New Mestizas in Guatemala: Utopian Racelessness and Indigenous Genocide in Activist Identity Formation

• In Event: Historicizing Embedded Colonial Constructs of Racial and Queer Identity in Postcolonial Societies

Abstract

This paper considers the character of mestiza political identity in contemporary Guatemalan activist spaces. It explores political mestiza-ness through postcolonial racial rhetoric and contemporary advocacy for memoria histórica and visibility of recent armed conflict's indigenous genocide. The disappear-ing/ed "indio" emerges as central to identity formations that aid in fostering attitudes of solidarity and reclamation of buried roots while simultaneously reifying the myth of the absent racial other. The paper centers queer activist efforts that demand the reappearance of the dead through memory practices that bring the disappeared into the present, calling them into communities organizing for change (Wright, 2015).

Presenter

• Kristen Kolenz, The Ohio State University