Voices of the Earth: Mayan Women’s Testimonies as Resistance and Identity Reclamation in Post-Genocide Guatemala

Abstract

This article explores the oral testimonies of Mayan women survivors of sexual violence in northern Guatemala as acts of political, cultural, and spiritual resistance to ongoing colonial violence. Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship from Latin America and Indigenous epistemologies rooted in Mayan cosmology, the study approaches testimony as a living ritual rather than a static narrative. In this context, storytelling is not simply a recounting of the past, but a ceremonial act of re-membering—reuniting body, land, and spirit that have been disrupted by war and dispossession.

Methodologically, the research employs trauma-informed ethnography and testimonial inquiry grounded in relational ethics (ética del cuidado) and acompañamiento—walking beside survivors rather than speaking for them (Lykes & Crosby, 2019; Smith, 2021). The narratives were gathered through deep listening and reciprocity, respecting Indigenous temporalities in which time is cyclical and memory communal.

By interpreting these testimonies through frameworks developed by Latin American thinkers such as Menchú Tum & Burgos-Debray (1983), Anzaldúa (1987), Rivera Cusicanqui (2010), and Paredes (2010), this article redefines testimony as an act of epistemic and political sovereignty. The voices of Mayan women emerge not as accounts of victimhood but as manifestations of cultural endurance—reclaiming language, spirituality, and belonging as forms of justice when institutional justice remains absent (Velásquez Nimatuj, 2019; Rebecka, 2025)