I've now been in the altiplano (highlands) for nearly a week, and it's a good time to reflect back on how I got here, specifically here to the department of El Quiché. My research in Guatemala has taken many twists and turns. If you've followed this blog since 2011, then you know much of this already and can skip the next couple of paragraphs, but it's useful for me to reorient myself, as well as any new readers.
In 2011, I lived in the department of El Quiché because this was where the migrants who lived in New Bedford came from. My research ended up not really focusing on migration but instead on community radio. That expanded into a broader interrogation of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state, and while I followed a lot of different indigenous rights struggles -- the resistance to mining in San Marcos and other areas -- I ended up focusing on the town of Santa Eulalia in Huehuetenango, a Q'anjob'al community where there was (and still is) a community radio station that was criminalized and shut down for a while by the town's Mayor, and where in 2014 two indigenous leaders (the term of art here is "human rights defenders" or defensores de los derechos humanos, abbreviated as DDHH), Rigoberto Juárez and Domingo Baltazar, were arrested on bogus charges. Altogether 9 Q'anjob'al human rights defenders from Santa Eulalia and Santa Cruz Barillas -- another majority Q'anjob'al town -- were unjustly imprisoned, and many other activists were facing a variety of criminal charges. That occupied me for several years, although most of the charges were eventually found to be baseless and in 2016 Rigo and Mingo, along with some of the others, were released from the Preventivo (the pre-trial detention center in Guatemala City's Zona 18).
In 2019 I shifted focus a bit and started a project on memory sites about the armed internal conflict (i.e. the Guatemalan genocide or the civil war -- el conflicto armado interno is how most of the people with whom I associate refer to it). I'd co-edited two books about public history and controversial memory sites, and had created a class on controversial monuments and memorials, so it seemed logical. The history of the armed conflict is still very much unsettled. When former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in an historic trial in 2013, the right wing took to the streets under the slogan "No hubo genocidio" (there was no genocide), despite the fact that 250,000 or more people were killed, over 80% of them indigenous and 93% of the deaths attributed to the military or the "armed civilian patrols" (often indigenous men and boys who were forced -- threatened with death -- to patrol and inform upon their neighbors and relatives who might be suspected of siding with the guerrillas).
And then ... the pandemic put a stop to my travels to Guatemala for a few years. However, all this time, I'd never stopped working with the immigrant community in New Bedford, Massachusetts - a few miles from the university where I teach. In 2009, I helped found an immigrant workers' center, the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), and since that time have regularly volunteered with the organization (usually during the academic year I would put in a full day at CCT's offices every week, and made myself available by phone and email for other consultations). One of the areas that I drifted into was writing grants for the organization. I've written grants for other organizations (and occasionally for myself) for years, so it was a skill that I was glad to contribute to the organization. I also do a lot of translation when workers need to meet with non-Spanish-speaking company owners and supervisors, or the police, or the Mayor, or ... well, you get the idea. Additionally, in 2014 I helped found an industry-wide campaign called Pescando Justicia (fishing for justice), which focused on the seafood and fish processing industry -- in economic terms, the largest industry in New Bedford and the major employer of Central American, and specifically Guatemalan Mayan, workers.
When the pandemic started in 2020 (that is, when it hit the US), my university had just gone remote -- we had left on March 5 for spring break and didn't go back to in-person classes for a year and a half. I didn't travel back to Southeastern Massachusetts until maybe May or June, as at one point, because of the high rate of infection in New York, the state of Rhode Island wasn't letting people with NY license plates travel through the state. But I kept in touch with CCT via phone and email, and helped secure funds - once they became available - for food relief and other forms of cash assistance. Once it was okay to travel, I started going to New Bedford every week and helping set up the food and cash assistance program -- arranging with United Way for food boxes, and representing CCT in a coalition called the Massachusetts Immigrant Collaborative (originally the Boston Immigrant COVID Collaborative -- started by three Boston-based immigrant-serving non-profits, but they eventually invited a handful of organizations outside Boston to join, including CCT). While MIC (now MiCollaborativa -- my collaborative) eventually started offering translation services for what were initially weekly Zoom meetings, I figured representing CCT was one way I could help out, since the Executive Director (who was at that time the only paid staff person at the organization) was busy dealing with the situation on the ground (and eventually once in-person schooling started up again, he had to pick up some of his kids from school in the afternoon, often at the time the meetings were held).
Once the vaccine became available, I also helped lobby for vaccine equity (I do need to write about all this, I can see) -- having vaccine locations that were accessible to Central American immigrants, most of whom did not have cars (southeastern MA is very poorly served by public transit) and making I remember the first vaccine clinic that was set up along the waterfront in the North End of New Bedford I also obtained funds for a vaccine program, that we launched because it was clear that people in the immigrant community often felt uncomfortable going to other locations to get the vaccine
After a while, it occurred to me that the impact of the pandemic on the immigrant community was something that I should research -- although I have to say that I spent more time just working with the community and supporting the organization's work than doing anything that resembled formal research (I guess I could call all of that "participant observation" but I mostly didn't take notes so I don't have a clear record). I did help develop and conduct a survey that was administered by all of the organizations that were part of MIC, about the impact of the pandemic in terms of jobs, food security, schooling, the vaccine, and so forth -- and worked to ensure that CCT collected around 100 surveys -- but this was back in 2021, and it's painful to admit that we haven't fully analyzed or published the results.
Finally, in the summer of 2022, I was able to travel again to Guatemala, and I devoted most of my trip to looking at the impact of the pandemic on the three municipalities of interest, and also interviewing families of pandemic-era migrants. You can look back at last year's blog posts if you haven't read them previously. I also participated in a human rights delegation for a week, so that broke up the fieldwork (I did some before, and some after, the human rights delegation's activities).
Then back to the U.S. in August, and back to my routine of working with CCT. However, people were still arriving from Guatemala. In late January of this year, we began to work on a new program called Deferred Action, which allows immigrants without work authorization who are involved in a labor dispute to apply for work authorization and a Social Security number. The work authorization is only valid for 2 years and there is no clear indication of whether it will be renewable. But CCT had been organizing in a couple of workplaces where the workers had filed complaints with a governmental agency, and so we decided to start helping people fill out the fairly lengthy and cumbersome applications for deferred action. Supposedly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had agreed that they would not take action against workers who were participating in the program even if they had outstanding deportation orders - which is the case for about 20% or more of the people we would be dealing with (I haven't counted up the numbers but that's my best estimate based on the reviewing some of the spreadsheets we created as we started to help people).
The entire process of helping workers apply for deferred action is worth its own blog post or posts. When we started with the workers at Bob's Tires - the ones who were dismissed in 2021 for participating in a brief work stoppage to try and engage the owner in discussing a case of sexual assault -- we worked with them one by one, and took down all the necessary information as a lot of them do not read and write easily, or at all. Often they did not have some of the information at hand, such as their wives' birthdays, or the date of their marriage. It struck me that in the rural areas where most of them came from, those dates were not especially important, or perhaps they did not focus so much on the Gregorian calendar but instead their lives were governed by other notions of time -- when it was time to plant or harvest, when the rains came and stopped. This is not to say that no one in rural Guatemala celebrates birthdays, but undoubtedly some of these men had been in the U.S. for many years and their lives did not lend themselves to, or leave much room for, celebration. So I sat with worker after worker who called his wife in Guatemala and asked for her birthday and/or the date and location of their marriage. I teased them afterwards and told them to put the date in their calendar and make sure to send flowers, and we laughed together. We brought in people to take finger prints so that the men could request a CORI report (Criminal Offender Record Information -- a background of any criminal charges), which was necessary before proceeding.
Afterwards, we began with a much larger group of workers from a seafood company where workers had been dismissed, also for organizing -- Eastern Seafoods (I'll have to write about that in more detail at some point). So we organized legal clinics -- bringing in volunteer lawyers, law students, and other volunteers so that we could process the paperwork for around 40 people at a time. We held five of them, and I participated in 4, I think. As we took down everyone's information, which included the date of their arrival in the U.S., I realized that there were a lot of recent arrivals -- people who had come in 2021 or 2022. That encouraged me to pick up the threads of the somewhat-back-burnered project I'd worked on last summer, of looking at the impact of migration from both the perspective of the migrants themselves and the perspective of their families.
So, somewhat hurriedly, I started compiling a list of people who had arrived since 2020 and was able to contact a few of them -- not all, unfortunately -- to see if I could interview their relatives in Guatemala. I asked those whom I was able to contact and who agreed to make sure they asked their relatives if it was okay for me to contact them, and to provide the contact information, so they (the Guatemala-based relatives) would be likely to answer my calls.
In several cases, I contacted the relatives before leaving the U.S. Nearly everyone in Guatemala uses WhatsApp, so it was easy for me to send text messages -- although I came to realize that it might be better to call since some of the relatives did not read or write. That is now something that I ask migrants. "Does your XXXX speak Spanish? Does he or she read and write?"
Armed with this handful of contacts, I set out to pack my bags.
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