USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will host the international conference “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala,” at the University of Southern California, Sept. 11-14, 2016. The scholars profiled in this series were each selected to present their research at the conference.

Batsabe Martinez Manzanero, a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at El Colegio de Michoacán, will speak about the Guatemalan Mayas who live in Mexico, specifically at a former refugee camp known as Maya Tecún.

“My work is about memory, mobility, and also other things related to these people in Mexico, like the problems with citizenship because some of them didn’t have identity papers,” Martinez Manzanero said.

During the Guatemalan Genocide of the 1980s, around 200,000 Guatemalan Mayas crossed into Mexico, and 46,000 were recognized as refugees by the Mexican government. Some later returned to Guatemala, others moved to Canada, but there remains a sizable population of Guatemalans in Mexico, most of whom are blue collar workers in cities such as Ciudad del Carmen and Cancún and who now have family that was born and raised in Mexico.

“The Mexican government says that the Guatemalan refugees’ integration was successful,” Martinez Manzanero said. “And I try to show something different about this because, yes it was successful in some sense, but integration is still problematic for these people.”

However, though Martinez Manzanero’s thesis is on the current status of the 200,000 refugees who crossed into Mexico, she plans to narrow down the topic in her presentation at the conference to the issues refugees have with talking about the past.

One thing Martinez Manzanero noticed when interviewing refugees was that none used the word “genocide” to describe the experience they went through. She said it was both an issue of them not knowing the terminology and of them not wanting to talk about. Instead they refer to the genocide as “el problema” (“the problem”).

“I think using ‘el problema’ is some kind of form of denial,” she said. “But this is the way they find to talk about it.”

One particular instance in which she noticed a strange discrepancy in how refugees now deal with their memories of the crisis was during the trial of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt. Rios Montt organized the scorched earth policy of 1982 and 1983 and is the reason many Guatemalan Mayas fled to Mexico in the first place. However, when Martinez Manzanero showed refugees photos of him in the papers during his recent trial for his crimes, they were surprised that the person they so despised looked like a kindly old man.

“At this moment, when the people saw the newspapers, it was so difficult for them to understand that he was the person who tried to kill them,” she said.

Now, however, Martinez Manzanero sees things changing. She said the third generation, born in Mexico, is beginning to use the word “genocide” and to talk to their relatives about what happened.

“There was a teenager here who decided to make a documentary about the history of her relatives,” she said. “She was the first person I knew in Maya Tecún who used the word ‘genocide.’ And I think that is so important and so interesting because it’s a form of resistance and it’s an open door to new forms of talking about what happened with these people.”