Fleeing rural violence: Mam women seeking gendered justice in Guatemala and the U.S.

ABSTRACT

I use the concept of gendered embodied structures of violence as the analytical framework for illustrating how in rural Huehuetenango, Guatemala, historical and contemporary structures and processes of violence which center the normalization of multiple forms of implied or actual physical and sexual violence against women (and often other men and children) continue to undermine efforts to strengthen women’s rights and provide access to safety and justice for women. Overlapping structures of primarily male power suggest the difficulty of separating state and non-state actors from the vectors of violence affecting women. This article contributes to emerging literature on indigenous women’s access to justice in Latin America through adding a transnational lens to this discussion and suggesting why we cannot separate pubic from private violence and state from non-state actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered violence
• justice
• transborder communities
• Guatemala
• indigenous women
• refugees

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the Center for the Study of Women in Society, a faculty grant and I3 grant from the Office of Research and Innovation, all at the University of Oregon. I would like to thank my collaborators Erin Beck and Darien Combs who with me collected much of the data in this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The 2008 law defines femicide as “the violent death of a woman caused in the context of unequal relations of power between men and women and in an exercise of the power of gender against women” (Centro Nacional de Analyisis y Documentacion Judicial 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon; Office of Research and Innovation, University of Oregon.

Notes on contributors

Lynn Stephen

Lynn Stephen is Philip H. Knight Chair, Distinguished Professor, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. Stephen’s scholarly work centers on the effects of globalization, migration, nationalism and the politics of culture on indigenous communities in the Americas. She engages political economy, ethnohistory, gender analysis and ethnography to create a hemispheric lens on major challenges faced by indigenous peoples – such as out-migration, tourism, economic development and low-intensity war – and their creative responses to these challenges. She serves as the President of the Latin American Studies Association from June 2018 to June 2019. Her work also engages the history of Latino communities spread across multiple borders through her concept of transborder communities and migrations. Stephen is committed to collaborative research projects that produce findings accessible to the wider public. Her work includes documentaries such as ‘Sad Happiness: Cinthya’s Transborder Journey’ and websites as well as scholarly publications.