Defying settler colonial logics: transborder territories and Indigenous Mam Women seeking justice for gendered violence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Indigenous Guatemalan refugees passing through Mexico to seek asylum in the U.S. move in the space of a larger transborder territory created over the past six decades in response to U.S. foreign policy in Central America, historical patterns of labor movement and retreat from violence in the region. I frame this larger territory within the larger settler colonial politics of dispossession and elimination as carried out by the U.S. Mexican, and the Guatemalan states, albeit in different ways and at different stages, that often result in the fragmentation of human and social bodies. I look specifically at how Mam women navigate this transborder territory to escape gendered violence and seek safety for themselves, their families, and communities, and reconstitute themselves as Maya communities in diaspora. I suggest how the bodies of Mam women who have sought redress for gender violence through the process of seeking asylum in U.S. immigration courts are fragmented into discourses, narratives and forms legible through state loci of biopolitics. Finally, I suggest how Mam women refugees seek reintegration of their human and social bodies through reconstitution in shared transborder communities.