In Search of Providence

Transnational Mayan Identities, Updated Edition

Patricia Foxen

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826501264
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

In the mid-1990s, Patricia Foxen traveled back and forth between the Guatemalan highlands and Providence, Rhode Island, to understand the migration paths of K'iche' Mayan Indians who had fled the Guatemalan civil war to work in the factories and fisheries of New England. More than two decades later, many Mayans are still migrating to the US, today part of the "border crisis" that prompted the Trump administration's ruthless immigration and asylum policy backlash. As Foxen argues, the recent surge in Mayan border crossings must be contextualized within both the longer history of violence, marginality, and exclusion that has long led Guatemala's Indigenous populations to be "survivors on the move, " as well as contemporary push factors such as climate change and growing inequality that have forced people from their communities. And yet one of the most significant drivers of continued emigration today, ironically, is the very culture of migration (described in the book) that has accelerated social change within many Indigenous communities, setting in motion a complex series of economic and cultural shifts that have compelled a continuous movement of people and generations to the US. Reading this story in 2020—at a time of massive growth in flows of irregular migrations around the world—can help us better understand the highly complex set of factors that propel long-term migrations and that shape transnational communities on both sides of the border. In Search of Providence offers a layered, historically grounded perspective that speaks to the local specificity behind the migration experience in order to point to the universal themes and contradictions of contemporary global displacements.

CHAPTER 1

ENTERING THE FIELD

In the summer of 1996, I traveled to Guatemala to discover the origins of the Maya-Providencia connection. Having learned that there was a growing population of Mayan Indians who had been living and working in Providence, Rhode Island, since the mid-1980s, I hoped to make some sense out of this seemingly curious migratory route. During my first week in the old colonial city of Antigua, I received my first hint rather by accident. As I got my bearings amid throngs of gringo Spanish-language students, backpackers, and locals, I was advised by geographer George Lovell that a development worker teaching indigenous school children in Joyabaj—a municipality located deep in the southern basin of El Quiché, a highland area known primarily for its very high rates of poverty and the massive violence perpetrated during the war—had several young students whose parents were living in el Norte.

Following this somewhat vague clue, I prepared for my trip into the mountains with some apprehension: Before leaving for Joyabaj, the national newspapers announced that a few days earlier, during that town’s annual fiesta, three men had been doused with gasoline and burned to death in the main plaza by a crowd of villagers seeking vengeance for a cantina (saloon/bar) shoot-out. Judging from the violence-packed newspapers I’d been pouring over in Antigua’s cafés, this type of incident was occurring with increased frequency throughout the highlands. Local frustration with corrupt police and justice systems, a dearth of economic opportunity, and the sinister residues of la violencia¹ were contributing to a frightening rise in lynchings, assassinations, rapes, and holdups, many of them committed by ex-military or paramilitary members.

Riding the ancient, jam-packed Canadian Bluebird school bus up the winding Quiché mountains, I was distracted for a few hours from these initial concerns. A sign at the front attesting to Canada’s civic concern and firm language laws announced in French and English: THE SAFETY OF YOUR CHILDREN IS OUR PRIMARY CONCERN, though the driver’s own sign, YO MANEJO, DIOS GUIA (“I drive, God guides”) was clearly more appropriate in this setting. Processing the tremendous beauty of the green countryside, while tensing in terror at the driver’s reckless swerves over endlessly deep canyons, required quite a cognitive effort—though my fellow riders, mostly K’iche’ Indians returning from regional markets, seemed decidedly unruffled.² At the entrance to each town we passed stood large billboards for Rubios cigarettes, projecting the image of a confident Ladino ganadero (cattle herder/cowboy). Approaching the department’s capital, Santa Cruz del Quiché, I was startled by the sight of a large army garrison, surrounded by soldiers and marking the town’s entrance. These seemed to be unsubtle proclamations, to say the least, of who remained in charge in these parts. I descended the bus at the town’s center in a sudden torrential downpour. Waiting for the connecting camioneta (bus) under the black sky for what seemed an eternity, feeling rather disoriented and discouraged by my somber surroundings, I soon noticed a number of muddy Rhode Island license plates drive by. Whether it was the work of God or the bus driver, I seemed to be in the right place!

On the bus to Joyabaj, I found a place for my backpack amid brightly colored bundles and sat surrounded by a group of rowdy young Ladinos whose loud, assured demeanor stood in stark contrast to the mostly silent Indians crowded in the front seats. After asking me where I came from, the nineteen-year-old albino at my side told me of his numerous friends and relatives living in . . . Providencia! His friends, teasing him mercilessly for having finally met his canchita³ match, pitched into the conversation, speaking excitedly of their hopes to travel someday to el Norte—though not, they vehemently asserted, as mojados.⁴

During my first few days in Joyabaj (or Xoy, as it is known by locals) I found out that, indeed, Providence was on my side: As I had arrived on the last day of the municipality’s patron saint fiesta, I encountered many visiting transmigrants, some of whom had risked their jobs in the United States for a chance to participate (like those who had migrated to the capital or elsewhere) in festivities, take care of domestic problems, bring home cars and consumer goods, or buy their friends rounds of drinks in the cantina. Many of the homes I visited proudly displayed pictures of relatives in Providence, posing seriously next to shiny cars, in front of important state buildings or large New England houses, and usually in the midst of bright autumn leaves or snow-covered landscapes. These photographs were invariably exhibited in front rooms next to televisions, refrigerators, CD players, and other symbols of consumer status and transmigrant success. I met with several people—all Ladinos from Joyabaj’s pueblo or cabecera⁵ (town center), who, given my limited time frame, were most accessible and eager to speak—with widely differing transnational stories.

One young man told me of his dangerous crossing by foot through Mexico, which like many had included several jail stints, and of the grueling five years spent in Providence working double shifts in building and roofing, fish-packing, dishwashing, and gardening, as well as in jewelry and plastic factories. Back in Xoy, he now owned two pickup trucks, both commissioned from Providence, with which he ran a successful business selling leña (firewood), construction materials, and fertilizer throughout the mountains, capitalizing on the construction boom resulting from transnational remittances. His two-story cement-and-brick dwelling, complete with balcony, running hot water, and sofas, was a veritable palace compared to the dirt-floor, adobe, or tin-roofed cornstalk huts of the surrounding hamlets.

An aging widow told me how her only two sons had left years earlier for Providence para superar (to excel) but had soon stopped sending money and these days sent news rarely. She, her daughter-in-law, and grandchildren made ends meet by running a tiny, run-down cafeteria in their home. They showed me mountains of pictures of the wayward men, sent soon after their departure to the United States; with a somber face and suppressed tears, the children’s mother wrote down the name of her husband and pleaded with me to find him when I went next to Providence.

Walking down one of Joyabaj’s three main streets, I encountered a sweet and troubled twenty-year-old strutting slowly in his baggy, low-hung trousers and “USA”-emblazoned shiny baseball jacket: “Whazzup, how ya doin’?” he greeted me in English, with perfect gangsta rap body motions. He had just returned from Providence, where he had lived with his mother and Puerto Rican stepfather since he was fourteen; after only five months, he was anxious to return. “This place is terrible, there is so much violence, so many fights, there is no way to have a good life. I don’t mind workin’ hard, but I don’t want to make that cheap little money you make here.” As I discovered, he had been planning to make the next trip al Norte with his cousin—one of the men caught in the week’s cantina shoot out, who was now paralyzed in a Guatemala City hospital. Throughout my fieldwork, I would often run into him, usually quite drunk or high on marijuana, jobless and still planning to return to Providence.

While these impressionistic portraits of success stories, abandoned women, and lost or dreamy young men gave me some important preliminary insights into the significant socioeconomic and human impact of the Providence connection, other clues indicated that this town’s transnational nature extended far beyond Joyabaj’s cabecera. On a Sunday, I observed hundreds of Indian campesinos (peasants) descend by foot from the mountains, arriving from the township’s many diffusely scattered hamlets to go to church and to buy or sell goods in the market. Many would then wait for hours to pile into the GUATEL (national telephone company) phone booths: These were the wives, parents, children, and siblings of transmigrants, who would speak for long stretches in K’iche’ to their relatives allá lejos (far away). Along the hamlet roads, K’iche’ boys with Nike baseball caps, fashionable haircuts, and earrings listened on Walkmans to the latest ranchero songs about life as an ilegal,⁶ while their sisters and mothers, dressed in the municipal guipil and corte, balanced on their heads striped pots of water fetched from the river or well. At the express courier services scattered through town, where Ladinos and Indians mingled to send or receive packages, cassettes, photos, and letters from the United States, I saw a number of elderly and impoverished K’iche’ people dictate to clerks, in broken Spanish, their brief and formal letters, marking their signatures with inked thumbprints.

My “blind search” for the home context had proved successful, so I decided, two months later, to settle in Joyabaj, hoping to compare the impact of transnationalism on K’iche’ living in hamlet communities with those living in the more “urban” cabecera. Although I was able to make various institutional and personal contacts and participate in town activities, my anticipated research in this large municipality, which included over fifty widely dispersed hamlets, was soon frustrated by several logistical difficulties. I found that Indian transmigration from the hamlets was more diffuse than that originating from the pueblo, extending to Florida, the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan, New Jersey, and Washington State, according to the courier service records. Hamlets known to have a more concentrated Providence-oriented population, moreover, tended to be scattered, some up to an eight-hour walk from the pueblo through rugged terrain. The fluid boundaries of transnationalism certainly seemed difficult to master in the vast mountains of El Quiché. Moreover, my visits to the hamlets accompanied by NGO and community workers, both Indian and Ladino, indicated that the level of suspicion and fear toward outsiders in outlying areas was immense. NGO workers recounted to me the tremendous difficulties of entering communities where distrust not only of outsiders but also of indigenous promoters from neighboring hamlets (whose allegiances and actions during the war were still remembered) continued to frustrate the implementation of basic health and education programs.

During this first month in Joyabaj I found that the decision to evade the theme of violence in my research would be impossible, just as I could not avoid the tremendous poverty, illiteracy, morbidity, and mortality that made life in this area so vividly harsh and that were directly related to the dynamics of both violence and mass emigration. Throughout the towns and hamlets of El Quiché, the silent weight of past fear and terror, of brutal massacres and disappearances, as well as the more conspicuous state of current “vigilante” violence, made its way into every aspect of the cultural repertoire, including the rather sinister humor through which some in Joyabaj referred to the grotesque public lynching of the fiesta, jokingly recalled as la barbacoa (the barbecue).⁷ The texture of this violence felt all the more ominous in its juxtaposition to the ordinariness of life around me. Within my host family alone, largely respected throughout the community, I learned that a brother of sweet Doña Faustina, the household matriarch, had been murdered in the living room as a result of his having blown the whistle on a corrupt town mayor. During my stay, her younger brother, returning from Providence after a two-year stint, was shot at in the capital as his car left the airport, leaving his young nephew with several wounds.⁸ A few months later he was assaulted by a masked gang along the road from a nearby village; while all his belongings were stolen, his fate was luckier than that of the women in the cars behind him, who, he told me, were raped. Doña Faustina, understandably, lived in perpetual fear of leaving the house or opening the door. Such stories of holdups, robberies, shootings, and other forms of social violence formed the stuff of everyday life and seemed to mock the insistent discourse on “civil society,” “democracy,” and “human rights” that appeared in the national papers as the country supposedly prepared for la paz (peace).

Frustrated by my initial difficulties in Joyabaj, I decided after a month to move my research site to a smaller municipio, Xinxuc. Though situated in the southern Quiché as well, Xinxuc had a distinctly different feel: In contrast to the boisterous market and more ubiquitous state presence in Joyabaj’s town center (which included a prominent military outpost, a well-equipped government communications office and health center, and numerous NGOs), Xinxuc seemed oddly subdued and quiet. The lack of formal organization and institutions seemed to reinforce the rather forlorn, desolate character of the town: The municipality didn’t have a covered marketplace, a local parish priest, or a police force (the police had left town during la violencia). The bomberos municipales—a group of local Ladinos working the town’s volunteer fire department—performed a number of civic “duties,” ranging from elementary emergency services to running (and profiting from) one of the three community phone services. My introduction to this small municipality of roughly seven thousand inhabitants came through a European NGO I shall call PLANTAS,⁹ which conducted projects in the area of traditional medicine and the revitalization of Mayan culture. During a social visit with this organization (the only international NGO in the municipio), I discovered by talking with indigenous health promoters that the large emigration from Xinxuc over the past ten or so years, from both the pueblo and hamlets, had been aimed almost exclusively toward Providence. Like Joyabaj and a number of villages in the surrounding area, Xinxuc could thus be described as a transnational community—one in which a substantial proportion of the population had migrated abroad but maintained an important presence in, and had a substantial impact on, the home community. Given its small size, the relatively easy access to its hamlets, and a kind invitation by the PLANTAS director to live at the NGO’s headquarters in the pueblo, I decided to settle in.

THE HOME COMMUNITY

Having sensed already in Joyabaj the existence of deeply rooted suspicions and factions between locals and outsiders, Ladinos and Indians, and rival religious and political groups, it became apparent that my initial positioning in Xinxuc—and the manner in which I was presented to its inhabitants—would be critical. While this might seem like common ethnographic sense, the presence of a single, female anthropologist during a highly volatile postwar period, and in an area where most foreigners had been either development workers offering ayuda (aid) or missionaries preaching salvation, was highly questionable. If I was offering neither material aid nor spiritual hope to these people, what, then, was I doing in their village? What was the nature of my research, and what did such an activity imply? What was my job, and who was paying me? What were the informaciones (information) I needed, and what would I be doing with them?

In the first place, a study of “migration,” unlike, say, the local health surveys to which community members were accustomed, made little sense to many people. In a place of such tremendous poverty and need, my abstract exercise seemed both bizarre and unbelievable, and was often, therefore, viewed with suspicion. Moreover, although the signs of transnationalism were ubiquitous throughout the municipality, reflected in both absence (of people) and presence (of relative material wealth), it was not an aspect of life habitually translated into a more formal, reflective discourse, and it was certainly an odd topic to explain to a gringa, who after all must know more about el Norte than anyone here. For some, in addition, “anthropologists” were associated with the exhumations of mass graves currently conducted by forensic anthropologists throughout the region and were therefore connected with the “dangerous” postwar work of human rights organizations from which many sought to keep a distance.¹⁰

My association with PLANTAS, which had been able to forge a relatively neutral and respected space in Xinxuc and whose indigenous promoters had an excellent rapport within the outlying Indian communities, was critical. I hired Juanita, the young wife of one of the PLANTAS promoters, to work with me as a K’iche’ translator, though the role she played would eventually extend far beyond this task, since she also served as an interlocutor who would smooth the introductions with interviewees and then assist me in clarifying and analyzing the interviews. She and her husband, like most of the PLANTAS rural promoters, had many relatives who either lived in Providence, had spouses and children there, or had returned from there. After choosing three hamlets to work in (in addition to the pueblo) and reviewing some interview guides, Juanita and I made a list of potential “transnational” persons and families to visit. The majority of these people, like her, were affiliated with the Catholic church; because of the tremendous social distance and tensions between Catholics, evangelicals, and traditionalists (costumbristas), which were closely associated with wartime factionalism, and the general suspicion surrounding outsiders, it was appropriate to employ a “snowball” methodology that began with conocidos (acquaintances).

In addition to the contacts I made through her, I eventually forged a few relationships of trust (relaciones de confianza) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface to the Updated Edition: Mayan Migration in the Age of Trump
• Preface to the First Edition: One Foot Here, One Foot There
• 1. Entering the Field
• 2. Mayan Identities through History
• 3. The K’iche’ of Xinxuc
• 4. La Costa del Norte: Transnational Social Practices
• 5. A Dialogue on Indianness: Maya or Mojado?
• 6. Memory and Guilt
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• Appendix: Three Transnational K’iche’ Families
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index