Building Community and Nationality in Exile: Guatemalan Refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, 1982-2000

• In Event: Central American Immigration: Macro and Micro Dynamics

Abstract

During the early 1980s, roughly 200,000 Guatemalans fled into the southern Mexican state of Chiapas to escape a brutal civil war. The refugee crisis lasted through the 1996 Guatemalan Peace Accords, and the landscape along the Mexican side of Guatemalan border remains dotted with communities of “ex-refugiados.” These indigenous refugees became a people “in-between;” neither fully Guatemalan nor fully Mexican. My paper examines how people in these border communities established a new sense of community identity after the trauma of displacement and genocide. Did refugees who stayed in Chiapas see themselves as Mexicans with full rights as citizens? Did they identify themselves as people in exile, still tied to Guatemala but with limited rights in either nation? How did these ideas of community belonging and national identity change over time? Refugees forged new communities that often transcended national borders. Prior to the genocidal violence of the early 1980s, indigenous campesinos worked on both sides of the Guatemalan/Mexican border, in both the formal and informal economies. The intense counterinsurgency campaign disrupted these labor flows as people fled into refugee camps or temporarily settled onto land held by ejidos or private landowners. For the Guatemalan refugees, citizenship (in either Guatemala or Mexico), existed along a continuum, often depending upon how the various government authorities perceived their value to the nation.

Author

• Catherine A Nolan-Ferrell, University of Texas/San Antonio