Chapter 1. Brenda’s Story: If They Can Support Our Language, Why Don’t I?

Chapter 2. Lucia’s and Melinda’s Stories: Our Language Is Valuable

PART II. ACTIVISM

Chapter 3. Feeling Strong through Language Revitalization

Chapter 4. Traje as Co-text: Clothing Revitalization at Home

Conclusion: Strength through Solidarity

Appendix: Methodologies for Researching Language and Clothing Revitalization

Glossary

Notes

References

Index

FIGURES

1. Map of key places mentioned in the text

2. Santa Catarina Palopó as seen from Lake Atitlán

3. Refurbished US school bus like those that women use for travel

4. Antiguo-style guipil from Santa Catarina Palopó

5. Moderno-style guipil from Santa Catarina Palopó

6. De colores–style guipil from Santa Catarina Palopó

7. Blusa of machine-made cloth

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of chapter 2 were published in ‘I Became More Maya’: International Kaqchikel Maya Migration in Central America, Universitas Psycológica 16, no. 5 (2017).

Countless individuals supported the completion of this project. I am grateful to each and every person who supported me in this work. This list is surely partial and incomplete. The order of these acknowledgments in no way reflects an order of importance of the contribution.

In Guatemala, I must thank a host of intellectuals and scholars who have warmly welcomed me, provided companionship, contacts, and countless opportunities. Andrés Alvaro Casteñada and Aracely Martínez from the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala provided important connections with intellectual communities and opportunities for teaching impressive students whose curiosity remains an inspiration. Ixim Nikte’ Carmela Rodríguez and Ixkamey Magda Sotz were instrumental in completing this work from data collection through analysis. I always appreciate Ajpub’ Pablo García Ixmata and Ixnal Ambrocia Cuma for their willingness to collaborate and talk through ideas.

Nestor Sajvin Cúmez, thank you for the beautiful photos of Santa Catarina Palopó. Isabel Sajvin Sajvin, you supported this project through data collection and into its final presentation. Your willingness to challenge my worldview and speak frankly has been my guiding light for this project and my development as a scholar.

Connecticut College supported this project financially and intellectually. Grants from Research Matters, Lynch Funds, Opantry Funds, the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Holleran Center for Community Action, and the Department of Anthropology were instrumental in researching, presenting, and refining this work at various conferences. Sabbatical support made possible through the Dean of the Faculty and the Department of Anthropology proved critical for completing this project. I must thank my departmental colleagues for their welcoming and supportive environment. Anthony Graesch, Chris Steiner, Catherine Beniot, Jeff Cole, and Rachel Black collectively created the kind of intellectual space for which every young scholar hopes. Michael Dreimiller was of great help in preparing the images for publication. I would also like to thank other Connecticut College colleagues whose contributions to this project have been invaluable. Leo Garofalo hosted a series of book proposal workshops that launched this book. Lisa Wilson, Mary Anne Borelli, Noel Garrett, Luis Gonzalez, Mónika Lopez-Anuarbe, Priya Kohli, Afshan Jafar, Julia Kushigian, Marc Forester, Nancy Lewandowski, Rosa Woodhams, Kim Sanchez, Henryetta Ballah, Andy Lanoux, Manuel Lizarralde, Jennifer Rudolph, Ginny Anderson, Anna Campos Manzo, Danielle Eagan, Michelle Neely, and Emily Kuder provided advice, support, and companionship at various stages of this manuscript’s development.

This work was graciously supported through a fellowship at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University in the fall of 2019. For providing such a welcoming intellectual environment, I must thank Edwin Ortiz, June Erlick, and the staff at DRCLAS. Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Ivan Bris Godino, Juana Garcia Duque, and Guilherme Werneck were my fellow visiting scholars who created an atmosphere of genuine intellectual engagement that was and remains a delight. I must thank Nick Harkness in the Department of Anthropology for welcoming me into a stimulating seminar.

This book benefited from grant support and the advice, guidance, and contributions of individuals at Tulane University. Judie Maxwell’s mentorship both personally and professionally has enriched my life for more than a decade. I cannot thank you enough for always being there, for holding me true to what I want scholarship to be, and for your inspirational work. Allison Truitt is a source of infinite wisdom. Your advice over the course of my career has proved instrumental. Two awards from the School of Liberal Arts Summer Merit Fellowship, two years of funding from the Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships for the study of Kaqchikel in Guatemala, and research funds through Dr. Robert M. Hill II all aided in funding this research.

In the broader scholarly community, I thank Ashley Kistler, Meghan Farley Webb, Walter Little, Tim Smith, Tim Knowlton, Sara Taylor, Patricia Anderson, Jessica Slinkoff, Anne Galvin, and Debra Rodman for a supportive scholarly community. Taylor Tappan, thank you for making the map. Ted Peebles and Amy Howard, my mentors at the University of Richmond, thank you for opening up a world of possibilities for me. I must especially thank Abigail Adams, Carol Hendrickson, Ellen Moodie, and Jennifer Burrell for the wonderful writing community. Your mentorship and guidance are invaluable and mean the world to me.

To my editor, Wendi Schnaufer, thank you for your enthusiasm for and patience with this project. It has been a pleasure to work with the staff at the University of Alabama Press. I am grateful to have found this home for the book.

I have many other scholars and friends to thank. Tiffany Creegan Miller has provided companionship, support, and intellectual exchange that truly benefited this project. Rachel Horowitz’s consistent writing sessions, perspective, and friendship sustained this work through difficult moments. Sara Phillips provided constant support, through both friendship and editing. Thank you for always being there. Ari Rotramel read countless versions of the manuscript and never tired of introducing me to the feminist literature that rounded out this work. I could not have asked for a better colleague and friend in one. Dianna Rodriguez, Monica Henry-Seifert, Rebecca Bruening, Anne Lizzaralde, Rebecca Hayes Prosser, Ellen Maloney, and Sally Booth graciously supported me with encouragement and companionship along the way.

And finally, this project would not be possible without my family. My parents, Blair and Becky Bennett, always encouraged and supported me. My late uncle, Dan Stevenson, believed in me and supported this work quietly and constantly; I could not be more grateful for the fun we had. My in-laws in Santa Catarina Palopó provided immense joy, laughter, and companionship through multiple trips to Guatemala and long writing sessions. My loving spouse, Celestino, kept me going with physical and emotional support from the beginning to the very end of this project. Your insistence that the work and theoretical approach accurately reflect and relate to lived realities made this project what it has become. To my Isabela, many thought that your arrival would derail this manuscript’s completion. I must say that could not be further from the truth. I needed you in order to write this book. Thank you for making me so strong.

INTRODUCTION

It is late afternoon on a Saturday in Santa Catarina Palopó. I am sitting with several women from the Evangelical church women’s group, accompanied by younger women from the youth group. We are enjoying a lull in the work of meal preparation, stirring enormous pots over open fires. They contain what will become the evening’s tamales after a celebratory church service for the youth group. Any time there is a special event at church, the women gather to do the cooking together. It is an intergenerational activity with joking and play, but it is also a space where older women pass on important information to younger women.

As we chat, one of the older women, Paulina, comments on my friend Brenda’s use of Kaqchikel Maya, her first language and one of twenty-two Indigenous languages in Guatemala. Brenda is a twenty-five-year-old woman who was forced into migration for survival. She is home for a rare weekend off between trips to El Salvador with the family she works for, where they sell handicrafts in a market. Paulina said of Brenda, She is a good woman. She speaks well [Riya’ ütz nub’än. Jeb’ël nich’a’o]. Passing on language and clothing is a fundamental component of good Maya womanhood, a concept women talk about as being utziläj ixoqi’ (Bennett 2020). As culture bearers, Maya women are generally responsible for upholding, practicing, and passing on the markers of Indigeneity, especially language and clothing (French 2010, 111; Warren 1998, 108). Brenda smiles proudly in response to the compliment, pleased to receive such praise.

Brenda’s use of Kaqchikel is notable because communities expect that migration and exposure to ladino, or non-Indigenous, lifeways will result in women adopting ladino practices, including language and clothing. But Brenda and other women who appear in this book do not abandon those Indigenous markers. Instead, they invest more heavily in speaking Kaqchikel and wearing Indigenous clothing, known as traje. These women want it all: they want to belong at home despite having been forced to migrate, and they want to show off their special status in their home communities as women who migrated and worked in ladino-dominated spaces. Women do this by using a particular kind of Kaqchikel, standardized Kaqchikel or Kaqchikel puro, and by using expensive pieces of traje with no machine-made cloth. In so doing, they seek to earn the label of good women and to enregister, or work to associate, the identity of good womanhood with migrant women. Women understand and experience their revitalization work as giving them strength, or chuq’a.

I say to Paulina, She speaks well, but her brother does not speak Kaqchikel like that [Riya’ jeb’ël pero ruxib’äl man ke la ta nub’än]. Paulina begins to laugh a slow but steady laugh with a large grin on her face. Her brother does not. It is that young men are not strong like we are. Us women can withstand more [Ruxib’äl mani’. Es que ri alab’on man e kow ta achiel ri-yoj. Roj ixoqi’ más niqakoch’]. Paulina was clear: of course, men do not do this work. Women have more strength. This book analyzes that strength and why returned migrant women like Brenda—and not returned migrant men—do the work of revitalizing Kaqchikel Maya language and clothing.

To analyze how Maya women’s activism is produced and why it matters, I use affect theory to critically interrogate how women’s migration experiences encourage activism. I argue that women’s migration is a form of structural violence stemming from neoliberal governance because the women in this book must migrate for survival. Analyzing women’s migration narratives reveals their affective labor as Indigenous women forced to migrate into non-Indigenous spaces. Maya women included in this book characterize systematic racism and oppression as hard and difficult (k’ayew, k’ayowal). To counteract such experiences, the women who appear in this book decided to revitalize Kaqchikel language and traje upon returning home as a way of feeling powerful (k’o qachuq’a).

Having established why women invest time and energy in revitalizing Kaqchikel language and traje, I then use the theoretical frameworks of entextualization and enregisterment to analyze women’s activism in their home communities. The women portrayed in this book seek to earn the entextualized label of good womanhood (Mehan 1996). Entextualized labels are a recognized personhood or stereotype. At the same time that these women seek to earn the label of good women, they also work to enregister standardized Kaqchikel (as opposed to colloquial Kaqchikel, which relies heavily on code-mixing with Spanish) and traje with good womanhood. Enregisterment occurs when ways of speaking become aligned with or come to represent a particular persona (Agha 2005). In other words, these returned migrant women seek to earn the title of good womanhood while also aligning its associations with migrant women.

I analyze women’s attempts at earning the label of good women and enregisterment through what Susal Gal terms clasps and relays (2018). Clasps are moments when women are identified as good women. These moments, and moments of failed clasps, reveal that women experience chuq’a through their activism. Furthermore, women’s activism serves as relays, or signposts of pan-Maya activism. Pan-Maya activists have sought to make space for Maya peoples at the national level and have focused on language rights and revitalization. Women’s attempts to earn good womanhood and to enregister it with Kaqchikel puro and traje serve to further pan-Maya activism while transforming it from a political, urban-centered movement into daily practices in home communities.

Analyzing returned migrant women’s experiences of forced migration and resulting activism through affect theory as empowering responds to scholarly calls for understanding neoliberal economic forces as more complex than a simple tidal wave of domination (Ong 2006, 12). It also responds to critiques that ethnographies of neoliberal conditions are often very dark, emphasizing the harsh, violent, and punitive nature of neoliberalism and the depression and hopelessness in which people under neoliberal regimes are often enveloped (Ortner 2016, 65). Using affect theory to analyze women’s activism responds to calls for a more hopeful understanding of marginalized individuals’ affective realities under neoliberal frameworks (Freeman 2020). This ethnography promotes an understanding of Maya women’s lives and work outside of developmentalist, Westernized notions of empowerment and allows for a more hopeful, nuanced scholarly analysis and representation of Maya women.

A Feminist Approach to Maya Women’s Lives

Indigenous women in Guatemala occupy a marginalized social position because of their intersectional oppressed identities. Maya women are often aligned with notions of tradition and expected to be the bearers of Maya language, clothing, and other lifeways (Bossen 1984; Brintnall 1979; Camus 2002; Carey 2013; Cumez & Monzón 2006; Ehlers 2000; Farber 1978; French 2010; Green 1999; Hill 1987; Little 2004; Musalo & Bookey 2013; Nelson 2001, 2009; Smith 1996; Warren 1998; Watanabe 1992). As Brigittine French notes, This gendered responsibility for the reproduction of traditional culture is often attributed to the intrinsic moral strength of Maya women (2010, 111). But nationally and in local Kaqchikel communities, language ideologies link Kaqchikel with undesirable, old ways of living, and Spanish with modern, desirable ways of life (17). By extension, Maya women come to represent what is wrong with the Guatemalan nation (Cojtí Cuxil 2007; Granadín 2000; Konefal 2010). At the same time, they are often highlighted in government publications to show how inclusive Guatemala is (Adcock 2012; Alia 2009; Fischer & Hendrickson 2002, 29; Hale 2006; Little 2004; Tegelberg 2013). Maya women thus live contradictory lives.

Scholarly literature on Maya women has rightly shown how structural relationships at the global and national levels marginalize Maya women on a daily basis, although attention to Maya women in the early twentieth century was scarce. Tracy Ehlers noted that until recently, Guatemalanists neglected the status of women as a legitimate subject (2000, 16). Her analysis is correct: ethnographers working in the Maya region before the latter part of the twentieth century generally maintained women as peripheral to their analyses, despite simultaneously depicting them as the bearers and reproducers of Maya traditions. Ethnographies that did discuss Maya women noted their marginal social positions (Oakes 1951; Tumin 1952; Wagley 1949). Sol Tax (1937, 1952) was unique in that he addressed women’s economic contributions to communities, but an investigation of women’s lives as a central focus remained something he wished to investigate but was never able to do (Ehlers 2000, 17). Ruben Reina directly addressed Maya women’s status, noting that women’s control over pottery production gave them some economic power (1966). His analysis of women’s status based on economic resources foreshadowed a line of inquiry into Maya women’s lives that developed as the twentieth century progressed. Robert Hinshaw argued that the status of Maya women had improved over time in Panajachel because of shifting worldviews. However, his analysis relies not on fieldwork with Maya women, but on survey data collected among men only, making his assertions about women’s lives questionable (1975, 74 and 192–93). Douglass Brintnall mentioned women in passing, noting that it was impossible for him to conduct a serious investigation of Maya women, given his position as a foreign man who did not speak any Indigenous languages (1979, 79). This was a common issue for scholars in the early part of the twentieth century because many Maya women were monolingual in Mayan languages during this time.

As the twentieth century progressed, scholars became increasingly interested in Maya women and how structural changes at the global and national levels shaped their lives. This literature has overwhelmingly analyzed Maya