Mayan Women & Guatemala Genocide

Crosby and Lykes (2019) Beyond Repair. Published with Rutgers U. Press

M. Brinton Lykes, Ph.D. Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology at Boston College and Co-Director of its Center for Human Rights & International Justice has a new book out from Rutgers University Press.

Drawing on eight years of feminist participatory action research (PAR), Alison Crosby (Associate Professor, Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies, York U., Toronto) and M. Brinton Lykes recently published their book Beyond repair? Mayan women’s protagonism in the aftermath of genocidal harm.

This book explores Mayan women’s agency in the search for redress for harm suffered during the genocidal violence perpetrated by the Guatemalan state in the early 1980s at the height of the thirty-six-year armed conflict.

Participants included fifty-four Mayan women who are seeking truth, justice, and reparation for the violence they experienced during the war, and the women’s rights activists, lawyers, psychologists, Mayan rights activists, and researchers who accompanied them as intermediaries (Merry, 2006) for over a decade. Creative workshops and in-depth interviews were used to document and accompany participants’ engagement in multiple actions for redress. Crosby and Lykes use the concept of “protagonism” to deconstruct dominant psychological discursive constructions of women as “victims,” “survivors,” “selves,” “individuals,” and/or “subjects.” They argue that at different moments Mayan women actively engaged as protagonists in constructivist and discursive performances through which they narrated new, mobile meanings of “Mayan woman,” repositioning themselves at the interstices of multiple communities and in their pursuit of redress for harm suffered.

E. N. Anderson, emeritus, University of California, Riverside offers a review:


“Over many years, climaxing in the early 1980s, the Guatemalan government killed some 200,000 citizens, 2 percent of the population and largely indigenous Maya, in what is now universally termed genocide. Hundreds of thousands more were raped, tortured, displaced, ruined financially, or driven into exile. The US was involved in much of the genocidal activity. The perpetrators almost always went free. This book recounts a rare, small success: 54 women worked over years for justice, finally achieving the conviction in 2016 of two perpetrators of rape and sexual enslavement. Crosby and Lykes worked with the women over much of this time (2009–17), listening and learning while providing legal aid, psychological support, and connections with the wider world. This book examines participatory action research, providing an extremely thoughtful, valuable, and important set of reflections on how it can work or go wrong. Of course, there is no question of “values-neutral” scholarship here; the situation is more like medicine, in which the doctor must be as accurate and careful as possible in dealing with trauma. Valuable for studies of Latin America; extremely important for studies of genocide, mass oppression, and trauma.” The review appears in October’s CHOICE.

Available from Rutgers Press. Also in Spanish.

The book was also published in Spanish in Guatemala in July 2019 by Cholsamaj in translation by Megan Thomas.

Find the book at the link: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/beyond-repair/9780813598963