Memoria Viva (Living Memory): Gendered Haunting and the Afterlives of Genocide in “postwar” Guatemala

Abstract (English)

Although the stories of women involved in historical revolutionary and armed struggle in Guatemala have been sparse, newly unsealed archived material ranging from written documentation to recorded oral histories provide powerful counter-narratives of the Genocidal Period (1960-1996) and “postwar.” This article takes archives as sources of power and key sites of struggle to understand the power dynamics at play during the Genocidal period and the struggle to build an alternative to organized state violence and impoverishment. Building on Avery Gordon (2008) and Viviana Beatriz MacManus (2024), gendered haunting in Guatemala are the ideological and material constructions that both expose violent systems of power present in the Genocidal period and excavate radical women in criminalized traditions. Through gendered haunting, this article analyzes the multifaceted ways radical women and their sociopolitical formations, including communist and socialist projects, have developed life-affirming strategies against what I call the afterlives of genocide. The afterlives of genocide consist of the historical continuum of violent systems of power that continue to shape “postwar” Guatemala. In a multilayered methodological approach, I frame the argument using ethnographic and archival analysis of three distinct archival collections where radical women are documented in contradicting ways, such as the Guatemalan Genocide Survivor Collection (GGSC) housed at USC’s Shoah Foundation and the formerly secret Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN). Radical women’s memoria viva (living memory) continues to haunt “postwar” Guatemala and their gendered haunting continues to refuse violent terms of order, particularly its racialized gendered and sexual tenants against their bodies.