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ANTONELLA FABRI 4 Space and Identity in Testimonies of Displacement: Maya Migration to Guatemala City in the 1980s THE PROBLEM OF DISPLACEMENT THIS CHAPTER is an attempt to understand the phenomenon of displacement in Guatemala during the civil conflicts that occurred over the last three decades (1966-96). Massive displacement originated in the 1980s as a consequence of the military conflicts during the governments of Generals Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-82) and Efrain Rios Montt (1982 to August 1983). When the Guatemalan military intensified its war against the revolutionary forces during the 1980s, the state also deployed a policy of tierras arrasadas, or scorched earth, which primarily affected the rural population, the majority of which is Maya. Estimates of numbers of Guatemalans displaced either internally or abroad range from 500,000 to a million persons. Of the 150,000 people who fled to Mexico, only a third settled in refugee camps and acquired the status of refugees from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); others went to Honduras, Belize, Canada, and the United States (CEH 1999). My research focuses on internal refugees who moved to Guatemala City, on the conditions of life they encountered there, and on the strategies they created to work their way out of a dreadful situation. My investigation began in 1989 and followed refugee issues through the steps of the peace accord, which was finalized on 29 December 1996. Working with the refugees was difficult and at times discouraging since the context of war and terror made them suspicious of anyone interested in their history. Some, however, were willing to talk, and thanks to them I was able to acquire some understanding of the complex issue ofdisplacement. The stories of displaced Mayas excerpted below were gathered during fieldwork in Guatemala City between 1989 and 1999. My interest 56 Copyrighted Material Space and Identity in Testimonies of Displacement 57 here is not to provide the reader with an account of recent developments in refugee issues in Guatemala but rather to analyze the rationale that lies behind the creation of internal refugees in the context of Guatemala's civil war and to explore the relationship between displacement and the re-creation of cultural identities. In this way I hope to shed some light on the duplicitous process of domination, which serves both to legitimize an ideology of the hegemonic structure and to generate a strategy of resistance on the part of subordinated groups.1 Although my project was not originally focused on violence and its effects, the more I talked to displaced people, the more I came to realize that an analysis of migration in Guatemala needed to be put in the context of the history of Guatemala of the last two decades, which was characterized by repression and ethnocide. In other publications (Fabri 1994, 1999), I link displacement to a form of control that has as its goal the fragmentation, dispossession, and effacement of Maya culture. The forced adaptation of Indians to a new way of life derives from a strategy of domination, or what is often called an "institution of terror," that permeated the Guatemalan national security policy in the 1980s (De Certeau 1986; Fabri 1994; Shapiro 1988). This discussion is part of a longer study concerning the relationship between identity, violence, and displacement among the Maya who migrated to Guatemala City in the early 1980s.2 Both ladinos and Mayas identify themselves as migrant in order to avoid raising suspicions of being displaced, but an initial distinction between the migrant and the displaced can be made. Those who have moved to the city in search of better economic and educational opportunities often use the word superaci6n, improvement, to describe their reasons for migration. In apparent contrast are the internal refugees who refer to themselves as desplazados, or "displaced," and attribute their migration to the city to the terror raging in their home communities. In short, migrants are primarily motivated by economics, and desplazados by politics.3 Urban Guatemalans often see migrant identities as more malleable than those of the displaced. While migrants are believed to be easily assimilated to ladino culture, they are hardly ever identified as indigenous because they have supposedly been "ladinized " (Adams 1959). The displaced are perceived as inditos because they are less easily assimilated to both urban culture and the urban job market. The displaced tend to be viewed as misfits and are less well received by urban Guatemalans than are indigenous migrants. Copyrighted Material [3.145.52.86...

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