Voices and images: Mayan Ixil women of Chajul
Photovoice as a Resource for Reconciliation and Community Change
A photograph preserves a moment of time and prevents it being effaced by the supersession of further moments. … Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning. … when we give meaning to an event, that meaning is a response, not only to the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can exist without the passing of time. Certainty may be instantaneous; doubt requires duration; meaning is born of the two. An instant photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. (Berger & Mohr, 1995, p. 89).
This book represents the fruition of more than seven years of collaborative work using storytelling and, more recently, photography in a remote corner of the Guatemalan Highlands. As suggested by Berger & Mohr, coupling photographs and stories prevents the past from being effaced and, over time, through them, we construct a future out of the constructed meanings of the past. The following pages present multiple examples of this co-construction of meaning through time. The first photograph, for example, is of one participant’s 1998 interview with the mother of a woman who was hung in Chajul’s town square in 1982, an event that most of the townspeople were forced to witness. The “facts” as presented in the interview were told by the interviewer to small group of women in the project, some of who had witnessed the event, and, re-told alongside an analysis of the photograph of the mother’s testimony by a larger group from the project. The story-photograph, PhotoVoice, presented here incorporates all three of these tellings and re-tellings, reflecting the “meaning and the mystery” to which Berger & Mohr refer above:
… the woman fought incredibly hard to save her daughter, but the commander did not do her the favor of freeing her daughter. The commander, it didn’t bother him even to kill her. He was just fine, stretched out on his bed, while the woman was crying, pleading for her daughter. But the commander … told the woman to leave: “get out of my house and if you don’t do what I say then you’ll stay here too because here is your father whom you must obey.”
… the woman cried and cried while recounting the history of la violencia in 1982. She felt sadness, pain, worry, and anguish. The daughter was hung in front of the municipal building with all the people looking on because they were forced to watch the soldiers carry out their justice. But this was not justice, because they killed honorable people, people who were without blame.
We hope that the war will never return, that what we suffered will never happen again, because this history is so terrible, so horrifying.
Testimonies of the “facts” of human rights violations have been re-storied through this participatory process of taking pictures and analyzing them, creating a multilayered description of war’s atrocities as well as of some of the many ways in which one local community is making meaning of these events and building its future.
The people of corn, the lands of struggle. Chajul, one of three major towns within the Ixil area, was one of the sites of mass atrocities committed during Guatemala’s 36-year war, including massacres, the scorching of villages, disappearances, and widespread displacement and exile (CEH, 1999; Falla, 1994; ODHAG, 1998). The extremely unequal distribution of land in Guatemala contributed to uprisings in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s that were met by subsequent repression.
Much has been written about how contemporary warfare destroys individual lives and affects families, communities, institutions and social life in general. Young children sometimes perceive such conflicts in binary oppositions (Garbarino, Kostelny & Dubrow, 1991), often “choosing” flight or fight (Martín Baró, 1994). Entire families have been forced to flee their homes, even their countries. Those destructive forces and their wake mark individuals in differing ways, distorting perception, suspending many in unresolved grief, and terrorizing and traumatizing others. Others have addressed the symbolic aspects of terror and trauma and its effects within and across generations (see Graça Machel/UN Study on the Effects of War on Children, 1998; Lykes, 1994, 1996 for reviews of this literature). Institutionalized racism against the majority Mayan population exacerbates the effects of war and economic inequality, destroying the material and spiritual fabric of everyday life.
The gendered nature of war’s violence has only recently been highlighted and the case of Guatemala is no exception (see, e.g., Agger, 1994; Aron, Corne, Fursland, & Zewler, 1991; Lykes, Brabeck, Ferns, & Radan, 1993). The Archdiocesan-sponsored report on violations of human rights (ODHAG, 1998, Vol. 1), and the official United Nations-sponsored report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH, 1999) documented thousands of gross violations of human rights, including the destruction of hundreds of rural villages, many in the Ixil area. Interviews with key informants told of repeated rapes of girls and women, the brutalization of fetuses torn from pregnant women’s stomachs, the torture and killing of girls and women, and of children in front of their mothers, mothers in front of their children. Many women were impregnated, giving birth to children frequently rejected by their communities and, sometimes, by the mothers themselves (ODHAG, 1998, see pp. 91-92). The women of Chajul and its surrounding villages were no exception to this violence.
Despite this brutality, women were more likely than men to survive and face the burdens of the psychosocial and material consequences of this violence. Many responded by creating and participating in new human rights organizations, some became important local or national leaders of those organizations. Many were left as the sole providers for children and worked miracles to assure the sustenance and growth of their families and many made important contributions to rebuilding their communities. The changes in role for women are multiple and often tangible: women in rural areas, for example, now tend large animals, prepare fields for planting, chop wood and participate in local religious and political organizations.
At the same time, years of war and deeply rooted structural problems have hindered improvements in economic and social conditions in rural Guatemala. Only 54% of the rural population has access to safe, clean water. Fifty-one percent is below the absolute poverty level, defined as the income level below which a minimum nutritionally adequate diet plus essential non-food requirement is not affordable. Total adult literacy in Guatemala is 65%; yet there are only 79 literate women for every 100 literate men and rates of illiteracy are considerably higher for women and men in rural areas. School enrollment is also notably lower for girls than boys, in part due to the disproportionate responsibilities girls and women bear as household heads and helpers (Barry, 1992; United Nations Children’s Fund, 2000; UNICEF Country Statistics, 1999).
Despite persistent poverty, a negotiated settlement between the guerrilla forces (URNG) and the Guatemalan government in December of 1996 has created alternative spaces in which survivors are giving more direct expression to the multiple effects of this 36-year war. The Association of Maya Ixil Women – New Dawn (ADMI) of Chajul is one response to the horrors of war, racism, and poverty. ADMI grew out of a committee of six women and, with technical assistance from Guatemalans, both ladinos and Mayans, it began to organize itself, first as a small women’s group and later as a Guatemalan non-governmental organization. Currently ADMI coordinates five projects in addition to the one described here, including three economic development projects, an educational program for children between the ages of 6 and 12, and a local library (see chapter 4 of this book and Lykes, Caba Mateo, Chávez Anay, Laynez Caba, Ruiz y Williams, 1999).
This work represents a tentative re-threading of community among a religiously, linguistically, politically and generationally diverse group of women. I have served as a consultant to this work, providing workshops on organizational development and psychosocial issues that the women of ADMI have encountered in responding to the multiple effects of political violence and to the new roles they have developed within their organization and the wider community. Creative resources, including dramatization, drawing, storytelling, photography and participatory research methods, have served as important tools in these efforts to create a public testimony, a PhotoVoice, that bears witness to the atrocities committed against the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ of Chajul and contributes to their development of individual and collective responses to health and educational needs of women and children in their communities. This is the story of how we worked together to generate ways by which these women could give voice to those experiences.
Taking pictures to tell stories: One response to war’s ravages. As a group of primarily Ixil-speaking women, few of whom speak Spanish or read or write in any language, the women of ADMI and I sought methods for working together that would facilitate the participation of all yet also enable us to communicate within and beyond our borders. Inspired by the work of Chinese rural women, Visual voices: 100 photographs of village China by the women of Yunnan Province (1995), ADMI decided that it wanted to use photography to develop a public record of Ixil women’s lives, to “tell the story of the violence” and also its story as a group of women responding to the war and its effects. They hoped to prevent future violence by speaking out, and, through pictures and storytelling, to build connections with other women in Guatemala and beyond who were engaged in similar processes. Equally importantly, they sought new skills and resources to develop economic and psychosocial resources for their communities thereby responding to the material ravages of war.
The workshops I had been facilitating with ADMI since 1992 integrated Freirian pedagogical and analytical techniques (Freire, 1970), creative resources, indigenous practices (e.g., weaving, religious ceremony, and oral histories) (see, e.g., Lykes, 1994, 1996; Zipes, 1995), and strategies developed within the context of participatory action research (PAR) (Fals-Borda, 1988; Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991; Maguire, 1987). Two photographic methods, “photovoice” (Wang, 1999; Wang & Burris, 1994; Wang, Burris & Xiang, 1996) and “talking pictures” (Bunster & Chaney, 1989) were incorporated into our existing group processes to consolidate a PAR method that fit the needs articulated by the group. We developed an iterative process of data collection and analysis; women “analyzed as they photographed.” They photographed life in Chajul and traveled to neighboring villages, photographing women and their families, frequently also recording stories of those whom they photographed. Photographers also audiotaped their own life stories, sometimes assisted by a facilitator, in dialogue with another participant in the group. Through recording multiple stories of daily living, that is, of war, its effects, and ongoing poverty, they developed sensitivities to the various forms of violence experienced in the wider municipality as well as analyses of the complex challenges facing the region in the wake of war’s trauma.
Data collection and analytic processes. Once we had completed an orientation and training program that included the self-identification of 20 of ADMI’s more than 65 members as participants of PhotoVoice (see, Lykes et.al. 1999), each participant received an automatic camera and began to take pictures. The thematic focus of each roll was decided in workshops involving all participants. We began with the topic of women’s work that had been an ongoing topic in the workshops we had organized over the previous half dozen years. Their experiences of work, as well as the meanings attributed to it, were shifting in the context of local realities as well hopes for the future. Later topics – women and their families, health and illness, religion, culture and traditional practices, land struggles, the war and its effects, the harvest, and the work of ADMI – were drawn from analyses of the photographs as the process developed.
The process. Each photographer selected five to seven pictures from each roll of 24 developed photos. She then “told the story” of each picture to a small group including two to four other participants. She included her particular reasons for choosing this picture, as well as any stories that she may have been told by the person she photographed. In a second round of analysis, we formed groups of five to seven women who selected two to four pictures from the previously chosen individual photographs, now clustered topically.
These group analytic sessions were particularly mobilizing and motivating. Through them we developed strategies for clustering ideas, identifying similarities and differences between and across photos, and constructing holistic analyses of clusters of photographs. We have explored possible immediate and underlying causes for the problems represented in any given picture and hypothesized causal sequences.
These analyses were recorded and, with the pictures, presented to the larger group where they were subject to re-analysis by other participants and/or to further elaboration through drawing, dramatization and storytelling. In this latter context participants explored possible solutions to the problems identified at the individual and collective level, thereby also developing a shared vision for change. The analyses were summarized in the notes from each workshop and used as source for defining priorities for future work.
The next stages of the project involved selecting the pictures that appear in this volume from among several thousand and crafting short stories from the pages of interviews and analyses that we had developed during the past two years. This process was repeated several times before we settled on the four chapters presented here. Significantly, as we struggled together to reduce the vast quantities of material, we returned to some of the techniques of drawing and dramatization (see, e.g., Lykes, 1994; Lykes, et.al., 1999) used in our earlier workshops. Through these creative activities we were able to identify the core ideas we sought to include in each story and the common threads to unite the multiple stories we had created through text and photograph.
Crafting stories within and across languages. Language was a constant source of challenge throughout the project but particularly as we developed the current volume. Most of the workshops were held in two languages – Spanish and Ixil – with group participants rotating as translators for me and for other resource people who worked with us on the project. None of the consultants understood or spoke Ixil well enough to use it in interaction within PhotoVoice. Although this sometimes seemed like a hurdle, it was often an equalizer, enabling the members of ADMI to communicate their positions and perspectives within their shared language group before sharing it with me, an “outsider.” It also functioned in multiple and different ways to redress some of the power imbalances due to education that we encountered in the development of the overall participatory action research project, particularly in negotiations with organizations outside of Chajul. Finally, many women in PhotoVoice developed their language skills through the multiple opportunities they had to translate for me and other consultants.
Because many of the women in PhotoVoice can neither read nor write we frequently used tape recorders and relied on the small number of women with literacy skills to do much of the transcribing of the words of those who could not write. Drawings were sometimes used to illustrate photographs and texts. These drawings, in other moments, became the glue to bond fragile stories - created from deep sadness or rage that had been dormant for decades - with the photographs of current reality or future dreams. These moments of picture taking, storytelling and analysis were accompanied by workshops wherein participants elaborated the multiple effects of the original events and the impact of revisiting these traumas and losses. The group of 20 met on a weekly basis at times and the women were always ready to offer support and feedback to all involved in the process.
These diversities of language skills and facilities have also affected the final version of the texts presented here. There is always “slippage” in moving from oral to written work and even more so when one is simultaneously moving from one language to another. Some of the interviews were taped in Ixil and then transcribed and translated simultaneously. When possible, these translations were checked by another Ixil speaker. However this was not always possible. All texts that appear in Spanish in the book were transcribed and then corrected by members of ADMI, and Joan Williams, M. Luisa Cabrera and I have reviewed all of the texts accompanying the photos. M. Luisa Cabrera, the only native Spanish speaker who worked on the project, checked the grammar and spelling in the texts in Spanish. This introduction and methodology chapter was written originally in English and translated into Spanish by Megan Thomas. Catherine M. Mooney completed the English translations of the Spanish texts and Paula Worby lent an important hand in reviewing these translations, as did I.
In the text presented with the pictures we have sought to maintain some of the dynamic of the group’s process by remaining as faithful as possible to the Spanish translations from Ixil developed by the women of ADMI However, we have corrected basic grammatical or orthographical errors in the service of comprehension.
The translation into English was equally challenging. We hoped to maintain the style of the project by leaving many of the local phrases and terms within the context in which the women presented them. However, in order to facilitate comprehension and fluidity we have not always maintained a literal translation. We trust that bilingual readers will refer to both the Spanish and English versions of the text to experience a fuller understanding of PhotoVoice.
Women and gender in a rural Mayan community. The 20 women who are part of the PhotoVoice team and authors of this book now identify themselves as photographers and as researchers. Through picture taking and reflections on their pictures these women have “stepped outside” of their daily lives and developed skills as historians and analysts of their lives and the life of their community. In our quarterly evaluations of the PhotoVoice process many women have reflected upon the multiple ways in which they have grown personally through their participation in the project, describing a new respect for themselves as women as well as for each other. Efforts to situate PhotoVoice as a community project have contributed to the organization’s development and to establishing ADMI as a resource to the wider community. The journey has demanded time, energy and commitment and some were not able to participate as fully as they might have liked because of family responsibilities. Coordinating work outside the home with these responsibilities remains an ongoing challenge for rural women.
Formal versus spontaneous photography: The othered self. Mayans are represented widely in photo essays, magazines and postal cards. Tourists and professional photographers struggle to capture “the exotic Mayan customs” for expensive coffee table books or post cards. Male Guatemalan photographers (los ambulantes) rove among county fairs to take formal family shots or offer themselves for hire to record weddings and funerals (Parker & Neal, 1982).
The women of PhotoVoice and members of the wider community who have allowed their pictures to be taken for this community project are very aware of the distinctive nature of these photographs and their relationships to them, as compared to the more predominant experiences described above of “being photographed.” Through PhotoVoice these Mayan women photographers have generated contradictions, challenging conventional roles for women, traditional understandings of who takes pictures of whom. They have thereby transgressed traditional roles, reshaping the meanings of women’s work and of photography for themselves as well for the communities of Ixiles and K’iche’s who have been photographed. Such contradictions and incongruities underscore some of the ways in which any collaboration in which outsiders enter a community with resources heretofore not available represents an intervention in that community and generates consequences for the project, its participants and the community more widely. As importantly, it underscores the need for all involved to be responsive to ethical issues and dilemmas generated within the multiple and complex relationships that develop in such collaborations.
Photography as art, research strategy, resource for healing. Drawing, dramatization, storytelling, analysis, and photography have been employed by local Mayan communities to recover and reflect upon stories about local traditions, community life and the effects of war. PhotoVoice offers an important alternative both at the level of the photograph and, as importantly, at the level of storytelling and analysis. The process of taking pictures within one’s local community became an opportunity to develop individual and collective stories that had heretofore been silenced or spoken only privately to family members, outside researchers or human rights workers. The photograph told its own story and became a site for wider participatory storytelling and analysis. It re-presents the photographer’s perspective or point of view but then becomes a stimulus for the group’s reflections, discussions, analyses and re-presentations. The fixed image serves as a catalyst for an ever-widening discussion of the differing realities that are present within these Mayan communities.
The stories and subsequent analyses of the photographs have contributed to our developing a shared understanding of some of the multiple causes of “the violence” and its local effects while contributing to healing and recovery processes within the group and beyond. These processes contribute to the group’s deepening commitment to work within and across differences, through persistent hurts, towards constructing a shared future, giving evidence of its steps along a journey towards reconciliation.
ADMI is enhancing its current programs and developing new ones that respond to the needs of women and children in their community and beyond. Participants with 5th or 6th grade formal schooling have honed analytic skills that were multiplied through small group work with other photographers with considerably less formal education. They pored over thousands of photographs and hours of interviews to create the text you have before you. As significantly, a core group has participated in training that prepared them for assuming all roles within the research process and for strengthening their local women’s organization. They have developed computer skills, become data recorders and systematizers, and learned how to balance the financial accounts of their various projects. Several have written grant proposals to support some of the new programmatic initiatives that have evolved from this ongoing work. Others have spoken publicly in national and international forums about their work. Most recently, they have established a team of “technical assistants” from among the 20 participants in the PhotoVoice project who are beginning to work with women in some of the villages surrounding Chajul to help them establish women’s groups in their communities and begin to develop community-based projects that will improve their lives and the lives of their families. Others represent ADMI in national efforts to pressure the government to fulfill promises made to Mayan communities as part of the Peace Accords.
The fragility of peace in rural communities. Outcomes from recent national and local elections as well as legal decisions in some of the more widely-known cases against alleged violators of human rights confirm that building the peace that was heralded on December 29, 1996 is a complex and often fragile process. Today's uncertainties, wherein future political instability and the potential recurrence of violence constitute very real threats, particularly in rural communities, contributed to the books' authors decision not to list the names of those whose pictures appear in the text, nor to include their names as authors of a particular story or photographers of a specific picture. This decision also reflects an equally important desire that the book be seen for what it is – a collective project and product created from the lives of the many individuals and families who survived one of the worst episodes of Guatemalan history.
M. Brinton Lykes
March 2000