The Ghosts of the Past, Human Dignity, and the Collective Need for Reparation

Abstract

In the early 1980s the Guatemalan army decimated the Achí Maya villages in the valley of Rabinal because they had opposed the construction of a hydroelectric dam that was going to destroy their homes and their livelihoods. This article uses the villagers’ demands for reparations as a way to explore issues that link ethnic historical memory to a notion that we could label as ‘postmemory’, or, better yet, ‘postmemorializing’, a sort of restitutional justice that goes beyond a more conventional understanding of what historical memory is. I argue that postmemorializing includes not only a sense of preserving the historical memory of ‘originary terror’, but adds to it a demand for economic reparations. Moreover, it extends its mantle to broader ethical issues of human dignity and a demand for the recognition of ethnicized subalternized subjects bearing alternative epistemologies and ways of thinking.