FIGHTING COLONIALITY IN GUATEMALA: A HISTORY OF MAYA ACTIVISM AND MEMORIES

Drawing on the memories and written works of Indigenous activists and intellectuals, this dissertation examines the history of Maya struggles against the coloniality of power in the territory that is now Guatemala. Aníbal Quijano conceptualized coloniality as a matrix encompassing all domains of social life, which he argued have been dominated and managed by the colonizers and their descendants since their arrival in the Americas. These domains include the economy (land appropriation and concentration, exploitation of labour); authority (the executive, judiciary, legislative bodies, the state armed forces, and various government agencies); norms regulating gender and sexuality; and subjectivity and knowledge (epistemology, education, and the formation of subjectivity). The powerful wave of coloniality that engulfed the continent could not be halted; it indeed constrained Maya peoples’ political autonomy, subordinated them to non-Indigenous interests through colonialism and capitalism, facilitated the legal and illegal dispossession of their lands, and sought to invalidate their cultures, values, and ideas. However, throughout history, Indigenous peoples have persistently sought – and often succeeded – to mitigate its effects and brutality. This dissertation argues that while they have articulated this resistance across multiple social domains, Maya peoples were particularly successful in maintaining significant control over the creation and transmission of knowledge and the formation of subjectivity. Beyond contesting the construction of the indio and the erasure of Indigenousness, Maya peoples have sustained an epistemic resistance through their knowledge production and the paradigms they constructed, challenging the ideas and narratives imposed by dominant sectors of society. Maya intellectuals’ and activists’ historical and personal memories – accessed through oral interviews conducted in both rural and urban areas of Guatemala between 2011 and 2015 – and their written production – which expanded progressively beginning in the 1970s – offer unique insight into their control over the social domain of knowledge and subjectivity. While this dissertation devotes particular attention to the period since the 1960s and 1970s, when Maya peoples began mobilizing in more concerted ways, it also offers a broader analysis of less organized forms of resistance to coloniality throughout the twentieth century. It begins by examining how the coloniality of power historically structured Indigenous lives, and concludes with an analysis of Indigenous activists’ and intellectuals’ historical perspectives. In a clear act of epistemic resistance, they have – since the 1970s – repeatedly denounced historical oppression and its persistent absence from dominant narratives and proposed new narratives in which they carved a place for Indigenous peoples, their experiences, and their agency.

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