Making meaning of women's persistence and protagonism in the wake of genocidal violence: Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women of Chajul,Guatemala

Psychological discourse about the effects of war and other gross violations of human rights focuses disproportionately on individual symptoms clustered as post-traumatic stress disorder (Figley, 1985; Martín-Baró, 1994) and reflects what Unangax^ scholar Tuck (2009) characterizes as damage-centered discourse. This focus on damage as well as the dominance of transitional justice praxis in post-conflict situations all too often position women who have suffered sexual violence as victims whose only recourse for redress is through trials, truth commissions and/or reparations processes (Crosby & Lykes, 2019; Piper et al., 2012). Despite the important and much delayed recognition of sexual violence as a crime against humanity (Ellis, 2007), an unanticipated effect of this historic accomplishment has been the hypervisibilization of women as victims (Crosby & Lykes, 2019; Henry, 2009). It has also contributed to the silencing of multiple other structural violations (for example, impoverishment), as well as of women's protagonism and resistance.

Problematically, psychological responses to war, disaster and humanitarian crises are typically short-term interventions that draw on theories of trauma and recovery that are frequently described as universal (Lykes & Mersky, 2006; Summerfield, 2001). Although those who intervene increasingly recognize the contributions of local knowledge systems and cultural and linguistic practices to healing (IASC, 2007), few remain in the field long enough to learn about or engage with such particularities and lived experiences.

In contrast to the above tendencies, Tuck (2009) argues in support of research that centers participants’ desire and recognizes their “understanding [of the] complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (p. 416; see also Vargas-Monroy, 2012). Further, the first author (see, for example, Lykes, 2001a; Lykes & Mersky, 2006), among others (see, for example, Summerfield, 2001), has critiqued short-term interventions grounded in universalized theories and their widespread applications, emphasizing women's protagonism and persistence (Crosby & Lykes, 2019; Lykes et al., 2021). This ever-expanding understanding of Mayan women's resistance reflects processes through which they rethread life and community despite a continuum of injustice and violence. The research presented here extends these critiques through an analysis of in-depth interviews with Mayan women through which they reflected upon and made multiple meanings of the feminist psychosocial action and reflection processes they developed in dialogic relationality with the first author over nearly three decades.

Situating Maya, EuroAmerican and Latinx co-researchers

Mayan meaning systems are complex, diverse, ritualized in multiple ways and transformed over time. Despite differences across 21 Mayan linguistic communities, commonalities include understandings of time's cyclical recurrences, of a 260-day calendar, of the ever-presence of ancestors, and of rituals developed through performances at the interface of Mayan and Catholic beliefs and practices (Tedlock, 1992). The onto-epistemologies of contemporary Mayan feminist and/or womanist activists and scholars (for example, Chirix García, 2003; Cumes, 2012; Kaqla/Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla, 2011) contribute to a rethreading of traditional knowledge systems and contemporary meaning making processes. Some of these have been documented by the first author through mutual accompaniment of the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women of Chajul (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000). The current research invited the living co-researchers from that feminist photo participatory action research (PAR) process to reflect on the multiple iterative action-reflection workshops in which they had participated over nearly three decades. The workshops facilitated the design and carrying out of multiple community-based actions, including economic development and educational projects, and were contexts for reflecting on and developing knowledge from this work towards building a better future for themselves and their children during the final years of the armed conflict and beyond.

These diverse cultural understandings and long-term processes of accompaniment were facilitated through a grounding in dialogic relationships that was developed by local and transnational activist scholars and practitioners, alongside local racialized and linguistic communities. White Northern-origin and Euro-descendant Southern-origin feminist researchers engaged in ongoing critically reflexive processes, documenting how their hegemonic privileges due to white supremacy and neoliberal capitalist educational and economic systems position them and challenge them to reposition themselves in local contexts (see, for example, Crosby & Lykes, 2019). The first author's psychosocial accompaniment of Maya Ixil and K’iche’ communities has evolved towards mutual accompaniment (Watkins, 2019), that is, a process through she accompanied local Maya – and learned about and from them through their accompaniment of her. These processes included additional colleagues as we developed ways of being and doing that informed the long-term work, as well as diverse onto-epistemologies framing the work described herein.¹ The first two authors of this study and their colleagues have written extensively about these and other experiences as intermediaries (Merry, 2006) as they have sought to position themselves in pragmatic solidarity (Farmer, 2003) alongside Indigenous women in Guatemala and Peru. Through their reflections on these experiences, the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women interviewed for this study narrated women's community-based survivance and confirmed some of the ways through which long-term mutual accompaniment contributed to their protagonism and persistence, actions through which they rethreaded community in the wake of 36 years of genocidal violence.

The present study, part of a larger multiple-year feminist participatory action research (FPAR) process (Lykes et al., 1999; see also Reid & Frisby, 2008, for a discussion of feminism's particular contributions to PAR), sought to continue the work of re-theorizing Mayan women's persistence “from the bottom up”, as participants or co-researchers in the photoPAR process reflected on their lives nearly 20 years after the publication of their “community testimony” (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000). In 2017, the first author conducted in-depth interviews with 15 of the 18 still living Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women who had participated in this feminist photoPAR process. Through documenting, in their own words, their experiences of the armed conflict and its wake, and focusing on their descriptions of what they had learned – or unlearned – about racialized and gendered violence through participating in the creative workshops and photoPAR processes, this research sought to understand how Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women perceived and made meanings of their, their families’ and their communities’ wellbeing in the wake of genocidal violence. The long-term accompaniment through FPAR and the in-depth interviews described herein center these women's protagonism and persistence, challenging and reframing the dominant damage-centered, trauma-dominated psychological discourse of post-conflict healing and recovery processes.

Historically situating the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women of Chajul

The Indigenous communities in what is today the nation-state of Guatemala and beyond its borders have persisted for more than 500 years, resisting institutionalized racism, economic exploitation, neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy, and political violence.

Mayan women during the armed conflict

The US-supported 1954 coup that overturned a democratically-elected Guatemalan government, which had sought to redress a grossly unequal distribution of land and wealth (Schlesinger & Kinzer, 1982), contributed to the installation of a series of dictators who were found responsible for what is now recognized as acts of genocide against the Maya, within the context of a 36-year armed conflict perpetrated by the Guatemalan military (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [CEH], 1999). The latter was found to be responsible for 93% of 669 massacres against the highland Mayan communities, including over 300 in the Quiché department in which the work described herein is situated (Carmack, 1988; CEH, 1999; Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala [ODHAG], 1998). More than 200,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands forcibly displaced within and beyond the country's borders. Ixil and K’iche’ Mayan women, participants in the study reported herein, were among some of the many survivors of multiple gendered and racialized violent assaults, including sexual violence. Importantly, even when the worst years of the armed conflict subsided, continuities of violence against Mayan women, some of which preceded that conflict, have continued (Carey & Torres, 2010).

Chajul is one of three towns that constitute what the Guatemalan army labeled as the “Ixil Triangle” due to the predominant Ixil-speaking population and the geographic positioning of the communities of Chajul, Cotzal, and Nebaj, a strategy that targeted them during the most recent Guatemalan armed conflict (CEH, 1999). One of the conflict's armed insurgent groups, the EGP or Guerilla Army of the Poor, organized in remote areas of the Western Highlands in the 1970s (Smith, 1990). Repressive measures targeting many of the Maya as “subversive” included scorched earth policies (Smith, 1990) and massacres of entire villages, and forced displacement within the country and across the border into Mexico and sites further north (CEH, 1999). Efforts to control these populations included the installation of military bases within the rural towns as well as “model villages” (Smith, 1990) on sites of former communities destroyed by the army; Mayan peasants who had not been slaughtered lived therein, participating in forced labor and militarized “reeducation” programs. Some women and men left Chajul during these years, joining the EGP, while others were hidden by family and friends or migrated to the capital or beyond the country's borders, to save their lives or protect their children.

Transitions towards post-genocide and beyond

Despite the war's duration, the worst years of this violence spanned the late 1970s and early 1980s. The signing of the final Peace Accords between the URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) and the Guatemalan government (December, 1996) contributed to important transitional justice processes, through which local and international intermediaries took testimonies from survivors in most parts of the country and documented gross violations of human rights (CEH, 1999; ODHAG, 1998). Some local Ixil and K’iche’ Chajulenses participated in these processes while others resisted. Among the latter were women who expressed a hesitancy to share their stories if they were not going to contribute to, in their words, “making a better life for their children”, highlighting their deep commitments to prioritizing a redress of poverty and the provision of educational opportunities, health care, and overall wellbeing for all in Chajul and its villages.

Although there have been notable changes in the Ixil region since the 1990s and the militarization of the region has waned, the town itself has seen limited economic development. The town hosts a small number of NGOs including the Associación Chajulense, which includes a coffee export project, a weaving project, as well as a hospedaje or overnight guest house (see https://coopcoffees.coop/chajul/). More recently, three small NGOs have been developed, with considerable economic support from the United States. Limitless Horizons Ixil (https://limitlesshorizonsixil.org/) focuses on educational opportunities and coordinates local afterschool programs, a town library, and scholarships for town and village children who qualify for their resources. Filantropia Guatemala (http://filantropis.org/en/) supports Chajulense youth in social entrepreneur programs, and AmaChajul (Associación Maya Chajulense, https://www.amachajul.org/) supports the local community through leadership and entrepreneurship training, with a particular focus on girls and women. All three are now coordinated by Ixil and K’iche’ youth and young adults, some of whom are children of the photoPAR project participants. These youth describe their local work as opportunities to generate life projects in the town, alternatives to migration north to the United States, which is a dominant survival strategy among many Maya. The town also now hosts several hotels, a number of local cantinas, numerous small stores, and multiple evangelical house churches as well as the Catholic parish and a charismatic Catholic gathering site.

Creative workshops, feminist PAR and photovoice

Informed by these ongoing political and social realities, the first author responded to an invitation to facilitate a range of workshops and economic development projects in Chajul in 1992. These were spaces wherein historically marginalized women who had suffered gross violations of human rights identified and performed their feelings and shared sorrows, voiced their varied and sometimes contradictory understandings of the causes and consequences of historic and contemporary violence, and engaged together in action-based responses. Twenty Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women from among a growing group of nearly 200 opted to collaborate in a more formal research process, that is, a photography-informed feminist participatory action research project or photoPAR (Lykes, 2010; Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000). Participatory workshops had been designed to accompany local women in lifting up and enhancing their listening skills; reclaiming their local or Indigenous knowledge and traditions; drawing on critical thinking skills towards documenting and sharing their understandings of the root causes of the armed conflict and massacres; and identifying capacities and resources through which to take actions for community wellbeing. The data from multiple iterations of these FPAR processes include images and texts representing Mayan women's documentation of their and their communities’ lived experiences. These 20 Maya Ixil and K’iche’ co-researchers took over 1,000 photographs in Chajul and its surrounding villages, conducted interviews with each other and with those they photographed, and generated over 100 phototexts. The latter were then collaboratively articulated as photonarratives, culminating in the publication of a book that some described as their nunca más [never again], “Voices and Images: Mayan Ixil Women of Chajul” (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000). The first author has continued to return to Chajul annually, facilitating psychosocial workshops with what are now two women's organizations, assisting in writing grants to support multiple projects in Chajul and some of its surrounding villages, and documenting processes that local women have generated in the wake of the photoPAR process, including a participatory process evaluation (Lykes & Crosby, 2015). As mentioned above, the research described herein is based on her individual in-depth interviews with 15 of the 18 living photoPAR co-researchers in 2017.

Methodology

The wider FPAR processes as well as the in-depth interviews analyzed herein were approved by the Boston College Institutional Review Board (IRB) at multiple points over these nearly three decades. The original photoPAR process as well as the most recent IRB submission included approval of oral informed consent processes given the educational levels of many of the women, with all descriptions and documentation in English and Spanish. Participants were limited to those 18 years of age or older and oral consent was granted. Confidentiality and anonymity were negotiated regularly over the multiple iterations of the larger research process as most co-researchers sought approval for co-authorship of the photoPAR book.

The 2017 interviews were preceded by a meeting in Chajul to which all 18 living members of the photoPAR project were invited; 14 participated. The first author's overall goals for documenting their experiences through in-depth interviews, as well as the anticipated format of the interview and the ethical considerations including the IRB forms, were presented and discussed. All expressed enthusiasm for supporting this phase of the research.

Participants

This study included 15 Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women from the 20 who had previously participated in the photoPAR project. Two of the twenty had died since the book's publication in 2000, but the remaining 18 women were invited to participate in this research. Two declined to be interviewed due to family challenges generated by recently deported family members in the fall of 2017. One of the daughters of one of those who had died was living in Guatemala City at the time of the interviews described herein, and deferred to her sister, also a member of the photoPAR project, to serve as a key informant about their experiences. Thirteen of the 15 participants are Maya Ixil and two are Maya K’iche’. Co-researchers from the photoPAR process including those interviewed in this study represent three generations of women, with precise ages often unreported as they were unknown by the women themselves. Those among the older generation had been joined with partners through arranged relationships, often when only 14 years old, and most had borne between four and seven children. Those in younger generations partnered through diverse strategies including these traditional arrangements as well as through their own choices, including at older ages and after having spent years as single women, a less traditional pattern but one reflected within this group. Many, particularly among the older generations, were widowed by the war. Fourteen of the 15 interviewees currently live in Chajul. One of the K’iche’ women who had lived in a village of Chajul during the photoPAR process continues to teach there now while living with her husband and son in Nebaj, where she was interviewed. All were interviewed in their homes.

Interview process

The interview protocol was developed by the first author to explore the local participants’ experiences of the photoPAR process 17 years after the publication of their nunca más. The questions focused on the participatory processes that contributed to the book's publication and on how the book had informed co-researchers’ lives and work within and beyond Chajul. Additional questions were developed to elicit stories about the knowledge(s) and capacities they attributed to those years together, their ongoing work within and beyond local organizations in the town, as well as their involvement in current activities that they perceived as related to the skills and resources that they had developed through photoPAR. We also sought their narratives about the continuities and discontinuities of violence, impoverishment, and gender and racialized oppression and marginalization in Chajul. The in-depth interviews were structured to elicit the narratives of women who had survived horrific violations of their rights and profound losses yet had undertaken and persisted in long-term processes, grounded in local knowledge and experiences, towards enhancing their own and their families’ and community's wellbeing.

Thirteen of the 15 interviews were conducted in Spanish, with two conducted in Spanish and Ixil with interpretation provided by one of the 15 participants, who had served as a local coordinator of the women's organization and a participant in the photoPAR process. Fourteen of the 15 participants gave permission to tape record their interviews and one gave permission for notes to be taken. All interviews were transcribed by native Spanish-speaking research assistants and transcripts as well as recordings were returned by the first author to participants for review. In 2018 she visited with participants in Chajul, reviewing the transcripts and seeking any recommendations for changes, none of which were forthcoming.

Data interpretation

Charmaz's (2014) constructivist grounded theory informed the analysis and interpretation of the interviews. This approach did not guide data collection, that is the interview process, as the data were gathered during a single visit to Chajul and not iteratively, alongside data analytic processes. However, the process was informed by Charmaz's theory and we attended closely to the roles played by the researchers’ subjectivities and positionalities and how they informed the interview processes, as well as the iterative constructions of knowledge that took place as we analyzed the transcripts (Charmaz, 2014). Analyses were conducted in Spanish and all quotes included herein then translated into English by the authors.

The first step of analysis included the development of inductive line-by-line codes that were then read multiple times while writing memos. This process facilitated a deeper understanding of the data as well as the identification of commonalities among the first-level codes in order to identify higher levels of abstraction and axial codes. The latter represent the meanings interpreted from the first-level coding. These analytic processes were iterative, as the authors constantly moved back and forth among the interview transcripts, the first-level codes and the axial codes so that the latter better represented the authors’ understandings of the meanings made by the participants.

The axial codes reflect the participants’ meaning-making of the processes that unfolded within and across time as they had participated in multiple community-based participatory workshops facilitated by the first author, and multiple actions in which they engaged prior to and in the wake of the photoPAR process. All workshops were sites for reflecting upon earlier actions and designing future responses to challenges and conflicts that emerged in their actions (for example, fears experienced by women who needed to rise at 4 am and walk to the center of Chajul to run the corn mill). Given the iterative and bottom-up nature of the knowledge construction process that occurred throughout the FPAR workshops, it was important to choose an analysis strategy for this study that could capture the local meaning-making processes of these Mayan women. Constructivist grounded theory centers participants’ particular understandings of the world when building theoretical frameworks that are grounded in the data. The rigorous and bottom-up nature of the data analysis and interpretation process fostered by constructivist grounded theory aligned with the focus of this study.

The analyses of the participants’ meaning making resulted in the identification of three processes that evolved over time and that are grounded in participants’ experiences. These include: (1) learning with and about themselves; (2) working for a better future for themselves and their families; and (3) becoming women through performing individuality and collectivity. These processes are reflected in themes constructed through axial coding and narrate a particular story about changes that unfolded iteratively over nearly three decades of the women's multiple actions. The diagram reflects the iterative processes within and across nearly 30 years during which these women engaged in multiple participatory processes and projects described briefly above, and in more detail in previous publications (Lykes, 2001b, 2010).

Documenting the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women's persistence and protagonism

As reflected in Figure 1, the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women who participated in the photoPAR processes had been part of earlier creative workshops that contributed to their development of multiple small economic development (for example, the corn mill) and educational initiatives, and in the formation of their Women's Committee in 1992. The creative workshops facilitated dramatizations of challenges encountered in taking these actions while affording moments through which current fears opened processes for storying previous experiences of the armed conflict and the reclaiming of Mayan rituals and traditions. Drawing from this, the group decided to document their “herstory” of the war through participatory processes that built on and informed the development of a women's community in Chajul. These nearly three decades of community-based collaborations reflect Maya Ixil and K’iche’ protagonism or local leadership, that is, their persistence articulated through actions on, in, and through their herstory. Below we document many of these processes through our iterative analyses of the Mayan participants’ narratives.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Documenting co-constructed meaning-making through action-reflection processes.

Learning with and about themselves

Since the creation of the Association of Maya Ixil Women New Dawn (ADMI, for its Spanish and Ixil language acronym), women were invested in learning processes, a commitment reflected in one of the group's first projects, an educational initiative, that is, the children's Ixil alphabetization project. Their commitment to promoting their children's learning necessitated their developing new skills by participating in spaces through which they themselves learned from each other and from their social context. They storied “la violencia”, horrors that had permeated and upended their lives in Chajul, through creative storytelling (Rodari, 1996) and dramatic play (Boal, 2000; Pavlovsky et al., 1985). These processes facilitated their sharing more personal experiences heretofore not verbalized and now embodied in performances of how they and their families survived the armed conflict, experiences they shared through workshops facilitated by the first author.

As mentioned previously, the photoPAR project (1996–2000) gave women the opportunity to learn from other women in their community and surrounding villages. Thus, they embarked on processes of re-membering the past that encouraged them to also collectively recover the history of their community. Interviewees reported vivid memories of having conducted interviews with each other and then with Mayan women in neighboring rural villages and how they had narrated their stories of the war and of the ongoing poverty and structural violence they endured. One woman noted an experience shared by many:

When I was interviewed, I remembered many things, my childhood, my youth, my parents during the war, how they left and when I found them, many things. One was seeing reality, what one had inside that often one had not realized, but with the help of photoPAR, I did many things.

The women they photographed, and whose stories they documented, also shared with them how they maintained their Mayan traditions and practices, significant elements of their culture that were also under attack during the armed conflict (see Lykes, 2010, for examples). These stories of violence touched the women of photoPAR profoundly, evidenced by one participant who noted that: “when she learned what the other woman told her, it hurt her, she heard the women's story and she felt hurt because of her situation”.² As can be seen, learning with each other as they re-membered the past led to and was sustained by forms of mutual accompaniment (Watkins, 2019), processes that allowed them to stand by other Mayan women in Chajul and its villages as they shared their suffering and also their persistence and protagonism.

In the 2017 interviews the women strongly underscored how much they had learned as they acquired new skills and knowledge throughout these years by being part of the women's association and the photoPAR project. Most of these learning processes took place in collective spaces, such as the participatory creative workshops, where they also learned about mental health, liberation psychology, children's education, and Maya and women's rights and wellbeing. Some also reported learning computer skills and about how to draft financial reports when the photoPAR project required such reporting. One participant mentioned: “They called us to teach us how to use the computers … to use the machines and make reports, because when we worked, we had to deliver reports, we had to do things with machines, with the computer”. A very relevant skill the women underscored learning was how to use a camera, a skill acquired during photoPAR that allowed them to reach out to other women in the surrounding villages and, as mentioned previously, keep learning from them through documenting their stories visually and orally. One woman noted, “When the photoPAR project group was formed, I remember how we organized women, … to learn to handle the cameras and the computer, … I started laughing, because I thought we weren't going to be able to do that”.

Participants mentioned the photoPAR processes as opportunities to discover and then strengthen their abilities to speak in public and in Spanish, a second language for many. Although many of them understood and spoke a little Spanish at the beginning of the project, they noted that they did not feel comfortable expressing themselves in this language. As the project unfolded, they gained the confidence to do so, as mentioned by one participant: “They had to translate because we couldn't speak [Spanish] well. With the workshops and trainings, little by little, we started learning. Maybe we could talk, but what happened is that we didn't dare to”. Another woman noted that:

The first thing you think about is, “what will they say about you when you are speaking”. Like me; when I spoke, I thought what they would say when I spoke and then I forgot what I was going to say. Little by little, my fear and shame disappeared. Also, participating in other trainings that they gave us and that is how I learned many things.

As they became more fluent in speaking a second language, some started to read and write in Spanish. Despite very few years of formal schooling, they reported that these workshops provided a space to practice and thereby improve basic literacy skills. Reflecting about this process, the women realized how gaining new skills was connected to the enhancement of their wellbeing and their self-esteem. They noted that these participatory processes facilitated their gaining confidence in themselves and in their capacity to continue learning from themselves and others within and, even more so, beyond their community where speaking Spanish was often required, as few spoke Ixil. As noted in Figure 1, between 2001 and 2017, some women participated as members and leaders of other NGOs within and beyond Chajul.

Many of the participants described fear and feelings of insecurity when not being able to engage adequately in the activities at hand when the association first formed. They noted that after reflecting on these feelings they realized that they had to shake those fears off in order to take a risk and learn new things. A lesson they drew from all these years was that in order to learn new skills and try new things, one needed to be determined. They also spoke about how learning and doing so many new things had had profound effects on them, effects that they perceived as having unfolded over time. One woman noted that: “I learned how to think, to speak about other things, my mind opened … we went to Nebaj once and so went out a bit”. Another participant noted: “I have learned a lot because I can speak in public, a lot of things, I no longer feel useless, rather I say that yes, we can”. Through taking actions, for example, speaking in public, and then acknowledging that they had done so and reflecting upon the experience, participants affirmed a learning process grounded in doing as well as an awareness that they could learn.

Working for a better future for themselves and their families

Throughout these years one of the main motivations for Chajulense women's work has been to build a better future for themselves and their families. When their association, ADMI, first came together, women were moved by the urgent need to respond to their families’ material needs in the wake of war's losses, their displacement, and their return to a community still occupied by the military. Thus, one of their first projects was to build a corn mill, which they saw as an important step toward building a better future by contributing to the community and to their lives as women who were grinding corn by hand for 6–8 hours each day (see Lykes, 2001b, for more details). But to build this future, women needed also to identify other shared problems and needs. Through creativity and participatory strategies that allowed them to express their suffering through dramatic play, the women were able to visualize, reflect on and then perform alternative ways to address identified challenges. In these spaces, and throughout the years, participants identified that an important part of building a better future had to do with getting an education. They recognized that in the past schooling had not been an option available to many girls or women. They noted that now, in 2017, in contrast to their youth, more young women – like their daughters – are finishing school, and some are even able to access higher education. One woman noted:

My daughter will finish high school this year and then begin her studies in business administration … she has work opportunities and I tell her she has to take advantage of her accomplishments … and to work hard … and she responds, “yes, mama, I am going to work”.

Other women noted that another key part of building a better future and responding to their material needs was being able to engage in income-producing work. Some participants remembered the early projects they had developed together (for example, the corn mill) while others explained that post photoPAR some women in their group had opted to join cooperatives or other organizations that have productive projects, for instance, making crafts or producing honey through keeping hives. They explained that sometimes these projects receive funds or other forms of material support, either from the Guatemalan government or from private institutions. Thus, for some women, building a better future today involves making a place for themselves through work that generates cash income. In other cases, participants explained that their family members were not able to secure an income-producing job in Guatemala and decided to migrate north, searching for a way to make ends meet. One woman noted that “many people had left Chajul to search for work, either in the USA or in other parts of Guatemala. They were able to buy land, build their homes, and their children are studying”. Another woman reported that her daughter was a single mother with two children, a son and a daughter, noting that “a year ago she traveled north to Florida where she is now with her young daughter”.

As mentioned in the previous section of the findings, throughout the photoPAR project the women gained new skills and knowledge(s). One significant area in which they learned new information centered on Maya and women's rights. Learning about their rights, as women and as Maya, contributed to their using that information as a tool or a framework with which they could denounce and resist diverse forms of violence against them. Participants remembered how this was an important part of their work within their association where, through workshops, they engaged in discussions with each other about their rights. They explained that one significant change 20 years post publication of their book was that more women now know their rights and also know what mechanisms are in place to support them in defending themselves. One participant mentioned that: “now there are [laws] for women, so men are decreasing their violence against them, women denounce … they go on their own, since there are people there [in the office] that speak Ixil; they go on their own to file a report”.

The women of photoPAR realized over time that they were able to create changes in their context, and this realization led them to progressively develop growing aspirations and to seek new opportunities for development. These changes were not limited to this group of women. Rather, participants explained how Mayan women in their town and beyond had started changing the ways in which they see themselves in relation to their context. They noted that in the past women were tied to their homes and their household chores because they believed that they were not able to do anything else. Today, some Chajulense women are more aware of their diverse and multiple capacities, self-awareness that contributes to their working towards creating change in their immediate environment. For example, one participant noted: “Yesterday there was a demonstration [against the government] and a woman was speaking. Before women did not speak in a public protest. This is a change because women ask to speak and know their rights and know their responsibilities”. Another participant mentioned that “women are now learning to overcome poverty”, explaining how they seek and pursue different projects that can help them improve their family's economic wellbeing.

Many noted that this search to create change was not an individual endeavor but rather a collective one. Participants explained that there are more organizations now than there were before and that many of them are constituted exclusively or primarily by and for women. Participating women recognized that in order to move forward they need joint efforts with other women, noting, “Other groups of women organized in other organizations. There have been many women … and that was how women felt the need to organize to move forward a little”. Many of the interviewees are familiar with these groups, having joined them at different points in their lives, and noted in the interviews how much the groups had contributed to their personal growth.

In their search for a better future, the women of photoPAR have also taken part in collective actions beyond Chajul where they have engaged in forms of civic participation. Participants mentioned that some of the women in their association had joined community-based protests in coordination with national social movements that organize to denounce government corruption at the national level. Through these acts they exercize leadership as women and are becoming active protagonists who seek to make an impact on the political landscape of the country more broadly as they struggle for equal opportunities for Mayan women and their families.

Becoming women through performing individuality and collectivity

The narratives of the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ co-researchers interviewed in this study reflect multiple processes, including the two described above, through which they experience themselves as “becoming women”. These processes were as much about learning with each other as about working to create structures and systems through which they could continue to build and sustain a better future for themselves and their families. As noted above, women survivors of genocidal acts are all too often hypervisibilized as victims as they search for redress for gross violations of human rights. Through individual actions and collective efforts, the women of ADMI persisted, evidencing an emergent protagonism, through their organization and their actions over almost three decades.

Their small Women's Committee of 10 was incorporated as an NGO and grew to include over 200 members, 20 of whom documented core aspects of their lives as women, including their cultural beliefs and practices, healing from the armed conflict, and the multiple projects for women and children of Chajul that they had developed. During the signing of the peace accords, those who sought refuge from the armed conflict had slowly emerged, returning to their homes and communities. As one recalled, in the beginning they were just a few: “Long ago, when it started and it was a Women's Committee that was organizing, we were like 10 women, there were just a few of us in this small committee and we participated in the meetings”. During the interviews some of them remembered that as the committee was forming, they had opportunities to connect with international organizations (for example, Save the Children, SOROS Foundation), groups that funded development projects including the corn mill for their community and an educational initiative to teach local children in the Ixil language, both described briefly above. These projects were designed to support their material wellbeing in the wake of the armed conflict. As discussed above, the women worked together through participatory workshops, taking actions to improve their lives and the lives of their children. The workshops also offered spaces for reflection and for collectively healing the wounds of war through recovering psychosocial wellbeing grounded in Mayan beliefs and rituals (Lykes et al., 1999; see also, de Sousa Santos, 2007).

Mayan women talked about those first collective actions, including their participation in the association ADMI and their engagement in different community-based projects such as photoPAR, as points of entry into a wider world: “With the help of photoPAR I did many things, … I felt that at that time a path became more open for me”. Mayan women were offered opportunities to participate in the larger community, doing work typically performed by men (for example, taking pictures) and critically thinking about their activities as women's work, while reflecting on themselves as protagonists. One participant noted, “I learned that I am worth a lot, because sometimes when one is only with the family taking care of it, one feels not so important, and one has no interest in improving oneself”. As they engaged in diverse activities and projects some assumed leadership within their group while others took up positions in the wider community. As their association grew from a dozen to several hundred members, some participating women noted that they had begun to recover their mental health or wellbeing. They described the creative workshops as sites through which they were collectively recovering their history and reclaiming their traditions: “we were participating in the mental health program. That helped a lot for my mental health as well. Mental health work is very nice because through it everything that has happened to one can be reexperienced there”.

Some women noted that in addition to enhancing their wellbeing, the photoPAR project contributed to their acquiring new skills and knowledge. The latter, coupled with their collective work in organizing as a women's community, amplified processes whereby they mobilized collective actions in Chajul. Their narratives about these experiences exemplify performances of social individuality (Lykes, 1985), of “self-in-community”, a way of being and doing reflective of Mayan women's sociality, that is, their longstanding persistence in the midst of a more recent protagonism increasingly performed in the 21st century (Lykes et al., 2021).

These experiences did not come without numerous challenges and contradictions as these Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women sought to sustain multiple changes in Chajul. ADMI's multiple successes, including that of the photoPAR project, were punctuated by subsequent conflicts and discord. Despite the communication and leadership skills they developed over the years, tensions emerged in the wake of new opportunities afforded by international funding for their organization. Overall scarcity of resources within the town generated competition as to whose family members would directly benefit from ADMI's ambitious plans to purchase land and build permanent offices for the organization. As their resources grew, so did strained discussions around how to invest new resources and who should control them. Tensions within ADMI's leadership contributed to their losing funding for a new building, triggering the organization's decision to split into two groups through the creation of a second women's association in Chajul, ACEFOMI. Interviewees in 2017 remembered different efforts to resolve these tensions – and their feelings when the group split, forfeiting the grant and one of their dreams. Some noted how collaborations and conflicts among the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women of Chajul shaped their experiences as women and contributed to their becoming and performing Mayan womanhood individually and collectively, as exemplified through their words and deeds and documented through these interviews.

Many of the participants mentioned how they replicated what they had learned and experienced in the women's association and in the photoPAR project in other spaces in which they were now active. One woman reported having gained confidence to apply these skills in her role as an Indigenous mayor (alcaldesa indígena): “I am the Indigenous mayor and I am going to defend my right for my community”. Another woman became more active as a teacher, noting: “I learned a lot from the [photoPAR] experience and I have been able to apply a lot of what I learned in teaching, now as a fourth and fifth grade teacher”. Another woman became a lay leader of her parish where she facilitated a youth group and participated in a women's marimba group. This woman noted, “sometimes they invite us [our women's marimba] to another municipality to go to perform the marimba, the religious songs”. Another woman joined an economic project producing honey, stating, “I am also a beekeeper and I participate in the credit committee in the cooperative”. These individual and collective performances continue to have significant impacts on these Mayan women and on their community, evidencing some of the multiple contributions of long-term community-based participatory action and reflection processes to psychosocial wellbeing in the wake of genocidal violence.

Clarifying implications within and across these three iterative processes

The photoPAR project was conceived as part of multiple years of psychosocial and mutual accompaniment of Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women in Chajul. It was designed as an alternative to several other truth-telling projects (ODHAG and CEH), a strategy through which local women sought to document and re-present their life stories in ways that could contribute to a better life for their children (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000). These processes facilitated survivors’ participation in community-based women's activities that did not require them to self-present as victims but rather sought to facilitate their diverse responses to loss and social suffering as they persisted in recovering or rethreading their local community, prioritizing a better future for their children. Despite the dominance of Euro-North American legal and psychological damage-centered models in most post genocidal contexts, the analysis of these interviews reveals some of the ways that these Mayan women have re-storied their lives and their community “from the ground up”. Findings from these interviews suggest that this feminist photoPAR process and creative, participatory activities grounded in community solidarity across differences and in material safety and security have been useful resources through which these Mayan women have enhanced their individual and collective wellbeing.

The 20 Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women who participated in the feminist photoPAR project encountered multiple new challenges that included learning how to use cameras, tape recorders, and computers, challenges that not only contributed to learning new skills but that, as they remembered them, facilitated their mental health as well as their self-esteem and wellbeing as women. After nearly three years of doing fieldwork, recording and analyzing the stories of those whom they photographed, they produced a book they now consider to be an important tool to share the history of Chajul with new generations: “for young people [the book] is a support, a knowledge that has to be given so that they know why there was war, why there were conflicts”. Through these participatory teaching-learning processes they took actions together and their reflections on those actions generated new self-understandings as well as new ways of knowing themselves as Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women, ways that are also reflected in how they perform who they are both individually and collectively. Many women described learning about who they were and what they could do through reflecting on what they had done, thereby recognizing not only the skills that they possessed but what these capacities confirmed about how they felt about themselves.

Wellbeing and healing from the suffering of wars was thus grounded in actions through which they secured some, albeit limited, material security for their children and, in its wake, new educational opportunities for them through literacy programs that they initiated. Although one cannot generalize from a single case, many of the interviewees affirmed that these iterative participatory processes of mutual accompaniment contributed to their mental health or psychosocial wellbeing in the wake of experiences of genocidal violence. Reflecting on these actions –and on their own protagonism as having generated the results they observed– contributed to the women's self-esteem and wellbeing as Maya Ixil and K’iche’. Feminist photoPAR facilitated community-based processes grounded in local traditions and values through which women re-storied their lives, contributing to multiple individual and community initiatives that helped rebuild a local community that genocidal violence had threatened.

The action-reflection processes of the creative workshops and photoPAR processes were iterated through multiple performances of individuality and collectivity and demonstrate some of the ways in which participants are ensuring a better future for themselves and their families. As they articulated individual strengths and interests, some became more interested in advancing themselves rather than in supporting the organization. Long-standing deep fissures within the community, exacerbated by the harm they had experienced as well as ongoing limited resources, generated conflicts that the women themselves could only resolve through forming two organizations, ADMI and ACEFOMI.

Despite the many strengths of this study there are some significant limitations. Several of the co-researchers had died before the first author returned to Chajul to conduct these interviews in 2017 and not everyone who she invited to participate was willing to be interviewed. Thus, there are some perspectives not represented in these interviews. Additionally, the interviews reflect retrospective data, that is, these 15 co-researchers were invited to reflect upon their experiences over nearly three decades, with a focus on the publication of their nunca más, one of the culminating products of the photoPAR process, and multiple other creative workshops before and after the publication. The interviews were conducted in Spanish although Ixil or K’iche’ are the first languages of all of the interviewees. Moreover, the inductive and iterative grounded theory coding process was complicated by the multiple languages of local women and the co-authors of this paper, which is being drafted in English, the first language of only the first author. These linguistic complexities reflect some of the positionality and power dynamics described in the reflexivity statements of the authors at the beginning of the paper. Notably, the primary print outcome from the photoPAR process was co-authored by the 20 co-researchers and the first author and published in Spanish and Ixil (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000). In contrast, this article reflects an inductive interpretive process that sought to reflect meaning making “from the bottom up” but is crafted by feminists who live beyond Chajul's borders. Finally, the non-linearity of the iterative processes described herein reflects a close analysis of the interviews, but also represent a challenge when trying to develop a figure that is presented in only two dimensions and seeks to capture processes across interviewees as well as the particularities of how different women made meaning of the shared and individual experiences at different moments in their lives.

Space does not permit a more detailed exploration of each of the three processes through which these Mayan women articulated their persistence and protagonism. As discussed above, the multiple processes and the figure representing their experiences over nearly 30 years was developed from the participants’ narratives and meaning making processes as they reflected on and spoke about actions they had taken. They reflect multiple processes through which they performed and documented previous and ongoing suffering, and engaged in transformative teaching, learning, and healing processes in the wake of genocidal violence. Time, presence despite absences, profound losses and suffering, renewed and transformative engagement with Mayan beliefs and practices, as well as mutual accompaniment as they developed or enhanced new skills through teaching/learning FPAR processes, were woven together as they reported on action-reflection processes, through which they performed their individuality and sociality within and across time. They also reflect some of the limits attendant to the polarization of life during armed conflict and the sequelae that inhabit many of the systems and structures emergent through post-conflict processes, in which a continuum of violence persists. Despite these methodological and substantive limitations, the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women's storying of these feminist photoPAR processes reflect some of the multiple ties that continue to bind them, as they and their children and grandchildren persist in affirming the dynamic and lived experiences reflective of Mayan women's gendered beliefs and practices.