A’Co Nuq’ : Maya Women in Post-1996 Guatemalan Cinematic Productions
California State University, Northridge
This essay examines how the feature film Ixcan (1998), directed by Henrique Goldman, and the documentaries Discovering Dominga (2002), co-produced by Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo McConahay, as well as Ixoq (2006), directed by Manuel Felipe Pérez, construct post-war Guatemala.1 I study how the films address Maya women’s experiences with economic, political subordination and struggles. The films, demonstrate the ways in which Maya women (re)defined home/land as they returned “home” to Guatemala and/or to their local communities following the signing of the peace accords. I contend that in the process of reconstruction Maya women’s re-articulation of the notions of family and home/land continue to be central in creating social and political change.
Several studies by feminists, particularly Western feminists, tend to engage their debates around what they consider are the separation between the “private” and the “public.” The “private,” often defined as the space of the home and family, and the “public” as aligned with the liberal state and its apparatus. Catharine A. MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) embodies the articulation of feminist frameworks that focus on the home, the private and the public as spaces that are gendered. For MacKinnon, the “private” is constructed in opposition to the “public,” represented in institutional spaces like the “government” and the “state” (1989: 187). Chicana feminists, like Rosa Linda Fregoso, challenge the tendency in Western Feminist scholarship that collapse what is outside of the “home” (the private) into a single all-encompassing notion of the “public sphere.” For Fregoso, who finds Nancy Fraser’s Unruly Practices (1991) useful in her study of Chicana working-class women, the “private” consists of more than “home” since the “private” also encompasses both an official economy of paid employment as well as the family.
In a similar effort, my analysis of Ixcan (1998), Discovering Dominga (2002) and Ixoq (2006) challenges conventional definitions of family, home, private and public. In my reading of the films, I suggest that the testimonies given by the Maya womenforce us to complicate and expand the concepts of “family” and “home.” This is particularly evident in the ways the Maya women protagonists actively construct and contest theses spaces in post-1996 Guatemala. Ixcan illustrates the conflictive return home for a former guerrilla Maya woman militant. While in Discovering Dominga the concept of home and family is articulated through Denese Becker/Dominga Sic Ruiz’s return to Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, the place of her birth. Fifteen-years after being adopted by a US family, wanting to reconstruct her childhood history, she is unable to reconnect with her extended family because of her inability to speak in Maya-Achí and Spanish, the languages of “home.” In the documentary Ixoq, we see how the notion of home/land and family is re-articulated and constructed in the film’s illustration of Maya women’s political participation in a variety of Guatemalan social and political spaces. The documentary articulates a strong sense of collectiveness through the incorporation of several testimonies, voices, and proclamations and highlights Maya women’s active participation in civil society during the armed conflict and in the post-war period.
The genre and production of Ixcan (1998), Discovering Dominga (2002),and Ixoq (2006) differ but they also share important similarities. The films situate Maya women at the center of their productions. In so doing, they address the social conditions of Maya women both in and outside of Guatemala. At the same time, they make visible the active social and political participation of Maya women in the pos-war period. The films’ illustration of the national reconstruction process highlights the importance of historical memory not just for Guatemalans but also for the international community. The films Ixcan and Discovering Dominga do so by focusing on the massacres of Maya communities, by the Guatemalan military, in the nineteen-eighties.2 On the other hand, in Ixoq we see an articulation of a historical memory through the documentary’s emphasis on the active participation of Maya women in the revolutionary movements and their struggles within these politically progressive spaces.
Ixoq (2006) is a documentary produced, directed, and written by Manuel Felipe Pérez, a Maya-Achí filmmaker and activist living in Los Angeles, California. The documentary incorporates a multiplicity of Maya women voices and illustrates the active political and social participation of Maya women during the armed conflict and post-war periods. Unlike Ixcan (1998) and Discovering Dominga (2002), produced mainly for an international audience, Ixoq’sintended audiences are Guatemalans living in and outside of the region. The film forces Guatemalans to critically examine their history and society by making visible the systematic marginalization of Maya women. Ixoq draws attention to the ways Maya women, via their cultural practices, contest colonial legacies still present in Guatemala. The film highlights Maya women’s agency by inserting a variety of images where women are marching in the streets claiming their rights, organizing in their local communities, writing, teaching and standing in large public spaces speaking about indigenous rights. These images situate Maya women as active political and historical subjects.
Ixcan (1998) is written, produced and directed by Henrique Goldman, a Brazilian of Jewish parents and a journalist by trade. Although Ixcan is a fiction-feature it contains various documentary elements and articulates a strong sense of realism.3 Ixcan is filmed entirely in Guatemala. The film is both Maya-K’iche’ and Spanish with English subtitles. The three Maya women protagonist are not professional actresses and had never acted before the filming of Ixcan.4 However, these women actively collaborated in the production of the film.5 Movimondo and the European Commission’s Humanitarian Office, which worked in the 1990s in the Ixcán region of the department of El Quiché in Guatemala, financed the cinematic production of Ixcan. The Commission’s Humanitarian Office helped Mayans resettle on their land after the signing of the Peace of Accords on December 29, 1996.
Discovering Dominga (2002) is a documentary co-produced by US journalists Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo McConahay. The documentary first aired in the United States on July 8, 2003, on the Public Broadcast System (PBS). After several screenings on PBS the documentary was released by HBO in August 2003, and allowed for a larger Guatemalan audience with access to cable television, to view Discovering Dominga. The documentary in Guatemala was received with mixed reviews.6 Dominga Sic Ruiz, the protagonist in the documentary, was first introduced to Guatemalans in two interviews by the widely read newspaper Prensa Libre. The newspaper interviews published on August 3 and November 7, 2003, a day before the two HBO releases of Discovering Dominga in Guatemala, publicized the film to a broad Guatemalan audience.
The conceptualization of Discovering Dominga (2002) is informed by the experiences of a Maya-Achí Guatemalan woman, Dominga Sic Ruiz, raised in the US by her adopted Anglo-American family in Angola, Iowa. The film traces Denese Becker’s (Dominga Sic Ruiz’s adopted name) personal history and her desire to uncover her Guatemalan family history. Thus, Ixcan (1998), Discovering Dominga and Ixoq (2006) remind us that Maya women’s struggles for liberation in Guatemala did not end with the signing of the peace accords but, rather, persist through the 1990s and present. In order to understand, however, the ways these films construct post-war Guatemala, and the personal histories of the Maya women protagonists, we must first situate the films in relation to 1980 film productions on Central America.
The Screening of 1980s Central America
Central Americans and solidarity groups abroad, simultaneously expressed the political commitment and urgency articulated in Central American testimonial literature of the 1980s, in the cinema of that period. Many of these cinema productions were committed in aiding the revolutionary process. For Latin American filmmakers, like Henrique Goldman, this was in part due to the influence of the “new” Latin American cinema. The “new” Latin American cinema emerged in the 1950s and continued through the early part of the 1990s. Film critic Ana M. López notes, in “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American Cinema” (1997), that Latin American filmmakers perceived the cinema “as a tool for demystification and revolution” (López, 1997: 308). Cinematic production was often connected to popular struggles in the region for political, economic and cultural liberation. The “new” Latin American cinema was an instrument for political and social change as well as a tool for consciousness-raising or to use Paulo Freire’s term concientización (López, 1997: 311). For López, “the New Latin American Cinema is not just a filmmaking movement; it is a social practice related to other movements struggling for the sociocultural, political and economic autonomy of Latin America” (López, 1997: 311). For these reasons, the “new” Latin American cinema stands in opposition and as a challenge to Hollywood productions.
In post-Vietnam and Watergate Hollywood, the Central American revolutionary movements offered liberal filmmakers the “action,” “adventure” and violence entrenched in wars. In numerous Hollywood productions, for example Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire (1983), John Milius’ Red Dawn (1984), Haskell Wexler’s Latino (1985), and Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986), they featured Central America during the 1980s and highlighted the spectacle of violent images of the civil wars. And as John King rightfully notes in Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (1990), “the North American [Hollywood] features were more concerned with the spectacle of images taken under fire, in the heat of battle: the complex and difficult tasks of national reconstruction were less interesting topics for consideration and also required a clearer political focus” (King, 1990: 232). The lack of interest, and political focus, by US filmmakers in illustrating the complexities of the Central American civil wars, and the revolutionary movements’ projects of national reconstruction, is also evident in more progressive, and independent, productions like Gregory Nava’s El Norte (1983).
Although Nava’s El Norte (1983) traces the horrific conditions of migration as the title suggests, North, for a Maya brother and sister fleeing 1980s Guatemala, the film continues to “lack discernible characteristics that might make them [the Maya brother and sister] something more than the objects’ of the rites of passage they are obliged to undergo” ( Kael, 1985: 99). These characters, for Pauline Kael, do not demonstrate any form of agency, or subjectivity, but are objects in their forced migration to El Norte.7 Furthermore, El Norte reproduces ethnocentric conceptions of Mayans in Guatemala as “pre-modern peoples” who are in awe by the modern technologies found in the first world. This “pre-modern” representation of Maya peoples is established through numerous images where the main characters express astonishment at modern plumbing (flushing toilets) and technology (washing machines and telephones). These cinematic representations of Guatemalan Mayan peoples reinforce, for El Norte’s mostly US audience, the ethnocentric issues embedded in dichotomies like US/Third World, developed/underdeveloped, literate/illiterate, and civilized/uncivilized.
In a short section titled “Central America and the Caribbean: Movies’ in Big Brother’s Backyard,” in Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (1990), on Central American films cultural, critic John King notes that “the development of cinema in Central America is bound up with the growth of revolutionary movements in the last decade [1970-1980s], their successes and reversals” (King, 1990: 231). And thus, besides Hollywood feature films and the Latin American “new” cinema productions, there are numerous documentaries on the civil wars produced by US and European solidarity groups. These documentaries, much like Central American testimonials of the period, focused on bringing international attention to the political and economic repression in Central America since these events failed to appear in mainstream media sources.8 The documentaries, like the testimonials, functioned as vital tools for consciousness-raising. Similarly, they were instrumental in urgently calling for political aid and action to solidarity groups in the US and Europe.
The Guatemalan case shows that indigenous women are often at the center of many of the documentaries on the civil war. Some of these documentaries include: When the Mountains Tremble (1983), the documentary narrated by Rigoberta Menchú where she tells her story against the background of the civil war in Guatemala. Forging Peace in Guatemala (1985), traces the political participation of Maya women in the organization of mothers and widows of the disappeared, through the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (CONAVIGUA) as well as Dark Light of Dawn (1987); Caminos del Silencio (1987); The Houses are Full of Smoke (1987) and Todos Santos: The Survivors (1989), a documentary on the socio-political changes that take place during the civil war in the town of Todos Santos in the region of the Cuchumatan mountains.
Besides the Quincentennial,9 I attribute the illustration of Guatemala’s civil war through the images and voices of Maya women in the documentaries to two main factors: First, the wide spread attention and recognition of Rigoberta Menchú. Her testimonial and activism in the early 1980s brought to light the political and economic repression of “all poor Guatemalans” and, specifically, the oppression of Maya women. Additionally, in the 1980s, Menchú’s nomination and subsequent award of the Nobel Peace Prize made visible, to an international community, indigenous movements in the Americas.10
Second, I find that the documentaries on Guatemala situate Maya women images at the center of their productions because of the strong presence of women in US and European solidarity movements.11 It was these US and European women, influenced by the women’s movement, who wanted to hear, read, and see the experiences of Other women. In the context of the civil war period, the documentaries made the atrocities committed by US backed military and police forces in Guatemala visible to the rest of the world. The films examined continue this project in an effort to bring international awareness to one of Guatemala’s most violent periods in history: the massacres of Ixcán, Quiché and Río Negro. The need to remember Guatemala’s recent violent history in the post-war reconstruction process is central in all three films.
The Return and Reconstruction of “Home”
In the films under analysis, the concept of home in post-war Guatemala is complicated. They also contest conventional notions that confine women within a “traditional” home and its patriarchal family structure. This varied definition of home, and family structure is particularly evident in post-war Guatemala and its interconnection to the civil war that annihilated people’s homes, communities and family structures. The human rights report Guatemala: Never Again! (1999) notes that “[during the civil war] a series of trauma-related effects [on the family] that appear with moderate frequency: persecution, family breakdown, and forced separation” contributed to the breakdown of family and communal ties (1999: 6).12 I situate four spaces in the films where the concept of home is redefined: the domestic sphere, the ethno-cultural community, the nation-state, and the “in-between” space of “home/land” for US Guatemalans.
In the first space, the notion of home is situated within the domestic sphere, but no longer in relation to a patriarchal family structure. This is in part a result of the material conditions families adapted to during the civil war.13 Ixcan (1998) illustrates, the multiple socio-political issues a former guerrilla Maya woman combatant and her family faced when returning “home” and integrating back to civilian life. In Ixcan, the protagonist Natividad tells us that after she was raped by soldiers in the Guatemalan military her husband abandoned the family.14 Natividad joins the guerrilla while her mother raised her daughter, Encarnación. When Natividad returns home, after the demobilization process, the family she searches for is Abuelita (her mother) and Encarnación. Natividad becomes the head of her household when she rejoins them. Yet, her return “home,” both with her family and the larger Guatemalan “family” (nation), reveals a variety of internal and external conflicts. Natividad’s experience is illustrated in the numerous testimonies of former Guatemalan women combatants that address the ways which women were marginalized in Guatemalan society during the demobilization process.15
The discrimination that several female URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria Guatemalteca) combatants experienced during the reintegration process is based on their active participation in the guerrilla. This marginalization is not necessarily the case for ex-URNG male combatants. In Guatemala, (Ladino) men who fought in the revolution were often recognized for their heroic struggle (Luciak, 2001: 238). Former male combatants as well as the rise of male political figures representing the URNG in Guatemalan politics illustrate this acknowledgement, for example, in the publication of literary narratives.16 However, many female combatants, after the demobilization process, were outcast by their parents, siblings, community members, and their children. Latin American scholar, Ilja Luciak’s After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala (2001) explains:
When we examine the reintegration process through the lens of gender, it is evident that it was especially difficult for women, who suffered both open and hidden forms of discrimination. Women paid a high price for being perceived as having violated societal norms by joining the armed struggle. Female combatants, seeking to retake their place in family structures they had abandoned during the war, were treated as outcasts by their own parents, siblings and children. They were accused of having neglected their children and having chosen the revolutionary struggle over their families. (2001: 238)
The character Natividad represents many of these experiences, since she continuously expresses her desires to rejoin her family and reunite with the daughter she was forced to leave behind. Yet, as we see through the relationship between Natividad and her daughter Encarnación, many of the former guerrilla female combatants’ children did not pardon their absence from the family. Ilja Luciak notes that at times the situation was further complicated, because often children no longer recognized their mothers due to the physical injuries the women experienced during war (2001: 239).
In the post-war period, women’s efforts in the revolutionary movement is often not seen by many Guatemalans as a heroic act, but rather as an immoral choice that stood against traditional family structures. This is one of the continuous struggles voiced by Encarnación who argues, “a mother does not leave her child abandoned like she did with me when I was little.” Encarnación, and in extent Guatemalan society, does not consider the reasons why ex-combatants were not present to raise their children. It is these women’s choice and active role in the revolutionary movement that is condemned since they challenged their traditional and expected roles in Guatemalan social structures. After the war, many of the women were in fact reluctant to take on traditional gender roles complicating these women’s roles in their families and Guatemalan society.17
From the beginning of Ixcan (1998), we are introduced to Natividad’s longing for her family and, particularly, her daughter. Before reaching the family Natividad returns to Ixcán, with a plow and machete in hand, and digs underneath a large Ceiba tree in search of her piedra de moler, or grinding stone, used to make tortillas.18 When Natividad finally reaches her family, living in a shantytown on the outskirts of Guatemala City, the moment is anticlimactic. Her daughter, Encarnación, refuses to embrace Natividad, yet the anger, pain and disappointment felt by the women is not yet overtly articulated. Encarnación, instead, demonstrates her frustration with her mother’s sudden presence in the family by ignoring Natividad. And hence, Encarnación makes Natividad’s presence within the family’s domestic sphere “invisible.”
Encarnación, not interested in reconnecting with her mother, or acknowledging Natividad’s presence within the family, asks why her father is not with them. Natividad explains to Encarnación that her father abandoned the family during the civil war. Encarnación’s absent father, and the disruption of a traditional family structure, was a common occurrence during the civil war. According to Ilja Luciak, men deserted their families largely for two main reasons: they started new relationships with younger women in the guerrilla camps or, as is the case with Natividad, they abandoned their families after their wife was raped repeatedly by the military (2001: 239). In the report Guatemala: Never Again!19 we are told that the rape of women by soldiers was another way the military attempted to “control and humiliate families and their communities. The soldiers would rape these ‘enemy’ women [in public] and burn their homes to express the soldier’s scorn towards those communities and the military’s victory”20 (1999: 96). The military’s systematic violence waged against the civilian population ruptured traditional family structures and blurred the “privacy” of home. That is, home/family became, during the civil war, a space systematically controlled and destroyed publicly by the military state. It is the Guatemalan military state’s institutionalized violence that metaphorically and literally seizes Encarnación’s parents’ from her home. The repression by the military state also erases Encarnación’s historical memory. Unable to locate her anger and pain within the larger national (family) context, Encarnación focuses her frustration on her mother. In their exchange, Natividad attempts to save Encarnación from her own painful history by reaffirming her maternal love for her daughter. Natividad, in short, attempts to construct a different family and home but Encarnación’s lack of a historical memory informs her resistance to her mother’s desires.
While making corn tortillas with Abuelita, Natividad asks her daughter, who sits on the bed with heavy make-up on, “Do you know why I abandoned you for all these years?”21 Without much interest and keeping her eyes on the television, Encarnación responds: “yes, because of the war.” Natividad, holding a tortilla in her hand, agrees with Encarnación and asks if she knows why the war happened in Guatemala. In this scene, Natividad provides Encarnación with another version of contemporary Guatemalan history. She situates the national history within a personal context and tries to locate Encarnación’s pain within a larger familial framework:
Well there was a war because we do not have sufficient access to land so that we can sustain ourselves, so that we can live with dignity, like human beings. But above all I went to fight for you so that you could have a better future and not live in the misery we currently live in. And for those reasons I left but I don’t want you think that I left because I didn’t love you, because it was precisely for the immense love that I have for you that I left to fight….I want us to think about our future together and return to our community together.22
Natividad’s decision to join the revolutionary movement is an act of love, but not a love for the nation, as it is often illustrated in guerrilla men testimonials, rather a maternal love that desires a life of dignity. Encarnación, bored with her mother’s narrative, walks away. Natividad’s explanations on the conditions that led to the thirty-six year civil war fail to clarify for Encarnación why the family continues to live marginalized from the larger Guatemalan society.
In the subsequent scene, Natividad, in an attempt to reconnect and show Encarnación her love, opens the bundle with the piedra de moler she has carried back from Ixcán. Hence, the film offers a second extension of the concept of home and family to an extended Maya community separate from the Ladino state. The piedra de moler she offers Encarnación is not only a gift for her daughter, but it is also the only material object saved from Ixcán. Natividad’s gift to Encarnación is a link to their personal and ethno-cultural history. The piedra de moler symbolizes their lives prior to their forced exile from Ixcán. Most importantly, the piedra de moler implies a connection for Natividad and Encarnación with their ancestors; since the making of corn tortillas is an ancient Mesoamerican practice.
The piedra de moler Natividad gives her daughter functions as a bridge between them and other Maya women like themselves. This is crucial, especially because Encarnación throughout the film articulates her “disgust” and “shame” towards “Indians.” Her internalized racism is illustrated in her refusal to wear a huipil and corte as her grandmother and mother do and instead wears dark punk-rock western clothing. At the same time, the audience is continuously presented with Encarnación’s derogative remarks about “Indians.” Encarnación, putting on make-up, denies any recollection of the piedra de moler she played with as a child. However, Natividad insists “but because we had to leave our community…when we left I had to bury the piedrecita[de moler] and now I had to return and search for it…I want to give it to you.”23 Encarnación takes the piedrecita de moler with little interest and places it on the side of bed.
The dialogue between Natividad and her daughter exposes the divergence that takes place in the family because of Natividad’s absence. This conflict is particularly heightened by Natividad’s participation in the guerrilla, which taints her and her daughter. Encarnación’s anger and the “asco” (revulsion) she aims at her mother, her ethno-cultural background and the “shitty shantytown with its shitty people” is a response to her marginalization.24 Encarnación tells Benedetta, the Italian filmmaker character, that she wants to live in the United States because “there are modern and fun people like you and I.”25 Her desire to leave her home/land, and her extended ethno-cultural home/community, is coupled with Encarnación’s yearning to participate in constructing her own home. For Encarnación, Guatemala, and its civil war, displaced her and her family while it also destroyed their home. The shantytown, where she and her grandmother live, is literally outcast from the rest of Guatemala. With the absence of her mother the revolution also abandoned her. Feeling displaced, Encarnación rejects the nation that marginalizes her, the mother that left as well as her ethno-cultural heritage.
In Guatemala the underlying conflict, the lack of access to land, that fueled the revolutionary movement for the majority of poor Mayans and Ladinos is not addressed in the peace accords.26 Thus, the mere presence of the accords did not succeed in transforming the institutionalized racism in Guatemala. Moreover, Ilja Luciak explains that in the post-war period:
a general problem for ex-combatants…were rising, unmet expectations. Many questioned whether their sacrifice had been worth it…their standard of living continued to be abysmal. In addition…female militants faced special challenges evident when one analyzes the implementation of the reinsertion programs… [since] women’s gender-specific needs were seldom taken into account. (2001: 238)
The film does not overtly question Natividad’s participation in the revolutionary movement, however, it is clear to the audience that Natividad and her family’s standard of living continues to be abysmal in the post-war period. After returning to their home(land), women like Natividad, the film suggests, remain invisible. Their invisibility is emphasized in the ways their material conditions worsen during and after the civil war. Although Natividad had limited resources before the civil war, she had a home and a community. In the post-war period she has no land, no job, and no connection to her ethno-cultural community. In addition, the displacement of Natividad’s family is further reinforced due to their marginalization in society as well as the Guatemalan government’s failure to fully implement the peace accords. From this invisible space, to which Natividad and her family are relegated, the only visible choice for Natividad’s daughter, Encarnación, is to “illegally” migrate North to the United States. Ixcan (1998) ends with Encarnación’s departure North and, with that journey, the further fragmentation of the family and community.
A third space that more explicitly explains and explores the concept of home/land is found in Discovering Dominga (2002). In the documentary, “homeland” is an in-between space, a hyphenated name, for Denese Becker/Dominga Sic Ruiz. The construction, and deconstruction, of Denese Becker/Dominga Sic Ruiz’s personal history and her return “home” is told through her fragmented memories, complemented with numerous voices and interpretations of linguistic interpreters, internet information on Guatemala, human rights lawyers, newspaper articles, a Spanish Catholic priest residing in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, community “tour” guides, and the translations of these voices. The in-between space of home/land is further illustrated through Denese Becker’s inability to communicate in either Spanish or Maya-Achí with members of her Maya community. At the same time, her return to Guatemala begins to make her isolation within the linguistic community of which she is a member in Iowa more visible.
The film forces us to remember that Denese Becker’s cultural and linguistic gap in Guatemala is interconnected to the systematic violence of the civil war. The report Guatemala: Never Again! explains:
Language was also affected when people were forced to leave their homes, either as exiles, refugees, or displaced in other communities, the city or in Communities of Peoples in Resistance (CPR). Many people had to learn another language, usually Spanish. The conventional language used to communicate became Spanish. Girls and boys began to forget their maternal language…The [Maya] women had difficulty making and using their traditional trajes [Maya clothing]. (1999:73)27
The historical experience of the civil war complicates Dense Becker’s ethno-cultural locations within Guatemala and the United States. In order for Denese Becker to survive in the United States, as well as for the one million displaced Guatemalans, they must learn the colonial language.28 Consequently, in Discovering Dominga, the camera is continuously crossing national borders taking us from Guatemala to Algona, Iowa, USA.
The documentary begins with Denese Becker’s voice remembering the events from the Río Negro massacre. Her voice is the background for the multiple images of Maya-Achí women crossing the river, cooking outside with firewood, and the darkness of the Guatemalan night. Sobbing, Denese Becker’s final words in the scene are: “that day [when the men of Río Negro where massacred] I would say I died inside.” The introduction of Guatemala, to the documentary’s mostly US audience, takes place through shots of Maya-Achí women performing traditional gender roles and the sight of the country’s darkness during nightfall. These initial images foreshadow a series of similar illustrations of Guatemala, which affirm the darkness and bloodshed in that nation within a sketched context of the political repression in the early 1980s.
The representation of Guatemala is followed by the presentation of the documentary’s title, one that reproduces a colonial “Othering.” That is, in using the concept of “discovering,” which the film suggests is towards “self” discovery, it constructs a serious colonial implication between the film’s mostly US audience and the Maya-Achí protagonist. After the introduction of the title, the film provides scenes from Algona, Iowa that show its green fields, quiet streets and rising sun. The position of such contrasting images, between the metaphorical depiction of nightfall in Guatemala and the sunrise in Iowa, produces a visual binary between the two nations that erases the complexities of both nations in relation to the 36-year Guatemalan civil war. The scenes facilitate a familiar translation of representations for its US viewers who see the “American heartland,” Algona, Iowa, with its quiet streets and flat green fields embodying “American innocence” and Guatemala, the Other, with its erratic valleys, darkness, poverty and victimized women.
Denese Becker’s adoption and arrival in Algona, Iowa, when she was eleven years old, was featured in the city’s newspaper. And though it is important to recognize that she tells us of her unsuccessful efforts to fit in with the community’s children, who often derogatorily call her “chink” thinking she is Chinese, is overshadowed by the numerous pictures of Dominga Sic Ruiz, now Denese Becker, growing up in Algona, Iowa. The photographs depict Denese Becker’s comfortable room with pictures of boy bands hanging on the walls, talking on the telephone, laughing, and posing for the camera and, in the background, we hear Denese Becker describing herself as “a typical American teenager in high school.” And then, the voice of her husband Blane Becker is background to the last series of photographs which show Denese and Blane Becker wearing white outfits on their wedding day.
The selection and place of these photographs functions in two ways: First, it negates the necessity to identify US complicity in the suffering and oppression of Maya women in Guatemala. At the same time, Denese Becker’s experiences of marginalization and racism in the United States are eclipsed by the multiple photographs of her “typical” (read happy) American teenage years that are juxtaposed with the horrific images of military boots, Maya women and children running in the Guatemalan highlands. The placement of these photographs permits the documentary’s US viewers to maintain an image of their homeland’s “innocence” in both domestic racial politics and its involvement in the establishment of repressive Guatemalan governments. Second, the array of photographs depicting Denese Becker’s comfortable life in the United States assist in the construction of a typical “American tale” of suffering, survival and the making of the “American dream.” In other words, Dominga Sic Ruiz, a survivor of repression and a victim of war, once adopted by American parents is able to live in and embody the American dream. This means having a home, two children, a career (as a manicurist), and a hard-working husband.
In this “American dream” Denese Becker is a “victim” whose mission to discover her Other self, Dominga Sic Ruiz, situates her as an object of a rites of passage she is obligated to undergo. The “American tale” does not have room for the Other to be critical, make choices and articulate a political consciousness. In this journey, it is Denese Becker’s adopted cousin Mary Purvis who holds the information that leads to her discovery of Dominga Sic Ruiz. Throughout the documentary, it is Mary Purvis and Blane Becker who sit in front of the computer searching the World Wide Web for historical background on the Río Negro massacre. In fact, it is Mary Purvis, through her research, who initiates the voyage in Discovering Dominga (2002), that leads Denese Becker on her mission to discover her Other self. It is Denese Becker’s adopted family, her cousin Mary Purvis and husband Blane Becker, who hold the intellectual tools and ability that facilitate Denese Becker’s rite of passage. Blane Becker and Mary Purvis possess the knowledge and political consciousness. Indeed, Denese Becker informs us that all her questions about Río Negro, and Guatemala, were posed to Mary Purvis who answered her inquiries “not skip[ping] a beat.” Similarly, when wanting to know more about contemporary politics in Guatemala, Denese Becker expresses her concerns to her husband Blane Becker. He, in turn, confesses:
I’ve never seen myself as a political activist, I was pretty happy with the status quo, but Denese is constantly asking me questions about the government as it was and now in Guatemala and so I am trying to figure these things out.
For Blane Becker, finding information on Guatemala for his wife Denese is about fulfilling his role as a husband and “provider,” in this case a provider of knowledge, rather than actively articulating a desire to transform unequal power relations in and outside of Guatemala. Similar to Blane Becker, who tries “to figure things out” for Denese Becker, it is Mary Purvis, who emails various organizations informing them that Denese Becker is a survivor of the massacre. This leads to a phone call from one of the Río Negro survivors stating that he knows Dominga Sic Ruiz and her family. The nameless survivor confirms that the family has also searched for Dominga Sic Ruiz. Mary Purvis tells us that “ten days later we were on the plane heading to Guatemala.” She explains that “[she] went along as an interpreter, as [Denese’s] cousin and as a friend.” Denese Becker/Dominga Sic Ruiz, we find out, needs an interpreter to translate for her in Guatemala since she is no longer able to speak Spanish and much less her native Maya-Achí. These representations of Denese Becker/Dominga Sic Ruiz, and her US allies, locate Maya women in Guatemala as the oppressed “Other” who can only be liberated by well-intentioned Westerners.
Because Dominga Sic Ruiz must learn to navigate in her adopted parents linguistic and cultural community when she returns home to Guatemala she cannot speak Maya-Achí or Spanish which, in turn, produces a cultural and linguistic alienation from her nation and ethno-cultural community. Consequently, Denese Becker arrives in Guatemala with an entourage of linguistic and cultural translators. The efforts to document for Denese Becker, and an international community, her long awaited family reunion produced a public spectacle. When Denese Becker, and company, arrive in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, they are welcomed with marimba music and speeches by members of the town who are aware that the event is being documented. The camera following Denese Becker focuses on her, who in contrast to Other Maya-Achí women in Rabinal, is wearing western clothes, stepping out of a sports utility vehicle. A tearful Denese Becker approaches the crowd, as the Maya women, children and men who have gathered at the steps of the town’s church watch her. A voice in Spanish is heard through a microphone: “Dominga, we welcome you to Rabinal, the land of your birth.” Cameras surround Denese Becker now Dominga Sic Ruiz. We hear women crying uncontrollably and Dominga Sic Ruiz asking “who are these people who want to see me?” Through Dominga Sic Ruiz’s interpreter, Mary Purvis, we find out that some of the Maya-Achí women sobbing are Dominga Sic Ruiz’s relatives. The camera captures only fragments of their face and hands.
The reunion scene ends with more images of crying Maya women. These reductive images confirm, as Chandra Talpe Mohanty argues in “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse”, a Western desire of situating women living in the third world as continuously suffering and oppressed (Mohanty 1991: 51-80). Dominga Sic Ruiz’s reunion with her Maya-Achí family fulfills the Western audience’s voyeuristic desire to view the life of the “Other” at a safe distance from which they can affirm a world view that situates women living “somewhere else,” in the third world, as victimized. However, it is important to note that the reunion between Dominga Sic Ruiz and her Maya-Achí family, though vastly different from others returning to Guatemala, does make the long awaited return “home” for Dominga Sic Ruiz, and the one million displaced Guatemalans like her, visible.
Dominga Sic Ruiz’s continuous migration, between Algona, Iowa and Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, after her decision in October 2001 to participate as a witness in the genocide case against General Efrain Ríos Montt, makes another cultural alienation visible for her. The personal and political connection she creates, through her collaboration with other Guatemalans giving testimony in the case against General Ríos Montt, allows Dominga Sic Ruiz to feel connected with her community in Guatemala and to overtly uncover her cultural isolation within her American (Iowa) home and family. Dominga Sic Ruiz tells us:
I am a little nervous about the genocide case but my testimony is to me important because I want to stand with my people. I am pretty torn in-between two worlds right now.
The in-between worlds, or homes, she inhabits ultimately forces her to question the ways she defines these spaces. In doing so, she is also critical of the ways she constructs her identity. Dominga Sic Ruiz’s last statement in the documentary, “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,” complicates our understanding of Maya women and their relation to their “native land” and culture. Dominga Sic Ruiz’s highly negotiated identity and cultural locations resist any automatic, and simplistic, construction of Maya women. She forces us to recognize the historical experiences that inform her ethnic identities. At the same time, the in-between space between the multiple homes that Dominga Sic Ruiz traverses exposes an important site for thousands of US Guatemalans, who like Dominga Sic Ruiz, “want to be a part [and are part] of both countries [the US and Guatemala].”
The documentary Ixoq (2006) by the Maya-Achí filmmaker Manuel Felipe Pérez articulates a notion of home/land that is a collective space where Maya women are active and central protagonists in the reconstruction process in Guatemala. While in Discovering Dominga (2002) the re-articulation of home/land, in post-war Guatemala, takes place via the voice of one protagonist, in Ixoq it is through multiple testimonial and textual voices that speak of this process. Similar to Maya women textiles, where the weaving of different color threads cross in a variety of directions and meet at others, the voices of ancient Maya texts as well as Maya women testimonial voices speaking in their local linguistic practices, cross each other and come together in the reconstruction of the Guatemalan social fabric.
Ixoq (2006) begins where both Ixcan (1998) and Discovering Dominga (2002) end. Both Ixcan and Discovering Dominga limit the centrality and vitality of the Maya movement in the reconstruction of the protagonists’ home/land. In Ixcan this is illustrated in the lack of Maya women’s active participation in the social and political reconstruction of Guatemala. The film emphasizes their marginalization from Guatemalan society and their attempts to survive as a family. The fragmented character of the family, since their hopes and desires are individualized and disconnected from each other, further stresses this struggle for survival in a country that overtly marginalizes Maya women. Natividad, for example, wants to reconstruct her “home” in Ixcan as well as the life she was forced to leave behind during the civil war. Her emphasis on this single aspiration keeps Natividad in the past and away from the present, which separates her from the rest of the family.
While in Discovering Dominga (2002) the political consciousness and activism of Maya women is simply suggested at the end of the documentary when Dominga Sic Ruiz, now literally divorced from her Anglo-American husband and the community he represents, begins to reconnect with her ethno-cultural community through her work in the genocide case against General Efrain Rios Montt. By contrast, the first image presented in Ixoq (2006) is of a Maya spiritual ceremony celebrating the Tzicolaj, the solstice, the rising of the sun. What emerges from this imagery is an affirmation to the centrality and hope the Maya movement creates in post-war Guatemala.29
Ixoq (2006) begins with a quote, in Spanish, from the Guatemalan Truth Commission which states, “since the independence of 1821 the economic, social and cultural structures [in Guatemala] have been extremely hierarchical, sustained and rooted in its colonial legacies…this has produced a state that is exclusionary and…racist.”30 The Truth Commission’s declaration at the beginning of the film makes visible the historical structures that continue to marginalize Maya women in post-war Guatemala. The image, that follows the Truth Commission’s statement, of a Maya ceremony performed at the front steps of a Catholic church, the embodiment of colonial power, illustrates the resistance of indigenous peoples to these inherently exclusionary systems. This is further highlighted by the ceremonial music that plays as the title of the film appears. In so doing, the documentary reveals that though these colonial legacies are still present in Guatemala, and are agents of indigenous oppression, they continue to be mediated and resisted by Maya cultural practices and political activism. At the same time, the film’s efforts to make visible multiple Maya women voices highlights their centrality within the Maya movement.
The insertion of several quotes from the Popol Wuj and the Anales de los Xahiles informs the audience of the moral function that the two texts continue to have within contemporary Maya communities. The incorporation of passages from these texts suggests that they also guide the documentary. At the beginning of the film, for example, the Popol Wuj’s proclamation that “they spoke, consulted with each other and meditated, they came into agreement, joined their words and thoughts,”31 asserts a strong sentiment to the importance of collective work in the Maya worldview. This is simultaneously made evident in the first scenes of the documentary where we are presented with several images of Maya women wearing their regional clothing and speaking in multiple linguistic practices. In addition to affirming a Maya worldview, the documentary also demonstrates the heterogeneity of the Maya women’s home/land and of their ethno-cultural community. This emphasis, made throughout the film, disrupts established cultural systems, and representations that traditionally value Ladino, and Western, cultural frameworks over Maya cultural practices. Thus, in situating the Maya movement and Maya women at the center of these dialogues, Ixoq (2006) provides its audience with an important interpretation of contemporary Guatemalan reconstruction processes.
It is within this Maya cultural framework that Ixoq (2006) incorporates the testimonies of former guerrilla Maya women combatants and addresses the marginalization they experience in Guatemalan civil society and within the revolutionary movement. Ixoq further expands and complicates our understanding of the former guerrilla Maya militants’ experiences by noting the contradictions and conflict within the guerrilla community during and after the civil war. For instance, in the first testimony the juxtaposition between the testimonial voices of Maya-Ixil women and the corridos that play as background, which emphasize the guerrilla’s claim that they will lead the poor to emancipation, urges the audience to make a critical reflection on the limits of these revolutionary ideological projects. The corrido’s assertion that “in the jungles of Ixcan the guerrilla has settled to teach the poor what is the best seed [to plant],”32 is challenged by subsequent testimonies of Maya-Ixil women discussing the collaborative projects they have led and organized in their communities. In so doing, they contest an ideological project that situates knowledge, not as a collective exchange, but as one that takes places within a hierarchical structure. While the first revolutionary song speaks of the guerrilla teaching the poor about emancipation, the second song reinforces traditional gender roles for women in its claim that the “guerrillera girl gives us her smile and her pain knowing that the nation depends on her bravery.”33 This song, defines women within cultural and social parameters that value their beauty, suffering and bravery. In the song, the guerrillera woman is not an agent of social change.
In contrast to the revolutionary songs, the testimonials of the Maya women draw our attention to the ways they have actively struggled to transform the socio-political structures that marginalize them and their communities. In a deeply moving passage by a former Maya-Ixil militant, who is now thirty-three years old, we are told in broken Spanish:
Since I was very small I was in the guerrilla…it was during the armed conflict [since] they had war in this country…and so we guarded our community…and we took up weapons…[when we were in the guerrilla] we walked barefoot while the others [the guerrilla leadership] were well dressed and traveled to other countries…they never recognized [our efforts]…Worse, because we are women they always try to ingrain it in us that we do not have rights, but we claim our rights, because we served in combat and in the trenches, an now we will serve even more.34
The Maya-Ixil woman’s interpretation of the armed conflict and, in particular, the phrase “they had war in this country” demonstrates that she is unable to identify with the nation as it has existed. That is, she cannot feel she is part of a nation that maintains its colonial legacies. Nevertheless, in the passage she emphasizes her identification and responsibility with her ethno-cultural community. This is reflected in her decision to take up arms to “guard our community.” Her commitment goes beyond a nationalist revolutionary project for in hers there is an active inclusion of her ethno-cultural community, which represents sixty-percent of the Guatemalan population. For these reasons her aspirations for social justice are not finished with the signing of the peace accords in 1996. Instead, she challenges those who attempt to silence her, by stressing that she has fought in combat and in the trenches, and affirming a subject that is an agent of social change who along with her ethno-cultural family will demand their rights “now even more.”
The festive sounds of marimba and another quote from the Popol Wuj, that states “Our ancestry will not be extinguished while there is light in the morning star,”35 opens the subsequent scenes where images of Maya women organizing no longer in the highlands but in Guatemala City are presented. These images deconstruct binaries that typically situate Maya women in rural regions and make their presence in the city invisible. The disruption is essential because it highlights the active participation of Maya women in all aspects of the Guatemalan social fabric while providing an important account of their diverse positions and struggles. Furthermore, the festive music as well as the illustrations of Maya women marching in the city, as in the image of a young Maya-Ixil woman with a microphone in hand, drums and chirimia playing in the background, shouting “without the participation of women there is no liberation,” reveals the central place women have in the Maya movement. By so doing, the film overtly challenges hegemonic representations that construct Maya peoples and their cultural practices as oppressive to women, “backwards,” and submissive.36
In the scene that follows, a young Maya-Kaqchiquel woman reads in front of the Guatemalan Congressional building and a crowd of thousands of people, a listing of fourteen laws developed by Maya communities and proposed to the Guatemalan congress. Among the laws she and thousands of attendees at the march demand be included in the Constitution are: reforms to the electoral laws of political parties; retribution laws; laws that protect the sacred sites for Maya, Garifuna and Xinca peoples; the protection of women, and in particular indigenous women, against sexual harassment as well as a laws that will protect community radio stations. In the reading of these laws we see not only the ways Maya communities define their specific socio-political needs but also how Mayans, through their inclusion of the Garifuna and Xinca communities, perceive the nation as a multicultural space. Implicit in Ixoq (2006) is an emphasis on the dreams as well as on the active and collective efforts Maya women illustrate in the (re)construction of their home/land. Furthermore, in Ixoq it is Maya women who are at the forefront in the transformation of a national structure that is inherently racist.
The ending of Ixoq (2006) returns to the celebration of the Maya culture and its peoples, as in the image of a Maya-Poqomam woman who recites passages from the Pop Wuj, and then reminds her audience that Guatemala is a multicultural nation and for this reason: “We cannot have peace if there are those who have more rights than others.” Hence, Ixoq provides an important (re)definition of the (national) family. In Ixoq the family unit is interwoven with the community and the community with the family. In this definition of the family social and cultural equality for all is essential in Guatemalan (re)construction processes. This view of the family is further reinforced in the ways that the documentary does not focus on the personal or individual histories of Maya women. Instead, the film, and the Maya women testimonies it presents, construct collective histories suggesting that the reconstruction process in Guatemala must incorporate a multiplicity of voices. These images simultaneously allow the audience to recognize the different ways Maya women have resisted and contested the socio-political repression of their families/communities before, during and after the Guatemalan civil war. In this sense, Ixoq also overtly contests established cultural systems that value Ladino, and Western, culture and that historically have attempted to homogenize Maya cultural practices while marking them as fixed and never changing. Ixoq’srendering of Maya women as central and active agents of social change in contemporary Guatemala makes visible communal systems that have continuously and actively contributed to decolonizing processes that are essential in the reconstruction of Guatemala.
Conclusion
The Truth Commission reported that at the end of the thirty-six year civil war in Guatemala, there were 200,000 dead, 150,000 disappeared, one million displaced living in exile or as refugees, and 40,000 widows. The report also states that the military, police forces or government officials committed ninety-three percent of these crimes. Moreover, the Archdiocese Human Rights report Guatemala: Never Again! explicitly affirms that
the counterinsurgency violence acquired certain genocidal characteristics. It attacked the community social fabric at its foundations by attempting to exterminate women and children in their capacity as vessels for the continuity of life and the transmission of culture…[in this] deliberate intent to destroy the community social fabric, a fabric woven and sustained primarily by women. Women were also the ones to repair broken social ties, preserving family cohesion even under the most adverse conditions. They were the ones who preserved the essential ingredients for reestablishing life among groups of survivors. (1999: 80)
The three films studied in this essay, Ixcan (1998), Discovering Dominga (2002) and Ixoq (2006), not only situate the voices of Maya women survivors of the civil war at the center of their productions but also illustrate the ways Maya women have continuously struggled for social justice. This is particularly important if we consider that, as the report Guatemala: Never Again! states, during the early 1980S the military designed specific violent methods aimed at women. Further, the report affirms that women were under attack precisely because of their gender (1999: 92).37 Consequently, the military’s systematic violence aimed at women transformed family structures and relations.
In Ixcan (1998), Discovering Dominga (2002),and Ixoq (2006) the notion of home/land in post-war Guatemala has multiple shifting meanings. That is to say, the varied definition of home, and family structure evident in post-war Guatemala is interconnected to its recent civil war, which annihilated people’s homes, communities and family structures. My reading of the films challenge mainstream Western paradigms that mark a clear separation between the private (family/home) and public (state) spheres. Moreover, I illustrate how an analysis of the re-articulation of the notion of home allows us to consider new directions and ways of thinking about Guatemala’s reconstruction processes. In so doing, it provides a critical space from which 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.
Alexander, Jaqui M. and Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, (ed.), 1997: Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge.
Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1999: Guatemala: Never Again! Guatemala: Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala.
Aazú Casaus, Marta Elena, 1998: La Metamorfosis del Racismo en Guatemala. Guatemala: Cholsamaj.
Bhattacharjee, Anannya, 1997: “The Public/Private Mirage: Mapping Homes and Undomesticating Violence Work in the South Asian Immigrant Community,” en: Alexander, Jaqui M. and Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (eds.), 1997: Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, New York: Routledge, 308-329.
Colom, Yolanda, 1998. Mujeres en la Alborada: Guerrilla y participación femenina en Guatemala (1973-1978), Guatemala: Artemio & Edinter.
Colop, Enrique Sam, 1996: “The Discourse of Concealment and 1992,” en: Fischer, Edward F., and Brown, McKenna R. (eds), 1996: Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, Austin: University of Texas Press, 107-113.
Cuxil, Demetrio Cojti, 1996: “The Politics of Maya Revindication,” en: Fischer, Edward F., and Brown, McKenna R. (eds), 1996: Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, Austin: University of Texas Press, 19-50.
Discovering Dominga. Dir. Patricia Flynn and Mary Jo Mc Conahay, 2002.
El Norte. Dir. Gregory Nava, 1983.
Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, 1999: Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio. Guatemala: Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico.
Fregroso, Rosa Linda, 1999: “Re-Imaging Chicana Urban Identities in the Public Sphere, Cool Chuca Style,” en: Kaplan, Caren, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (eds.) 1999: Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. Duke University Press, 72-91.
Ixcan. Dir. Henrique Goldman, 1998.
Ixoq. Dir. Manuel Felipe Pérez, 2006.
Kael, Pauline, 1985: State of the Art. New York: Dutton.
King, John, 1990: Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. London: Verso.
Lopez, Ana, 1997: “’Other’ History: The New Latin American Cinema” en: Martin, Michael, (ed.) 1997: New Latin American Cinema: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 135-156.
Luciak, Ilja A, 2001: After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 1991: “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” en: Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (eds.), 1991: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 51-80.
Popol Vuh, 1996: trans. Dennis Tedlock, New York: Touchstone.
Raxche’, 1996: “Maya Culture and the Politics of Development,” en: Fischer, Edward F., and Brown, McKenna R. (eds.), 1996: Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala, Austin: University of Texas Press, 74-88.
Robinson, William, 2003: Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization, London: Verso.
Stephen, Lynn, 1997: Women and Social Movements in Latin America Power from Below, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Stock, Marie Ann, (ed.), 1997: Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, trad. by Ambrosio Fornet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.vuelve 1. I situate the postwar period in Guatemala after the signing of the December 29, 1996, Peace Accords.
vuelve 2. According to the Guatemalan Truth Commission between 1960-1996 the armed conflicted resulted in 200,000 deaths and one million Guatemalans displaced. While the report Guatemala: Never Again! states that of these 200,000 deaths 83% were indigenous peoples.
vuelve 3. The cinematography techniques used in Goldman’s Ixcan seem to suggest a strong influence from the Latin American new cinema. For example, Ana M. López, “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American Cinema,” tells us that because the new Latin American cinema wanted to “shift attention away from Hollywood models” these filmmakers focused on alternative forms like the European Art cinema and Italian Neo-Realism (López, 1997: 311).
vuelve 4. Blanca Estela Alvarado, who plays the Natividad character in the film, is a member of the Guatemalan Presidential Commission Against Discrimination and Racism.
vuelve 5. The use of non-professional actors is a common method found in Henrique Goldman’s films. Most specifically, this cinematic technique is evident in Ixcan and Princesa.
vuelve 6. See the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre August 3 and November 7, 2003.
vuelve 7. See Pauline Kael’s State of the Art (New York: Dutton, 1985).
vuelve 8. Some of these testimonials include: Rigoberta Menchú’s I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), Elvia Alvarado’s Don’t be Afraid Gringo (1989), and Claribel Alegria’s No me agarran viva (1983).
vuelve 9. The Quincentennial produces a hemispheric consciousness around the process of Colonialism and its continuing legacies in the Americas.
vuelve 10. Rigoberta Menchú is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.
vuelve 11. See for example Lynn Stephen’s Women and Social Movements in Latin America Power from Below (1997), for a discussion of US women in Salvadoran solidarity movements of the 1980s.
vuelve 12. The report further notes that “the primary impact at the time of the events [of the civil war] was the loss of one or more family members, which was compounded by economic hardship and the fact that survivors, particularly women, are overwhelmed by their new roles and responsibilities” (6).
vuelve 13. The report Guatemala: Never Again! further notes that “added to a pattern of family losses that have affected female survivors the most,…the overall impact of the [civil] war on families has been felt most strongly by women” (6).
vuelve 14. In the report Guatemala: Never Again! we are told that “the army’s counterinsurgency tactics against women were consistent at different places and times and formed part of its strategy of mass destruction. [Further] the cultural and religious value attached to ‘purity’ and sexual intimacy, moreover, may make the woman or her family feel even more devastated by this experience” (79-81).
vuelve 15. See her 1998 testimonial Mujeres en la Alborada: Guerrilla y participación femenina en Guatemala (1973-1978).
vuelve 16. The death of former guerrilla commander Rigoberto Asturias, also known as Gaspar Ilom, on Thursday, June 16, 2005 brought much national attention to his role in the URNG. Gaspar Ilom was the URNG’s presidential candidate in 2003. Nineth Montenegro, one of the most outspoken political female voices from the Guatemalan left, noted in an article “La Izquierda Fragmentada” by Lesli Pérez that appeared on July 3, 2005 in the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre, that the fragmentation of the Guatemalan left is in part due to the inability by former URNG commanders to let go of their “commanding” positions. This in turn has not allowed the rise of new political leaders, voices and visions to take place within the URNG.
vuelve 17. See Ilja Ilja Luciak’s After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala (2001).
vuelve 18. The Ceiba tree is native to Central America. The Maya believed that it was a Ceiba tree that stood at the center of the earth connecting the spirit and earth worlds. The Ceiba tree is also a Guatemalan national symbol. The piedra de moler is an ancient Maya oval stone used to grind corn, which is still utilized by Maya and Ladinos in Guatemala to grind the corn that makes tortillas.
vuelve 19. Unless otherwise noted all translations are mine.
vuelve 20. The text in Guatemala: Nunca Mas! appears in Spanish as follows “Las violaciones sexuales se hacían de forma pública para que todos vieran…La violación era para controlar y humillar a las familias y comunidades. Los soldados violaban a las mujeres ‘enemigas’ igual que incendiaban sus casas, para expresar desprecio y victoria” (95-96).
vuelve 21. In the Spanish: “¿Vos sabés porque yo te había abandonado por todos estos años?”.
vuelve 22. The Spanish appears as follows: “Fíjate que hubo guerra porque no tenemos suficiente tierra para poder comer, para poder vivir dignamente; como personas. Pero sobre todo yo fui a luchar por ti para que tuvieras un mejor futuro para que no vivieras en la miseria que vivimos en la actualidad y por eso me fui pero no quiero que tú pienses que me fui por no quererte porque precisamente por el amor tan grande que tengo me fui a luchar…yo quiero que pensemos juntos nuestro futuro que regresemos juntos a nuestro pueblo.”
vuelve 23. In the Spanish it appears as follows: “pero como nos tuvimos que ir de nuestro pueblo…cuando nos fuimos yo tuve que enterrar esta piedrecita y ahora yo tuve que regresar a buscarla…te la quiero regalar.”
vuelve 24. The original in Spanish: “asentamiento de mierda; donde hay gente de mierda.”
vuelve 25. The original appears in Spanish: “hay gente moderna y alegre como tú y yo.”
vuelve 26. For an excellent discussion on post-war Guatemala see William Robinson’s Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (2003).
vuelve 27. The Spanish original appears as follows: “El idioma también fue afectado. Al salirse de sus lugares, ya sea al exilio, refugiados o desplazados a otro pueblo o aldea, a la cuidad o a las CPR [Comunidades de Población de Resistencia], muchas personas tuvieron que aprender otro idioma, sobre todo la castilla. La lengua común para poder entenderse pasó a ser la castilla. Las niñas y los niños fueron perdiendo las lengua materna…Las mujeres [Mayas] tuvieron dificultades para seguir haciendo y usando los trajes tradicionales” (73).
vuelve 28. For many Mayan Guatemalans, exiled within the nation, it meant learning Spanish not only to survive but to strategically claim their citizenship rights in Guatemala.
vuelve 29. See for example, Enrique Sam Colop’s “The Discourse of Concealment and 1992,” Demetrio Cojti’s “The Politics of Maya Revindication,” and Raxche’s “Maya Culture and the Politics of Development.”
vuelve 30. In the Spanish the quote appears as follows: “Desde la independencia en 1821 la estructura de las relaciones económicas, culturales y sociales ha sido extremadamente jerárquica, sostenida por una enraizada herencia colonial…Esto determinó que el carácter del Estado….fuese excluyente….y….racista.”
vuelve 31. The Spanish quote appears as “Hablaron, pues, consultando entre sí y meditando, se pusieron de acuerdo, juntaron sus palabras y sus pensamientos.”
vuelve 32. The Spanish appears as “En la selva del Ixcán se asentó la guerrilla para enseñar a los pobres cuál es la mejor semilla.”
vuelve 33. The Spanish appears as “La niña guerrillera nos da una sonrisa y su dolor aprende que la patria depende mucho de su valor.”
vuelve 34. The quote appears as follows in Spanish: “es en el conflicto armando porque tuvieron guerra en este país...entonces nosotros porque velamos por nuestro pueblo…fue que agarramos un fusil…. Desde muy chiquito estuve en la guerrilla…hasta que no nos reconocieron…andamos descalzos y los otros mandando en otros países bien entacuchados….Peor que somos mujeres siempre nos han metido en la cabeza que no tenemos derecho pero nosotros reclamamos nuestro derecho porque nosotros servimos en el combate y en la trinchera mucho menos no vamos a servir ahorita.”
vuelve 35. The quote appears in Spanish as follows: “Nuestra estirpe no se extinguirá mientras haya luz en lucero de la mañana”—Popol Wuj.
vuelve 36. See for example, Marta Elena Aazú Casaus’ La Metamorfosis del Racismo en Guatemala (1998) for an excellent discussion on dominant stereotypes in Guatemala of indigenous peoples as “submissive,” “backwards,” and “oppressive.”
vuelve 37. The original in Spanish appears as: “hubo formas de violencia contra las mujeres por el sólo hecho de ser mujeres” (92).
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