Migration and the Transnationalization of Fiesta Customs in Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Guatemala

Abstract

In the past decade, wage-labor migration to the United States has accelerated in Todos Santos Cuchumatin, a Mam Maya town in northwestern Guatemala, to the point that almost every family can claim at least one member who is living elna (west, the Mam word used to refer to the United States).1 While this pattern is now common throughout much of Mexico and Central America, local reactions to it have been quite varied (Binford, 1998; De Hart, 2002; Loucky and Moors, 2000; Gledhill, 1995; Rodriguez and Hagan, 2000; Rouse, 1995). Many places have become veritable ghost towns, while others are largely populated by women, children, and the elderly, in a landscape dotted with the new and vacant houses of migrants who hope to return one day to their home communities. Todos Santos, in comparison, though intensely affected by migration, has remained vibrant and dynamic. As the wage-labor migration experience enters its second decade, the annual celebrations of All Saints Day and the Day of the Dead in Todos Santos have themselves become transnational social fields (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton, 1994) shaped by a continually shifting interplay of political economic and historical forces (Garcia Canclini, 1988; Guss, 2000). Notable as a site for observing the imagining of community (Guss, 2000: 2)