NACLA Report on the Americas

ISSN: 1071-4839 (Print) 2471-2620 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rnac20

Rebuilding Communal Life

Gladys Tzul Tzul

To cite this article: Gladys Tzul Tzul (2018) Rebuilding Communal Life, NACLA Report on the
Americas, 50:4, 404-407, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.2018.1550986

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2018.1550986

Published online: 10 Dec 2018.

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 REPORT
GLADYS TZUL TZUL
Rebuilding Communal Life
 Ixil women and the desire for life in Guatemala
T
he Ixil women were digging underground, look-
ing for the bones of those killed during the geno-
cide, when they came across mining company
workers looking under the same earth for minerals and
water sources. It was the early 2000s, and these women
became the first to warn their communities about this
new wave of aggression and dispossession. Their strug-
gles then adjusted to a new rhythm of defense against
the political regime of extractivism.
This text is an homage to the strength and energy
that Ixil women have given to Indigenous women like
myself. It is an attempt to explain the notion of the
desire to live (voluntad de vida), which is to say the social
energy Indigenous women produce that allows them to
preserve their memory and defend the land where the
dead rest and water is born. Ixil people often refer to
voluntad de vida as that which keeps them struggling and
living despite all the problems they face.
This article examines communal rebuilding after
the war in Guatemala (1970-1996) with a focus on the
struggle of Ixil women. The region where they live,
in northwest Guatemala, was home to 116 massacres
at the height of the conflict. Even though the war has
ended, the attacks have not. On September 21, 2018,
Ixil midwife Juana Ramírez Santiago was killed by
four bullets, in a year when over 40 Ixil people have
been murdered.
The process of searching for those who were killed in
the war but whose bodies were never recovered is the
backbone of these Indigenous women’s political struggle
in their communities. They look for the dead in order
to continue to defend life and future generations. The
dead are under the earth, which is why defending the
land itself is so central. Within the Ixil communal lands,
communitarian economies produce corn and more than
17 plant species are reproduced. And so this struggle
can be understood from the perspective of the defense
and the recuperation of communal lands.
In Ixil communities, there are many simultaneous
struggles: not only for memory, but also to resist the
404 NACLA  — REPORT ON THE AMERICAS  |  VOL. 50, NO. 4  —  404-406, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2018.1550986
© 2018 North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
NACLA_50-4.indd 404
expropriation of their weaving and textiles, the genetic
modification of seeds, and the police and military
occupation of their lands. In 2012, women carried out
assemblies to demand the closure of saloons, which
they claimed were a key driver of domestic violence.
Communitarian women, working against domination
and exploitation, have laid out political horizons that
we call the desire to live, the desire to live communally.
How c a n we underst a nd t he soci al energ y
communitarian Indigenous women employ as they
struggle against the extractivist political regime?
Or, put another way, how can we begin to examine
the antagonisms between the state and Indigenous
communities’ reconstruction of communal life following
massacres and genocide? These questions are crucial
to understanding the struggles in Ixil territory, more
than 20 years since the the formal end of the war in
Guatemala, and 12 years since the ratification of the
Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
Communal Rebuilding
After the war in Guatemala, communities had
to be rebuilt. To understand the social energy that
communitarian women have produced in this process, we
must first look to the autonomous reconstruction of land-
based communal systems, and also to the construction of
truth and memory in Guatemala’s genocide trials.
Following the war in Guatemala, which led to the
killing or disappearance of over 200,000 people over
a 36-year period, communities returned to their lands,
rebuilding their homes and systems of communal
authority. “The communities of Salquil or Tzalbal didn’t
need international assistance. It was the communities
themselves who rebuilt,” says Ana Laynez, an authority
and member of the Indigenous Mayorship of Nebaj.
“They named their authorities again and recognized
their leaders; they remade their market, and the women
started to become stronger, they rebuilt the school. It
was the communities that helped themselves.” Laynez
emphasizes the importance of the community market as
12/1/18 5:25 PM
 one of the places where women exert their strength even
amid such precariousness.
Miguel de León Ceto, the first Mayor of the Indigenous
Mayorship of Nebaj, says that even amid so much pain,
women have the capacity to build strength through
celebrations. “The women organize the communal
celebrations. This helped us a lot because the women have
a lot of power, they have also been the midwives,” he says.
“Regardless of the pain and the death of many people close
to us, we have found the strength to continue living.”
In order to rebuild their communities, the Ixil
women helped to recover memory and truth about
what had happened during the war. In 2013 the
genocide trial against Efraín Ríos Montt and Mauricio
Rodríguez Sánchez began in a High Risk Court in
Guatemala City. Ixil women testified during the trial
Maria Soto and other Ixil women celebrate after former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide against the
Indigenous Ixil people during the country’s civil war. (ELENA HERMOSA/ WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
NACLA_50-4.indd 405
that they were victims of sexual violence, and that
the army burned their crops, massacred communities,
and killed their families. These testimonies clearly
demonstrated the connections between territorial
dispossession, sexual violence, and forms of resistance
and of organizing for life. These three elements help
us comprehend how these women understand war,
and how attacks against women serve as a means
of suppressing entire communities and weakening
processes of social reproduction.
The voices of these Ixil women opened up the history
of Guatemala. They denounced sexual violence as a crime
that should not be repeated, as something that does not
shame them but rather should be condemned. The
dominant sentiment in these communities is that never
again shall there be sex slavery, never again shall there be
Winter 2018  | NACLA  — REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 405
12/1/18 5:25 PM
 Our focus here is the social energy Ixil women have
deployed towards the reconstruction of communal life.
more violence against women’s bodies, never again shall
communities be destroyed and pushed from their lands.
These voices are a key part of communal rebuilding, and
of the vital energy not just of Ixil women but women all
over the world.
Today, the war against these communities has taken
on new forms of dispossession, aggression, and capture
through the extractivist regime, deepening community-
state antagonism. What is at stake in these new forms
of war? The state and capital are taking communal
lands, textiles and weavings, seeds, forms of Indigenous
authority and organization, autonomy, and health.
Sociologist Mina Lorena Navarro implores we pay
attention to the multiple dimensions of dispossession—
for example when a common good is stripped from a
community, the social relations created through the
management of that good become undone too. Women
think about and resist multiple dispossessions, in
Navarro’s words, and through that resistance they also
plan their reconstruction and defense.
The Desire to Live
Our focus here is the social energy Ixil women have
deployed towards the reconstruction of communal life.
These are women with histories and genealogies, who
lived in the Communities of Population in Resistance
(CPR); who were refugees in Mexico; who cooked
for and washed soldiers’ clothing when the military
was occupying their communities. Many of their
communities were erased from the map. And in the midst
of this fragility and pain, through the strategies of Munil
(communal work), they were able to continue to give
form to life.
These are the same Indigenous women who have
continued the centuries-long tradition of weaving the
güipiles (woven blouses) that we Indigenous women
wear today. These are the women who, along with their
children and spouses, have opposed the imposition of
state regulation over communal lands, and who have
birthed and educated the next generation. These are the
women who along with their communities are on the
frontlines of rebellions, organize religious celebrations,
and prepare the feasts served at burials. These are the
women who began the searches for the disappeared. They
are the ones who alerted their communities of the threats
against the lands that hold their dead. Simultaneously,
406 NACLA  — REPORT ON THE AMERICAS  |  VOL. 50, NO. 4
NACLA_50-4.indd 406
they organize ceremonies and celebrations to ask for
rain, and carry out campaigns against domestic violence.
How do they muster this stubborn capacity to live? “We
are not alone, our children and grandchildren will live in
this land,” said Feliciana Cedillo, an Indigenous mayor
from Nebaj. “We don’t want our siblings or our children
to become beggars.”
So then, how can we think through the conditions
Indigenous women have organized, joyfully and
tenaciously, as active leaders, in defense of the constant
aggressions of capital and the Guatemalan state in order
to live communally? It means employing tactics to
organize life and scorning the symbolic order imposed
by the domination of capital. In other words, they
use tactics that escape the certainties, discourses, and
practices that attempt to force us into the dichotomy
between heroes and victims. The strategies we use to
obtain the means and the resources to weave the threads
of our personal lives come from our experiences and
from sharing communal goods.
We are permanently aware of our strengths and our
limitations, of the possibilities we have to organize
our lives in common with other women and men in
ways that are more cooperative and balanced, and
less hierarchical. We are aware that as women, we face
circumstances that limit our decision-making capacities.
We challenge those circumstances and have interpreted
these limits as connected to kinship structures, which
have a dual and paradoxical nature: they are a guarantee
of community defense; at the same time, they can be
conservative strategies limiting women’s autonomy.
Women are not individuals floating freely through
time and space, self-made without anyone’s help. Rather,
we are and we exist in communal weavings, in the
cadence of collective struggles, desiring and yearning for
Indigenous dignity.  nn
Dr. Gladys Tzul Tzul is a Maya K’iche’ woman from
Totonicapán. She is a researcher with the Amaq’ Institute. In
2016, she was part of the national Support Commission for
Indigenous Authorities in the Constitutional reforms of the
justice system.
Translated by Dawn Paley.
12/1/18 5:25 PM
 Vivas nos queremos/En el campo encontré un machete y una flor/ Los cargaba una mujer/ Con firmeza y con
amor/ Como para defender su ser y su corazón (We want to be alive/ We love ourselves alive/ In the field I found / A
machete and a flower/ A woman carried them/ With firmness and with love/ As if to defend her being and her heart)
MUJERES GRABANDO RESISTENCIA

Winter 2018  | NACLA  — REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 407

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