Healing Cartographies: Weaving Memory, Movement, and Embodied Testimonios Across Imaginary Lines

Carla Macal

Occidental College

Abstract

This paper examines the transformative memory of two GuateMaya feminist groups across settler-colonial borders. The paper explores the multidimensional ways the groups create a countercultural memory, opposing Guatemala’s state of what can be remembered and what cannot. 8 Tijax is a grassroots group formed during the wake of March 8, 2017, a day that fifty-six girls were victims of a fire at a state-operated shelter, Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asuncion. Through accompaniment and spreading awareness about the case, the group has linked with other feminist groups across borders. One group is GuateMaya Mujeres Resistiendo-Los Angeles (GMR-LA), a multigenerational group in the diaspora that continues to amplify the cultural memory of the disappeared. Both groups are committed to what I call healing cartographies, weaving memory, movement, and embodied testimonios across imaginary lines. The groups honor their loved ones’ memories by installing public altars, photos, art, and poetry as counter memories. This paper explores the concept of healing cartographies and the ethnographic work I employed in Guatemala and Los Angeles from 2019 to 2023 as part of my dissertation. By producing a countercultural memory, the groups challenge state-imposed boundaries of what should be remembered, challenging border-thinking and working towards a hemispheric memory of expansiveness, fluidity, and transformation.

Resumen

Este artículo examina la memoria transformadora de dos grupos feministas guatemayas a través de las fronteras coloniales. El artículo explora las formas multidimensionales en que los grupos crean una memoria contracultural, oponiéndose al estado de Guatemala de lo que se puede recordar y lo que no. 8 Tijax es un grupo de base formado durante la estela del 8 de marzo de 2017, un día en que cincuenta y seis niñas fueron víctimas de un incendio en un refugio estatal, el Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción. A través del acompañamiento y la difusión del caso, el grupo se ha vinculado con otros grupos feministas más allá de las fronteras. Un grupo es GuateMaya Mujeres Resistiendo-Los Ángeles (GMR-LA), un grupo multigeneracional en la diáspora que continúa amplificando la memoria cultural de los desaparecidos. Ambos grupos están comprometidos con lo que yo llamo cartografías sanadoras, tejiendo la memoria, el movimiento y los testimonios encarnados a través de líneas imaginarias. Los grupos honran la memoria de sus seres queridos instalando altares públicos, fotos, arte y poesía como contramemorias. Este artículo explora el concepto de cartografías sanadoras y el trabajo etnográfico que empleé en Guatemala y Los Ángeles de 2019 a 2023 como parte de mi tesis. Al producir una memoria contracultural, los grupos desafían los límites impuestos por el Estado de lo que debe recordarse, desafiando el pensamiento fronterizo y trabajando hacia una memoria hemisférica de expansión, fluidez y transformación.

Keywords

cultural memory, embodiment, Guatemala, Los Angeles, diaspora, healing cartographies

Introduction

We must liberate land and life by actively honoring our responsibilities to kinship at this moment, fostering good relations within all creation in our intentions and actions.
—Lindsay Nixon (Saulteaux Nation), “Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurism”

Indigenous scholars remind us that relationships are interwoven into the community, plants, land, and the cosmos (Cabnal 2010; Goeman 2013; Kimmerer 2013). Discussing relationships from an Indigenous perspective is significant to this paper because the GuateMaya feminist groups 8 Tijax and GuateMaya Mujeres Resistiendo-Los Angeles (GMR-LA) in my study center community and Maya cosmology in their work. This study demonstrates the relationships between GuateMaya feminist groups across borders, their search for justice, and their countercultural memory production. The groups are committed to a memory that transforms their stories, narratives, and autonomy without state approval. By producing a countercultural memory, the groups challenge stateimposed boundaries of what should be remembered, challenging border-thinking and working towards a hemispheric memory of expansiveness, fluidity, and transformation. 8 Tijax is a volunteer group accompanying the mothers and families of the fifty-six girls who died in the 2017 massacre at the Virgen de la Asuncíon children’s home outside Guatemala city, as they search for justice. GMRLA is a group of Guatemalan and Maya women in the diaspora situated in Los Angeles. They are a collective of diverse, organized women resisting colonial and patriarchal systems that generate violence (Macal 2024a). The groups are interested in building countercultural memories across borders, weaving pluriverse testimonios of memory, resistance, and healing.

The participants in this research were associated with many intersecting identities, such as Guatemalan women, Maya, Ladina, K’iche’, Q’anjob’al, and Mam ethnic identities. These women also identified themselves as migrants, queer, political refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons, and exiles. The groups I worked with and interviewed defined themselves as GuateMaya feminist groups. GuateMaya is a popular concept used by activists in the diaspora to critique the homogenization of Guatemalan people and center the Maya population, which comprises the larger population in Guatemala. GuateMaya is a spacious, fluid concept, and I carefully use it to resist state-imposed categorizations such as “Hispanic” or “Latino/a/x” that exclude Indigenous populations. Susy Zepeda (2022, 6) states that Latina/o/x has also been understood as a term that does not acknowledge the specificity of Indigenous lineages or roots and Afro-descendent and Black roots and lineages. Ultimately, Native and Indigenous people on either side of the Mexico-United States border are rooted in distinct and multiple experiences that must remain complicated to resist the homogenization of Indigenous formations across the hemisphere. Furthermore, Indigenous scholar Shannon Speed states, “The erasure of Indigenous migrants’ identity as Indigenous people is one in a long series of technologies used by settler states to eliminate Indigenous people, and as scholars, we should not participate in reifying settler-imposed national borders in ways that facilitate such erasures” (2019, 13). Therefore, GuateMaya is a popular identity among the younger generations of Central Americans in urban settings such as Los Angeles. It includes Black and Indigenous Central Americans while still being conscious of the anti- Blackness and anti-Indigenous discrimination that persist in the Isthmus.

Women of color and feminist geographers contend that being in tune and having a sense of place in our work manifests who we are as activist scholars (Cahuas 2022; Eaves 2019; Gökariksel et al. 2021; McKittrick 2006). In feminist research, positionality has become a critical concept and practice to address questions of voice and authority. The intensification of debates over “sisterhood” across geographic, sociopolitical, and racial borders pushed feminist academics not only to interrogate the power dynamics between the interviewer/interpreter and the interviewee/narrator, but also to pose challenging questions ranging from who can/should write whose history to what kinds of struggles research/theory should enable (Benson and Nagar 2006, 583). Subsequently, I describe my positionality and how I came to my research interests.

I identify as a GuateMaya woman in the diaspora with Maya roots, acknowledging my conflicting mestiza identity, formerly undocumented and from a working-class background. I am also connected to GMR-LA as a group volunteer. The group is multigenerational, with the younger generations curious about our cultural roots and a deep desire to be involved in the diaspora and learn more about Guatemala’s complicated politics (Macal 2024a). As I sat writing this paper, I reflected on the title of the call for papers, “Knowing Borders: Ecologías, Materialidades, Estéticas.” Some of us have a relationship with borders; we have crossed boundaries in our lifetime, physically and/or symbolically (Geobrujas-Communidad de Géografas 2021). My relationship with borders began when I turned four years old. My mom brought my brother and me from Guatemala City to Los Angeles, California. Our journey to the US dealt with crossing multiple borders and leaving friends and loved ones behind to begin a new life (Abrego 2014).

Writing about Guatemala is complicated because some of my family members question me about being away from a place but still yearning to go back. Also, since I did not experience the thirty-six-year war (1960–1996) firsthand, why should I write about it? Central American scholar Cecilia Menjívar (2011) notes that Guatemala is a society dealing with the aftermath of nearly four decades of state terror. Although acts of genocide were committed intentionally towards the Ixil population in the highlands of Guatemala, she states that “the armed conflict left the country awash in weapons, with webs of people trained to use them and a civil society accustomed to the horrors of violence” (2011, 2). To this day, many Central Americans, including my family members, are afraid to speak about the horrors of the violence and what they witnessed during the 1980s. Other genocides that have been documented throughout history, such as the Native American genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, also play a role in the way survivors of these horrific wars intimately feel toward themselves. For example, Indigenous scholars M.Y. Brave Heart and L.M. DeBruyn (1998) discuss disenfranchised grief, which people experience when a loss cannot be openly acknowledged or publicly mourned. However, rituals, memorial sites, and ceremonies permit the community to reaffirm social values and publicly grieve. I situate my positionality story as an intergenerational one connected to my ancestors, mis abuelas (my grandmothers), and the poets and students who continue to search for justice in Guatemala. I also feel the urgent need to make the connections between the genocides in Guatemala and Palestine.

To write about Guatemala, I have the responsibility to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people as our histories, stories, and mourning weave the collective memory of the oppressed and minoritized subject. Israel, with US support, has been waging genocide in Palestine, murdering and displacing thousands, as if history repeats itself for the gains of a settler-colonial state. The war on women’s bodies in Palestine and Guatemala is synonymous with the illegal occupation of Indigenous land (Macal 2024b). Therefore, knowing borders means being consciously aware of the marked divisions in our geographies but with a vision to dismantle imposed borders in our bodies, minds, and spirits.

This paper centers on the multidimensional ways GuateMaya feminist groups produce a countercultural memory. It is divided into three sections: a review of the cultural memory literature; GuateMaya feminist groups narratives; and a discussion about healing cartographies. The sections explain how the GuateMaya feminist groups are committed to a countercultural memory production for selfdetermination and autonomy over their bodies, values, and memories. My research is a political project of unearthing the counter-memory, silences, fear, and intergenerational trauma from the oral and embodied testimonios of GuateMaya women survivors of genocide who are currently involved in collective projects to recover Guatemala’s historical memory. The solidarity networks woven among transnational feminist groups across the hemisphere are mapping healing tools and methods to preserve cultural memory and counter-state hegemonic narratives, which I call healing cartographies. Mapping GuateMaya feminist groups’ stories, narratives, and counter-vision across borders amplifies and centers the voices of women survivors of genocide, providing a gendered memory analysis of the past, present, and future.

Cultural Memory Literature Review

Marita Sturken (1997, 3) defines cultural memory as a memory shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning. Sturken argues that survivors of traumatic historical occurrences are influential cultural figures. They are often considered wisdom figures in popular culture while ignored in person. The discourse around trauma and memory informs us how the revictimization of survivors occurs due to a lack of understanding of survivors’ agency and distinct ways of coping with loss, human rights abuses, and land displacements. In addition, Indigenous scholars have suggested that the effects of historical trauma are transmitted intergenerationally as descendants continue to identify emotionally with ancestral suffering (Evans-Campbell 2008, 321).

María Luz García’s ethnographic work on historical memory with the Ixil community in Guatemala argues that a constant focus on trauma to heal brokenness can prioritize a discussion of dysfunctional communities and individuals. Instead, the researcher urges scholars to analyze the complex ways Maya community structures (e.g., language, ceremony, altars, speaking to the dead) do indeed function, despite the legacy of the war, and how the Maya, as subjects of their history, respond to these “political moments” by prioritizing their cultural frameworks (García 2014, 665). The GuateMaya feminist groups in my study reflect the Maya community structures, including spirituality at the center of their epistemologies, dismantling years of Western colonization and knowing. For example, before starting an event, both groups in my study prioritize centering Maya cosmology by placing an altar at the gathering with flowers, white candles, herbs, and incense to ground the day and the group. This spiritual practice allows the multigenerational members of the groups to activate an ancestral practice, collectively centering grief, memory, and intergenerational healing.

Western hierarchies of knowledge and imposed culture upon Indigenous Peoples are also part of a cultural warfare that Indigenous Peoples continue to be affected by. Carlos Marín Beristain, Darío Paez, and José Luis González describe Maya culture as following the ethos of collectivism: “For Indigenous culture, the value or worth of a person and all his identity marks (language, clothes, religion) are linked to the community” (2000, 118). Unfortunately, due to Guatemala’s colonial legacy, Indigenous culture is viewed as unworthy and uncivilized by the Guatemalan elite. The thirty-six-year war in Guatemala traumatized and victimized survivors, specifically the Maya population. For example, the state does not consider how Guatemalan survivors of the war and in the diaspora are transcending borders by creating solidarity networks and transforming their lives by producing personal narratives and memories of the war.

Nation-states build and rebuild hegemonic memory, forming the consciousness of a population. The formation of a nation depends on creating imagined communities (Anderson 1983), regardless of war, exploitation, and social inequality (Gomez-Barris 2009; Sturken 1997). To counter hegemonic memory, create transformative memories (Pulido 2022), hold on to specific memories, and never forget the past, groups negotiate power dynamics within the nation and produce what Patricia Zavella (2011) identifies as technologies of memory, such as art installations, films, archives, narratives, or murals. Jeanette Rodríguez and Ted Fortier (2007) further explain cultural memory by applying the following distinctions: the survival of a historically, politically, and socially marginalized group of people, and the role of spirituality as a form of resistance. My study aimed to use both distinctions but specializes in the latter because it allows for a more extensive discussion around healing. An example of where Rodríguez and Fortier’s distinctions coexist is with the work of 8 Tijax. As families grieve and politically advocate for justice for these murders, 8 Tijax sets up multipurpose altars that provide care, awareness, and prayers. The science behind the altar creation and formation is multifaceted as it transcends time and space, allowing for spiritual connection with loved ones and honoring the memory of those who are forgotten by the Guatemalan state. Like García’s (2014) ethnographic recounting of the Ixil community, the pain of the genocide is not only related to the deaths of loved ones but also to their inability to integrate the dead into their rightful places in the community of the living. For the Maya community, the spirits of the dead continue to play an essential role in ceremonies and prayer. It is a constant relationship to be in harmony with the spirits of loved ones. Thus, Ixil's ways of talking and relating to the dead in a ceremonial speech during the reburial of exhumed victims of war constitute a significant site for constructing and reflecting historical memory of the war. Spiritual traditions allow groups to connect to the dead daily with altars and prayers to honor their memory. Furthermore, memory becomes vital as a survival mechanism when it becomes part of artistic, emotionally laden ways of forming group identity and meanings (Rodríguez and Fortier 2007).

In Los Angeles, GMR-LA is forming its identity and making meaning and a place to honor family members and compañeros taken by the war. The Guatemalan army pulverized communities, inflicting more than 600 massacres, 200,000 deaths, the displacement of 1.5 million people, and tens of thousands of disappearances, most significantly in the 1980s (Manz 2008, 152). To continue denouncing the terror committed by the state of Guatemala, the group engages in the counterhegemonic production of cultural memory by organizing protests, vigils, and art to share the truth of the genocide and continue the leftist groups’ legacy in Guatemala. Ester Hernández’s work on mapping Central Americans in Los Angeles’ public spaces and memory sheds light on GMR-LA’s cultural memory work. Hernández says, “Migrants become embedded in a larger struggle for justice; they create community and provide a historical context for the following generations. This allows for creating spatial imaginaries on the urban cityscape of Los Angeles” (2017, 145). In her work, the scholar recalls a mural production of the Salvadoran war and the culture that unites Salvadorans in the diaspora, such as food, music, and traditional celebrations. The mural is located at the non-profit organization Central American Resource Center, Los Angeles; it greets viewers with its spectral image of a woman running with her child and another one who raises her fist behind a group of mourners and evacuated refugees carrying Monseñor Romero’s portrait (Hernandez 2017, 146). The mural presents the complexities of memory connected to Central America within the diaspora and provides a sense of agency, affirming those who choose not to forget the past. The memories represent a whirlwind of images that range from wars and martyrs to moments of resistance and solidarity among transborder communities. The younger generations of Central Americans are starving for the truth and curious about our roots and history that center dignity and collective memory. As Hernández (2017, 148) explains, these new public sites of memory allow for intergenerational dialogue and invite multiple voices to intervene in the context of emerging US Central American public memory, inviting survivors to confront the unspoken.

In addition to the multipurpose altars, vigils, protests, and murals, Maya cosmology is a significant tool that helps reclaim the truth and memory of the past for the GuateMaya feminist groups. Cosmovision is the Maya people’s form of spirituality. The cosmovision spiritual practice allows us to experience life and be part of the whole. The connection to the world and cosmos is the basis of the actions, thoughts, and sentiments in life and of life (Mayan League 2023). Mayan cosmology is part of a cultural transmission across the generations. Elders and Acqijs (spiritual guides) pass down their knowledge to the younger generations, which is part of Mayan traditions. However, there is also fear of sharing these traditions due to ignorance, hate, and misinformation in Guatemala, as many of the Acqijs face persecution and even death. On June 6, 2020, Acqij Domingo Choc Che was set on fire by a group of people accusing him of witchcraft. Domingo Choc Che was an herbalist and healer and was involved in documenting the traditional medicinal plants of the Guatemalan Department of Peten. In a press release, the Board of the K’iche Peoples declared, “The murder of the spiritual guide Domingo Choc makes very clear to us that political and spiritual intolerance still exists, and religious fanaticism has deeply hurt communities. Today, colonial attitudes and behaviors that prevent us from living the Mayab’ worldview remain in force. If we speak of human rights, we run the risk of being murdered, criminalized, and persecuted by groups of people manipulated by religious fundamentalism” (Pastor and Cherofsky 2020).

My intervention in my overall study was to examine how Maya and Guatemalan women survivors’ bodies are used as sites where one can recover a range of memories, examining the cargas (burden), the heavy emotions, pain, and isolation the mothers carry in their bodies. Extensive literature has stated how our physical bodies can endure, survive historical trauma, and store memory (Cabnal 2010; Menjívar 2011; Mucci 2013; Ringel and Brandell 2012; Van der Kolk 2014). Lorena Cabnal (2010) denotes bodies as the first territory, meaning we ascribe to our physical body before region, allowing us to localize where we have been affected by violence. For this study, this process of understanding and mapping out embodied trauma through memories will enable healing to take place and be with other bodies (Cabnal 2010). I turned my attention to Sturken (1997, 220), who discusses the AIDS epidemic as a memorial, a quilt, or an image, and explores how the human body is also a vehicle for remembrance—through its surface (the memory that exists in physical scars, for instance). In addition, Sturken also reminds us that bodies are often perceived to speak without words. The bodies of Vietnam veterans talk of guilt, forgiveness, and accusation in their presence, while those of people with AIDS speak of suffering, anger, resilience, and protest. Across other territories in Latin America, Data Against Feminicide and Feminicidio Uruguay document missing data by mapping it through knowledge sharing, participatory technology development, and community building (D’Ignazio et al. 2024). These efforts expand beyond borders using other technologies such as media and mapping to document, visualize, and creatively express a call for action against feminicide.

GuateMaya Feminist Groups: 8 Tijax and GuateMaya Mujeres Resistiendo-Los Angeles

Conscious of power dynamics, I aimed to build intentional relationships in the field with research participants. Instead of perceiving the women in my study as just participants, I saw them as co-collaborators, agents of change, and disruptors against not only the state but also the ivory tower’s individualistic ethos. Therefore, I developed a collaborative research project based on trust, reciprocity, and accountability. Interested in learning about how groups preserve or build cultural memory, I studied two GuateMaya feminist groups. I was interested in feminist groups in Guatemala, but the pandemic also pushed me to research diaspora groups. The group I am a part of, GMR-LA, became a base to support 8 Tijax in Guatemala. For this paper, I will focus on the relational dynamics between both groups and how, despite settler-colonial borders, the groups build solidarity networks, especially on March 8, to honor International Women’s Day. This is also the day to remember the fifty-six girls—forty-one of whom, ages twelve to seventeen, died at the hands of the state, and fifteen survived with physical and emotional trauma.

While GuateMaya feminist groups are connected across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, this study focused on the relational testimonios of GuateMaya feminist groups in Guatemala and Los Angeles. Overall, the study aimed to center the testimonios of GuateMaya feminist groups to learn from their production of countercultural and embodied memory to counter hegemonic narratives produced by the state. This research bridges the work of south-north Indigenous women (Martínez and Agüero 2023). The work the groups produce is a testament to women’s activism in Latin America and the Caribbean. There’s rich documentation of women’s activism and struggles in the twentieth century, from labor organizing education rights to on reproductive rights and land defense in the twenty-first century (Maier and Lebon 2010).

Drawing from interviews with feminist groups in Guatemala and Los Angeles, I argue that post-conflict gender-based violence, or at the extreme level, feminicide, is a continuation of the ongoing state violence stemming from the thirty-six-year war and is also a product of the gender coloniality of power (Lugones 2008) and settler colonialism (Speed and Stephen 2021). While there is a body of work regarding cultural memory in Latin America and how it is produced through testimonies and visuals (Galeano 1989; Gomez-Barris 2009; Proyecto Interdiocesano Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica et al. 1999; Sutton 2018), less has been researched and written about how the human body can connect to memory and heal from intergenerational trauma (Sutton 2007). My research was attentive to the embodied experience of Guatemalan and Maya women in the war concerning intergenerational trauma, memory, and healing.

8 Tijax

The group 8 Tijax comprises community volunteers—mothers, students, social workers, and activists—who took an active role in supporting the families who lost their daughters during the terror of March 7 and 8, 2017, at state-sponsored and state-operated shelter Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asuncion in San José Pinula, Guatemala. When I started my research and fieldwork in Guatemala, I did not envision the shelter as a prison. But my perspective drastically changed when I visited Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asuncion in August 2022.

The shelter is two hours away from Guatemala City, and getting to the location is difficult because the streets are narrow and there is heavy traffic. The term shelter usually connotes a welcoming atmosphere, but this shelter is surrounded by barbed wire. No other buildings or businesses are next to the shelter, but a large green field is in front. This is the field where the girls ran to when escaping the shelter’s insecure conditions. Prison abolitionist and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore critically states, “Prison is not just a response to a free-floating thing called crime—it’s a response to ‘surplus’ populations. Which is to say that prisons are designed to absorb people: those people who the state has abandoned” (2022, 176). The shelter describes a prison due to its isolated location but also in how the girls were being treated inside the shelter, consumed with abuse, sexual violations, and malnutrition.

Five years after the massacre, this shelter did have some welcoming murals of young girls playing and even a memorial with the names of the forty-one girls in front of the shelter. However, what was interesting was that the name of the shelter had been removed. The murals, memorial, and the removal of the shelter’s name disclosed the denial of what occurred on March 7 and 8, 2017, at Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asuncion. The state of Guatemala and conservative politicians continued to blame the girls, punishing them posthumously for speaking up against the horrible conditions experienced at the shelter.

8 Tijax has not only responded to the families with emotional support by accompanying (Yarris and Duncan 2024) the mothers to the court hearings but also by becoming an extended care network, advocating for solidarity efforts in Guatemala as well as Mexico, Canada, and the United States. According to anthropologists Kristin Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan (2024, 3), accompaniment relies upon engagement with trust, building relationships requiring humility and openness. One of the many ways 8 Tijax accompanies the mothers in the search for justice is by creating art and building global support. 8 Tijax organized an international art campaign dedicated to the memory of each of the forty-one girls. The worldwide campaign invited fifty-eight artists from different geographies to draw each girl. The purpose of this campaign was to share each girl’s story, their name, their favorite colors, and interests. The campaign went viral on social media and is known as #NosDuelen56 (see Figure 1). A member of 8 Tijax shared her testimony:

La campaña global es un ejercicio de memoria, para nosotras es una acción global. #NosDuelen56, artistas globales invitados para ilustrar a las niñas. Cada artista honra la vida de las niñas como el arte es un lenguaje para la memoria que muestra que la población tiene más empatía, y combate el odio, el prejuicio y el estigma, un grito del arte, una memoria permanente de las niñas, una campaña permanente que también acompaña el juicio penal. El arte ha sido fundamental en la búsqueda de la justicia.

The global campaign is an exercise of memory; for us, it is a worldwide action. #NosDuelen56 invited international artists to illustrate the girls. Each artist honors the life of the girls as art is a language for memory. This shows that the population has more empathy and combats hatred, prejudice, and stigma—a cry from art, a memory of girls, a permanent campaign accompanying the criminal trial. Art has been fundamental in the search for justice.

Figure 1. The global campaign in memory of the fifty-six girls. Source: Colectivo 8 Tijax Instagram.

The international campaign reached groups in Santiago, Chile, such as Tejidas Subversivas, who organized a series of days starting with a doll workshop at the National Library of Chile and ending with a second day of weaving and embroidery. The groups sent the canvas to Guatemala to support the cause of Nos Duelen 56, weaving solidarity networks for memory, embodiment, and healing. These transnational efforts from subversive groups across Abya Yala demonstrate the counter-memory aesthetic of literally weaving the girls’ memory. As a community educator and scholar, I could not separate myself from the case and those involved in the search for justice. Instead, I saw my role as the bridge to connect 8 Tijax with other GuateMaya feminist groups in the diaspora and spread awareness of the case. I made that bridge by connecting 8 Tijax efforts to the GMR-LA group and creating transnational solidarity networks across Abya Yala and the United States. By bridging solidarity across imposed imaginary lines, GuateMaya feminist groups’ world-making resists state hegemonic narratives of denial, and weaves in their memory across space and time.

GMR-LA

Xuana Mulul, a GMR-LA member, shared the following reflections on the origins of the group and translated them into English:

Vengo de un proceso organizativo en Guatemala. Tenía toda la intención de hacer algo similar aquí en Los Ángeles con organizaciones para mujeres y organizaciones sociales. Estaba motivada para ver lo que podíamos hacer. Así nació la idea de reunirnos en un espacio donde pudiéramos discutir situaciones sobre mujeres. Notamos que la situación para las mujeres aquí es difícil, como las tareas asignadas a ellas y estar fuera del país lo hace más difícil.

I came from an organizational process in Guatemala. I had every intention to do something similar here in Los Angeles with organizations for women and social organizations. I was motivated to see what we could do. That is how the idea was born: to get together in a space where we could discuss situations about women. We noticed the situation for women here is challenging, like the chores assigned to them, and being out of the country makes it more difficult.

GMR-LA addresses intergenerational trauma by creating art in the streets of Los Angeles or becoming involved in public activities to raise awareness about feminicides, the fifty-six girls, disappearances of Indigenous people, or the precarity in Guatemala. When the group was formed, one goal was to create unity principles that speak to the group’s intentions and work ethics. They follow four main principles: women’s empowerment, preserving a collective memory, social justice, and transnational solidarity. The group continues to work on these principles while building community with other Indigenous groups in Los Angeles, such as Mexicali Resiste, La Comunidad Ixim, and Guatemala LGBTI Diaspora, which are also grassroots based.

GMR-LA commemorates March 8 (International Women’s Day) annually concerning memory struggles in Guatemala. GMR-LA uses public space to amplify the memory of the disappeared and feminicide cases, bridging the connections of resistance and solidarity among imaginary lines. In March 2020, a month to commemorate International Women’s Day, GMR-LA organized an event at MacArthur Park honoring the memory of the fifty-six Guatemalan girls. GMR-LA commemorated the event three years after the massacre with a vigil at the park and a collective gathering with the immigrant community to remember the girls in connection to other local issues such as anti-gentrification, health disparities, immigration, border deaths, and so on. The group reclaimed the space by chalking big letters NOS DUELEN 56 (see Figure 2). Photos of the girls were hung all around using the park trees to make it a public mourning.

Figure 2. Photo from the March 2020 International Women’s Day event at MacArthur Park, Los Angeles. Source: GMR-LA Instagram, March 9, 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/B9hbBjqA71s/?hl=en&img_index=1

US and Guatemala official memorials provide tangible access to the past, and memorial encounters are woven into everyday routines across cities, towns, and rural areas. While inviting casual and intentional encounters, vernacular memorials differ in that they are spontaneous, produced outside official processes, and can initiate counter-narratives to commemoration’s official, sanctioned subjects (people, events, and issues). Memorials are situated within social processes of political-socialsymbolic systems of meaning production (Gibson and Burstow 2022, 67). The vernacular memorials and public mourning GMR-LA produced in a public park spatially map the GuateMaya community’s cultural memory and simultaneously build a network of GuateMaya people in the diaspora.

Latin American critical cartographer Helena Suárez Val (2022) uses the term affect amplifiers to denote activists, symbols, and protests publicly amplifying feminicide cases in Latin America, specifically in Uruguay. Feminicide has united Latin American feminist activists into continent-wide protests all forms of violence against women. In Uruguay, feminists appropriated the term feminicide for street demos that started spontaneously towards the end of 2014, protesting gender-related murders of women, the lack of political will to tackle the issue, and the media’s sexist and re-victimizing reporting. However, the affective atmosphere around feminicide emerges in the interaction of multiple discourses: the voices of a transnational feminist counter-public, on the one hand, and media and political voices on the other (Val 2022, 169). Val notes how the voices of a transnational feminist counter-public are an affect amplifier, and this is how I situated GMR-LA place-making, centering memory with an affective tone and action to amplify the names and stories of girls and women, victims of feminicide in Guatemala.

The group amplifies an affective environment by using Maya cosmology rituals of placing an altar with herbs and being guided by the day’s nawal (Maya energy). By doing this in a place like Los Angeles, the group educates participants about Mayan culture and practices and remembers their loved ones and traditions. Remembering is a decolonizing methodology, particularly for Indigenous Peoples forcibly dislocated from their culture, knowledge, and land (Zepeda 2022). Therefore, 8 Tijax and GMR-LA collectively are making space for the sacred, remembering, and re-rooting through cultural production and creating communal or community healing spaces through cultural memory. Diplomatic policies define political borders as a national line that prohibits communication and transportation; however, the efforts of GuateMaya groups in their search for justice have challenged diplomacy to reach solidarity groups and spread awareness about the case of the fifty-six girls.

Healing Cartographies

Sandra Luna, a GMR-LA supporter, shared the following remarks: “Yes, I believe I’ve carried intergenerational trauma. Since I started having this awakening, I have found painful things, but we're ending this trauma together. Thankfully, I also have this conocimiento (knowledge) to help my siblings, so we don’t repeat the same things. We are building community across borders. Now, I feel supported by my family, and we are changing the narrative in Los Angeles. I am connecting with my people.”

8 Tijax and GMR-LA create transformative memories of Guatemalan culture through creative ways reflected through poetry, art, protests, symbolic installations, and ceremonial altars—what I call healing cartographies. In contrast, the groups are in different geographies. They are motivated by other outcomes but with a similar goal of rebuilding counter-memory amidst the Guatemalan state’s continued impunity on feminicide cases. For 8 Tijax, they demand justice for the families of the fifty-six girls. GMR-LA is a network that 8 Tijax collaborates with to expand solidarity beyond borders about the girls’ legal case and memory. GMR-LA continues to produce a transformative memory for Maya women through embodied testimonials and place-making in Los Angeles. However, both groups focus on their interpersonal relationships and affective experiences. This broadening of the notion of communities breaks time and space barriers: Community is no longer perceived as closed and fixed, related simply to the present. Testimonies travel through different mechanisms connecting time and space (Mcleod and DeMarinis 2018, 8).

From a Native American woman’s perspective, Mishuana Goeman explains that “unlike Western maps whose intent is often to represent the ‘real,’ Native narrative maps often conflict, perhaps add the story, or only tell certain parts: Stories and knowledge of certain places can belong to families, clans, or individuals” (2013, 25). Indigenous maps create multiple perspectives, like plurality to mapping, and where many worlds can fit. With care and affection, we can weave liberated futures with these stories. For many of us who are the descendants of terror, fear, and silence, feeling liberated means being healed from the past and able to live without guilt in this complicated world. Therefore, I wanted participants to feel a sense of healing, a breath of fresh air, and feel part of the community during the body mapping workshops and even when spending time together at a meeting or through texting on WhatsApp. As a feminist geographer, I felt I was practising healing cartographies, mapping our present and future through spiritual altars and embodied testimonios.

8 Tijax and GMR-LA collective body map. Photo of a woman with a collage of my
dissertation fieldwork photos from Guatemala to Los Angeles, 2019–2023.

Figure 3. 8 Tijax and GMR-LA collective body map. Photo of a woman with a collage of my dissertation fieldwork photos from Guatemala to Los Angeles, 2019–2023.

Healing cartographies are exemplified by the verbal, embodied testimonies of Guatemalan feminist groups mapping out the plural communication and language through art, songs, poems, and events as a critical recovery of memory and healing. I kept visualizing the healing cartographies of this study, and I wanted to put an image on paper. My cousin Marina, who is an artist, was able to help me capture the memories and memorabilia of loved ones from these embodied practices. I gathered my fieldwork photos and asked her to add the pictures to an image of a woman’s body, making the body of the woman a map (see Figure 3). As we worked on this collage together, she became very excited to know more about Guatemala’s history from a woman’s perspective. Therefore, the collage represents the healing cartographies and maps out embodied geographies using GuateMayas’ feminist decolonial futurity, the body and territory of my research, and the transformation it developed after five years of research.

As Marina and I worked on the collage, we intentionally added photos of my fieldwork that symbolize a specific body part. For example, the woman’s head and heart symbolize memory. We added photos from my fieldwork that reflected historical and cultural memory. On top of the head, we placed the images of the fifty-six girls’ memorial and the altar in the Plaza de las Niñas. The heart and chest areas include four different altars created by the groups in the study. Instead of memorials, the groups connected more to spiritual altars to invoke the memory of the girls and loved ones in the present time. The arms include photos of the arms of one of the mothers, with tattoos of her daughter and a sunflower, which symbolizes the fifty-six girls. Coming down to the legs represents the two body mapping workshops, and we added a few photos of the body maps from both groups. The feet include the images of the Hogar Seguro shelter and some posters we used for a protest in Los Angeles calling out the state of Guatemala for the massacre of the fifty-six girls.

What interested me was that the woman’s eyes looked in a specific direction. I was using Maya cosmology and the four directions to guide me in which direction the woman was looking towards. Reading about Maya’s cardinal directions, she would be looking at the direction of the north. In contrast to the Western directions, the north is not on top but on the side, and in Maya cosmology, the north symbolizes the color white, the father sky, and the way of the sacred warrior. Growth, children, and education are linked to the north. What is beautiful about this image is that it embodies both groups, personifying their actions, stories, and beliefs by marking the body’s memory and identifying it as the first territory. The women in the groups are sacred warriors who walk a path protecting sacred memory.

In addition, the woman’s body has no borders, allowing the territories to touch and embrace differences but stretching out the territory for participatory change using spiritual technologies like altars. The red flowers around the collage are red carnations to represent the everlasting memory of loved ones. Marina added the collage to her blog titled, “Collective Memory Making and Healing Among GuateMaya Survivors of State Violence Through Testimonies, Public Art, and Music,” as she explained what it means to her and made it expansively live in the digital world. Therefore, these healing cartographies continue to expand, making the visual and embodied testimonios of GuateMaya feminist groups transcend settler-colonial borders through time and space.

The narratives in this study represent feminist groups in Guatemala and the diaspora that decided to build a memory based on their accounts, principles, and political convictions. For 8 Tijax, the search for justice for the fifty-six girls is a priority, and the mothers’ testimonies zealously elevate the girls’ memory. They are determined never to forget what the state did to their daughters on March 8, 2017. As with GMR-LA, the group comprises women from Guatemala living in Los Angeles who create a community for recent migrants and political refugees to build solidarity around Guatemala’s past and contemporary issues. Both groups’ oral and embodied testimonies illuminate the urgent need for archiving feminist memories of the war and contemporary issues such as feminicide with a cuerpo-territorio lens that communicates the nuances of cultural memory from an embodied geographical perspective. Throughout this study, I carefully documented the oral and embodied testimonios because retelling a story can impact a survivor. However, guided by the framework of cuerpo-territorio (Cabnal 2010) and body mapping methods, I created a space to feel confident to do this research with care and love, which the participants appreciated. As I continue with this research, some questions arise: How can the role of a community educator, scholar, and active member enrich the efforts of healing movements? How do the body maps form collective solidarity, memory, and healing constellations? Lastly, how can the group’s healing efforts become liberatory praxis for other feminist groups across the hemisphere?

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the GuateMaya feminist groups in this study for their bravery and resilience and for sharing their testimonies. I dedicate this work to the memory of the forty-one girls and Acqij Domingo Choc Che. Thank you to the reviewers, editor, and friends who gave me generous feedback.

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Author Bio

Carla Macal is an interdisciplinary anti-colonial feminist scholar dedicated to community-engaged research addressing the intersections between state violence and intergenerational healing. She is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC San Diego’s Department of Literature.

Carla Macal es una académica feminista anticolonial interdisciplinaria dedicada a la investigación comprometida con la comunidad que aborda las intersecciones entre la violencia estatal y la sanación intergeneracional. Actualmente es University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow en el departamento de literatura en UC San Diego.