Voices and images:
Mayan Ixil women of Chajul
Acknowledgments and Dedication
Like other projects, this one has been supported by many people. Joan W. Williams of the United States lived and worked with A.D.M.I. during the critical first months of the project. She brought considerable resources as an amateur photographer and a student of psychology to the project.
Those of us with whom she worked appreciated her capacity to listen and to serve as an “animator” when local women found it difficult to respond to the projects’ demands or those of our children and spouses. M. Luisa Cabrera served as mid-wife to a later stage of our work, facilitating workshops wherein we identified the “heart of the story,” thereby providing keys for reducing huge quantities of data and organizing a vast amount of material into the four chapters that you see here. Valia Garzón contributed her photographic eye to the layout and accompanied the project in the final months of rendering many drafts to this final edition. María Caba Mateo, María Victoria Menchú, and Ubaldo Ruiz have been friends of A.D.M.I. for many years and provided technical assistance and a belief in the possibilities of the women of Chajul to create a better world through our collective energy and work.
The SOROS Foundation–Guatemala provided financial support for PhotoVoice and believed that photography and storytelling are important resources for re-creating community in the wake of extreme violence. They supported our argument that the local community is an important site for struggle in the creation of reconciliation and that women are critical protagonists in that process. Our personal thanks to Maria Caba, Ramsay Liem, Marcie Mersky, Elliot Mishler, Vicky Steinitz, Joan W. Williams and Paula Worby who generously reviewed parts of this work and to Catherine M. Mooney who reviewed the work in its entirety through its multiple drafts. Despite their contributions, we remain responsible for the final version.
Boston College of Chestnut Hill, MA, USA, has supported the ongoing work in Chajul of Dr. M. Brinton Lykes: a generous sabbatical leave during the 1998-1999 academic year allowed me, Brinton, to work more continuously in Chajul in the PhotoVoice project. Marcie Mersky’s years of friendship and my “home away from home” were the context for many conversations and debates with her and other local protagonists that have deeply informed my understandings of war and its effects within Guatemala and often sustained me in my commitments to pursue the work described herein. María Caba invited me home with her nearly a decade ago. Years of friendship and her family’s generous hospitality during my many stays in Chajul transformed my knowledge of rural Ixil life and deepened my personal understanding of the complex challenges that face rural peasants committed to creating a better world for themselves, their children and their communities.
It is, however, the children, women and men of Chajul and its surrounding villages that have given most to this project. It is their story and they generously embraced the opportunity to collaborate with the 20 authors in its telling in images and words. We hope that they will embrace the result of our labors with equal generosity. We dedicate this volume to you and to all of the brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, whose lives were taken by the war and extreme poverty that has marked the communities of Guatemala. We trust that this volume will contribute in some small way to improving the quality of life for our children and their children and that it will serve as a testimony to those who have gone before us and a challenge to those who follow – that the war and violence described herein will neither recur in Guatemala nor spread to another corner of the world.