Performing Justice: Guatemalan Women Reconfiguring Resistance through Activism and Performance

In this paper, I interrogate the performance art of two Guatemalan performance artists, Regina Jose Galindo and Maria Adela Diaz, emphasizing the ways they use performance art to intervene in Guatemala’s history of gendered violence. Focusing on the experience of the civil war (1960-1996) and its aftermath, I argue that this intervention summons silenced narratives of collective memory and trauma. In doing so, these artists chronicle a history of gendered violence systematically erased from the nation’s archives and sanctioned accounts of Guatemalan history. I propose that the performances reposition the marginalized memories of indigenous women in particular. Engaging Cecilia Menjívar’s conceptualization of ‘normalized violence’ in Guatemala and Diana Taylor’s theorizations of the ‘spectacles of gender and nationness,’ I assert that Diaz and Galindo push against the all too generalized belief that the violence of the Guatemalan Civil War does not permeate through the present. By centering marginalized memories of feminicide, military violence, and genocide, I propose that the artists perform acts of remembering and knowledge as forms of resistance.

“¿Desarollo Para Quienes?” Maya Women’s Resistance Against Megaprojects in Guatemala
Zully Juarez, Gender and Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies