AAA 2013 Paper: Historical Memory as Weapon and Arena: Comparing Three Forms of Memory Activism in Guatemala

Historical Memory as Weapon and ArenaDoc M. Billingsley

Historical Memory as Weapon and Arena:

Comparing Three Forms of Memory Activism in Guatemala

Doc M. Billingsley

Washington University in St. Louis

Billingsley, Doc

2013 Historical Memory as Weapon and Arena: Comparing ThreeForms of Memory Activism in Guatemala. Paper presentedat the Annual Meeting of the American AnthropologicalAssociation, Chicago, 20 November 2013.

Abstract:

In contemporary Guatemala, historical memory (memoriahistórica) offers a valuable generative resource for(re)defining identity at multiple sites and scales—fromindividuals’ profound personal experiences withritualized remembrance in Maya spiritual traditions, tonational-level political and legal contests over theofficial version of history. However, personal andcollective memories in Guatemala often reflect the pastas experienced from perspectives that weresubstantially divergent—sometimes even violently atodds. The public negotiation of these contrastingmemories can thus have highly charged politicalconsequences, creating impasses that indicate anational-scale crisis of truth. In order to explainhow, why, and to what effect different Guatemalanscould remember the past so differently—e.g., how thecurrent president can claim that “there was nogenocide” while one of his predecessors stands trialfor its perpetuation—I turn to an anthropologicalframework of memory as mediated action. In this paper,

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I examine and contrast three movements that seek socialchange through transforming practices of collectiveremembering: protest-oriented ‘memory offensives’ thatchallenge society to discuss rather than silence thedifficult past, pedagogically-oriented campaigns fortextbook reform that seek to re-imagine nationalhistory, and legally-oriented movements to prosecuteformer military leaders for war crimes. I focus on theways in which each of these movements draws on Mayamemories and mnemonic practices, arguing that someapproaches are fundamentally transformed by thisborrowing while others merely appropriate Mayadiscourses in ways that are deeply (though oftenunintentionally) problematic.

Keywords: Memory, Activism, Guatemala

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Introduction

I have three goals to accomplish in this short paper: first,

to explain the title. What do I mean when I say that historical

memory is both a weapon and an arena, and why do I think that is

an important factor for conducting and writing ethnography?

Second, I wish to juxtapose three examples of the ways in which

groups and individuals are waging battles over memory in

Guatemala. I hope to show through these examples how remembering

practices are reflections of other political and cultural

processes that are perhaps more familiar territory for many

anthropologists. Third, I want to offer my thoughts about the

relationship between memory activism and other changes that are

underway in Guatemala, particularly the impact of what Victor

Montejo (2005) has called the “Maya intellectual renaissance.”

In particular, I found that memory activism is an important site

for studying recent and profound changes in the politics of

knowledge, as Maya perspectives are incorporated into various

public debates.

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Although I focus on specific cases from Guatemala, in

keeping with the goals of this panel I aim to step back and

illustrate how memory can be a useful focus for ethnographers

working anywhere. To be able to cover all of the ground that

I’ve promised to cover today, I will need to skip over some

details. In particular I won’t be providing a lot of historical

context, and the extent of my theoretical contributions will have

to be limited to the specific examples I describe below. The

missing parts are covered more exhaustively in my dissertation

and manuscripts in progress. For now, suffice it to say that the

type of collective memory I deal with is historical memory,

borrowing the language used by the participants themselves. In

particular, my research has focused on people’s historical

memories of violence in Guatemala, and the role that this

violence has played in defining collective identities, national

and otherwise. For the most part, the violence in question

refers to the internal armed conflict which lasted from 1960

until 1996, though in other cases that I won’t address today, I

found that people expressed historical memories of events that

occurred much earlier, including early colonial period.

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As I conceptualize it, historical memory offers a fortuitous

and pragmatic approach to studying collective memory because it

conspicuously blurs the line between memory and history,

categories which some scholars treat rather like opposites. For

example, Pierre Nora wrote that history is “antithetical” to

memory (1989:9), and Peter Novick has claimed that memory is

“ahistorical, even anti-historical” (1999:3). However I find

this clean separation to be problematic. For one thing, this

binary view of knowledges about the past limits our ability to

understand local practices on their own terms. Anthropologists

are often attuned to knowledges that we encounter outside the

bounds of officialdom or the mainstream—one might even say this

is our disciplinary specialty. We stand to gain a richer

understanding of past experiences, as well, by recognizing the

different local discursive conventions at play in any act of

commemoration.

More importantly, I am concerned that an a priori analytical

break between memory and history risks obscuring the role that

power plays in claims to truth. For example, the peculiar forms

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of subjectivity and literacy practices that make up professional

historiography or social science have come to enjoy a great deal

of power and prestige. As academics we may be especially prone

to consider “authoritative” and “true” those interpretations that

fit our expectations of what a well-researched account should

look like: precise dates, named actors, perhaps some nice

unrounded numbers that suggest an exact count. However, such

accounts are not inherently more or less true than any others. We

must cultivate awareness of different conventions—that is,

different local understandings of the parameters of “history,”

“memory,” or even “historical memory”—in order to evaluate the

truth value of claims, and understand how different forms of

authoritative statements compare against each other.

Three Examples of Memory Activism

At this point I will very briefly describe three examples of

how groups are using historical memory as a resource for activism

in Guatemala. My goal here is to point out a few details that

reveal the complexity and productivity of memory as an

ethnographic focus.

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Memory Offensives & Offensive Memories

The first case is centered on an organization called

H.I.J.O.S., the Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice

against Forgetting and Silence,1 which is based on an Argentine

group of the same name (Contreras 2009). In particular, I’d like

to describe H.I.J.O.S.’ signature event, an annual celebration-

slash-protest called the “Memory Offensive.” These Memory

Offensives take place during the final weeks of June each year,

leading up to June 30, which is officially recognized in

Guatemala as Army Day. Traditionally, on this date each year the

Guatemalan military would parade through the streets in a show of

force and nationalist pride. For over a decade, H.I.J.O.S. has

responded by organizing series of public demonstrations that they

call “memory offensives [ofensivas de memoria],” a play on military

terminology. The events culminate in a “Memory March” on June

30, designed as a direct counter-response to the Army Day

parades.

Despite being the culmination of a ‘Memory offensive,’ the

march is far from militant. When I participated in 2011, at1 Hijos y Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio; their acronym signifies “Children” in Spanish.

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least half of the participants were young, including dozens of

children and teenagers who were probably too young to personally

remember even the signing of the Peace Accords, much less the

forced disappearances, assassinations, and torture that plagued

Guatemalans during the war. Many of these younger participants

came dressed as clowns, or walked about on tall stilts. Drummers

occupied the center of the march, tapping out cadences that the

clowns and others used as a rhythm for dancing. A group of young

women, wearing t-shirts and tank tops that declared that “Women’s

bodies are not spoils of war,” sang a short song about sending

Ríos Montt to jail. In short, the Memory March was a festive

occasion. Although the demands of the participants would no

doubt be threatening to some, the medium they used to deliver

their message is attractive and disarming, and I noticed

bystanders joining the procession or stopping to watch with

smiles on their faces.

The march and other events of H.I.J.O.S.’ Memory Offensive

seemed to evoke the carnivalesque atmosphere that Bakhtin

described as being “ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the

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same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries

and revives” (1968:12). Bakhtin held that carnivalesque

atmospheres provide participants with a “temporary liberation

from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it

marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges,

norms, and prohibitions” (1968:4-11). These brief periods marked

by both respite and upheaval, celebrations of ambiguity and

change, were immensely meaningful for people. They were also

important sources of communitas, with the corresponding potential

for political consciousness-raising and mobilization. In

contrast with the official festivals sponsored and organized by

state authorities, which uphold hierarchy and fetishize the

stability and immutability of the status quo, carnivals and

popular feasts “were the second life of the people, who for a

time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality,

and abundance” (Bakhtin 1968:4-11). This contrast is all the

more meaningful in the context of the competing definitions of

June 30 in Guatemala, where the official celebrations are

precisely ordered and choreographed spectacles of military might,

the archetypal hierarchical organization.

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Finally, I want to share descriptions of memory and history

as offered by members of H.I.J.O.S. First, the slogan of

H.I.J.O.S. is “We are all children of the same history,” a claim

that is at once unifying and polemical. On the one hand, it

recognizes that the burdens of history are, or should be, shared

by all members of society. On the other hand, it rejects the

tendency toward multiple explanations—i.e., a history of the

victimized and the victimizer. One of the defining goals of

H.I.J.O.S., and other memory activist groups, is to force

Guatemalan society to come to terms with the past and ultimately

to assign blame and demand justice. As for memory, a

representative of the group offering the following remarks before

the march got underway: “Our memory is not a pure, static

record. Our memory does not obey the interests of groups or

elites. Our memory is not guarded in a box … Our memory is alive

… Our memory is the seed of rebellion, the voice, the word, the

action, the idea that reveals itself before so much oppression.”

Reconfiguring Textbooks & Museums for Historical Memory

The second group applying historical memory toward social

transformation consists of scholars and activists in a variety of

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institutions focused on educating future generations about the

difficult events that Guatemala has experienced. I encountered

several groups engaged in the production of new textbooks,

including the Office of Human Rights of the Archbishop of

Guatemala, the coworkers of the late Bishop Gerardi who was

assassinated in 1998 for his early leadership in memory activism.

The same researchers who prepared the Church’s influential

Recovery of Historical Memory Project are now working with the

Guatemalan Ministry of Education to prepare new materials that

cover the periods of history that have been largely ignored in

public education. Another group called Equipo Cosmovisión has

worked with the photographer Jonás Moller to create textbooks

that feature powerful images of forensic excavations of burial

sites and reburial ceremonies in Maya communities. These photos

are interspersed with essays and poetry from various Maya

intellectuals. Although Moller is American, his project is

clearly focused on incorporating Maya experiences of the conflict

into the national consciousness.

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Several Maya writers have also been working to transform the

national narrative on an even more fundamental level. Whereas

the official versions of history usually focus on the Guatemalan

State—its mythic origin story, an unbroken chain of political

leaders, and various symbols of nationalism—the historical

memories of my K’iche’ and Kaqchikel colleagues tended toward a

much longer view of history. The stories they told began long

before Guatemala: before independence, before colonization,

before the arrival of the Spanish. Although their individual

narratives differed in the details, a common theme was the

recurrence of violence against Maya communities by the highest

authorities, be they representatives of crown, colony, or State.

As one of my friends in the publishing industry put it, “the

violence [of counterinsurgency warfare] was just the latest

episode in a long series that began with the arrival of Pedro de

Alvarado.” Now that the tools and authority needed for text

production are once again available to Maya scholars, such

alternative views of history may finally be on the horizon.

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From the Streets to the Courts: Memory on Trial

The third and final example of historical memory being used

for social transformation is also perhaps the most inspiring. In

recent years, communities that were victimized by military

violence during the internal armed conflict have finally

succeeded in pursuing judicial action against the perpetrators of

the crimes. These historic trials are a particularly clear

example of the negotiation of contrasting forms of knowledge

about the past: the testimony of victims—who are predominately

Maya, and who often testify in their native languages with the

assistance of a court interpreter—must undergo a quite deliberate

process of transformation to fit the expected parameters of

courtroom discourse. For example, in the official transcripts of

the recent Ríos Montt trial, each witness’s testimony is followed

by a list of the reasons why their declaration is deemed valuable

by the court. These brief explanatory remarks function on the

one hand as a form of evaluation of the validity of the testimony

—for example, pointing out the age of the witness at the time of

the event, as a sign that she was mature enough to understand and

remember what she experienced. They also serve as a space for a

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sort of meta-commentary on the trial itself, incrementally

building evidence of a recurring pattern in the narratives which

in this case led the court to find Ríos Montt guilty of genocide.

On the surface, it would appear that the court’s handling of

survivor testimonies reflects long-standing patterns of

discrimination and privilege, specifically in the necessity of

commenting on the validity of survivors’ testimonies rather than

letting them speak for themselves, as it were. However there is

a larger sea change underlying these commentaries and

translations. The process of incorporating victims’ memories of

violence into the official record, via the judicial system, has

consequently led to broader shifts in how society at large

discusses and understands the internal armed conflict. The

relationship between individual testimonies and national

narratives is thus laid visible in this critical moment in

Guatemala.

Memory as Weapon & Arena

Finally, I arrive at explaining the first part of this

paper’s title: memory as weapon. For the activists, writers, and

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survivors described above, historical memory has become a

valuable resource—or weapon—for challenging the status quo and

demanding social change. For the participants in H.I.J.O.S.’

Memory Offensive, for whom memory is the “seed of rebellion,”

historical memory functions as an organizing principle and a

powerful recruiting tool. For the authors of new textbooks,

memory offers perspectives that have been excluded from the

national historical narrative. And for the survivors and victims

of violence who finally have their day in court, historical

memory is the primary evidence they bear. In this final case,

memory is a weapon with the potential to put some of the most

powerful men in Guatemala behind bars for the rest of their

lives.

And yet the rise of memory as a weapon has been accompanied

by new struggles, particularly by a shift in debates onto the

terrain of memory itself. That is, memory has become an arena.

This is likely the case everywhere that we find traumatic

experiences in the past that diverged along ethnic, racial, or

national lines. This is also the area where attention to the

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politics of knowledge is most required: to examine truth claims

with a critical eye, aware of the differing conventions and

experiences at play in any given speech act or commemorative

practice. Powerful figures in Guatemala have now shifted from

denying the authority of memory to denying the specific contents

of memories shared by survivors of violence. Days before Ríos

Montt was convicted of genocide—a ruling that was later

overturned on a technicality—President Perez Molina reiterated

his stance that there was never genocide in Guatemala.

Ultimately, I cannot offer a conclusion to this story

because it is still unfolding today. H.I.J.O.S. continues to

organize marches and to paint the capital with graffiti.

Scholars, Maya and ladino and foreigners like myself, continue to

write about Guatemalan history in new ways. And the survivors of

violence, who have waited more than a decade for their day in

court, have vowed to continue their campaign for justice. What I

can say with some measure of certainty is that historical memory

provides a useful lens for understanding many of the most

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important social processes unfolding in Guatemala today. I hope

this short paper helps to illustrate that point.

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AAA 2013 Paper: Historical Memory as Weapon and Arena: Comparing Three Forms of Memory Activism in Guatemala