Maya Political Memory: Patrullero Voices Disrupting Civil War Narratives Through Collaborative Cinema

• In Event: Artist Salons as Sites of Unforgetting: Reimagining Liberatory-Education through Plays, Film, Poetry, Novella, and Collage

Abstract

My contribution centers collaborative documentary filmmaking as methodology for activating intergenerational memory and disrupting dominant Civil War narratives in Guatemala. Through screening excerpts from "Somos Maya, Eramos Patrulleros," I demonstrate how arts-based research serves as "unforgetting,” refusing educational frameworks that arrest Indigenous subjects within static victimhood narratives.
The film emerges from years of ethnographic collaboration with Maya-Mam elders and youth across Oakland, California and Xjan Xwan, Huehuetenango, Guatemala. The project intervenes in how the Guatemalan Civil War has been remembered, moving beyond typical framings of Indigenous communities as passive victims caught between ladino military and guerrilla forces. Instead, the film centers five Maya-Mam grandfathers who served as patrulleros—municipal patrol leaders during the conflict—allowing them to share complex political analyses and lived experiences for the first time.
The collaborative filmmaking process becomes a site of knowledge production, where oral histories in Mam, Spanish, and English converge to create intergenerational archives of resistance. These archives emerge through both elder testimonies and the film's structure, positioning youth as interlocutors catalyzing discussions about the past's relevance to present struggles with migration, deportation, and Indigenous sovereignty.
The demonstration screens a sequence exemplifying this intergenerational dialogue, a moment where an elder patrullero's recollection of strategic negotiations with both military and guerrilla forces is witnessed by younger community members grappling with contemporary state violence. This excerpt illustrates how collaborative storytelling generates critical consciousness about historical and present-day political conditions.
Central to this work is navigating genre tensions between oral history, testimonio, and essayistic documentary approaches to rethink relationships between those documented and those documenting. Drawing from testimonio's commitment to first-person political narration while integrating essayistic cinema's reflexive interrogation of filmmaking processes, the project opens space for Maya elders to simultaneously bear witness and theorize their experiences. This methodological hybridity disrupts traditional documentary hierarchies where subjects provide content while filmmakers control interpretation. Instead, testimonio methodologies integrated with creative essayistic approaches allow patrulleros to function as both storytellers and analysts, while my role as ladino filmmaker becomes explicitly interrogated within the film's structure. The collaborative process generates a new form of political documentary supporting Indigenous sovereignty through shared authorship rather than extractive representation.
The educational dimensions extend the salon's commitment to "command[ing] the full use of the tongue." Beyond the film, we develop multilingual pedagogical resources for schools across Guatemala and California, targeting educators working with recently migrated Maya youth. These materials position the film as catalyst for intergenerational healing dialogues and critical historical education centering Indigenous political agency.
This demonstration contributes to the salon's exploration of arts-based research by showing how collaborative cinema serves as both methodology and pedagogy, a practice that not only documents Indigenous knowledge but actively generates new forms of political consciousness through creation itself. The project exemplifies how "unforgetting" operates not just as remembrance, but as generative practice that imagines Indigenous futures through activating ancestral knowledge and creative methodologies.

Author

• Alex Mejía, San Francisco State University