Maya after War: Conflict, Power, and Politics in Guatemala

2. Localities in Conflict: Spaces and the Politics of Mapmaking

CHAPTeR 2 Localities in Conflict: Spaces and the Politics of Mapmaking Localities are always political and struggled over. This is especially true among the rural Maya, where specific conceptions and local knowledge of space are central to the construction of identity and subjectivity. An individual is Mayan in part due to her relationship to a particular place, constructed from the memories and experiences that connect people through shared knowledge: the family milpa, the secret hiding places of childhood, the out-of-the-way courting grounds of teenagers, and the sacred peaks and valleys. Each plays a part in what it means to be a Todosantero. Because locality is shaped so precisely and in relation to myriad understandings about space, place, and politics, it is also a locus of inevitable conflict among community members and between neighboring villages and citizens and the state, in part over what Harvey categorizes as “the proper sense of space that should be used to regulate social life and give meaning to concepts such as territorial rights” (1989:203). Culture and power have particular forms of spatialization that are best understood by examining the changing meanings that space has for people over time. As Gastón Gordillo has demonstrated in his work on the Tobá and Guaraní of the Argentinean Chaco, the sedimentation of historical processes of confrontation are lodged in the physical textures of landscapes (2004). This is particularly meaningful among the rural Maya in the post-war period, since sacred signifiers, associations, and histories have been so severely disrupted and even manipulated through long-term experiences of military occupation. Relationships to the land have been in flux over the course of the last century, especially with the increasing privatization of commons and the brief nationalization of agricultural land in the 1950s. The Catholic Church sought to eradicate signs of intimate connection with ancestors and spirits located in the sacred places Localities in Conflict 39 of Todos Santos by often brutally destroying the symbols and offerings people placed there. During la violencia, the space of Todos Santos was invested with memories of violence and the land was saturated with blood. As a result, histories of recent struggle and conflict can be read through space and the multifaceted meanings it holds for Todosanteros. As I have shown in the previous chapter, the Guatemalan army carried out a project that systematically “destroyed, reconstructed and penetrated the geographic and cultural fabric of villages” (Schirmer 1998:95). To accomplish their agenda required fundamentally altering local spatial understandings and patterns of use. While space, place, and the imagination of locality are dynamic and constantly shifting processes, la violencia represented a deep-seated break with many historical connections. Since then, the tensions of the post-war period, such as migration and the rise of gangs, have been built upon the changes introduced by la violencia, incorporating spatial relations and patterns of use and control that have been developing since the early 1980s. Understandings, uses, and representations of space, as Wood (2003) has shown in the case of post-war El Salvador, are personal, often varying among individuals and groups who share similar experiences. Histories of communities, families, and other overlapping groups, such as agriculturalists or religious practitioners, are clearly reflected in space, in relation to local practices, cosmology, and agrarian patterns.This local knowledge contributes to the significance of space in the construction of Mayan subjectivities (Watanabe 1992, Warren 1978, Little 2004). Stemming in large part from Foucault’s study of the emergence of the modern prison (1979), recent scholarship has highlighted the use of control through the management of space (Merry 2001, Gupta and Ferguson 1997, Smart 2001, Low 2001). For Foucault, space functioned as a container of power: within it, subjects were incarcerated, disciplined, or otherwise socially controlled (Foucault 1986, cf. Watts 1992, Harvey 1989:211). By considering space in such a way, Foucault made the organic connection between spatial concepts and the microphysics of power— that is, the relationship between the map and surveillance, with all territorial concepts implying the exercise of power (Foucault 1986, cf. Sack 1986 in Watts 1992). While spatial governmentality is often viewed as an urban phenomenon (Merry 2001, Low 1999, Caldeira 1999, O’Neill and Thomas 2011, Perry 2000, Perry and Sanchez 1998), conflict in rural community life also develops around space, with tensions along lines of class, ethnicity, gender, and age, among others. 40 Maya after War Todos Santos as...