University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Mobile archives of indigeneity: the Maya diaspora and cultural production

(USC Thesis Other)

Mobile archives of indigeneity: the Maya diaspora and cultural production

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

MOBILE ARCHIVES OF INDIGENEITY:
THE MAYA DIASPORA AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION
by
Floridalma Boj Lopez
August 2017

A Dissertation Presented to the

FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to so many who have made this pursuit possible. Being a first generation
student, a woman of color, an Indigenous scholar, an immigrant, and a mother often means that
while we may come from minimal financial resources, we often call upon a millennial and multi-
generation legacy of struggle that has shaped a fierce spirit of determination. It is often our most
precious inheritance; it is the ongoing legacy and the living friends and family who continue to
embody it that I have relied on to get me through the most difficult moments of producing
academic scholarship from the margins.
At the epicenter of my network of love and support is my partner mark! Lopez. When I
take a moment to look at our relationship and the family that we’ve built with Luna and Soledad,
I am able to recognize the cosmic shift that occurred for me when I made the decision to love
someone who would be committed to creating and sustain justice in all aspects of our lives.
Together we have built a home where I know I am loved and respected in my entirety—and that
is radical. Thank you for seeing the light and being able to handle the glare.
To my daughters Luna and Soledad, I am so grateful for your entire being. You have
taught me more about myself and the world then I could possibly learn in a classroom. I hope
that as you grow you will be able to have dreams beyond what I could imagine for myself. I hope
that you Soledad will continue to be as powerful and as firm in your determination as you are
now at the age of five. You have helped me be brave. I hope that you Luna will be as fearless
and funny as you are at the age of three. You have helped me heal very old wounds.
I also want to acknowledge and honor my extended family and community. You have
held me up and loved me through this process. I want you to know that you are in every word
I’ve woven together, every idea has been built through your generous support and exists as a

ii
reflection of the beautiful ways in which you rebel against oppression, the ways each of you
creates cracks in the walls of history. This work is a humble offering and it has been shaped as a
testament to our dignity as a community and as a people.
To my aunt Maria Boj who raised me, I learned to dream of a life I had never known
from your border crossings and your courage to create a new world for yourself and for all of us.
To my brother Leyser, whose struggles remind me to keep fighting the regimes that have shaped
our lives. To my brothers, sister, nieces, nephews, and cousins, thank you for your patience and
love as I’ve taken time to pursue my educational goals. I’ve missed too many gatherings, but I
have always carried a deep sense of love for all of you with me.
I also extended deep thanks to my in-laws, Elsa, Gerardo, Nick, Omar, Ryan, and Sara.
You have been absolutely integral to helping me achieve this milestone through your unwavering
love for my daughters. Whenever I am asked how I was able to accomplish a PhD while having
two young daughters, my response is always, “I haven’t done any of this alone.” Elsa and
Gerardo, you are in essence a second set of parents to my daughters and you should know that
you are a big part of what made this possible.
To my cohort loves, Cecilia, Jessica and Jennifer, I am eternally grateful for the moments
of fierce rage, open vulnerability, and damn right silliness that we’ve been able to share. Cecilia
you taught me that motherhood is the labor of revolution, I appreciate your constant courage.
Jessica, your kindness and generosity always astound me and I have benefitted deeply from both.
Jennifer, I admire your determination to live and feel joy, you remind me to trust my intuition
and inner sense of justice. I can never repay what you three have given me.
The members of La Comunidad Ixim have also been critical to this project. Much more
than interviewees, they are friends who carry the burden of our collective histories while

iii
maintaining a sense of humor and a deep commitment to creating resources for our peoples. I am
also indebted to East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice and their staff for being a
political home where I could build with community members. You all gave me the space and
resources to build the Marina Pando Social Justice Research Collaborative and put the skills of
research to use to further encourage young people in the creation of community knowledge. I am
so happy to have met and gotten to know all of you.
I have met wonderful colleagues who became friends along the way and the completion
of my dissertation would not have been possible without the constant reminders that we can be in
the institution without being of the institution. Maltyoox to Giovanni Batz, Daina Sanchez,
Brenda Nicolas, Luis Sanchez, Rico Kleinstein Cheneyek, Alfredo Huante, the Chicana
M(other)work crew, Gretel Vera-Rosas, Alvaro Marquez, Kristie Valdez-Guillen, Rossmery
Zayas, Charlie Valdivia, Jih-Fei Cheng, Priscilla Leiva, and Miriam Morales. I was also very
fortunate to have amazing Indigenous scholars who provided mentorship: Maylei Blackwell,
Sandy Grande, Luis Urrieta Jr., Gloria Chacon, and Lourdes Alberto, thank you!
And finally, I want to thank the people who have helped me shape this project over the
course of years, my committee comprised of Macarena Gomez-Barris, George Sanchez, Laura
Serna, and Maylei Blackwell. I am grateful for your mentorship, feedback, insight, and the ways
in which you pushed this work and me as a scholar. I know student and faculty relationships are
hierarchical in their nature, but at critical moments each of you has worked with me to invert
those hierarchies and struggle with them. I see this work as a collaborative process that has
benefitted from each of your talents, time, and labor.
With that being said, I can only hope that the work I have poured so much of my time and
energy into somehow reverberates into the world of my ancestors.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments i

Table of Contents iv

Abstract v

CHAPTER ONE 1
Transborder Violence and Mobile Archives

CHAPTER TWO 25
Discovering Dominga: Contesting the Logics of Displacement in
the Production of the Indigenous Migrant

CHAPTER THREE 70
Weavings that Rupture: Cultural Retention among the Maya Diaspora

CHAPTER FOUR 101
La Comunidad Ixim and Organizing in the Maya Diaspora

CHAPTER FIVE 137
Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles: Relational Mobile Archives
of Indigeneity

CODA
Migration and Indigeneity 164

Bibliography 170

v
ABSTRACT
My dissertation Mobile Archives of Indigeneity: The Maya Diaspora and Cultural
Production examines how Guatemalan Maya migrants and youth in Los Angeles challenge
notions of Latina/o identity through material objects that act as archives of their collective
experiences. Using interviews and cultural studies methods, I found that the Maya diaspora’s
ability to record their own experiences of transborder forms of violence in Guatemala, in their
migration through Mexico, and in the United States was central to creating intergenerational
memory. The dissertation is split into two parts with the first chapter being an introduction to
Guatemalan history and an exploration of the work of archives in consolidating state power. In
addition, I present how critical scholars have looked at archives as limited in what they can tell
us about marginalized subjects to frame the need to think about archives that are not only
produced by Maya people, but that take materials forms that promote intergenerational dialogue
in the service of building Maya collectives in diaspora. From there I trace the transnational
movement of anti-indigenous racism to explain how and why Mayas experience indigenous
dispossession both in Guatemala and the United States through an analysis of the human rights
documentary Discovering Dominga. Based on the story of a Maya Achi massacre survivor who
is adopted by a white couple in the United States, I use this film to analyze how the visual
representation of adoption ignores indigenous child removal as a strategy of transnational
genocide that occurs across national territorial borders and builds on the dispossession of
Indigenous women in particular.
The second section begins to look at what I understand as mobile archives of indigeneity,
which I define as archives that document the epistemologies and experiences of Maya migrants
in materials that are also mobile and can move with migrants. Through the formation of these

vi
archives, Mayas engage cultural production as a site through which to document their own
experiences for themselves, their families and other Mayas. These archives resist and challenge
the erasure of indigeneity that occurs through displacement and migration by actually
documenting the process of erasure and the possibilities for intergenerational continuities. My
third chapter, “Weavings that Rupture: Contesting Settler Colonial Politics in the United States
through Maya Clothing,” analyzes how Maya women access and use Maya clothing as a form of
political praxis. Through interviews with Maya migrant women and the second-generation, I
chart how these textiles document geographic, gendered, and classed histories. Chapter four,
“La Comunidad Ixim and Organizing in the Maya Diaspora” focuses on a youth group of second
generation Mayas in Los Angeles. This chapter explores how youth deploy family genealogies
and organizing skills gained in social justice organizations in their children’s book about Gaby, a
gender-neutral Maya child growing up in Los Angeles. Chapter five, “Mapping Indigenous Los
Angeles: Relational Mobile Archives of Indigeneity” examines the digital humanities project
Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles to think about how archives can create the opportunity for
multiple indigenous communities and nations to become visible to each other in a shared urban
city.
My dissertation contributes to current thinking about indigeneity by examining how it is
both deeply tied to place and a dynamic category that shifts and bends. In understanding what it
means to be Maya today I foreground archives produced by Mayas to center their epistemologies
and concerns in making interventions into Indigenous and Latino Studies.

1
CHAPTER ONE

Transborder Violence and Mobile Archives
I. INTRODUCTION
In 2010, Teatro Frida Kahlo in Los Angeles, CA presented Sentado En Un Arbol Caido, a
play based on the narrative of Jesus Tecu Osorio. Tecu Osorio was one of the few survivors of
the Rio Negro Massacres in 1983 in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala. He became a public
figure when in 1993 he submitted an official complaint of an illegal mass grave in his home
village that led to the exhumation of the clandestine grave in which some of his family members
and other community members were buried after the military had massacred them. Besides the
exhumation, Tecu Osorio’s testimony and his retelling of the massacre at Pak’oxom were crucial
to prosecuting three top ranking local civilian patrol leaders that carried out the massacre.
1
Since
the initial complaint, documentaries have featured Jesus Tecu Osorio’s testimony and he has
written a book that became the basis for this play. Centered on the prominent image of an eleven-
year-old Jesus sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree as military officers brutalize women and
children from the village, Sentado En Un Arbol Caido extends the power of testimony and
memory to the production of a visual, audible, and mobile archive.
2
As the Efrain Rios Montt

1
For a more detailed account of the initial complaint, the trials and prosecutions, as well as the appeals that followed
after, see Dill (2005) “International Human Rights and Local Justice in Guatemala: The Rio Negro (Pak'oxom) and
Agua Fria Trials.” In addition, it is important to highlight that those who were prosecuted were members of the
civilian patrol that while established and enforced by the military, was not officially considered part of the military.
As a result, even the successful prosecution of these officials safeguarded official military personnel.
2
I use the term testimony because the play uses Tecu Osorio’s court testimony. However, Tecu Osorio’s book and
public appearances rely on his testimonio. Testimonio differs from testimony in that it does not rely on normative
understands of truth and instead centers the stories of marginalized people as legitimate counter stories to
disciplining discourses (Montejo and Barnet 1968; Beverly 1996; Montejo 1987). David Stoll’s (1999) critique of
Rigoberta Menchu’s (1984) testimonio was often taken as an attack on the developing and well-received field of
testimonio; but since then there have been critical contributions to expanding the understandings of the possibilities
and limitations of testimonio (Arias 2001; Arias 2016; Nance 2006). Given the emphasis of this dissertation on
Maya migrants and the second generation who are marginal subjects in multiple nation states, the literature on

2
trial and appeals of 2013 show, demanding justice through juridical structures, especially of top
ranking military officials, is often a process directly linked to the contest over whose narratives
and memories are institutionally legitimate. When official state narratives continue to claim that
there was no genocide—that if there were any massacres, they were not tied to the military —
cultural productions like Sentado En Un Arbol Caido shine light on the need to center Maya
experiences to challenge national discourses of forgetting. Sentado En Un Arbol Caido is about
more than one man, exhumation, or series of trials and appeals; it is instead about producing
memories that push back against the normalization of an anti-Indigenous politic.
While Osorio’s testimony can be analyzed strictly within a Guatemalan context, this
dissertation instead questions how Maya cultural production invokes the armed conflict in
Guatemala and Maya epistemologies to make sense of the existing Maya diaspora in Los
Angeles. This play performance at Teatro Frida Kahlo in Los Angeles, California indicates that
these issues of memory also exceed the boundaries of the Guatemalan nation state. As noted
below, most research has emphasized the Maya diaspora as victims of brutal genocidal violence
in the state of Guatemala and legal violence as predominantly undocumented immigrants. While
I examine the importance of this genocidal period, I also argue that when we consider the Maya
diaspora we must extend our analysis of genocidal violence both temporally and geographically.
In short, we must analyze cultural production produced by or about Maya migrants and the
second generation in the context of a transnational politic that, while distinct across national
border, nonetheless hinges on the elimination of vibrant Indigenous communities.
The production of memory animates Mobile Archives of Indigeneity: the Maya Diaspora
and Cultural Production through archives that can move with migrants to consider how

testimonio as well as that of archival formation reviewed below serve as anchors to the argument that the creation of
material objects for and by the Maya community create possibilities for rethinking belonging.

3
indigeneity travels across national borders and generates disjunctures that can help one
reconceptualize notions of belonging. Rather than consider these as immigrant narratives, I
center indigeneity to depart from sociological markers of immigrant integration that focus on
access to and success within mainstream normative institutions of private property like home
ownership, job security, and educational attainment. These markers become cornerstones for the
socio-economic advancement of immigrant populations and become definitive aspects of
immigrant well being. What these studies do not interrogate is that this progress often occurs
through participation in fundamentally unjust structures that take settler colonialism as finalized.
I, instead, foreground cultural objects and routes that articulate the Maya diasporic experience
through multi-directional, intergenerational memory around the Guatemalan Civil War, the
articulation of an Indigenous migrant identity that is both tied to place and yet mobile, and a non-
linear relationship to racial categories of Latinidad and indigeneity in the U.S. The interventions
this dissertation makes are multifold and each grounded in a set of literatures that I put in to
conversation in order to build an understanding of the Maya experience in diaspora.
II. THEORETICAL SCAFFOLDING
The Maya Diaspora and Transborder Violence
In addition, the use of the term “Maya” as an umbrella identity for 22 distinct yet related
ethno-linguistic groups is also an ongoing project of defining indigeneity in terms legible within
national and international forums. As Victor Montejo clarifies, the turn to a Maya identity is
directly tied to the work of scholars and activists who sought to challenge Ladino’s discourse
that contemporary Mayas are not really connected to pre-colonial societies.
3
While the
international community recognizes Mayas as a civilization with a deep understanding of

3
Montejo, Maya Intellectual Renaissance.

4
astronomy and math, Ladinos claim that those ancient civilizations are only distant ancestors of
the Maya who land owners exploit in plantations and mines today.
This distance from the great civilization that “disappeared” has also justified the constant
state violence that Maya people have been subjected to. The most well known period of this
ongoing colonial project is the violence of the armed conflict from 1960-1996, which reached its
climax in the 1980s. During this period over 200,000 people were murdered, 40,000 were
disappeared, 83% of the victims were Maya, and various branches of the government, military,
police, and paramilitaries committed 93% of the violence. The coalescing of economic and
political elites in Guatemala with the financial and military support of the United States resulted
in one of the most deadly moments of Maya history.
4
Giovanni Batz articulates the continuities
of state violence as four waves of colonization: the Spanish invasion of Pedro de Alvardo, the
plantation system, the genocide of the 1980s, and the current territorial dispossession that occurs
through the advancement of megaprojects.
5
While there are many overlaps within these stages,
they often focus on how the government, military, and landowners steal Maya people’s land,
benefit from their coerced labor, and brutalize them if they mount organized resistance.
The other arm of this violence is the perpetual poverty that Maya families often encounter
across generations. There can be a disassociation between the loss of land and the widespread
poverty within Maya communities that when pushed out of their original territories are coerced
into marginal wage labor or into being debt workers. Understanding intergenerational economic
poverty as part of a colonial project positions genocide as not solely focused on violent physical

4
Menjivar and Rodriguez’s When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and technologies of terror is an excellent
anthology that demonstrates the interrelated projects of state violence that continually link the United States and
economic/political elites in countries in Latin America.
5
Batz’s forthcoming dissertation will focus on the Ixil region and it has been through his work there that he has
begun articulating this understanding of waves of colonialism that draw their similarities in the consequence of
violence rather than a singular perpetrator of such violence.

5
deaths, but also on a series of social and political deaths that result when Mayas are
fundamentally excluded or included through unequal relationships grounded in multicultural
neoliberalism.
6

One way that these communities have pushed back on the national project of Indigenous
dispossession has been through a turn towards a Maya movement that while decentralized
operates on the logic that Maya people must push back on these projects of death. Maya scholars
and activists use the term “Maya” to contest that temporal rupture noted above, although many
everyday people continue to identify with their hometown or language group and not necessarily
a “Maya” identity. The limitations of Maya identity in relation to the tourist industry open
critical questions around how Maya vendors can and use this identity to fulfill the desire from
international tourists for authentic Maya culture.
7
Edgar Esquit has also launched an important
critique that thinks about the way Maya identity produced by scholars and activist who ignore
the reality of Indigenous people living in poverty who find a sense of belonging and
empowerment through religious institutions like the Catholic or Evangelical Church instead of
through Maya spirituality.
8
These insightful critiques push back on the force with which earlier
Maya scholars like Demetrio Cojti Cuxil and Raxche’ defined political and cultural agendas
through their own ideas and not necessarily in conversation with Mayas outside of formal
institutions.

9

In this sense to speak of a Maya diaspora exemplifies how the conflicts and temporal
linkages I am drawing on are political and contested. For this project the notion of a Maya
diaspora as a purposeful and consciously constructed identity allows me to think through and

6
Hale, “Rethinking Indigenous Politics.”
7
Little, Mayas in the Marketplace.
8
Esquit, “Nationalist Contradictions.”
9
Cuxil, “The Politics of Maya Revindication;” and Raxche’, “Maya Culture and the Politics of Development.”

6
chart how the repositories of memory I read do not take for granted that a Maya diaspora already
exists. Instead, I argue, it is through these archives, that Mayas lay out and grapple with the
parameters around Maya identity. Tensions can exist with those that the “Maya” identity leaves
out and they can struggle with it internally through questions of cultural authenticity. As a result,
the sites I consider emphasize that rather than a complete rupture or “new alternative” Maya
migrants weave in and out of multiple identities and collectives to form a Maya diaspora. Rather
than consider Mayas a monolithic, unified, and singular community, this research emphasizes the
internal diversity that generates multiple definitions of “lo Maya” or Mayaness and foregrounds
how generation, geography, gender, queer identity, and class are an important axis of
differentiation within the diaspora. While sometimes contradictory, these tensions and frictions
also form the basis from which second and third generation Mayas in the United States articulate
claims to Maya identity that make sense of their lived realities outside of Guatemala.
One of those tensions focuses on the relationship between Mayas and the larger umbrella
term of Central American. As an emerging and rapidly growing field, Central American Studies
is often the umbrella category that scholars place Mayas into. Padilla argues that what she labels
as the “Central American transnational imaginary” includes the following three facets: memories
of war and U.S. intervention in the country of origin, settlement in the U.S., and dangerous
crossings through Mexico during the migration journey.
10
Much of the early literature on the
contemporary migration of Central Americans from Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and El
Salvador position national violence and political strife as key to the experiences of migrants.
11
In
addition, scholars emphasize that the experience of being an immigrant in Mexico or having a

10
Padilla, “The Central American Transnational Imaginary."
11
Abrego, Sacrificing Families, Coutin, Legalizing Moves, Hamilton and Chinchilla, Seeking Community in a Global
City; Menjivar, Fragmented Ties; Suarez-Orozco, Central American Refugees and U.S. High Schools;

7
contentious relationship to longer established Mexican migrants is something that distinguishes
the Central American or Maya experience of migrating to the United States.
12

However, one issue with this literature is that it attempts to bring together a relatively
diverse set of experiences and it leaves unexamined internal power differentials. For example,
only in private conversations do other Guatemalan (Maya and non-Maya) scholars recognize the
relative position of privilege that Salvadorans hold that has led to more structural support. So,
while some scholarship recognizes how Central American migrants are an internally diverse
population with different contexts of reception,
13
there has often been a much greater effort to
articulate what Arturo Arias has termed a Central American-American identity.
14
For Arias, this
term positions Central American experience in the United States as a, “life on the margins of
those hyphenated others (Cuban-Americans, Mexican-Americans). It is a population that has not
yet earned the hyphen to mark its recognition, its level of assimilation and integration, within the
multi-cultural landscape of the United States.”
15
Because of often centering this marginality in
relation to more established migrant communities from Latin America, what often gets subsumed
under many of these layers are the racial differences within national identities. In this same
article Arias mentions the Maya, but only as a point of recognition, not as an experience that
should force a consideration of how transnational and mobile racism is in the Central American
diaspora.
16

This casual lumping conceals the direct racism that Maya migrants and other Indigenous
migrants face from Latinos, including Central Americans, who do not identify as Indigenous.

12
Arregui and Roman, “Perilous Passage;” and Allison, Beatriz, and Xochitl, “Mexicanization.”
13
García, Seeking Refuge.
14
Arias, "Central American-Americans;" and Arias and Milian, "US Central Americans."
15
Arias, "Central American-Americans," 171.
16
Arias has however authored many articles that do focus on Maya authors and Maya literature across
Mesoamerica, however, the question of looking at our internal differences across racial lines would force a
conversation about how diasporas form against, but also through “othering.”

8
Structures of inequality in their countries of origin inform and reinscribe this racist
discrimination through new modes of expression in the diaspora. Alicia Ivonne Estrada writes for
example that some Mayas, “…noted that often non-Indigenous immigrants used paternalistic and
derogatory terms when interacting with Mayas, or other Indigenous immigrants.”
17
Giovanni
Batz’s article emphasizes the various strategies Maya youth employ to maintain a sense of Maya
identity in Los Angeles, but also acknowledges that discrimination from other Latinos plays a
role in subverting Maya cultural practices.
18
Alan Lebaron’s work and Hiller, Linstroth & Vela’s
work emphasize how conflicted Maya community members are regarding officially identifying
as Latino or Native and what the implications of these types of racial identifications are for
retaining a Maya epistemology and cultural, spiritual practice.
19
What is clear in the pieces
mentioned above on the Maya diaspora is that part of the diasporic experience is the difficult
project of understanding how and when distinct racial structures (those in home countries and in
the U.S.) coalesce to produce a continual borderless anti-Indigenous politic. The sites of memory
that the Maya diaspora produce are keenly aware of these contradictions across multiple political
geographies and their seamless rejection of indigeneity.
Settler Colonialism
One of the major interventions of Mobile Archives of Indigeneity is to argue that the
literature on Indigenous migrants from Latin America must be in conversation with critical
scholarship on settler colonialism and the politics around American Indian sovereignty. While I
will do this through a Maya archive, engaging these literatures have forced me to articulate the
commonalities and disjunctures between Indigenous experiences that occur in overlapping

17
Estrada, "Ka Tzij," 213.
18
Batz, "Maya Cultural Resistance in Los Angeles," 195.
19
Lebaron, “When Latinos are Not Latinos;” and Hiller, Linstroth, and Vela, “I Am Maya, Not Guatemalan, nor
Hispanic.”

9
spaces. I argue that the Maya experience cannot be articulated through traditional sociology of
immigration literature that is data driven because the quantitative data on Mayas is nebulous and
frameworks of assimilation and integration cannot grasp some of the most integral aspects of
Maya identity, especially as they relate to cultural practice and epistemology. Within
immigration literature the retention of Indigenous ways of being and knowing, is often absent. At
best, cultural retention is only valuable in how it facilitates integration.
20

This gap in the literature between immigration and Native studies results in often erasing
Native people not solely through a settler politic, but through a framing of integration and
assimilation as eventual and desirable outcomes for all migrants. Even the critiques of U.S.
imperialism often evade engaging with critical Native studies and how the immigration of people
from the global south resulting from U.S. imperialism can also reify the erasure of Native
people’s claims to sovereignty.
21
Within the framework of settler colonialism we have another
set of tools to rethink the “impossible subject” not just as incapable of citizenship, but that does
important settler work for the nation. Settler colonialism has emerged with such force because it
takes to task other claims of justice, reparations, or representation. Settler colonialism repositions
conversations engaged along a racial binary with whiteness as its central power structure to
reconsider that these are claims taking place on occupied Indigenous territories.
22
Settler colonial
theory configures the settler-Indigenous binary beyond racial categories, so those often
considered people of color can also occupy the position of settlers if they benefit and perpetuate
the dispossession of Indigenous peoples especially in relation to territorial theft. While this
dissertation begins by looking at how Maya migrants can be absorbed into settler discourses, I

20
Portes and Zhou, "The New Second Generation;" Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies; Kasinitz, Inheriting the City; and
Telles and Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion.
21
Saranillio, "Colliding Histories."
22
Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Hall, “Navigating our Own "Sea of Islands;” Hall, “Which of these Things is Not
Like the Other;” and King, Labor's Aphasia.

10
also think through the notion of “mobile archives of indigeneity” to articulate how Mayas contest
their inclusion in to the multicultural settler project that is the United States.
One benefit of placing the Maya diaspora into a hemispheric conversation on indigeneity is
that engaging Native American literature in questions of authenticity as it relates to political
sovereignty can be insightful for the relationship between forms of colonialism, access to
resources, indigeneity as a category of management, and identity formation.
23
Rather than
position Maya identity in a vacuum where cultural production exists outside of power structures
of race, gender, class, and so on, these works allow me to consider that the (trans)formation of
anti-Indigenous politics works through what Maylei Blackwell has termed as “hybrid
hegemonies.”
24
For Blackwell hybrid hegemonies names, “the intersection of local and
transnational hegemonic systems and describes the ways in which they shift, overlap, and
hybridize in the process of migration.”
25
How settler colonial material and discursive structures
shift to incorporate the Indigenous arrivant, often through excluding it as an Indigenous subject,
will require thinking through how different state structures hinge on destroying Indigenous
people and epistemologies.
Writing against the erasure of indigeneity in Central American Studies, Latino Studies, and
in the sociology of immigration, I build on the critical discussions about space and mobility
within Native American Studies. Mishuana Goeman articulates how settler colonialism is
spatialized in the construction of private property and by, “…constricting native mobilities and
pathologizing mobile native bodies.”
26
One consequence of settler colonialism’s strategy of

23
Barker, Native Acts.
24
Blackwell, "Lideres Campesinas," 13.
25
Blackwell, "Lideres Campesinas," 16.
26
Goeman, Mark My Words, 12.

11
territorial occupation
27
is that the migration of Indigenous people into the United States in a post-
encounter moment occurs in relation to—and not outside of—politics of Native nationhood,
reservation encroachment and forced relocations.
28
In a brief passage from X-Marks, Scott Lyons
radically departs from this notion by stating that one of the most effective strategies of
colonization has been to silence the narratives of pre-colonial Indigenous migration.
29
More
recent work also challenges the notion that reservations are the space of authentic indigeneity
and instead considers the possibility that urban Natives are in a constant process of traversing
and building Native community in the multiple geographies they inhabit.
30
These articulations of
mobile Native identities provide a blueprint about how to think of migrant indigeneity in relation
to settler colonial structures in the United States.
I emphasize that Maya belonging should not vacate the multiple Indigenous peoples in
the United States. Settler colonial theory argues that to claim a justified occupation, a settler
society must first produce Indigenous peoples as a constantly vanishing collective. This
emptying of the land of its original peoples then allows settlers to reposition themselves as
pioneers and to some extent as “Native.” By recognizing themselves as Indigenous to local
places outside of nation states (even outside of the mainstream or dominant society of
Guatemala), Maya migrants can use the materials I analyze as an ethical and aesthetic vehicle
through which to contest the “logic of elimination” that always produces Indigenous people as
non-existent.
31
This grounds the notion that Maya belonging is also tied to a sense of non-
belonging, which can be the genesis of an anti-settler colonial politic. Mobile Archives of
Indigeneity uses the literature in settler colonial theory to launch an analysis attuned to place-

27
Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native."
28
Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country.
29
Lyons, X-Marks.
30
Ramirez, Native Hubs.
31
Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”

12
specific epistemologies that capture the complexity of being a dynamic diaspora. These sites and
archives refuse to be fixed in space and challenge the ongoing colonial regimes of power that
despite differing articulations remain entrenched in positioning Indigenous peoples as
disappearing or gone.
Memory and Archives
Mobile Archives of Indigeneity adds to this conversation by examining historical memory
anchored in Maya epistemologies and experiences through mobile materials that move with
migrants to support Maya community formation in diaspora. These mobile archives of
indigeneity push back on institutionalized archives that consolidate national power because they
are repositories for accumulated information that facilitates legibility in the service of
governmentality.
32
Institutional archives are limited in what they can say about historically
oppressed people
33
and involve problematic Western practices of archival analysis.
34
For
Indigenous peoples, archives also act as a technology of settler colonialism because they
naturalize, “the righteous fiction of the nation-state and its fundamental desire to disavow the
existence and rights of Indigenous peoples and communities.”
35
As a function of the
hybridization of multiple colonialities
36
institutional archives erase Maya migrants through the
settler colonial maneuver of considering Indigenous people as vestiges of a foreclosed past
37
and
by demographically disappearing them through their integration as solely “Guatemalan”
immigrants. U.S. settler colonial structures produce a coerced Latinidad when it documents and
archives Maya migrants as Guatemalan, Latino, or U.S. citizens.

32
Featherstone, “Archive.”
33
Hartman, Lose Your Mother.
34
Silva, Aloha Betrayed.
35
Adams-Campbell, Falzetti, and Rivard, “Introduction," 110.
36
In “Geographies of Indigeneity” Maylei Blackwell argues that rather than solely engaging with settler
colonialism, Oaxacan migrants in Los Angeles enter a settler colonial political geography that is built on top of
earlier Spanish and Mexican colonial structures. This is what she refers to as “multiple colonialities.”
37
O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting; Calderon, “Settler Grammars in Curriculum.”

13
In contrast, Indigenous archives raise critical questions, “such as who ought to own and
control Native knowledge, who ought to store this knowledge and for what ends, and, of course,
whose knowledge counts as legitimate.”
38
Since mobile archives of indigeneity are different in
their formation, intention, and audience, I instead build on theories of archives as embodied sites
and transfers of knowledge.
39
But beyond the quotidian embodiment of being Maya, there are
ways that this question around “lo Maya” is grappled with through the creation or use of material
objects. Departing from discussions about new materialism, these objects do not necessarily
create meaning on their own, and often their distance from Maya communities enables a
misreading. For this project, I use archives to think through the specific materials used and their
relationships to Maya people themselves. Balancing an analysis that looks at the cultural material
and the lived experience of cultural producers allows us to remember that Indigenous archives do
not stand-alone. Indigenous archives require an engagement that fleshes out the nuance of their
significance in relation to families and collectives.
Appadurai’s notion that “migrant archives” are a tool for “documentation as
intervention,” to create forms of collective consciousness is also vital to this discussion.
40
This
intervention is not solely about the formation of Maya collectives in diaspora, but also about the
possibilities for disrupting the way a settler colonialism functions against Native people. As a
result I couch parts of each chapter in discussion about settler colonialism to challenge how the
popular discourse of immigration and race “…avoids grappling with Native sovereignty,
especially in terms of land rights.”
41
I argue throughout my chapters that scholars must analyze
mobile archives of indigeneity with an eye toward de-naturalizing settler colonial politics that

38
Adams-Campbell, Falzetti, and Rivard, “Introduction," 111.
39
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.
40
Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” 16.
41
Das Gupta and Haglund, “Mexican Migration to Hawai‘i and US Settler Colonialism,” 456.

14
erase Native people. This requires understanding that Maya migrants are not Indigenous to the
places they migrate to, but their connections to their own places while not constructed through
land tenure or tribal citizenship can still provide models for contesting settler colonialism as
Indigenous migrants.
These mobile archives of indigeneity are also not equivalent to archives because they do
not presume to be specifically about the past. Part of the Maya diasporic archival practice centers
on what I understand as archives in formation. As a result, thinking through these contemporary
archives prevents any singular story from serving as a stand in for a totalizing view of Maya
people. This ambiguity troubles the temporal conscription provided by scholars like Harriet
Bradley who argues that while there are multiple definitions and uses for the archive, they
primarily reproduce the following sequence: “archive – memory – the past – narrative.”
42

Instead, these archives cross generational divides and require multiple generations of Maya
people to be in conversation in order to understand how the cultural materials enact a process of
“gathering together signs” and setting “a bundle of limits which have a history.”
43
These sites
and archives refuse to stay fixed in space and challenge the ongoing colonial regimes of power
that despite differing articulations remain entrenched in positioning Indigenous peoples as
disappearing or gone. Through creating archives of indigeneity, Mayas of all generations engage
in cultural production as a site through which to document the process of erasure and the
possibilities for intergenerational continuities for themselves, their families, and other Mayas.
The key analytical questions that guide this dissertation are:
1) How does the Maya diaspora use cultural materials to build an archive of memory that
links violence in Guatemala with the experience of migration and displacement?

42
Bradley, “The Seductions of the Archive," 108.
43
Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever," 10.

15
2) How do Mayas in Los Angeles produce forms of belonging that complicate the literature
on immigration that often ignores U.S. settler colonialism? How does is challenge
bounded notions of Latinidad and Indigeneity?
3) How do second generation young adults engage the processes of creating diasporic
community?
III. METHODOLOGY
As a Maya scholar this project has opened a host of concerns that deal with what it means
to be a scholar that not only writes for the Maya community, but is also a member of the
community. This “membership” is not just an identification with other Maya people since I have
laid out that being Maya is not a singular definition but a process of conceptualizing the
boundaries around those terms and their corresponding social and political histories. As an active
organizer and participant in multiple spaces that center the Maya experience in the diaspora, the
insider/outsider binary revolves less around identity and more around the actual creation of
spaces and of shared histories. Recognizing the work that goes into spaces that are thinking
through indigenous migration and grappling with long-standing histories and responses to state
violence urged me to conceptualize this project as an extension of what exists and what is needed
within the Maya community. My emphasis on archives that are contemporary—in formation,
continuously engaged publically, setting boundaries, and opening spaces—reflects a deep-rooted
respect for the multiplicity of experiences that exist even among those who are actively trying to
cohere a Maya diasporic experience.
In thinking about the open definition of archives in terms of its form and interpretation,
Harriet Bradley argues that scholars should consider themselves guides to the archive.
44
That is,
scholars offer one understanding of the material or archival process informed by our own

44
Bradley, “The Seductions of the Archive."

16
interests and research that can differ from other interpretations. She writes, “In the longer term,
then, a much more modest role for the intellectual might be posited, as little more than guide and
facilitator to the means and methods of skillful interpretation.”
45
I claim that part of my
interpretation includes being able to look beyond what the literature already says about the Maya
diaspora and generate a dissertation rooted in the vibrancy and complexity of Maya diasporic
experiences.
The recent advent of scholar activist literature has been essential to challenging the
notions of objectivity, especially with research about marginalized communities that face a
disproportionate degree of violence and discrimination.
46
However, I also argue that scholars
who have made these important interventions are not a part of the communities or specific
organizations they write about. While they consider their writing a form of solidarity to the
political demands of Indigenous movements, they do not consider what it means to be active as a
leader and a researcher where research may not be the most important contribution one makes as
an activist scholar.
Arguably the most thoughtful account of what it means to work, write, and live in the
same communities as one’s research participants is Audra Simpson’s notion of accounting for
the ethnographic refusal. As she writes in her article:
The ethnographic limit then, was reached not just when it would cause harm (or extreme
discomfort) – the limit was arrived at when the representation would bite all of us and
compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past

45
Ibid, 118.
46
Hale, “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique;" Hale, Engaging Contradictions; Speed, “At the Crossroads of
Human Rights and Anthropology.”

17
100 years, in small but deeply influential ways, with a cadre of scholars from Kahnawake
whose work has reached beyond the boundaries of the community.
47

Simpson reminds us that to be part of the community means you not only theorize interviews
through transcription and coding procedures, but you are also responsible for its real world
consequences. These consequences are not just a concern for the participants who share or
withhold intimate narratives that deal with a legacy of violence. The consequence you risk as an
Indigenous scholar is the potential impact it will have on those with whom you hold a collective
future. This sense of responsibility has resonance with the ongoing detention of Central
American refugees, where scholars testify as expert witnesses on the violence that migrants are
fleeing and that they face as undocumented immigrants in the U.S. However being and
Indigenous scholar also has deep implications for Indigenous communities who have
experienced the brunt of colonial and imperial violence while being denied access to Western
forms of literacy. As a result, to be Maya and to read and write about your community within a
theoretical context is a complex and privileged process.
My inability to disentangle my Indigenous positionality with my academic pursuits
requires a series of maneuvers to consider issues of power in creating knowledge. Aside from the
reality that most scholars who have written about the Guatemalan Maya diaspora are not part of
the diaspora, I have never taken for granted the ability to write about Maya people because it is a
privilege entangled with a collective history that includes generations of ancestors who have not
been as formally educated as I have. Their ability to survive as domestic workers, semi-skilled
carpenters, shoe-makers, farmers, weavers, and street vendors inform how I think about these
archives in relation to our pasts and futures. Just as important as those who survived are the
ancestors who passed away, many of them died young because the hatred for Maya people in

47
Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal," 78.

18
Guatemala produces extreme poverty, poor healthcare, homelessness, and drug addiction. These
are stories that exceed any research training I received. Beyond a sociological division of insider
and outsider, I approach my analysis with a deep respect for what it means to want to form a
collective despite ongoing colonial violence. I approach this work with an understanding that my
desire for the collective is a process of meaning making in itself. As a community member that
isn’t interested in extracting people’s stories and labor, I ground this work in a reciprocal
commitment to these various sites, practices, and collectives. This commitment extends beyond
my doctoral work because no matter what pathways lay ahead of me, I am Maya and I am part of
the Maya community in diaspora and in my hometown.
Fleshing out this research requires the ability to use a multimethod approach
48
that is
intuitive and in conversation with academic literature. The commitment to a multi-methodology
that can bring forth the inter-related nature of oral history with cultural materials and objects
rests on analyzing what is not institutionally documented quantitatively, but is nonetheless real
and felt. Gray and Gómez-Barris provide a framework analyze the social world through the
sociology of the trace in which there is, “…a commitment to the empirical without being
reductionist and that engages related fields without being territorial. In the end, we aim to show
how a flexible but grounded idea of a culture-as practice, meaning, site, and process-can be
useful for getting at the crucial importance of social traces for making sense of social worlds
across a range of sites and situations.”
49
Their work on the sociological trace has the ability to
grapple with what exists in spite of an institutionalized project of erasure, like the ones that

48
Mixed-methodology is typically defined as a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. Multimethod is a
more accurate description of the approach sued in the dissertation because I mix qualitative sociological methods
with those of cultural studies and humanities. Rather than focus on one strictly defined method, I approached each
set of oral histories and cultural objects for what they could say that had not already been said about the Maya
diaspora. I analyze the cultural objects, oral histories, and their relationships to each other through an inductive
method and each chapter also includes a method segment in order to more directly state how each chapter was
developed. For more on multimethodology, please see Brewer and Hunter, Foundations of Multimethod Research.
49
Gray and Gómez-Barris, Towards a Sociology of the Trace, viii.

19
constantly seek to conscript the vibrant nature of Indigenous lives. The sociological trace aligns
well with Avery Gordon’s earlier work of hauntings as indicative of what remains even after
brutal state violence is supposedly done or resolved.
50
Gordon’s work along with that of
Macarena Gómez-Barris in Where Memory Dwells both articulate that systematic projects of
“disappearance” or state violence do not actually have an end as they are open wounds that
require revisiting.
51
These open wounds set the stage for the struggle over memory that often pits
the narratives of the state against the narratives of the people (Indigenous or otherwise
organized). It is how this struggle takes place in diaspora that determined which types of
methods and which forms of readings I would use given the need to contour and texturize the
traces of Maya social worlds.
These theories are useful to this dissertation because while the Maya diasporic
community has been written about, it has often primarily focused on ethnographic and interview
based data. This project moves away from the anthropological or even strict definitions of
archival research towards one that consider the sociological imagination in ways that link the
lives of Maya people, with the process of creating memory, and the materials that they actually
play a role in producing. Within this context, I attempted to think about the interviews alongside
the materials as much as possible. In other words, this is neither a strictly oral history study that
looks at say Maya clothing as a secondary and supplemental object of analysis and instead seeks
to understand how the two become a mirror for the other. Someone’s story about traditional
clothing would be limited without an understanding of its relationship to local Guatemalan
landscapes, how the clothing has functioned in relation to gendered state violence, why there is

50
Gordon, Ghostly Matters.
51
Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells.

20
pressure to stop using it after migration, and why it may be possible for the second generation to
continue finding value in the clothing as a site of, “practice, meaning, site, and process.”
52

It is from my position as a Maya scholar that I consider methods of accountability when
working with Maya collectives. In concrete terms, I created a process of feedback and
clarification with various research participants. This began with asking for permission, but also
included asking for interviews and letting everyone know I would be taking notes during
meetings and events. I committed to staying in contact about what aspects of their stories I would
use and the analysis I was drawing from those stories. I sought clarification to balance out the
weight of my perspective and when met with disagreement I thought through what could be
gleaned from tensions that arose. In basic terms, I have sought multiple opportunities to think
with research participants about what my findings mean for our groups, families, and the larger
Maya diaspora. Part of the challenge of having such intimate connections not just to the
collectives I consider, but to the organizations and individuals that other scholarly works have
highlighted, is to consider the questions that Simpson poses, “Can I do this and still come home;
what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?”
53

These are questions that all scholars could ask themselves, but when they are entangled in
communities of origin that have histories and politics that exceed the bounds of your research, it
becomes imperative to challenge oneself to step back and think about how others will read one’s
research inside and outside of the academy.
IV. CHAPTER SUMMARIES
This dissertation includes two major components: the first part articulates transborder
anti-indigenous state violence and the second part addresses how the Maya diaspora creates

52
Gray and Gómez-Barris, Towards a Sociology of the Trace, viii.
53
Simpson, “Ethnographic Refusal,” 78.

21
mobile archives of indigeneity. This introduction lays out some central tensions and issues of
transborder state violence and how Maya migrants respond to it. In Chapter Two I examine
Discovering Dominga (2002), a human rights film that tells the story of Denese Joy
Becker/Dominga Sic Ruiz, a survivor of the Rio Negro Massacre, to extend the analysis of how
Maya migrants are incorporated into settler colonialism. A white family in Algona, Iowa adopts
Denese/Dominga and the film follows her now in her late twenties as she travels back to
Guatemala to “discover” her family and community history in Guatemala. For this chapter I
highlight how this film enacts a settler colonial violence by focusing on genocide as an act of
violence committed elsewhere while ignoring the forms of violence that shape
Denese/Dominga’s life in the United States. I emphasize a transnational reading of gender and
indigeneity together to conceptualize the intergenerational impacts of violence and the
possibilities of continuity across borders.
The second part of the dissertation moves to examine how mobile archives of indigeneity
function within the Maya diasporic experience. In Chapter Three I offer key tenants of mobile
archives of indigeneity. Mobile archives of indigeneity form out of Indigenous epistemologies
and act as a link between historical struggles of Maya people and the contemporary diaspora,
which is partially a response to transborder violence. Through an analysis of Maya clothing and
thirteen interviews with people who wear the clothing, I chart how these textiles function as
archives because they facilitate the documentation and transmission of geographic, gendered,
and classed histories among multiple Maya generations. I use this chapter to think about how
mobile archives function through a two-fold understanding of “mobility,” because Maya clothing
is mobile in its material nature, but also reflects added layers of meaning in relation to the
migrant experience. To operate as archives, Maya clothing often relies on intergenerational and

22
transnational relationships; in line with critical literature on transnational mothering, Maya
clothing displaces the nuclear family as a central organizing unit in Maya society. In Guatemala,
scholars and spiritual leaders of the Maya community consider Maya spirituality as an ethical
and aesthetic framework for how to be in the world. Building on this notion, I examine how
Maya clothing allows migrants to continue claiming their ancestral homelands not as the state of
Guatemala, but the local regions of Quetzaltenango, Huehuetenango, among others, while
thinking through the challenges and possibilities for continuing this practice in diaspora as part
of an anti-settler colonial politic.
Chapter Four focuses on La Comunidad Ixim, a young adult group of 1.5 and second
generation Mayas in Los Angeles and their production of a children’s coloring book. I analyze a
series of formal interviews with organizers in the collective to understand how their family
histories and social justice organizing shape how they create a children’s coloring book.
Thinking about the coloring book as the archive they produce, I pay close attention to how queer
Maya positionalities, along with investments in social justice, extend the function of these
mobile archives outside of the extended kinship networks I laid out in the previous chapter. It is
in this extension beyond the biological ties of family that Mayas engage in the actual formation
of communal notions of what it means to be Maya in diaspora. While family genealogies still
play a critical role in how members of La Comunidad Ixim understand “lo Maya” they also
challenge each other across boundaries of race, citizenship, and sexuality to demonstrate that
second generation Maya organizing positions itself as intersectional and social justice oriented.
Chapter Five turns to the digital humanities project of Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles
to think about Los Angeles in relation to multiplicity as it relates to: 1) the numerous Indigenous
peoples that live in Los Angeles, 2) the various ways in which each of these communities relate

23
to the same place of Los Angeles, and 3) the ability of Indigenous migrants to visually
conceptualize a connection to more than one place and thereby refusing a notion of indigeneity
as tied to only one place. Rather than consider archives as singular, I use visual and textual
analysis to examine how indigenous communities that exist in Los Angeles challenge the
singularity of settler colonial cartography by centering multiplicity and giving primacy to the
Gabrielino-Tongva people. In particular, I analyze how the project thinks about Indigenous
people beyond categories of recognition, demographics, or as tied to one piece of land; the
project also develops the possibility for others to visually conceptualize Los Angeles as the home
and homelands to multiple Indigenous peoples which enables a multivocal and community
oriented approach to thinking about Indigenous peoples in the cosmopolitan city of Los Angeles.
These chapters work together to lay out erasure as a form of transborder violence that is
(re)produced through the colonial structures of Guatemala and settler colonialism in the United
States. While it is critical to name and understand how these structures consolidate themselves
through a disavowal of vibrant and complex Indigenous life in the Americas, it is also important
to acknowledge that Indigenous migrants respond to these structures through their own
ontologies and epistemologies. They know these violent structures well and through their own
material documentation they (re)create a sense of belonging beyond reclaiming; A sense of
Maya-ness that acknowledges multiple ruptures and continuities. While I do not claim that all
Maya socialization is geared towards defying racial projects of exclusion or problematic
inclusion, for this dissertation I have purposefully chosen sites and practices that take a defiant
stance against these structures. This defiance is the genesis of a decolonial praxis that accounts
for the ongoing territorial dispossession of our people in our homelands and of Indigenous
peoples in the places we migrate. Beyond a politic of solidarity that assumes indigeneity is

24
cohesive, I examine how Maya ways of being can support the dismantling of settler colonialism
in the United States.

25
CHAPTER TWO

Discovering Dominga: Contesting the Logics of Displacement in the Production of the
Indigenous Migrant
Tal vez
Son los espíritus
De nuestros antepasados,

Y
lloran

Cuando creemos que cantan,
Porque ellos también
Son Indios

-Humberto Ak’abal
54

I. INTRODUCTION
In the aftermath of a 36 year civil war in Guatemala from 1960-1996 that left over 200,000
people dead and over 40,000 disappeared, the documentation of human rights violations in oral
and written testimonies of survivors clearly indicate that Maya communities bore the brunt of
this violence.
55
These reports qualify this extended episode of state violence as a genocide that
targeted Maya people in particular.
56
Alongside this written and recorded testimony, human
rights organizations and filmmakers produced films that documented the human rights violations
of the period during and in the aftermath of political turmoil.
57
Among the most popular were
When the Mountains Tremble (1983) a documentary based on the life of famed Maya K’iche’
activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum and feature films like El Norte (1983) directed by Gregory

54
This is an excerpt from the poem “Cerro de Los Muertos,” whose opening stanza “El aire viene otra vez/ Ha
venido muchas veces…” is used in multiple scenes of the film as part of the musical score of the documentary. This
poem is part of Maya K’iche’ author Humberto Ak’abal’s (2004) collection entitled Raqonchi’aj/Grito.
55
Commission for Historical Clarification. 1998. Guatemala: Memory of Silence, Tzunil Natabal. Guatemala.
56
Project, Recovery of Historical Memory. 1999. Guatemala, Never again!. Maryknoll: The Human Rights Office,
Archdiocese of Guatemala.
57
Estrada, "A’Co Nuq’."

26
Nava. Post-war documentaries include Granito/How to Nail a Dictator (2011), Mayan
Renaissance (2012) and Burden of Peace (2015). Despite this flurry of cultural production, one
of the least documented consequences of the chaos produced by state violence is the growth of
transnational adoption of Guatemalan Maya children, especially by white families in the United
States. One of the films that gained wide circulation in human rights forums and University
classrooms that centered the ways in which state violence and transnational adoption were
intertwined in Guatemala and the lasting consequence of this entanglement was Discovering
Dominga (2002).
58

Discovering Dominga, a documentary directed by Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo
McConahay and produced for the Point of View Series at the Public Broadcasting System, tells
the story of Denese Joy Becker and/or Dominga Sic Ruiz.
59
Denese/Dominga is a survivor of the
Rio Negro massacres of 1983; her parents were murdered at Xococ and Pak’oxom. As she
recounts in the film, when soldiers arrived in her community and began to round everyone up,
Denese/Dominga, then around the age of nine years old, fled into the mountains surrounding Rio
Negro. With her infant sister on her back, she wandered for weeks and survived on her own in
the highlands. Her baby sister eventually passed away and Denese/Dominga was finally found by
her cousin. Because her relatives were still in the process of fleeing the military they decided to
hide Denese/Dominga away at a local orphanage in the larger town of Rabinal rather than place

58
Discovering Dominga. Directed by Patricia Flynn, Mary Jo McConahay, KQED-TV (Television station: San
Francisco,Calif.), Berkeley Media LLC, Jaguar House.
59
From this point forward I will use Denese/Dominga to refer to the protagonist of the documentary. Rather than
privilege either “the American Denese” or “the Guatemalan Dominga,” as she states in the film, I will use both to
emphasize the reality of multiplicity and give space to the possibility that the two can remain distinct and yet
connected as part of her experience. In her critique of how Chicana/o nationalism attempts to create resistance
narratives through the practice of naming, Guidotti-Hernandez [refer to Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, Unspeakable
Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 43] uses this
strategy of double naming the historical figure of Josefa/Juanita because, “By calling attention to all of
Josefa/Juanita’s names, we defy the practice of making her nameless and problematize the question of truth in
historical scholarship” (43). The effort to include the name Denese/Dominga challenges the assumption that either
name is the “real” name because both names are inextricably tied to the macro processes and personal experiences
that are part of her story.

27
her life at risk. She is then transported by the nuns at the orphanage to another orphanage in
Guatemala City and two years later a white couple from Algona, Iowa adopted her. The film
takes place over the course of one to two years with Denese/Dominga as a grown woman at the
age of 29, now married, with two sons of her own, embarking on a journey to recover her past in
Guatemala. The film follows her as she returns to Guatemala to learn about the politics
surrounding the murder of her parents, the multiple massacres of the Achí community of Rio
Negro, and the genocide that took place nation-wide. Over the course of three return trips to
Rabinal, we witness Denese/Dominga reunite with her extended family, confront the layers of
loss, and pursue courses of justice that make sense of her transnational lived experience.
In this chapter, I look at Discovering Dominga as a human rights film
60
that makes
violence and indigenous suffering legible to viewers, while paradoxically enacting a settler
colonial logic. Unlike films that depend on fictional narratives, one of the distinguishing aspects
of documentary film would appear to be that it captures on camera unscripted events occurring
and existing in the real world.
61
However, film studies scholars have reminded us that the
documentary, like any other film, remains embedded within structures of desire and politics of
representation.
62
Human rights films mobilize individual testimonies in order to allow a largely
white Western liberal audience to become spectators for violent injustices occurring around the
world through an individual story of violence and loss.
63
As Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey

60
In Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Right, Goldberg (2007) argues that human rights films emerge in a
post World War II context to document extreme forms of political violence to direct international pressure towards
stopping these forms of brutality. However, human rights films also make use of the documentary form which Trinh
T. Minh-Ha (1990) critiques by noting how documentaries are positioned as uniquely producing, “a whole aesthetic
of objectivity” grounded in, “the power of the film to capture reality ‘out there’ for us ‘in here.’ The moment of
appropriation and of consumption is either simply ignored or carefully rendered invisible according to the rules of
good and bad documentary” (80).
61
Tascon, "Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics," 869.
62
Nichols, Representing Reality. Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary. Julianne Burton, The Social
Documentary in Latin America.
63
Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes." Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering. Tascon, Human Rights Film

28
have noted, this overreliance on individual narratives and the testimonial form is in part due to
the reliance on individual testimony within juridical structures and their subsequent popular
characterization as truth.
64
Discovering Dominga follows this trend in human rights film by
producing a narrative about an individual that rests on universal ideals of human “freedom and
dignity.”
65
The film challenges US imperial intervention in Guatemala, but in doing so
naturalizes both a white liberal gaze and an ideology of settler colonialism.
Against the backdrop of Guatemalan Maya dispossession my engagement with this
documentary points to the ongoing struggle over meaning and memory about genocide especially
as it relates to indigenous peoples. I extend this discussion around Maya dispossession, state
violence, and the contest over memory within Guatemala to also consider how Mayas enter
settler colonial structures and are used to reinforce Native American dispossession.
66

Discovering Dominga attempts to articulate what it means to be a Maya migrant in the United
States after the genocide of the 1980s. However, building on Wahlberg’s notion that
documentary film acts, “simultaneously as an image of the present and a trace of the past,”
67
this
chapter argues that in order to make Denese/Dominga’s story accessible to white Western
audiences this documentary must reproduce what Mark Rifkin has termed the settler common
sense. For Rifkin this settler common sense is “…the ways the legal and political structures that

Festivals.
64
Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey recent special issue on testimonial form centered on the following question: “to
what extent have cultural practices been transformed by the increasing use of testimony as a way of speaking and
acting in the world?” They use this journal issue to open possibilities for non-verbal forms of testimonies, while
also provocatively asking what forms of ethical listening are required and how are these testimonies tied to juridical
notions of truth [refer to Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey “Testimonial cultures: An introduction,” in Cultural Values
volume 5, issue 1 (January 2001), (1-6)]. Also insightful in this issue is Lauren Berlant, “Trauma and Ineloquence”
in Cultural Values volume 5, issue 1 (January 2001), 48, (41-58).
65
Tascon. “Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics,” 872.
66
My argument in this chapter is that the film makers shaped Denese/Dominga’s story to sidestep Native
dispossession, but the drive for this analysis comes from acknowledging that the Maya diaspora can perpetuate
settler colonialism. As I detail later in the dissertation, this is a consequence of how widespread and entrenched the
logic of elimination is in the United States.
67
Wahlberg, Documentary Time, 6.

29
enable nonnative access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply the
unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and
personhood.”
68
This “settler common sense” is the unmarked ground upon which
Denese/Dominga’s adoption into a white American family is treated as a natural consequence to
the structural issues of Maya genocide.
This chapter examines the discourse and strategies called upon and produced through the
visual form to consider the following: what overarching narrative about indigeneity and
displacement does the film produce or extend through Denese/Dominga’s story? What visual
strategies does the film use to create this narrative? How is indigeneity treated in relation to her
migration and the transnational nature of this film? Are there strategies that open the possibility
for this documentary to be a part of a Maya mobile archive? In order to answer these questions, I
analyze how the documentary creates a sense of fundamental difference between Guatemala and
the United States that it then uses to highlight U.S. imperialism while obscuring settler
colonialism. This difference becomes activated through Denese/Dominga’s body by positioning
her gender performance as stand ins for U.S. or Maya identity and her mixed affective responses
to displacement. Replicating the familiar troupe of feeling out of place in both the U.S. and
Guatemala, the film makers never problematize how transnational adoption does not resolve
dispossession for Indigenous peoples in the Americas and actually further ruptures the
possibilities of intergenerational and extended kinship networks among Indigenous people.
Towards the end of the chapter I examine scenes where the film does provide moments where
the transborder and intergenerational significance of state violence is centered especially in using
land as a model for survival and the role of intergenerational storytelling in the formation of
diaspora.

68
Rifkin, Settler Common Sense, xvi.

30
II. METHODOLOGY
Reading visual works for a transborder anti-indigenous politic requires a set of strategies
that allow us to unpack the material we see and hear for the underlying assumptions that make
the discourse produced by the visual image and its audio track legible to a white gaze. Beyond a
method of visual analysis, this documentary requires a method that attends to what is left outside
of the framing of this story, examining the absence and overt erasures of other forms of
indigeneity. Reading for how indigeneity is managed across borders requires the two following
thoughtful exercises.
First, I engage Evelyn Alsultany’s concept of simplified complex representations
69
to
look beyond the filmic text in order to read the politics and desires that make such stories
desirable. For example, Discovering Dominga does not reproduce the negation of the genocide
against Mayas in Guatemala. Quite the opposite, it normalizes the fact that the genocide occurred
and even highlights the United States’ role in legitimating and empowering dictators. Thus, the
story created by the filmmakers seems progressive against the reality that within Guatemala,
even twenty years after the signing of the Peace Accords that officially ended the armed conflict,
the discourse of the Guatemalan nation state and economic elite is that there was no genocide.
70

69
Evelyn Alsultany, “Arabs and Muslims in the media after 9/11: Representational strategies for a post-race era” in
American Quarterly volume 65, issue 1 (March 2013). (161-169). Alsultany’s notion of “simplified complex
representations” names how visual production attempts to produce a more progressive perspective of a marginalized
community by offsetting negative portrayals of Arab/Muslim characters with positive or redeeming Arab/Muslim
victims of discrimination. Alsultany argues that these characterizations may seem humanizing, but often reinforce
discourses of terrorism and security while simultaneously acknowledging that there will unfortunately be individual
casualties of these discourses. She argues that, “These representations often challenge or complicate earlier
stereotypes yet contribute to a multicultural or postrace illusion” (162). I extend this analysis because Alsulatny
exemplifies the need to read beyond the narrative and images before us to the implications of such narratives to
justify structural issues even as they highlight the potential pitfalls of these policies and politics.
70
Lisa Laplante, “Memory battles: Guatemala’s public debates and the genocide trial of Jose Efrain Rios Montt,” in
Quinnipiac Law Review volume 32, issue 3 (June 2014). In her article Laplante meticulously charts the general
strategy of denying genocide by either reinforcing that it was a time of war against communists (now labeled
terrorists) or that while crimes were committed the charge of genocide is unrealistic or worse, unfounded. Her case
study for outlining what she terms “Memory battles” is the court trial of Efrain Rios Montt, which at the moment of
this writing has been indefinitely stalled under the pretext of Montt now being too old to stand trail. That this

31
In the face of the continuing battle over Guatemala’s historical consciousness, Discovering
Dominga firmly positions itself as denouncing the state violence of Guatemala and documents
the ongoing and precarious struggle for justice. However, this representation adamantly refuses
to engage in the issues of adoption of Indigenous children into white families. The scenes that I
examine below are treated as background filmic text rather than, as I argue, actual extensions of
state violence against Denese/Dominga as an Indigenous woman. In order to make this argument
however, we must look beyond what is provided by the filmmakers to consider the desires
produced through erasures that are being wholly accepted and even celebrated.
Second, because I position the transborder anti-indigenous politic as a hemispheric
analytic it consequently requires reading across national borders. This type of reading forces us
to consider how borders are visually produced and entrenched while simultaneously centering
the experiences of Indigenous peoples who exist in relation to the nation states that those borders
demarcate. I utilize the transborder anti-indigenous politic within this chapter in part because the
film actually travels back and forth from Guatemala and the United States as it follows
Denese/Dominga. But more importantly, I begin from the premise that a comparative approach
allows us to understand how migration complicates indigeneity because it clarifies the
underlying structures of managing and erasing indigeneity.
On the surface Discovering Dominga is a heart-wrenching documentary of a young
woman coming to terms with the violence and memory of her childhood. However, I argue that

decision comes a year after the initial judgment that he had indeed committed crimes against humanity, demonstrates
that memory, especially as it relates to historical consciousness and juridical justice, is part of an ongoing struggle.
Laplante’s privileges the courtroom, but other scholars on Guatemala and memory have also emphasized the
struggle over memory in terms of visual art [Steven Hoelscher, “Angeles of memory: Photography and haunting in
Guatemala City” in GeoJournal volume 73, issue 3 (January 2008)], linguistic practice among Ixil communities
[Maria Luz Garcia, “The long count of historical memory: Ixihl Maya ceremonial speech in Guatemala” in
American Ethnologist volume 41, issue 4 (November 2014) 664-680.] and in the existence of police archives [W.
George Lovell, “The archive that never was: State terror and historical memory in Guatemala” in Geographical
Review volume 103, issue 2 (April 2013): 199-209.]

32
the choice to position Denese/Dominga as a victim of state violence in Guatemala who is saved
through her adoption by a white family in the U.S. actually works to obscure Native American
dispossession through the story of an Indigenous Maya migrant. In highlighting
Denese/Dominga’s trauma as rooted in the violence of Guatemala, the film creates a settler
visual rhetoric
71
that ignores that the United States has its own historical and ongoing project of
Indigenous dispossession through settler colonialism and that adoption into white families has
been a strategy for furthering that settler project. Reading this adoption as Indigenous erasure
brings forward a continuity of violence that than draws our attention to the other forms of
Indigenous dispossession that are either normalized or that through Denese/Dominga’s story
becomes solely possible in a place like Guatemala. Being able to read beyond the filmic text
allows us to see that the film ignores a long history of Indigenous dispossession in the Untied
States, as if indigenous genocide only occurs in places like Guatemala and as if
Denese/Dominga’s story is defined primarily through the violence that she experienced “over
there.” In plain terms, the Indigenous migrant is positioned to fit neatly within a settler common
sense through the assumption that Native extermination is complete or foreign and does not need
to be a part of the conversation of how and why Denese/Dominga experiences dispossession in
Guatemala and the United States.

71
A “settler visual rhetoric” combines Dolores Calderon’s (2014) theory of settler grammar with Vivo and Demo’s
theory on visual rhetoric. For Calderon settler grammars are a set of maneuvers that allow for settler colonialism to
be reinscribed. This includes Indigenous dispossession, but also extends to a more complex interplay of absence and
presence whereby even the manner in which Indigenous people are present still enacts settler colonial ideologies. I
combine Calderon’s analysis of settler grammars within social studies curriculum with Vivian and Demo’s (2012)
analysis of the connection between visual images and memory. They write, “…visual and memorial forms coalesce
according to the ways in which practices of interpretation, argumentation, or communication assign shared meaning
to them” (6). I use the term settler visual rhetoric to represent that there are underlying messages that are being
communicated even through the presence of a particular Indigenous body (like Denese/Dominga) and an absence of
other Indigenous bodies or even an acknowledgment of their removal and displacement.

33
III. CONTRADICTION AND DIFFERENCE AS FUNDAMENTAL
In order to trace the underlying logics and subtle nature of a transborder anti-indigenous
politic it is key to locate how Discovering Dominga from the outset creates a relationship
between the United States and Guatemala that will later sustain this difference through a
disavowl of multiple forms of indigenous dispossession. From the outset, the narrative of
Discovering Dominga positions the United States and Guatemala as stark and even oppositional
contrasts. Alicia Ivonne Estrada’s analysis of this film pays particular attention to the use of light
and darkness in the opening scenes of the documentary to distinguish Guatemala and the United
States.
72
Estrada goes on to problematize the ways in which Denese/Dominga’s experiences rely
on gender tropes especially as it relates to her experiences in Guatemala. I expand on Estrada’s
call to, “to consider Guatemala as a pluralistic society where conventional notions that confine
Maya women within a ‘traditional’ home and its patriarchal family structure are challenged,” by
interrogating gender and indigeneity together across both national spaces of the film—as well as
the Indigenous spaces the films flattens.
Gender becomes an important analytic to think about how difference and transnationality
are explored through Denese/Dominga’s narrative. The masculine/feminine binary delineates for
the audience a narrative that centralizes contradiction and difference between Guatemala and the
U.S. as nation states. Rather than emphasize men working in the fields in Guatemala or perhaps
stay at home mothers in Algona, the use of these gendered forms of labor make the construction
of commonality between the two spaces visually and discursively impossible. This inability to
draw parallels and connections between the experiences of indigeneity across borders becomes
pivotal to mobilizing a transborder anti-indigenous politic. However, it is also important to

72
Estrada, “A’Co Nuq’."

34
consider what work these distinctions accomplish not for Denese/Dominga herself, but for the
filmmakers and presumed audiences of the documentary.
These opening scenes embed a tenor of contradiction that operates through the nexus of
gender and indigeneity for the remainder of the film. As I analyze through the remainder of this
chapter, this mode consistently forces the audience to consider Denese/Dominga’s experience
through difference and question if Denese/Dominga can ever bridge these two worlds. By
shifting the gaze back on to the documentary to consider what is left outside of the purview of
this over-simplified contradiction I chart the anti-indigenous politic across borders to draw
parallels in the ways that both the United States and Guatemala consistently position indigenous
people and Indigenous children as disposable and yet their conversion and control as central to a
project of colonialism based on capitalist accumulation. In doing so, Discovering Dominga
extends the project of settler colonialism through the story of an indigenous transnational
adoptee. The film’s visual production of Guatemala as a volatile and violent place directly relies
on making Iowa a place of security and stability where Indigenous dispossession is not possible.
IV. VISUAL PRODUCTION OF A TRANSBORDER ANTI-INIDGENOUS POLITIC
Ignoring the narrative thread of Indigenous dispossession through positioning the United
States and Guatemala as foils of each other, the film builds the notion that Denese/Dominga as
an Indigenous migrant that can never fully belong in either place. The continual displacement
that Denese/Dominga experiences is particularly marked through a reliance on the visual
performance of gender and femininity. Following the line of thought that the United States and
Guatemala are different, Denese/Dominga then grapples with her identity through gender. As she
states toward the beginning of the film, it was not until high school that she became a “typical
American teenager.” As Estrada notes the film visually conveys this through an approximation

35
to middle class whiteness as we see pictures of Denese/Dominga as a teenager in her own room,
on the phone, with pictures of boy bands on her wall while she wears stylish clothes and a hair
perm.
73
This distinction between her earlier experiences of exclusion along with the
photographic depictions of a happy teenager and young woman begin to unfold how the
documentary uses the visuality of a gendered citizen subject formation alongside her voice
over.
74
Denese/Dominga states that after being ridiculed as a child, she became closed off and in
the absence of her actually being welcomed, the film demonstrates that it becomes necessary for
her to become not just an “American,” but an American woman. However that nationalized
subject is not defined through legality, but through a forced cultural appropriation of whiteness.
As a result, it as at this juncture that Denese/Dominga “forgets” her language, stops speaking
about her family and no longer discusses her memories publically. As her husband Blane states,
it was only after they were married that Denese shared that her name was actually Dominga. The
transborder anti-indigenous politic that the film builds on requires that her silence be normalized
without a reference to the racism, genocide and violence that is being enacted in Algona, Iowa.
In other words, there is no discussion around why she was forced to adhere to these gendered and
racialized standards in order to feel like a typical American teenager.
Gender is also taken up by the film as that which can visually filter Guatemalan and Maya
identity for a Western audience. The use of gender as a visual strategy through which the
narrative of displacement is communicated to the audience occurs in several key scenes

73
Estrada, “A’Co Nuq’."
74
The use of a childhood narrative of displacement is also central to how children and the loss of innocence is often
positioned as a site of critique against state violence within Latin American cinema. The use of a contemporary
young child to also stand in and recreate Denese/Dominga’s experience of the massacre enables viewers to enter this
issue of violence through the eyes or body of a child. However, this strategy has been critiqued in that it presumes a
particular notion of childhood that is often inaccessible to the most marginalized segments of Guatemalan society
[Seminet, “A Child’s Voice, A Country’s Silence”]. In addition, the anthology Screening minors in Latin American
cinema edited by Rocha and Seminet was also helpful in understanding how and why children and adolescents are
often used in Latin American cinema in stories about state violence and migration.

36
throughout the film. For example, even when Denese/Doming is in one country, she is visually
marked as doing or dressing in such a manner that makes her displacement legible to the
audience. From the outset of the film, we are constantly asked as viewers, presumably American
viewers, to identify with Denese/Dominga and identify her as not fully belonging to either place.
After the opening scenes in which Denese/Dominga discusses the murder of her father and we
see these contrasting images of Rio Negro and Algona, the sequence that follows more fully
introduces the viewer to Denese/Dominga for the first time through her everyday life, attempting
to be as her voice over states, “this perfect person.” While her voiceover tells us that she has
struggled to become this person, this interview is coupled with scenes of Denese/Dominga
working at a beauty salon. She is putting on her makeup and discusses nail polish colors with a
customer. Aside from engaging in these acts of Western femininity herself, we are also introduce
to this as her job and labor in Algona. In one of the few scenes that include other residents in
Algona, Iowa the wide angle frame purposefully includes an elderly white woman who is being
advised by Denese/Dominga on what color to choose for her nails. Denese/Dominga in this early
scene is positioned as not just an ordinary “American” woman, but one that is employed as a
cosmetic expert in her town. The performance of femininity comes to stand in as the visual
marker for Denese/Dominga’s ability and desire to belong in the United States.
In addition, during Denese/Dominga’s second trip to Guatemala for the commemoration of
the massacre at Pak’oxom, the morning after the spiritual ceremony held at the site, the film
shows a clip of Denese/Dominga putting her make-up on and offering eye cream to her white
cousin, Mary. Set to the backdrop of a mountain in Guatemala, where Denese/Dominga, her
husband Blane and her cousin Mary have slept in sleeping bags and are awaking at sunrise, the
exchange between Denese/Dominga and Mary seems oddly placed. This sequence is shot as a

37
close-up of Denese/Dominga and Mary to purposefully exclude Blane and focuses on this beauty
ritual and exchange to position Denese/Dominga as invested in Western notions of femininity.
Again this is an exercise that positions Denese/Dominga as even more dedicated to gender
conformity than Mary who laughs at the idea of eye cream. Its placement acts as an abrupt cut
between the intense moments in the scenes preceding where she is participating in a Maya
ceremony and reaffirming her sensory memories that recall the smell of incense and the lighting
of candles to mourn their loved ones. The purpose of this lingering scene about eye cream and
makeup is again supposed to remind the viewer (who is presumed to be a monolingual English
speaker) that she is after all a normal woman. The scene where she and her cousin are giggling
about eye cream is immediately followed by a closeup where Denese/Dominga silently puts on
her foundation as she gets ready for her day. To further highlight how important issues of
feminine gender expression were to the filmmakers, in a newspaper article Patricia Flynn states,
“‘That might be one reason she became a cosmetologist,’ Flynn said. ‘She was literally putting
on the face of an American.’”
75
As we can see from this quote directly from the documentary
director and co-producer, gender becomes the vehicle through which they can create
Denese/Dominga as a citizen-subject torn between two radically different worlds. That Flynn
equates a particular gender expression with American identity is critical to the labor that gender
in particular does in the service of emphasizing over and over again Denese/Dominga’s
displacement.
In similar fashion when Denese/Dominga returns to Iowa, it is through the expression of
Maya femininity that we are again reminded of Denese/Dominga’s displacement. For instance, in
one scene set in what appears to be the kitchen at her church, Denese/Dominga is showing a
group of white women how to make tortillas out of corn masa. The group of three white women

75
Hughes, “Local Woman Helps Cousin Reveal Horrific Past,” D6.

38
look on as Denese/Dominga works the masa and states that, “This is how I was taught. And the
secret to it that my mother told me is that you make these little pocket holes, see them, and the
water goes in there and it gets all mixed up in there.” While it is unclear why Denese/Dominga
is doing this demonstration and who the women really are, it is enough to simply place her in this
scene and have her exhibit her knowledge as a Maya woman to again remind us that
Denese/Dominga is different from these white women. These juxtapositions emphasize a sense
of dislocation in ways that continue to position Guatemala and the United States as radically
different worlds.
Ironically, Algona, Iowa’s own connections to the historical dispossession of Native
Americans demonstrates the types of parallels that could have been made to Denese/Dominga’s
story. The town’s name itself originated from the Algonquin word for waters and lakes and while
Algona itself is a small town replete with a seemingly untroubled history of open and successful
settlement, Iowa is one of the states in the Midwest linked to the Black Hawk War of 1832. This
armed resistance to U.S. imperialism was led by Black Hawk and the British Band, a group
composed of Sauk (Sac), Kickapoo, Meskwaki (Fox), and Potawatomi people. In the aftermath
of the failed attempt to stave off settler colonialism, the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in
Iowa were able to purchase land to create a community that lives together, is federally
recognized, but off of any reservation.
76
This only occurred in 1857 after a series of failed
removals, returns, and relocations supported by the Indian Federal Removal Act of 1830. The
commonalities between the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and its particular relationship to
land and water rights—as well as the response of removal and dispossession by the nation states

76
Please see http://www.meskwaki.org/History.html for the Meskwaki’s own account of their tribal history, which
has been privileged here. For other understandings of the Black Hawk War of 1832 please see John W. Hall,
Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Patrick
Jung, "Black Hawk War (1832)" in The Encyclopedia of War, ed. Gordon Martel (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2011);
and Patrick Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

39
of Guatemala and the United States are linked through anti-indigenous politics that recognize
Indigenous dispossession as part and parcel of nation-making in the Americas.
Despite the possibility for historical or contemporary connections around land loss and
removal, the film writes Indigenous genocide as tragic, but ultimately foreign. In centering the
story of a transnational adoptee we are also able to side step the experience of undocumented
migration by Maya communities. While the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the
conflict in Guatemala are invoked as victims, the film makes no mention of how common
transnational adoption or undocumented migration has been. Among the connections that are left
unexplored is that the terror and violence on large swaths of Maya communities only continues
in the United States. Despite the fact that Denese/Dominga entered into this community as a
legal citizen and part of a hetero-nuclear family did little to safeguard her from experiencing a
deep sense of exclusion. Contrary to much of the work on Maya migrants in the diaspora that
exposes the violence and marginalization they experience as a result of not being recognized as
refugees and therefore remaining categorically undocumented and criminalized migrants,
Denese/Dominga’s displacement while critical to this narrative of not knowing where she
belongs, is also never dealt with as something that emerges from the racism and exclusion she
faces in Algona, Iowa. Through this gendered visual rhetoric of displacement we are left
believing that Denese/Dominga’s experience is a result of the violence of the massacre in
Guatemala, as if this type of violence cannot be traced to places like Algona and is not
maintained by normal, everyday white Algona residents.
V. THE POLITICS OF FORGETTING
The transborder anti-indigenous politic requires a gender performance that communicates
displacement as central to the narrative that white benevolence intervenes in. In the absence of an

40
indigeneity that can be autonomous and flushed out in its relation to other Indigenous peoples
and communities, gender becomes the instrument through which the private and public effects of
state violence are also communicated in ways that further disposes Denese/Dominga by ensuring
that she is not considered a part of the Maya movement or part of a legacy of Maya women who
have a long history of engaging and resisting genocide.
77
Throughout the film men play
significant public roles that provide the context for Denese/Dominga in an effort to have her
understand the history of the 1980s genocide. From the male tour guide that drives
Denese/Dominga around during her first trip, to the all male forensic team who lead the
exhumation at the end of the film, we see that men play substantial filters to alert
Denese/Dominga and the audience to the macro-politics of the genocide in Guatemala. For
example, the town priest Roberto Avalos in the resettlement community is one of the first people
in the film to discuss why the men of Rio Negro were massacred. In the narrative he provides,
the men of Rio Negro were one of the most resistant groups to the construction of the
hydroelectric dam and because of their participation in the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC)
workshops and discussions around Indigenous sovereignty and land rights the military translated
their involvement into subversive participation that justified the elimination of the village and
community. In this sense, the narrative of the massacre is also in line with particular gendered
tropes of men as public activists that also position women as those who do the labor of home and
raising children, something we know was not always the case since Maya women were also a
part of the armed struggle.
78

77
Refer to Alvis E. Dunn, "A Cry at Daybreak: Death, Disease, and Defence of Community in a Highland Ixil-
Mayan Village" in Ethnohistory volume 42, (October 1995): 595-606; and David Carey, Engendering Mayan
History: Kaqchikel Women as Agents and Conduits of the Past, 1875-1970, (New York: Routledge, 2006).
78
Arias, "Reconfiguring Guatemalan Historical Memory."

41
Gender becomes the analytic that the film relies on to uphold the through line of
Denese/Dominga’s individual story while also providing what ends up being an
oversimplification of race and genocide in Guatemala in the 1980’s. The use of stock footage that
falls along this presumed gendered difference between how Maya women and men experienced
the war becomes the vehicle through which the filmmakers make apparent the national and
transnational political context of the genocide. For example, the earliest context that the viewers
are given for the genocide is when Denese/Dominga visits her family in Guatemala for the first
time. Through the use of stock footage of guerrilla warfare where we see images of brown men
in military fatigues, dead men on the ground, shootouts in the jungle and finally the scenes stop
on the images of Maya women weeping in the jungle with text that states, “Survivors hid in the
mountains. Many lost their land.” This sequence falls in line with the notion that men were the
primary actors of the genocide (both as military and as causalities) while women and children
suffered secondary results of displacement. This narrative never comes directly from any Maya
person in the film and is instead consistently filtered through white or Ladino people in the
documentary.
This oversimplification also requires that Denese/Dominga’s journey be taken out of the
context of the Maya movement. In the film her story affirms her Achí identity through language
and dress and yet does not recognize that there is also a larger movement on behalf of many
Maya communities to challenge the elite that, as noted above, has for decades denied any
wrongdoing during the armed conflict. The encounters with Maya leaders in the film are
tremendously significant and yet very brief. These community leaders, in particular Jesus Tecu
Osorio and Carlos Chen Osorio are only present for a couple of minutes total and their role in
community re-vindication projects are decontextualized. Both Tecu Osorio and Chen Osorio

42
were also child orphans of the same massacre in Rio Negro.
79
They survived because they were
taken to live in the military soldier’s homes as child captives and it was only as adults that they
were able to legally accuse the commanders of murder. They have both gone on, with a number
of others from their community, to create a museum in honor of the victims, raise monuments
that contain the names of the massacred and have become international spokespeople for peace
and justice. They both appear in the film, but their appearance is very brief and Carlos Chen
Osorio does not actually speak in the documentary. Given that these are leaders who are widely
recognizable for anyone that works to document genocide in Guatemala, their absence as
significant storytellers who can give Denese/Dominga an understanding of not just the Rio
Negro massacre but its connection to larger politics of Guatemala is representative of the missing
context of the Maya movement.
Alongside the use of a gender binary that adheres to the notion that men played active roles
while women suffered as passive victims is also a silence around the movements in which
Guatemalan Mayas are critical leaders. Rather than one unified organization, the Maya
movement is comprised of multiple NGOs, collectives, and even political parties that advocate
for a wide array of rights, reparations and reconciliation.
80
While it is beyond the scope of this
chapter to fully engage the accomplishments, tensions and possibilities of the Maya movement, it

79
There is an extensive archive at the University of Texas, Austin that includes video footage and interviews with
survivors of the Rio Negro Massacre who are also leaders in the effort to exhume the clandestine grave. The
material was collected by Jesus Tecu Osorio and donated to the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. I point this
out to demonstrate an alternative role of collaborating with Jesus Tecu Osorio and documenting the exhumation
through a lens that reflected a more nuanced perspective of those with murdered relatives.
80
To learn about the Maya movement, refer to the following book: Kay B Warren, Indigenous Movements and their
Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Victor Montejo Maya
intellectual renaissance : Identity, Representation, and Leadership, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). In
addition, for a more critical perspective on the Maya movement refer to Edgar Esquit, "Nationalist Contradictions:
Pan-Mayanisms, Representations of the Past, and the Reproduction of Inequaities in Guatemala," in Decolonizing
Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas, edited by Florencia Mallon and Gladys
McCormick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 196-218. In addition, chapters in this recently published
edition also covers the Maya movement and some of its tensions: Greg Grandin, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, and
Elizabeth Oglesby, The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

43
I suffice to say that within the context of Discovering Dominga there is no Maya movement.
Even when the film focuses on the proceedings that lead to the exhumation of the clandestine
grave towards the end of the film, the viewer is only exposed to the legal process and not
necessarily to the long-standing progress that Maya people have made through their demands on
multiple levels of the state and in international forums. Among what is left out of the narrative, is
the particularly crucial role that women and the now adult-children that were survivors have
played in demanding justice in a country where doing so is still a life-threatening practice.
81

Within this film the overreliance on vicitimizing tropes for Maya women elides their
positions as critical social justice activists and simplifies the meaningful process of exhumation
in particular. For instance, the first day of the exhumation, Denese/Dominga becomes extremely
distraught as the digging begins and it is one of her aunts who comes over to her and rubs herbs
on her forehead and tells her to stop weeping because the sadness can make her heartsick. She
says this all in Achí and Denese/Dominga can’t fully understand, but the potent smell of the

81
As Hanlon and Shankar [Catherine Nolin Hanlon and Finola Shankar, "Gendered Spaces of Terror and Assault:
The Testimonio of REMHI and the Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala," in Gender, Place &
Culture volume 7, issue 3 (September 2000): 265-286.] points out, Maya women who expose sexual violence are a
critical component of highlighting an issue that overwhelmingly affected Maya women. While they highlight the
challenges of voicing these types of war crimes, they also emphasize the intergenerational consequences that
impacted entire families and communities; essentially highlighting the manner in which sexual violence and rape in
particular is a war crime. In addition please see [Jennifer Schirmer, “The Seeking of Truth and Gendering of
Consciousness: The CoMadres of El Salvador and the CONAVIGUA widows of Guatemala,” in Sarah A. Radcliffe,
"Viva" : Women and Popular Protest in Latin America, (New York: Routledge, 1993): 30-64] to learn more about
the organizing of Maya women in the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (National Council of
Widows of Guatemala) who were instrumental in demanding a variety of rights for women widowed during the
armed conflict. Their organizing included demanding the exhumation of mass graves and they used survivor’s
accounts to locate the unmarked graves. I also highly recommend referencing the following articles in order to
amplify the multitude of perspectives about Maya women’s organizing: Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes,
"Mayan Women Survivors Speak: The Gendered Relations of Truth Telling in Postwar Guatemala" in International
Journal of Transitional Justice 5, no. 3 (November 2011): 456-476; Carol Lynne D'Arcangelis, "Mayan Women and
the Foro as a Political Collective: The Case of the Guatemalan National Women's Forum," in Canadian Woman
Studies volume 22, issue 2 (2002): 126; and Rachel O'Donnell, "‘We were Different then’: Indigenous Women in
Rural Guatemala and the ‘War-Widow’ Category" in Canadian Woman Studies volume 27, issue 1 (2008): 145.
While there are very few texts in English written by Maya women I also recommend accessing Irma Alicia
Velasquez Nimatuj’s, “Transnationalism and Maya Dress” in Greg Grandin, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, and
Elizabeth Oglesby’s The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011):
523-531; and in Spanish Aura Cumes, "‘Sufrimos Vergüenza’: Mujeres k´iche´ Frente a La Justicia Comunitaria En
Guatemala." Desacatos volume 31 (2009): 99-114.

44
herbs allows her to stop crying. I highlight this moment as one that stands in contradiction to
what is highlighted as the exhumation continues. As the exhumation of the murdered men of Rio
Negro occurs we see a Maya woman in tears as the bodies are being carefully unburied by a
forensic team. Already on the second day of shoveling and sifting dirt and without any guarantee
that they will actually find anything, there is a gasp in the crowd as the first bone fragment is
found. Following the close up of a one inch unidentified bone, there is a close up of a Maya
woman who while crying states in Achí, “They had no pity. I suffered to raise my children,
suffered hunger and thirst. It’s as if they had no humanity.” This issue of hunger and thirst, a
denial of very basic human needs is a thread between this moment and the death of
Denese/Dominga’s infant sister. While the scene of this woman occurs towards the end of the
film, it bears a resemblance to the beginning of the film when Denese/Dominga recounts how
she ran from the massacre with her baby sister strapped to her back and details how she tried to
keep her alive by squeezing berry juice into her mouth. Despite her best efforts, the baby grows
weak and dies and Denese/Dominga is forced to bury her under a tree and keep moving until her
cousin finds her. This hunger that both Denese/Dominga and this woman describe, a hunger that
is caused by death and that also causes death, is a particularly gendered experience of a
patriarchal society that targets men for being public activists and in doing so also leaves
Indigenous women to fend for themselves and their families. This dichotomist understanding of
the public and private effects of genocide serve to make the story more legible, but it is also in
many ways false. Aside from the fact that women were part of the armed guerrilla as well as
many indigenous and human rights organizations, gender studies scholars have also analyzed that
even private spaces of home and family are so deeply embedded in public policies and politics,
that the division only serves the social reproduction of gender.
82
This framing of women and

82
For more on the false binary of public and private spheres, Barbara O. Reyes’ (2010) Public Women, Private

45
children suffering only serves to delegitimize this consequence as directly tied, not to the murder
of men in particular, but to an anti-indigenous politic that exceeds literal death to also include
social death through starvation and the elimination of kinship relationships.
Rather than stay with how Maya women or Denese/Dominga herself experiences this
process, the one on one interview that the film focuses on is that of Denese/Dominga’s white
adoptive cousin who “gets choked up” once they find the bone. Despite the fact that out of all the
women at the site she is perhaps the furthest removed from the actual consequences of the
genocide, it is Mary who articulates pain and sorrow that is legible for the audience. Victoria
Sanford, a U.S. scholar who has worked and written extensively about exhumations since the
1990s further explains how exhumations are intricately tied to the process of genocide and
reconciliation. In addition to being meaningful processes for the re-spatialization of kinship
relationships, exhumations offer an opportunity for Maya women to challenge their silencing and
become vocal and active leaders. In part because they were witnesses and survivors to these
massacres, but also in part because they are forced to denounce statecraft that is linked to terror
through their activism and memory.
83
These narratives also point to how the women’s refusal to
forget is still key to recognizing the ongoing effects of violence. The massacre is not contained to
the killing of men, women and children by soldiers; it becomes intergenerational and is
systematically sustained through the ongoing structures of colonization.
In one of the most poignant moments of the film as Denese/Dominga is sitting in the home
of her aunt with other relatives, they sit on a petate, a woven palm mat on the dirt floor, to
reconnect and discuss what happened. With Mary as an interpreter, they ask how many days

Lives: Gender and the Missions of California articulates that there are multiple public and private spheres, but they
often are not as easily separated as we may believe, especially for indigenous women who fulfill particular functions
for nation-building.
83
Refer to Sanford, Buried Secrets.

46
Denese/Dominga had been lost and if they knew where she had buried her baby sister. As they sit
around the darkened room, one of the uncles states that after they found Denese/Dominga she
cried for an entire night and an aunt also states that Denese/Dominga actually cried for eight days
after they found her, to which Denese/Dominga solemnly responds, “I have cried for eighteen
years.” Given the constant charge that her memories were nothing more than the products of an
active imagination or that she was just plain crazy, this adamant rejection of actually forgetting is
a critical mode of sustaining memory for those that have passed. What Denese/Dominga points
to with that statement is that she has never forgotten, she has never stopped remembering. Her
refusal to forget becomes an opportunity to challenge the powerful national narratives that in
Guatemala still to this day claim “no hubo genocidio.” In that moment, she is able to verbalize
that these memories and stories never left, that her coercion into silence is not to be confused
with actual healing. In a newspaper article published near the time of the film’s release, Patricia
Flynn states, “[Denese] left Dominga behind.”
84
However contrary to Flynn’s perception that
clearly informs this emphasis on dislocation, Denese/Dominga’s comments demonstrate that
even under the pressure to silence her memories in an effort to assimilate, she always held them
within her and they have continued to shape her life. Revisiting her coming to terms with the
burial of her sister in the context of exhumations, we see that what remains buried does not
disappear and does not stay easily quieted.
When Denese/Dominga reveals at the end of the film that she and her husband Blane had
separated and were sharing custody of their children, it is her challenge to both gender and
forgetting that becomes especially apparent. Both Blane and Denese/Dominga discuss their
separation and Denese/Dominga states, “He just wanted the old Denese back, like I was when I
was covering up everything when we got married and I didn’t show my true feelings at all.” We

84
Hughes, “Local Woman Helps Cousin Reveal Horrific Past,” D6.

47
then hear Blane state, “I’m really disappointed. I wanted to see this through, I wanted to be
involved, I wanted to—I wanted the happy ending. It’s amazing that a war that happened so long
ago and so far away is still affecting us today. Yea it’s still very much a problem in Guatemala,
but it’s taken our family apart too in a way.” In effect, the film allows Blane to position himself
as a victim of the conflict in Guatemala as well. However, given Denese/Dominga’s statements
before about determining for herself the actions she would take in solidarity with her community
and how significant it was for her to participate in the exhumation and to have recovered her
father’s body, we can see that their separation is also directly tied to issues of gender. Her desire
to want to publically denounce the violence and become active and not automatically return to
Iowa and their normal life was part of the source of conflict. Her involvement in the genocide
case that was reviewed in Chapter 1 alongside Jesus Tecu Osorio becomes a critical avenue for
her to create her own space to figure out what these memories mean and create a praxis that is
reflective of her own transborder experience.
Along the lines of juridical justice, Denese/Dominga states that she joins the legal cause of
both exhuming the grave and charging the paramilitary murderers because, “I won’t rest until
justice is served, that I know as my right in the U.S.” And while this bears the tone that she, now
as an American, demands that Guatemala account for its violence, she follows this statement by
seeking legal council to determine how much danger she is in now that she has agreed to testify.
With the assurance of the lawyer that the risk is low though there is still a risk, the documentary
cuts to scenes of Denese/Dominga walking down a cobble stone street by herself with arms
folded. As the camera pans out on this particular scene we see Denese/Dominga as a smaller
more child like version of herself that is pensive and perhaps conflicted as she walks looking
down at her feet. Her voiceover states, “I’m a little nervous about the genocide case but my

48
testimony is important to me because I want to stand with my people. I’m pretty torn in between
two worlds right now.” A growing consciousness that her experience is informed by multiple
seemingly disjointed realities doesn’t stop her from becoming active as both a U.S. Citizen with
particular notions of juridical rights and justice as well as a Maya woman and survivor. While
scholars have launched important critiques about the limits of legal justice, for Denese/Dominga,
this is still a viable project that connects her to her community.
This is in part the complexity of lived experiences for the Maya diaspora, where one is
relatively empowered through access to legal U.S. citizenship and yet attempts to bring those
notions to bear in a country where impunity is an ongoing logic that severely limits juridical
justice in Guatemala. This is where transborder readings are especially critical. In part, these
scenes reveal that legal justice is so fraught for dispossessed Mayas that Denese/Dominga must
rely on a notion of “rights” based on westphalian conceptions of citizenship.
85
It also reveals that
she has been removed from other manners of remembering and enacting her responsibility to her
parents. And this is why the Maya movement is so critical to fleshing out her experience since
scholars and activists have often acknowledged that the diversity of responses within the Maya
movement represent the multiple manners in which people have learned to grapple with the
effects of the genocide. For some, it has been the demand for exhumations that allow them to
confront the reality and for others it has been the revindication of Maya spiritual practice, for
instance.
VI. RESOLVING DISPOSESSION THROUGH WHITE BENEVELOENCE AND ADOPTION
The scenes that provide Denese/Dominga’s story about the massacre, her adoption, and her
childhood in Algona all follow the opening scenes where Guatemala and the United States are

85
Refer to Fraser, Scales of Justice.

49
visually and discursively depicted as opposites. Against the backdrop of a violent, traditional and
feminized Guatemala, the kind and loving white adoptive family from the modern and civilized
world of the United States comes to represent a necessary and positive intervention into the
genocidal politics of Guatemala. I argue, however, that this trajectory also allows viewers to
dismiss that Denese/Dominga’s story has many parallels to the taking of Native children and the
consequent erasure of their realities as Native people. That Algona, Iowa is never placed into the
history of settler colonialism allows Denese/Dominga’s story to remain exceptional. The over
dramatization and visual production of this difference between the U.S. and Guatemala hides
how Denese/Dominga’s story actually illustrates the transborder continuity of indigenous
dispossession and allows us to think about how the anti-indigenous state apparatus extends
beyond territorial borders.
As I outlined above, the transborder anti indigenous politic is not solely about a single
nation and its policies for managing indigenous peoples within its territorial boundaries. It is
instead about reading beyond borders to tease out the continuous violence that allows multiple
states to produce overlapping forms of anti-indigenous policies that can hybridize along the axis
of dispossession. Thinking about Maya migrants within a hemispheric approach also allows us
the opportunity to connect the ways in which the settler structure of the United States is extended
through white benevolence vis a vis the Indigenous migrant. In settler colonial theories more
often than not the “arrivant” is ignored or categorically not indigenous.
86
However, with more
scholarly work emerging that thinks through indigeneity in a hemispheric approach there is a
greater attempt at triangulating the experience of indigenous migrants to the U.S. nation state that
excludes them as racialized immigrants as well as to Native communities that have mixed

86
Saranillio, “Colliding Histories," and Saranillio, “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters," and Kay-Trask,
“Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony."

50
responses to their presence.
87
Extending this hemispheric framework to my analysis of the film, I
peel back the layers of white benevolence to position Denese/Dominga’s adoption as a visual
exercise in normalizing settler logics.
Given the long histories of colonization that existed differently in both nation states (see
Chapter 1), the film symbolically absolves national structures built on indigenous dispossession
through the benevolence of Denese/Dominga’s adoptive white mother, the white adult citizens of
Algona and even Blane, Denese/Dominga’s white husband. For instance, the scenes that discuss
the adoption give as much authority to the adoptive mother Linda Burk as it does to
Denese/Dominga herself. Set to a backdrop of a sunny outdoor area, the only scene in which
Linda Burk appears by herself is when she tearfully states the following about Denese/Dominga,
“She was really excited to have a family again. But many times she would get quite, she would
cry, and so all I could do was put my arms around her. That was the only thing I could do.” This
scene effectively exonerates her white mother by portraying her as a loving, caring and innocent
woman, perhaps lacking the resources to help Denese/Dominga confront the reality of violence.
Here it is useful to turn to Laura Briggs’ work which directly challenges the dichotomous
narratives around transnational adoption as always being either child rescuing or child stealing.
88

For Briggs, this binary neatly resolves the complex ways in which both tropes reify macro
transnational politics that do not challenge the very existence or need for transnational adoption.
The transnational politic that the film refuses to acknowledge includes that
Denese/Dominga’s adoption also occurs at a time in which the passing of the Indian Child

87
M. Bianet Castellanos, Lourdes Gutierrez Najera and Arturo J. Aldama, Comparative Indigeneities of the
Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012). This anthology brings
critical insight into the need for comparative approaches to questions of indigeneity. They write, “We hope to
provide scholars with new tools and alternative frameworks by which to analyze native communities and structure a
transnational and comparative framework for indigenous studies…” (3). Many of the chapters in this anthology are
cited throughout the dissertation.
88
Briggs, Somebody’s Children.

51
Welfare Act (ICWA) in 1978 attempts to curb the adoption of Native children who had been
previously adopted at five times the rate of non-Native children.
89
The limitations set forth by
ICWA in conjunction with the Central American solidarity movement which popularized the
victimization of Central Americans as a result of U.S. intervention creates the space for the
transnational adoption of Maya children to be considered not only possible, but also a righteous
duty. The Central American solidarity movement (also known as the Sanctuary Movement or the
Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement) was built on the notion that those in the
United States had a particular responsibility to hold their government accountable for its
interventionist policies in Central America.
90
This was accomplished through many fronts but
perhaps the most useful for this analysis is the affective impact that this type of movement
required. As Nepstad writes, the individuals who participated in this movement required a “moral
shock” that would do the emotional work needed to have them support this struggle.
91

In one scene for example, Denese/Dominga’s husband Blane is speaking to a group of
white Algona citizens inside of a church. Denese/Dominga, wearing her Maya clothing,
discusses her personal experience and then steps aside so that Blane can provide a historical
context and talk to the members of the church, which includes her adoptive parents and her
children, about the role of the U.S. government in this conflict. Momentarily, the viewer is asked
to examine the role of their government in the violence that Denese/Dominga experienced. This

89
Philips, “The Indian Child Welfare Act in the Face of Extinction,” 352.
90
To learn more about the various entities that were involved in the Central American solidarity movement, their
strategies, goals and Achíevements refer to: Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Convictions of the soul: Religion, culture,
and agency in the Central America solidarity movement. [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], Héctor Perla,
"Central American counterpublic mobilization: Transnational social movement opposition to Reagan's foreign
policy toward Central America" in Latino Studies volume 11, issue 2 (June 2013): 167-189, Hector Perla, "Si
Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá: Central American Agency in the Creation of the U.S.: Central American
Peace and Solidarity Movement" in Latin American Research Review volume 43, issue 2 (January 2008): 136-158,
and Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and
Cultures, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).
91
Nepstad, "Oppositional Consciousness among the Privileged," 666.

52
scene is then followed by one of the church members, a white man who seems to be in his
thirties stating, “…if most of the American people had any idea, but they don’t know and that’s
the problem. So education like this is vital. And I’m absolutely astonished to see something like
this happening in north Iowa. I think it’s absolutely incredible.” To which a woman in the group
responds, “Yes it is, in Algona, Iowa,” and the audience breaks into laughter and applause. This
particular scene takes place at a church both linking it to the solidarity movement, but also to the
notions of sanctuary replicate the interview with Linda Burke. Both use lighting and location to
convey light, truth, and purity. However, in the context of Indigenous critique, both are linked to
colonial processes of adoption and missionization. This is extended to nation building when the
white man in the audience from his pew speaks for all Americans to convey not only a sense of
disappointment, but also an innocence that when paired with how the story positions
Denese/Dominga’s white mother demonstrates that white individuals have no responsibility for
the work of their government. Both this scene and the scene with her adoptive mother does the
work of cleansing these white citizens of responsibility towards Denese/Dominga in particular,
but also towards the systematic genocide of Indigenous people by government policies and
practices.
This scene reminds us that Denese/Dominga’s story is filtered through the popular
discourse of the Central American Solidarity movement. However Steulke
92
and Rodriguez
93

92
Patricia Stuelke, "The Reparative Politics of Central America Solidarity Movement Culture" in American
Quarterly volume 66, issue 3 (September 2014): 767-790. Steulke’s article in particular builds on indigenous studies
and examines a novel in which Maya refugees are asked (perhaps obligated) to play the role of Native American
parents in order for the protagonist, a white lesbian U.S. citizen, to be able to keep a Cherokee child as her adoptee.
This novel exemplifies the transborder anti-indigenous politic as it positions one indigenous person as participating
in the dispossession of native people through the orchestrated stealing of a Native child.
93
Ana Patricia Rodriguez, "The Fiction of Solidarity: Transfronterista Feminisms and Anti-Imperialist Struggles in
Central American Transnational Narratives" in Feminist Studies volume 34, issue 1-2 (April 2008): 199-228.
Rodriguez’s work points to the appropriation of Central American diasporic narratives in the service of Chicana
feminist agendas. While her work does not specifically focus on indigenous or Maya narratives in particular, she

53
both provide critical insight into how the affective reparative politic also produces a solidarity
that co-opts and over-sentimentalizes the narratives of Central American migrants. However, as
stated in the first chapter, the use of the term Central American often elides indigeneity. With few
exceptions most research notes the involvement of Maya refugees, but does not consider what
the movement has meant for settler colonial imaginaries and politics within the United States. It
is this framing of family formation through transnational adoption that requires an analysis that
should be read beyond sentimentalization to understand that when placed into the longer history
of Native child removal reveals the continuous dispossession that is normalized. The audience of
Discovering Dominga is asked to have sympathy for a white woman who through adoption
enacted a transborder anti-indigenous politic by removing Denese/Dominga from her home
country and extended family.
94
But even more so then portraying her individual mother as an
innocent white person with noble intentions, it ignores that this type of family formation through
Indigenous dispossession is structurally possible because of genocide. Denese/Dominga is made
available for adoption through state violence because of the support that Ronald Reagan in
particular gave Efrain Rios Montt who was the dictator at the time of the massacres in Rio
Negro.
Denese/Dominga herself shares a very different perspective about her adoption and her
reception in Algona, Iowa. The sequence that discusses her adoption opens with a photograph of
her and her adoptive parents in a newspaper that documented her adoption by the local couple.
We hear the noise of children playing in the background and Denese/Dominga’s voiceover

highlights the tensions and failures that occur when a Chicana feminist lens is used to read Central American
experiences without a committed dialogue with Central American people themselves.
94
For more on indigenous dispossession through adoption by white families please see: Laura Briggs, Somebody's
Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) and
Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous
Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) which
examine closely the adoption of Native children in white families as a strategy of colonization and dispossession.

54
begins to discuss her experience of coming to this small town in the U.S. As we see images of
white children wearing backpacks we hear Denese/Dominga’s voice over state, “I tried really
hard to fit in. Some of them thought I was Chinese, so they called me chink. When I tell my
story, they just look at me like I made it up. Yea, she’s ins-yea, like I was crazy. She has a vivid
imagination.” With wide eyes and nodding at the person beyond the camera, Denese/Dominga
shares this story with a sense of disbelief that she had been accused of lying.
In this scene sequence, the film shows images of white children presumably at a school
while Denese/Dominga describes this experience, giving the impression that this racist
interaction occurred at school. Denese/Dominga never verbally provides an indication that this
was limited to the perspective of other children. The visual stock footage of children, backpacks
and a school bus all allow the racism she experiences to be framed as something that only
children could perpetuate. It creates a visual framing that ignores the possibility that this was part
of a larger project of how Algona, Iowa is constructed as a white town, where non-whiteness is
read as foreign, and foreign is read as Asian through the use of a racist slur. Against the much
more common experiences of Mayas as undocumented migrants that informs other research,
95

the fact that Denese/Dominga arrives in the United States with legal citizenship does not prevent
her Maya phenotype and body being read as not belonging in Algona, Iowa.
To further create a discourse that exonerates discrimination and violence against
Denese/Dominga this scene also does the work of making apparent to the audience the
benevolence of her white mother as a way of mediating the racism upon the subjectivities of

95
For example Jennifer F Reynolds, "(Be)Laboring Childhoods in Postville, Iowa." Anthropological Quarterly
volume 86, issue 3 (Summer 2013): 851-889; and Cecilia Menjivar and Leisy J. Abrego, "Legal Violence:
Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants," The American Journal of Sociology volume 117,
issue 5 (March 2012): 1380-1421 argue that Maya migrants, because they are phenotypically, culturally and
linguistically identifiable, experience disproportionate amounts of deportation and exclusion, even in relation to
other Latina/o migrants.

55
transnational adoptee children. This is in part accomplished by what is left out of the narrative of
the film. For example, the film itself also never answers why Denese/Dominga was in an
orphanage in Guatemala City to begin with. As we saw from Jesus Tecu Osorio’s testimony in
the first chapter, it was a common practice for soldiers and paramilitaries to “adopt” child
survivors after their parents had been murdered. In the case of Denese/Dominga the film never
clarifies that her extended relatives had placed her in an orphanage to hide her for fear that she
would be targeted as a witness and survivor.
96
As we saw in the first chapter, families and even
biological parents often feared for their lives if they were to even try and claim their children
who were now living in communities and families who had the authority and power to kill them
with impunity. In addition, to this threat of death, we also have to consider that
Denese/Dominga’s extended family had just dealt with multiple massacres and were still
constantly fleeing from the military as they struggled to survive in the mountains. While the film
does not provide any details about what happened after Denese/Dominga flees, is found by her
cousin the mountains and then is adopted, Laura Briggs narrates some of this gap. As Briggs
recounts, her cousin takes Denese/Dominga to the orphanage in Rabinal and yet neither the text
nor the film disclose if it had been her extended family’s decision to transport her to an
orphanage in the capital city, approximately 65 miles away from Rabinal or if it had been the
missionaries who had ultimately removed Denese/Dominga from the nearby orphanage in
Rabinal. These gaps and silences work to make possible her adoptive mother’s benevolence by
hiding away these intimate forms of violence, rupture and displacement.
The analytic of a transborder anti-indigenous politic allows us to articulate that her
narrative is the result of multiple national imaginaries (both the U.S. And Guatemala) that
objectify her for what she means to the state. In the case of Guatemala, the anti-indigenous

96
Briggs, Somebody’s Children, xx.

56
politic at play is one that positions Maya communities as barriers to progress and development
that needed to be eliminated. In the case of Rio Negro, Denese/Dominga’s community, the
military government agreed to build the dam using foreign funds without taking into account the
communities that had existed along the river for centuries.
97
The dam was set to deliver
electricity to the capital city and the military responded to the resistance of the various
communities to relocation with massive and brutal repression. The single largest massacre was
on March 13, 1982 in which 178 people were systematically and collectively murdered, 70
women and 107 children.
98
It was this conflict over the Chixoy Dam that was at the root of why
Denese/Dominga was orphaned. While part of a longer history of dispossession, the genocide of
the 1980s was also connected to a particular economic model of development that operated
through funding by international finance banks and the military regimes of Guatemala. As J.T.
Way writes the, “epoch of intense modernization in Guatemala culminated in genocide. The
period from 1970 to 1985 was one of transformation through terror. Counterinsurgency and
development, the army’s two missions, are not analytically separate.”
99
Not having eliminated
Denese/Dominga through murder or capture by the paramilitary, Denese/Dominga becomes an
adoptable orphan. Brought to Algona, Iowa as a pastor’s daughter, she becomes the object that
exemplifies the pastor’s (her adoptive father’s) charity and morals. She is then taken up by this
film and positioned as a woman who does not know where she belongs, who then makes it part
of her own mission to raise awareness about the violence in Guatemala.
While it is important to consider that Denese/Dominga’s experience is not the same as
that of adopted U.S. Native children, positioning her dispossession as something that is foreign
to the United States allows for the filmmakers to ignore the adoption of Maya children as a

97
Aguirre, ""The Chixoy Dam Destroyed our Lives’," 2.
98
Refer to Dill, "International Human Rights and Local Justice in Guatemala"; and Pacenza, "A People Damned."
99
Way, The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development and the Making of Modern Guatemala, 125.

57
transnational strategy of genocide. By eliminating Iowa’s and the United States’ history of
elimination, we only see Denese/Dominga’s plight as a result of the armed conflict in Guatemala
that led to the massacre of her parents. This is of particular concern because it occludes how
Indigenous migrants are subject to technologies that have also allowed a settler colonial political
economy to flourish.
The genocide of Native communities and their long-standing struggles for sovereignty
are never a part of this film. This absence allows the U.S. to absorb displaced Indigenous
migrants through citizenship and U.S. racial structures by removing any possibility for
Denese/Dominga to exist in relation to Native North America. We, as viewers, are not
encouraged to consider her indigeneity in relation to the Indigenous peoples who are from nearby
regions and who, unlike others in Algona, may be more capable of understanding her experience
with genocide. Rather than have this discussion about the commonality of both dispossession,
adoption and then returning to home communities, the filmmakers instead produce a discourse of
difference that creates space for white people in the film to be represented as kind, innocent, and
open hearted—but most certainly not colonizers themselves.
So while the film seems to represent a progressive agenda that can indict the U.S.
government for its role in supporting and financing the genocide of Maya people, the innocent
everyday white citizen of Algona, Iowa is not asked to consider how they may be reaping
benefits from centuries of Indigenous dispossession in their country. This reveals much more
than a disavowal of Native genocide, it also points to how the narratives of Indigenous migrants
may be used to normalize a multicultural settler colonialism. This multicultural settler
colonialism is built through what Jodi Byrd argues is the transit of Indianness where the notion
of the “Indian” travels to other territories in order to also allow the imperial and colonial work of

58
the United States.
100
As a result when Denese/Dominga’s narrative is presented it is important to
note that she is only an “Indian” in Guatemala. This allows for the film to extend the assumption
that settler colonialism is complete, unquestionable and perhaps even untraceable in the stories of
Indigenous migrants.
VII. INTERGENERATIONAL MEMORY MAKING
Transborder anti-indigenous politics must be deconstructed in order to perceive
possibilities for forming a diaspora that is not necessarily defined through settler colonial
maneuvers of occupation. While the film replicates these politics in how it conceptualizes the
Maya experience of genocide, there are also moments that represent different routes. In the
context of Maya organizing and the diversity of responses that have been employed to struggle
over the meaning of justice and memory, the film develops a praxis that while not an overt
frame, does important work in providing glimpses into survival strategies that are generated from
Maya epistemologies. These strategies are not always obvious, I would even argue that one of
the evasive power relations that this film seems incapable of engaging is how the filter of the
white gaze is necessitated through the presumption of Mayas as victims incapable of their own
movements for justice. As a result, the film often circumvents the tension by only including
scenes around Maya epistemologies and activism in brief and decontextualized moments, it
ignores the white gaze by normalizing Maya victimhood. Overlooking these possibilities also
transforms Maya epistemologies into a trace. While scholars have argue that the trace is the
residue of violent structures, I would also argue that in instances where human rights films works
so diligently to visually capture and communicate one particular form of violence and atrocity, at
times what becomes an afterthought is the responses generated by those impacted by state

100
Byrd, The Transit of Empire.

59
repression.
101
I delve deeper into the moments where this film stumbles on to the reality that
Mayas have formed a praxis that attest to their survival of multiple genocides.
Intergenerational imaginaries, part of the praxis that emerges from a transborder existence,
counteract the rupture associated with displacement and state violence. To take one example, one
of the under-examined narrative threads of the film is Denese/Dominga’s journey as it relates to
her own children. In one of the opening scenes of the film, Denese/Dominga lays out a central
problem for the diaspora. In reference to her older son she asks, “When he was four he would ask
me what I did when I was four. What am I gonna say when he’s nine? I can’t tell him that my
parents were massacred.” The politics around intergenerational memory within a context of
indigenous genocide and displacement are critical to thinking about what is remembered and
how it is communicated to those who did not live that memory. To some extent, it even begs the
question of what it means to “live a memory?” Even further, it forces us to question if there are
corporeal, temporal, or spatial boundaries for memories of genocide? This very critical question
posed by Denese/Dominga forces us to reconceptualize how our visions of the future must
simultaneously embrace that the past, more than historical fact, remains a formative presence.
Extending the notion of hauntings,
102
I posit that intergenerational imaginaries are
presented in the documentary as peripheral aspects because they disrupt the narrative of

101
I would especially like to highlight the contribution by Herman Gray and Macarena Gomez Barris [The
Sociology of the Trace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), because they, “…propose a sociology
of the trace as a way to attenuate the distance between observable social worlds and those things that are not easily
found through methodologies that attempt to empirically account for social reality” (5). A singular emphasis on the
white gaze would also elide the ways in which these problematic representations are also not fully determinant and
how the glimpses into the connection to Maya activism can also be important sites of analysis. My attempt to read
these fleeting moments is an attempt to engage with the reality that while this film circulates as human rights film, it
is also an opportunity for Mayas in the United States to also reflect on the challenges they face in the diaspora.
102
Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press 2008) was critical to the development of the analytic of the “haunting.” Her work is especially
useful because it outlines the aspects of life that are complicated and messy and yet make something known through
their shadowy absence. As she argues further [Avery F. Gordon, “Some thoughts on haunting and futurity” in
Borderlands volume 10, issue 2 (October 2011)], this haunting is not solely about recognizing that a structure of
power is present though perhaps not overtly visible or articulated, but is more importantly about the “something-to-

60
contradiction that the filmmakers have worked hard to establish. They create threads that contest
the temporal and spatial demarcation of particular countries, particular generations, particular
periods of conflict to demonstrate that this violence remains an open wound for countless
generations who are now scattered across the Americas. Nonetheless, this discursive practice of
building intergenerational imaginaries, or social relations that extend beyond the generational
schema of migration studies, makes this film a critical and mobile archive for the Maya diaspora.
The filmic text of Discovering Dominga that positions Guatemala and the United States as
inherently different in relation to indigeneity also obscures the critical ways in which
Denese/Dominga mobilizes her own agency to create bridges between not only her and her
extended families, but to extend those intergenerational relationships to her children in the
United States and to generations that have passed away. What is left in the margins is the
incredibly significant work that she commits to as part of a generation that was adopted/removed
and yet seeks to mend the generational links that may have faded, but did not break.
One of the challenges to thinking about the intergenerational nature of memory is that this
can lead to an analysis that romanticizes the discourse of recovery. Recovery assumes that there
is an authentic Indigenous experience or a specific form of Indigenous consciousness that was
fully ruptured by genocide and colonization that must somehow be recuperated.
103
This can be

be-done” that results from this oblique presence (2). Gordon’s work plays on time to argue that the past shows up in
ways that we don’t always predict, understand or can even see but it provides an important opportunity to
reconsider, reassess. Just as power structures haunt these representations, so does the epistemologies that ground
continuance, these are the ghosts that I attempt to flesh out in relation to Maya praxis.
103
Here it is especially useful to turn to work within Native American studies that problematizes the
conceptualization of Native communities as static and challenge the production of forms that seek to determine
authentic subjects that the state can recognize and subsequently manage. In particular Scott Lyons [X-Marks: Native
Signatures of Assent, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) notes that one of the most effective
narratives of colonization has been to silence the events of pre-colonial indigenous migration. Through a reading of
Ojibwe creation stories, Lyons acknowledges the multiple migrations that allowed the Ojibwe to form homes even
through conflict with other indigenous peoples, who also possess their own creation stories of movement and
migration. Jodi Byrd [The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011)] also begins her academic analysis from the vantage point of movement, transit and
migration. While Byrd is more concerned with how the process of Indianization moves through narratives to solidify

61
particularly problematic because it also assumes that indigeneity is not complex enough to
include the realities that someone like Denese/Dominga experiences. It also does not account for
how indigeneity shifts. Before the 1980s it may have made sense for Denese/Dominga’s story to
be highly localized within an Achí experience of Rio Negro, however the advent of the Maya
movement and the recognition it has garnered in an international forum also opens the possibility
for a pan Maya identity to be claimed, especially in relation to challenging the discourses and
actions of the genocide of the 1980s. Part of what this analysis of recovery obscures is that as
Joanne Barker highlights, the very formation of what an indigenous person is has been a product
of nation states who have a vested interest in the notion that there is a time and space, a moment
in history, that is representative of authentic Indigenous culture.
104
Within this film, it is Maya
women in bright textiles, with children strapped to their back and with baskets on their heads that
often become signifiers for authentic Maya culture. In contrast, Denese/Dominga arrives in cargo
shorts and having left her children in Iowa. However, this distinction of a whitewashed or
Americanized Denese/Dominga in comparison to women who speak their language and wear
regional clothing only reifies the notion that Denese/Dominga has indeed lost her culture. As a
result, it is that moment, space or articulation that is constantly in need of being recovered or
protected and from which any degree of departure is suspect and dangerous. Authenticity

American imperialism, what is evident from her work is that indigenous subject formations through the process of
migration have yet to be fully flushed out. Part of the reason is that it is very difficult to fix into academic language
an experience that is both tied to particular lands and the social relations forged through centuries in those places as
well as how those worldviews still provide modes of operating in the world that accept migration. In addition, as
Giovanni Batz [“Maya Cultural Resistance in Los Angeles: The Recovery of Identity and Culture among Maya
Youth.” Latin American Perspectives volume 41, issue 3 (May 2014): 194-207] also contemplates, language is
interwoven with legacies of violence that do attempt to create permanent ruptures and so for Maya youth there may
be a feeling of “recovery.” However, Joanne Barker [Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2011] in particular reminds us to think critically about how we deploy conceptions
of belonging and recovery and emphasizes the role of state structures in formulating what it means to be indigenous.
This forces scholarship on indigenous migrants (of all types) to constantly travel through two competing projects:
state power and indigenous epistemologies. While they are usually competing frameworks, I also contemplate them
as two frameworks that interweave, never existing as fully distinguishable, but also not being completely co-
dependent either.
104
Barker, Native Acts.

62
becomes the underlying problematic of attempting to produce notions of “lo Maya” and in order
to offer analytics outside of this trope, I want to consider spirituality as one of the sites that
Denese/Dominga turns to in creating her intergenerational imaginary.
I mentioned in the introduction that this film becomes a critical site of diasporic
experience and part of a larger archive that is both mobile and also centers the experience of
migration. As the film focuses primarily on Denese/Dominga, we only slightly remember that it
is not just about her, but it is indeed about the narrative she will construct for her sons. While her
children are peripheral characters in the narrative of the film, part of the concern is about how to
transmit her experience to her children. Her children only appear on camera in a handful of
scenes and only twice are they actually speaking with Denese/Dominga. Towards the beginning
the film, we see Denese/Dominga reading a book to her children where Mr. and Mrs. Porcupine,
the main characters, are attempting to name their child. She then tells her children, “Look at him
looking in to the mirror, isn’t that how you discover yourself, she what kind of nose you have.”
This scene creates a sense that Denese/Dominga’s story as it is captured in this documentary is
fundamentally tied to coming to terms with what her memories also mean for her children. We
see the three of them again towards the end of the film, interestingly enough after the scenes
about the separation between her and Blane. They are in a new home and are sitting on their
beige couch when we see Denese/Dominga showing her two sons a sumahador (incense burner)
and attempts to explain to them that her grandfather was a “Maya priest” or what is today better
know as an ajq’ij’ in K’iche’, a spiritual guide and day keeper who leads ceremonies.
This is something Denese/Dominga learns when she attends a ceremony during her first
trip back to Guatemala. The documentary frames the fire of the ceremony as the center-shot and
we hear Denese/Dominga voiceover state, “The smells brought a lot of memories to me. I just

63
kept thinking how my mom and dad when they would go mourn their dead they would do the
same thing. I kept thinking, is this what its like to be part of these people? And if it is, I think I
like it.” In an article reflection written by Patricia Flynn, the director and producer of the
documentary noted that it was when Denese/Dominga saw the ceremony leaders wearing the red
headscarf that she remembered her grandfather would do the same. Without an overt intention
from the filmmakers the ceremony then plays a critical role in jogging Denese/Dominga’s
sensory-based memories and helping her identify the role that her grandfather played for the
community. For Denese/Dominga this allows her to extend her narrative beyond the violence of
the genocide to something much larger, which is Maya spirituality or cosmovision. The sensory
remembrance of smelling incense and seeing the head scarf and candles creates a critical space
from which Denese/Dominga begins to question and affirm an affinity for Maya people. Given
the violent circumstance surrounding her parents’ death and the power of Maya ceremony in
communicating Maya epistemologies, it is spiritual practice that becomes a site from which she
wants to connect her children. Memory is a critical aspect of Diasporas produced out of state
violence and dispossession, the issue of memory becomes critical in articulating visions of both
the past and the future and become sites from which to generate political intentions. Within the
context of her original questions, "What will I tell him when he is nine, I can't tell him my
parents were massacred," the film moves towards a place where she indeed tells them about the
massacre, but her investment is to tell them much more, to root them in Maya spirituality briefly
perhaps fleetingly, but to do it nonetheless.
It is important then to recognize that theorizing intergenerational relationships for Mayas
must center the notion that intergenerationality is not restricted to categories often employed in
traditional immigrant integration work. Rather than disaggregate migrants as first generation and

64
their citizen children as the second generation and so on, centering the reality that these
generations do not always fall into clear categories or patterns is critical to understanding the
difference that indigeneity makes. For Mayas, in particular there is also an intergenerational
imaginary that extends beyond the physical and temporal realm of the here and now. Spiritual
ceremony becomes a critical avenue through which this intergenerational imaginary is produced
and as such, these relationships become difficult to measure in sociological metrics, but they
nonetheless do important spiritual and memory work. For example, in one instance I attended a
ceremony for a young woman in Quetzaltenango where at the beginning of the ceremony her
deceased relatives were called back by name and invited to join us. In addition, it is common
practice within Maya ceremonies to speak of abuelas/abuelos (grandparents) with the
understanding that these ancestors and grandparents are collectively all of our grandparents. In
the same scene with her sons, Denese/Dominga’s son asks about her cousins who died.
Denese/Dominga affirms that when their [her children’s] grandma and grandpa were killed that
indeed a lot of her cousins were also murdered. Her son replies by asking how many cousins she
has left and Denese/Dominga responds that she probably has about fifty cousins still alive and
that there is actually a cousin that looks just like him. The scene ends as they both quietly
contemplate the interaction. The importance and power of the discursive practice through which
an intergenerational imaginary occurs is critical to how we conceptualize Maya cultural
production and continuity in the face of displacement. I want to stress again that while these
scenes are not central to the documentary overall, they are important because they provide an
intervention into the notion that displacement is the ultimate rupture and always equates
insurmountable loss. In actuality, for both Denese/Dominga and her sons, there are moments and
exchanges that center continuity, attachment and genealogy.

65
Likewise, woman-centered intergenerational imaginaries create continuity for
Denese/Dominga. This is most evident in a scene that follows the films account of the Rio Negro
conflict. As the priest details for Denese/Dominga why the community was targeted and the
belief that it was a hot bed for guerrilla subversives, Denese/Dominga’s voiceover states that she
has tried so hard to remember what Rio Negro was like before the massacres. As we get a utopic
account of bountiful mango trees, coconut tress and baskets of silverfish, we then transition to a
sunrise view of Rabinal as Denese/Dominga walks through the local marketplace and smells
mangos from the fruit vendors. As she walks into a stall where the vendor has hung a few dozen
textiles used for the corte on the walls, she reaches to touch one. We hear Denese/Dominga’s
voice say, “My mother liked to shop, she smelled the cloth and I like the smell of it.” As she
grabs the folded textile and smells it she then unfolds it and states, “I kinda know how to put it
on.” She is smiling as she folds the cloth of the corte around her with the two trademark waist
flaps firmly in place and she is obviously full of emotion as she stands wearing the skirt. We then
hear her say, “When I tried it on, I could see my mother wearing it and I want so much to be a
normal Achí Mayan woman.” In the context of problematic discourses of recovery I want to
consider what it means for Denese/Dominga to cover herself in the textile in an effort to
remember who she is as an Achí woman in particular. While Chapter 3 will go into further detail
regarding the significance of textiles and Maya clothing, in this particular instance, I highlight it
to consider the notion of fluency. As we see throughout the film, Denese/Dominga has forgotten
not only Achí, but Spanish as well. It is worth remembering that Algona is almost exclusively
white and unlike other migrants who create hubs, she was directly assimilated into an English
speaking community. However, as we can see in this scene, after years of geographic, linguistic
and cultural distance from her home community, she remains fluent in the practice of covering

66
herself with Maya clothing. To (re)cover Denese/Dominga is to acknowledge that the moment
when she covers herself in the textile with such ease, she begins to chart a path for her to
consider what it means to belong to her people. As we see in the next scene she is wearing the
entire outfit and addresses a large crowd that has gathered to hear her on the day of
remembrance. To some extent this following scene is not so much about her recovering an
identity that was always with her, but is instead about her community recovering a leader who
can and does support the community despite the multiple ruptures that sought to eliminate her as
a Maya Achí person. While she is on a particular journey to understand what that means in the
context of her adoption into a white family and town, she nonetheless makes critical decisions
for herself to build on what she has and make contributions to the struggle for justice taking
place before her.
VIII. MEMORY AND LAND BASED EPISTEMOLOGIES
These intergnerational imaginaries are also not necessarily anthropocentric nor bound by
time or physical space. At the beginning of the film, as Denese/Dominga embarks on her journey
we see her sitting silently on the plane as she stares out of the window with a pensive expression
and we hear her voiceover state, “I just wanted to step on the land, to complete my memories, to
make sure I was not insane.” As we see her in the airport in the capital city and as her van travels
through paved roads we also hear her say, “I could see the valleys, and the mountains, and the
hills. I could see the little children dressed in Mayan clothing and all I could see was me as a
little child and my mother. And that was when I knew I was home.” Through her tearful words,
we remember that the trip back to Guatemala for Denese/Dominga is what will allow her to
make sense of the memories she has carried for years. We are introduced to land as a site of
memory at the same time that we also begin to sense that her journey is about returning to a

67
reality she was violently cut off from. However, land is not solely positioned as a site of home.
During her second trip back to Rio Negro for the commemoration of the massacre where her
mother was killed, she goes on a small boat to reach the site of the massacre. As she silently rides
this boat across what appears to be a lake, we hear her voiceover state, “The river—the river’s
gone, it’s a lake now. I don’t even want to touch the water, my home is gone.” The man made
dam that is at the source of the conflict in Rio Negro, forever marks the literal loss of her home,
which is now completely flooded by what looks like a lake. This lake is a site of pain and disgust
for Denese/Dominga because its creation marks the loss of her parents and the life that she knew
as a child. In this sense, land is a site of memory and not always equated to “home.”
However, land also plays a critical role in memory making that gives it a unique position in
the creation of the intergenerational imaginary. As we see in the film Denese/Dominga actually
meets Jesus Tecu Osorio during this trip for the commemoration of the massacre at Pak’oxom
and he recounts for her in gruesome detail what he saw during the massacre. She stands silently,
asking her interpreter not to translate the stories of Tecu Osorio because she understood them. As
she cries and thanks him for sharing painful memories, he responds, “Like I said earlier,
sometimes it’s hard for us humans to bear seeing such things, like the day of the massacre. But
like I was saying, these trees have more memories than we do because they, the trees, saw
everything, and so did Mother Earth.” In this sense Tecu Osorio extends the role of land, not just
as the physical place on which things occur, but as a repository of memories. Land is the oldest
relative that has born witness to everything that occurs and according to Tecu Osorio, it provides
a model for resilience and continuity in spite of violence. Land then, is not simply an inert site
whose value is only understood in what it provides. Instead, land remains and spans across
multiple generations, continuously bearing witness.

68
IX. CONCLUSION: WHAT REMAINS
I end with the above scene about the role of land-based models of resilience because while
I believe it is a critical moment of meaning making for Denese/Dominga, this understanding of
land does not reappear in the documentary; it does not become a critical vehicle for the story that
the filmmakers are attempting to narrate. As such, I want to return to the primary narrative that is
being created in this film, that of a young woman torn between worlds. The last time we see
Denese/Dominga her voice over states, “I have not come to terms with the American Denese and
the Guatemalan Dominga. I don’t have an answer for that. I just know I want to be a part of both
countries. I need Guatemala to survive.” Part of what is troubling in this narration, is that not for
a moment are we as the audience allowed to consider if the question to which she has no answer
is even a legitimate one. Why would she ever have to choose? What can reconciliation mean for
her as a Maya Achí U.S. citizen? Part of the urgency in reframing the very question being
posed—Who are you really?— is that there must be an intentional and pragmatic recognition
that our futures as Maya people are not predetermined. And if as Charles Hale suggests, the
changes that followed the peace process are perhaps more symbolic than material where notions
of justice and reconciliation remain open terrains of struggle,
105
I argue that the value of this film
as a mobile archive lies in what is obscured through its dominant narrative, that rupture and
continuity occur simultaneously at all times. Denese/Dominga is the Indigenous migrant that is
legible to white Americans as not fitting in anywhere. However as the diasporic Indigenous
subject she becomes embedded within the complex nature of a diaspora that forces our notions to
expand, to migrate and move with us both to new places and in our returns to ancestral spaces.

105
Refer to Hale, “Rethinking Indigenous Politics in the era of the ‘Indio Permitido’.”

69
As I consider what remains after this film is seen and analyzed, I return to the very central
process of the exhumation of the mass grave of the men from Rio Negro, among them
Denese/Dominga’s father. What remains in the grave is the clothing and the fragments that point
to who we are and what happened. Even when the skin and flesh of these men have melted away
after decades, what remains is their clothing, their bones and the instruments of torture used to
murder them. These fragments can still be pieced together through the knowledge we continue to
have. That is both the cultural and spiritual knowledge of who the Maya Achí are as a people, but
also the knowledge we have of those that were murdered. Identifying who is likely to be in the
grave can be accomplished through DNA tests, but I would argue that beyond this form of
biological testing, it is the stories that survivors carry that can also tell us who went to Xococ that
day and who didn’t return. What remains is the process of rebuilding, of creating stability and
harmony, of creating narratives of consciousness and continuity. Contrary to the lingering in-
between-ness that the film leaves us with, as Denese/Dominga states after the exhumation, “The
community will bury the bodies that have been exhumed. I’d love to be there, to say good-bye to
my dad. I really do hope that he knows that I am fighting for him. That he didn’t die for no
reason.” For Denese/Dominga what remains is the will to continue extending the
intergenerational bonds that de-stabilize transborder anti-indigenous politics and that can and
should draw generations in the diaspora to those struggling in our homelands and those who
passed as a result of genocide.

70
CHAPTER THREE

Weavings that Rupture: Cultural Retention among the Maya Diaspora
I. INTRODUCTION
In previous chapters I have argued that anti-Indigenous violence shifts across national
borders, but also remains constant in only acknowledging indigeneity in ways that normalize the
nation-state. I have also shown that Maya migrants respond to this type of violence through the
ability to create intergenerational connections across time and space. In this chapter, I continue
this line of argumentation, but ground my analysis in expanding the mobile archive of
indigeneity. The term “mobile archive of indigeneity” addresses a host of Maya cultural practices
within larger issues of displacement, cultural memory, and an ongoing process of engaging Maya
epistemologies. Maya clothing itself is critical to the process of “documentation as intervention”
because as I demonstrate below it marks Maya women as targets for structural violence. As a
result of this targeting, the impetus to continue this practice, transmit its significance, and use it
as a medium for storytelling all make this practice critical as a site of community making.
In addition, the use of regional clothing by young, second-generation Maya women in
Los Angeles disrupts social and political hierarchies that exist around Indigenous practices,
beliefs, and people in Guatemala and the United States.
106
In the diaspora, the use of this
clothing—colloquially known as traje
107
—requires an intergenerational transmission of

106
I distinguish my research from most literature that focuses on issues of second-generation migrants to think about
migration in relation to indigeneity. Because immigration literature often thinks about generational issues in relation
to socio-economic mobility and integration (Portes and Zhou 1993; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Rumbaut 1994;
Fernández-Kelley and Sara Curran 2001) it often misses how indigeneity plays a critical role in how people
conceptualize their transnational practices. While I occasionally use generational terminology like “second-
generation” or “1.5 generation,” these types of categories often diminish the possibilities of understanding the
critical continuities that have enabled communities to survive colonialism for centuries.
107
The shift from the term traje, which is popularly used in Guatemala and the diaspora among Mayas and non-
Mayas alike, to “regional clothing” or “Maya clothing” marks an ongoing conversation among scholars and activists
to question the folklorization of Maya culture. The concern that the term traje, and its translation to English as
traditional clothing does not clearly articulate the diversity of textiles that exist, their relationship to particular

71
knowledge that centers Maya women because they are primary wearers of Maya clothing.
Beyond the actual textiles are the relationships embedded in the wearing of these clothes and the
opportunity that the clothing provides to share stories of Maya life. The process of learning to
wear Maya clothing and understanding its function allows for specific family histories to be
maintained despite the experience of crossing multiple borders which then allows for the second
generation in particular to continue claiming and transforming traditions.
One of the possibilities that this practice opens up is that Maya belonging exceeds the
boundaries of the nation-state. Investigating how regional Maya clothing is attached to specific
towns, and not the Guatemalan nation state, helps us understand these practices as part of
building transborder communities through Indigenous geographies. Migration is an ongoing
process rather than a singular event; it does not necessarily end with the migrants themselves, but
rather migration informs how second-generation Mayas participate in the structures and
meanings of the multiple local places they consider home. While this is true for many
migrants,
108
indigeneity also plays a key role in the attachment not to a national homeland, but to
specific towns and places that remain salient. Unlike normative archives that seek to categorize
and organize in order to control difference and consolidate national projects, Maya clothing
instead act as a mobile archive of indigeneity that anchors Indigenous geographies that are
localized even as they remain attached to a broader Maya collective. This is in part a reflection of
the many designs and styles of clothing that literally reflect the immediate landscape. For
instance towns or areas near prominent bodies of water may feature predominately blue tones in
their dress, while places like Quetzaltenango weave in images of mountains given that it is a

geographic and regional areas, and its specificity to the Maya experience are important considerations. In this
chapter I leave the term traje when mentioned by interview participants specifically, but use the terms regional
clothing and Maya clothing when using my own words.
108
Tejada, "Transplanting the Organizing Seed;" Levitt and Schiller, "Conceptualizing Simultaneity; " Espiritu,
Home Bound.

72
valley surrounded by volcanoes and mountains. It is also important to note that the materials
used to create the clothing also reflect particular histories. According to the museum director
Raquel Garcia at Museo Ixkik’ in Quetzaltenango which specializes in Maya huipiles, in some
regions women used lace not just because it was available, but because they actively resisted
having to manufacture cotton.
However, in the diaspora the clothing also takes on added meanings that contribute to its
function as a mobile archive. It is in diaspora that the clothing also creates the possibility to
challenge settler-colonial frameworks by recognizing Native Americans in a nation-to-nation
relationship that respect Native American survivance. As Mayas form enclaves in places that are
not their ancestral homes, Maya clothing becomes a critical and dynamic mechanism through
which they can tap into longer historical trajectories of what it has meant to be Maya and to
claim forms of being that also include the experience of migration in the twentieth and twenty
first century.
II. METHODS
This research emphasizes, but is not exclusive to, women who wear Maya clothing. For
this chapter, I conducted eleven formal interviews with 1.5 and second generation Mayas in Los
Angeles as well as older Maya migrants to highlight the diversity of narratives that interweave
personal histories with political economies of multiple nation-states. In addition, I conducted
participant-observation at three annual conferences held in different towns in the United States
that bring various members of the Maya diaspora together. I also attended community-specific
celebrations held in Los Angeles that hometown associations organized in honor of the saint of
each town in Guatemala, as well as more intimate celebrations around father’s day, weddings,
quinceañeras, and so on. I include some interviews with Maya men in this chapter because while

73
they do not wear Maya dress themselves, they gain insights into the significance of Maya culture
and history through the stories of women elders.
109

When participating with organized communities I asked for permission to attend as a
community member and as a researcher, though often the reality of being Maya K’iche’ myself
creates an immersive experience that blurs many boundaries. I was occasionally asked to share
my experience with attending college even though at times community members seemed hesitant
with me in part because I did not speak K’iche’, was not related to anyone else in the
organization, and was from a more urbanized hometown in Guatemala. This was most apparent
when I wore my own Maya clothing whose design is quite different from all the other regions
and which has been popularized by the liquor brand “La Quetzalteca.” Nonetheless, I worked to
remain cognizant of the multiple roles I inhabited since I could hardly assume the role of an
objective outsider, given that my personal experience as a Maya K’iche’ informed both my
methods and analytical frameworks. In some ways, understanding the profound intergenerational
practice of Maya clothing emerged as I learned to dress myself with the help of my oldest aunts.
It was as they saw me dressed in regional clothing for my undergraduate graduation, something
they themselves had stopped wearing as children, that they recollected stories about my
grandmother who used Maya clothing as an everyday practice.
My emphasis on young adults and older migrants in this chapter deciphers how interview
participants responded to the colonial legacy of Guatemala, but also settler colonialism which

109
This increased use of Maya clothing among Maya men along with an analysis of communities in which men have
also maintained a visible and consistent practice of wearing regional clothing has yet to be fully addressed in
academic research. For example Betsy Konefal (2009) writes, “Some men in communities such as Sololá, Santiago
Atitlán, and Todos Santos and within a new class of urban professionals wear traditional and ‘neotraditional’
clothing” (48). However, the literature is very limited and transborder frames will also be crucial to future analysis
on the clothing practices of Maya men because it is also present in places like Los Angeles where Maya community
leaders and young men increasingly connect spiritual practice and cultural performance to the use of the Capixay
(men’s shirt often used by Maya-K’anjob’al men in Huehuetenango and Los Angeles) or other regional textiles and
shirts.

74
positions them as categorically Latina/o while enacting a Native erasure that can extend to and
be reproduced by Maya migrants. The colonial legacy of Guatemala as noted in the introduction
continues to be reproduced through the various projects that seek to dispossess Maya and
Indigenous people from their land while converting them in to wage and debt laborers.
Alongside this political and economic drive is the discursive violence of Maya and Indigenous
people as inherently inferior, lazy, and uneducated while considering those who organize for
collective rights as communists or terrorists. The settler colonial structure of the United States
operates to similar ends but functions discursively through the widespread notion that Native
people are gone.
Understanding this distinction is critical in thinking about multiple generations in the
diaspora. Unlike Mayas who migrate at a later age, young adults who migrated as children or are
born in the United States experience life through social spaces that naturalize settler colonialism
like public education.
110
I note first that these U.S.-born or -raised Mayas remain engaged in the
practice of wearing Maya clothing, but also strive to more deeply analyze how they actively
engage this practice and the significance it holds for them as part of a larger Maya community. I
have chosen to also interview older migrants, some of whom are the parents of the young adults
interviewed, to formulate the intergenerational connections or ruptures that occur in the context
of diaspora. Part of what occurs is that youth at times transform how the clothing is used and,
while elders and activists may oppose these changes, it is important to remember that changes
are often how young adults negotiate both their relationships to elders and their home country
and the context of their lived experiences in Los Angeles.

110
Abrego and Gonzales (2010) for instance discuss that even undocumented youth (part of the 1.5 generation)
experience different social and political realities from their parents. According to these authors, this often changes
once youth turn 18 and find that both legal labor and financial support for college are foreclosed because of their
status. Combined with scholars like Dolores Calderon (2014) who argues that public education reinforces settler
colonial history and politics, these youth are exposed to settler colonial logics in ways that are different from adults.

75
III. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MAYA WOMEN’S CLOTHING
The significance of women continuing to wear Maya clothing can be understood through
an analysis of the clothing in relation to Guatemala history and contemporary politics. Tracing
the meaning of Maya clothing back to Guatemala is also critical because the use of Maya
clothing in the diaspora requires ongoing transnational connections and does not occur in a
vacuum. Maya clothing in particular has served multiple functions in Guatemalan history and has
often marked Maya women as outside, yet central to, the formation of the nation-state.
According to Irma Otzoy and Greg Grandin, Maya men were forced to discontinue the use of
regional clothing to enter mainstream institutions of politics, government, education, and
trade.
111
Grandin, who writes about Quetzaltenango specifically, argues that the historical
production of Maya clothing as a predominately feminine cultural practice was essential to
allowing K’iche’ patriarchs to participate in public positions while maintaining their ethnic
identity through their wife’s and daughter’s continued use of Maya clothing.
112
This means that
while Maya women were left out of popular and mainstream institutions that defined what it
meant to be Guatemalan, their exclusion was also the foundation for Ladino
113
and K’iche’ elite
men to lay claim to the masculine national subject. The gendering of this cultural practice is
especially significant because, unlike other cultural markers, it literally imprints Maya identity
upon the body, making it a highly visible, and often gendered, act.
Currently, as many scholars have argued and as the sweeping tide of femicide shows,
discrimination against Maya women has persisted in Guatemala. While analysis of femicide in

111
Otzoy, “Maya Clothing and Identity.” Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala.
112
Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, 6.
113
It is important to distinguish between the terms Ladina/o and Latina/o. Ladina/o is a term used for Guatemalans
who do not identify as Indigenous and instead highlight their European ancestry. For an excellent analysis of
contemporary Ladina/o identity, I recommend Charles Hale’s (2006) Mas Que Un Indio= More Than an Indian:
Racial Ambivalence and the Paradox of Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala.

76
Guatemala has been linked to the global issue of gender based violence, scholars of Guatemala
have also been meticulous in documenting the growth of this violence in the context of impunity
that was/is an issue in searching for justice in the aftermath of the armed conflict and
genocide.
114
Impunity, the freedom to act violently without fear of legal accountability, makes
poor women and Indigenous women especially vulnerable because as Fregoso and Bejarano note
in their introduction, feminicide implicates larger institutions and individual perpetrators who
regardless of intention act in tandem to subjugate women to gender based violence.
115
Femicide
in Guatemala has risen to the level of international concern, but as scholars have pointed out, this
violence operates in Guatemala for a multitude of reasons that make women particularly
disposable.
116

The context of genocide, colonialism, and the ongoing gender based violence also needs
to be added to research that de-politicizes the use of Maya clothing. For instance, Joyce Bennett
found that Mayas stopped using the clothing because of economic factors and discrimination.
117

The only time that this was not the case was when Mayas did cultural work either through NGOs
or by being artisanal vendors for tourists.
118
However, Bennett’s research positions this as a
positive outcome of neoliberalism and disregards the ways in which tourism has done little to
change the actual structure of Guatemala, and in many ways exacerbates the discrimination

114
See Carey and Torres, “Precursors to Femicide: Guatemalan Women in a Vortez of Violence;” Musalo and
Bookey, “Crimes Without Punishment: An Update on Violence Against Women and Impunity in Guatemala;” and
Velasco, “The Guatemalan Femicide: An Epidemic of Impunity.”
115
Fregoso and Bejarano, Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas.
116
For more on the femicides in Guatemala please see: Godoy-Paiz, “Not Just ‘Another Woman’: Femicide and
Representation in Guatemala;” Hartviksen, Towards a Historical Materialist Analysis of Femicide in Pot-Conflict
Guatemala; For a more regional analysis on femicides in Central America please see: Prieto-Carrón and Macdonald,
“No More Killings! Women Respond to Femicides in Central America.” These studies point to femicide as a
growing crisis grounded in a continuing disposability that often works to eliminate poor people and Indigenous
people.
117
Bennett, “Traje's Future.” According to Bennett, these economic factors include the increased availability of
cheap second hand clothes, the increased cost of materials, and Maya people’s stagnant wages.
118
Ibid, 81.

77
already present.
119
While it is important to highlight that the everyday use of Maya clothing
continues to be the clearest target that marks Maya women for discrimination, its use on special
occasions works alongside the quotidian use to demonstrate that the clothing is always an
opportunity for storytelling that is embedded in a direct contestation of Western epistemologies.
Maya women who use Maya clothing are engaging in a political praxis founded on Maya
worldviews because they contest this discrimination by refusing to be erased and acting as a
form of persistence. Maya scholar and activist Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, for example, has
publically denounced the discrimination she encountered because of her use of regional
clothing.
120
In one instance, she sued the exclusive restaurant El Tarro Dorado in Guatemala for
denying her entrance into the establishment because she was wearing Maya clothing. After
detailing this particular situation in her article, Velásquez Nimatuj explains the politics at issue,
“Whenever we are seen in regional traje, the ruling classes are reminded of the failure of their
efforts to make us disappear, which have ranged from genocide to ideological coercion. Five
centuries of humiliation have not succeeded in bringing the Maya people to their knees.”
121

Maya clothing, in Velásquez Nimatuj’s assessment, serves as a visual marker of Maya resilience
against the multiple projects of genocide and ethnocide. She argues that neoliberal changes in the
global market have resulted in an increased national economic dependency on tourism that has
exacerbated the folklorization of Maya textiles often completely divorced from the lived realities
of Maya people.
122
Maya clothing cannot be analyzed as a simplistic folkloric tradition since it is
embedded in the political and economic exclusion of the majority population in Guatemala.

119
Ibid, 83.
120
Nimatuj, “Transnationalism and Maya Dress.”
121
Ibid, 524.
122
Ibid, 527-8.

78
While this exclusion relies on a multitude of strategies, the Western fashion industry has
facilitated the process of separating Maya textiles from their collective significance. A recent
example of this form of appropriation is Caroline Fuss’ designer line Harare which used textiles
woven by Maya women from Atitlan, Sololá as part of their New York Fashion Week show in
2014.
123
While products manufactured by designers like Fuss retail hundreds of U.S. dollars
under the free market’s consumption patterns—the free market does little to change or even
acknowledge the structural marginalization that creates and constantly reproduces the inequality
most Maya women live with. Harare, and projects like it, often portray themselves as conscious
producers, creating high end material goods for a niche market of wealthy individuals who want
to purchase goods made through global co-operatives. While Harare does attempt to pay Maya
women weavers a better wage, it also effectively divorces the material product from the
particular stories of these women or communities. It does this by solely engaging Maya women
as artisanal wageworkers and by requiring them to produce textiles that are appealing to a
Western market and trendy in mainstream fashion. In projects like this, Maya women become the
backdrop for a designer line that again centers the white neoliberal gaze and reinforces Maya
communities as folkloric, backwards, and exotic.
124
This appropriation by designers has also led
to outcries against the notion of legal ownership as some Western designers have gone so far as
to copyright exact replicas of clothing that Indigenous communities have used for centuries.
125

Alongside the struggle to maintain collective intellectual and cultural property
126
over
their textiles, there are also moments where Maya clothing informs a collective resistance to

123
Bobb, “Proenza Schouler Alum Launches a Line.”
124
Guzman Blockler and Herbert, Guatemala, 117.
125
Varagur, “Mexico Prevents Indigenous Designs From Being Culturally Appropriated — Again.”
126
Since the initial writing of this chapter, Maya women have formed the Movimiento Nacional de Tejedoras -
Ruchajixik ri qana’ojb’äl (National Movement of Weavers) and on February 23, 2017 have presented Initiative 5247
which would create a series of reforms and procedures that guarantee a collective patrimony for Maya women in

79
injustices like systemic gendered violence. The Sepur Zarco trials of 2016 for instance, focused
on the sexual violence against Q’eqchi’ women who forcibly completed three-day shifts acting
as forced slave laborers who cooked, did laundry, and cleaned the military outpost in Sepur
Zarco. Over the course of months, the military men stationed at the outpost repeatedly raped the
women who were obligated to work these three day shifts under the threat of violence and death.
While sexual violence has been documented as a strategy of war during the genocide,
127
it was
not until 2015 that women were able to find justice in a court room when two men were
convicted of these charges. One of the most visually stunning images of the court case were
Maya women who covered their faces using the peraje (shawl). The brightly colored textiles
served to protect the women who were testifying from facing public stigma and victim-blaming.
The gendered forms of violence like sexual assault, that took place during the genocide was
facilitated by the fact that Maya women were identified as being from certain places through
their clothing,
128
and yet the clothing in this case acted as a shield from further marginalization.
The clothes act as material objects that are deeply embedded and celebrated by Maya
communities despite placing Maya women in particular risk for forms of violence that are state
sanctioned and systemic. It is against this backdrop of historical gendered violence that any
claims of neoliberalism or tourism supporting the use of traditional clothing can be disproved.
Neither neoliberalism nor tourism provides the structural change required for Maya women to
fully own and exercise control over all aspects of their clothing and bodies. The issues around
how, when, and who has access to Maya clothing are deeply embedded within larger political

relation to their textiles. You can check their Facebook page for the most up to date advances on this proposal and
their public demonstrations.
127
Equipo de Estudios, Tejidos que Lleva el Alma.
128
Ibid.

80
and economic concerns around Maya communities being able to sustain themselves not just as
individual people or organizations, but as a collective.
IV. MAYA CLOTHING AND MIGRATION
Maya clothing is a key archive that can document the impact that intergenerational
displacement has on the ability to sustain communities across generations and nation-states. If
archives are in their most basic form a collection of material objects that can document the
experiences of people at any given time or place, then Maya clothing and the stories around the
clothes also act as extended forms of family-based archives. While there are actual museum
collections that include Maya clothing as part of their archives, it is the families who hold on to
either the practices of wearing these clothes or the stories around why they no longer wear the
clothing that have the ability to create archives that are mobile. This is not just to say that the
clothing itself can actually be transported across borders, but the narratives about this practice
also acts as a document for the experience of displacement.
When thinking about Maya clothing as a mobile archive, we must also consider that
previous migrations shapes how migrants in the United States engage the use of Maya clothing.
Mobile archives therefore do not solely emphasize the crossing of national borders, but also
attach meaning to the migrations from ancestral communities to urban centers. Migration from
original communities to other places in Guatemala are primarily analyzed in the context of labor
and displacement during the war, however most research about the Maya diaspora does not
bridge these migrations to migration to the United States. In the interviews I conducted
interviewees described their family experiences through migration from a hometown or village to
a bigger city and then to Guatemala City. These migrations happened when they themselves
were children or even a couple of generations before they were born and these often preceded the

81
final decision to cross international borders. For instance one on the interviewees Esperanza who
is currently 65 and migrated to the United States for the first time at the age of 24 shared that she
actually did not use traditional clothing as an infant and toddler.
129
During her first years of life,
her parents had made the decision to migrate from their hometown in Quetzaltenango to the
capital city both to escape poverty, but perhaps more importantly to avoid dealing with the issue
that even though they were both K’iche’ they were from different socio-economic classes.
Esperanza’s mother had been raised as a domestic worker, while her father had been skilled in
shoe-making and his family owned land. These class distinctions angered Esperanza’s paternal
grandmother and the young couple decided to try their hand at living independently in the city. It
was in this context that Esperanza and her older siblings were born. When her paternal
grandmother became ill, she decided to invite the whole family to live at her house and it was
under the economic support of communal living that Esperanza and her sisters began to use
Maya clothing as part of an everyday practice. However, her grandmother passed a few years
later and soon after her father also passed away unexpectedly. This meant that Esperanza’s
mother was left widowed with a total of six children to care for. Without a formal education or a
high demand trade, the family left to the capital city once again. Once in the capital city,
Esperanza’s mother could no longer afford to keep her in Maya clothing and Esperanza herself
had to find work as a live in domestic at the age of twelve to help sustain her siblings. Since that
time of living with extended family in Quetzaltenango, Esperanza has not owned her own set of
Maya clothing. Extending our analysis of migration across generations can place the experiences
of the second-generation in conversation with those that were the first people to leave their
original communities, which may not necessarily be the same generation that migrates to the
United States.

129
Interviewed conducted on September 28, 2016 by author

82
The inability to own and use Maya clothing in Guatemala shapes the narrative around
multiple generations of a family. In Esperanza’s case she and her children are the first
generations to not use Maya clothing as an every day practice. She noted that it was actually by
pawning her mother’s clothes that she was able to gather enough funds to migrate to the United
States and that while she sent money back to her sister to buy the clothing back, there was never
any follow up on her or her sister’s end. The ongoing struggle to get out of poverty remained a
salient issue in relation to being able to claim the clothing as her own practice despite the fact
that she remembers fondly her time in Quetzaltenango when she was able to do so. However,
attached to these memories are also memories of the discrimination her mother faced in the
capital city, including being called a dirty Indian. Esperanza shared that she was obviously well-
aware that her family was poor and Indigenous or as she terms it “naturales” and when it came
time for her to begin dating she purposefully sought young men of a similar background because
she did not want her mother to be discriminated against. She stated, “I didn’t want them to treat
her badly so I knew it was better to be with someone like us. Someone who was poor like us.”
So while according to popular understandings of what it means to be Maya in Guatemala,
Esperanza and her children would no longer be counted as Maya and yet the poverty produced
by their displacement alongside an awareness of the discrimination they could faced because of
their Indigenous difference all made poverty a deeply entrenched reality that was intertwined in
limiting the possibilities Esperanza had.
Esperanza’s story highlights the multiple ways to think about the function of Maya
clothing across generations of people that are displaced from their ancestral places. The narrow
definition of Mayas as those who speak a Maya language or wear Maya clothing create
simplified notions that support a project of ethnocide in which communities are rigidly defined

83
by the state in ways that make it easier to demographically shrink the population. However, it is
also the stories about when and how people stop wearing Maya clothing that hold important
insights into how the work of embodied epistemologies extend beyond singular bodies. In other
words, the embodied experience of wearing Maya clothing holds communal and familial
significance and therefore creates connections for others who while not wearing the clothing
itself still connect their grandmother’s use of the clothing for instance to a meaningful
relationship to Maya people. In Esperanza’s story, it is her mother and grandmother’s use of
Maya clothing that continue to bring her family back to Maya cultural practice. So while we can
think of these clothes as material objects, it is also the particular histories of struggle,
displacement and even discrimination that make them an archive. They archive individual
stories, but those stories reflect on and engage larger policies of anti-Indigenous hatred that can
inform subaltern histories of what it means to be Maya in Guatemala and through multiple
migrations.
Similarly, another interviewee Anabel shared that her grandparents had migrated from
Quetzaltenango as well because of poverty and a lack of economic possibilities for sustaining a
family.
130
While her grandfather made a living from weaving textiles on looms, he only produced
tablecloth like textiles and not the clothing itself. When I asked Anabel why she did not grow up
wearing the clothing, she responded that her family just didn’t have the money. Surprisingly
when I ask her when she first wore the traditional clothing of Quetzaltenago she responded that it
was actually in Los Angeles. Her mother had obtained a visa to visit about ten years after she had
migrated and she was able to borrow one of her outfits to wear. Migration, or the inability to
migrate back to her hometown, also meant that it would be in her forties that she would finally
be able to own her own set of clothes. In her case, it was actually her son’s boyfriend who is of

130
Interview conducted on August 6, 2016 by author.

84
Jamaican descent and a legal citizen who went to study Spanish in Quetzaltenango who also used
that opportunity to buy her the huipil that she now uses. In most cases, the ability to own or even
borrow Maya clothing depends on extended networks of family in part because the cost of the
clothing is still prohibitive for migrants and at times the lack of legal citizenship means that they
cannot travel back to Guatemala to buy the clothing. Another migrant woman Valentina from
Quetzaltenango for instance stated that it was her daughter’s godmother that first gifted the
young girl a corte and huipil.
131
She stated that it was important for her that her daughter have
the connection to their hometown, but she on her own would not have been able to afford the
outfit. In addition, Anabel was especially adamant about not buying traditional clothing in Los
Angeles because her mother had told her that it was all part of an unjust cycle where U.S.
merchants acquired the clothing from impoverished families at very low prices and then sold
them for much higher prices in the United States.
Even for second generation Mayas, the stories around how these practices cannot be
continued inform how indigeneity affects experiences of migration. One of the young men I
interviewed who mentioned the regional clothing was Luis, a twenty-four-year-old college
student, raised in Mid-City Los Angeles, whose paternal grandmother is K’iche’. He shared that
his paternal grandmother was undocumented when she arrived and, “there's [a picture] where she
was only in LA for two or three months, and she was no longer wearing her traje, she was just
wearing a skirt, and whatever she wears now—she looks all sad.”
132
In Luis’s view, his
grandmother’s inability to continue wearing Maya clothing was directly linked to the fact that
she was undocumented and that her clothing would mark her as such. In this instance, the barrier
to continuing the use of Maya clothing exists at the intersection of being undocumented,

131
Interview conducted on September 28, 2016 by author.
132
Interview conducted on August 18, 2010 by author.

85
Guatemalan and Maya. Previous research has documented the prevalence of no longer wearing
Maya clothing as a result of migration. In “Mexicanization: A Survival Strategy for Guatemalan
Mayans in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Davenport, Castañeda, and Manz find that Mayas
identify as Mexican to minimize the negative consequences of being marked as an
undocumented migrant, an Indigenous person, and a Guatemalan in a state where the majority of
Latinas/os are of Mexican origin or descent.
133
In addition, Batz also finds that, “For
undocumented Maya, wearing traditional dress may represent an increased risk of being deported
or being discriminated against while crossing Mexico and settling in the United States.”
134

Within the context of displacement and migration, Maya clothing marks a difference that some
migrants fear will be read as “illegal” status. As Abrego and Menjivar have expanded the notion
of “legal violence,” that is violence that is actually perpetuated by the law, it is important to
highlight that robbing Maya migrants of their ability to wear their Indigenous clothing is an issue
of ongoing genocide.
135
So while the rupture of this practice may not be the literal death of
breathing bodies, it perpetuates a social death since it reduces the ability for migrant women to
maintain ties to their ancestral communities, but also limits what is then possible for second-
generation Mayas in diaspora. Within the diaspora, the migrant generation uses Maya clothing to
transmit family and community history in Guatemala and the experience of being undocumented
to the second-generation. So while Luis does not wear Maya clothing himself, the knowledge
that his grandmother could not practice something she had done every day of her life
communicated that the violence of being undocumented was compounded with the loss of her
clothing.

133
Allison, Beatriz, and Xochitl, "Mexicanization."
134
Batz, "Maya Cultural Resistance in Los Angeles," 199.
135
Menjívar and Abrego, Legal Violence in the Lives of Immigrants.

86
These stories collectively illustrate that the decision to engage in the use Maya clothing
often involves stories of sorrow and loss as intergenerational poverty and migration deeply
fracture the opportunity to engage in this practice of belonging and identification with their
familial legacy and their relationships to particular places. The clothing is so deeply related to the
town, village or region that it acts as a connection to their places of origin that is worn on the
body. When this practice is prohibited, it acts as a process of ethnocide that literally erases
Indigenous people in terms of state recognition in Guatemala. However as migrant women
interviewed noted, the rupture is not necessarily permanent. The narratives and histories linked
to the clothing itself continuously open the possibility of reclaiming this practice. The ability for
cloth or textiles to serve as not just the space for targeting Maya women, but also a place of
resistance to national projects of recognition have deep implications for how migrants can lay
claim to their epistemological sites as a process of archive making and collective consciousness.
When I interviewed a young second-generation woman Camila, who is Acateca, about her
identity she shared the following:
Flori: Do you feel like outside of language there was anything else that really -- even, for
example growing up, where you were really conscious of being Acateca, you know what
I mean? Or was it just something like, it was just what we spoke and how we did things.
Camila: Conscious? Maybe not at that level that I am now. I did know I was different in a
sense because, I don't even know how I identified myself when I was younger. I might
have said I was Indian or Native American, because I do have memories of being
younger and my mom sewing me skirts from the material of the cortes and I do have a
memory of my mom running into, like when we were at the corner store, and then she
randomly met another Acateco man.
Flori: Aw, she was probably like, oh my god! [Laughter]
Camila: Yeah, and she was wearing her skirt too and that's how he recognized her. That's
such a big identifier and I just remember seeing that and I'm just like, why are they so
excited to see each other? [Laughter] And then I just remember him specifically pointing
out her skirt and I was like, oh that's something different.

87
At this moment in the interview we had not explicitly discussed Maya clothing and yet aside
from language, it was what Camila specifically remembered as part of her growing
understanding of a collective difference that had significance for her mother and others in Los
Angeles. The clothing marked not just a Maya practice, but one from the Acateco community in
particular. Camila later shared that she has huipiles from other areas in Guatemala and at this
point does not specifically stick to the one from her hometown, yet through witnessing her
mother’s encounter she also knows that there is one unique to their hometown. This is a key
aspect to building intergenerational sites of meaning within the Maya diaspora. The role of Maya
clothing in producing belonging and community in diaspora cannot be understated and while this
cultural practice is still circumscribed by displacement, transnational networks of extended
community, the issues of being undocumented, and the ongoing poverty that many migrants find
themselves in after migration, there is nonetheless a possibility for engaging the clothing in
meaningful manners. And while the clothing is often treated as a normalized practice, thinking
about migrant experiences in particular also allow us to affirm that even after one or two
generations have stopped using it, the clothing remains as a site of oral history.
136
This
possibility requires ongoing dialogue among multiple generations in order to engage a practice
that is constantly thwarted by national states that seek to eradicate any form of indigeneity that
does not work to consolidate the power of the state.
V. INTERGENERATIONAL ARCHIVE-MAKING
The clothing as a site through which migrant Maya women can document and transmit
their own histories of displacement, violence, and resistance also become sites of oral history
available to 1.5 and 2
nd
generation young people in the diaspora. While the clothing itself

136
In relation to Hmong story cloths for instance, Viet Nguyen (2012) comments, “For refugees, the imagination of
past, present, and future countries can occur simultaneously, in refusal of the progressive notion of time that belongs
to the nation, marching relentlessly from past to future” (934).

88
presents an opportunity to discuss family history in relation to larger issues of intergenerational
poverty, Indigenous exclusion, and gendered violence, the process of actually wearing the
clothing also centers the knowledge of women elders in relation to youth in diaspora. In the
context of discrimination, the ability to occupy the position of teacher and historian for young
Mayas is part of what makes this a mobile archive that functions across generations. This process
of using Maya clothes becomes an avenue that engages Maya geographies in particular, not in
order to reproduce state defined notions of authenticity, but for the sake of promoting belonging
and understanding.
Part of this sense of belonging involves women elders encouraging and instructing young
Mayas about how to wear the clothing. Araceli, one of the young people I interviewed is the
daughter of a Maya-K’anjob’al father and Ladina mother and was seventeen at the time of the
interviews. When I asked her if she had worn Maya clothing, she responded, “Yes! Right when I
came back from Guatemala, it was like two years ago. We came back early in the morning and
we went to visit my tíos and my tías because it was the first time both my great grandma and my
grandma came here. So it was a really, really big deal.”
137
Araceli’s grandmothers’ visit
motivated her to wear the regional clothing during her trip back to the United States. This is
crucial because in addition to providing inspiration for wearing Maya clothing, women elders
play an important role in teaching younger women how to wear the regional clothing
138
. For
second-generation young women who are not raised wearing region-specific clothing as an
everyday practice, the support and skills provided by elders are essential to their participation.
For instance Camila noted:
Flori: Who taught you how to wear it now that you’re older? How to wear it in the
traditional way without the zippers?

137
Interview conducted on February 3, 2010 by author.
138
Boj Lopez, "Maya Youth and Cultural Sustainability in the United States."

89

Camila: I kind of just looked at how they put it on and then I was like, oh this is how you
do it and then any little things I didn’t know, I asked my mom. I was like, “how do you
actually tie the belt?” Or like, “how do you tuck it in so it actually looks like I know how
to put it on?” Because I’ve heard my mom say before, like, “oh she didn’t tie it tight
enough. You can tell because it’s falling down on the inside or if you put it on properly or
if you know how to put it on, at the back it doesn’t crinkle up when you tighten the belt.”
I guess constantly hearing it from my mom, I was like, does it look like I know how to
put it on? Like, double-checking with her. [Laughter] My mom is such a perfectionist
when it comes to that.
139

While Camila had previously shared that as a child her mother would sew zippers on to her
cortes, this was primarily done to facilitate her use of the clothing even though it is not typically
worn this way. As she grew older however she began to use it without zippers. Even though she
indicated that she had learned from years of observing her mother and older relatives, she still
needed her mother’s verbal and physical guidance in making sure that it was done properly. It is
not uncommon during the conference and fiestas (community celebrations) to hear young women
ask older women if their corte (skirt) is on correctly or to help them tighten the ranta or faja
(waist belt). This is crucial because contrary to research that emphasizes intergenerational
conflict among the Maya diaspora,
140
the continued use of Maya clothing by young women in
Los Angeles is reliant on dialogue and transmission between generations.
This cultural practice involves the oral transmission of information and the gifting of the
actual outfit which creates the sharing of oral histories that can help second-generation youth
learn about the economic and sociopolitical hierarchies that exist in Guatemala, even among
Mayas. One of the conferences I attended with Maya Pastoral in 2012 gathered community
leaders across the country in Alamosa, Colorado to discuss and share experiences of violence
and resistance during the genocide as well as partaking in Maya cultural and spiritual practice.

139
Interview conducted on September 3, 2015 by author.
140
Harman, "Intergenerational Relations among Maya in Los Angeles."

90
During the conference, I was sitting with a group of four other Maya women, one older, one
younger, and two high school students. As the conversations turned to the Maya clothing we
were each wearing, the older woman remarked that one can tell whether an outfit is cheap or
expensive based on the weight and thickness of the material and the type of embroidery. One of
the young women responded that the clothing was relatively expensive and that her relatives in
Guatemala gifted her most of her outfits. The two younger students, whose skirts were
significantly thinner than the cortes the rest of us were wearing made no comment. While it is
impossible to say with certainty what the intention of the comment was, nor how everyone in the
group perceived it, it nonetheless taught and reminded those present that hierarchies and
differences abound even within the Maya diaspora. The incident highlights that access to Maya
clothing and Maya textiles more generally will vary across socio-economic class in Guatemala
and Los Angeles. That is to say that the socioeconomic class of youth in Los Angeles as well as
their relationship to family in Guatemala and their socioeconomic status there will play a role in
what type of clothing youth can obtain. While the young woman who had multiple outfits
frequently returned to Guatemala, the young high school students had not been back to their
original communities and were unaware about the differences in materials. They may all identify
as Maya, but there are underlying tensions based on class standings and Maya clothing serves as
one platform through which these differences are communicated.
The stories of Maya youth that accompany the use of the corte and huipil can also
provide them with key insights into other forms of Maya cultural practice. Luis mentioned that
on a trip to Guatemala his grandmother showed him some of her cortes. He stated:
She took out some trajes in the luggage that she had. She's like - see this, this is 60 or 80
years old. She puts on the, I don’t know what you call it, I probably should know, but it's
kind of like a blanket you put over your head. And when you go into church and if the
ceremony is a funeral, you put it on like this. If it's a wedding, you put it on like that. She

91
showed me some of the dances she used to do and how she would mourn people. So
many little details that were really interesting to me.
141

Luis’ reference to the clothing of his grandmother and how it was a space for cultural
transmission across gender was surprising. While Luis may not literally wear the Maya clothing,
as a young man he draws meaning form the experiences of his grandmother who wears Maya
clothing in Guatemala. The clothing while typically considered a practice primarily engaged by
Maya women also holds significance for young men in diaspora. So while the use of Maya
clothing is an embodied practice, it holds significance beyond single individuals, including those
who do not wear the clothing on their own bodies. In Luis’ case, the clothing and stories of his
grandmother acted together to communicate information about ceremonies.
Moreover, second generation women employ dynamic clothing practices that transform
their traditional use. In a follow-up conversation with Araceli, for example, she shared that
sometimes she uses her corte as a blanket. Araceli further stated, “Actually I just wore my
rebozo on Friday for school . . . I do wear them, not the corte like the dress, the skirt [but] I do
wear the shirts and my morrales, my bags.”
142
This was also true for another participant: Jessica,
an eighteen-year-old being raised by her Mexican and Guatemalan Maya maternal grandparents.
During the interview, I asked her about the regional clothing. She commented, “I like wearing
the camisa [blouse] with jeans, and I think that looks nice. You can still show who you are with a
different look to it.”
143
This can be a point of contention, given that the clothing is meant to be an
entire outfit and each piece has its own function and significance within the whole. As Morna
Macleod writes, “Mayan dress has a deep significance for those versed in the Mayan worldview
who can read and interpret the symbols represented in the weavings. Such depth of knowledge is

141
Interview conducted on August 18, 2010 by author.
142
Interview conducted on May 23, 2010 by author.
143
Interview conducted on June 26, 2010 by author.

92
not shared by all community members; different people have different levels of ethnic
consciousness.”
144
Despite the fact that Maya dress varies across regional geographies, each
garment represents an aspect of Maya cosmovision and is most often a reflection of more
localized histories and landscapes. Whether it is the sacred numerical values that are present in
the technique of weaving which correspond to numbers of key significance in the sacred
calendars of the Mayas, or the actual figures and designs which speak to important landmarks in
the area (lakes, mountain ranges, or volcanoes), the regional clothing is, as Macleod and
Hendrickson have noted, a crucial form through which not only identity but spirituality is
engaged. When second–generation Mayas then decide to adapt the use of regional clothing in
ways that make sense to them, it can lead to a slippery slope towards questions of tradition and
authenticity. However, rather than consider this difference a rupture, we can see this practice as
an extension of regional dress, since second-generation youth want to connect their cultural
practices to their everyday realities, which require that those practices be flexible.
Perhaps the most unique use of the corte textile that I have witnessed was a handmade
tube-top dress worn by the daughter of one of the leaders of the national Maya organization I
participated with. When I asked her where she had gotten her dress she replied that she had
actually made it herself. There is also a cross gender aspect to the shifting use of textiles and at
the same conference I saw a young man wear a similar textile in the form of a men’s dress shirt.
In the context of displacement we cannot assume that these changes are representative of a
cultural loss rather than an attempt to continue identifying as Maya even in the face of migration.
It should also be noted that with few exceptions, it is uncommon to see women in Maya clothing
in Los Angeles. Those spaces of family or community celebrations like the ones I attended where
many women wear their Maya clothing are a far cry from the everyday contexts of places like

144
Macleod, "Mayan Dress as Text," 682-3.

93
public schools or the workplace. As a result, young Mayas often negotiate the desire of wanting
to embrace their distinctive culture with also knowing that it will mark them as different from
their peers. This fear of difference needs to be understood in the framework of settler colonial
perception of Native people as completely extinct or disappearing. In a settler colonial context,
Indigenous difference is refracted through erasure and not just outright exclusion, as is the case
in Guatemala. As a result, how young Mayas in Los Angeles engage this practice carries the
layers of their migrant families as well as layers of what it means to be Indigenous in a settler
colonial nation.
Maya clothing is a visible marker, not just of difference, but of being rooted in a Maya
worldview. As Macleod mentions, being able to read the spirituality and history embedded
within regional clothing is linked to the knowledge one has access to
145
. For example, when I
directly asked young Maya women if they knew the significance of their clothing, they
responded that they did not. They engaged the practice because it represented a connection to
older generations, to Maya identity, and to a homeland, but without necessarily being able to
articulate what each textile meant. However it is ultimately unhelpful to write off second-
generation (mis)understandings of Maya clothing; instead, we should understand that the whole
signifying world of Maya clothing is augmented by their creativity. At the very least, their
transformations continue to make these textiles and the clothing an active process of cultural
production. Irma Otzoy writes, “the incorporation of new symbols into the Maya meaning
system permits textiles to serve as a dynamic expression of the Maya experience.”
146
Referring
specifically to the charge that changes in the colors and designs used within huipiles and their
production through foot looms as opposed to back strap looms made some of them less authentic

145
Macleod, "Mayan Dress as Text."
146
Otzoy, “Maya Clothing and Identity,” 144.

94
than others, she instead argues that the fact that members of the Maya community accept and
integrate these new techniques and designs are part of what makes them Maya. I pose that in a
similar fashion, the incorporation of the experiences and perspectives presented demonstrates
that the clothing continues to be a dynamic space in which young Maya women (and men) in Los
Angeles negotiate their identity in the diaspora.
The ability to engage the shifting terrains of Maya clothing is also partly informed by
how their elders understand this practice. For instance when I ask Lila, a second generation
young Maya K’anjob’al living in Houston, Texas if she had ever had any negative reactions
while using the clothing originally stated that she hadn’t because she typically wore it in
community and family spaces where it was common. However towards the end of interview she
actually backtracked her answer and stated:
Well, actually, going back to the negative experiences, this might be an important thing. I
haven’t heard people state this about me, but I’ve heard like even my own mom has said
when she sees other women wearing corte out on the street on a regular Monday or
Tuesday. A lot of times, she’ll say, “Why are they wearing that. Why are they dressed up
like that?” Like, “We’re not in Guatemala anymore.” … Like it’s a negative thing. It
hasn’t been to me, but she said it, which is weird because I’m like, "Okay, but you wear it
too.” I guess she doesn’t see it like an everyday thing anymore.
147

This was a point of confusion for Lila since her mother had encouraged her to participate in
community events, and had facilitated the use of the clothing for her. However, her mother had
also decided that this practice had to be engaged differently in diaspora and attempted to pass
that message on to Lila. Regardless of why Lila’s mother made this decision, it impacted the way
that Lilia continued to understand it as an occasional practice. Lila also stated that she had never
really reflected on this and what it meant, but that she would talk to her mother about it more.
This demonstrates the layers that second generation Mayas have to navigate as they consider that
the clothes are a site of attachment to homelands that in some cases they have never visited,

147
Interview conducted on September 27, 2016 by author.

95
while also knowing that these connections are layered with negotiating what the use of Maya
clothing has meant for older generations.
These generational distinctions are also not uniform. In one case I interviewed a family
with two generations of migrants. Valentina was in her early forties at the time of interview and
had migrated in her late twenties to complete her doctoral degree in the United States and
currently lives in Arizona. In addition, her mother Maria Jose had recently begun making trips to
the United States and agreed to also be interviewed.
148
When I asked Valentina if she had ever
had any negative reactions to her use of the clothing she stated simply that, “the clothes are
beautiful so why would anyone have anything negative to say?” Maria Jose who spent the
majority of her life in Quetzaltenango on the other hand responded, “Of course. People say
things all the time, it’s to be expected, but my husband always tells me that I should be proud
and be who I am, and to not be bothered by what others have to say.” I interpreted this
divergence in response as an instance in which both women were acutely aware of how prevalent
discrimination in Guatemala is, but responded to this in very different manners based on the
positions they each held. Valentina had studied in private schools and universities in Guatemala
and came to the United States to attain an advanced degree while her mother was from very
different class origins.
In addition Maria Jose shared that her husband actually told her to not raise Valentina to
wear the clothing. Maria Jose completely disregarded his opinions and continued with her choice
to have Valentina raised using Maya clothing. It was perhaps this early struggle that also enabled
Valentine to be adamant in her defense of the clothing. This is in part critical because it allows us
to understand that when the clothing is considered a mobile archive it requires both an
understanding—and refusal—of the politics of exclusion that exist around the clothing. For both

148
Interview conducted on September 28, 2016 by author.

96
Iris and Valentina, either challenging or reaffirming their mother’s perspective is part of what
informs their own practice.
Rather than view Maya epistemologies or worldviews as static and rigid, mobile archives
of indigeneity recognize the ways in which these aspects shift and change depending on the
needs and views of Maya people themselves. While not stated outright, the experience of
existing at the intersection of multiple worldviews that are also dynamic, highlight what
autonomy looks like in practice. To acknowledge the critical role of elder knowledge, and at the
same time leave space for migrants and second generation Mayas to play with and create new
modes, is part of what will allow us to understand the ways in which sovereignty for Indigenous
peoples is rooted in long dynamic histories. No matter what boundaries they choose to break or
enforce, they do it while entrenched in the lived experience that puts youth at risk for
discrimination and direct physical violence. In spite of the potential risk, the use of Maya
clothing continues to visibly affirm their relationship to their ancestral places and communities.
Despite anti-Indigenous politics that cross borders, coalesce and morph to produce ongoing
marginalization, Maya women engage the clothing as a site of oral history thereby creating a
mobile archive that allows their practices and stories to also cross borders.
VI. RUPTURING SETTLER COLONIALISM
If there exists an affinity for understanding the Maya experience as somewhere in
between a Latina/o or Native American experience, it is also critical to think about how we enter
a settler colonial political project that is premised on elimination. Alliances with Native
communities would force us to always consider that we are visitors, that to not become settlers
and reproduce Native dispossession we must always refute the notion that we are occupying
emptied land and instead work to actively and concretely build solidarity networks with Native

97
nations. However, in the absence of highly visible relationships between organizations or clearly
defined communities, the persistence of Maya clothing among the diaspora will remain a critical
avenue through which Mayas can contest these problematic logics.
By marking Mayas as outsiders to the US nation-state and Indigenous to specific towns
or regions in Guatemala, Maya clothing for that same reason, has the potential to be a practice
through which geographies of belonging, identity, history and spirituality can be retained through
intergenerational dialogue and simultaneously be the foundation for an Indigenous anti-settler
colonial politic. Saranillio poignantly states, “Perhaps until we become multilingual in each
other’s histories, we will continue to renew a system of imperial violence and capitalist
exploitation”
149
. Maya cultural practices like regional clothing blur the boundaries between
settler, Native, and migrant in ways that challenge what it means to be an Indigenous migrant in
a settler society. In her work on the ways in which Native women produce decolonial spatial
logics through narrative, Goeman challenges the idea that mobility and Native subjectivity are
often considered oppositional. She writes, "I contend that instead of ingesting the norm of
immobile native women, we open up the possibility of (re)mapping the Americas as Indigenous
land, not only by rethinking dominant disciplining narratives but also critically examining how
we become a self-disciplining colonial subject”
150
. While this demarcates the hemisphere as
Indigenous land, it also shifts how we conceptualize migration for Indigenous people. Goeman is
specifically referencing Native American migration within the United States, however her
writing also pushes to consider what it means to think about Indigenous migration across U.S.
borders.

149
Saranillio, "Colliding Histories," 304.
150
Goeman, Mark My Words, 12.

98
Earlier I discussed how Maya clothing operates as a visible cultural marker that denotes
not just a generalizable Maya identity, but is also a form of Indigenous geography that links
migrants to particular histories and landscapes of the regions they are from. It is through this
specificity that Mayas connect to their ancestral places of origin and that the use of Maya
clothing in the diaspora can also create the opportunity for an aesthetic expression of Indigenous
alliance. In one such instance, when I attended a national conference for Maya migrants in June
of 2012, held in the small town of Alamosa, Colorado, I was struck that during the opening
ceremony, elders from the Taos Pueblo were invited to pray and bless the conference. As the
night grew more cold, one of the conference organizers went and draped her peraje (shawl) on
the shoulders of one of the Taos Pueblo women who seemed to be cold. I was astonished by the
waterfall of meaning in this one gesture. The textile given by the Maya woman said as much
about her presence in Alamosa as it did about her absence from the hometown that she
nonetheless continued to claim through her regional clothing. The shawl that to some extent
symbolized “home” for a migrant, now provided momentary warmth and comfort for an elder of
a Native nation thousands of miles away from that place. Here we have a dynamic that defies the
principle terms employed by settler colonial theory, one of the dominant interpretive and
political lenses used in Native studies, which employs categories that do not adequately address
moments of intercultural embrace like the Taos Pueblo-Maya interaction.
Thinking across borders has been central to transnational work, but also holds value for
thinking about indigeneity beyond national borders and recognition politics. In Guatemala, Maya
people are marked as those who speak a Maya language or wear Maya dress, but part of what it
means to be Maya in Los Angeles is, or should be, to disavow the dispossession of the
Indigenous peoples in whose lands we navigate the maintenance of our own cultural practices.

99
Native communities are in themselves complex, diverse, and face a series of challenges, however
understanding the multiple geographies of Maya identity that exist in regional clothing, may help
us move towards a common politic that challenges settler colonialism by making Indigenous
communities visible and accountable to each other in a nation-to-nation structure. If settler
colonialism is dependent on the elimination of contemporary Native struggles for the sake of
territorial appropriation, then embracing a migrant or mobile positionality that can be reflected in
Maya dress allows for Mayas to continue denouncing the politics that led to their displacement
without necessarily laying claim to other Indigenous territories.
Part of what makes a nation-to-nation approach useful is that it creates space for the
Maya diaspora to be accountable in a settler colonial structure that seeks to incorporate them in
order to further the dispossession of Native people. In this context, rather than presume a
connection to indigeneity as automatically resistant to all form of colonialism, I posit that this
remain an ongoing conversation that takes place between Maya communities and specific Native
communities. I position Maya clothing as a site of this possibility without prescribing and
automatic notion of “decolonization.”
151
Tuck and Yang carefully remind us that “decolonization
is not a metaphor,” and, “decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land
and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.”
152
Nor does this possibility assume
that all Native nations or peoples will respond in the same ways to Maya people. Instead this
highlights that the process of diaspora making requires an ongoing engagement with local
geographies of their ancestral homes while also having to account for Indigenous sovereignty in
Native North America.

151
Work like Alberto’s, “Topographies of Indigenism: Mexico, Decolonial Indigenism, and the Chicana
Transnational Subject in Ana Castillo's Mixquiahuala Letters,” and Saldaña-Portillo’s “Indigenous but not Indian?
Chicana/os and the Politics of Indigeneity,” have pointed out that making claims premised on generic
understandings of indigeneity can perpetuate erasures.
152
Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” 21.

100
VII. CONCLUSION
Elaborating upon how Maya migrants and second-generation Mayas work collectively to
navigate and negotiate Maya clothing practice also highlights that these practices remain a
dynamic terrain through which Mayas respond to mobility by transforming cultural practice
when necessary. These shifts across time, geography, and generation are anchored in the actual
clothing and the oral histories that surround the wearing of clothes. In this sense mobile archives
of indigeneity do not cohere around a singular and stringent definition that is imposed from a
nation state that seeks to accumulate wealth through territorial dispossession, but instead relies
on centering the voices of Maya people themselves to create avenues through which their
experiences of discrimination and struggle are documented by them alongside stories of joy and
celebration. Whether that discrimination takes place in relation to their displacement from their
hometowns or their inability to wear the clothing due to being undocumented in the United
States, Maya women interweave political and historical critique into an Indigenous practice that
contests their erasure. They rupture the normalization of Indigenous dispossession in Guatemala
through this archival work and create opportunities for second-generation young people to one of
the most visible markers of their ancestral homelands. The use of Maya clothing in diaspora also
opens the opportunity for rupturing settler-colonialism by ensuring that Maya geographies
remain rooted in their homelands and local places of belonging therefore acting as an
intervention in making arrivants into settlers. This rupture may not be complete or structural, but
it is a vital opportunity that has yet to be acknowledged in discussions of Maya clothing.

101
CHAPTER FOUR
La Comunidad Ixim and Organizing in the Maya Diaspora
I. INTRODUCTION
Created in 2010, La Comunidad Ixim is led by a group of Maya, Xinca, and Guatemalan
people that were raised in Los Angeles, California. The group is comprised of primarily young
adults who have found each other through informal networks within the social justice organizing
community in Los Angeles. La Comunidad Ixim chose their name to reflect an engagement with
Maya cosmovision and culture since corn is considered the basis of creation and life within the
Pop Wuj, one of the Maya creation stories. The founding of this collective is unique because it
has primarily developed in relation to the experiences of the members themselves, the majority
of whom were not raised as active participants in spaces that centered the Maya experience. La
Comunidad Ixim adds to previous academic research about the Maya diaspora by presenting
perspectives that do not predominately focus on Hometown Associations or community based
organizations created through religious networks.
153
Through individual friendships or
participation in social justice organizations, members found each other and built on their
common understandings of organizing and Maya identity to create a collective that centers the
experience of 1.5 and second-generation Mayas.
I have collaborated as an active member in the collective since its formation and have
seen it developed over the course of six years to include and reflect a wide range of diversity.
The background of various members represents a growing diversity of Maya experiences in Los
Angeles. For instance, members are from various parts of Los Angeles, including East LA,
Culver City, Huntington Park, and Pico-Union and as a result meet all over Los Angeles. This
geographically diffuse political formation is also reflected in the fact that members are from

153
Wellmeier, “Santa Eulalia’s People in Exil;” Steigengam, Palma & Solorzano, A Place to Be.

102
various regions within Guatemala-including the departments of Huehuetenango, Quetzaltenango,
Solola- and are also from multiple ethnic groups, K’iche’, Kaqchikel, Q’anjob’al and Acateco.
As discussed below some of the members can only trace their migration to areas within or
around Guatemala City. Since their decision to name the group La Comunidad Ixim in 2011, a
Xinca member has also joined the collective.
This chapter argues that second-generation Maya youth organizing draws from both
familial genealogies and intersectional organizing to develop a mobile archive of indigeneity that
grapples with multiple racial structures. By reading the children’s book that they collectively
created as an archive, I will demonstrate that while they document and center common struggles,
they do so with an understanding that there is no totalizing narrative of the Maya diaspora
experience. Because these are young adults who have experienced life in their home
communities through temporary visits or primarily as children, their cultural production presents
the opportunity to think about Maya indigeneity in relation to migration for youth who live the
majority of their lives in the diaspora. Examining how these kinship ties operate in conjunction
with experiences in social justice organize I ask the following: How do second generation make
sense of the overlap or difference in Guatemalan and U.S. racial hierarchies? How does La
Comunidad Ixim challenge heteronormative and patriarchal conceptions of kinship? What types
of common experiences do they archive in their cultural production as they attempt to produce or
engage a Maya community?
Because Maya identity is often defined through state-driven identifications the reproduce
erasure,
154
I instead highlight how in the absence of these regulated identifications Maya youth

154
For example, Shannon Speed (2008) argued that the Mexican state project of erasure through assimilation in the
early twentieth century has also worked through shrinking the Indigenous community by only identifying those that
speak their language and wear Mayan clothing as Indigenous. She writes, “From the perspective of those in power, a

103
in Los Angeles form Maya collectivity through other means. I first analyze the familial
genealogies of various members not as a practice of authentication, but as a set of histories that
help trace the intergenerational impact of colonialism. My argument then moves to demonstrate
how the group grapples with what it means to be Maya within the collective because it is a space
where they interact with other people who may have different experiences, definitions, or
practices that anchor their Maya identification. To varying degrees, each of the members grow
up with particular linguistic or cultural practices being normalized within their homes, and La
Comunidad Ixim becomes one of the few spaces in which they are required to understand these
experiences in relation to people that are not biologically related to them.
What is key to this process in La Comunidad Ixim is that in addition to being part of the
Guatemalan and/or Maya diaspora, the other commonality among the group is that they have all
participated in social justice organizations. This creates a secondary context that allows them to
lay out parameters around Maya identity that include queer and genderqueer possibilities. Even
in moments where their family members reproduce heteronormativity, members in La
Comunidad Ixim support each other in challenging the notion that indigeneity and queerness are
contradictory. They also use the combination of their familial histories and intersectional politics
to create a children’s book that centers critical orientations towards queer experiences,
intergenerational dialogues, and the second-generation Maya experience. While in the previous
chapter I discussed how Maya women uphold Maya epistemologies through the use of regional
clothing, I extend the work that mobile archives of indigeneity can do by examining its function
in spaces where individuals are not biologically related to each other. As a result, they bring a

homogenous, modern Mexican population was required. The disappearance of Indigenous peoples though the
manipulation of census data was but one means to achieve that end” (96).

104
variety of definitions and experiences that they work through to transmit a sense of Maya
community through their children’s book.
In addition, I foreground La Comunidad Ixim’s organizing and cultural production in an
effort to re-define the Maya experience through intergenerational memory that does not always
flow from elders to children. For members in this collective, family histories and community
memories must at times jump generations because of the experience of migration. As one
generation is forced to migrate and struggle for economic survival, the bonds between
grandparents and grandchildren fills gaps in memory that are caused by these pressures. This
also produces non-linear relationships to categories of Latinidad and indigeneity in the U.S.
where as information is filled in by multiple generations, youth are left to put pieces of these
narratives together in ways that make sense to their lived experiences in Los Angeles.
II. METHODS
The methods for this chapter include interviews with seven of the nine active organizers
in La Comunidad Ixim and participant observation with the collective over the last three years. I
selected La Comunidad Ixim as a site for research in part because their collective was primarily
comprised and led by Maya youth who are 1.5 or second generation. In addition to being led by
young people, these young adults are part of a generation that can most easily blend into Latina/o
categories. They often speak Spanish and English, they are college educated, and the majority of
them have U.S. citizenship. However, their ability to navigate and complicate these categories is
useful to thinking through indigeneity and mobility and the salience of displacement beyond the
experience of recent migrants. In order to accomplish this, I use an inductive and grounded

105
method that starts from my subjects and how they articulate their own desires and investments,

especially as they were expressed in their organizing meetings.

155

As I have noted in my introduction, my position as a part of what is really a diverse Maya
community in Los Angeles is both an asset and a challenge to how I craft my analysis and read
these texts. For this chapter in particular, my decision to write about La Comunidad Ixim came in
the later stages of my research in part because it had gone relatively defunct during the stages
when I was drafting my research proposal. However, a grant from the Guatemalan Human Rights
Commission acquired by Sylvia, one of our members who was returning to Los Angeles after
finishing her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, revitalized our efforts and brought us
back together. As a result, I came to this group first as an active member and only later did I ask
for the group’s permission to consider it a research site. This roots my analysis as one that is
intertwined with
III. YOUTH AND THE MAYA DIASPORA
The contribution of this research to the study of the Maya diaspora is best contextualized
by briefly reviewing the literature that exists about Maya migrants in the United States. Early
research about the Maya diaspora was especially concerned with language retention
156
and later
with the experience of migrating after experiencing state violence,
157
the transnational economic
and cultural practices of migrants in Los Angeles
158
and their experiences as undocumented
migrants.
159
In addition, other research emphasized the notion of diaspora as grounded in the

155
I developed a research protocol and interview questions based on both the oral history interview guides and
protocols provided by UCLA and by accounting for what they expressed as their goals during their planning and
organizing of their first public event in 2014 and a workshop series for Maya youth
156
Peñalosa, "Trilingualism in the Barrio."
157
Foxen, In Search of Providence. Hagan, Deciding to be Legal. Wellmeier, "Rituals of Resettlement."
158
Popkin, "Guatemalan Mayan Migration to Los Angeles." Popkin, "The Emergence of Pan-Mayan Ethnicity."
159
Camayd-Freixas, "Interpreting After the Largest Ice Raid in US History." Reynolds, “(Be)laboring childhoods.”

106
internal migration of Mayas within Guatemala in addition to other parts of the world.
160
More
recent research on the Maya diaspora has also critically intervened within Latina/o Studies to
challenge popular notions of what it means to be Latina/o and how this racial identification often
directly contradicts the Maya experience.
161
In particular, this scholarship challenges how the
casual lumping of Mayas within Latinas/os conceals the direct racism that Maya migrants face
from Latinos, including Central Americans, who do not identify as Indigenous. This racist
discrimination is entrenched in structures of inequality in the countries of origin and is
reinscribed and finds new modes of expression in the diaspora.
162
This problem with the Latina/o
category can often lead to identification with the broader term Native American, rather than
diasporic Indigenous identities.
163

These studies emphasize a type of Maya identity to challenge Latinidad. For example, the
majority of the research has focused on sites where even though the collective may be
intergenerational conclusions were premised upon ideas that were conveyed by migrants—those
who are older and who spent more time in their communities of origin and therefore have ideas
of Maya identity as directly tied to the use of Maya languages and Maya clothing. Given that
researchers have relied on these structures of identification, the youth in La Comunidad Ixim
who were born or primarily raised in Los Angeles, and whose parents did not participate in Maya
collectives outside of their immediate families, may not be identified as Maya. However, La
Comunidad Ixim creates a unique space in which regardless of the fact that most of their family
members did not necessarily seek out Maya collectives in the diaspora, they themselves have
formulated one. Second generation youth experiences help flesh out possibilities for Maya

160
Loucky & Moors, The Mayan Diaspora.
161
Batz, "Maya Cultural Resistance in Los Angeles."
162
Estrada, "Ka Tzij," 213. Batz, "Maya Cultural Resistance in Los Angeles," 195.
163
Lebaron, "When Latinos are Not Latinos." Hiller, Linstroth, and Vela "I Am Maya, Not Guatemalan, nor
Hispanic."

107
community in Los Angeles that extend our current understandings of Maya community
formation. However, these identifications still exist as part of the family genealogies that these
youth inherit.
IV. IDENTIFICATIONS
Strategic and fluid forms of identification amongst Maya youth challenge the notion of
ethnic categories because they force us to consider that the diaspora includes young people who
cannot claim a Maya identity, but that also does not automatically mean that they claim a Ladino
Guatemalan ancestry either. As scholars have noted, the racial structure of Guatemala pivots
around the binary of Ladino-Indigenous, with Ladinidad historically defined as the cultural (and
preferably the biologically) absence of indigeneity.
164
This overarching structure gives rise to
localized understandings of indigeneity,
165
but with the emergence of the Maya movement in the
1980s, Mayan identity in particular becomes critical to publically and globally contesting the
violence of the Civil War.
166
Ladino identity on the other hand has historically been tied to class
while simultaneously operating through a racist structure by defining itself as superior to
Indigenous culture or heritage.
167
The consequence is a national structure that absorbs
individuals so long as they refuse an Indigenous genealogy and act in accordance to a national
culture that is neo-colonialist. It is this structure that then authenticates indigeneity through
language and dress.
Understanding this dichotomy as a historical construction is incredibly difficult for youth
in the diaspora when they and their families become submerged under a Guatemalan identity that
also becomes categorically Latino in the United States. As a result, Ladino identity becomes

164
Blockler and Herbert. Guatemala.
165
Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala.
166
Montejo, Maya Intellectual Renaissance.
167
Hale, Mas Que un Indio.

108
difficult to trace in migration, at times leaving youth confused about their heritage. Rather than
interpret this point of ambiguity as a form of cultural loss, I examine these fragments to analyze
the impact of the (neo)colonial legacy of Guatemala on the young people who have been
primarily raised outside of Guatemala. These longer trajectories of family history also position
this dialogue as one that is formulated in relation to kinship networks that included extended and
non-biological connections rather than the problematic—but legally instituted—concepts of
blood quantum. As J. Kēhaulani Kauanui methodically charts, blood quantum logics serve to
undermine Indigenous epistemologies, including those that determine what it means to belong to
your people.
168
While she speaks to the Hawaiian case, I situate this work alongside scholars like
herself, Audra Simpson, and Joanne Barker that all work to think about identity not only in
relation to individuals, but in relation to power structures and ongoing colonial structures.
For instance, one of the participants, Mynor, acknowledged that his parents would possibly
identify as Ladino. Mynor does not identify as Maya, but his experience can help us understand
that youth in the diaspora contend with multigenerational dispossession that has been happening
within Guatemala for centuries before the official beginning of the armed conflict in the 1960s
and informs how they understand themselves. This intergenerational dispossession obligates La
Comunidad Ixim to constantly examine their definitions of Maya identity with an eye to who
those definitions exclude. Mynor recounted that his maternal great-grandfather was actually a
railroad worker who raised Mynor’s grandfather in tenement housing. Mynor’s grandfather was
left orphaned by the age of six and soon after Mynor’s great-great grandmother, who had become
the caretaker, passed away as well. As a result Mynor’s grandfather became homeless as a young
man and was recruited to join the military. His grandfather shared that the strictest military
commander was actually Indigenous, but would be especially hard on Indigenous recruits and his

168
Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood.

109
grandfather was often confused as to why the commander would treat him in similar fashion. His
grandfather then decided to leave the military and join the labor force that was building the
railroads and his family traveled to different parts of Guatemala and lived in tenement housing.
This narrative spans over a century and points to the fact that there is a lot that is unknown for
youth. Non-linear genealogies will place them into a Ladino category by virtue of the absence of
indigeneity.
For participants like Mynor and Gabriela whose story I will share below, indigeneity
travels through undefined and nebulous markers. Perhaps the strongest of these markers is the
discrimination their families confronted because they were read as Indigenous. In the case of
Mynor's story with the military commander, but also in the case of Gabriela, another organizer in
the group, whose paternal family felt that her maternal family was darker, inferior, of a lower
status and Indigenous. Based on what Gabriela’s mother has told her, Gabriela’s great-
grandmother died in childbirth and her great-grandfather died when Gabriela’s grandmother was
a very small toddler. Until the age of four or five, it was Gabriela’s great-great grandmother who
raised the young child, but she passed away. At this young age Gabriela’s grandmother was left
completely orphaned and someone who claimed to be her grandmother’s aunt took her in and
made her the servant of the house. When that woman’s husband molested and raped Gabriela’s
grandmother, her grandmother escaped and was homeless. Gabriela isn’t sure what her
grandmother did in between that time and the time that she met Gabriela’s grandfather who was
much older and an organizer in Guatemala. They eventually married, but Gabriela’s mother and
her uncles are all convinced that Mama Julia (Gabriela’s grandmother) most likely made up her
surname and her birthdate. Even though her uncles did once try to find birth records for their
mother they were told that all the records had been destroyed because of an earthquake.

110
In the case of Kevin, one of the participants, when I asked if he identified as Maya he said
that after feeling insecure about being Maya he was finally understanding that he was. He noted
that his paternal aunt would often say that they were Ladino, but that his dad would always
challenge her and ask her how she could say that if their older siblings and their parents spoke
lengua. However, even at the time of the interview his hesitation was still somewhat present as
he struggled in particular to understand why his aunt would want to claim Ladino identity. In
other words, the Ladino-Maya or Ladino-Indigenous binary that has operated in Guatemala for
centuries is especially challenging to understand for youth who are raised outside of that
everyday context.
I begin with stories of uncertainty and fragmentation because they reflect what Maya and
Guatemalan youth must grapple with. In both Mynor and Gabriela's case, they choose to identify
as Chapina/Chapin because there is so much unknown within their family histories. The
unknown information is in part due to the silence of older generations, but it is also reflective of
a longer trajectory of dispossessing poor and Indigenous people as part of a Guatemalan national
project. Again in the context of transnational research, it is important to note how the term
Chapin also shifts in migration. Within Guatemala, those who are from the capital city are known
as Chapines, but within the context of migration it becomes a label that is applied to all
Guatemalans and for these youth in particular, it becomes an identity that is linked to a clear
understanding and acceptance of ambiguity. La Comunidad Ixim directly grapples with the
ongoing question of whether youth like Gabriela and Mynor should be active participants in a
space that is for Maya youth in part because they have all experienced the process of learning
about and making sense of these longer genealogies. For Kevin, he has come to terms with

111
embracing a Maya identity although he feels limited in his understanding of such an
identification.
Making sense of these genealogical ties or ruptures to particular places and people also
points to the limitations in thinking about “the family” as the sole organizing institution in
relation to belonging in diaspora. Invoking family as the sole site of belonging limits our
understanding of how one engage in community building in the face of genocide. For instance,
the human rights report Guatemala, Never Again! notes that one of the results of the armed
conflict was the increase in orphans who lost one or both parents and were raised by non-
biological kin or extended relatives.
169
Given that conceptualizations of family often uphold
exclusionary politics that relegate subjects—undocumented, Indigenous, queer, immigrant, and
so forth—to the margin, reposition this work away from solely biological claims to genealogy
creates possibilities.
In this sense, understanding genealogical histories and non-biological ties to create Maya
belonging in diaspora begins with recognizing these fractures and the non-linear process of
racialization for youth that must make sense of long(er) histories of displacement. Pidduck
writes, “against hegemonic kinship narratives of continuity across space and time, of heredity
and progress, the motifs of displacement, illness, death, and loss …produce fractured and
affectively ambivalent kinship documents characterized by disruptions, silences, traumas, and
gaps.”
170
While not foreclosing the role of genealogy, it is critical to note that as Vera-Rosas’
argues, “While it is easier to blame family break-up on migration, family separation is a
historical legacy for colonized peoples: it is the result of structural conditions and regimes of
racial violence that propel our scattering in the first place and make displacement the order of the

169
Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala, Guatemala, Never Again!, 37.
170
Pidduck, “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence,” 444.

112
day.”
171
Rather than attempt to piece historical realities together, I make fragmentation useful to
understanding 1.5 and second-generation youth. The more expansive notion of kinship and
genealogy that I employ adds to the literature that contests the role of the normative nuclear
family from the position of diasporas created out of anti-Indigenous state violence.
For other members in the collective there is a much stronger awareness of their family’s
connection to the Maya communities of Guatemala. However, even for participants who had a
direct connection to how Maya identity is usually defined, there were aspects that remained
unclear. For example, one of the organizers, Ana was born in Los Angeles and is a fluent speaker
of Acateco and English, but does not speak Spanish. Ana shared in the collective that her family
had left their hometown because of the genocide of the 1980s and lived in the refugee camps in
southern Mexico. Her family hid in Chiapas, Mexico with fake identities for three years, but
eventually decided to complete the migration to the United States mirroring finding in previous
research.
172
Some parts of the family went to Indiantown, Florida and some remained in Los
Angeles. What is interesting about Ana is that her family strongly advocated for language
maintenance, but also equated the loss of language with the loss of culture and identity. However,
she shared that it was not until her participation in La Comunidad Ixim that she realized how
many people are erased through this belief.
In addition to stories about migrating to the United States, the migrations their families
made within Guatemala before coming to the United States also emerged during the interview
process. While scholars have examined the historical nature of Maya displacement within
Guatemala,
173
few have examined these displacements and migrations through the perspective of
the young people that are primarily raised in the United States. For 1.5 and second generation

171
Vera-Rosa, The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life, 3.
172
Burns, Maya in Exile.
173
Lutz and Lovell, "Survivors on the Move."

113
youth, acknowledging and building a genealogy that looks at migration not as an irreparable loss,
but as a process embedded within longer historical trajectories creates the opportunity for them
to also look for and build continuities or at least acknowledge that the loss is rooted in larger
structures of power.
V. MULTIGENERATIONAL OBSERVATIONS
This is also why it is critical to think about indigeneity in relation to immigration. As
cited in Mattice and Loret de Mola, “While first-generation migrants tend to focus their
organizational activity on transnational issues, much like the HTA leaders we observed, second
generation and ‘1.5 generation’ migrants tend to focus more on ethnic discrimination in the
United States.”
174
Part of what this literature has missed however is that for Indigenous migrants
this includes potentially moving away from a localized Indigenous identity (like K’iche or being
specifically from Santa Eulalia, a predominately K’anjob’al town) towards an immigrant one and
then to a U.S. based ethnic label. In addition, part of what I will demonstrate is that for the
members of La Comunidad Ixim, their identity is not a linear process premised on Indigenous
loss. Instead there are important contradictions that they are forced
For those I interviewed, the deeper history of internal displacement was often premised
on knowing the experiences of their grandparents. For example, in the story of Milton, his
grandmother’s migration remains pivotal to understanding why his parents migrated when his
extended family did not. He shared that his grandmother was his maternal figure during his
childhood because both of his parents had migrated to the U.S. His grandmother told him that
she had left Quetzaltenango due to political turmoil that caused her parents to loose their land.
His grandmother and all of her five siblings fled Quetzaltenango to different places and she was
actually captured by a military general and forced into marriage giving birth to two children.

174
Mattice and Loret de Mola, “Yucatec Maya Organizations,” 210.

114
Unbeknownst to the rest of her family, she lived with her captor for years until she managed to
escape and decided to work to raise her children. However, as a single mother with an additional
two children from another relationship, she ended up being the poorest of her family. Milton
stated, “There is a photo where [my grandmother is] with her sisters and even with the huipil and
the corte, you could tell that hers is the most used while her sisters are wearing newer ones. Even
by the shoes you can tell that my grandmother was poor.” The end result is that only Milton’s
branch of the family has migrated. This demonstrates that the migration of one generation can
have direct impacts on the migration of the next generation. Facing intense poverty, Milton’s
grandmother did not have any economic wealth to pass down and this informed Milton’s parent’s
perspective that migration to the United States was the most viable option. Research that only
examines migration to the United States may miss the nuance of multiple migrations and how
indigeneity is passed down generationally even in the absence of living in communities of origin.
For other participants, their families’ migration stories point to important gaps in our
understandings of indigeneity. For the participants and organizers of La Comunidad Ixim, it has
been important to understand the need to bend and blur categories as it makes sense to their
organizing. For example, to outreach to participants for their workshop series, they created
registration forms. The fact that they wanted Maya participants was explicit from the outset, but
they also all understood that they themselves were not necessarily raised with the umbrella term
of “Maya” because they were more tied to their parents’ hometowns or language. They
understood through their own experiences that in the process of displacement family history
becomes colored by the experience of migration, and for many of the participants this resulted in
not coming into a more concrete understanding of indigeneity until they were slightly older. As a
result when they were trying to distinguish who would be invited to participate they were open to

115
participants who noted that they were unsure what ethnolinguistic group their family was from.
They collectively understood that they had not always had the vocabulary and historical context
to actively claim a clearly defined identity and that developing a process for sharing this
knowledge was critical.
For the members who did have closer connections with Maya identity, it was often a
result of grandparents who transmitted Maya epistemologies and supported them to see
themselves as members of particular ethnolinguistic groups and places. Their parents simply did
not emphasize Maya cultural, linguistic and spiritual practice during their childhood in part
because they were the generation who struggled to sustain families as undocumented migrants in
Los Angeles. Outside of a Maya social network of support, the concern for Maya spiritual and
cultural practice took a backseat to the very urgent material concerns around providing for their
children. In some cases, the grandparent generation experienced similar obstacles due to internal
migration so while they were language speakers, there was no concrete economic, political or
social benefit to passing down language ability. However while grandparents did not always pass
down social and cultural practices to their children, they were often much more open and
supportive of their grandchildren.
In the case of one of the organizers Sylvia, her desire to learn her language even now in
her twenties is arguably more supported by her Kanjobal grandparents than her father. When
Sylvia has spoken to her parents about having them teach her Kanjobal, her father often jokes
that she will not learn the language because she is too old. Her grandmother on the other hand
actually teaches Sylvia words in Kanjobal and Sylvia in return teaches her grandmother words in
English. More importantly, her grandmother also validates her desire to participate in their
culture. On a recent occasion when her family was gathered to celebrate Sylvia’s birthday, her

116
grandmother asked Sylvia if it would be ok for her to pray for Sylvia in Kanjobal. Needless to
say, Sylvia was extremely moved by her grandmother’s offering of not just a prayer, but a prayer
in their own language. For many of the members of La Comunidad Ixim, it is actually their
relationship to elders, especially grandmothers or great-aunts that root them in their identity as
Maya. This represents a very interesting generational relationship because multiple members of
the collective share the experience of being the only ones in their families, especially among
their siblings and parents, that actively embrace Maya cultural and spiritual practice in a
collective outside of family. This also creates the opportunity for their parents to feel embolden
by their children and begin to challenge their own conceptions of being indigena.
In his interview, Milton shared that he was not sure why his mother never shared very
much about her experiences growing up with her grandparents in Quetzaltenango especially
since her grandfather was an ajq’ij (spiritual guide and daykeeper) who conducted ceremonies
and rituals at home. It was actually Milton’s grandmother who was instrumental in teaching
Milton that they were Kaqchikel. When she told him that they were indigenas, he asked if they
were K’iche’ because after having heard about Rigoberta Menchu that was what he knew. His
grandmother laughed and told him that they were actually Kaqchikel. He believes his
grandmother told him stories that she had not shared with his mother. As a result of his
grandmother’s stories, Milton was very intentional about encouraging his mother to openly
celebrate her Maya heritage for her 50
th
birthday party by wearing corte, having marimba at the
celebration and dancing el son as it is done in Quezaltenango.
These opportunities to create multi generational exchanges about Maya cultural, spiritual
and linguistic practice are critical because they provide families with the possibility of creating
the intergenerational imaginaries that sustain Maya life in the diaspora, even if those practices

117
are more muted during certain phases of the experience of being migrants in the United States.
This also directly challenges the notion that memory flows solely from elders to children and
youth and furthermore demonstrates that the Maya diaspora requires a multidirectional flow of
memory. The youth who became aware of the historical context of displacement and who
participate in community spaces also represent important opportunities for the parents who were
unable to do. These memories become the foundation for building Maya mobile archives because
youth connect these experiences to the skills and frameworks that they have gained in other
social justice movements. In the next section I discuss the impact of such memories towards the
politics of intersectionality. In particular a political context for generational displacement
facilitates the creation of non-biological relationships that produce Maya collectivity in diaspora.
VI. INTERSECTIONAL POLITICS AND QUEERING KINSHIP
Aside from their varied family based genealogies the members of La Comunidad Ixim
build on their family histories by connecting them to political understandings and knowledge
gained in non-Maya specific spaces. It is critical to note that the majority of participants in La
Comunidad Ixim are college graduates and a few have advanced degrees. Through their positions
as students many have participated in student organizing and community organizing in spaces
that do not center Maya issues. For example in the case of Milton, his recruitment as a high
school student to an environmental justice organization also led him to work with the Southern
California Library and Q-Team, a queer trans youth of color collective. His politicization on
behalf of both the environmental justice issues facing his Southeast LA community, along with
his growing consciousness around a politicized queer of color identity, has informed his
participation La Comunidad Ixim in multiple ways. Milton has been the member that most

118
directly challenges the group to be intersectional in regards to thinking about sexuality in
immigrant rights organizing.
For example, during one planning meeting, the group was discussing how to understand
their migration as Indigenous people. They had chosen to term their places of origin their
ancestral home, but were stuck on what to label their arrival and creation of community within
the United States. I posed the possibility that terming Los Angeles our “new homeland” could
reproduce erasures of the original peoples of Los Angeles, the Tongva, Tataviam and Fernandino
considering they were still very much present in the area and are struggling to enact their own
sovereignty. The counter to my argument came from Milton, who stated that through his activism
he had learned to denaturalize the criminalization of migration. He argued that migration was a
natural process that many species engage when their homes are no longer able to sustain them.
For decades youth involved in organizing for immigrant rights, now often named the Dreamers,
have worked to enact this paradigm in their organizing with slogans of “Undocumented and
Unafraid,”
175
to visual art like that produced by Favianna Rodriguez that employed the Monarch
Butterfly as a motif for denaturalizing borders and asserting that, “Migration is Beautiful.” As a
result, our conversation mirrored a critical tension that exists for Indigenous migrants who have
been dispossessed and yet contend with the possibility of enacting similar Indigenous
dispossessions.
The result of our tension on how to name our relationship to the socio-political landscape
of Los Angele was that during the workshop on migration, which Milton and Ana led, we worked
collaboratively so that he could discuss this conceptualization of migration as a natural process,
but also noted that the migration of Mayas was produced by other humans in service of
capitalism. He also gave space for the idea that that the use of new homelands erases the

175
Nicholls, The DREAMers.

119
struggles of Native people in Los Angeles and instead consider that what we were producing a
kind of “Native hub,” following the work of Renya Ramirez.
176
While we did not necessarily
create a new vocabulary to name this experience for Mayas, we were at the very least able to
interrupt a settler colonial imaginary by discussing the notion that like Guatemala, wherever we
go there are Indigenous people there who more often than not are struggling for political,
economic, and cultural survival.
It is important to recognize that Maya youth organizing had many routes for the members
of La Communidad Ixim. Participants’ history in relation to political organizing demonstrates
that there is no uniform and linear trajectory to a Maya identity. In particular, it was through
Chicana/o Studies, Chicana/o organizations and Latina/o organizations that many members
began to participate in social justice organizing. Mynor, for example first experienced organizing
as a graduate student at Columbia University where he ran for President of the Latin American
Student Organization. However, this organizing was informed by early politicization through an
undergraduate course reading of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People.
177
It was
not just about the fact that he felt the story reflected an aspect of his life, but also that for the first
time he knew more than his peers who in other courses could espouse European, Greek or
literary knowledge while he sat confused and unsure of himself. Other members such as Gabriela
also noted that it was actually through M.E.Ch.A (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicana/o de Azlan)
that she become a youth leader in high school and continued to organize in college. In addition,
Sylvia also joined Xinachtli, an organization whose, “purpose is to serve as a circle of growth
and support for the empowerment of the Xican@/Latin@ community.”
178
As a member of
Xinachtli, she was able to build on a consciousness that initially emerged from her interest in

176
Ramirez, Native Hubs.
177
Acosta, Revolt of the Cockroach People.
178
“Xinachtli Profile.”

120
Punk and Ska music and her participation in Communities for a Better Environment as a high
school student. While for most of them, a Maya consciousness emerged later in life, in high
school or afterwards, what I highlight is that they mobilize the cultural wealth of organizing in
other collectives to form and sustain La Comunidad Ixim.
The very structure of the collective also calls upon everyone’s assets to coordinate
projects without necessarily having a director. The various members rotate facilitation, note
taking and delegate tasks to each other as necessary. In the case of their workshop series for
example, each session had two organizers and those organizers were responsible for the bulk of
the curriculum work. Their other responsibility was to determine what they could use support on
and check in with the members so that those tasks would be covered. This is a critical aspect
because it normalizes an organizing culture that is based on consensus and mutual support.
However, it is important to recognize that this is an operational method that they have gained
through heir participation in various spaces where recognizing each other’s labor without over
burdening any particular person is also a practice employed. Rather than taking a vote, their
method is to address any and all concerns that arise and to have the collective adapt as needed.
The investments in social justice spaces allows the participants in this Maya youth collective to
form and shift how they understand their own personal experiences and the Maya diaspora in
general.
The experiences of second-generation youth illustrate that the path to Maya identity is not
linear and it does not always emerge through Maya organizations. While for particular
organizations, hometown associations and churches have been sites of gathering, networks of
support, and spaces to engage Maya spiritual and cultural practice, I would also argue that
gaining skills and knowledge through non-Maya specific organizations strengthens the formation

121
of Maya identities in the diaspora. These spaces have also allowed the participants to engage
notions of heteronormativity, patriarchy and homophobia in particular. For example, during the
first workshop series, Sylvia structured the introductions through a method that she learned
through her organizing in Xinachtli. She asked the members to state their name, something about
themselves and their preferred gender pronoun. The ability to normalize the experience of people
who are transgender or gender non-conforming is critical to acknowledging that members of this
group and of the larger Maya community are queer.
The group has often been frank about being a queer friendly space, something that makes
it unique among many Maya organizations. For the workshop series about a third of those who
participate identified as queer and discussed how being queer and Maya created challenges and
opportunities for them. One such moment was during an exercise in the first workshop of the
series. Participants and organizers were asked to bring an item from home that they felt
connected them to Guatemala and to being Maya. Kevin, one of the participants brought his
morral, which he carries with him to most places and stated that he appreciated how the bag was
gender neutral. Given that Maya clothing is often conceptualized through gender binaries, a
morral is a common item that is used by Mayas of all genders. At a later workshop a different
participant who is K’iche’ mentioned that he often felt conflicted and saddened about the fact
that he has stopped going back to Guatemala. He has not come out to his family in Guatemala
and felt that the best thing for him was to avoid seeing them so that he would not have to address
their heteronormative questions about why he did not have a girlfriend. As a result of his
willingness to discuss how heteronormativity impacted a detachment from biological relatives in
Guatemala, members reached out to him and shared YouTube videos of transgender festivals in
Quetzaltenango where people of various genders use women’s Maya clothing.

122
These youth collectively share and build queer Maya possibilities through an
intersectional politic that does not position queerness as a contradiction to indigeneity. As Chris
Finley notes, settler colonialism reproduces itself through patriarchy and heteronormativity.
However she also reminds us that, “Purposeful deconstruction of the logics of power rather than
an explosion of identity politics will help end colonial domination for Native peoples.”
179
In
other words, (settler) colonialism reorders kinship to privilege not only men, but heterosexual
formations that become sanctioned through legal and economic practices and (re)produce settler
societies. Instead, La Comunidad Ixim challenges this logic not solely by contesting
heteronormativity, but doing so through Maya cultural practices and epistemologies. They make
space for queerness in relation to Maya cultural practice as a direct challenge to heteronormative
and homophobic attitudes among some of the members’ families. The youth members do this by
instead pointing out and affirming that cultural practices, like the use of morrales or of Maya
clothing, can defy gender binaries that align themselves with heteronormativity. As Driskill, et al.
point out, “…kinship ties were targeted by colonial regimes to eliminate gender and sexual
diversity. As a result, reimagining kinship presents a method for affirming that diversity without
reinforcing heterosexist norms of the family or nation in indigenous communities.”
180
In this
context the members of La Comunidad Ixim are building a collective that works to expand and
reposition gender and sexual diversity in the face of institutions like families that seek to
constrict these realities.
These dynamic understandings also influence how they move forward in the formation of
what I term mobile archives of indigeneity that center the experience of Maya youth in Los
Angeles. Given the wide array of experiences present in the collective, their determination in

179
Finley, “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body,” 34.
180
Driskill, et al., Queer Indigenous Studies, 20.

123
producing a material archive that reflects some of their commonalities requires calling upon their
ability to think and work through intersections in order to not reproduce a singular, normative
and uniform understanding of Maya diasporic lives.
VII. LAS AVENTURAS DE GABY
Central to my argument about Maya collectivity in diaspora is that is rooted in Maya
epistemologies and engages Maya people in the creation of their own sites of memory. In the
face of institutional violence and the limits of normative conceptions of archives, Maya people in
diaspora seek out and create sites of memory that account for the legacy of genocide in
Guatemala, as well as the experience of migration and diaspora. I analyze the genealogies and
intersectional politics of La Comunidad Ixim to use them as the context from which I can
analyze their own archive making. La Comunidad Ixim creates a mobile archive that grapples
with these layered experiences in the form of a children’s book that they have titled The Colors
of Guatemala: Las Aventuras de Gaby. It would be possible to analyze this text outside of its
connection to the stories of the members, but doing so would arguably miss the political context
for the narrative and stylistic challenges they use within the book. Based on my participation
with the group, many of their choices are made consciously and through in depth dialogue about
their experience. Rather than ignore tensions, they have used this coloring book to dialogue
through them at times presenting adamant positions and at other times leaving gaping, open-
ended possibilities that tie back to their inability as a group to create a singular narrative about
what it means to be second generation.
It is important to note that all of the members had input on the creation of this book. The
general storyline emerged from one conversation and one member took up the task of working
on actually writing part of the story. By the following meeting no matter how incomplete the

124
story was, it was passed on to another member to continue writing, and so on. Once the story was
actually done, the group gathered again to re-read, edit, question, and direct the revisions. As a
result, it is basically impossible to attribute the story to any individual or even set of members.
As they wrote the storyline they also began to verbally describe the image that could accompany
each page. The images were created once most of the story was finalized and in a similar fashion
went through revisions and had primarily two members, Gaby and Mynor, draw the storyline
images and front cover.
Las Aventura’ s de Gaby took approximately six years to complete and is centered on the
character Gaby, who is a gender-neutral, young child that experiences memories in the form of
dreams. Every night after Gaby says good night and kisses Nan (Mom), Gaby has a dream. At
times the dream is actually the nightmare of a familiar place, with familiar homes, being
destroyed. At times the dreams are of food, of Nan cooking black beans, platanos (fried
plantains) and hechando tortillas (making tortillas). Through the story, the reader discovers that
Gaby’s dreams are actually a form of remembering. The act of dreaming reflects memories that
may or may not be Gaby’s lived experience and are also an expression of Gaby’s desires. I would
argue that the use of multiple dreams as part of the narrative and visual structure of the coloring
book reflects the multiplicity of experiences of growing up as part of a diaspora. For example,
the way in which the dream blurs temporal moments, transcends physicality, and embraces
ambiguity reflects how many of the participants felt about the multiple migration stories of their
families, the non-linear family genealogies telling who left what part of Guatemala when and
why, and perhaps even of their own mixed emotions about what it meant to grow up as Maya. In
addition, while the story eventually reveals that Gaby’s dreams are the actual histories of the

125
family, it remains unclear whether Gaby experienced these events first hand or whether they
become a part of Gaby’s consciousness through stories that have been heard at other moments.
The archive then is the conflation of what might be considered the primary sources for
this archive, the family genealogies of the participants, as well as the understanding that they are
crafting this story for future versions of their past experiences. The historical consciousness of
Gaby is one of intermixed terror, joy, pleasure and confusion. This archive in particular does not
seek to clarify or eliminate the ambiguity around Gaby, but instead acknowledges it as part of the
process of continuity. As Sarah Hunt poignantly asserts, “If we accept the alive and ongoing
nature of colonial relations, and the lived aspects of Indigeneity as critical to Indigenous
ontologies, any attempts to fix Indigenous knowledge can only be partial.”
181
Las Aventura’s de
Gaby practices this partiality as a site not of loss, but of multiplicity. It does so in the following
ways: 1) It uses dreams as a way to embrace the ambiguity that results from inherited family
histories that point to multiple displacements, 2) It visualizes intergenerational relationships in
ways that account for the migrant labor of Maya parents, 3) It uses family stories as a starting
point to build relationship through and despite problematic institutions like schools.
In Las Aventuras de Gaby dreams act as a way to highlight the affective, physical, and
temporal rupture produced by intergenerational Indigenous dispossession. The dreams are a way
to explore what it means for the children of the diaspora to challenge the linear nature of
genealogy, storytelling and even the division between lived memories and those that are inherited
in more subtle and undisclosed manners. For instance, research often points to how Maya
migrants either experience poverty or physical state violence and then migrate to the United
States. The book instead challenges the linearity of this sequence by initially demonstrating
Gaby’s connection to Guatemala through a dream of “a familiar place…somewhere far, far

181
Hunt, Ontologies of Indigeneity, 31.

126
away.”
182
Two pages later, Gaby has another dream in which they, Alex the older brother, and
Nan are crossing the border and hiding behind bushes. Nan reminds them that if the coyote—a
young man with a baseball cap on—tells them to run then they need to run. Gaby awakes from
the dream startled. The following night Gaby has a nightmare of the familiar home seen before is
actually on fire.
183

Figure 1 Figure 2

The inclusion of these issues to critically important to ensuring that Maya children have a sense
of genealogy that includes state violence as visually represented by migration and the familiar
yet geographically distant home burning. What is just as critical is that these events are not
sequences as they are in academic research, and are instead all presented as part and parcel of
Gaby’s existence.
The use of dreams and the temporal rupture is reflective of the experience of many
members from La Comunidad Ixim. Even for those who did not migrate, they often recounted

182
La Comunidad Ixim, Las Aventuras de Gaby, Figure 1
183
La Comunidad Ixim, Las Aventuras de Gaby, Figure 2

127
the multiple migrations of their families. Alongside these multiple migrations were also stories of
siblings born on both sides of the border, women (mothers) who migrated alone, parents who had
children with other partners, and even multiple migrations completed by the same parent. This
breaking, remaking, and expansion of the familial structure also contests the gendered and
nuclear family formation that transnational family literature has often challenged.
184
As Sylvia
one of the participants noted:
[My mom] was just scared that [my Dad] was not going to come back because she said
that was common, for men to just go and never come back. And she was like, no, this
isn't happening. At that time they had three kids already, so then she came to the U.S. and
she left my older brother and sister with my grandparents. My grandparents raised them
over there like I think maybe two years, a year or two years? I don't know something
around one to three years and they brought my sister who was the youngest at that time.
So they lived here and then my older brother and sister lived over there, which is
interesting because yesterday my grandparents were home and my grandma she just goes
and hugs my sister. She's like, “ah eres mi hija, I raised you for the first three years.” It
was just random, she just grabbed her and hugged her and my sister was like, “yeah, you
were my mom.” So she was her mom really. So, them my mom and my dad were here,
what is it, maybe 1987 or so and then my dad went back to go get my brother and my
sister, and his younger brother, so then they came back that way.

The non-linear and multiple migrations remain significant to Sylvia’s understanding of family
and the role her grandparents played even though she was born and raised in South Central Los
Angeles. Accompanying this brief quotation from Sylvia is a much longer response from Sylvia
to my question of “Just to start out I wanted to see if you can tell me about your family's
migration story.” It was a question I asked all the organizers and they all had stories that included
multiple migrations across many generations.
This sense of an expansive wealth of family history in relation to not only Guatemala, but
to migration as well, is part of what Gaby’s dreams capture. Aside from playing with the
sequence of these events, it is also the that Gaby has no social network outside of her family to

184
Vera-Rosas, “Regarding the Mother of Anchor-Children.” Parreñas, Children of Global Migration. Abrego,
Sacrificing Families.

128
process these memories that creates an opportunity for the book to act not as a source of history
for all Maya children, but instead as a site of dialogue within the community and among families.
The group purposefully chose to not provide details about why the home was on fire or about the
migration experience in part because it aims to create space for multiple dialogues to occur
within the Maya diaspora. However, rather than beginning from the place of intergenerational
dialogue, the book moves towards this dialogue only after it references how challenging it can be
to uphold this practice in the diaspora.
When Gaby is awake, Gaby has interactions that remind the reader that this is also a story
of what it means to be Maya in an urban Latina/o context. For instance after having the
nightmare of the homes burning, Gaby runs to tell Nan
about the dream only to find that she is already outside of
the apartment boarding the bus to go to work.
185
Making
the maternal figure a working parent that was not
necessarily available the instant that Gaby needed her was
an expression of what Milton, Sylvia and Gabriela all
shared in terms of having parents that worked to sustain the household. The experience of having
parents that worked all day, at times cleaning homes and caring for other people’s children, was a
formative part of their childhoods. When I asked Milton about his migration as a young child he
tied his migration to the loss of family in two manners. The first loss is tied to his family in
Guatemala and the second loss was tied to his parents having to work such long hours. He
shared:
I think at that time I did not know my dad. I knew of him, I knew that he existed and so
there was a lot of stories my family would tell me. And I was like, “oh wow he exists,

185
La Comunidad Ixim, Las Aventuras de Gaby, Figure 3.
Figure 3

129
he’s there.” But seeing how he was in reality, as a human being, he was working two
jobs, having to deal with a child that has leukemia, and having two other boys now. I
think and not understanding who I was as a little boy, I was flamboyant. At the beginning
it felt really good, it’s my dad he’s really here, but then later on I realized it’s not going to
be what I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t the promised land, I feel cheated out of—I
had a family [in Guatemala] and I no longer had them. My cousins, I lost connection.
And my grandmother, that’s when I realized I really miss my grandmother because she
was there. I think living in Cudahy, my parents had to work so we were left alone pretty
much all day. I had to learn how to cook. I turned 7 in Cudahy and by 8 years old I
remember my Mom taught us how to cook, she taught my older brother and I that we
need to take care of our younger brother and don’t answer the door. I understood this is
the reality and that’s ok, I need to learn how to cook.

Milton’s experience shows us the overlap of what it means to be queer, Maya, and an
undocumented child whose family has to suffer the health consequences of environmental racism
and poverty. However, it is critical to understand that for Milton and other participants, their
organizing provided them with the structural critique that we see as Milton describes the pressure
that his father was under. While he doesn’t excuse his parent’s absence or his father’s
homophobia, he has also learned through his previous organizing that this is all a part of the
reality that he and his family lived with.
Sylvia whose father is Kanjobal and whose mother is Ladina stated that her parents also
worked very long hours because they had an herbal and natural supplement store at a swap meet
in South Central. Her parents rarely took time off and often required all of their children to
support their work at the store. In addition, this often created a family structure that required
older siblings to take on many of the caretaker responsibilities. As a result the family structure
within the storyline, both in its visual and literary representation, exemplifies the stories that are
common among the group. With the scene of Naan boarding the bus to work, Gaby is obviously
disappointed that she is not home, but the storyline recognizes that it is directly tied to Naan
having to go to work. The gap left by Gaby’s mother figure is filled by a sibling named Alex in

130
the story. The story does not take an overtly positive or negative tone when it comes to Gaby and
Alex’s relationship, but it is Alex who actually tells Gaby that the dreams are not dreams, they
are memories.
While Naan is not always readily available to provide the emotional labor because she
must provide economic sustenance as a single migrant mother. She nonetheless does appear
towards the end of the story in a pivotal moment where Gaby is trying to determine what to share
with her class for Show and Tell at school. After experiencing her dreams and rejection from
peers at school (discussed in more detail below), it is Nan’s discussion with Gaby that serves as a
moment of resolution within the story. As they both work on
making tamales, Gaby is able to finally tell Nan about the
dreams and Nan responds, “I see. Well Gaby, I have a story
to tell you…” While the book does not actually mention
what Nan shares, the following morning we see Nan at
Gaby’s bedside holding a morral.
186
The text from the story
states, “The next morning, Nan gives Gaby a morral to wear
to class for Show and Tell. She says, ‘Wear this so you can
always remember that we are a strong family and should not be ashamed of who we are.’” Both
the shared story, and the gifting of the morral as a material cultural and spiritual object has deep
implications for Gaby as a Maya child in diaspora. The image on the morral is that of the two
headed bird that visually represents duality within Maya cosmology—and is actually a common
image on morrales sold all over Guatemala.
The strategy to not privilege one narrative of what it means to be Maya over another is
visually and textually represented in the absence of Naan’s actual story. The organizers honed in

186
La Comunidad Ixim, Las Aventuras de Gaby, Figure 4.
Figure 4

131
on this silence as a moment intended to provoke real stories and real voices within the diaspora.
The potential for these stories to ground both the knowledge of elders is also premised on the
notion that there is still a lot of shame that is a direct result of anti-indigenous rhetoric, policy,
and state violence in both Guatemala and in the U.S.
187
While Nan’s clearly states her reasons
for sharing the moral, the open-ended moment provides an opportunity for the readers to discuss
what Nan may tell Gaby and why it is important to have those moments of listening and sharing
between generations. It was also clearly articulated among the collective that this is one of the
moments that invoked a Maya audience. They knowingly chose to operate from the assumption
that readers would be able to fill in the context of the war and the ways it shapes their experience
in diaspora.
While much of the story takes place in Gaby’s home or subconscious, the storyline also
showcases Gaby’s interactions with peers and a teacher at school. In one instance, a teacher
named Ms. Smith states that they will soon be celebrating Cinco de Mayo with the selling of
nachos during lunch, a Mexican Hat Dance, and a Show and
Tell.
188
In the story, Ms. Smith states, “Don’t forget that we
are doing this to celebrate your culture!” In the image itself,
Gaby has a thought bubble that states, “My culture?” When
the collective was discussing how they would be forced to
participate in events that centered Mexican history and
culture it was often presumed that all brown children were
Mexican and that these events were culturally relevant to them. Interestingly enough, the

187
Giovanni Batz (2014) correlates the self-identification of some Maya youth as Latino or Hispanic with, “parents
[who] may themselves feel ashamed of being Maya and see no value in teaching their children an indigenous
culture. Discrimination within the Guatemalan community contributes to this attitude, and so does daily life in Los
Angeles neighborhoods…” (203).
188
La Comunidad Ixim, Las Aventuras de Gaby, Figure 5.
Figure 5

132
meeting where they were reviewing this a partner of one of the members attended and challenged
whether it made sense to be critical of potential allies like Ms. Smith. While the commentator
was of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, all the organizers stood by their decision to point out
the ways in which schools and educators impose multiculturalism at the expense of a real
engagement with how schools act as sites of violent assimilation.
This is an important note to make in conversations around the experience of children and
youth in the Maya diaspora. James Loucky writes, “For children and youth, some born in
Guatemala and others in California, life in Los Angeles revolves around normative standards and
institutions such as public schools that appear to have little or no connection to the homeland and
experiences of their parents.”
189
Their need to confront this experience directly speaks to the
ongoing salience of brushing up against a Latino identity premised on Mexican-ness. The story
does not solely portray the educator and school as the site of this issue, but also notes that non-
Maya peers often perpetuate these same ideals.
Gaby’s first choice in terms of what to present at Show and Tell is actually a photograph
from Naans nightstand of Gaby, Naan, and Gaby’s grandmother. When Gaby takes the picture to
school and shows a group of friends the picture, another child asks what the women in the
picture is wearing. Gaby responds simply by stating that Naan is wearing “la ropa” (the clothes).
In discussions around this scene in particular, the collective discussed how to mark the difference
they felt growing up, especially in schools where they were often assumed to be Mexican and yet
lacked the terms to explain to others that they were Maya or Indigenous. While not always
directly antagonistic or violent, being made to feel invisible through a mestizo Mexican/Latino
identity reveals the marginalization that exists within Latinidad as a common occurrence.

189
Loucky, "Maya in a Modern Metropolis," 214.

133
In addition, it demonstrates that the ability to name Maya practices was often shrouded in
the euphemisms that their parents learned. Therefore rather than have Gaby state that Naan is
wearing Maya clothing, or the pot (the huipil) the group decided to label it with what they heard
growing up, which was simply la ropa. Visually the text on the page actually narrates this
experience and the image itself is of Gaby’s hand holding the picture in which all three of them
are smiling. The juxtaposition between the experience of marginalization through Gaby’s peer
and the visual image of a photograph that exudes happiness is the symbolic replica of the joy of
belonging to your family and community and the contradiction of being marginalized for not
fitting a Latino paradigm, especially as it is upheld by your teacher and your peers.
Rather than position the school as a site of learning, the collective instead uses it to
confront U.S. racial and ethnic categories that make Maya people invisible. The story closes with
a fellow classmate introducing herself to Gaby and stating
that her family is also, “from Guatemala and they want to
share their family story with Gaby.” In the image Gaby is
holding onto the moral and the two are sitting at a table
talking.
190
This ending reflects the project of defining Maya
community by extending knowledge drawn from family
stories to engage with other in the formation of non-
biologically determined relationships.
In addition to the storyline of the coloring book, the other half of the project is set of
activities created by the group that would be for older children. This includes a K'iche' word
search, a maze with glyphs, a review of the Maya number system, and a set of questions and tips
that young people can use to ask their elders about their family’s genealogy and migration

190
La Comunidad Ixim, Las Aventuras de Gaby, Figure 6.
Figure 6

134
stories. It is critical to understand how Las Aventura’ s de Gaby builds on the work of Irma Otzoy
who argues that Maya textiles can be considered texts that are written by weavers, carried by
wearers and that can be read by Maya people and those familiar with Maya systems of
meaning.
191
In similar fashion, this coloring and activity book is directed at readers with a
particular diasporic Maya gaze that can draw meaning and connection from the moments of
Gaby’s life and from the activities used. As such, it gives primacy to the migrant Maya gaze
while also allowing for that gaze to be defined through a series of open ended experiences.
However, it doesn’t simply allow for those open ended experiences to remain, it invites multiple
readings and calls the reader to engage the memories of their families, to ask questions about
Gaby’s memories and to realize that even something as ubiquitous as a word search can be a part
of a much larger effort to maintain and redefine Maya community outside of and in relation to
our places of origin.
VII. CONCLUSION
The mobile archive of indigeneity positions the Maya diaspora as a purposeful and
consciously constructed identity that does not take for granted that a Maya diaspora already
exists as a community that is fully defined. Instead, I argue, it is through these mobile archives,
that parameters around Maya identity are laid out and struggled over both within the group as
well as in their cultural productions. While positioning any identity (whether queer, youth,
diasporic or Indigenous) as inherently radical is problematic, I would argue that La Comunidad
Ixim and their archive act as one avenue through which queer Indigenous experiences in diaspora
are centered. Often relying on their own experiences of what it means to build a notion of justice
that does not reproduce erasures, they expand what it means to be Maya in diaspora through their

191
Otzoy, "Maya Clothing and Identity."

135
practice of kinship and community and reflect these ongoing and open-ended conversations
through their book
I do not position the book as solely cultural production because within the text and
images we are presented a historical account of violence not as the site of creation for Mayas, but
as an integral part of what migrants and the second-generation confront. A central tension to this
positioning is questioning the interplay of the written text of the story and it’s use of words and
images to invoke oral storytelling. What is certain is that the intergenerational effects of multiple
migrations and displacements requires an engagement with indigeneity as it is formed out of
relationships with specific places and yet extends beyond spaces. In that extension there is an
engagement with somewhat unfamiliar power structures like the structure of settler colonialism
that the organizers also grapple with.
As I have argued previously, the ability to challenge a settler imaginary must also be
nestled within a recognition that Mayas are not Indigenous to the places they migrate to and that
to some degree that there must be a sense of non-belonging in order to be able to challenge
settler colonial politics. As a result, archives that continue to center migration in relation to the
second generation are key to engaging ongoing conversations about why Mayas leave Guatemala
for the United States in the thousands every year since the 1970s. However, what has lead the
collective to be able to create La Comunidad Ixim has been their participation in spaces that may
be easily read as Latina/o, that is those of immigrants rights movements, environmental justice,
and so forth. Rather than completely dismiss Latinidad as always already closed to Indigenous
migrants, I would argue that Mayas draw attention to the ways in which even this category is not
seamless or a finished product.

136
Within the diaspora, the positionalities embodied and constructed by the youth of La
Comunidad Ixim function in a context that is informed by multiple generations confronting what
Maylei Blackwell (forthcoming) terms multiple colonialities. La Comunidad Ixim make sense of
their realities through the stories passed down, or at times silenced, by generations of their family
in Guatemala and the United States, as well as their own experiences of brushing up against
Latinidad in the settler colonial and white supremacist country of the United States. Maya
positionalities in the diaspora create complex linkages between historical family legacies and the
political economies of their places of origin, as well as the colonial structures of nation-states of
Guatemala and the United States and how these relationships are configured within Los Angeles.
This complexity is also the richness that allows for Maya collectives to enact an archival practice
that searches for and creates materials that can embrace multiplicity and a diverse understanding
of Maya cultural practice.

137
CHAPTER FIVE

Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles: Relational Mobile Archives of Indigeneity
I. INTRODUCTION
On October 12, 2015, the Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles (MILA) project officially
launched their Latin American Indigenous Diasporas (LAID) map. While October 12 is federally
recognized as Columbus Day, Indigenous communities and those in solidarity with the objective
of connecting cartographies of Indigenous presence actively mobilized to pressure the Los
Angeles City Council to change the celebration in recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day. This
mobilization and launching were not unrelated. At the center of both is the objective of
challenging how we think of Los Angeles. MILA complicates the notion that Los Angeles is a
cosmopolitan hub and instead invokes the city as Gabrielino-Tongva space. In doing so it centers
the Gabrielino-Tongva as the original people of Los Angeles, while also opening up a critical
space from which to think about Indigenous migrants in relation to the place of Los Angeles. In
previous chapters I developed the mobile archive of indigeneity as a practice that bridges
embodied forms of knowledge with cultural objects to produce Maya community in diaspora.
For this chapter I expand this analysis to consider what mobile archives of indigeneity can offer
to analysis of relationality that moves beyond the Maya experience to consider multiple
Indigenous experiences in Los Angeles. For this chapter I analyze the strategies taken up by the
MILA project as one site through which Indigenous geographies contend with the United States
as both settler colonial and imperial power while also laying out visual and discursive
possibilities rooted in Indigenous epistemologies.
Rethinking the geo-political landscape of Los Angeles as a trans-national and trans-
indigenous space contests the ongoing nature of settler colonialism and refocuses our attention

138
towards Indigenous ways of knowing and being. From Carey McWilliams’ classic work where
he claimed Southern California a place where, “While not a living influence, the dead hand of
the Indian is everywhere upon the land,” Los Angeles has been a site of layered colonizations
that productively work in tandem to justify the erasure of contemporary Indigenous peoples.
192

As Saldaña-Portillo has poignantly noted, the co-constitutive racial geographies of the border
region actively reproduce themselves and each other whether they exist in conflict or
cooperation. Extending the work of Jodi Byrd who examines how “Indian-ness” acts as the site
of possibility for U.S. imperialism outside of its borders, Saldaña Portillo argues that the way,
“national geographies are perceived, imagined, lived, and mapped are supremely racial, and that
these racially produced geographies cannot be understood without a thorough investigation of the
colonial modes of governmentality imposed on and engaged by indigenous people.” In this
chapter I argue that the visuals and text of the MILA function as a mobile archive of indigeneity
that interrogates multiple and overlapping racial geographies while giving primacy to Indigenous
epistemologies.
While making structural critiques is central to Saldaña-Portillo’s analysis, she directly
acknowledges that it is beyond the scope of her work to think about Indigenous struggle,
resistance, or autonomy/sovereignty though she politically aligns herself with such movements
that seek to challenge (neo)colonial structures of the nation. I argue that MILA successfully does
both because it unpacks Los Angeles as an urban Indigenous geography produced through
dispossession while also presenting modes of reading Los Angeles as a place where “strategic
and contingent collaborations” are still possible—though not guaranteed—among Indigenous

192
McWilliams, Southern California, 23. In addition, works like Mike Davis’s City of Quartz while engaged in
critical geo-political analysis often only touched upon indigeneity in relation to Los Angeles’ romanticizing of the
Spanish mission era.

139
communities.

193
As Worley states, “The very act of mentioning colonialism’s impact therefore
decenters its effects and paradoxically privileges an adaptive form of decolonial continuity.”
194

By documenting how Los Angeles is produced through and reproduces settler colonialism,
MILA makes the colonial project visible and forcefully asserts it as incomplete. Grounded in
calling into question the ways in which Indigenous people are integrated through their
racialization as Latinos, Asian Americans or recognized American Indians, they place at the
center a politic that makes multiple claims to indigeneity possible within one place. As Byrd
writes, “Rather than wait in the dustbins of history for that moment in which our own
[Indigenous] communities might arrive at the table as fully recognized nations within the West,
such scholars suggest we might gain more by shifting our attention from such neoliberal traps of
recognition and statehood and turn instead to the production of our own modes of intelligibility
within and through Indigeneity.”
195
Reframing how we understand Los Angeles’ formation, its
current significance to multiple indigenous peoples and the ongoing relationships built between
these communities all work to challenge the colliding forces of settler colonialism and U.S.
imperialism that are sutured through anti-indigenous politics.
The MILA project is a technology of trans-Indigenous praxis that has the ability to
recognize the primacy of specific Indigenous peoples while not necessarily folding Indigenous
migrants into a monolithic Indigenous or settler category. In order to examine how MILA
visually and textually uses a digital platform to create a mobile archive of indigeneity, I use
Chadwick Allen’s concept of trans-Indigenous methods.
196
He positions trans-indigenous
methods as the practice of centering Indigenous to Indigenous relations rather than a comparative

193
Tuck and Yang, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, 28.
194
Worley, “Pan- Maya and ‘Trans- Indigenous,’” 8.
195
Byrd, “Trans-Indigenous Book Review,” n.a.
196
Allen, Trans-Indigenous.

140
method that reduces analysis to similarities or differences and reaffirms whiteness as center and
indigeneity as marginal. Chadwick points out however that, “The point is not to displace the
necessary, invigorating study of specific traditions and contexts but rather to complement these
by augmenting and expanding broader, globally Indigenous fields of inquiry. The point is to
invite specific studies into different kinds of conversations, and to acknowledge the mobility and
multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts.”
197
To better
understand how MILA employs trans-indigenous methods to magnify the prospects of
addressing Indigenous concerns across multiple indigeneities in one space, I ask the following:
What materials does the project use to challenge settler colonial histories of Los Angeles? How
is Los Angeles as Land invoked differently by each map? What other forms of spatial production
does MILA engage?
To answer these central questions, I begin by laying out a brief background for the
development of the project and its use of ArcGIS and virtual ethnography. I build on these more
logistical insights to consider Eve Tuck and Marcia Mckenzie’s call for a method of critical
place inquiry that bridges the literature in geography and Indigenous studies to attend to how Los
Angeles is presented in a range of ways.
198
Critical place inquiry and theories around spatial
production provide a foundation to highlight how MILA (re)contextualizes historical mappings
of Los Angeles not as artifacts of objective truth, but as archival sources that were produced by
and sustain the settler colonial gaze of Los Angeles an expansive and cosmopolitan city.
One of the guiding principles for the MILA project is to disrupt settler cartography by
challenging the intention behind the mapping imperative and by shifting it’s form so that
mapping becomes an embodied project that produces multiplicity rather than uniformity. This is

197
Ibid, xiv.
198
Tuck and Mckenzie, Place in Research.

141
a direct contestation to thinking about any map as naturalized and repositions the creation of
maps as an ongoing practice anchored in engaging with Land from indigenous positionalities.
The alternative readings of Los Angeles that the project provides allows for indigeneity
to be represented in ways that makes sense to each community involved in the project. It
highlights diverse spatial and temporal relationships to Los Angeles that demonstrate that space
is not uniformly experienced among indigenous communities, but is instead inflected through the
legacies that each community brings to Los Angeles. For instance Maya migrants encounter Los
Angeles as an urban center that seems foreign outside of the ethnic enclaves into which they first
arrive. This is very different from the Gabrielino-Tongva who, despite not having federal
recognition, continue to build a sense of collective identity in a multitude of ways that express
what it means for Los Angeles to be their homeland. I close the chapter by considering how this
complex rendering of indigenous Los Angeles demonstrates the need for archives that account
for—but do not necessarily smooth over—how each community builds a relationship to Los
Angeles.
II. BACKGROUND
The overall project was first conceptualized by Dr. Maylei Blackwell as part of a grant
that would strengthen the collaboration among University of California, Los Angeles faculty
who work in various ethnic studies units, but whose work overlaps along the lines of indigenous
studies. In addition to Dr. Blackwell, Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Dr. Wendy Teeter and Dr. Keith
Camacho as well as a team of dedicated graduate students have all supported the work of
Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles. Each person involved crossed departmental and disciplinary
boundaries to highlight that, “While many would argue that there is not one Los Angeles but
multiple LAs, what is less known is that there are multiple indigenous LAs whose histories are

142
layered into the fabric of the city.”
199
For this chapter I analyze the strategies taken up by the
Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles website as one discursive and material site through which the
mobile archive of indigeneity makes multiple indigenous communities legible to each other.
For the MILA project, making Indigenous communities legible to each other has involved
working with a range of Indigenous leaders in Los Angeles. With the exception of two or three
non-indigenous collaborators, all those involved in producing this project are members of the
communities that are present on the map. Community collaborators were sought out not as
informants, but as writers, videographers, and research assistants. As a result part of the critical
behind the scenes work that MILA has accomplished has been bring leaders from these
communities into the fold as fully capable of actually presenting these communities as dynamic
and multifaceted. I myself participated by writing two and co-authoring another two (with
Maylei Blackwell) of the Guatemalan Mayan sites that are part of the Latin American Indigenous
Diasporas story map.
200
This included the following organizations and issues: La Comunidad
Ixim, Maya Pastoral, Mayavision and the shooting of Manuel Jamines Xum by the Los Angeles
Police Department in 2010.
As an example of the intensive collaborative nature of this process, the Maya Pastoral site
required that I write a description based on my five years of involvement and also find a visual
image that could be paired with the text on the Latin American Indigenous Diasporas story map.
I then sent this material to one of the leaders and they replied with feedback and also included
Professor Lebaron at Kennesaw State University because he works closely with the group and
they provided extensive rewrites on how the organization was described. I then made a final cut
to meet the word limit. While each process varied slightly, overall there was an effort to ensure

199
See Homepage-Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles: https://mila.ss.ucla.edu
200
See Latin American Indigenous Diasporas:
http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=31d1100e9a454f5c9b905f55b08c0d22

143
that the organizations agreed to participate and had an opportunity to provide feedback. This
sharing of power is critical to ensure that scholars who are a part of these communities are not
solely viewed as labor, but are also well aware that they mediate this type of process in an effort
to increase self-representation and visibility among indigenous communities. The process
through which these maps are created serve as an opportunity to determine proper ethical codes
among those developing maps in collaboration with organizations and people who do not have
the same access to the technology itself.
201
These decisions are deeply political and revolve
around who gains visibility or remains on the fringe of such mappings.
202

For Indigenous studies projects that use the technology of digital humanities especially in
relation to mapping, it is critical to continue thinking about this tool in relation to the embodied
and lived experience of Indigenous people. Palmer argues that “Indigital geographies,” or
indigenous digital geographies, can be co-opted by the state, but can also be used to disrupt
entrenched conceptions of spatial production produced through the gaze of terra nullius.
203
For
instance, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has its own geography division that is mostly
concerned with mapping non-human inhabited land which Palmer and Rundstrom argue is an

201
In addition to the theoretical considerations of spatial production, MILA’s use of ArcGIS (Arc Geographic
Information System) is also relevant. ArcGIS is essentially a user-friendly version of GIS.
GIS was initially used to consider large quantitative data but scholars that dealt with issues of race and gender
challenged the presumptions associated with its reliance on quantitative data gathered through instruments like the
census (Kwan 2002). They argued that people without formal technological training do not necessarily have access
to large data sets and demography often erases nuances that are critical to how people, especially marginalized
people, experience space, GIS in its earlier iterations served as another instrument in positivist science and liberal
policy (Elwood 2006b). Programs like ArcGIS that make spatial mapping accessible to those without formal training
became one instrument for the growth of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) which looks at how Geographic
Information Systems can be used to redistribute power in decision making, especially as it relates to policy (Parker
2006). In addition, research has pointed out that new more user friendly iterations of GIS have created the possibility
to chart queer histories (Brown and Knopp 2008), consider the embodied experience of space (Kwan 2007) and how
mapping can also be used for cooptation and resistance (Elwood 2006a). MILA has chosen this particular
technology to challenging erasures produced through cartography because it shifts the power of publically mapping
Indigenous people to scholars and organizers.
202
Brown and Knopp, “Queering the Map,” 43.
203
Palmer, “Indigital Geographic Information Networks”

144
attempt to remain aware of the raw resources that exist in Indian territory.
204
In addition, tribal
governments do not always have access to the data collected by the BIA that is used in maps or
the ability to effectively use GIS to advance tribal sovereignty. Palmer’s concern that this
software has the potential to replace elder knowledge and Indigenous modes of transmitting
knowledge points to the ongoing tensions between the oral nature of Indigenous epistemologies
and the use of new technologies that make stories widely available.
205
Beyond a concern over
tradition (oral Indigenous epistemologies) versus modern (digital technologies), Palmer calls
attention to the ongoing tension between ongoing dispossession in the service of primitive
accumulation and Indigenous land claims. This marks the precarious terrain on which projects
like MILA attempt to increase visibility while having to ensure that they do not facilitate the
reproduction of cooptation and disempowerment.
206

III. DISRUPTING SETTLER COLONIAL CARTOGRAPHY
Geographic knowledge as a field of statecraft facilitates the normalization of Eurocentric
ways of seeing and knowing the world. As Saldaña-Portillo notes, “Geography is not only a
discipline for mapping the world to be seen: it is also a way of disciplining what we see, of
disciplining us into seeing (and knowing) mapped space as racialized place.”
207
Maps are tools
of colonial imperatives not solely because they order space, but because they normalize the
presumed ability to know by seeing. In addition, mapping included “[enabling] newcomers to
locate themselves in this space and find their way around. More than this, maps conceptualized
unfamiliar space in Eurocentric terms, situating it within a culture of vision, measurement, and

204
Palmer and Rundstrom, “GIS, Internal Colonialism, and the U.S. B.I.A.”
205
Palmer, “Inidgital Geographic Information Networks”
206
MILA counteracts some of this by prohibiting the discussion of ceremony or mapping sacred spaces. This is also
informed by a long tradition among settlers of (mis)appropriating spiritual knowledge and practice in an effort to
both create a new profitable market through the selling of things like sage bundles or by charging to enter sacred
ceremonies (Aldred 2000).
207
Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, 18.

145
management.”
208
The notion that maps act as instruments of power is critical to thinking about
how MILA disrupts settler colonialism in Los Angeles by critiquing how urban histories of Los
Angeles erase indigenous people and by highlighting the many ways that indigenous people
come to experience Los Angeles.
Contextualizing cartographic representations as products and productive of settler
colonial politics calls attention to the ways in which geographic mapping has been used to
visually normalize Indigenous erasure. The written section entitled “Mapping Indigenous LA” is
paired with a topographical representation of the Los Angeles basin.
209
However within the
primary text there is a series of embedded links and one particular set of links connect you to
archival maps of Los Angeles from the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. The sequence of
maps allow us to see Los Angeles as a site of rapid urban growth, especially after the 1848 gold
rush, that also includes the expansion of private property and the bureaucratic city center as the
basis for what Los Angeles looked like at these various points.
However the links to these maps are contextualized in the text as the following, “From
the early beginnings of LA it was referred to as a “city without Limits,” and as the city grew the
Gabrielino-Tongva and their relatives were relocated and absorbed into the cityscape (1871 Map,
1875 Map, 1896 Map)…One-hundred years later, the celebration of California as a state would
show no signs of on-going lives of Native peoples.”
210
(Re)mapping, as Goeman theorizes it, is
not solely an act of producing visual images, it is also one that occurs in literary forms that
reorient our spatial understandings with an eye to indigenous survivance and dispossession.
211
In
MILA the very maps that were created and used to enact settler dispossession are taken back up

208
Harris, “How Did Colonialism Disposes,” 179.
209
This section can be found at the following URL:
http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=a9e370db955a45ba99c52fb31f31f1fc
210
See: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=a9e370db955a45ba99c52fb31f31f1fc
211
Goeman, Mark My Words, 3.

146
with a different lens. The text allows the author to take on an archive that achieves multiple
dispossessions in order to deconstruct the discursive spatial production of Los Angeles’s
establishment, growth and history. As Moore and Perdue note, “Map-making is an inherently
political process…Indeed, the production of maps in association with geopolitical narratives over
time has given structure to politico-territorial processes and provided neatness to the inherently
messy process of state-making.”
212
MILA challenges cartographic materials that make the
colonization of Los Angeles a historically complete project and instead destabilizes the map
itself by marking it as an incomplete and partial site of knowledge. It directly points out
indigenous absence in order to point out how this absence is used to solidify a particular vision
of Los Angeles.
I argue that MILA also disrupts settler colonial cartography by giving primacy to
Gabrielino-Tongva spatial representation and refusing to fold all other Indigenous people in to a
settler-Indigenous binary. They accomplish these two feats by centering multiplicity rather than
investing a singular visual representation of Indigenous peoples in Los Angeles. Rather than
present one map of indigenous Los Angeles, they use ArcGIS to tell multiple stories through a
series of photographs, texts, videos, and embedded links. This multiplicity of voices, of
technologies, and of strategies allow for a plethora of representations not just of Indigenous
people, but of their relationships to each other and to Los Angeles. While the primary strategy of
contesting settler colonial cartographic practices is to emphasize multiplicity, the project also
makes key ethical maneuvers that distinguish how communities are ordered so as not to replicate
a Pan-Indigenous uniformity.
Rather than visually conveying that all these communities can be melted into a
homogenous category of indigeneity, the MILA website remains cognizant of a different power

212
Moore and Perdue, “Imagining a Critical Geopolitical Cartography,” 892-93.

147
dynamic by giving primacy to Gabrielino-Tongva people throughout the various maps. While all
other communities are migrant populations, the project has chosen to continuously re-inscribe
Los Angeles as Gabrielino-Tongva land. In the process of creating the project this meant that no
other story map was completed until the Gabrielino-Tongva one was completed to the
satisfaction of those involved in its creation. This included work done in collaboration with
Angie Behrns and the Kuruvungna Springs Cultural Center & Museum as well as Cindi Alvitre
and Craig Torres who were central community scholar contributors to the story map entitled,
“Waterways throughout Indigenous Los Angeles.” As a result, the first map on the MILA website
is a digital reproduction of a map originally produced to accompany Cindi Alvitre’s essay in
LAtitudes: An Angeleno’ s Atlas.
213
The image is a topographical representation of Los Angeles
that notes both Kaweenga’s place names in Gabrielino-Tongva as well as important markers of
settler colonial institutions like the San Gabriel Mission. In the lower left quadrant is the only
representation of the people themselves on the map. The image is of four muscular individuals in
a canoe in the water of the shore of Los Angeles. The muscular tone of the people in the canoe,
their contrasting deep brown bodies to the light brown colors of the map, and the action of being
mid-row remind us that the original people of Los Angeles actively engaged the water of the
coast and were as connected to the water as they were to the land. The use of these figures in the
canoe also intervene in a settler gaze that would reinscribe a sense of terra-nullius that the logic
of elimination reproduces through many maps of Los Angeles.
Once you enter the story map entitled Mapping Indigenous LA: Placemaking through
Digital Storytelling, it describes the project and the communities that the project has

213
Wakida, LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas.

148
emphasized.
214
The first image that appears is of a Gabrielino-Tongva sand map. Its placement
as the opening image to the story map about the project again gives primacy not just to
Gabrielino-Tongva history, but to the continuing and active existence. This presence is presented
through their spatial relationships and expressions of Los Angeles. The photograph centers the
multi-colored circular sand formation, but also includes the bodies of those who are making the
sand map. We see a woman whose back is towards the camera kneeling and in the process of
creating the map itself. We also see in the background that there are three other people also at the
site, though they do not seem to be actively involved at the moment of the photograph. We can
tell by the lawn chairs, buckets and other materials that the group has set up next to the sand map
that the photograph is a contemporary one.
The placement of this photograph precedes other visual images and also falls in line with
prioritizing Gabrielino-Tongva relationships to Los Angeles. However what is particularly
intriguing is that again, the visual image works to remind us that this traditional form of
knowledge continues to be actively practiced. The fact that the image does not actually focus on
the sand map as a finished product, but as something that is in the process of being made
redirects our attention from a finished object to an active practice. As the Gabrielino-Tongva
nation does not have federal recognition, it is especially critical to show the survival of their
spatial epistemologies beyond a relationship to the state. Despite the politics that position
Gabrielino-Tongva as a nation that cannot qualify for federal recognition under U.S. regulations,
MILA presents this visual image to understand the Gabrielino-Tongva continue to practice their
own forms of mapping, archiving and meaning-making that cannot be institutionalized and are

214
This story map is organized by having along portion of linear text on the left hand. Each topic within the story
map has links embedded within the text and to the right are images or websites that each section and each link
connects to. It is important to note that the template of a story map is made to be able to really tell a story that is not
solely created through Cartesian cartography.

149
by their nature temporary. Contesting spatial and temporal permanence, this sand map highlights
that the Gabrielino-Tongva have a distinct logic that contests the way indigeneity is marked
through fixed categories of belonging to a place. In addition, while the sand map may involve the
support of many people throughout the creation process, the use of an image that centers a
woman in the process of creating this map is in line with how women are key leaders for their
communities’ survival.
215

In terms of the sand map’s function within the story map we also have to consider the
shifts required of viewers. This includes a shift away from spatial representation as a source of
gathering and codifying spatial information in the service of an expanding nation-state. The text
that is paired alongside the image does not give a historical overview of the Gabrielino-Tongva,
nor does it actually describe the sand map itself. This means that as readers and viewers who are
unfamiliar with Gabrielino-Tongva epistemologies, we have to recognize our own limits in being
able to read this map. The absence of the legend or key that typically accompanies Cartesian
maps reminds us that part of an indigenous migrant experience is to accept that we may not
always know the Indigenous ways of other places. For migrants, this is an especially important
limit.
As Manulani Aluli Meyer writes about Hawaiian epistemology and place, “For the Native
Hawaiians speaking of knowledge, land was the central theme that drew forth all others. You
came from a place. You grew in a place and you had a relationship with that place.”
216
For
Meyer, it is the knowledge that Indigenous people have with specific places that informs their
epistemologies and cultural practices. Refusing to explain the sand map to a presumably non-
Gabrielino-Tongva viewer is an important strategy that works to center epistemologies as a

215
Krouse and Howard-Bobiwash, Keeping the Campfires Going.
216
Meyer, “Indigenous and Authentic,” 219.

150
political praxis and not necessarily open to consumption or interpretation by non-Gabrielino-
Tongva Angelinos. In other words, the value of the image is not having the rest of us know a
Gabrielino-Tongva practice, but instead to accept the limit of our knowing as an ethical principle
that within a long legacy of anthropological inquiry challenges the presumed availability of
indigenous worldviews.
As we can see the three maps discussed above all represent an expansive range from
normative maps that become repurposed as evidence for dispossession and erasure, to maps that
are Gabrielino-Tongva representations of Los Angeles, to the use of topographical maps that
remind us again that Land is also significant in its own right. Imagining or seeing Los Angeles as
place of multiplicity reminds us that the challenge to the practice of mapping for control cannot
be contested through a singular alternative. It requires creating or maintaining many forms of
knowing, experiencing, and living in Los Angeles. To this end it is also important to analyze how
the other communities relate themselves to Los Angeles and introduce them to this project. While
this same initial story map uses three different tabs to guide viewers through Los Angeles as a
site of Gabrielino-Tongva life. Other tabs work to introduce migrant indigenous populations.
Alongside the image of the sand map is a description of the overall project. The
beginning text states, “A map of Los Angeles does not tell the story of its people,” and then
moves on to contextualize Los Angeles as Gabrielino-Tongva land that is also home to multiple
streams of Indigenous migrants. The opening paragraph names the two arms of settler
colonialism and imperialism. This critical move means that the project does not solely begin
from a site of dispossession nor does it attempt to position Indigenous people as solely traditional
peoples either. Instead this pairing purposefully links both the structures of dispossession literally
alongside the visual image of persistence. It pairs displacement with an abundance of Indigenous

151
livelihoods, histories, and practices of spatial production that is central to repositioning Los
Angeles as Indigenous territory.
Despite making space for Indigenous migrants, MILA does not ignore the complexity of
indigenous migration that Tuck and Yang address as they remind us that movements for racial
and social justice are often still occurring on occupied indigenous land.
217
For instance, the
paragraph on “Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles” critiques the absorption of indigenous migrants
into multicultural settler colonialism via its positioning in to the Gabrielino-Tongva.

218
While
one would expect that this section would highlight the militarization of their ancestral lands,
what is also critical is the way in which they document their own participation in settler
colonialism. For instance, the paragraph notes:
Hawaiian settlerism in North America illustrates how the U.S. shaped the kind and
degree of native-native encounters in the nineteenth century. As we cultivate a
relationship with the Gabrielino-Tongva of the Kuruvunga Springs, then, we are wary of
the ways in which cross-cultural exchanges remain contingent on local, regional, and
transnational configurations of power and place.
219

This statement demonstrates a commitment to continuously thinking through the tensions of
settler colonialism and does not take indigeneity as a site that is void of the power to further
settler colonial projects. While it is important to not automatically assume that indigenous
migrants are settlers, and thereby insinuate that indigenous people are only indigenous if they
remain in one fixed spatial location, it is important to think about settler colonialism as a
structure—not an identity—that we either actively support or actively dismantle. In this instance
highlighting that this is an ongoing issue is an attempt to preempt the logic of elimination that

217
Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.”
218
See: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=a9e370db955a45ba99c52fb31f31f1fc
219
See: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=a9e370db955a45ba99c52fb31f31f1fc

152
has as a key maneuver of removal and replacement.
220
So while Kanaka Maoli, Chamorro, and
Samoans are all still indigenous people, their indigeneity is one that is dynamically shaped by the
contours of settler colonialism in multiple ways. Scholars have noted how Kanaka Maoli, for
example, have experienced white American encroachment,
221
Asian settler colonialism,
222
and
epistemic dispossession,
223
but there have also been scholars who look at the way that Mormon
Pacific Islanders have also actively supported settler colonialism on American Indian lands.
Taking an approach that can balance out both dispossession and acquiescence is creating a
foundation that can lead to understanding and creating indigenous relations that do not hinge on
the ongoing dispossession of indigenous people when indigenous migrants are occupying their
space.
It also bears noting that the possibility of creating indigenous relations is reinforced
through the visual image of a map of the Pacific Islands overlaid with an image of a canoeing
community event over the map image. The overlays bring together the images of people, maps
and the canoe to demonstrate their interconnected nature. The canoe appears for the second time
on this blog as a symbol of connection to sea and waterways and acts as a powerful instrument of
connection between both the Gabrielino-Tongva and Pacific Islanders, all of whom are
culturally, spiritually, and spatially connected to the sea.
224
Again, the work of trans-Indigenous
methods allows for Indigenous multiplicity, but also requires looking at intersections and
divergences as sites of power. Indigenous-to-Indigenous relations cannot be deemed natural
given the problematic matter in which U.S. multiculturalism absorbs Indigenous migrants.
Instead trans-Indigenous possibilities require dealing with the ways in which we are placed into a

220
Wolfe, “Elimination of the Native.”
221
Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood.
222
Saranillio, “Colliding Histories.”
223
Silva, Aloha Betrayed.
224
Goeman, “Eastern Oceania.”

153
settler colonial paradigm—and the ways in which we break out of such practices. The canoe,
much more than a symbol or metaphor, materializes an ongoing and complex relationship to the
concept of mobility, indigenous relations, and Land/Sea relations primarily by giving the creative
power to name these practices to tribal and Indigenous people.
The final section of this initial story map is titled Latin American Indigenous Diasporas
and primarily emphasizes Oaxacan (Zapotec and Mixtec) and Mayan Diasporas in Los Angeles.
The text directly notes that many Mayan migrants arrived in Los Angeles after the U.S.-backed
coup and civil war in the 1980s that directly targeted Mayan communities.
225
Interestingly, the
image paired with the textual introduction to this indigenous migrant community is of a young
man wearing traditional head gear and standing in front of the Los Angeles City Hall building in
Bunker Hill. Using a photo that is meaningful to the history of American Indian and Oaxacan
people exemplifies the way in which Los Angeles has a layered history in relation to Indigenous
people. At first glance what is at the forefront of the image is a young man in brightly colored
and large headgear. Yet City Hall in the background also purposefully invokes the history of
Yangna, often noted in historical timelines as a prominent Indian village once situated in
Downtown LA. The people of Yangna, like those of Bunker Hill in a later century, were
displaced as part of urban development. At the intersection of these multiple layers, Latin
American Indigenous Diasporas documents these multiple histories of presence and erasure even
as it adds Oaxacan migrants to the Indigenous geography of Los Angeles.
I chose to do an in depth analysis of this single story map because it begins to lay
foundations for thinking about how trans-Indigenous methods can be invoked in relation to space
in ways that can disrupt the structures of power (both colonial and imperial) that shape what life
in Los Angeles. Los Angeles has always been Gabrielino-Tongva land while contending with the

225
See: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=a9e370db955a45ba99c52fb31f31f1fc

154
violence of nation building and the multiple roles indigenous migrants play in these struggles
over land. Rather than position the national or state government as the sole culprit for indigenous
dispossession, these maps require that indigenous migrants also conceptualize what it means to
attempt to center sovereignty when you are not in your homeland. The following section takes
this question back up by seeing how the multiple indigenous communities represent not just their
relationships to each other, but to Los Angeles.
IV. LOS ANGELES IS (A) RELATIVE
Los Angeles has been the site of many struggles for justices that are spatial in nature. “A
People’s Guide to Los Angeles,” emphasizes these various histories that exist at the intersection
of race, space, and power.
226
Thematic tours curated by the authors include a “First Peoples
Tour” for those willing to engage Los Angeles as a site of Indigenous history and politics. While
not the only book length work on Los Angeles, A People’ s Guide to Los Angeles has been critical
to claiming a wide range of geo-political struggles as central to experiencing Los Angeles as a
place. These practices of (re)mapping Los Angeles as Indigenous territory are necessary in
contesting narratives that rely on linear timelines that position the Gabrielino-Tongva as Los
Angeles’s first people who are never again mentioned in historical or political monographs.
227

Part of what MILA contributes to the projects of mapping Indigenous vibrancy is an
engagement with Los Angeles that articulates Los Angeles as Land. Building on the intersections
of Indigenous studies and environmental studies, Tuck and McKenzie emphasize that spatial
theory plays a critical role in understanding power, but rarely conceives the socially constructed
world as something that occurs in relationship to Land and non-human animals.
228
The authors
address the limits of Marxist geography in particular by noting that Indigenous conceptions of

226
Pulido, Barraclough, Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles.
227
Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza and “Historical Timeline of Los Angeles.”
228
Tuck and McKenzie, Place in Research.

155
Land usually require an understanding of Land not as a resource upon which the human world is
shaped, but instead as an entity that also has agency, life, and consciousness. From this
foundation, they develop a methodological theory termed “critical place inquiry.” Rather than
one specific method they propose seven principles, two of which are key to this chapter. Critical
place inquiry 1) “Recognizes that disparate realities determine not only how place is experienced
but also how it is understood and practiced in turn and 2) Aims to further generative and critical
politics of places through such conceptualizations/practices and via a relational ethics of
accountability to people and places.”
229
Critical place inquiry provides a theoretical framework
that stresses the need to include Indigenous centered modes of thinking about Land alongside a
geo-political analysis of social relations among humans.
In other words, space is not an empty or fixed container—and neither is it solely
constructed by humans. This is an aspect that early spatial theorists ignored when they
positioned Land as solely significant in how it functions as a raw resource for the primitive
accumulation that is required for capitalist production.
230
Revitalizing the need to move beyond
land as a resource also invites the opportunity to conceive of Land in multiple ways given that
Indigenous cosmologies are not uniform though many acknowledge the ability of Land to create
and sustain life. For example, the Gabrielino-Tongva story map titled “Waterways in Indigenous
Los Angeles” does not focus on a human-centered, historically linear narrative of who
Gabrielino-Tongva people are.
231
Cindi Alvitre and Craig Torres instead choose to think about
water in Los Angeles. The contemporary context of water struggles against capitalist
infrastructure has captured national attention and centered the work of Indigenous youth and
women in leading struggles against the destruction of waterways that results from the extraction,

229
Ibid, 19.
230
Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
231
See: http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=fb3cb0712e8a4aa29751f0e091559fe4

156
transportation, and use of fossil fuel.
232
What waterways in Los Angeles contributes is a
historical analysis from the position of Gabrielino-Tongva people in Los Angeles. This story map
stand in contrast to historical accounts of Southern California water wars that often center the
formation of Los Angeles as an urban city with the privatization of water through the conflict
over Owens Valley and the scarcity of water in Southern California,
233
and more recently how
Paiute people experienced this conflict and its aftermath.
234
This story map repositions Los
Angeles as a site of abundant water and challenges the popular belief of Los Angeles as a site of
scarcity.
In a short clip of video, the waterways of Los Angeles are introduced as flowing sources
of life that while framed by the urban geography of concrete nonetheless maintain movement and
presence within the cityscape. Introducing Los Angeles through an alternate perceptual
experience that replaces the sound of car traffic with that of birds chirping and relegates concrete
highways to the margins of our ocular experience helps reconfigure the Los Angeles viewers
already imagine. Organized through pairing paragraphs of text alongside visual images, the story
map is presented through a series of videos, interviews with Craig Torres and Cindi Alvitre, and
a map that links various water sources in Los Angeles. The gaps and spaces of the Los Angeles
River that remain a site of wildlife challenge narratives about the Los Angeles River as a
concrete riverbed. In the clip, the urban landscape does not necessarily disappear, but is instead
relegated to the margins in and effort to remind us that a different version of Los Angeles has
continued to exceed urban encroachment.
Removing humans from the video clip enacts the principle that Land is meaningful
outside of human enclosures and asserts that water has its own life to which people are

232
See #StandingRockSyllabus at: https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/
233
Reisner, Cadillac Dessert.
234
Bauer, “Giant and the Waterbaby,” and Walker, Piyahu Nadu.

157
spectators. The clip forces us as viewers to see and follow the flow of water and as an
introductory video to the story map it emphasizes a waterway that is flowing, incorporating a
movement that we can see happen in twenty-three seconds. Had the emphasis been on a spring
for example—which is how water is discussed in other parts of the project—its life and
movement may have needed explanation because a spring may seem to stand still in twenty-three
seconds. Instead the rapidly flowing and full river becomes the central manner through which
this section seeks to identify water. In the context of ongoing drought in Southern California and
the ensuing discourse of scarcity, it becomes a critical maneuver to think about water as
abundant, alive, and flowing.
At the center of this story map is the disruption of thinking about space—in particular
Land and Water—as a resource. This is a critical challenge to the practice of cartography that has
often relied on as stated above, knowing “the wild” in order to manage and use it while taking
territory away from indigenous people. While these types of challenges have been covered in
critiques of mapping and archival projects, it is interesting that rather than attempt to reconstruct
an archive on Gabrielino-Tongva history or cultural practice, they instead enact that practice by
forcing us to think about the Land directly. Removing their people as the objects of analysis,
Alvitre and Torres turn a particular settler colonial imperative to have a tribal nation state and
verify its claim to indigeneity on its head. Side-stepping the notion of linear conceptions of
continuity is also a way to remove the power from having to make the types of claim that are
defined by the settler state and required for federal recognition.
235

The story map developed for and by the Gabrielino-Tongva nation is markedly different
from the one developed as the Latin American Indigenous Diasporas. LAID uses a contemporary
and common map as the foundation for their mapping project. Rather than opt for the same

235
Barker, Native Acts.

158
format as MILA, they chose one that relies heavily on thinking about Los Angeles in its
contemporary form. This reflects that the version of Los Angeles migrants from Latin American
diasporas arrive to and built a relationship with is an urban metropolis. While scholars like
Gaspar Rivera-Salgado have pointed out that the Bracero program did draw out indigenous
migrants, these flows were relatively low until the 1970s and 1980s when Indigenous migration
from Mexico increased.
236
In addition, as I have discussed in relation to mobile archives and the
importance of living praxis for Native peoples, diaspora is a question not only of settlement but
also of imperial accountability. Guatemalan Maya migrants began arriving in large number
during the 1970s and1980s as the war and genocide in Guatemala intensified. As a result, the Los
Angeles that these communities come to know are already built as part of the urban landscape
and their choice of a more Cartesian map is informed by that experience. For LAID, pinpoints
are primarily concentrated in the Pico Union area with the exception of the Frente Indigena de
Organizations Binacionales (FIOB) located in South Los Angeles. While there is an interaction
with public space in the sense that sites often focus on cultural celebrations that occur at parks,
the relationship to Land is also visually conveyed in a manner that shows that these multiple
communities are more recent migrants. Such histories tell us that while some Indigenous
geographies rely on looking beyond the urban landscape, some instead rely on looking within the
same landscape to find sites of Indigenous survival. Both conceptions of Los Angeles of course
remain in flux and do not necessarily assume to be a universal account of how even members
within each group conceives of L.A.
One photograph focuses on the Guatemalan Maya organization Maya Pastoral. The
image is of a Maya ceremony being set up in the parking lot of a Catholic church in South Los

236
Fox and Rivera-Salgado, Indigenous Mexican Migrants, Rivera-Salgado, “Mixtec Activism in Oaxacalifornia,”
and Stephen, Transborder Lives.

159
Angeles. Maya ceremony and spirituality emphasize relationships to the natural world as an part
of an ethical philosophy that underpins many indigenous worldviews in the Americas.
237
Within
the diaspora, the ceremonial practice and philosophy are actively shaped by the urban built
environment and the conceptualization and management of public parks. The already limited
green space within Los Angeles is even more limited in the neighborhoods where migrants often
live, forcing indigenous migrants to often use privately held land to be able to practice their
ceremonies. This is in part due to the fact that the use of a fire remains a point of tension between
migrants, the Parks and Recreation Department, and other officials. This tension demonstrates
that the built structures of life in Los Angeles inform how migrants are able to practice
community building when even green space is regulated within settler colonial conceptions of
environmental conservation.
238
LAID therefore enacts and engages this conflicted relationship to
Land by engaging the normative contemporary conception of what Los Angeles is and then
visualizing how indigenous migrants live with and through this tension by nonetheless
attempting to build and maintain their own conceptions of spiritual, cultural, and political
practice.
Tuck and Yang write that, “Land is what is most valuable, contested, required. This is
both because the settlers make Indigenous land their new home and source of capital, and also
because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic,
ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the
settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.”
239
Rather than assume that there must be one
singular and clear experience of indigeneity, I argue that indigeneity makes relationships possible
in ways that are grounded in a struggle for community vibrancy that does not necessarily empty

237
Forbes, Indigenous Americans.
238
Isaki, “Governance at Ka'Ena Point, Hawai'I,” and Loperena, “Conservation by Racialized Dispossession.”
239
Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 5.

160
out Land or view it as solely a backdrop to human action. This happens quite differently for each
community. For the Latin American Indigenous Diaspora, this relationship to land must occur in
relation to both, the community of origin and Los Angeles. As indigenous migrants they must
think about how to maintain practices that have sustained community cohesion in their
hometowns without reproducing Los Angeles as an already emptied space upon which to build
community.
However, this is also the limit of digital humanities and visual representations to actually
capture the many ways in which these relationships are built. While the actual map of LAID does
not do this work explicitly, the majority of these maps function as spatial relationships that focus
on particular communities. The overall project will eventually include an “Indigenous
Crossroads and Currents” map that will emphasize sites of intersection between these various
communities. The move to have both sites of commonality and group specific sites is also a
critical move that looks at “indigenous” as a site that can be useful without necessarily
foreclosing the possibility that each of these communities thinks about itself differently in part
because of its relation to Los Angeles.
Beyond the visual representation, MILA also acts an opportunity for various communities
to conceptualize what Los Angeles is in relation to their history and struggles. In a project like
MILA, the practice of mapping is inflected by overlapping and differing histories of colonization
that occur spatially. This lens is especially notable when these maps are read alongside each
other. Each map links to not only particular places in Los Angeles, but also visually represents
and conceptualizes these links in ways that challenge settler colonialism or imperialism. To
speak of Los Angeles as relative is to understand that these inflections become part of how each
community comes to experience, gain affection for, and continue molding their visions of Los

161
Angeles. Not all indigenous people think of Los Angeles in the same manner and these
relationships depend on why and when one comes to Los Angeles. To speak of Los Angeles as a
relative is to recognize that Land is more than just an experience, it is a deep engagement and
love not for an object, but for a living entity that has allowed us to remain, that for some has
given us refugee as our own homelands became less and less able to do so.
V. CONCLUSION: TOWARDS URBAN GEOGRAPHIES OF INDIGENEITY
Understanding indigeneity within urban centers that are also hubs for many migrant
populations allows us to understand how indigeneity makes its presence known in relation to
multiple indigenous communities. Given the settler imperative to remove and replace indigenous
peoples, urban geographies of indigeneity are an opportunity to link the colonial and imperial
practices that force these communities to exist in overlapping spaces. Spatial theory intersecting
with memory theories has also examined how space is produced in relation to the built
environment, especially as the struggle for memory and meaning is often played out through
architecture and monuments.
240
Theses scholars have argued that the way space is constructed
demonstrates that the struggle for memory is not separate from the power to determine the work
that particular spaces do for national, neoliberal or colonial narratives.
Mishuana Goeman further argues that we should understand space and the mapping of
space (both visually and narratively) as an ideological, visual and political strategy for building
nation and empire by presenting in a simplified and normative manner therefore also enacting a
spatialized settler colonialism. Goeman writes, “The state has marked our lands and our bodies
through the process of creating a geopolitics in which ‘BORDERS’ enforce state violence and

240
Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells; Gómez-Barris and Fiol-Matta, “Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly;”
Hayden, Power of Place; Weizmen, Hollow Land.

162
enact settler colonial biopolitics that materialize in the interpersonal.”
241
The author considers
how Native people (specifically in her work, Native women) use literature to express how they
orient themselves towards Land in ways that align with their worldviews. As a result, there is an
anti-settler colonial ethic that becomes operationalized through the awareness that all Land is
indigenous land and therefore there are always collectives of original peoples that have deep
connections to their particular places. Goeman’s notion of (re)mapping however also leaves
room for thinking about Native mobilities in ways that still honor the relationship to particular
places without making indigeneity ultimately static and equating mobility with an automatic loss
of indigeneity.
242

Thinking about space, mobility and indigeneity are also fragmented as we grapple with
indigenous struggles for sovereignty and ways of life that contest settler colonialism while
simultaneously struggling with how the realities of indigenous migrants are informed by their
own histories of indigenous dispossession as a result of state violence. While indigenous people
in Latin America have their own particular and varied relationships to urban centers,
243
the
underlying logic that migration to urban centers equates a loss of indigeneity remains a prevalent
notion that exasperates place-based claims even as it occurs on land that is nonetheless
indigenous land. The trans-indigenous methods activated within MILA reorients Los Angeles
from a site of Indigenous erasure to a site of multiple Indigenous possibilities. MILA grapples
with structures of colonialism and the ways in which “colonial subjects who are displaced by
external colonialism, as well as racialized and minoritized by internal colonialism, still occupy
and settle stolen Indigenous land.”
244
But even in highlighting these issues it reinforces that there

241
Goeman, Mark My Words, 205.
242
Ibid, 12.
243
Camus, Ser Indigena en Ciudad Guatemala; and De La Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos.
244
Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 7.

163
exist possibilities for Indigenous forms of connection that are premised on Indigenous
epistemologies.
MILA is a manifestation of this attempt to expand simplistic notions of indigenous
communities by framing them in relation to each other, while also ensuring that their place in
Los Angeles is also understood in relation to power structures. Deborah Massey writes, “The
view of place advocated here, where localities can in a sense be present in one another, both
inside and outside at the same time, is a view which stresses the construction of specificity
through interrelations rather than through the imposition of boundaries and the counterposition of
one identity against an other.”
245
MILA claims and refigures the possibility of Los Angeles to be
both a place of diaspora and a place of indigeneity. This website is a mobile archive both in the
sense that it travels through the internet and is therefore accessible to many different types of
audiences, but it is also a project that archives movement(s), indigeneity, and power in critical
and complex manners and does so with the intention of building a dialogue across multiple
communities. By archiving multiple histories of dispossession and forms of continuity it
becomes a collection of materials that reconceptualizes the Angelino experience. At the heart of
MILA is the opportunity to articulate Los Angeles as Gabrielino-Tongva land and as a place of
relocation, a place of refuge, a place of arrival. These multiple ideas of what Indigenous Los
Angeles is all come together to reflect and affirm that indigeneity itself is not fixed and instead is
a tool through which we can think about challenging settler colonial discourses and practices.

245
Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 7.

164
CODA
Migration and Indigeneity
As I sat in a small theater in Boyle Heights to watch “An L.A. journey,” a play about a
young K’iche’ unaccompanied migrant, I wondered what it meant to have a story anchored in the
experience of a Guatemalan Maya young man performed by a cast of primarily Chicanas/os from
East LA. I wondered whether my questions about representation were an over simplification of
who had the authority to write and perform Maya narratives. My concerns were only amplified
as the choppy dialogues in K’iche’ seemed to empty out who Maya people were in exchange for
a general sense of Latinidad. Could we perform each other’s stories and histories without any
acknowledgement of power differentials? Would the audience be this accepting if it had been
white actors performing Maya narratives? Was there any effort to cast actual Maya K’iche’
speaking children and adults in the play? Why was any sense of structural violence absent from
the story even though we see this young man become a child orphan, living on the streets of
Guatemala City? Was I the only one concerned with any of this?
These questions are deeply embedded in a Los Angeles landscape in which Chicana/os
have rightfully fought for and in many ways gained visibility. In part the interrogation offered int
his dissertation has often continued to position white settlers as the embodiment of structural
power, and as the gaze which Maya communities in diaspora are constantly pushing back on.
However, as my experience at Casa 0101 reminded me, the existence of overlapping struggles
with other Latinos who have nonetheless also engaged in the process of erasing Native people,
Native knowledge, and Native history is one that must be understood through nuanced
intersections of history, racial and/or colonial structures built and maintained by state violence,
and the ongoing struggle to imagine other worlds. In some ways, Casa 0101 is the fruit of such a

165
struggle. Born of famed playwright Josefina Lopez’s determination to see such a space in the
low-income, predominately Mexican immigrant community of Boyle Heights where she herself
grew up. This dissertation has been anchored in an analysis of these types of tensions between
collaborative movement building, overlapping issues, and yet the ongoing denial that Maya
people should be the most forceful voices in the making and telling of Maya stories and Maya
history.
Throughout this dissertation I primarily discussed mobile archives of indigeneity as a
process of Maya epistemological practices that articulate and challenge transborder forms of
violence. The material objects that make up the archive, along with the stories of Maya people
themselves, generate opportunities for those in the diaspora, youth in particular, to continue
building Maya collectives in their own visions. However, as the arc of the chapters contends, the
ongoing struggle to build community in Los Angeles is also occurring within a settler colonial
structure that has utilized Latinidad in its project of dispossession. As a result, visions for
diasporic Indigenous community building contend with the way in which settler colonialism
seeks to erase Native people even in its incorporation of Indigenous migrants into U.S. racial
structures. This incorporation or integration into U.S. racial structures accompanies particular
metrics of success, well-being, and civic engagement—but it also limits the possibility for Maya
people capable of understanding Native people in an Indigenous to Indigenous relationship.
Rather than simply make the claim that Maya migrants are Indigenous, I sought to disentangle
the way in which as Aida Hernandez Castillo points out, Indigeneity is a field of power.
246

At the core of some of these conversations is what it means to be Indigenous and how we
can continue to tie the importance of Land with the reality of mobility and diaspora, even as we
move beyond the notion that to be Indigenous is to solely stay (physically, spiritually, and

246
Hernandez Castillo, “Indigeneity as a Field of Power.”

166
culturally) rooted to one place. Despite what settler colonialism would have us imagine, these
communal and tribal dialogues do not occur over emptied Land or in a vacuum. As noted in the
Introduction, the relationship between indigeneity and Land are both deeply spiritual and of
upmost importance, while simultaneously being fraught sites though which settler colonial and
imperial violence is often enacted by constricting and simplifying how these relationships are
created. Mobile archives of indigeneity are far from singular, but exemplify that when
Indigenous communities take meaning making into their own hands, they create the materials
that communicate historical memory and a life-centered politics that are cognizant of the power
dynamics of what it means to be Indigenous in the twenty first century. My discussion of
Discovering Dominga emphasized that the relationship built over thousands of years to particular
places remains foundational. However, those relationships shift as we consider migration and the
ongoing power of distinct nation states to form regimes of anti-Indigenous violence. This forces
specific communities to rearticulate what aspects of their experiences remain dynamic, and
which remain collectively rooted in a millennial history and practice. In that expansive space of
building relationship across time, geography, and the physical world of the living we can see the
critical work that people like Denese/Dominga commit to. Outside of making her struggle legible
to white Western audiences through a sense of “in-between-ness,” we can read her activism as
exceeding the bounds of the plotline produced by the filmmakers. She herself begins to lay out
the threads that will bind her—and her children—back to the Achí community that is still
seeking justice.
Part of the process of creating mobile archives requires a consideration for the aspects of
Indigenous life that cannot be captured by the material. The mobile archive of indigeneity in the
manner that I have conceptualized it is about the process of working through layered temporal

167
and spatial understandings of what it means to be Indigenous and collectively thinking about the
power of archival materiality beyond an individual. In the case of Maya clothing for instance, the
appropriation by fashion designers of weavings as fabric emptied of their meaning repurposes a
historied practice into a mode of production in the service of profit. Maya clothing used and
shared among kin and chosen family instead makes it possible to create an archival practice that
contains and transmits the history of violence and the experience of migration as an extension of
that violence. The clothing is critical not just because it is a cultural practice, but because within
the context of genocide in Guatemala and erasure in the United States, it remains political to
claim places of origin through Maya aesthetics. It is these practices that continue to be upheld as
a site of belonging and collective meaning that includes the impact of state violence.
Emphasizing Maya clothing as a practice that is transnational and acts as a container for
collective histories across generations is also linked to new forms of memory making like
alternative forms of literature. Among those are grassroots projects like the coloring book
produced by La Comunidad Ixim. Through their collective efforts, La Comunidad Ixim is
shifting how we understand second-generation Mayas as not only engaging with their cultural
practices, but also as a group that can draw resources from their organizing to develop critical
interventions among Maya community. In particular, they make visible that women and queer
people also lead Maya collectives. Through a shared responsibility for the collective, they have
produced conceptualizations of transmitting knowledge and memory that can playfully blur
temporal linearity as the character in the book, Gaby, draws from a variety of sources to
interrogate and affirm who they are.
I end the dissertation with a very different type of project to think about possibilities for
mobile archives of indigeneity outside of but still connected to Maya communities. In line with

168
the overarching notion that Maya migrants do not build community on empty Land, Mapping
Indigenous Los Angeles is profound both for its scope, its ethics, and its ability to help us make
sense of Land not as a singular entity, but as one capable of holding Life for multiple Indigenous
communities. This digital humanities project intervenes in the notion that place itself is singular
and simultaneously still configures it as a site where Indigenous people continue to grapple with
longer histories of dispossession and where they can build relationships that still account for
power dynamic’s among each other. Therefore mobile archives of indigeneity on a larger scale
cannot simply claim land, but must consider that claims create borders and such need to be
carefully thought out and organized around collaborative projects that focus on issues of power.
Future research needs to think more closely about the relationships between recent
arrivals and second-generation Mayas and if necessary analyze why there might be a distance
between these communities. This includes looking at issues around where second-generation
Mayas live in Los Angeles compared to where recent arrivals live. This has implications for how
Maya diasporic communities may be inflected by issues of class and socio-economic level in
ways that are different form those in Guatemalan hometowns where elite and impoverished
Maya people live in the same town. In particular how can the second-generation community
continue to do critical work around immigration in ways that support recent arrivals as part of a
larger diasporic Maya community. The growing diversity also presents issues around language in
particular. For La Comunidad Ixim for instance, most were not language speakers, and yet there
are many Maya migrants in Los Angeles who do speak K’iche’ Kanjobal, Chuj, or one of the
over twenty different languages from Guatemala. And while there have been some attempts at
language schools created and run by the community, they lack the financial resources necessary

169
and this poses lost opportunities for sharing resources among multiple generations in relation to
language.
Mobile Archives of Indigeneity focused on diasporic Maya communities, but future work
may also consider diasporas in relation to Mayas in Guatemala. The ongoing violence against
women, the poor, and Indigenous people in Guatemala has been a facet of its everyday social
fabric. Alongside such violence are the ongoing, multi-faceted movements that organize against
these expressions of sate violence in the service of extractive capitalism. While it was beyond the
scope of analysis for this iteration of my research, I have been collecting interviews with cultural
and political activists in Quetzaltenango since 2012. Placing this data in conversation with the
materials presented in this dissertation is one future direction for my work. While there have
been some transnational case studies for Maya people, outlining the movement of ideas and
politics across borders is challenging and deserves more attention in relation to both immigrant
and Indigenous studies.

170
Bibliography
Abrego, Leisy J. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Abrego, Leisy J. and Roberto G. Gonzales. “Blocked Paths, Uncertain Futures: The
Postsecondary Education and Labor Market Prospects of Undocumented Latino Youth.”
Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR) 15, no. 1-2 (2010): 144-157.
doi:10.1080/10824661003635168.
Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Revolt of the Cockroach People. 1
st
Vintage Books ed. New York:
Vintage Books, 1989.
Adams-Campbell, Melissa, Ashley Glassburn Falzetti, and Courtney Rivard. “Introduction:
Indigeneity and the Work of Settler Archives.” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 2 (2015): 109-
116. doi:10.1080/2201473X.2014.957256.
Aguirre, Monti. “‘The Chixoy Dam Destroyed our Lives’.” Human Rights Dialogue:
“Environmental Rights” (Spring 2004) 2, (Novemember 1, 2009, 2004).
Ahmed, Sara and Jackie Stacey. “Testimonial Cultures: An Introduction.” Cultural Values 5, no.
1 (2001): 1. doi:10.1080/14797580109367217.
Ak’abal, Humberto. Raqonchi’Aj = Grito. Guatemala: Cholsamaj, 2004.
Alberto, Lourdes. “Topographies of Indigenism: Mexico, Decolonial Indigenism, and the
Chicana Transnational Subject in Ana Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters.” In Comparative
Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach, edited by Castellanos, M.
Bianet, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, Aldama and Arturo J., 38. Phoenix: University of Arizona
Press, 2012.

171
Aldred, Lisa. “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances.” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3
(2000): 329.
Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. doi:10.5749/j.ctt2jcckc.
Allison, Davenport, Manz Beatriz, and Castañeda Xochitl. “Mexicanization: A Survival Strategy
for Guatemalan Mayans in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Migraciones Internacionales 1,
(2002): 102-123.
Alsultany, Evelyn. “Arabs and Muslims in the Media After 9/11: Representational Strategies for
a ‘Postrace’ Era.” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2013): 161.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Archive and Aspiration.” In Information is Alive, edited by Brouwer, J.
Rotterdam: V2, 2003.
Arias, Arturo. “Central American- Americans: Invisibility, Power and Representation in the US
Latino World.” Latino Studies 1, (2003): 168-187. doi:10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600007.
———. “Reconfiguring Guatemalan Historical Memory: The Lived Experience on Maya
Women at War.” Oregon Review of International Law 15, no. 2 (2013): 205224.
Arias, Arturo and Claudia Milian. “US Central Americans: Representations, Agency and
Communities.” Latino Studies 11, no. 2 (2013): 131. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.1.
Arregui, Eder Velasco and Richard Roman. “Perilous Passage: Central American Migration
through Mexico.” In , edited by Ochoa, Enrique and Gilda L. Ochoa. Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2005.
Barker, Joanne. Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity. Durham [N.C.]: Duke
University Press, 2011.

172
Batz, Giovanni. “Maya Cultural Resistance in Los Angeles: The Recovery of Identity and
Culture among Maya Youth.” Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 3 (2014): 194-207.
doi:10.1177/0094582X14531727.
Bennett, Joyce. “Traje’s Future: Gendered Paths in Guatemala.” Journal of the Native American
and Indigenous Studies Association 2, no. 1 (2015): 67-89.
doi:10.5749/natiindistudj.2.1.0067.
Berlant, Lauren. “Trauma and Ineloquence.” Cultural Values 5, no. 1 (2001): 41-58.
doi:10.1080/14797580109367220.
Blackwell, Maylei. “Geographies of Indigeneity: Indigenous Migrant Women’s Organizing and
Translocal Politics of Place.” Journal of Latino Studies, Forthcoming 2017.
Blackwell, Maylei. “Lideres Campesinas: Nepantala Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the
Intersection of Gender and Globalization.” AZTLAN - A Journal of Chicano Studies 35, no.
1 (2010): 13.
Blockler, Carlos Guzman and Jean Loup Herbert. Guatemala: Una Interpretacion Historico-
Social. 2
nd
ed. Guatemala: Cholsamaj, 2002.
Bobb, Brooke. “A Proenza Schouler Alum Launches a Line made from Traditional Guatemalan
Textiles.” The New York Times Style Magazine (August 27, 2014, 2014).
Boj Lopez, Floridalma. “Maya Youth and Cultural Sustainability in the United States.” Chap. 14,
In Latinos and Latinas at Risk, edited by Gutierrez, Gabriel. Vol. 1, 151. Santa Barbara:
Greenwood, 2015.
Bradley, Harriet. “The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and found.” History of the Human
Sciences 12, no. 2 (1999): 107-122. doi:10.1177/09526959922120270.

173
Briggs, Laura. Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Brewer,
J.
and
Albert
Hunter.
Foundations
of
multimethod
research:
Synthesizing

styles.
2
nd

ed.
Thousand
Oaks:
SAGE
Publications,
2005.

Burns, Allan F. Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993.
Burton, Julianne. The Social Documentary in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1990.
Byrd, Jodi A. “Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by
Chadwick Allen (Review).” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15, no. 1 (2014).
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Cadena, Marisol de la. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru,
1919-1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Calderon, Dolores. “Uncovering Settler Grammars in Curriculum.” Educational Studies 50, no. 4
(2014): 313-338. doi:10.1080/00131946.2014.926904.
Camayd-freixas, Erik. “Interpreting After the Largest Ice Raid in US History: A Personal
Account.” Latino Studies 7, no. 1 (2009): 123-139. doi:10.1057/lst.2008.54.
Camus, Manuela. Ser Indigena En Ciudad De Guatemala. Guatemala City: FLASCO, 2002.
Carey, David. Engendering Mayan History: Kaqchikel Women as Agents and Conduits of the
Past, 1875-1970. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Carey, David and M. Gabriela Torres. “Precursors to femicide: Guatemalan Women in a Vortex
of Violence.” Latin American Research Review 45, no. 3 (2010): 142-164.

174
Castellanos, María Bianet, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera 1966, and Arturo J. Aldama 1964.
Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2012.
Charles, R. H. “Rethinking Indigenous Politics in the Era of the ‘Indio Permitido’.” NACLA
Report on the Americas 38, (2004): 16.
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London ;Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE, 2006.
Commission for Historical Clarification. Guatemala: Memory of Silence, Tzunil Natabal.
Guatemala, 1998.
Cojti Cuxil, Demetrio. “The Politics of Maya Revindication.” In Maya Cultural Activism, edited
by Fischer, E. F. and R. McKenna Brown. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Cotera, Maria Eugenia and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo. “Indigenous but not Indian?
Chicana/os and the Politics of Indigeneity.” In The World of Indigenous North America,
edited by Warrior, Robert, 549. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Coutin, Susan Bibler. Legalizing Moves: Salvadoran Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Crosby, Alison and M. Brinton Lykes. “Mayan Women Survivors Speak: The Gendered
Relations of Truth Telling in Postwar Guatemala.” International Journal of Transitional
Justice 5, no. 3 (2011): 456-476. doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijr017.
Cumes, Aura. “‘Sufrimos Vergüenza:’ Mujeres K´iche´ Frente a La Justicia Comunitaria En
Guatemala.” Desacatos no. 31 (2009): 99-114.
D’arcangelis, Carol Lynne. “Mayan Women and the Foro as a Political Collective: The Case of
the Guatemalan National Women’s Forum.” Canadian Woman Studies 22, no. 2 (2002):
126.

175
Das Gupta, Monisha and Sue P. Haglund. “Mexican Migration to Hawai‘i and US Settler
Colonialism.” Latino Studies 13, no. 4 (2015): 455-480. doi:10.1057/lst.2015.40.
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. 1
st
Vintage Books ed. New
York: Vintage Books, 1992; 1990.
Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25, no.
2 (1995): 9-63.
Dill, Kathleen. “International Human Rights and Local Justice in Guatemala: The Rio Negro
(Pak’Oxom) and Agua Fria Trials.” Cultural Dynamics 17, (2005): 323-350.
doi:10.1177/0921374005061993.
Driskill, Qwo-Li. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and
Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011.
Dunn, Alvis E. “A Cry at Daybreak: Death, Disease, and Defence of Community in a Highland
Ixil-Mayan Village.” Ethnohistory 42, (1995): 595-606.
Elwood, Sarah. “Beyond Cooptation Or Resistance: Urban Spatial Politics, Community
Organizations, and GIS-Based Spatial Narratives.” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 96, no. 2 (2006): 323-341. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.2006.00480.x.
———. “Negotiating Knowledge Production: The Everyday Inclusions, Exclusions, and
Contradictions of Participatory GIS Research.” The Professional Geographer 58, no. 2
(2006): 197-208. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9272.2006.00526.x.
Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial and Unión Nacional de Mujeres
Guatemaltecas. Tejidos que lleva el alma: Memoria de las mujeres Mayas sobrevivientes de
violación sexual durante el conflicto armado. Guatemala City: F&G Editores, 2009.

176
Espiritu, Yen Le. Home Bound: Filipino Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Esquit, Edgar. “Nationalist Contradictions: Pan-Mayanisms, Representations of the Past, and the
Reproduction of Inequaities in Guatemala.” In Decolonizing Native Histories:
Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas, edited by Mallon, Florencia and
Gladys McCormick, 196. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Estrada, Alicia Ivonne. “A’Co Nuq’: Maya Women in Post-1996 Guatemalan Cinematic
Productions.” Istmo 13, (2006): 12/13/2014.
———. “Ka Tzij: The Maya Diasporic Voices from Contacto Ancestral.” Latino Studies 11, no.
2 (2013): 208. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.5.
Estrada, William D. The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space. 1
st
ed. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2008.
Featherstone, Mike. “Archive.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2-3 (2006): 591-596.
Fernandez-Kelly, Patricia and Sara Curan. “Nicaraguans: Voices Lost, Voices found.” In
Ethnicities: Coming of Age in Immigrant America, edited by Rumbaut, Ruben and
Alejandro Portes, 127. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001.
Finley, Chris. “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull- Dyke):
‘Bringing Sexy Back’ and Out of Native Studies Closet.” In Queer Indigenous Studies:
Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature, edited by Driskill, Qwo-li, Chris
Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen, 32. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 2011.

177
Discovering Dominga. Directed by Flynn, Patricia, Mary Jo McConahay, KQED-TV (Television
station : San Francisco,Calif.), Berkeley Media LLC, Jaguar House Films and Independent
Television Service. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Media, 2002.
Forbes, Jack D. “Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos.” Daedalus 130, no. 4 (2001):
283-300.
Fox, Jonathan, and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado. Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United States.
La Jolla, Calif: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD/Center for Comparative
Immigration Studies, UCSD, 2004.
Foxen, Patricia. In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities. 1
st
ed. Nashville,
Tenn: Vanderbilt University Press, 2007.
Fraser, Nancy. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2009; 2008. doi:10.7312/fras14680.
Fregoso, Rosa Linda and Cynthia L. Bejarano. Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas.
Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2010.
García, María Cristina. Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United
States, and Canada. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
García, María Luz. “The Long Count of Historical Memory: Ixhil Maya Ceremonial Speech in
Guatemala.” American Ethnologist 41, no. 4 (2014): 664.
Godoy-Paiz, Paula. “Not just ‘Another Woman’: Femicide and Representation in Guatemala”
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 17, no. 1 (2012): 88-109.
doi:10.1111/j.1935-4940.2012.01192.x.
Goeman, Mishuana. “Eastern Oceania: Los Angeles Region Canoe Societies.” (2015).

178
———. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping our Nations. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013.
Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson. Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights. New
Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2007.
Gómez-Barris, Macarena. Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Gómez-Barris, Macarena and Licia Fiol-Matta. “Introduction: Las Américas Quarterly.”
American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2014): 493.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008. doi:10.5749/j.ctttt4hp.
Grandin, Greg. The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000.
Grandin, Greg, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, and Elizabeth Oglesby. The Guatemala Reader:
History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Gray, Herman and Macarena Gómez-Barris. Toward a Sociology of the Trace. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010. doi:10.5749/j.ctttsvmb.
Guatemala, Archidiocese of. Guatemala: Never again! Orbis Books, 1999.
Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole Marie. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican
National Imaginaries. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2011.
Hagan, Jacqueline Maria. Deciding to be Legal: A Maya Community in Houston. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994.

179
Hale, Charles R. “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the
Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology 21, (2006):
96-120. doi:10.1525/can.2006.21.1.96.
———. Mas Que Un Indio = More than an Indian : Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal
Multiculturalism in Guatemala. 1
st
ed. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press,
2006.
———. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. doi:10.1525/j.ctt1pncnt.
Hall, John W. Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War. Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 2009; 2010.
Hall, Lisa Kahaleole. “Navigating our Own ‘Sea of Islands’: Remapping a Theoretical Space for
Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism.” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 15-38.
doi:10.1353/wic.0.0038.
———. “Which of these Things is Not Like the Other: Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders
are Not Asian Americans, and all Pacific Islanders are Not Hawaiian.” American Quarterly
67, no. 3 (2015): 727.
Hamilton, Nora and Norma Stoltz Chinchilla. Seeking Community in a Global City :
Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2001.
Hanlon, Catherine Nolin and Finola Shankar. “Gendered Spaces of Terror and Assault: The
Testimonio of REMHI and the Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala.”
Gender, Place & Culture 7, no. 3 (2000): 265-286. doi:10.1080/713668875.

180
Harman, R. “Intergenerational Relations among Maya in Los Angeles.” 156-173. Washington
D.C.: American Anthropological Associations, 1996.
Harris, Cole. “How did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire.” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (2004): 165-182. doi:10.1111/j.1467-
8306.2004.09401009.x.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Hartviksen, Julia. “Towards a Historical Materialist Analysis of Femicide in Post-Conflict
Guatemala.” ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1995.
Hernandez Castillo, R. Aida. “Indigeneity as a Field of Power: Multiculturalism and Indigenous
Identities in Political Struggles.” In The Sage Handbook of Identities, edited by Wetherell,
Margaret and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 379. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2010.
doi:10.4135/9781446200889.n21.
Hiller, Patrick T., J. P. Linstroth, and Paloma Ayala Vela. “‘I Am Maya, Not Guatemalan, nor
Hispanic’-the Belongingness of Mayas in Southern Florida.” Forum: Qualitative Social
Research 10, no. 3 (2009).
Historical Timeline of Los Angeles. Accessed May 25, 2016.
http://www.discoverlosangeles.com/blog/historical-timeline-los-angeles.
Hoelscher, Steven. “Angels of Memory: Photography and Haunting in Guatemala City.”
Geojournal 73, no. 3 (2008): 195-217. doi:10.1007/s10708-008-9203-3.

181
Hunt, Sarah. “Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Politics of Embodying a Concept.” Cultural
Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014): 27-32. doi:10.1177/1474474013500226.
Isaki, Bianca. “State Conservation as Settler Colonial Governance at Ka’Ena Point, Hawai’i .”
Environmental and Earth Law Journal no. 3 (2013): 57.
Jacobs, Margaret D. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the
Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Jung, Patrick J. “Black Hawk War (1832).” In The Encyclopedia of War, edited by Martel,
Gordon: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2011.
———. The Black Hawk War of 1832. Vol. 10. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
Kasinitz, Philip. Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age. New York
:Cambridge, Mass: Russell Sage Foundation ;Harvard University Press, 2008.
Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and
Indigeneity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
King, Tiffany. Labor’s Aphasia: Toward Antiblackness as Constitutive of Settler Colonialism.
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 2014.
Knopp, Larry and Michael Brown. “Queering the Map: The Productive Tensions of Colliding
Epistemologies.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98, no. 1 (2008): 40-
58. doi:10.1080/00045600701734042.
Konefal, Betsy. “Subverting Authenticity: Reinas Indígenas and the Guatemalan State, 1978.”
Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 1 (2009): 41-72. doi:10.1215/00182168-2008-
044.

182
Krouse, Susan Applegate, Heather Howard-Bobiwash. Keeping the Campfires Going: Native
Women’s Activism in Urban Communities. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Kwan, Mei-Po. “Affecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotion.”
The Professional Geographer 59, no. 1 (2007): 22-34.
———. “Feminist Visualization: Re-Envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic
Research.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 4 (2002): 645-661.
doi:10.1111/1467-8306.00309.
Laplante, Lisa J. “Memory Battles: Guatemala’s Public Debates and the Genocide Trial of Jose
Efrain Rios Montt.” Quinnipiac Law Review 32, no. 3 (2014): 621.
Lebaron, Alan. “When Latinos are Not Latinos: The Case of Guatemalan Maya in the United
States, the Southeast and Georgia.” Latino Studies 10, (2012): 179. doi:10.1057/lst.2012.8.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, OX, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA:
Blackwell, 1991.
Levitt, Peggy and Nina Glick Schiller. “Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social
Field Perspective on Society.” International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 1002-1039.
doi:10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x.
Little, Walter E. Mayas in the Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization, and Cultural Identity.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Loperena, Christopher Anthony. “Conservation by Racialized Dispossession: The Making of an
Eco-Destination on Honduras’s North Coast.” Geoforum 69, (2, 2016): 184-193.
Loucky, James. “Maya in a Modern Metropolis: Establishing New Lives and Livelihoods in Los
Angeles.” In The Maya Diaspora: Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives, 214.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

183
Loucky, James and Marilyn Moors. “The Maya Diaspora: Introduction.” In The Maya Diaspora:
Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives, edited by Loucky, James and Marilyn Moors.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
Loucky, James, Marilyn M. Moors 1934, and Inc ebrary. The Maya Diaspora: Guatemalan
Roots, New American Lives. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
Lovell, W. George. “The Archive that Never was: State Terror and Historical Memory in
Guatemala.” Geographical Review 103, no. 2 (2013): 199-209. doi:10.1111/gere.12009.
Lutz, Christopher H. and W. G. Lovell. “Survivors on the Move: Maya Migration in Time and
Space.” In The Maya Diaspora: Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives, edited by Loucky,
James and Marilyn M. Moors, 11-34. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.
Lyons, Scott Richard. X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010.
Macleod, Morna. “Mayan Dress as Text: Contested Meanings %J Development in Practice.” 14,
(2004): 680-689.
Massey, Doreen B. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994.
Mattiace, Shannan L. and Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola. “Yucatec Maya Organizations in San
Francisco, California: Ethnic Identity Formation Across Migrant Generations.” Latin
American Research Review 50, no. 2 (2015): 201.
McWilliams, Carey. Southern California: An Island on the Land. 1
st
Peregrine Smith ed. Santa
Barbara [Calif.]: Peregrine Smith, 1973.
Menjívar, Cecilia. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000.

184
Menjívar, Cecilia and Leisy Abrego. Legal Violence in the Lives of Immigrants: How
Immigration Enforcement Affects Families, Schools, and Workplaces: Center for American
Progress, 2012.
Menjívar, Cecilia, and Néstor Rodriguez. When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and
Technologies of Terror. 1
st
ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
Meyer, M. A. “Indigenous and Authentic: Hawaiian Epistemology and the Triangulation of
Meaning.” In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Denzin, N. K.,
Y. S. Lincoln and L. T. and Smith. California: Sage Publications, 2008.
Mike, Hughes. “Local Woman Helps Cousin Reveal Horrific Past.” Lansing State Journal, 2003.
Minh-Ha, Trinh T. “Documentary Is/Not a Name.” October 52, (1990): 77-98.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses.” Feminist Review 30, no. 1 (1988): 61-88. doi:10.1057/fr.1988.42.
Montejo, Victor. Maya Intellectual Renaissance : Identity, Representation, and Leadership. 1
st

ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
Moore, Anna W. and Nicholas A. Perdue. “Imagining a Critical Geopolitical Cartography.”
Geography Compass 8, no. 12 (2014): 892-901.
Musalo, Karen and Blaine Bookey. “Crimes without Punishment: An Update on Violence
Against Women and Impunity in Guatemala.” Social Justice 40, no. 4 (2014): 106.
Nepstad, Sharon Erickson. Convictions of the Soul: Religion, Culture, and Agency in the Central
America Solidarity Movement. Oxford ;New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
———. “Oppositional Consciousness among the Privileged: Remaking Religion in the Central
America Solidarity Movement.” Critical Sociology 33, no. 4 (2007): 661-688.
doi:10.1163/156916307X210982.

185
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Refugee Memories and Asian American Critique.” Positions: East Asia
Cultures Critique 20, no. 3 (2012): 911-942.
Nicholls, Walter, author. The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement
Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2013.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991.
Nimatuj, Irma Alicia VelÃ¡squez. Transnationalism and Maya Dress. Vol. 2009. Brooklyn:
Global Security and Cooperation, 2006.
O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. N -
New ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. doi:10.5749/j.cttttjpw.
O’Donnell, Rachel. “We were Different then”: Indigenous Women in Rural Guatemala and the
“War-Widow” Category.” Canadian Woman Studies 27, no. 1 (2008): 145.
Otzoy, Irma. “Maya Clothing and Identity.” In Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, edited by
Fischer, Edward F. and R. McKenna Brown. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997.
Pacenza, Matt. “A People Damned.” Multinational Monitor 17, (1996): 8-12.
Padilla, Yajaira M. “The Central American Transnational Imaginary: Defining the Transnational
and Gendered Contours of Central American Immigrant Experience.” Latino Studies 11, no.
2 (2013): 150. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.2.
Palmer, Mark H. “Engaging with Indigital Geographic Information Networks.” Futures 41, no. 1
(2009): 33-40. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2008.07.006.

186
Palmer, Mark and Robert Rundstrom. “GIS, Internal Colonialism, and the U.S. Bureau of Indian
Affairs.” Association of American Geographers.Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 103, no. 5 (2013): 1142.
Parker, Brenda. “Constructing Community through Maps? Power and Praxis in Community
Mapping.” The Professional Geographer 58, no. 4 (2006): 470-484. doi:10.1111/j.1467-
9272.2006.00583.x.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered
Woes. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Peñalosa, Fernando. “Trilingualism in the Barrio: Mayan Indians in Los Angeles.” Language
Problems and Language Planning 10, (1986): 23.
Perla, Héctor. “Central American Counterpublic Mobilization: Transnational Social Movement
Opposition to Reagan’s Foreign Policy Toward Central America.” Latino Studies 11, no. 2
(2013): 167. doi:10.1057/lst.2013.3.
———. “Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador Vencerá: Central American Agency in the Creation
of the U.S.: Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement.” Latin American Research
Review 43, no. 2 (2008): 136-158. doi:10.1353/lar.0.0011.
Philips, Sloan. “The Indian Child Welfare Act in the Face of Extinction.” American Indian Law
Review 21, no. 2 (1997): 351-364.
Pidduck, Julianne. “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies 15, no. 3 (2009): 441.
Popkin, Eric. “The Emergence of Pan-Mayan Ethnicity in the Guatemalan Transnational
Community Linking Santa Eulalia and Los Angeles.” Current Sociology 53, (2005): 675-
706.

187
———. “Guatemalan Mayan Migration to Los Angeles: Constructing Transnational Linkages in
the Context of the Settlement Process.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, (1999): 267-289.
Portes, Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second
Generation. Berkeley :New York: University of California Press ;Russell Sage Foundation,
2001.
Portes, Alejandro and Min Zhou. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its
Variants.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530, no. 1
(1993): 74-96. doi:10.1177/0002716293530001006.
Prieto-Carrón, Marina, Marilyn Thomson, and Mandy Macdonald. “No More Killings! Women
Respond to Femicides in Central America.” Gender & Development 15, no. 1 (2007): 25-40.
doi:10.1080/13552070601178849.
Pulido, Laura, Laura R. Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng. A People’s Guide to Los Angeles. 1
st
; 1
ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. doi:10.1525/j.ctt1pnq23.
Radcliffe, Sarah A. “Viva”: Women and Popular Protest in Latin America. London ; New York:
Routledge, 1993.
Ramirez, Renya K. Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and
Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Raxche’ (Demetrio Rodriguez Guajan). “Maya Culture and the Politics of Development.” In
Maya Cultural Activism, edited by Fischer, E. F. and R. McKenna Brown. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1996.
Recovery of Historical Memory Project. Guatemala, Never again!. Maryknoll: The Human
Rights Office, Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1999.

188
Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. New York,
N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1987.
Renov, Michael, 1950. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Reyes, Barbara O. Private Women, Public Lives University of Texas Press, 2010.
doi:10.7560/718968.
Reynolds, Jennifer F. “(be)Laboring Childhoods in Postville, Iowa.” Anthropological Quarterly
86, no. 3 (2013): 851-889. doi:10.1353/anq.2013.0044.
Rifkin, Mark. Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American
Renaissance. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
doi:10.5749/j.ctt6wr811.
Rivera-Salgado, Gaspar. “Mixtec Activism in Oaxacalifornia: Transborder Grassroots Political
Strategies.” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 9 (1999): 1439-1458.
doi:10.1177/0002764299042009016.
Rocha, Carolina and Georgia Seminet. Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books, 2014.
Rodriguez, Ana Patricia. “The Fiction of Solidarity: Transfronterista Feminisms and Anti-
Imperialist Struggles in Central American Transnational Narratives.” Feminist Studies
[H.W.Wilson - SSA] 34, no. ½ (2008): 199.
Rodríguez, Ana Patricia. Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories,
Literatures, and Cultures. 1
st
ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
Rosenthal, Nicolas G. Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in
Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
doi:10.5149/9780807869994_rosenthal.

189
Rumbaut, Ruben G. “The Crucible within: Ethnic Identity, Self-Esteem, and Segmented
Assimilation among Children of Immigrants.” International Migration Review 28, (1994):
748-794.
Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the
United States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016; 2015.
Sanford, Victoria. Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. 1
st
ed. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; 2005. doi:10.1057/9781403973375.
Saranillio, Dean Itsuji. “Colliding Histories: Hawai‘i Statehood at the Intersection of Asians
“Ineligible to Citizenship” and Hawaiians “Unfit for Self-Government”.” Journal of Asian
American Studies 13, no. 3 (2010): 283-309. doi:10.1353/jaas.2010.0009.
———. “Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and
Indigenous Difference.” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3-04 (2013): 280-294.
doi:10.1080/2201473X.2013.810697.
Seminet, Georgia. “A Child’s Voice, A Country’s Silence: Ethnicity, class, and gender in El
Silencio de Neto.” In Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America:
Children and Adolescents in Film edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet, 63, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism.
Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2004.
Simpson, Audra. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, â€˜Voiceâ€™ and Colonial
Citizenship.” Junctures 9, (2007): 14.

190
Speed, Shannon. “At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically
Engaged Activist Research.” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 66-76.
doi:10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.66.
Speed, Shannon. Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas.
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Steigenga, Timothy J., Manuel A. Vásquez, and Philip J. Williams. A Place to be: Brazilian,
Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida’s New Destinations. New Brunswick, N.J:
Rutgers University Press, 2009.
Stephen, Lynn. Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Stuelke, Patricia. “The Reparative Politics of Central America Solidarity Movement Culture.”
American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2014): 767-790. doi:10.1353/aq.2014.0058.
Suarez-Orozco, M. Central American Refugees and U.S. High Schools: A Psychological Study of
Motivation and Achievement. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.
Tascon, Sonia. “Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics: Whose Face?”
Human Rights Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2012): 864-883. doi:10.1353/hrq.2012.0057.
Tascón, Sonia M., author. Human Rights Film Festivals: Activism in Context. New York;
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Tejada, Karen. “Transplanting the Organizing Seed: Seasoned Activists’ Political Habitus and
the Transnational Social Field.” Latino Studies 13, no. 3 (2015): 339-357.
doi:10.1057/lst.2015.32.

191
Telles, Edward Eric, and Vilma Ortiz. Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans,
Assimilation, and Race. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008.
Trask, Haunani-Kay. “Settlers of Color and “Immigrant” Hegemony: “Locals” in Hawai’i.”
Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 1.
Trask, Haunani-Kay. “Settlers of Color and “Immigrant” Hegemony: “Locals” in Hawai’i.”
Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 1-24. doi:10.17953/amer.26.2.b31642r221215k7k.
Tuck, Eve and Marcia McKenzie. Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods. Vol.
9. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization :
Indigeneity 1, no. 1 (2012).
Varagur, Krithika. “Mexico Prevents Indigenous Designs from being Culturally Appropriated —
again.” The Huffington Post, Latino Voices (2016).
Velasco, Natalie Jo. “The Guatemalan Femicide: An Epidemic of Impunity.” Law and Business
Review of the Americas 14, (2008): 397-875.
Vera-Rosas, Gretel. “Regarding ‘the Mother of Anchor-Children’: Towards an Ethical Practice
of the Flesh.” E-Misférica: Decolonial Gesture 11, no. 1 (2014).
Vera-Rosas, Gretel H. “The Breaking and Remaking of Everyday Life: Illegality, Maternity and
Displacement in the Americas.”Los Angeles, California, 2013.
Wahlberg, Malin. Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology. Vol. 21; 21. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Wakida, Patricia. LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas. Berkeley, California: Heyday, 2015.
Walker, Chantal R. “Piyahu Nadu - Land of Flowing Waters: The Water Transfer from Owens
Valley to Los Angeles 1913-1939.” ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014.

192
Warren, Kay B. Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala.
Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Way, John T. The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development and the Making of Modern
Guatemala. Durham ;London: Duke University Press, 2012.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London ;New York: Verso,
2007.
Wellmeier, Nancy. “Rituals of Resettlement: Identity and Resistance among Maya Refugees.”
Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 1 (1995): 43-60. doi:10.1111/j.0022-
3840.1995.2901_43.x.
Wellmeier, Nancy J. “Santa Eulalia’s People in Exile: Maya Religion, Culture, and Identity in
Los Angeles.” In , 97: Temple UP, 1998.
William J. Bauer, Jr. “The Giant and the Waterbaby: Paiute Oral Traditions and the Owens
Valley Water Wars.” Boom: A Journal of California 2, no. 4 (2012): 104-117.
doi:10.1525/boom.2012.2.4.104.
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide
Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409. doi:10.1080/14623520601056240.
Worley, Paul. “Pan-Maya and “Trans-Indigenous”: The Living Voice of the Chilam Balam in
Victor Montejo and Leslie Marmon Silko.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 28, no. 1
(2016): 1-20. doi:10.5250/studamerindilite.28.1.0001.
Xinachtli. “Xinachtli Profile.” Accessed August 1, 2015.
https://callink.berkeley.edu/organization/xinaxtli/about

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Borderland visualities: technologies of sight and the production of the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands

PDF

Spaces of violence: indigenous figuration and Los Angeles colonial culture

PDF

Writing exile: Vietnamese literature in the diaspora

PDF

From Citrus Belt to Inland Empire: race, place, and mobility in Southern California, 1880-2000

PDF

Bastard diasporas: illegitimacy, exile, and U.S. Cuban cultural politics

PDF

Return engagement: contemporary art's traumas of modernity and history in diasporic Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh

PDF

AIDS and its afterlives: race, gender, and the queer radical imagination

PDF

The prisoner's cinema: film culture in the penal press before 1960

PDF

Stepping out on faith: representing spirituality in African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement

PDF

Colonial brews: café and power in the Américas

PDF

Conditions of belonging: life, historical preservation and tourism development in the making of Pelourinho-Maciel, Salvador da Bahia, 1965-1985

PDF

The somnambulist's hour: unruly bodies and unruly modernism, 1913-1947

PDF

Racial ambivalence in literatures of the Americas: mixed-race subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

PDF

Gut cultures: fat matter(s) in genealogies of health, nation, and empire

PDF

The poetics of reemergence: psetry, subjectivity, and political violence in the neoliberal age

PDF

Reorienting Asian America: racial feeling in a multicultural era

PDF

"As shelters against the cold": women writers of the Black Arts and Chicano movements, 1965-1978

PDF

Mechanisms of (in)visibility: Korean militarized subjects, critical sensing, and the project of decolonization

PDF

Sensing fascism in America: Thomas Mann in Los Angeles

PDF

Passing notes in class: listening to pedagogical improvisations in jazz history

Asset Metadata

Creator Boj Lopez, Floridalma (author)

Core Title Mobile archives of indigeneity: the Maya diaspora and cultural production

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 06/20/2019

Defense Date 04/12/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag archives,Guatemala,immigration,indigeneity,indigenous archives,Mayan,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gomez-Barris, Macarena (committee chair), Blackwell, Maylei (committee member), Sanchez, George (committee member), Serna, Laura Isabel (committee member)

Creator Email bojlopez@gmail.com,flima@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-387596

Unique identifier UC11258934

Identifier etd-BojLopezFl-5432.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-387596 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BojLopezFl-5432.pdf

Dmrecord 387596

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Boj Lopez, Floridalma

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA