From I, Rigoberta to the Commissioning of Truth: Maya Women and the Reshaping of Guatemalan History

Abstract

Officially erasing both community and individual memory and agency, the Guatemalan army, elite interests, and some academics have attempted to explain Maya political activism as a manipulation of the Maya by the guerrillas and/or popular organizations andreligious groups. Indeed, such representations of the Maya tend to conflate or draw little to no distinction between 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. Like the official story upon which it is based, it 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 article, I explore testimony, official discourse, and truth in popular memory in relationship to the still contested reconstruction of Guatemalan history. It is my intention to posit that [End Page 16] understanding the political ideologies and mobilizations of these organizations through Maya experience, instead of official state discourse, offers a more nuanced analysis of Maya political activism as experienced by the majority of rural Maya, remembered within their world cosmology, and expressed in their political memory and agency as conscious subjects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.