2003 CLAS Summer Research Report Susan G. Hicks Latin American Studies "Guatemalan – U.S. Migration and Sending Communities"

Last spring I proposed a research project, the purpose of which was to investigate an often ignored facet of Latin American -- specifically Guatemalan -- immigration to the United States. How does out-migration and return shape the sending communities, and what factors contribute to decisions to return (or not to return) to Guatemala? My plan was to focus on rural communities in the heavily indigenous western region of Guatemala, an area of the country in which many communities were also directly affected by the military’s violent campaign against Mayans in the 1980s. I sought to make sense of what migration means to different communities (and how they make meaning surrounding migration) in light of these changing community structures -- especially among predominantly Mayan villages. By talking to both the families of absent out-migrants as well as returned migrants, I could compare the role of community in coping with absence (and return) in each case. I was also interested in the effects of remittances on these communities. The plan was to visit some of the largely rural departments that had experienced the most out-migration in recent years, such as Totonicapan, Huehuetenango, El Quiche, and Quetzaltenango.

I began my summer research in a small town in North Carolina, where I had previously met several men and women from the highland department of Huehuetenango as part of an internship with an immigrants’ legal services organization. The rural town of Siler City, NC has been transformed by the arrival of Latino immigrants, including a significant population of Guatemalans. My guide and principal contact with the Guatemalan community in Siler City was an eight-year resident of the U.S. from Chiantla, Guatemala. Cesar patiently accompanied me from back porches to restaurants, trailer parks and quiet suburbs to introduce me to a number of Guatemalan immigrants, many of whom found work in the local poultry plant or in tobacco fields. I set up interviews with several of these men over the course of three trips to Siler City, and offered to take letters, photos, and keepsakes to four families in western Guatemala. Hearing stories of departure, the long journey to the U.S., and uneven histories of abuse and prosperity in unfamiliar terrain, as well as their thoughts on return, helped shape my research questions for migrants and returnees once in Guatemala.

The Guatemala-Mexico border at La Mesilla. Every day buses return from Chiapas carrying those Guatemalans who have been recently deported by Mexican officials. I crossed the line several times with Guatemalan Eber Garcia (pictured) and walked into Mexico with no questions asked.

I had not considered staying with the families of these men while in Guatemala, but when I arrived they welcomed me into their homes, and for part of my travels they provided me with a base for exploring nearby towns and setting up some interviews. Getting to know these four families, first through their sons or fathers, then as a footsore traveler and guest, became in itself a central part of my experience, and, I believe, my current approach to the original research questions that I proposed last spring. I will later elaborate on their influence on my research.

After arriving in Guatemala City and learning to use the transportation system over a week, I headed north and west into the highlands. I was able to stay with one family for two weeks in a partly ladino (non-Mayan) rural community near Chiantla, during which I was able to meet several local residents who had left for the United States and recently returned. In addition, I accompanied my host, a local businessman, to the more strongly Mayan town of Aguacatan nearby, and was able to conduct informal interviews with returnees there.

After hearing rumors about out-migration from a string of villages in the Cuchumatanes mountains – San Mateo Ixtatan, San Miguel Acatan, San Rafael la Independencia, Santa Eulalia – I planned to travel into the mountains to get an idea of the effects of this transformation and try to talk to some of the people who had returned. In addition, several of these towns had been strongly affected by the military regime’s campaign of violence in the 1980s, and I was interested in how this past influenced current migration.

In a brief visit to the famous indigenous town of Todos Santos, which is also experiencing a 60-70% out-migration of young males (many living in East Oakland, a community I would like to become more familiar with), I noticed several trends and local perspectives on migration that would be interesting to explore in several of these villages, especially the influence of recently-arrived Evangelical churches on community structure.

However, the realities of travel in Guatemala and the seven-week duration of the trip necessarily conditioned my research, and at several points I was frustrated by knowing what I wanted to explore or whom to visit, but simply not being able to get there. Illness proved to be particularly constraining.

During my fourth week in Guatemala and second week in Huehuetenango, I was hospitalized for amoebic dysentery for several days and unable to travel for the next week and a half. I found that I was too sick to ride in a bus or pickup, much less attempt the grueling mountain route to these isolated but rapidly changing villages deep in the Cuchumatanes. I spent some time recovering with my contact family and then used the last several weeks to travel south to the departments of Quetzaltenango and Totonicapan. Although staying in Huehuetenango would have given me a chance to travel to other local villages, I wanted to spend at least some time in another department, to see how migration had shaped the landscape in another region, and talk to returning migrants who had left different local attachments behind. For several days I was able to stay in the department of Totonicapan with the Mam (indigenous) family of one of the men I had met in North Carolina. Petrona, the mother of fourteen, watches over a family of weavers who sell their fabrics, huipiles, beadwork and souvenirs at nearby markets every weekend. My interviews with them and the Catholic Action community in their village (canton) were insightful, but ultimately I did not spend more than a week there; I became ill once again and took a bus to the nearby city of Xela for treatment.

Petrona and some of her children (a Mam family -- their father has lived in the U.S. for three years) on a hill overlooking their village in Totonicapan. Petrona worries that if he stays another year, he may never come back.

As irritating as it was to be unable to travel for much of the last few weeks in Guatemala, the experience of being a “sick gringa” in the care of surprised Guatemalan families allowed me to develop relationships to the mothers, sisters, and daughters of the absent men that promoted frank conversations. The typical power and freedom-of -movement of the northern traveler/tourist was temporarily undone and perhaps enabled the women to see me as less exotic and more vulnerable, as well as very much indebted to them for taking care of me.
By visiting my four “contact” families I was able to meet people in regions where out-migration and return was experienced differently. To summarize some complicated observations that I will continue to develop in organizing and re-reading my interviews, I found that strongly indigenous/Mayan communities in the northwest, Huehuetenango, tended to draw more migrants back if the migrants were involved directly in community-based functions, such as serving on a committee or participating in shared duties. Family left behind, of course, was a factor for all migrants in return, although it mattered whether or not they had children yet (several young migrants returning to take care of their parents expressed their reluctance to return in interviews). In ladino communities with large numbers of outmigrants, men that had stayed more than three years in the U.S. were, according to their families, likely never to return. Many of their wives, sisters, and daughters were pursuing visas or other routes to the United States, while others fretted constantly that their loved ones would “lose their way” to drinking or drugs.

From a hill overlooking Totonicapan.

For many families with migrants in the United States, religious beliefs and organizations strongly shape the meaning of migration and absence, as well as strategies for coping. For example, a son’s successful migration meant to one Evangelical convert in Todos Santos that his own monetary contributions to the church had established a strong personal relationship with God, reflected in his son’s good fortune. Yet for another Evangelical worshipper, migration was a destructive force because young men returned and drank too much, an activity that he equated with sin, laziness, and the collapse of tradition. In a household in Totonicapan where Catholic Action (in this community, a left-leaning church organization) played a strong role, the wife of a migrant to the US prayed every night for his safe return, and under her breath would curse the “sinful” political and economic system that made it necessary for him to leave.

These are only a few of the observations that I recorded in interviews with families and returnees, and will recorded in depth in the Masters Thesis that I am developing on migration and return in Guatemala. One interesting development over the past few years is the increased Guatemalan deportation campaign in Mexico; what are its effects as an actual control on migration, and how does it figure into imagination and decisions to migrate or return? Almost all of the returned migrants considering another U.S. trip mentioned the new dangers of deportation. Undoubtedly some of the most important questions are just now being formed, and I hope to address them further with research this fall and spring and, hopefully, another trip to Guatemala to visit these communities (and possibly others).