Voices from Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History (review)

Voices from Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History. By Victor Montejo. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. xiv + 287 pp., illustrations, maps, table, notes, bibliography, index. $25.95 cloth.)

Since the late 1980s, the effects of state violence against Mayas has been one of the major concerns of ethnographers working in Guatemala and Mexico. Victor Montejo’s book, Voices from Exile, explains, ethnographically, the use of state violence against Mayas from Guatemala’s western highlands, which resulted in their subsequent flight from Guatemala, their exile in Mexico and the United States, and, for some, their eventual return to Guatemala.

The book contributes to the corpus of ethnographic literature on refugees and state violence, but Montejo’s perspective distinguishes the book from other ethnographic accounts of refugees. A Maya from Jacaltenango, Guatemala, Montejo suffered through Guatemalan military and guerrilla campaigns before going into exile in Mexico and eventually the United States, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in anthropology. This rare combination of experiences and accomplishments adds depth and insight to his descriptions. Unlike other anthropologists studying violence and refugees in Guatemala, Montejo lives the life of a U.S.–educated academic, has lived the life of a refugee, and continues to cross the border into Guatemala. His cross-cultural position comes from studying and learning to live in the United States, which allows him to draw on scholarly resources to which few Guatemalans, Maya or otherwise, have access.

Montejo begins the book by positioning himself in relation to U.S. academia, the Guatemala nation-state, Mayas, and refugees and then proceeds to briefly summarize the history of unequal political, economic, and social relations experienced by Mayas beginning with the Spanish conquest and continuing to present-day Guatemala. While this overview provides some historical context, it is superficial and not integrated into the rest of the book.

Most of Voices from Exile focuses on the intensification of Guatemalan military violence in the late-1970s and the effects of it on Mayas from the Kuchumatan highlands into the 1990s. Montejo skillfully combines previous ethnographic and political research with his own observations of and participation in a number of different refugee camps. He documents not only the ways that the military infiltrated, contained, and killed those persons deemed subversive in Maya communities but also how Mayas dealt with such intrusions. Far from being passive victims, Mayas used creative ways to avoid capture, survive dangerous times, and live in extreme deprivation in the refugee camps in Mexico, as shown by Montejo punctuating his personal observations and textual sources with the voices of his Maya informants.

The chapters “One Man’s Testimony” and “Songs and Poetry from the Camps” are particularly rich because they provide the reader with glimpses of the hardships suffered by Mayas, the reasons why some even joined the army, the general economic distress of rural highland towns, and the preoccupations of refugees about returning to Guatemala and living in Mexico. Both of those chapters, in addition to “Life in the Refugee Camps,” “Strategies of Cultural Survival,” and “Ethnic Relations and Cultural Revival in the Refugees Camps,” chronicle the problems facing refugees: food shortages, language confusion, tenuous political and economic relations with Mexico, and the preservation of cultural traditions. In regard to this last problem, Montejo documents how experiences in the refugee camps served to strengthen Mayas’ sense of cultural and ethnic identity. In addition, it helped foment broader pan-Maya concepts of identity as Mayas from different ethno-linguistic groups were put together in the camps and received support from Mexican Mayas.

Through captivating, this chronicle on refugees could be strengthened in a few ways. First, in the initial pages of the book Montejo takes the position, vis-á-vis his informants, that anthropologists have not listened to Mayas. If this truly is the case, as a Maya trained in the tradition of U.S. anthropology, he could bring a valuable critique of anthropological practices to the...