Pedimos Posada: Local Mediators and Guatemalan Refugees in Mexico, 1978-1984

Catherine Nolan-Ferrell

doi:10.7440/histcrit80.2021.08

Pedimos Posada: Local Mediators and Guatemalan Refugees in Mexico, 1978-1984

No. 80 (2021-04-01)

Catherine Nolan-Ferrell

Author Biography
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She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio (United States). She received an AB from Cornell University, an MA from Tulane University, and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Nolan-Ferrell’s research interests are in migration, citizenship, and national identity in modern Mexico and Guatemala, as well as the history of gender in Latin America. Her book, Constructing Citizenship: Transnational Workers and Revolution on the Mexico-Guatemala Border, 1880-1950 (University of Arizona Press, 2012), focuses on how laborers who worked in the coffee industry along the Guatemalan-Mexican border developed an understanding of nationality, particularly after the implementation of agrarian reforms in Mexico during the late 1930s. Her current work examines the movement of Guatemalan campesinos into southern Mexico and the United States, both as economic migrants and as refugees. Guatemala’s ten-year revolutionary effort to reform ethnic and economic hierarchies ended in a US-backed military coup (1954) that restored elite power. Indigenous campesinos increasingly worked as seasonal laborers on Mexico’s coffee fincas due to rising poverty and deteriorating living conditions. With the expansion of the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996), this labor pattern turned into a refugee crisis as thousands of indigenous villagers escaped violence by fleeing to southern Mexico. Her research explores how refugees maintained and established new communities that redefined and protected basic human rights in the absence of the state. She also researches the impact of international education on Mexican-heritage and first-generation college students. With Nydia Martínez and Gina Mikel Petrie, from Eastern Washington University, she co-authored “Studying abroad in Mexico with Mexican ancestry” in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development [on-line], https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2021.1874001, and is completing two other articles on decolonizing international education. catherine.ferrell@utsa.edu

University of Texas at San Antonio, United States

https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit80.2021.08

How to Cite

Nolan-Ferrell, C. (2021). Pedimos Posada: Local Mediators and Guatemalan Refugees in Mexico, 1978-1984. Historia Crítica, 1(80), 153-178. https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit80.2021.08

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Abstract

Objective/Context: This article investigates how indigenous Guatemalan campesinos who took refuge in Chiapas, Mexico, relied upon Mexican mediators and community solidarity to secure their safety during the Guatemalan army’s genocidal campaign (1979-1983) against Mayan campesinos. The objective is to identify why different groups of mediators successfully met refugee needs. Methodology: Using the framework of forced migration studies, the article uses archival and oral histories to examine patterns of labor migration and refugee movement. Originality: The study uses previously uncatalogued archival collections, including the Guatemalan Refugees Collection in the Archivo Histórico Diocesano de San Cristóbal de las Casas, local documents from the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas (formerly Instituto Nacional Indígena, ini), and oral histories collected in communities of ex-refugiados. Conclusions: Refugees relied upon local mediators, primarily campesinos and small farmers, for food, shelter, and work. Although formal mediators (governmental and intergovernmental organizations) potentially offered more services to refugee settlements, refugee camps also required formal registration and restricted peoples’ rights to work and move freely. Indigenous Maya villagers on both sides of the border shared long histories of labor migration, along with social, religious, and family ties. These links formed the base of new communities and provided refugees with needed flexibility. More broadly, this research shows how grassroots community formation protected, and at times exploited, the human rights of refugees.

Keywords: Guatemala, informal mediators, Mexico, migration, refugees

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Pedimos Posada: Local Mediators and Guatemalan Refugees in Mexico, 1978-1984

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