Violence Against Women and the Land: Maya Perspectives in 500 Years: Life in Resistance by Pamela Yates (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Feminist Journal of Politics
Following the signing of Guatemala's 1996 Peace Accords, which brought an end to 36 years of conflict culminating in a genocide against Mayan communities, violences have persisted at alarming rates. Research has noted a high number of reports of violences against women and femicide, highlighting legal battles and challenges to address this issue. This article aims to make an empirical contribution, in that it explores the political economic dimensions of violences against women in predominantly Maya Q'eqchi' communities in Guatemala's development corridor, the Northern Transversal Strip region. Furthermore, the article emphasizes how women community leaders have linked violences against women in the contemporary context to the historical gendered violences of colonialism and armed conflict, as well the postwar extractivist development model and related ecological violences, particularly in relation to palm oil. Drawing on qualitative research and expanding on "continuum" theoretical approaches, the article concludes by suggesting that violences against women in postwar Guatemala can be understood as existing within an intersectional matrix, illustrating the dynamics of continuity and change. Violences against women are shaped by political, economic, historical, and social factors, which in turn shape how women organize to resist and address the violences against them in the Northern Transversal Strip region.
Indigenous Women Environmental Defenders: their Criminalization and Assassination in Guatemala
2023
his research conducts a qualitative comparative analysis to understand which combination of circumstances heightens the risk and/or contributes to instances of extreme VAW experienced by indigenous women in their environmental advocacy against mining and hydropower conflicts in Guatemala. The research project’s central question is: Under which conditions are indigenous women environmental defenders in Guatemala criminalized or assassinated for their activism against mining and hydropower projects? The paper’s introduction elaborates on the context of the extractive industry in Guatemala. Then, presents theories developed by researchers such as Dunlap, Tran, and Paredes on the nexus between environmental defense, indigenous people as well as violence against WED. The paper’s introduction contextualizes the situation on violence against indigenous women in Guatemala. The second section of the paper elaborates on the research design. It focuses on the data collection and its systematization, the rationalization and operationalization of the independent variables. The third section provides a thorough empirical analysis reviewing the Truth Tables for each outcome. At last, the paper presents a conclusion, reflecting upon limitations and future research opportunities.
Behind Maya Doors: Gender Violence, Acceptance, and Resistance in Highland Guatemala,
Gender Perspectives in International Development, 2015
Relying on years of ethnographic research in highland Guatemala, this qualitative study explores domestic and family violence in a Maya community. Twenty-five life history interviews were conducted with most living members of an extended family in two departments of western Guatemala, and ten interviews were conducted with men and women not related to the family of reference in the same region. Based on these interviews, multivariate models of gender violence and abuse were developed, including male initiation of abuse, acceptance of or resistance to male abuse on the part of women, and cycles of violence. These frameworks provide a rich understanding of the etiology of dynamics that contribute to family violence and aggression towards women in contexts of gender subordination in patriarchal settings, economic and political upheavals, and poverty
Redressing Injustice, Reframing Resilience: Mayan Women’s Persistence and Protagonism as Resistance
Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice, 2021
Young, adult, and elderly [Mayan] women in Guatemala are making changes in their lives, to generate wellbeing and good living for themselves, other women, and their communities. Despite all the inequities, oppressions, violences of a system that prioritizes injustice and death, there is enough joy, creativity, desire for life, for being and becoming, and as such, women are defending life, territory and body.
Based on 20 months of participant observation in a weaving cooperative based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, I argue that indigenous Guatemalan women articulate their womanhood through victimhood, using “woman” and “victim” synonymously to make claims and understanding the courses of their lives through the framework of suffering. In their presentations to visiting tourists, the officers of the weaving cooperative work to legitimate themselves as representatives of the victims of the civil war (1960-1996), to encourage tourists who are sympathetic and interested in the history of the conflicto to support the cooperative financially. Their insistence that everything they recount is true because they witnessed it gains urgency from the Guatemalan government’s official position that genocide did not take place during the civil war. They also assert that other cooperatives are trying to steal their narrative by falsely claiming to aid war victims. The international human rights discourses that constructed them as victims created a limited space for them to imagine themselves as actors in the public sphere. The women claim that they did not take control of the corruption among employees in their own weaving cooperative until they were empowered by the legal language that came out of the peace accords in 1996. While deploying their victimhood has given women a voice, they are also concerned that, in the context of the remilitarization of Guatemala under former general Otto Pérez Molina’s administration, it has made them a target. Cooperative officers try to use their gendered victimhood to appeal to tourists and other powerful international interlocutors to gain economic and political leverage as Mayans and as women, historically oppressed groups in Guatemala, within the larger Ladino society. At the same time, the diffuse, “neoliberalized” nature of violence in post-conflict Guatemala leads them to anxiety about their control over their own images.
Violence and Women’s Lives in Eastern Guatemala: A Conceptual Framework
Latin American Research Review, 2008
In this paper I outline a framework to examine women's lives in eastern Guatemala, how multiple forms of violence coalesce in their everyday lives, and how these become internalized and normalized so as to become invisible and "natural." Women in western Guatemala, mostly indigenous, have received the attention of scholars (and with good reason) who are interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror and its gendered expressions in Guatemala. This discussion builds on previous research conducted among indigenous groups in Guatemala and renders a depiction of the broad reach of violence, including those forms of violence that are so commonplace as to become invisible. I argue that an examination of multiple forms of violence in the lives of women in eastern Guatemala, mostly non-indigenous, exposes the deep and broad manifestations of living in a society engulfed in violence, depicting the "long arm of violence."
Spaces for female indigenous activism in Guatemala
2021
This dissertation is based on findings from a collection of in-depth interviews conducted in Guatemala during one month's fieldwork with indigenous women working in rights-based grassroots organizations. An intersectional lens is used to analytically frame the narratives of these activists. The dissertation examines the structure and support networks of current spaces for activism, discusses the obstacles encountered by such women and the inspiration behind their motivations for activism – including the influence of 'feminist thinking', community role models and the Mayan cosmovision. It lastly proposes recommendations at the local, national and international level, for the support of female indigenous activists in Guatemala and worldwide.