Imperial and Colonial Economies of Trauma, Travel, and Knowledge in Guatemala

Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation

Authors Freeman, Katherine E.

Citation Freeman, Katherine E. (2020). Imperial and Colonial Economies of Trauma, Travel, and Knowledge in Guatemala (Doctoral dissertation, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA).

Publisher The University of Arizona.

Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

Download date 24/09/2021 06:03:02

Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/650848

IMPERIAL AND COLONIAL ECONOMIES OF TRAUMA, TRAVEL, AND KNOWLEDGE IN GUATEMALA

Katherine E. Freeman

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2020 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by: Katherine E. Freeman titled: Imperial and Colonial Economies of Trauma, Travel, and Knowledge in Guatemala

and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

______Date: ______Oct 14, 2020 Monica Casper

______Date: ______Oct 15, 2020 Linda B Green

Eithne Luibheid ______Date: ______Oct 14, 2020 Eithne Luibheid

______Date: ______Oct 19, 2020 Susan Stryker

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: ______Oct 14, 2020 Monica Casper Gender and Women's Studies

Acknowledgements

I thank, acknowledge, and honor all sacred things seen and unseen—my luminous ancestral guides, the guardian spirits who have watched over me my entire life, and the beautiful grace afforded me by divine intelligence and love—for bestowing upon me the ability to see the light, wonder, innocence, and perfection that fills every form and expression of living be-ing.

I thank, acknowledge, and honor the Land currently known as the US Southwest in the imperial and colonial imaginary. This Land has nurtured me, supported me, sustained me, and gifted me with the beautiful and weighty responsibility of knowing there is always more to every encounter, experience, testimony, and witnessing than could ever meet the eye.

I thank, acknowledge, and honor all of the Indigenous, Black, Latinx, trans*, queer, feminist, working-class, and other warriors risking their lives every single day in the service of imagining and creating a new world order.

I thank, acknowledge, and honor my first mentor, Dr. Kathleen Fine-Dare, who threw me a lifeline when I was a young, angry, frightened, and queer riot grrl coming out of rural New Mexico. She exposed me to my first classes in cultural anthropology, women’s studies, and queer theory. She taught me that there was a whole world of womxn who were thinking, feeling, and writing about the sorts of things I had been thinking, feeling, and writing about, letting me know that I was never alone.

I thank, acknowledge, and honor the chair of my dissertation committee, Dr.

Monica Casper, for taking me on as her student, reading countless drafts of my work, meeting with me at a moment’s notice, and talking me through any and all moments of

3 paralyzing self-doubt and uncertainty. I do not have the words to thank her for her selfless dedication and hard work.

I thank, acknowledge, and honor the esteemed members of my dissertation committee for likewise taking me on as their student and hanging in there with me through the ups and downs of my graduate school career. I thank Dr. Linda Green for always asking me the hard questions. I thank Dr. Eithne Luibhèid for the honest, thoughtful, and thorough feedback she has always provided me concerning my dissertation. I thank Dr. Susan

Stryker for her willingness to discuss the nuances of critical social theory over a shared meal.

I thank, acknowledge, and honor the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. I deeply appreciate the support and assistance I received over the years from Darcy Román-Felix and Dr. Jennifer Croissant. I thank them both for their commitment to the department.

I thank, acknowledge, and honor my life partner and best friend, Joseph D. Lowney.

His loving support and care allowed me to write this dissertation and navigate this strange, incredible, scary, beautiful journey called “life.”

Dedication

To my mom and dad, Sallyann and James Freeman, who are still

the smartest people I know.

Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... 9

Abstract ...... 10

1 Chapter One: Investigating Leisure Travel and the Consolidation of World Power ...... 11

1.1 Research Biases: I am Not Detached, Objective, Apolitical, or Passive (I Want to

Live) ...... 15

1.2 Research Design, Methods, and Other Delusions of Epistemic Grandeur ...... 19

1.3 Key Terms and Concepts: Using Subjugated Knowledges to Rethink Leisure

Travel ...... 32

1.4 Dissertation Overview: Toward an Insurgent Understanding of Leisure Travel,

World Power, and the Production of Knowledge ...... 57

2 Chapter Two: Leisure Travel, World Power, and Cartographies of Struggle in Guatemala ...... 64

2.1 Columbus Day, Colonial Wound-ings, and the Advent of Guatemala’s Tourism

Sector ...... 64

2.2 The Global Coloniality of Power and Latin America: An Overview ...... 70

2.3 Leisure Travel, Coloniality, and the Imperial Geopolitics of Knowledge in

Guatemala ...... 92

2.4 Conclusion: The Invasion as an Enduring Geocultural Project and Matrix ...... 125

3 Chapter Three: Security Logics, Gender(ed) Violence, and the Recalibrated Civilizing Mission ...... 130

3.1 Leisure Travel, Sexual Violence, and World Power ...... 130

3.2 Encountering the Global South, the Global North, and Antigua in the Imperial

Imaginary ...... 136

3.3 Tourism Security Logics, Corporeal Moralities, and the Fomentation of Imperial

Panics ...... 165

3.4 Turismo es Chingar: The Raced, Classed, and Gendered Prosthetics of Coloniality

...... 184

3.5 Conclusion: The Recalibrated Civilizing Mission and the Geopolitics of

Embodiment ...... 195

4 Chapter Four: The Political Economy of Trauma and the Geopolitics of Knowledge ...... 203

4.1 Introduction: Mundo Maya and the Crossroads of “New World” Power/Capital

...... 203

4.2 Bridging Trauma Time and Hegemonic Time: The Colonial Wound and the

Commodity ...... 207

4.3 Excavating Imperialist Desire: “Mundo Maya” and the Political Economy of

Trauma ...... 218

4.4 Exploiting the Cannibalistic Drives of Empire: Fabricating the “Heart” of “Mundo

Maya” ...... 249

4.5 Conclusion: Rethinking the Necrotic Organization of Planetary Life ...... 265

5 Chapter Five: Toward Abolishing the Global Coloniality of Power ...... 267

5.1 Dissertation Chapter Summary: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the

Same ...... 269

5.2 Toward Abolishing the Coloniality of Power: Recommendations and Thoughts

...... 276

Notes ...... 285

References ...... 313

List of Figures

Figure 1.1: The author visits Tikal, 2009 ...... 20

Figure 1.2: A rooftop view of Antigua’s El Parque Central/Central Park ...... 29

Figure 3.1: Encountering the tourist ...... 161

Figure 3.2: National military police as they patrol Antigua’s Central Park ...... 168

Abstract

This dissertation examines the enduring representation and exploitation of Guatemala as a particular type of travel and research destination in the imperial and colonial imaginary. It is a place where trauma is engaged, managed, and/or commodified as an object of white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, and capitalist desires. Drawing from over a decade of research, including ethnographic fieldwork and archival analysis, I show that this exploitation depends upon and activates the embodied, psycho-affective, and socioeconomic regimes of control left in the wake of the European invasion of the

Americas. To advance my arguments, I trace the inauguration and maintenance of

Guatemala’s tourism sector against a carefully managed backdrop of colonial warfare, one that still targets Maya peoples as spatiotemporal and somatic markers of the “savage” and

“pre-modern.” I reveal how military officials, oligarchic stakeholders, and venture capitalists continue to exploit this “nostalgic” representation to encourage and guard the intranational travels of European and Euro-American anthropologists, archaeologists, humanitarians, missionaries, sightseers, and other “benevolent” representatives of Empire.

As I illustrate, genocide in Guatemala (past and present) has never fully impeded this travel because it remains a requisite for the production of imperial knowledge about the country and for the accumulation of power/capital. Alongside original research, my work builds on

Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Third World, queer, working-class, and feminist scholarship.

These perspectives and my own research findings demand a form of knowledge production that can sustain, uplift, and honor planetary life. This includes how to demolish the Invasion as a persistent, pernicious, geocultural project and philosophy.

1 Chapter One: Investigating Leisure Travel and the Consolidation of World Power

Archaeologists postulate that a series of ancient and elaborate roads connect what is now called Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to the venerable city of Tikal, located in the

Petén region of northern Guatemala. Chaco Canyon is considered a site of cultural, ancestral, and ceremonial heritage by over 22 distinct Indigenous groups in the United

States (US) Southwest, such as Keres, Towa, Tewa, Tiwa, Zuni, and Hopi language speakers. A bygone metropolis, Chaco Canyon was inhabited from c. 850 BCE to 1250 CE

(Jarus 2017). An architectural wonder, many of its walls, windows, and other structures were crafted to track the stars, moon, and sun—the movements of sky and earth. Tikal, a former site of Maya empire and governance in the isthmus, is internationally renowned for its impossibly tall pyramids, precise celestial alignments, and indescribable grandeur.

Settlement at Tikal is estimated to have begun around 300 BCE, lasting until 900 CE

(Cartwright 2014). Both Chaco Canyon and Tikal offer living rebuttals to Euro-American historical, technological, and epistemic supremacy.1 Ancient roads connecting these sites parallel the trail presently taken by many Central American migrants. Archaeologists hypothesize that they once uniformly bound the US Southwest to México, Guatemala, and broader Mesoamerica (Jarus 2017). The complexity and reach of these roads may be surprising only to archaeologists, who are arguably missing the point about the anguished truth they record and reveal: The embodied regimes of death, which shape the current world system via the regulation of travel and migration, are products of their time and place.2

Long before the blockades of European imperial and colonial power—el repartimiento, la encomienda, the civilizing mission, manifest destiny, hegemonic

11 mestizaje, eugenics, genocide, slavery, reservations, boarding schools, detention centers, and prisons—transformed the US Southwest, México, and Central America, these roads connected Indigenous peoples of the Americas in an immense, complicated, and intricate geopolitical network. They traced the continuous movement of Indigenous peoples across a momentous landscape, bearing witness to dynamic interchanges between diverse languages, cultures, and environments. I cannot do justice to the full, rich story of these roads as living palimpsests. Much like those archaeologists who attempt to justify the theft of Indigenous cultural and spiritual resources in the name of “science” or “history,” I am limited—I am cut through—by the genocidal logics of imperial ontology and epistemology, or ontoepistemology. I borrow this term from feminist scholar and physicist

Karen Barad (2007, 979), who argues that knowledge production is inexorably grounded in material reality, making it impossible to separate how one understands the world from how one is made to exist within that same world.3

Transnational circuits of interaction and exchange, fostered by global political economy and continued imperial and colonial rule, add an almost impenetrable layer of cultural sediment to these ancient networks. Tikal and Chaco Canyon are major tourist attractions, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, research destinations, and national parks. Both sites are managed, studied, and commodified by those in power—in the case of Chaco

Canyon, white people, and in that of Tikal, members of Guatemala’s (Ladino,4 Spanish,

Western European, and Euro-American) oligarchy. Nonetheless, the entombed roads preceding and scaffolding these circuits rattle and shake with uneasy revelations. This is because other pathways exist for the organization of political, biological, and economic life: Things do not have to be the way they are now.

The “archaeological” remains of modern empire transect this veiled promise and prophecy. The steel-toed boots worn by soldiers, militia members, and paramilitary agents leave clear footprints along the length and breadth of these roads, marking the boundaries and death dealings of the contemporary nation-state. Barbed wire and concrete walls blight these roads, signifying where “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds,” una herida abierta/an open wound, in the oft-quoted words of Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 3). Of course, such measures do not stop people and animals from migrating across the Americas as “natural forces of the earth, just as rivers and winds are natural forces” (Silko 1996, quoted in Aldama 2012, 164). Like rivers and winds, people and animals maneuver around, through, and underneath border checkpoints and other policing efforts. In a haunting testament to these precarious mobilities, thousands of discarded shoes line these roads, many of which are missing soles. The migrants who once wore them walked impossible distances in a determined and valiant effort to survive and thrive.

Further chronicling these “rites of conquest” (Taussig 1987, 109) are the ephemera of safe passage and privilege: tattered guidebooks, expired airplane tickets, discarded travel brochures, lost passports, and identification cards. Not all who tread upon these ancient roads are incarcerated, separated from their families, or otherwise made to die. Some people are granted juridical leave to easily pass through the barbed wire and concrete walls, superimposed upon the timeworn paths between Tikal and Chaco Canyon—tourists, researchers, students, and other travelers, as well as the industry serving the consumer desires of these mobile citizen-subjects. Why are these subjects able to circumnavigate cartographies of struggle (Mohanty 1991) or scattered hegemonies (Grewal and Kaplan

1994) and empowered to freely traverse the Americas? What does this “travel” reveal about

13 power and the world system? Honoring insurgent knowledges and subjugated ways of being once connecting the US Southwest to México and Central America, the answers to these questions can help us to imagine a new way to relate to the world and its lifeforms.5

Guided by these questions, this dissertation critically examines leisure travel within the geocultural context of Guatemala, excavating the psychic, historical, and somatic economies that distinguish the “tourist” as a social figure, force, and legend. Since 2010, I have conducted interviews with and observations of various stakeholders in Guatemala’s tourism sector, seeking to understand how power—raced, classed, gendered, and geopolitical—figuratively “travels.” This dissertation is also, to a degree, autoethnographic. It is about people like me who, for the most part, can freely enter or leave Central America because of their/our embodied and economic privilege. An attempt to “study up,” this dissertation focuses on “the middle and upper end of the social power structure,” interrogating “the processes whereby power and responsibility are exercised”

(Nader 1969, 1). The bulk of fieldwork analyzed here occurred during the “Central

American Immigration Crisis,” brought to recent public attention due to a marked escalation in US imprisonment of migrant children. I remain haunted by my presence in

Guatemala when so many vulnerable others—particularly children—were forced to leave because of drug cartel violence, US imperialism, oligarchic impunity, and poverty. I offer no excuses. Indeed, this dissertation interrogates the social conditions that have made

Guatemala an enduring travel destination during this “crisis,” including the resulting commodification of its manifold traumas by social scientists and other members of the

European and Euro-American academy.

In the following section, I outline my research assumptions, methods, and design, illustrating my fraught engagement with this project, one that began, in many ways, when

I was sixteen years old, conducting research in Chaco Canyon as an archaeoastronomer- in-training. I then review my theoretical framework, grounded in insurgent and subjugated knowledges across the Americas, primarily the coloniality of power school, Latinx and

Chican@ scholarship, Indigenous thought, queer theory, Black studies, transnational feminist theory, and critical trauma studies. Embracing the call of Boaventura de Sousa

Santos (2014, 45) for “global cognitive justice,” this framework reflects my dedication to a research praxis informed by subjugated and insurgent efforts to remake the world. The chapter ends with an overview of the dissertation. Subsequent chapters unpack the dynamic, consequential relationship between contemporary leisure travel and global power in Guatemala.

1.1 Research Biases: I am Not Detached, Objective, Apolitical, or Passive (I Want to Live)

My birthplace, Farmington, NM, is one hour north of Chaco Canyon and the ancient roads winding to Tikal and is bordered on all sides by the Diné Nation and reservation. I was raised in the extractive colonies of the Four Corners Region of the US Southwest, in its oil and coal towns. My father was a coal miner; my Anglo family moved across the Four

Corners, following the lead of transnational resource extraction corporations.6 Counting

Haliburton among their number, these corporations dominate life in the region, contaminating earth, air, water, and sky. They occupy Indigenous lands strategically and insidiously—an invading army seeking profit. The painful beauty of the Four Corners, as well as the effortless kindness and humility of community members, makes its

15 transmutation into a national sacrifice area (Ortiz 1992) that much more difficult to bear.

My body is filled with strange growths and illnesses, a regional stamp borne by many from this area (Freeman 2015; KatherineKellyAbraham 2018). At the cellular level, our bodies trace the wounding of this land, including its sacred attempts to heal. In the face of relentless environmental genocide and cultural desecration, the Four Corners vibrates with life. People survive. Cottonwoods grow, reaching toward the sky, miraculous giants of the high desert. Sage scents the air with its promise of renewal and purification. The San Juan and Animas brim with fast-flowing waters, rainbow trout leaping like a prayer from white- tipped rapids. What has been wounded can heal; this is the Land’s promise, and it is binding.

Farmington is colloquially known as the “Mississippi of the Southwest,” reflecting the poverty shaping life there and the horrific acts of physical and sexual assault levelled against Indigenous and Latinx peoples, trans* people, women, and queer folks. This violence occurs mostly at the hands of white men or boys, typically raised in abusive and/or impoverished families. Life in Farmington is cyclical and predictable. Three of the most popular boys from Farmington High School approached me after class. Encircling me, they asked if I wanted to come with them to “tip Indians,” to “roll the drunks” sleeping homeless on Farmington’s streets. This was the terrible slang of lynching, the syntax of terror ordering life in my hometown. Horrified and scared, I called them motherfuckers, punching one in the chest. In return, he laughed, calling me a “dyke” and “Indian lover.”

They closed formation around me. A passing teacher interrupted this dire prophecy, demanding to know why we were loitering in the hallway. Others would never be as lucky.

Given my childhood, I was tormented by a ruthless melancholy that Renato Rosaldo

(1989, 107) famously termed “imperialist nostalgia”—I desperately longed for the “very forms of life…intentionally altered or destroyed” (Rosaldo 1989, 107) by white settler colonialism. By pursuing Southwest archaeology as a career, epistemic orientation, and craft, I gave my imperialist nostalgia a sort of tangible materiality. I sought to challenge white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism in my hometown.7 That is, I understood Southwest archaeology as a means of furthering social justice in Farmington; I sought to empirically document all of the other options that existed for political, economic, and biological life, grounded in the “reality” of “history.” So, I learned everything I could about Indigenous peoples of the US Southwest. I became particularly obsessed with Chaco

Canyon and its sociohistorical connections to different archaeological sites, scattered throughout the Four Corners. In fact, Chaco Canyon was the center of my universe, the pivot around which spun my understanding of time and space, as well as of the profound.

By the time I turned sixteen, a series of renowned and well-meaning archaeologists had begun to mentor me. With my father’s help and guidance, I learned from these archaeologists how to study the intentional symmetry of various architectural structures in

Chaco Canyon to the sky and earth. The planetarium of my hometown’s community college was given over to my father, these archaeologists, and me. There, we reenacted celestial phenomena occurring centuries ago, formulating hypotheses about Chaco

Canyon’s function as an astronomical, regional, and ceremonial calendar. We then returned to Chaco Canyon to test our theories. We charted the alignment of walls, windows, and glyphs to the solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, lunar standstills, stars, and cardinal directions.

I began to see the land of my birth as beautiful. It was within the context of this homegrown

17 research that I first stood upon what is now known as the Great North Road, which connects

Chaco Canyon to other ancient places across the Four Corners. Once I learned that the southern extensions of this road bound Chaco Canyon to Mesoamerica, I began to study the Mexica/Aztec, Maya, and Inca empires. I planned to visit these places upon completion of my undergraduate studies.

I traveled the country, presenting my research at conferences and science fairs; I started college (in the Four Corners) with a budding career already in place. Until the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA),8 it never occurred to me: I had no rights to the secrets of Chaco Canyon, and neither did most archeologists.9 Although many things caused my flight from archaeology, the reactions of select professors to NAGRPA quickened my retreat. As if talking about the weather, some argued that Indigenous peoples did not possess the necessary objectivity to understand that the catalog and display of “human remains”—of cherished ancestors—was a “scientific” imperative. Others insisted that their excavation of a given site was always sensitive, respectful, and careful; after all, this survey was bound by the sterile ethics of Western epistemology, the cool pursuit of “history” and its studied documentation. However, to paraphrase the wry words of my mother, the “remains” of the Mormon and Anglo settlers, who brutally colonized the Four Corners, remained sweetly buried in hallowed ground. In short, I was deeply troubled by the racism, classism, and sexism embedded in these disciplinary justifications and logics, beyond any possible recall.

I could not resolve such violent philosophies and practices with my vision of archaeology, my goal being to produce knowledge that emancipated loved ones, including the land and its myriad wondrous lifeforms, from death. Consequently, I altered my

18 academic and professional trajectory. I decided to “research” the destructive tendencies of my “people,” to mitigate “whiteness” as an economic regime, embodied schematic, and ontoepistemological orientation. I began the most momentous, terrifying, and enduring journey of my lifetime—the search for a philosophical, economic, and political praxis capable of irrevocably altering the necrotic organization of life in my hometown and, by proxy, the world. For over two decades, this search spurred my professional employment as a social worker, community organizer, labor organizer, and tenant organizer, as well as various (restless) interdisciplinary migrations within the US academy. I eventually earned a B.A. and an M.A. in cultural anthropology and applied anthropology, respectively.

However, my indomitable will to live is my research bias, and it is this will that drives my intellectual efforts, now “housed” within gender studies and cultural anthropology. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, which brings me to the current study.

1.2 Research Design, Methods, and Other Delusions of Epistemic Grandeur

A woman, speaking Spanish with a strong French accent, ripped me from the profoundly joyful contemplation within which I had wrapped myself, disrupting the benediction of silence. Pulling a folded map from the fanny pack carefully wrapped around her waist, opening it and then handing it to me, she asked, “Do you know how to get here?”

Her white, perfectly manicured finger, its nail a bright pink, pointed to a nearby hotel. I resentfully turned toward her, tearing my eyes from the amazing pyramid before me—

“Tikal Temple IV,” so ruthlessly named by archaeologists in a bid to catalog this cultural and technological wonder. It had taken me ten years to save enough money to visit Tikal;

I wanted to see, with my own eyes, one of the proposed terminuses of the Chacoan road system. Driven by the melancholic compulsions of my childhood, the psychic dregs of

19 imperialist nostalgia, I was in Guatemala, and I was there alone. It was the summer of 2009.

I had told my family not to expect word from me until I returned stateside, a month or so later. I considered myself a pilgrim, “different” from the woman before me. As this dissertation explores, we had more in common than I cared to admit.

Figure 1.1: The author visits Tikal, 2009. Unbeknownst to me, the Ladino tour guide I had contracted for this excursion took my camera from my backpack and snapped this picture. He took great pleasure in describing how he had accomplished this without my notice. He then asked me to have sex with him. When I refused, he thankfully left me in peace.

I gave the woman exact directions, hoping to terminate our conversation. She smiled and thanked me. “I will talk to you in English,” she said. “My English is much better.” I sighed and nodded for her to continue. She said, “I am amazed that these people could build this place. It is not Rome, but still.” From a backpack slung over her left shoulder, she retrieved a camera, which had one of the largest telephoto lenses I had ever seen. “Guatemala has been so good for my art. I am a photographer; I take pictures, like in

National Geographic. I sell them in a little gallery that my friend owns.” She turned on her

20 camera; the digital screen flashed with an image of a woman bathing in Guatemala’s Rio

Dulce/Sweet River. “Look, just look at this picture!” said the French tourist, beaming with pleasure. “I discovered her, a real Indian, when I was walking on this bridge… this one here.” She showed me another picture. “I had to climb down to this spot; it was very dangerous.” She showed me yet another picture. The woman continued, “She never even knew that I was there! That is what makes this [the first picture] art; it is so natural, so real.” The women affectionately patted her telephoto lens: “This was completely worth the price.”

As would happen many times throughout my fieldwork in Guatemala, observing and interviewing leisure travelers from the Global North, I was rendered speechless. I had no idea where to begin in terms of a response or intervention. So I “accidentally” deleted the pictures, apologizing for my clumsiness in the face of her wrath. I should have done more. Upon my return to the US, I was plagued by a series of troubling questions. How could this violent exchange happen, so casually and congenially, proving Hannah Arendt right about the nature of evil? Why was this woman so profoundly comfortable with her trespass and able to approach a complete stranger (me) with its story? What made her think

I would share in her rapacious pleasure? What social conditions, politics, and scales of vulnerability and exposure made such an exchange possible, even permissible?

Initially, these questions motivated my resulting fieldwork in Guatemala, carried out during the summers of 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016. I believed that I had stumbled onto the perfect entry point for tracing the regimes of contemporary power, including white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy—an ethnographic study of the transnational capacities and sensibilities of leisure travel in Guatemala. Given the hateful, carceral rhetoric

21 surrounding figurations of the “Central American Immigrant,” such a study could show where borders yield, bend, and relax, capturing their strategic permeability, as well as the economic, somatic, and cultural logics of this permeability. By highlighting how these fissures cultivate select forms of life, the concomitant hierarchies of death could likewise be revealed, including their raced, classed, gendered, and geopolitical sedimentations

(Chapters Two and Three). By “studying up” (Nader 1969), i.e., focusing upon those who were juridically sanctioned to traverse the world, I could navigate some of the exploitative power relations driving qualitative research. An example of these relations is the advancement of one’s academic career vis-à-vis the ethnographic study of suffering, pain, and trauma, which can commoditize and flatten these affective fields and spatiotemporal orientations (Chapter Four). I congratulated myself for finding a redemptive exception to the structural violence of the academy, taking great pride in my burgeoning research plan.

Eventually, I was disabused of this delusion—most notably, when I began to write this dissertation, engaging in the very processes of abstraction and representation I sought to critique.

I relied upon the following methodological tools or approaches to collect data from research participants. I conducted semi-structured interviews, mostly to explore research findings arising from informal situations and archival research. These interviews were

“structured” in the sense that I went into them with a series of questions in my head, but I always followed the flow of the conversation. I did not use a formal tool. In addition, I relied upon unstructured conversations to collect data. Some of these conversations were spontaneous and included additional interactions with people I formally interviewed. For example, this approach includes going out to dinner with research participants. I also

22 utilized structured observations. These were targeted around specific questions and generally involved formal tours of study abroad or humanitarian programs, tourism- training facilities and bureaus, popular tourist destinations and attractions, police stations, research institutions, the airport, museums, shops, and other places. I also depended upon unstructured observations. For example, if I witnessed the police questioning a tourist, I would record this exchange as “data.” This method also included spontaneous observations concerning the people I formally interviewed. As I discuss shortly, my interviews and observations were guided by the principals of rapid ethnographic assessment (REA), a staple of applied anthropological research since the “post-modern turn” (Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger 2020). That is, REA comes out of “a broader social revolution related to civil rights, women’s liberation, and anti-war sentiment that was occurring in the 1960s and

1970s in the United States and beyond” (Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger 2020, 5). In the next section, I further interrogate this revolution as well as the “post-modern turn.”

As my research goals were specific—to qualitatively examine tourists/tourism in

Guatemala in an attempt to understand global power and political economy—I initially required participants to be from the Global North and in the country for vacation purposes.

Participants could not be in the country for professional reasons, such as research, diplomatic, or development work. Participants must have been in Guatemala for sightseeing purposes only; for example, to visit any of the country’s major tourist attractions. I conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews with these stakeholders, in addition to structured and unstructured observation sessions. For the purposes of this dissertation, I classify these participants as pedestrian tourists.

As oligarchic impunity, US imperialism, systemic poverty, and drug cartel violence increased in ramification and scope in Guatemala (i.e., the “Central American Immigration

Crisis”), I noticed more and more social scientists, students, and humanitarian volunteers in the country. There was an increase in the availability of these stakeholders for interview and observation, with an attendant decrease in pedestrian tourists. My sample was impacted by these circumstances. Specifically, during the summers of 2014 and 2016, I interviewed and observed mostly cultural/medical anthropologists, cultural geographers, social historians, missionaries, humanitarian volunteers, medical volunteers, and students, conducting interview and observation sessions with these stakeholders either individually or in groups. These sessions fostered a shift in my understanding of the “tourist,” as I discuss in the next section. Moving beyond pedestrian travelers, I center and innovate the terms “leisure travel” and “leisure traveler” to describe the practices, hierarchies, and privileges of geopolitical mobility examined throughout this dissertation.

Although participants from both groups (i.e., ordinary tourists and travelers with more professional goals) came from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, most identified as white, middle class, straight, and well educated.10 Most were legal citizens of

Canada, France, Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and the US. The majority of participants spoke Spanish and English (in addition to their natal tongues, if they spoke

German or French). Thus, I conducted interview and observation sessions in either Spanish or English. Interestingly, both groups reported being drawn to Guatemala because of its tumultuous politics and rich cultural history. They described being repulsed by

“mainstream” tourism and “trivial” research efforts, as mine were often classified by the social scientists I interviewed. This similarity across participants caused me to change the

24 focus of my interviews. Turning my analytic eye toward the transnational commodification of trauma, I began to explore how participants perceived and related to enduring political violence in Guatemala; that is, how they understood their travel and stay in the country in the face of this violence.

Given the peripatetic nature of study participants, and following in the methodological footsteps of other anthropologists of tourism (Bruner 2005; Leite and

Graburn 2009, 36–37; Little 2004), the ethnographic fieldwork documented here was multi-sited in nature (Marcus 1995; see also Gordon 1995; Narayan 1995; Ong 1995). I navigated “multiple sites of observation and participation” (Marcus 1995, 95) in an attempt to chart the local histories/global designs (Mignolo 2012) of leisure travel as both industry and practice. For example, I followed select cohorts of tourists as they traveled the major tourist highway in Guatemala (i.e., the “Gringo Trail”). I observed these cohorts visiting key destinations along this path, such as the bustling market town of Chichicastenago, the beautiful Lago Atitlán/Lake Atitlan, and the awe-inspiring Tikal. In a bid to witness an entire travel experience, when it came time for these groups to return home, I followed them to the airport in Guatemala City. I also interviewed and observed key industry gatekeepers in Guatemala, such as tour guides, homestay “moms,” Spanish language teachers, administrative entities from the country’s national tourism bureau (INGUAT), security and police officers, street vendors, business owners, and others. To triangulate and contextualize interview and observation sessions, I engaged in extensive archival research and media analysis. I reviewed published travelogues, electronic travel blogs, tourism campaigns and advertisements, ethnographies, and other documents germane to the history of leisure travel and Guatemala.

To help me organize and accomplish my research goals, I utilized the methodological techniques, approaches, and philosophies of REA. The goals of REA are to gain immediate “familiarity with a situation, generate new ideas or assumptions, and determine whether additional studies or follow-up is needed” (Sangaramoorthy and

Kroeger 2020, 36). This assessment remains somewhat controversial among social scientists who embrace more long-term research approaches; for example, those hinging upon the mythological integration of the “anthropologist” into the lives of those they seek to ethnographically examine and/or write about (Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger 2020). The remainder of my dissertation unpacks why I use the term “mythological” to describe said integration.

Conversely, REA hinges upon short, concentrated, focused bursts of qualitative research that are explicitly focused upon a given geopolitical problem or issue

(Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger 2020). During these “bursts,” the researcher attempts to interview, observe, map, and/or otherwise interact with as many study participants as possible in order to arrive at a rapid and holistic understanding of said issue or problem.

REA utilizes ethnographic research staples, such as interviews, but with the goal of quickly exploring and apprehending a specific topic (Sangaramoorthy and Kroeger 2020). REA does not attempt to enact or promote the long-term assimilation of the “anthropologist” into a particular cultural group or situation. In my opinion, REA is very similar to community and labor organizing models as it depends upon the concise and practical mapping of immediate issues or concerns as part of formulating and advancing political agendas. Such agendas drove my project, as will be further evinced by this dissertation. In

26 addition, as both the majority of my research participants and I were in Guatemala for limited periods of time, REA simply made the most methodological “sense.”

In drawing from this diverse array of methods, my goal was to arrive at a rich understanding of leisure travel as a “social field in which many actors engage in complex interactions across time and space, both physical and virtual” (Leite and Graburn 2012,

37). To this end, I was primarily based in the transnational hub, UNESCO World Heritage

Site, and small city of Antigua. A former seat of the Spanish empire in Central America,

Antigua is located in the Guatemalan department of Sacatepéquez, nestled in the country’s central highlands. In 2013, the population of Antigua was about 45,669 permanent residents; as of 2018, 39,368 people lived in the city (World Population Review 2018).

According to UNESCO (2018), Antigua is “one of the best examples in Latin American town planning and all that remains of the 16th century” and a “most magnificent example of [Spanish] colonial architecture in the Americas.” Both domestic and international visitors come to Antigua to experience this heritage (Little 2004). The city is well known for its large number of Spanish and Maya language schools, which attract mainly international tourists. It also hosts two prestigious research institutions, which draw social scientists from all over the world. As most tours of Guatemala’s major attractions begin and end in Antigua, the city lies at the heart of the country’s travel industry. Consequently,

Antigua boasts five-star restaurants and hotels, continuous electricity and water, and other luxuries not available outside of the city. Antigua provided me with an almost endless supply of research participants and situations of interest.

Sociocorporeal hierarchies in Antigua, such as those inflected by race and ethnicity, provide a snapshot of political life throughout Guatemala (in Chapter Two, I further discuss

27 these hierarchies). Anthropologist Walter Little (2004, 24–25) notes:

Mayas from nearby towns have provided labor and food to the city for nearly five hundred years. It has been a popular tourist destination for more than a century, and, since the 1940s, one of the places where the wealthy from all over the world come to live and to vacation and to buy homes. It is also a place where tourists, Ladinos, and sometimes even Mayas expect that Maya should act like “Indians” in order to fit into the touristic scheme of the city. Antigua has become a place for both foreign and national tourists to play and relax but one where Mayas work.

Guatemalan sociologist Egla Martínez Salazar (2014, 10), who self-identifies as a

“working-class peasant woman with Indigenous [Xinka and Pipil] ancestry,” contends that such hierarchies serve “Euro-North American-centric political, military and cognitive power” and have done so for centuries. Guatemala is a “window on how events and power struggles commonly viewed as isolated and new—such as the current ‘war’ on terror, security thinking, racial profiling, and the criminalization of those who demand meaningful, social change—are patterned” (Martínez Salazar 2014, 21–22). She maintains that these “patterns” continue to reflect the epistemic, cultural, somatic, and economic mores of Euro-American imperialism and colonialism. Part of the work I undertake here is to reveal these troubling sociohistorical repetitions, as expressed vis-à-vis the transnational praxis and industry of leisure travel.

Due to dangerous political conditions in Guatemala, I did not video- or audio-record interview and observation sessions; I utilized encrypted field notes to document instead.

To sort and analyze collected data, as well as to guide my research efforts, I relied upon a coding process. Using color-coded notecards, spreadsheets, whiteboards, and other techniques, I “organized and reduced” these data, “so that the ideas, themes, units, patterns, and structures within them” (LeCompte and Schensul 1999, 45) were made apparent. My goal was to ensure that any of my analytic “hunches” reflected direct observation and

28 interview data, as well the findings of my archival research. That is, I surveyed, excavated, and catalogued collected data, sifting through layers of accumulated political sediment, in an effort to unearth cultural worlds and becomings. I exercised what Anzaldúa (1987, 38) calls “la facultad”—the “capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface.”

Figure 1.2: A rooftop view of Antigua’s El Parque Central/Central Park. I conducted most of my interview and observation sessions in this park. Photograph by the author, 2009.

In particular, Anzaldúa (1987, 38) insists that this perception or sense is the unique purview and talent of “those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world.” As Anzaldúa (1987, 38–39) explains:

When we’re up against the wall, when we have all sorts of oppressions coming at us, we are forced to develop this faculty so that we’ll know when the next person is going to slap us or lock us away. We’ll sense the rapist when he’s five blocks down the street. Pain makes us acutely anxious to avoid more of it, so we hone that radar.

In this quote, “we” references “those who are pounced on the most,” such as women,

LGBTQ peoples, migrants, Indigenous peoples, and people of color, “the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, [and] the foreign” (Anzaldúa 1987, 38)—the beautifully resilient. La facultad, an analytic ability and intuition grounded in survival, treats the spoken and unspoken, the visible and invisible, as “data,” especially when it comes to understanding structural violence. La facultad refuses categorical distinctions between the lived, the imagined, the felt, and the “real” because such distinctions are cornerstones of

Euro-American ontoepistemological power (e.g., “science”). They deny and belittle the wisdom and expertise of those who negotiate state-sanctioned violence every day.

Thus, I accepted that people (including myself) can utilize a “language of imprecision” when thinking about and describing the “dense, imprecise, and often elusive nature” of their sociopolitical universes (Gómez-Barris and Gray 2010, viii), particularly when oppressed, terrorized, surveilled, or otherwise hounded by agents of modern power

(Martínez Salazar 2014, 19). Embracing a rich tradition of qualitative analysis established by feminist, Indigenous, and critical race scholars, I treated hauntings (Gordon 1997), traces (Gómez-Barris and Gray 2010), silences (Martínez Salazar 2014), missing bodies

(Casper and Moore 2009), omissions (Stoler 2002), and exclusions (L. T. Smith 2012) as

“evidence” of life and living. I read against the grain of my qualitative archive (Stoler

2002), leaving empirical room for the “pivotal role of absent presences in the production of subjects, the conduct of social relations, and the making of social worlds” (Gómez-Barris and Gray 2010, xv).

A final word about the methods outlined thus far. I do not perceive my reliance on these methods as ensuring that I have a handle on The Truth or that this dissertation

30 encompasses the same. I talked to people, I listened to people, and I observed people; this dissertation is an attempt to analytically capture what I heard, saw, and felt. My life experiences, my embodied relationship to power, and my academic training mediate everything written herein (Harding 1995; Naples 2003). That is, I understand qualitative research as “a social process in which the researcher is part of the ‘field,’ is a part of knowledge production, and is also part of relations of power and domination” (Martínez

Salazar 2014, 18). I have had great difficulty in writing this dissertation because I fear furthering these relations. In the words of Martínez Salazar (2014, 18–19), “research as a process is contingent and challenging, especially for those who take very seriously the fact that knowledge can be epistemically violent; in consequence, there must be an obligation to become epistemically responsible and accountable.” I have tried to hold my work accountable to these standards; I am terrified of the various ways I have inevitably failed.

In the end, I believe this fear to be entirely healthy. It signals a recognition that

“Euro-North American-centric political, military and cognitive power” (Martínez Salazar

2014, 10) touches everything. This dissertation cannot outrun the reach and grasp of its tentacles, and to claim otherwise evades epistemic responsibility. As Santos (2014, 72) argues:

Because science and hence the social sciences as we know them are part and parcel of the project of Western modernity, they are much more part of the problem […] than part of the solution [...]. At the most, they may help us to elucidate and bring analytic precision to the different dimensions of our problem.

Given its reliance on Western ontoepistemology (e.g., qualitative research), this dissertation is “part of the problem,” even though it may shed analytic light upon the

“different dimensions” of modern power vis-à-vis leisure travel. Yet, by acknowledging

31 these limitations, I allow for (hope for) a “new relationship between epistemology and politics” or a “new relationship between epistemology and subjectivity” (Santos 2014, 72).

In other words, I acknowledge that insurgent and subjugated knowledges have much more to offer regarding the “problem” of world power and capital, including how this power and capital are to be studied, researched, understood, and/or challenged.

1.3 Key Terms and Concepts: Using Subjugated Knowledges to Rethink Leisure Travel

Of course, we are all tourists, anthropologists included. —Sidney Mintz (1977, 59)

Tourists are criticized for having a superficial view of the things that interest them—and so are social scientists. Tourists are purveyors of modern values the world over—and so are social scientists. And modern tourists share with social scientists their curiosity about primitive peoples, poor peoples and ethnic and other minorities. —Dean MacCannell (2013, 5)

The tourist searches for authentic encounters with the other. The greater the otherness of the other, the more satisfying the tourist experience. At the limit, this makes anthropology the ultimate form of tourism. —Pierre L. Van Den Berghe (1994, 8)

The analysis which follows is also covertly auto-biographical because the author has been a lifelong peripatetic anthropologist-tourist, thus a qualified participant-observer. —Valene L. Smith (1998, 203)

I begin this section with the above quotes, drawn from canonical scholars of the anthropology of tourism, in an initial attempt to illustrate one of the central and enduring philosophical crises menacing the social sciences. As canonical works, they are dated. They generalize tourist perceptions, experiences, backgrounds, realities, and motivations, and the “social scientist” and “anthropologist” suffer the same fate. These works reflect their historical and political moment in which the casual deployment of “primitive” captures a

32 small margin of the violent racism, classism, and sexism engendering the social sciences

(see Torgovnick 1991). Of course, different terms now accomplish a similar task:

“developing nations” or “developing peoples” describe the imagined denizens of the “Third

World” and/or the “Global South,” replacing words like “primitive” or “savage” (L. T.

Smith 2012, 63). Nonetheless, I appreciate these quotes for their insistence that social scientists and leisure travelers share striking similarities that are worthy of further analysis or, at the very least, honest discussion and fearless inventory. However, these authors neutralize the potential for such discussion and inventory by invoking qualitative research methods to distinguish themselves from the “tourist” or leisure traveler.

Van Den Berghe (1994, 5) states that when “studying tourism as an anthropologist,

I may look like a tourist—that is, I may blend in quite well as a participant observer—but

I am not really a tourist because I have an ulterior motive beyond simply being there for its own sake.” Accordingly, the similitude between “anthropologist of tourism” and “tourist” signifies that “participant observation” is working “quite well.” An “ulterior motive” (i.e., ethnography) actualizes said “anthropologist” as a discrete entity or subject. In his seminal work, MacCannell (2013, 1) explains that he utilizes “tourist” to describe “actual tourists: sightseers, mainly middle class, who are at this moment deployed throughout the entire world in search of experience. I want the book to serve as a sociological study of this group”

[emphasis added]. Consequently, anthropologists and sociologists fall outside this “study” because they are not “actual tourists,” even though some sort of quest for experience arguably drives the pursuit of qualitative knowledge. Mintz (1977, 60) also focalizes

“experience” in his formulation, adding that ethics and a wage distinguish the anthropologist from the tourist: “The tourist pays to experience: the anthropologist is paid

33 to carry out responsible work” [emphasis in original]. V. L. Smith (1998, 203) acknowledges that she is a blended assemblage of sociocorporeal parts and practices—a

“lifelong peripatetic anthropologist-tourist.” Nonetheless, she insists that the latter makes her a “qualified participant observer,” a trained “expert” who can speak authoritatively about tourism. That is, she is more than “just” a tourist because she is also an

“anthropologist.”

In the wake of these words/works, I am left with several methodological questions and quandaries. What if ethnography is the “ultimate form of tourism” precisely because it is invoked to argue otherwise? How does the “anthropologist of tourism” retain a certain and profound analytic openness regarding their existentially touchy subject? By figuring the “social scientist” as the “ultimate tourist,” embracing intradisciplinary anxiety and fear, what is gained and what is lost? To address these questions, this section summarizes key moments in the anthropology of tourism. I highlight how this anthropology jettisoned one of its greatest strengths—the potential to dismantle unequal relationships, histories, and philosophies of power via a fearless examination and humble acceptance of ethnography as geocultural praxis, doctrine, and logic of mobility, travel, and impunity.11

For example, as so cogently captured by Mary Louise Pratt (1992) and Anne

McClintock (1995), Euro-American leisure travel has long been framed by imperial and colonial agents as a “civilizing” necessity, priority, and duty. These scholars argue that this hegemonic sense of urgency effectively inaugurated “ethnography” and/or “science” as figurative technologies of imperial/colonial “discovery” (i.e., invasion), governance, classification, and locomotion. To further contextualize these and other arguments, I place the aforementioned summary in conversation with insurgent and subjugated knowledges.

I define these knowledges as the texts, practices, philosophies, and perspectives promoted and embraced by Indigenous peoples, peoples of color, working-class folx, queer people,

Third World feminists, and other marginalized groups, which have been historically excised from the anthropological “mainstream.” My goal is to chart the modern operations of power vis-à-vis one’s capacity and ability to traverse the world, including how this travel informs the constitution of “proper” or “acceptable” academic knowledge. In fact, my operational definition of “leisure travel” is the capacity and ability to cross nation-state bounds with some measure or guarantee of security, safety, and impunity.

As noted by Errington and Gewertz (1989, 37), the anthropology of tourism was sparked by the “crisis” of ethnographic representation, the “loss” of scientific authority, that slammed the discipline-proper in the late-1970s—the “post-modern turn” (Clifford and

Marcus 1986). Detailing this “turn” is beyond this dissertation’s scope; instead, I limit my brief, broad, and inadequate review to cultural anthropology.12 My intent is not to single out this discipline as “the epitome of all that is bad with academics,” a popular thing to do since anthropology was forced to confront itself as a relation of rule (L. T. Smith 2012,

70). To quote scholar L. T. Smith (2012, 11), who identifies as Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou iwi: “In their foundations, Western disciplines are as much implicated in each other as they are in imperialism.” As I advance throughout this study, the entire academy is a problem for insurgents and insurgent-scholars due to its ongoing role in the fortification of imperial and colonial power.13 Rather, I am driven here by practical reasons. At the end of “the post- modern turn” and the resulting existential resurrection of anthropology in the 1990s, I was being trained in the discipline. For better or worse, cultural anthropology is the devil I know. Another reason is that I wish to highlight how a profound ontoepistemological

35 rupture and melancholy (i.e., the “post-modern turn”) nurtured the anthropology of tourism. These tortured origins made its initial scholarship so exciting, showcasing a willingness to think about anthropology as a form of leisure travel in order to confront the discipline-proper as an imperial and colonial philosophy for and of this travel.

From my small corner of the world, the “post-modern turn” felt and looked like an extended panic attack as various anthropologists scrambled to justify their professional existence.14 In the dramatic, contemporaneous words of Kirsten Hastrup (1995, 2), “the postmodernist critique of Objectivism, Realism and Essentialism has somewhat shattered the foundations of anthropology […].” When select anthropologists “began to question their ‘value-free’ science, to think more about their sources of support, and to wonder about the goals of their research” (Mintz 1977, 60), their discipline figuratively broke.

Specifically, anthropology was broadly and publicly denounced by activists and scholars for furthering imperialism and colonialism, as well as for a lack of engagement with the larger political world—such as feminist, queer, Indigenous, Chicanx, Black, transgender, and Third World liberation movements, struggles, and intellectual work. The framing of anthropological knowledge as deductive, objective, and universal was critiqued and

(supposedly) annulled, heralding a “death” in the “era of detached observation” (Mintz

1977, 60). As I once explained to undergraduate students, Truth was to become “truth.”

Several solutions were hotly debated in a bid to resolve the above “crisis,” “loss,” and “death” (again, broadly surmised here). “Reflexive anthropology” was prominent among these, i.e., the self-conscious positioning of the “anthropologist” as irrevocably implicated in the networks of power connecting ethnographer to “the field,” “observer to participant,” and pen to paper (Burawoy 2003, 645). In an act of epistemic checks and

36 balances, the “reflexive” anthropologist was to acknowledge that they were a conduit for and locus of geopolitical power, generating theory about the cultural world that was only ever experimental, contingent, fraught, political, and subjective. Another popular solution was the “training” of so-called “native informants” or “cultural insiders”—aka, the

“Other”—in anthropological research methods and theory, thereby equalizing the ontoepistemological playing field (e.g., Headland et al. 1990; Mintz 1977; Narayan 1993).

“Community” partnerships and applied methodologies were heavily promoted, and anthropologists were to work in tandem with, and be guided by, oppressed peoples at all stages of research design, implementation, analysis, dissemination, and publication (e.g.,

Arce and Long 2000; Bodley 1983; Escobar 1995; Schensul et al. 1999). In sum, the discipline engaged power as an analytic problem, orientation, and blockade, but without fundamentally changing the terms, parameters, and optics of this power. These (and other) methodologies neutralized the spatiotemporal fractures and cleavages threatening to dissolve “anthropology” (and, by proxy, the Euro-American academy) as a cultural practice, orientation, creed, and craft.

For example, although largely co-opted, erased, or eclipsed by canonical scholars

(e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986), subjugated and insurgent knowledges were central to

“shattering” the foundations of anthropology. Specifically, feminist, Indigenous, and critical race scholars challenged the omission of racialized, classed, gendered, sexualized, and geopolitical power from the study, analysis, and “writing” of culture (e.g., Anzaldúa

1987; Behar and Gordon 1995; Castillo 1994; Fanon 1952; Lorde 1984; Moraga and

Anzaldúa 1981; Rubin 1975).15 They took ethnographic writing to task for reifying harmful stereotypes and colonial tropes, for effectively creating the “proper” purview of

37 anthropological focus as the raced, classed, gendered, and exotified Other (e.g., Deloria,

Jr. 1969; hooks 1992; Minh-ha 1989; Ortiz 1992; Pérez 1999; Trask 1993). Some of these scholars questioned the dissolution of Truth, the destabilization of authority, at the very moment they were gaining entrance to the academy (e.g., L. T. Smith 1999). Crucially, one of the central goals of this scholarship—the decolonization and abolition of Euro-

American power at the level of ontoepistemology—was muted by “reflexive” methods and

“post-modern” theory. Consequently, the “social sciences” were revitalized as a hegemon of this power. That is, these methods and theory reworked and reinstalled Western ontoepistemology as a universal language for thinking about and describing the world

(Mignolo 2000).

In effect, some of the insurrectionary motivations and drives of insurgent and subjugated scholarship were effaced by the “post-modern turn” and the “reform” (i.e., recolonization; see Alexander 2005) accomplished by the latter. The fact of the matter is that many insurgent and subjugated scholars did not wish to rescue “anthropology,” the

“social sciences,” or the academy from an imperial and colonial inheritance. Instead, they sought to irrevocably change the terms of knowledge production in a bid to root out and destroy this inheritance (e.g., Césaire 1955; Dussel 1986; Fanon 1952; Freire 1968; hooks

1994; Lorde 1984; Minh-ha 1989; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Quijano 1972). These scholars and activists insisted this power could not be reformed or made kind—it promised only death because death was its core principal and logic. As Aimé Césaire (2000, 39) insists, “a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which, irresistibly progressing from

38 one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.”

Thus, the central objective of many insurgent and subjugated scholars was to develop an entirely new way to orient toward, understand, embody, and wield power that did not recycle the death dealing of European imperialism and colonialism. For example,

Frantz Fanon (2008, 1) demanded: “How can we possibly not hear that voice again tumbling down the steps of History: ‘It’s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it.’”16 He explicitly decried the institutionalized pursuit of “knowledge” at the expense of continued life on the planet. In his mind, oppressed peoples already “knew” the functions and operations of contemporary power; they did not need to study or map this power, nor have it explained to them, because they negotiated its terrible realities every day. In fact, he challenged attempts to include subjugated scholarship within the Euro-

American cannon, arguing that such measures would not change oppressive material conditions, such as white supremacy and capitalism.

For many black intellectuals European culture has a characteristic of exteriority. Furthermore, in human relationships, the western world can feel foreign to the black man. Not wanting to be thought of as a poor relation, an adopted son, or a bastard child, will he feverishly try to discover a black civilization? Above all, let there be no misunderstanding. We are convinced that it would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the third century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. There should be no attempt to fixate man [sic], since it is his [sic] destiny to be unleashed [emphasis added] (Fanon 2008, 205).

According to Fanon (2008), attempts to “discover a black civilization” further entrenched

Euro-American ontoepistemology as a Rosetta Stone for thinking about, describing, and

39 ordering the world. He argued that these attempts locked people into the economic, psychic, somatic, linguistic, and historical conditions of colonial rule, mimicry, dependency, and devastation. Instead, Fanon (2008, 2) sought to annihilate these terms— what he called the “civilizing language, i.e., the metropolitan culture” against which

“colonized people…position themselves in relation.”

In other words, Fanon was not trying to make the academy (nor any other established institution of contemporary power) more hospitable or comfortable for insurgent voices and subjectivities. Rather, this academy was to be rebuked as an agent of colonial recognition—the determination of “human worth and reality” (Fanon 2008, 191) vis-à-vis the norms, codes, languages, optics, sensibilities, and registers of European and

Euro-American power and capital. Fanon was calling for nothing less than a total unravelling of the colonial and colonized Self by virtue of a violent rejection of imperial ontoepistemology: “It is through self-consciousness and renunciation, through a permanent tension of his [sic] freedom, that man [sic] can create the ideal conditions for a human world” (Fanon’s 2008, 206). For Fanon, reforming the academy—refurbishing the mechanisms of colonial recognition—was not really the goal.

Instead, as Paulo Freire (2018, 44) argued, the “great humanistic and historical task” at hand was the global liberation of oppressed peoples:

The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to “soften” the power of their oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity,” the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this “generosity,” which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty.

The “weaknesses” of oppressed peoples—the embodied, psychic, and economic aftereffects of surviving and negotiating structural violence—are actually “strengths” for challenging global “death, despair, and poverty.” These strengths reveal the exact mechanisms of power that must be abolished in order to dismantle an “unjust social order” that always wears a rotten mask of “generosity,” obscuring its suicidal and homicidal ideations.

Thus, to destroy this social order, which seduces so many with its promises of pleasure, security, representation, and comfort, the reigns of knowledge production must be handed over to subjugated and marginalized peoples. According to Freire, the only way the Euro-American academy could foster political emancipation was if subjugated and insurgent knowledges existed within, alongside, and outside of this academy on their own terms—relying upon and amplifying their unique voices, ways of being, and registers of recognition—as part of a larger process of conscientização/critical consciousness raising.

In this way, insurgent and subjugated knowledges might escape “generous” efforts to colonize related scholarship via the imposition of Western research methodologies, pedagogies, and hierarchies of legibility (e.g., the written word).

Seen in this light, in the glow of insurgent philosophy, anthropology’s “reflexive” or “post-modern” turn was always a Trojan horse. It was an attempt to “soften the power” of the oppressor, a manifestation of “false generosity,” in a bid to neutralize the challenges levelled against the discipline as a relation of rule. Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989, 59) echoed something very similar when she called out the cultivation and training of “Third World anthropologists” or “native informants” as a sign of reconfigured imperialism and colonialism: “Gone out of date, then revitalized, the mission of civilizing the savage

41 mutates into the imperative of ‘making equal.’ This is how aliens form aliens, how men in crisis succeed to study men in crisis” (Minh-ha 1989, 59). Vine Deloria, Jr. (1988, 93) noted, with great irony and rancor that

academia, and its by-products, continues to become more irrelevant to the needs of people. The rest of America had better beware of having little quaint mores that will attract anthropologists or it will soon become victim of the conceptual prison into which Indians have been thrown.17

As Ana Castillo (1994, 6) insisted, in order to counter this geopolitical and spiritual damage, “another way of seeing life and the world we live in now” was emergent and necessary.

Castillo (1994, 6–7) contended that “it is only they [Eurocentric intellectuals] who remain narrow minded and virtually ignorant of our [Chicana/Xicana] knowledge since in fact, we have been schooled in a Western perspective and immersed in it all our lives”

[emphasis in original]. Castillo (1994, 220; 226) understood Chicana/Xicana “knowledge” as a “sophisticated and complex perception of dominant society,” an “ever present consciousness of our interdependency,” rooted in multiple fields of oppression, resilience, and survival. For Castillo (1994, 6), this perception and consciousness resulted from being a “woman in the United States who is politically self-described as a Chicana, mestiza in terms of race, and Latina or Hispanic in regard to her Spanish-speaking heritage, who […] cannot be summarized nor neatly categorized.” In other words, the ability to escape classification vis-à-vis imperial ontoepistemology gives Chicana/Xicana knowledge an insurgent edge, allowing for a “collective vision toward the development of an alternative social system” (Castillo 1994, 220).

Anzaldúa (1987, 80–81) beautifully described what such a vision might look like:

As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo- Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet.

Anzaldúa (1987, 80) termed this insurgent system of values “mestiza consciousness,” the

“breaking down of paradigms,” and the emergence of a “new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave.”

Along similar lines, Audre Lorde (2007, 112) famously argued:

Those of us who stand outside of the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about real change [emphasis in original].

Lorde insisted that “real change” depended upon working outside of established institutions or conceptions of power in order to “define and seek a world” in which all peoples and beings can survive and thrive. Like Anzaldúa, Castillo, Fanon, and Freire, Lorde understood that the seamless incorporation of “difference” into these structures would not change the material and cultural realities of oppressed peoples. Institutions and ways of being that made the academy legible—e.g., white supremacy, capitalism, the binary gender system, and heteropatriarchy—cannot be harnessed to bring about “real change.” Lorde’s

43 logic was profound and devastating: The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house but rather make it a stronger prison.

In reviewing this moving body of work, I seek to illustrate how a resolute, heartfelt, and heartsick rejection of Euro-American ontoepistemology underscored the production of insurgent and subjugated scholarship during the “post-modern turn.” Ultimately, this rejection was transformed into a thunderous, interdisciplinary call for “reflexive,” inclusive, and applied methodologies. As noted above, I was trained in and continue to utilize these methodologies. However, the insurgent and subjugated scholars, to whom the

“post-modern turn” was supposedly responding, did not make this call. In fact, most wanted something quite different—the destruction of imperial and colonial power and a dethroning of anthropology/academia as its “keeper.” In the world they envisioned, there would be no place for anthropology, for any of the “sciences” of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism. They knew that the “reflexive” olive branch offered by anthropology, the “generous” imperative of “making equal,” signified the workings of what I term the recalibrated civilizing mission. It was an attempt to neutralize the threat posed by insurgent and subjugated knowledges to the global hierarchies of power, executed in the name of a specious political “good,” benevolence, or morality. This olive branch sought to repress “other modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives” by imposing “the use of the ruler’s own patterns of expression, and of their belief and images” (Quijano 2007, 169)—in this case, the development of an allegedly kinder, open-minded, even-handed, and inclusive anthropology or “science.”

Interestingly, the early anthropology of tourism appeared poised to assist in the hegemonic demolition of the social sciences via a fraught examination of the discipline-

44 proper as a logic, praxis, and philosophy of geopolitical mobility and power. The angst, anxiety, and even hope attendant upon this inventory was, in part, due to its field of inquiry: the history, culture, and industry of leisure travel, which unequivocally paralleled that of anthropology. That is, select social scientists considered the qualitative analysis of tourism to be a “reflexive” survey of anthropology itself. Thus, they echoed some of the critiques leveled against the discipline-proper by insurgent and subjugated scholars without engaging or citing most of these scholars. Further, these scientists analytically elided the nuances of embodiment (e.g., race, class, gender, etc.), which optimized Euro-American world power as a philosophical, cultural, and material regime. Nonetheless, by virtue of their “reflexive” investigations, they challenged some of the moorings of this power.

For example, Malcolm Crick (1995, 206) unwaveringly insisted that anthropologists were “travellers and collectors—both literally and metaphorically.”

Indeed, Crick (1995, 206) contended that, given anthropology’s nineteenth-century origins

“when armchair theoretical speculation was largely divorced from the ethnographic data collection role performed by explorers, missionaries, and so on, our modern discipline has, in fact, climbed on the back of travellers and adventurers.” These observations mirrored those made by L. T. Smith (2012, 8):

The transplanting of research institutions, including universities, from the imperial centers of Europe enabled local scientific interests to be organized and embedded in the colonial system. Many of the earliest researchers were not formally “trained” and were hobbyist researchers and adventurers. The significance of travellers’ tales and adventurers’ adventures is that they represented the Other to a general audience back in Europe which became fixed in the milieu of cultural ideas. Images of the “cannibal” chief, the “red” Indian, the “witch” doctor, of the “tattooed and shrunken” head, and stories which told of savagery and primitivism, generated further interest, and therefore further opportunities, to represent the Other again [emphasis added].

Both scholars, writing from very different geopolitical and embodied positions, argued that the pursuit of “anthropology,” “research,” and/or “science” was historically grounded in the leisure travel of imperial and colonial agents. In fact, they noted that this travel was obscured as such via its framing as an ontoepistemological pursuit or field of inquiry. In so doing, these scholars seized upon some of the hegemonic capacities and sensibilities of mobility and impunity, which fortify world power and capital, capacities and sensibilities obscured via their cultural and semiotic inauguration as “anthropology.”

Thus, “ethnography” has always described a particular form of leisure travel. This magical word and practice effectively transmuted the sensationalized, racist, classist, and sexist documentation of “travellers’ tales and adventurers’ adventures” into a “science.”

As Queztil E. Castañeda (1996, 71; emphasis in original) argued: “[…] anthropology and tourism do not merely mutually reinforce but inhabit each other.” Another canonical scholar of the anthropology of tourism, Edward Bruner (2005, 7), echoed these sentiments:

Anthropology as a scientific discipline is dependent upon its being distinguished from tourism. Over the years, ethnographers have gone to great lengths to differentiate their accounts from those provided by missionaries, explorers, colonialists, travel writers, journalists, and, now, tourists. Yet the similarities are disturbing as so many others journey temporarily to distant lands, observe and experience, and return home with stories about their encounters [emphasis added].

In order to understand the hierarchies of knowledge and mobility forever linking the “social sciences” to imperialism and colonialism, Bruner (1989, 439) argued that it was imperative to study tourism. In response to the “post-modern” crises, losses, and deaths “shattering” the discipline-proper, Bruner and his contemporaries understood this analysis as a means of radically changing the terms of anthropological authority and knowledge production.

That is, these scholars insisted that because the tourism industry was a direct relation of the hegemonic apparatuses enabling and empowering ethnography, its study would address some of the problems brought to light by the “post-modern turn”:

After all, if anthropology is presently attempting to cope with a “crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fisher, 1986: vii) over how we portray the objects of our discourse (the other), pondering on how we represent ourselves can scarcely be regarded as a luxury since the images of “self” and “other” are interdependent; indeed, perhaps the other represents precisely those aspects of self which we wish to disown. Whilst this chapter concerns itself solely with the anthropologist/tourist relationship, far more general issues are potentially involved (Crick 1995, 205).

By breaking down the semantic barriers separating the “social scientist” from the “tourist,” acknowledging an undeniable “overlap in identities,” Crick (1995, 205) held that anthropology’s “crisis of representation” could be resolved (as an aside, note who Crick cites regarding said “crisis”). Such a dissolution would dismantle some of the philosophical, methodological, and embodied hegemonies upon which anthropology rested as an imperial cartographic practice, e.g., “Self” vs. “Other.” In refusing to make strict, categorical distinctions between “tourists” and “social scientists,” Crick challenged anthropology’s “scientific” immutably and invincibility. Crick came very, very close to unravelling anthropology as an ontoepistemological system by unmasking the latter as a geocultural doctrine of mobility, impunity, and power. Indeed, Crick’s (1985) work caused

Errington and Gewertz (1989, 39) to exclaim: “We doubt, in fact, that there can be much justification for anthropology if anthropologists are fundamentally like tourists.”

MacCannell (2013, 5) also argued that the qualitative study of tourism would enhance, politicize, and equalize the production of social science knowledge:

At a time when social science is consolidating its intellectual empire via a colonization of primitive people, poor people and ethnic and other minorities, it might seem paradoxically out of the “mainstream” to be

studying the leisure activities of a class of people most favored by modernity, the international middle class, the class the social scientists are serving. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if we [social scientists] are eventually to catch up with the evolution of modern society, we must invent more aggressive strategies to attempt to get closer to the heart of the problem. By following the tourist, we may be able to arrive at a better understanding of ourselves [social scientists].

According to MacCannell, the sociology of tourism could reveal the various ways in which

“social science” functioned as an empire, one that consumed, dissected, translated, and commodified “difference” in order to “serve” the manifold, market, and voyeuristic desires of a thriving, international, and “traveling” bourgeois. MacCannell (2013, 1) thus reasoned that “our first apprehension of modern civilization…emerges in the mind of the tourist.”

Bruner (2005, 10) echoed this claim, explaining that his oeuvre was driven by an “aim to write tourism as others were writing culture,” a desire “to apply a radically reflexive ethnography to tourism research,” because tourism was “one of the greatest population movements of all time.”

Moreover, as “one of the greatest population movements of all time,” these scholars wondered at the complete absence of tourists/tourism—and thus important aspects of global political economy—from most contemporary ethnographies. This absence was so puzzling because, in the sardonic words of Crick (1995, 208), “the stark fact is that in many areas anthropologists and tourists now literally stare at each other.” Crick (1995, 209) contended that this elision reflected embarrassment, anxiety, arrogance, and “a long line of denials” about the hierarchies of power, allowing anthropologists to travel, engage in fieldwork, publish their research, and advance their careers.

In the colonial period, for instance, anthropologists distanced themselves from administrators, missionaries, and the like, despite the fact that their own presence, even if they were critical of the colonial set-up, was underpinned by the same political and economic forces which brought about

the colonial system as a whole […]. In a previous period the anthropologists claimed to be different from a whole range of other Europeans who made up the colonial apparatus; in the present day it is the tourist from whom the anthropologists distance themselves (Crick 1995, 209).

Crick and his contemporaries called out these acts of distancing and amnesia as exercises in imperial and colonial myth-making, as additional examples of how anthropological knowledge production fell short of the “reflexive” aspirations generated by the “post- modern turn.”

For instance, Bruner (2005, 8) maintained that the excision of tourists/tourism from the anthropological record was “reminiscent of 1920s ethnographic accounts that omitted any reference to the colonial governments around them and produced fantasy ethnography, which anthropologists call writing in the ‘ethnographic present.’” Bruner (2005, 8) continued that

the contemporary omission of tourists is a similar phenomenon, a purposeful ignoring of that which is present but that ethnography finds embarrassing or threatening to its privileged position. This ethnographic practice might be called writing in the “touristic nonpresent.” We anthropologists are repeating the sins of our ancestors [emphasis added].

In other words, Bruner noted that the above was a neocolonial fabrication of cultural reality at the well-practiced hands of anthropologists. It was an attempt to advance one’s academic career by “discovering” and depicting a fantastical “untouched” Other—a popular protagonist of ethnographic writing—who was somehow isolated from the unfolding realities, aftereffects, and cartographies of global power, such as capitalism. Like its historical predecessors, the “touristic nonpresent” suspended the object or focus of anthropological inquiry within an artificial, timeless, and imagined void. Notably, this fantastical and commodified timescape did not represent or capture the strategies of

49 resilience, resistance, survival, celebration, coping, loving, and mourning embraced by various people in response to modern power and political economy.

In sum, the early anthropology of tourism leveraged the discipline’s sociohistorical relationship to leisure travel as a means of responding to the “post-modern turn” (i.e., the ghostly traces and influences of subjugated and insurgent scholarship that provoked and haunted this “turn”). Select anthropologists argued that the qualitative examination of contemporary tourism would unmask the identifications, practices, and hierarchies rendering the “social scientist” an enduring agent of imperialism and colonialism. They insisted that the epistemic violences of the discipline-proper would be revealed via an ethnographic analysis of the discomfort and denial provoked by the similarities between tourists and anthropologists. In fact, they understood this level of engagement and investigative openness to be the definition of “reflexive” anthropology. To quote James

Clifford (1992, 91), by conceptualizing ethnography as “an evolving practice of modern travel,” these canonical scholars hit upon some of the hegemonic norms engendering, sustaining, and cloaking imperial and colonial ontoepistemologies as cultural systems and orientations. These social scientists thus parroted and/or responded to insurgent and subjugated critiques that “anthropology” (as a term and practice) described the travels, autonomy, freedoms, privileges, perceptions, and impressions of rich, white people

(primarily, Euro-American and European men) who were able to institutionalize and guard the above as a “science.”

However, the utility of this anthropology to the destruction of the “science” of power, capital, privilege, and impunity was repurposed and neutralized. As previously outlined, one way in which the latter occurred was through implementation of “new and

50 improved” qualitative methodologies, specifically “reflexive” and “applied” approaches.

A second way in which this repurposing and neutralization occurred was by virtue of the following intradisciplinary insistence and mantra, which arrested some of the angst, anxiety, and melancholy provoked by scholars such as Crick. Anthropology never was— and never will be—a form of leisure travel because of its expert, deliberate, professional, methodological, and holistic take on modern culture and the processes thereof.

Anthropologists grasped the nuances and intricacies of the sociocultural world in a way that tourists (supposedly) never could, given the “trivial” nature of their travel endeavors and the (presumable) fact that tourists were not trained social scientists. “Real” anthropology was thus serious, utilitarian, political, engaged, ethical, technical, specialized, driven, focused, critical, and certainly not fun. Leisure travel was framed as the polar opposite—in particular, as a ludic, unethical, unscientific, and frivolous cultural behavior.

I began this section with four canonical examples of this insistence and mantra:

Mintz (1977), MacCannell (2013), Van Den Berghe (1994), and V. L. Smith (1998). I want to unpack Mintz (1977) a little more to illustrate the basic and enduring essence of these intradisciplinary justifications, legitimizations, and re/configurations. Certainly, this work is dated, given that Mintz wrote it at the onset of the “post-modern turn.” Nonetheless, I maintain that it grounds and reflects the geopolitical desires, cultural motivations, historical underpinnings, and economic drivers of the contemporary social sciences. Although I conclude this section with additional examples of this anthropological imaginary, the remainder of this dissertation will further advance my argument in direct relation to my fieldwork in Guatemala.

Mintz argued that, although social scientists and tourists shared many points of common interest, what differentiated the two was the somber, heavy, and ethical burden borne by the anthropologist. Mintz (1977, 60) contended that “dilettantes though we may be,” anthropologists had a “serious responsibility both to those who underwrite and support our work, and to those among whom we carry it out.” Tourists, he argued, were not obliged to carry a similar load and were thus incapable of the same level of moral introspection, political negotiation, and cultural analysis as trained anthropologists. In effect, tourists were the villains of ethnographic fairy tales and anthropologists the heroes.

As the world gets ever smaller, all people within it—including those nameless, half-naked fellow human beings who befriend us at every turn— are drawn ever closer and more interdependent. This process makes the anthropologist more and more responsible for what will be done with her or his work (Mintz 1977, 60).

In light of this imagined “shrinking” world, Mintz (1977, 60) insisted that the anthropologist’s primary responsibility was to ensure that his [sic] work did not become a

“divining rod with which ‘progress’ identifies its newest victims.” According to this line of thought, tourists were part of the “problem” that anthropologists were to “solve,” as opposed to actual kin. Their presence in “anthropological” territory signified the increasing geopolitical encroachment and global influence of Euro-American “progress” or modernity. This modernity menaced the “scientific” investigation of those peoples, places, and things violently positioned outside of its spatiotemporal optics, embodied registers, and technological practices—the various “cultures” that would “hardly survive the tourists” (Mintz 1977, 60). In other (caustic) words, the charge of the recalibrated civilizing mission ensured that ethnographic research was not leisure travel. Ultimately, what separated the “anthropologist” from the “tourist” was the pioneering, heroic, preeminent,

52 inaugural, and well-documented travel of the former to the homelands, geographies, and corporeal zones of the exotified and “untouched” Other. To preserve, rescue, salvage, or save this fantastical Other from the evils of modernity/tourism—and thus to fortify the job security of anthropologists—ethnographies must be “ethically” produced and circulated.

That these ethnographies should not be written—at all, ever—was not on this particular table.

Before I move on, I would like to note the following social fact. When Mintz wrote the above, insurgent and subjugated scholars had already widely excoriated his type or variety of ethnographic writing and representation. Indeed, these scholars had called out such drivel as so much white supremacist, colonialist, and capitalist nonsense. For example, Deloria, Jr.’s seminal, epic, and infamous manifesto Custer Died for Your Sins had already been in print for eight years (since 1969). In this broadly circulated manifesto,

Deloria, Jr. (1988, 78–100) painstakingly refuted the racist ideologies of anthropologists such as Mintz, most especially the fantasy that Indigenous or marginalized communities

“befriended” anthropologists “at every turn.”

Anthropologists came to Indian country only after the tribes had agreed to live on reservations and had given up their warlike ways. Had the tribes been given a choice of fighting the cavalry or the anthropologists, there is little doubt as to who they would have chosen (Deloria, Jr. 1988, 81).

Despite such well-known and robust critiques, Mintz persisted in relying on violent colonial tropes to justify his particular brand of knowledge production. Crucially, the enduring, discomfiting similitude between tourists and anthropologists forced Mintz’s hand, causing him to reveal the extremely troubling geopolitics attendant upon, and made manifest by, his “empirical” conceptualization, corporealization, and “investigation” of the

Other.

As this work by Mintz (1977) showcases, on the heels of the “post-modern turn”

(i.e., insurgent and subjugated challenges to the discipline), anthropology recomposed its raison d’être. In the name of redress, contrition, reparation, and public service, the discipline would endeavor to “ethically” engage the serious, the political, the troubling, and the violent in the pursuit and publication of ethnographic research. That is, as I show throughout this dissertation, “trauma” became the “new” Truth, following general trends in global economy, governance, and power. Crucially, the bulk of this travel, research, and careerism would occur under the auspices of “helping” subjugated peoples and places (i.e., the recalibrated civilizing mission). The anthropological Other was thereby resurrected from the ashes of Its demise. As noted above, this Other had been summarily slaughtered by insurgent and subjugated scholars, who argued for the irrevocable negation, destruction, and abolition of Euro-American ontoepistemology, especially the regimes of perception and classification attendant upon the social sciences.

Let us consider a key moment in this intradisciplinary reconfiguration. Crick (1985,

71) insisted that ethnography, like tourism, was fundamentally an expression of cultural

“play,” a game waged by political actors in order to secure certain gains, goals, or objectives. He maintained that, by analyzing the rules of this “play,” some of the larger social inequalities of the discipline (and, by proxy, the world) would be unmasked. In turn,

Errington and Gewertz (1989, 39) responded: “It will be our conclusion that, in a world in which it profoundly matters who controls the terms of the interactions—the negotiations— and who wins or loses, anthropology needs not a heightened sense of the ludic but of the political.” Missing Crick’s point (i.e., that the ludic is “seriously” political), Errington and

Gewertz (1989, 52) argued that anthropologists had an unflagging moral duty to speak for

54 the world’s “non-post-modern peoples.” That is, to produce “politically informed” ethnographies, anthropologists were to draw from their expert “knowledge of both cultural particulars and cross-cultural patterns,” tracing the “processes or the effect of change”

(Errington and Gewertz 1989, 51) upon an imagined, pre-modern Other. In making these arguments, Errington and Gewertz (1989) echoed the ideological claims of anthropological heroism staked by Mintz (1977) some twelve years prior.

Another example of this reconfiguration is the following quote from Nancy

Scheper-Hughes, which captures an inaugural moment in the anthropology of genocide

(Hinton 2002):

Modern anthropology was built up in the face of colonial genocide, ethnocide, population die-outs, and other forms of mass destruction visited on the non-western peoples whose lives, suffering and deaths have provided us with a livelihood. Yet, despite this history and the privileged position of the ethnographer as eye-witness to some of these events, anthropology and anthropologists have been relatively mute on the subject. Everything in our disciplinary training predisposes us not to see the political violence that ravages the lives of our subjects [emphasis in original] (Scheper-Hughes 2000, 8).

Scheper-Hughes (2000, 8) promoted ethnographic research as a means of ameliorating

“colonial genocide, ethnocide, population die-outs, and other forms of mass destruction” that engendered the discipline of anthropology. To atone for this destruction, including its commodification and consumption by social scientists, anthropologists must learn to “see” the “political violence that ravages the lives of our subjects” (Scheper-Hughes 2000, 8).

Please note her choice of words—“our subjects” signals a radically unemancipatory re/inscription of the sociocorporeal boundaries and optics, which distinguish the “social scientist” from their investigative object of desire, i.e., the abject Other. As I have argued thus far, insurgent scholars wanted very little to do with such endeavors, precisely because

55 the “ravages” of “political violence” depend upon the aforementioned optics, boundaries, economies, and desires.

In a seeming moment of historical amnesia, Scheper-Hughes (2000, 12) promoted the then-nascent anthropology of genocide as a valid, urgent, and essential response to the

“recent critiques of anthropological ways of seeing and knowing and behaving.”

Apparently, this “new” anthropology would guarantee a more responsible, ethical, and charitable commodification of political violence and the living targets thereof. In other words, this “kinder” commodification, like its historical predecessors, hinged upon the privileged ability of select anthropologists to visit, tour, and write books about the various places where “our subjects” were oppressed, imprisoned, tortured, or otherwise made to die. Importantly, in making this violence a central focus of contemporary ethnography, the post-post-modern anthropologist would restore and preserve these “subjects” as a geopolitical and analytic category, thereby “reinventing anthropology once again as a tool and practice of human freedom” (Scheper-Hughes 2000, 13). Repeating the sins of their ancestors, aglow with the zeal of the recalibrated civilizing mission, the social scientist regained their ontoepistemological footing and place.

Certainly, I do not wish to overlook the important contributions of the social sciences and humanities to understanding the historical, geopolitical, affective, embodied, and economic mechanics or ramifications of political and structural violence. Indeed, this dissertation draws from and contributes to these discussions. My point is that this study lives and breathes in the belly of the imperial beast—it speaks the terrifying language of colonial wanderlust, opportunism, and invasion, the always-already language of death. The anthropological examination of terror, trauma, and suffering is enlivened by the same

56 economies of destruction animating its horrific and bloody field of “prestigious” inquiry.

Given its fluency in the language of death, and specifically its litigation of Empire, this research can be of some utility. However, its necrotic metaphysics remain a serious problem precisely because of this capacity and capability—qualitative research methods are technologies, tools, assets, and dialects of Empire.

In my mind, insurgent scholars and activists articulated an immensely more hopeful, helpful, and anti-colonial vision of the world via the production of emancipatory forms of knowledge. As part of this vision, they argued for the categorical abolition of hierarchies of power and capital, which vitalized the language of death (e.g., “science”) as a treasured ontoepistemology and guarded logic of mobility. Select scholars from the early anthropology of tourism came close to this vision by refusing to distinguish the discipline- proper from any other act of imperial/colonial leisure travel and meaning-making.

However, the “post-modern” crises and losses, which nurtured this anthropology and exposed ethnography as the “ultimate form” of voyeurism, were effectively countervailed.

In a heroic effort to “put us and our discipline squarely on the side of humanity, world- saving, and world-repair” (Scheper-Hughes 2000, 13), the ethnographic study of contemporary forms of violence was promoted and advanced. To reiterate, insurgent scholars and activists did not request this “assistance” as most understood anthropology to be an irredeemable philosophy, praxis, and apparatus of imperial white power.

1.4 Dissertation Overview: Toward an Insurgent Understanding of Leisure Travel, World Power, and the Production of Knowledge

One of the many consequences of the intradisciplinary processes and reconfigurations discussed throughout this chapter is that the anthropology of tourism

57 abdicated its salient analytic strength and position—its unique “reflexive” edge and potential. Specifically, this anthropology no longer candidly wrestled with or directly confronted the fraught, intractable, dynamic, and ongoing relationship of the discipline- proper to imperial and colonial leisure travel, travel writing, desire, and governance. In step with the theoretical trends outlined above, the anthropology of tourism came to focus more on the violences, economies, global force fields, and localized spheres of interaction attributed to pedestrian tourists and the tourism industry. In other words, the “social scientist” was erased from the post-post-modern investigation of leisure travel (see also

Kaplan 1996). Ideologically severed from this practice and industry, the “anthropologist” now pursued the ethnographic examination of tourists/tourism as a distinct and dedicated field of inquiry, complete with its own cannon. The existential distance between “tourists” and “anthropologists” was thus reinstated, recorporealized, and reinforced, suturing one of the most exciting and productive chasms cleaved by the anthropology of tourism.

Anthropologists Naomi Leite and Nelson Graburn (2009, 37) capture the general, conceptual arc of this abdication:

Accordingly, in the past two decades anthropologists have moved beyond debates over models and typologies of the “tourist” […] and of “tourism” […] and have begun to explore the ambiguities, contingencies, and slippages revealed in the particularities of each instance.

Leite and Graburn (2009, 37) also argue that these “particularities” capture “how actual people understand and conduct their involvement” in tourism as a global, local, and diverse practice, industry, and force [emphasis added]. However, it remains unclear exactly who these “people” are as their backgrounds, histories, and embodied realities are not discussed, unpacked, or mentioned. That is, “actual people” are rendered the contemporary subjects and foci of a sweeping analytic desire and renovated grand narrative, in this case a desire

58 and narrative made manifest by the ethnographic examination and presentation of an imagined, undifferentiated, and touristic Other. Conversely, Crick (1995) would have made the following point: the “ambiguities, contingences, and slippages” of these exact theoretical and methodological acrobatics unmask the beliefs, perceptions, rationales, and motives of “actual people” masquerading as “social scientists.” By maintaining the powerful socioeconomic fiction that the “social scientist” is neither a tourist nor an “actual” person, the fact that they are both is suppressed, effectively allowing the anthropology of tourism to exist in its current form.

These sociocorporeal elisions (as well as those highlighted in the preceding section) evidence what I term the social scientist nonpresent, building upon Bruner’s (2005) touristic version of the same idea. These omissions disguise how select anthropologists continue to exploit imperial and colonial regimes of mobility, citizenship, knowledge, and privilege in order to travel the world, conduct research, and professionally advance. These regimes ineluctably shape the production, circulation, and consumption of ethnographies as creative, revered, timely, or empirical works; material, political, and affective investments; products and commodities; archival documents or palimpsests of power; and unique forms of travel writing. An uncanny temporal void and space of cultural encounter, the social scientist nonpresent, like its touristic counterpart, elucidates the sociocorporeal paradoxes, fantasies, exclusions, and “realities” left in the wake of modern power and capital.

As an insurgent corrective to these hegemonic timescapes, modes of knowing, and ways of being, this dissertation resolutely attempts to return the “reflexive” edge to the anthropology of tourism. In what follows, I draw on my ethnographic examination of

59 leisure travel in Guatemala to expose the social relations of rule (D. Smith 1990) that shape the discipline and the concurrent architectures of world power. However, I do not undertake this effort in order to rescue, critique, or otherwise “help” the social sciences.

Instead, I seek to work toward the irrevocable dismantlement of Euro-American ontoepistemology by strategically advancing possible avenues for its demise. Therefore, to reiterate, I do not perceive my dissertation, embodied life, or political/professional aspirations to be “exceptional” in comparison or relation to the timescapes, operations, economies, and seductions of power examined herein.

Given these analytic designs and desires, my dissertation is guided by four overarching goals. The first is to pick up where the early anthropology of tourism left off by utilizing the qualitative analysis of contemporary leisure travel to trace the mechanics of world power and capital, with Guatemala as my field site and “case study.” The second is to follow and embrace the critical lead of insurgent and marginalized scholars to reveal the registers, optics, sediments, and geopolitics of embodiment in my (and all) investigative attempts (e.g., race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation). The third is to think through why and how leisure travel functions as such a crucial and revelatory site for the analysis of world power, including the implementation and maintenance of nation-state borders that many people from the Global North are able to cross and profit from (e.g., through researching and publishing about these technologies of Empire). The fourth is to use my analysis as a means of re-centering the insurrectionary drives of insurgent scholarship, with respect to sustainably caring for the world and its sacred lifeforms via the production of knowledge. The subsequent chapters of this dissertation engage these goals.

Chapter Two begins to advance my argument that the development of Guatemala’s tourism sector captures how the so-called “Conquest of the Americas” (hereafter referred to as the Invasion) persists as a philosophical, economic, historical, and material project.18

Empowered by “New World” configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation,

I show how this sector rose to international preeminence against a backdrop of colonial warfare, terror, and pain. As the primary customers of Guatemala’s nascent tourism industry, I further illustrate the relationship of European “scientists” and other imperial travelers to this “rise.” I conclude by showing how the “post-modern turn” uniquely fired these troubling processes. My goal in this chapter is to establish the historical relationship of “helpful” scientists and other travelers to the promotion of imperialism and colonialism vis-à-vis the production of knowledge. Specifically, I argue that, by fetishizing political violence and other traumas, these travelers invoked the Invasion as an enduring scale and matrix for the continued exploitation of global “life.”

With its historical context established, Chapter Three examines the recalibrated civilizing mission, drawing on my ethnographic data and an analysis of related artifacts, such as travel warnings. I call upon this mission to illustrate the marked similarities between the social scientists and pedestrian tourists who visited Antigua during the summer of 2014. The timeframe of the fieldwork in question also marked the media-created onset of the “Central American Immigration Crisis.” As I document, many research participants were in Guatemala for a shared purpose: to “help” Maya peoples negotiate this “crisis,” especially women and children. By recycling imperial and colonial installations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, I show how these “helpful” participants ultimately upheld the destructive mandates of world power and capital. To further unpack these

61 installations and mandates, I detail the reactions of these same participants to a series of sexual assaults committed against white women from the Global North, who were also visiting Antigua during this time. The main goal of this chapter is to analytically contract the imagined distance between tourists and social scientists in an attempt to enact a militantly “reflexive” anthropology of tourism. In addition, this chapter anticipates the horrific policies and practices of the US concerning ongoing imprisonment of Central

American migrants and children across the US southwest.

Chapter Four continues this exercise in insurgency by illustrating how the Invasion inflects the contemporary pursuit and manufacture of transnational knowledge about

Guatemala vis-à-vis the commodification of trauma. Specifically, I contend that the “post- modern turn” enshrined this relationship as an act of “world-repair” or social justice by ideologically severing it from the means of capitalist production, exchange, and consumption. To advance my argument, I outline my understanding of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent as a collapsible and overlapping timescape that sentimentalizes the relations of rule allowing the “helpful” representatives of Empire to visit Guatemala.

To illustrate this uncanny timescape “at work,” I curate and survey an archive of ethnographies, published travelogues, and travel blogs about political violence in

Guatemala, as well as data gleaned from the “field.” In addition, I analyze a popular, profitable, and national tourism campaign, which I argue capitalizes upon the social scientist and touristic nonpresent as an established, evolving, spatiotemporal, and geocultural practice. In advancing these arguments, I hope to illustrate the enduring and irresolvable “crises” plaguing the social sciences due to their inexorable, intimate, and productive relationship to imperial and colonial rule.

Chapter Five concludes the dissertation by summarizing its main points and arguments. In addition, I offer initial recommendations for advancing the “impossible”— the abolition of Euro-American world power and capital as ontoepistemological orientations, practices, hierarchies, and economies. To formulate my suggestions, I draw from insurgent and subjugated scholarship across the Americas, with a particular focus on

Guatemala, as well as from the critical insights of my own research and evolving thinking.

I aim to re-center the sweepingly hopeful political vision of insurgent scholars and activists concerning the production of emancipatory forms of knowledge that honor, uplift, and sustain planetary life.

2 Chapter Two: Leisure Travel, World Power, and Cartographies of Struggle in Guatemala

This chapter examines the foundational logics of imperial and colonial knowledge production in Guatemala and the Americas more broadly. My goal here is to unmask how these logics invoke or rely on trauma as one method for installing Euro-American power as a global regime. To account for the astonishing persistence and persuasion of these logics, I place my analysis in conversation with the coloniality of power school. I pay close attention to how architectures of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation inaugurated the modern world system. Throughout, I unravel the rhizomatic tendrils of this system as it has operated in and on Guatemala. I illustrate how Guatemala’s tourism sector functions as a revitalized channel for these thick tendrils of world power, relying on the influx and capital of archeologists, social scientists, missionaries, humanitarian volunteers, sightseers, and other travelers from the Global North.

2.1 Columbus Day, Colonial Wound-ings, and the Advent of Guatemala’s Tourism Sector

Quincentennial Guatemala, a term that refers to the five-hundred-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage, encompasses [national] anxieties and aspirations in the context of the country’s recent history while emphasizing the still painful wound of the Conquest. —Diane Nelson (1999, 4)

Similar to many who write about cultural life in the Americas (e.g., Aldama 2012;

Dussel 2000; Gomez-Barris 2009; Ortiz 1992; Pratt 1992), Nelson (1999) positions

Columbus Day as an analytic portal for her anthropological investigations. She utilizes the

500th anniversary of this watershed moment to trace the lingering aftereffects of historical trauma in regard to contemporary power, politics, and subjectivity in Guatemala. Situating

64 the country’s “history as catastrophe,” Nelson (1999, 7–8) argues that, “like its present,

Guatemala’s past can be described as a traumatic wound, an unsutured opening on the body politic.”

According to Nelson (1999, 8–9), this “history” includes “pre-Columbian” famines, wars, slavery, and governance; the classed, raced, and gendered regimes of control left in the wake of the Invasion; and the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other natural disasters that consistently plague the country.1 Nelson (1999, 9) is also referencing a more

“recent catastrophe”—the Guatemalan Civil War (1954–1996),2 which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people and the displacement of one million nationals

(Volpe 2017).3 As is well documented (Cojtí Cuxil 1994; S. Davis 1988; Handy 1984;

Menchú 1984; C. Smith 1990; Velásquez Nimatuj 2018), those who bore the brunt of this war’s manifold horrors were impoverished Maya peoples.4 Despite the signing of the UN- brokered Peace Accords in 1996, as noted by anthropologist Linda Green (1999, 172), “a war continues in Guatemala today, even though it is a war called peace.”

As reported by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, the “security systems” developed during the war, such as “death squads, intelligence units, police deployments, and military counterinsurgency forces, have largely been infiltrated by criminal organizations, amounting to a parallel state” (Tran 2011, 2).5 By framing Guatemala’s

“history as catastrophe,” Nelson foreshadowed this “new” face of terror, which chronicles what many argue is the country’s most violent epoch (Benson and Fischer 2009; Martin

2019; Sieder 2011; Thomas, O’Neill, and Offit 2011). Examples include drug cartel dominion and impunity, oligarchic collusion with these extralegal forces, and covert security operations executed upon Maya lands (sponsored by Canadian, Israeli, and US

65 corporations) to extract resources and build hydropower dams (Tzul 2016). In a terrifying parallel to wartime Guatemala, Maya and other activists are “disappeared” for challenging such violences (Martin 2019). As discussed in Chapter One, these circumstances have caused hundreds of thousands of children to flee Guatemala in a bid “to break the curse that steals their dreams the moment they are born” (Velásquez Nimatuj 2018, 1).

By coining the term Quincentennial Guatemala, Nelson (1999, 2) sutures together these seemingly disparate events, specifically via her concept of “history” as a productively traumatic force in relation to the nation’s abidingly “scarred and wounded body politic.”

However, Columbus Day in Guatemala also charts the more subtle trajectories of power, including its non-catastrophic tendencies. Not all colonial wounds (Anzaldúa 1987;

Mignolo 2012; see also Chapter Four) leave a mark—they do not always shatter the earth.

Instead, they underpin the cool, calm, and collected “commonsense” (Comaroff and

Comaroff 1991; Gramsci 1971) of daily life and living, including how power is wielded or internalized. Thus, I argue that Guatemala’s “body politic” is contoured by a dialectic of trauma and wounding, one forever and delicately perched between the “catastrophic” and the “peaceable” (see also Green 1999 and Way 2012).

For example, October 12, 1977, marks the seemingly innocuous inauguration of

Guatemala’s national tourism bureau in Guatemala City—Instituto Guatemalteco de

Turismo (INGUAT)—by war criminal, former defense minister, and former president

(1974–1978) General Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García (Fonesca 2007).6 Signaling a metamorphosis of geopolitical power, I argue that this event quietly heralded the weaponization of Guatemala’s tourism sector. Tourism development and security were tacitly ushered in as potent forms of governmentality (Castañeda and Burtner 2010),

66 furthering transnational, oligarchic, and military control over the means of production, subjectification, and coercion. Given that this event occurred during an actively unfolding war and “catastrophe,” INGUAT’s inauguration did not make international headlines or garner much attention. However, this “moment” was also a watershed event in cementing the regimes of rule memorialized by Columbus Day.

Notably, it was during the Civil War that tourism became “a major national industry

[…]. Regional tourist centers, such as Panajachel, experienced historically unprecedented popularity, growth, and expansion in infrastructure” (Burtner 2004, 9).7 Antigua, another regional tourist center, experienced similar bursts (Hinshaw 1988, 195). By 1979, tourism had become the second major source of national income, bringing in US $200 million a year (Burtner 2004, 104).8 One reason international travel to Guatemala could occur during wartime was that these centers had long functioned as bastions of Euro-American power, capital, and wanderlust. For example, as is well known, Panajachel was the site of anthropologist Sol Tax’s (1963) canonical research. In addition, members of Guatemala’s oligarchy, as well as other affluent Europeans, frequented both of these towns as vacation destinations—before, during, and after the war (Burtner 2004; Hinshaw 1988).9 In fact, oligarchic stakeholders and venture capitalists still own and safeguard most businesses in these centers, retaining a viselike grip upon the national economy.

I contend that the inexorable relationship of political violence to the pursuit and praxis of leisure is rooted in the Invasion. For instance, Spanish overlords barred Maya peoples from even entering Antigua (Martínez Salazar 2014), one of the first cities established as an administrative center for European rule in Central America (Woodward

1990). As part of the encomienda system, Maya peoples were forced to live and work on

67 plantations, located in more rural parts of Guatemala (Martínez Salazar 2014). European settlers not only freely traveled the country but also tended to live, work, and relax in the citadels of “civilization” such as Antigua. Hauntingly, this citadel is now a regional tourist center. Further, in a similar bid to control Indigenous labor power and mobility, many impoverished Maya workers are still barred from a variety of public spaces in Antigua, such as upscale stores, restaurants, hotels, and parks (Little 2014). By reconfiguring

“leisure” as a logic of rule, movement, and capital, the transnational oligarchy continues to benefit from embodied schematics and hierarchies installed by the Invasion.

Of course, Guatemala’s tourism sector nearly collapsed in the early 1980s, during the height of the war’s genocidal violence (Burtner 2004). Nonetheless, tourist centers such as Antigua remained relatively untouched by this violence, largely due to the conservative political leanings of these municipalities, in addition to the oligarchy’s ties to the military and other security forces (Hinshaw 1988).10 Until the early 1980s, most international travelers could safely visit these centers, a fact promoted by INGUAT (Burtner 2004).

Thus, in my mind, the specious tranquility of tourist centers captures “war by other means”

(Von Clausewitz 2012)—the nuanced shifts in power that signal a strategic retuning of the sociohistorical engines of death.

After the election of the first civilian president in fifteen years (Vinicio Cerezo,

1986–1991), an event hoped by many international and national stakeholders to signal an end to the Civil War (Nelson 1999), tourists were not the only stakeholders to resume international travel to Guatemala. As José Oscar Barrera Nuñez (2009, 114) argues,

“Guatemala” became a premier location for “global civil society,” as “NGOs, volunteers, tourists, students, scholars, language learners, religious missionaries, and others […]

68 brought the explosion of the organizations and peoples with good intentions to help

Mayas.” Notably, the rising tide of this “explosion” occurred against the backdrop of a still-active war, which continued despite Cerezo’s election. Concurrently, as anthropologist

Jennifer Burtner (2004, 21) observes, Guatemala became “one of the most heavily studied countries in Latin America (‘to every town an anthropologist…or two’ went the quip among fieldworkers […] at the time).” In a bid to document the impact of war upon Maya communities, “anthropologists repopulated the highlands (Central and Western) during the late 1980s and early 1990s […]” (Burtner 2004, 22). This “repopulation” also marks the height of the “post-modern turn,” which resulted in the centering of political violence, trauma, and other wound-ings in the production of ethnographic knowledge (see Chapter

One).

In what follows, I argue against “history as catastrophe” in order to chart the nuanced operations of power in Guatemala. Engendered by the dialectic of trauma as a process of embodiment, I contend that these operations have long allowed European

“scientists” and other travelers to enter, remain in, and leave Guatemala during “moments” of extreme, political, and intranational oppression and chaos. Historical “catastrophes” impact some people more than others, and these graded, contextual, and specific impacts unmask the conduct and business of leisure travel as an imperial art, philosophy, and practice. To begin, I engage the coloniality of power school in order to frame how the

Invasion inaugurated an enduring world system and philosophy. As I show, this system and philosophy remain structured around the embodied mores of “imperialist capitalist white supremacist [cishetero]patriarchy,” to borrow from bell hooks.11 These mores inform my theorization of “trauma,” which I understand as a structural and material feature of

69 global “life” and political economy. To further contextualize my arguments, I demonstrate these relations of rule vis-à-vis “Guatemala.” I conclude by illustrating how the country’s tourism sector channels these relations. I center my examination on the development of this sector in the twentieth century (i.e., before, during, and after the “post-modern turn”), against a backdrop of violence and terror. I hope to illustrate how “Guatemala” emerged as a particular kind of leisure travel destination—a place to encounter, experience, or investigate trauma-as-Truth.

2.2 The Global Coloniality of Power and Latin America: An Overview

Since the mid-1960s, the coloniality of power school has produced an astounding body of work, a full review of which is beyond the scope of this dissertation. I limit my coverage to three key premises.12 The first is that the Invasion installed a global mode and doctrine of socioeconomic organization, “history,” and be-ing that continues in the

“present” moment (Dussel 1986; Mignolo 2012; Quijano 1972). The second is that this regime depends on the body or the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 1987, 67) for its relentless vitality, intelligibility, and pull (Lugones 2007; Martínez Salazar 2014). The third is that the production of knowledge about the world is automagically inflected by these imaginaries and sorceries (Dussel 2000; Mignolo 2008; Quijano 2008; Pérez 1999;

Santos 2014; Valle Escalante 2009).13 Here, I unpack the first two premises, while the remainder of this dissertation examines the third. I situate my review in conversation with feminist, queer, Indigenous, and critical race scholarship. As I illustrate, the insights showcased here are central to my understanding of trauma as a dialectical hinge for connecting modern power, capitalism, and other colonial wounds.

It is to the first premise I now turn. As canonical Argentine-Mexican philosopher and theologian Enrique Dussel (2000, 470) suggests, the Invasion marks the “beginning of the world-system” in the sense that “the whole planet became the space of one world history.” Certainly, Indigenous and other marginalized peoples continue to maintain and establish unique philosophies and perspectives concerning the planet and its lifeforms, despite colonial violence and interference (Aldama 2001; Montejo 1999a; L.T. Smith 2012;

Valle Escalante 2009). Many “worlds” exist alongside, outside, and within the totality of

European “history,” effectively producing the latter as a stratified cartography, haunted palimpsest, and contested orientation (Mignolo 2012). Dussel’s point is that the Invasion generated a new, shared, and productive terrain of global struggle, with the hegemonic juxtaposition of “Europe” as the “civilized” center of an imagined universe. This

“universe” was inaugurated via the colonial conception and exploitation of (what is now)

Latin America. Crucially, this universe invoked and installed linear or progressive conceptions of time and space as part of imagining, subjugating, and governing “New

World” peoples and lands. More precisely, the Invasion initiated “the ideology of modernity” as an enduring field of “intelligibility where colonial domination could be implemented and legitimized as a strategy” (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 8).

For example, the imperial and colonial imaginary fixed Indigenous peoples, nations, and knowledges as somatic signposts of a “savage,” bygone, and inferior “past,” further marking the embodied parameters of Europe’s genocidal “present” and “future.”

“The people without history” (Wolf 2010) were relegated to a “pre-modern condition, while barbarism and primitivism were proposed as the defining features of cultural alterity”

(Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 8). Consequently, “a new space/time was constituted

71 materially and subjectively: this is what the concept of modernity names” (Quijano 2008,

195). In particular, the “temporal deficit of the Other” (Dussel 1995, quoted in Moraña,

Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 8) was made a geopolitical problem and sociocorporeal register, giving way to the civilizing mission as a lethal logic and convention of the “new” space/time. This mission sought to legitimize “an irrational praxis of violence” (Dussel

2000, 472)—i.e., modernity, the salvation of the primitive “savage”—as the good, the just, the divine, and the contemporary.

In Guatemala, the installation of the temporal deficit of the Other (i.e., modernity) attempted to supplant a long, complex, and fraught history of Indigenous governance and knowledge production in the isthmus. Victor Montejo (1999a, 26), a world-renowned anthropologist and self-identified member of the Jakaltek-Maya people, writes:

When democracy was flowering in the Attic world, our ancestors were forming city-states such as Tikal, Uaxactún, and Quiriguá, with monumental art and architecture, writing, calendars, and astrological systems. Our first recorded Maya date, 7.10.0.0.0, was chiseled in stone before the dawn of the Christian era. Our Maya ancestors developed regional political organizations in the lowlands whose trade networks extended into Mexico. They influenced and were influenced by the civilizations in the Central Valley of Mexico. By the time Rome had fallen and Europe had struggled through the dark ages of chaos and disease, our lowland city-states had also reached their peak […]. Overall there were more than thirty Maya linguistic communities, or native nations, redefining themselves and their internal relations when the Spanish arrived.

Montejo notes that these knowledge systems were erased and devalued by European settlers as savage “nonsense” in a bid to justify the enslavement and slaughter of

Indigenous peoples.

Montejo (1999a, 28) cites the following well-known claim by Juan Ginés de

Sepúlveda in the sixteenth century: “Those people [‘Indians’] are barbaric, uninstructed in letters and the art of government, and completely ignorant, unreasoning, and totally

72 incapable of learning anything […]. They are to be governed by the will of others.” By transmuting Indigenous epistemologies into signs of primitivism, Europeans further inaugurated the temporal deficit of the Other as an embodied register and technology of rule (e.g., the “Indian” as a social figure). As such, this “deficit” was deployed to legitimize genocide and ecocide in Guatemala (i.e., the civilizing mission), helping to create the

“modern” world.

Thus, as the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2007, 168) famously argues:

With the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is called Latin America, began the constitution of a new world order, culminating, five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet. This process implied a violent concentration of the world’s resources under the control and for the benefit of a small European minority—and, above all, of its ruling classes. Although occasionally moderated when faced with the revolt of the dominated, this process has continued ever since.

Quijano insists that these schematics of rule are contemporary problems and must be centered in the analysis of cultural life. Echoing Fanon (2008), Quijano contends that so- called independence movements failed to enact profound geopolitical change precisely because “power” remains a concept, instrument, and philosophy of imperial and colonial domination. Quijano (2008; 2007; 1972) believes that three main forces, honed by the creation of the “New World,” allowed for the continuance of this domination, or what he termed “the coloniality of power.” According to Quijano (2008, 182–183), these axes, which work in tandem to classify and rank all peoples, places, and things, are “the idea of race,” global capitalism, and Eurocentrism. Shortly, I detail feminist critiques of this formulation, especially those advanced by María Lugones (2007).14

Crucially, Quijano (2007) argues that modernity organizes, maximizes, and vitalizes these axes of power as ontoepistemological “realities,” desires, and designs,

73 including figurations of race.15 Quijano (2008, 182) contends that the “idea of race” gained exponential traction during the Invasion as a way to “refer to the supposed differential

[socio]biological structures” between colonizers and colonized.16 Thus, “social relations founded on the category of race produced new historical social identities in America—

Indians, blacks, mestizos, [whites]—and redefined others” (Quijano 2008, 182). These relational identities broadcast one’s relationship to “civilization” as a “historical” continuum, economy, and caste system; this “broadcast” was used to imagine and populate a novel timescape with tangible, ranked, governable, and “modern” subjects. In this way, the “idea of race” works to transmit the temporal deficit of the Other as a visual, material, and cultural register, relaying the optics and haptics of modernity as a global framework.

Of course, the systemic propagation of the “idea of race” was a dynamic and contextual process, forged by the generative clashes between what Walter Mignolo (2012) terms local histories/global designs. Race took on very particular forms while still reflecting the overarching structural imaginaries of the “New World” order.

For example, in Guatemala, “Ladino” is used more frequently than “mestizo” to describe “mixed” or blended Spanish and Indigenous ancestry. As Nelson (1999, 4) observes, this identity has been “traditionally defined only negatively—as not Indian—and assumed to control the state and the economy.” Ladino identifications are not solely determined by skin color per se; the conspicuous adoption and performance of a set of cultural practices, thoroughly and geopolitically linked to colonial whiteness in Guatemala, also transmit the optics of this identity. Examples of these practices include clothing, hairstyle, language, economic behaviors, and other mannerisms; in this sense, Ladinos are not “Indians” because they wear “Western” clothing, speak Spanish, and embrace

74 capitalism, signaling their alleged accord with “modernity.” An ambivalent symbol of national heritage and “history” (Nelson 1999), the “Indian” remains a sign of “pre-modern” alterity in Guatemala, a somatic marker of “Europe’s” genocidal past, present, and future

(e.g., as the temporally disappearing and deficient Other). Thus, despite the fact that

“Ladino” is used so uniquely in Guatemala, this identification remains grounded in the fields of force (Roseberry 1998) provoked by the Invasion. The term captures the local histories/global designs (Mignolo 2012) of white supremacy and/through the installation of modernity as a “historical” regime.

Therefore, as anthropologist Carol Smith (1990, 4) argues, “the ascending social categories of black, Indian, ladino, and white are based in an ideology about race that includes beliefs about the genetic make-up of people in these different categories […], as well as a system of racial ranking.” Of course, even this statement is too broad to capture the complexities of race in Guatemala. For example, many “Black” nationals identify as

Garífuna—the descendants of slaves from the Caribbean, West Africa, and South America, whose presence in Guatemala was facilitated by the Invasion and the racialized reconfiguration of the slave trade. Many “Indians” identify by their particular municipal and/or sociolinguistic affiliations (Carey 2008; Montejo 1999a; Tax 1963)—which, alongside over thirty distinct Maya groups and dialects, include Xinka and Pipil peoples and languages (Martínez Salazar 2014). As has been well documented (Nelson 1999; Valle

Escalante 2009; Warren 1998), the Pan-Maya Movement arose during the height of the

Civil War in a bid to unite select members of these diverse groups and advance Indigenous human rights claims in Guatemala and beyond (e.g., the UN). For some of these stakeholders, the term “Maya” is preferred to negotiate national/international public

75 spheres. Further, as I show in Chapter Three, “gringa” tracks a “whiteness” in Guatemala that is denigrated, highlighting the contextual nature of the latter as a geopolitical logic of supremacy.

In short, subjectivity and embodiment in Guatemala, as elsewhere, is a fraught, relational, and complicated process, with many contingencies, manifestations, and articulations (Nelson 1999). Nonetheless, these intricacies can be erased by the colonial

“idea of race,” which continues to function as an animated and contentious springboard for the expression of “New World” subjectivities. For instance, as Nelson (1999, 27) documents, many Guatemalans describe their country as “schizophrenic”—fractured by a

“fundamental split between Indian and ladino.” The country continues to be rent asunder by the “idea of race” and its particular installment in Guatemala. In addition, the most elite members of Guatemala’s oligarchy identify as white, Criollo/Creole, Spanish, and/or

European, much as they did during the formative years of the country as a geocultural constellation or nation-state (Martínez Salazar 2014).

To be clear, this oligarchy has always been a transnational affair. Reflecting the ebbs and flows of world power, actors (individual and organizational) from Canada, the

US, Israel, Germany, Spain, broader Latin America, and other countries have cooperatively governed it, oftentimes in precarious partnership with national and international military/policing forces and privatized security cadres (Dosal 1995; Handy 1984; Martínez

Salazar 2014; Thomas, O’Neill, and Offit 2011; Way 2012). Further, as historians Jim

Handy (1984, 41–46) and Paul Dosal (1995) document, select Ladino families have successfully ascended to power by making lucrative investments and career decisions, in addition to marrying into the country’s “pure-blood” elites. In general, light-skinned,

76 wealthy Ladinos rise more quickly through the ranks than their impoverished, dark-skinned counterparts (Martínez Salazar 2014). In spite of any seeming variations in the materialization of power, “whiteness” encodes the optics of domination in Guatemala

(Martínez Salazar 2014), similar to other “New World” contexts (Quijano 2007). Indeed, in a bid to capture this disturbing continuity, Martínez Salazar (2014, 34) calls Guatemala’s ruling class “the colonizer’s heirs.”

As Mignolo (2012, 32) insists, the installation of such geopolitical hierarchies was not an isolated occurrence “but rather moments of a continuum in colonial expansion and in changes of national imperial hegemonies”—including how race was registered as an artifact or byproduct of these violent geographies. A “New World” logos thus solidified the formation of what Quijano (2008, 188) termed “geocultural identities” or nationalities

(i.e., European, American, African, Guatemalan, etc.). These cartographies of be-ing cemented the world system, such as the development and administration of nation-states

(Dussel 2000; Lugones 2007; Mignolo 2012; Quijano 2007). A macro extension of the

“idea of race,” the “nation” helped to install, transmit, and naturalize the temporal deficit of the Other as a fixed and global topology (Martínez Salazar 2014, 8). As L. T. Smith

(2012, 63) argues, these “imaginary lines” perennially vitalize imperial and colonial power by ranking all lands and lifeforms in terms of their expendability. As evidenced by more recent terminology such as “Global North and Global South” (Martínez Salazar 2014),

“developed and developing nations” (Valle Escalante 2009), and “secure and insecure countries” (Amar 2013), the embodied and geographic boundaries of Empire “continue to be redrawn” (L. T. Smith 2012, 63). The enforcement of borders, the conception of the world as a stable and exploitable field, is one way the Invasion persists as a project and

77 philosophy. Accordingly, this grisly cartography captures the coloniality of power as a

“modern” reality that is scripted, animated, and maintained via the body.

Quijano (2008, 184) argues that these geocultural identifications ultimately enabled

“a new, original, and singular structure of relations of production in the historical experience of the world”: transnational capitalism. “New World” somatic hegemonies, including the solidification of the nation-state system, allowed for the advent of capitalism as a global practice, one that further assisted in the classification and ranking of all peoples/lifeforms. As Lugones (2007, 191) observes, “it is important in beginning to see the reach of the coloniality of power that wage labor has been reserved almost exclusively for white Europeans.”17 Initially, the subordinated members of the “colonial races” (i.e.,

“Indians,” “Blacks,” and “mestizos”) were enslaved across Latin America (Quijano 2008).

When faced with the impending extermination of Indigenous peoples via slavery and genocide (and thus the loss of labor/capital), European overlords relegated the latter to indentured servitude, essentially imprisoning these peoples on plantations. Until about the eighteenth century, impoverished mestizo peoples were similarly exploited by “pure blood” or white colonizers.18 Black people, however, remained enslaved. Thus, even in

Guatemala, the exploitation of Indigenous lands and peoples was “reinforced and complicated by the violent conversion of a heterogeneous population from Africa into a human commodity through the establishment of slavery” (Martínez Salazar 2014, 8).

Quijano (2008) insists that these somatic hegemonies delineated one’s place in the

“New World” caste system, furthering the racialized division of labor as a transnational process. These encounters installed the social geography of global capitalism, including its graded regimes of accumulation and slaughter (i.e., death and trauma as mainstays of

78 governance—catastrophic or mundane). As evidenced by the modern-day slavery enacted by the prison industrial complex (i.e., the largescale imprisonment/enforced labor of impoverished people of color), the exploitation of migrant labor by agribusiness (i.e., contemporary serfdom or indentured servitude), and/or the militarized enforcement of nation-state borders (i.e., the Invasion as an ongoing process), “New World” labor regimes endure. “Capital” remains an embodied, geopolitical, and temporal relationship of imperialism and colonialism, a “social formation for control of wage labor […], the axis around which all remaining forms of labor control, resources, and products” continue to be articulated (Quijano 2008, 187).

Crucially, the early scripting of this geography centered upon the chimerical containment of “savagery” as a “historical” hazard or contagion, one held to threaten

“civilization” as a “progressive” mission, timescape, and philosophy (i.e., modernity). For instance, as has been well documented (Castañeda 1996; O’Rourke 1988; Pickering 2018;

Rosaldo 1993; Tausig 1987; Whitehead 2011), the “cannibal” was an infamous figure of

European rule and mythology. Rooted in “medieval tropes and discourses on the alterity of the Orient,” (Castañeda 1996, 135), tried and tested to legitimize the enslavement of

African peoples (Thornton 2003), the “cannibal” was a bloodthirsty, unthinking, monstrous creature that harbored a particular taste for the flesh of Europeans. Even in a “New World,” those “Indians” deemed to be “cannibals” could be swiftly killed—or enslaved, depending on the “cannibal” in question—without risking the ire of sovereign power or Catholic hellfire (Whitehead 2011). As Michael Taussig (1987, 105) notes, “Cannibalism summed up all that was perceived as grotesquely different about the Indians as well as providing

79 the colonists the allegory of colonization itself.” In Chapter Four, I return to this “allegory” as an enduring travel trope, fantasy, and commodity in Guatemala.

In short, the “cannibal” was a somatic palimpsest and technology, fine-tuned for use in Latin America to subjugate pressing threats to imperial white power/capital. Any

“Indians” who challenged “New World” hegemonies were expeditiously classified as

“cannibals” and murdered or enslaved (Whitehead 2011). Certainly, in practice, colonizers killed “compliant Indians” and “cannibal Indians” indiscriminately, following the changing needs of world power. Nonetheless, Spanish law during this time dictated that “good

Indians” should not be immediately enslaved or killed (Altman 2017; Handy 1984; Restall

2003; Restall and Asselbergs 2007), given their “redeemable” proximity to modernity, the

Christian god, and thus the “human.” In theory at least, the “monstrosity” of the “cannibal

Indian” was to be made legible before they were killed or enslaved. Black people, however, could be immediately enslaved or killed because they were considered originary

“cannibals” or signposts of an “irredeemable” barbarism and animalism (Thornton 2003).

Crucially, these “New World” encounters determined not only “the black colonial subject’s familial structure or social and physical mobility” (Weheliye 2014, 26) but also that of the

“Indian” and the “European.” These cartographies of be-ing delimited “who” could access the “human” via the “cannibal”—both concepts were potent instruments of rule, further transmitting “the idea of race” and capitalism as structural logics of the “modern” nation.

To provide an illustration of these cartographies, I turn to a brief examination of the “cannibal” in the early conduct of “Guatemalan” politics. During the long sixteenth century, self-appointed historian and erstwhile conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote numerous petitions to the Spanish court (Restall and Asselbergs 2007). He sought

80 recompense for his role in the colonization of what is now México, Honduras, and

Guatemala. Later compiled in a book entitled The Conquest of New Spain, these letters also detail the alleged advice given by one Don Hernán Cortés to his underling, the so-called

“conqueror” of Guatemala, Pedro de Alvarado. Cortés purportedly cautioned de Alvarado about idolatry, sodomy, and cannibalism in Guatemala, or the uncanny appetites and behaviors of “monstrous Indians” in “New Spain.”

Per Díaz del Castillo (1570, quoted in Restall and Asselbergs 2007, 62), Cortés decreed:

When he [de Alvarado] found prisons and cages in which it was customary to keep Indians imprisoned in order to fatten them up to eat, he should break them open and take them [the captives] out of the prisons; and that with love and good will he should bring them to give obedience to His Majesty, and in everything he should treat them well.

Hypothetically, those “Indians” rescued from “cannibals” could be presented before “His

Majesty” as obedient supplicants and potential “humans.” The unwitting “victims” of their own kind, these “Indians” were to be treated favorably. For these “victims,” the civilizing mission would be merciful and just. Instead of facing immediate death, “redeemable

Indians” would be forced to live and labor upon the “modern” landholdings of men such as Díaz del Castillo, de Alvarado, and Cortés. As mentioned above, “cannibals” were granted no such “mercy.” Of course, “the idea of race” ensured that “good Indians” could be classified as irremediable and killed at whim. After all, the “cannibal” eternally haunted and tempted its “compliant” brethren, ensuring that the latter could easily revert to the pre- modern “savagery” from which they were so generously “rescued.” Nonetheless, the

“cannibal” was a powerful technology and mythology that sustained the racialized division of labor in the inchoate “Guatemalan” nation-state, further vitalizing coloniality/modernity as burgeoning global regimes. 81

However, as the infamous Bartolomé de Las Casas argued, cannibals might well exist in “New Spain,” but they were not “Indians.” Instead, they spoke flawless Spanish, and their gleaming armor caught the reflection of the sun, as the devastation left in their wake generated unique cartographies of struggle across Central America. In his seminal work, Las Casas (1540, quoted in Restall and Asselbergs 2007, 75) claimed that de

Alvarado and company were the only “real” cannibals in Guatemala: “And thus there was in his camp the most downright butchery of human flesh, where in his presence [‘Indian’] children would be slain and roasted, and a man would be killed just for his hands and feet, which were considered to be a delicacy.” Las Casas used these depictions to promote the manumission and compassionate treatment of “Indians,” in addition to their systemic conversion to Catholicism (and, thus, their transmutation into “modern humans”). These depictions evince the political utility of the “cannibal” as a site for the articulation of “New

World” subjectivities, including insurgent figurations of Europeans as flesh-eating monsters. Nonetheless, Las Casas’ seeming act of resistance was contingent upon the

“Indian” adopting “civilization” as a religious and geohistorical imperative. Similar to his contemporaries, Las Casas perceived the civilizing mission to be a redemptive act, a perception that occluded the tremendous losses—catastrophic and chronic—left in the wake of cultivating the modern and “humane” nation-state (e.g., “Guatemala”).

In the end, the “idea of race” ensured that the “Indian”—be they good or bad— remained an object of European rule, law, and cosmology. The “Indian” was deemed incapable of the reason and intellect granted the “human” as a somatic placeholder for white supremacy and, by proxy, the ranked registers of coloniality. As more recently popularized by Achille Mbembe (2003, 11–12) and his concept of “necropolitics,” such

82 embodied and historical operations continue to “dictate who may live and who must die

[…], to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.” By perennially highlighting the temporal deficit of the Other, these “politics” install “modernity” as a practical framework for the exploitation of all peoples, places and things via the nation- state. For example, they legitimize the bloody accumulation of capital, labor, and land— and thus the destruction of marginalized countries and their citizens—in the name of

“civilization” and/or the containment of the savage, the terrifying, and the unhuman, i.e., the “pre-modern.” In this way, the racialized insurgent, an artifact of the “New World” cannibal, continues to be temporally demarcated and blockaded for imprisonment, exploitation, and death.19 That is, “the idea of race” still demarcates “periphery” peoples, lands, economies, knowledges, or “species” of being, to borrow from Foucault (2008).

As scholars of coloniality argue (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 3), these enduring and evolving violences certify that the “Latin American modern subject is the product of a traumatic origin.” As a structural and symbolic feature of the “modern colonial landscape” (Philipose 2007, 61), trauma is inexorably “connected to the textures of everyday experience” (Cvetkovich 2003, 4), including the registers of contemporary embodiment. Thus, as Maurice Stevens (2016, 20; emphasis in original) advances:

[…] trauma is not simply a concept that describes particularly overwhelming events, nor is it simply a category that “holds” people who have been undone by such events; but it is a cultural object whose function produces particular types of subjects, and predisposes specific affect flows that it then manages and ultimately shunts into political projects of various types. Trauma does not describe, trauma makes.

I add that this “cultural object” has long installed “New World” somatic hegemonies as actual logics of mobility and “freedom,” further operationalizing the coloniality of power.

These identities continue to delineate the “catastrophes” one might face or evade as an

83 interpellated subject of “modern” rule, such as slavery, indentured servitude, imprisonment, torture, rape, etc. These somatic hegemonies determine if, when, and how one can move about the Americas, including where one lives, loves, works, relaxes, or otherwise exists. In other words, these subjectivities, capacities, and abilities transmit and mobilize trauma as a contextual and responsive dialectical processes, a topic I return to in the next section. For now, the point I wish to emphasize is that the Invasion continues to influence contemporary geopolitics, structures of feeling, regimes of embodiment, and the topologies of global capitalism.

Thus, as the “elaboration of loss” (i.e., geopolitical, psychic, terrestrial, and economic devastation) continues to define the teleology of “history” in the Americas, terms such as “post-colonial” and “post-modern” are misleading (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui

2008, 3). They are misleading because the Invasion persists as an “unnecessary and avoidable intersectional project of oppression, subordination, and exclusion” (Martínez

Salazar 2014, 31). This “project” continues to center destruction, wounding, and death

(slow or otherwise) as markers of progress, security, and vitality, further fomenting the ideology of modernity. That is, trauma connects the “historical events, political philosophies, and institutional protocols” of imperialism and colonialism, “with the much more elusive domains of social subjectivity and symbolic representation” (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 2). Trauma maintains the delicate balance between catastrophic and everyday violence, further animating the Invasion as an unfolding process, wound, and economy. The fetishization, commodification, mystification, and concealment of trauma engenders and enhances the coloniality of power.

However, as the various critiques of Quijano’s work showcase (e.g., Lugones

2007), race is not the only embodied codex “traumatically” producing and ordering the

“New World.” As the remainder of my dissertation advances this argument, I limit myself to a broad review of the aforementioned critiques. Presently, I introduce my second point of discussion: The world system is an artifact of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers

1987, 67), and the body, in its scripted or intelligible totality, vitalizes the coloniality of power. To begin, as Lugones (2007, 187) insists, it is “politically important that many who have taken the coloniality of power seriously have tended to naturalize gender,” thereby furthering “oppressive colonial gender arrangements, oppressive organizations of life.”

Quijano problematically treats cisheteropatriarchy as “more benign than race in terms of the oppressive impact of its social classificatory role” (Martínez Salazar 2014, 9). In so doing, Quijano overlooks how coloniality anticipates a multitude of embodied “axes,” registers, and philosophies of power as part of organizing global “life” and political economy. As Lugones (2007, 186) outlines, colonial architectures of gender, sexuality, and class vitalize “the idea of race” as worldwide modes of “organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing.”

Thus, one enduring consequence of the global coloniality of power has been the biological and political classification of womxn/female-identified bodies as “inferior to

[cis-heterosexual] men, especially men at the top of the racialized and classed hierarchy”

(Martínez Salazar 2014, 42). To accomplish this feat, Lugones (2007) contends that

Europeans not only introduced “men” and “women” as governable subjects in the

Americas (i.e., gender/sex as a binary construct and anatomical matrix) but also installed the heteropatriarchal regime of the Spanish metropole to further delineate these

85 subjectivities. Property, inheritance, marriage, and citizenship rights would be determined by one’s purported, embodied, and geopolitical proximity to masculinity, whiteness, heterosexuality, and capital (i.e., civilization/modernity).

As Martínez Salazar (2014, 9) observes, the colonial dimorphic gender system was imposed “through the persecution and criminalization, even extermination, of other practices amongst women and men [sic] in societies that had more open, flexible, and democratic relationships […].”20 Indigenous peoples espousing more matriarchal, communal, and/or multivalent approaches to gender, sexuality, lineage, land use, and politics were particularly targeted (Allen 1986; Lugones 2007; Oyěwùmí 1997; Smith

2005).21 Notably, this system exacerbated the subordination of Indigenous womxn in pre-

Invasion societies with established hierarchies resembling European cisheteropatriarchy

(Alexander 2005; Anzaldúa 1987; Castillo 1994), while removing others from their once prominent place in public and juridical spheres (Allen 1986; Oyěwùmí 1997; Smith 2005).

Consequently, “institutions of direct control of colonial rule—the military, the judiciary, and, most important, the administrative service—have always been overwhelmingly masculine” (Mohanty 1991, 16). More precisely, rich, white, cis, heterosexual “men” embody “rule by literally and symbolically representing the power of

Empire” (Mohanty 1991, 16). These sociocorporeal logics encode “power,” rendering it legible as something to be desired, feared, rejected, reformed, etc. To be clear, the installation of the colonial gender system was (and continues to be) a complicated and nuanced process, with global and local effects. In a very real sense, the “New World” was created and maintained vis-à-vis people’s efforts to resist, survive, master, or otherwise negotiate “the power of Empire” (i.e., coloniality). Specifically, by transmuting people into

86 species or hierarchies of be-ing, the colonial gender system invigorates and manifests this power as an intelligible socioeconomic goal, attribute, and matrix, alongside codices of race and class.

For example, one contemporary aftereffect of this transmutation is the troubling complicity of some colonized peoples in the ongoing oppression of marginalized womxn, including those who identify as queer and/or trans* (Lugones 2007). As Anzaldúa (1987,

21) notes, in response to misogyny, homophobia, and internalized colonialism in her natal community: “Not me sold out my people but they me. So yes, though ‘home’ permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home.” Martínez Salazar

(2014, 27) cites the following example concerning the complicated cartographies of struggle provoked by the colonial gender system in Guatemala:

The knowledge produced by Indigenous Peoples included an interrelation of mind, body, and spirit, and an ecological vision in which the earth and its ecosystems were always changing. This knowledge also included an interlocking relationship between the feminine and the masculine energies, and an acceptance of diverse sexualities and ways of being women and men, which were penalized and vilified by conquerors and their heirs, and are now denied by many Maya women and men.

One reason for this denial, or what Fanon (2008) terms colonial recognition, is that

Eurocentric cognitive and affective norms continue to inform “the standard by which diversity is measured and extracted” (KatherineKellyAbraham 2018, 5), especially regarding the adoption of “the power of Empire” as a political aspiration or means to an end (e.g., survival). In fact, this “desire” can cross lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. I further unpack this argument in Chapter Four, in terms of how colonial recognition influences the production and consumption of transnational knowledge about

Guatemala vis-à-vis leisure travel.22

To provide another illustration of these variegated haptics and optics, I return to my earlier examination of the “cannibal.” As a technology and relation of rule, the cannibal materialized not only “the idea of race” but also the necropolitical caesurae of the colonial gender system and, by proxy, the “modern” nation-state. As previously noted, the cannibal was a mythological springboard for the organization of “American” peoples (i.e., the

“colonial races,” including Europeans) into ranked species of be-ing. However, as Lugones

(2007) notes, this operationalization of race depended upon the framing of colonized peoples as without gender, in the sense of assigning these peoples a lack or absence of a refined “masculinity” or “femininity.” The cannibal was incapable of performing and understanding European “civilization” precisely because It was not a “man” or a “woman.”

Therefore, subordinated “New World” peoples were not always recognized or registered dimorphically in terms of the colonial gender system.

As Lugones (2007, 195) notes, the “sexual fears of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites or intersexed, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk”; these fears further charted the “cannibal” as a distinct type of being. McClintock (1995, 22) argues that such colonial phantasms were “porno-tropics for the European imagination—a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears.” The “Americas” were subsequently populated with monstrous, ambiguously gendered, and sexually perverse creatures, e.g., cannibals, the containment of which legitimized the “New World” caste system (i.e., race and the eventual rise of nation-states). In contrast, “Europe” housed the “human” and

“civilized” modes of comportment attributed to bourgeois “men” and “women,” white cisheteropatriarchy amongst them. In tandem with the “idea of race,” the colonial gender

88 system vitalized the “human” (male) as a genocidal/ecocidal decree. European colonizers invoked architectures of race, class, gender, and sexuality as actual species distinctions, thereby yoking themselves to the “human.” These architectures further empowered the nation-state as a means of transmitting these distinctions on the world stage. In this way, as part of the civilizing mission (i.e., the salvation and cultivation of the “human” and/or the modern), colonized countries, peoples, and other lifeforms were perennially judged against their “regressive” proximity to the “savage” and the “animal.”

By establishing what Lugones (2007, 188) calls “the tortured materiality of power,” these combined technologies foreground the “traumatic origins” of the Latin American modern subject. An assemblage of embodied “axes” simultaneously and differentially transmit the temporal deficit of the Other. For example, although many bourgeois white womxn continue to be severed from “collective authority, from the production of knowledge, from most control over the means of production,” they are nonetheless considered “human” by virtue of their “femininity” (Lugones 2007, 206). As Lugones

(2007, 203) notes, this racialized and gendered configuration of the “human” ensures that impoverished and non-white womxn are “understood to be animals in the deep sense of

‘without gender,’ sexually marked as female, but without the characteristics of femininity.”

One of the most startling achievements of the global coloniality of power has been the excision of Indigenous womxn, Third World womxn, and womxn of color from the

“human” and/or the “civilized” via white cisheteropatriarchy. In Chapter Three, I return to this argument via an examination of ethno-femicide in Guatemala and a discussion of how research participants invoked the colonial gender system to make sense of the “Central

American Immigration Crisis.”23

Interestingly, Lugones (2007, 208) posits that “white women servants, miners, washerwomen, prostitutes” and other similar stakeholders occupy “an in-between zone

[…], as not necessarily caught through the lens of the sexual or gender binary and as racialized ambiguously, but not as white.” In select cases, class excises some womxn from the “human” because manual, blue-collar, and extralegal labor—poverty—is not

“feminine” qua the “European.” Thus, in tandem with “the idea of race,” the colonial gender system generates the social geography of capitalism. More precisely, the wage- labor relation installs cisheteropatriarchy as a necropolitical schematic. For example, the ability of poor white womxn, womxn of color, and Indigenous womxn to freely traverse the world—much less feed themselves or their families—is severely constrained by what has been popularly termed the “feminization of poverty” (Kingfisher 2013; Pearce 1978;

Peterson 1987). Due to this phenomenon, many womxn are locked into menial, low- paying, and/or extralegal jobs, in addition to facing rampant physical/sexual assault, biopolitical neglect, and other forms of structural violence at their workplaces and beyond.

As I discussed in Chapter One, raced and classed differentials exacerbate and complicate these violences. Indeed, in a bid to escape these dire circumstances, many mothers, children, and other nationals from Central America are currently and bravely risking their lives on the migrant trail.

However, in contrast to the above-cited scholars, I do not understand the

“feminization of poverty” as a recent or “neoliberal” phenomenon. Instead, following

Lugones (2007), I perceive the wage-labor relation to be grounded in the Invasion— specifically, the establishment of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation as stratified scales, modes, and registers of be-ing. These philosophies of rule structure global political

90 economy, such as the ranking, administration, and exploitation of nation-states—and, by proxy, the ranking, administration, and exploitation of bodies/subjectivities. These philosophies calibrate “capital” as a social formation (Quijano 2008) and local history/global design (Mignolo 2012). The world system is a largescale expression of the various mythologies and technologies illuming the coloniality of power via the body.

I find Joseph Pugliese’s (2013) concept of “geocorpographies” very helpful for conceptualizing the totality of this expression. Pugliese (2013, 86) coined this term

[…] to encapsulate in one word the following thesis: that the body, in any of its manifestations, is always geopolitically situated and graphically inscribed by signs, discourses, regimes of visuality, and so on. Its geopolitical markings can only be abstracted through a process of symbolic and political violence. The geopolitical significations that invest the body are constitutive of its cultural intelligibility.

The overarching sociohistorical context endows the body with meaning, a context that collapses without the body to foreground its “signs, discourses, regimes of visuality, and so on” (Pugliese 2013, 86). Notably, both “symbolic and political violence” capacitate this intractable dependency. Catastrophic and mundane articulations of trauma empower modern governance, political economy, and psychology as essentially geocorpographic acts or accomplishments. To borrow from Fassin and Rechtman (2009), an “empire of trauma” shapes contemporary regimes of subjectification and embodiment as categories of thought and registers of Truth. By functioning as a mode of “knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives” (Quijano 2007, 169), I posit that the coloniality of power engenders these relationships, charging modernity as a teleology of loss.

In other words, trauma helps to produce and shape what Mignolo (2008, 225) calls

“the geopolitics of knowledge”—the ramifications and lines of flight provoked by coloniality and modernity as shared, contested, and global topologies for the organization

91 of perception, thought, and “history.” In what follows, I trace the manifestation of these topologies via Guatemala’s tourism sector in a bid to introduce my final discussion point:

The production of “scientific” knowledge about the world remains inflected by the

Invasion. In so doing, I seek to foreground the conditions causing “Guatemala” to emerge as a particular and “post-modern” travel destination. Specifically, I argue that “Guatemala” has become a renowned place to experience “catastrophe” and other traumas as cultural objects, signs, and fetishes.

2.3 Leisure Travel, Coloniality, and the Imperial Geopolitics of Knowledge in Guatemala

This dissertation centers the commodification of trauma in Guatemala. Embracing

Santos’ (2014, 42) rallying cry that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice,” I seek to illustrate how this conversion of trauma occludes emancipatory forms of understanding and relating to the world. My analysis is critical, and yet I do not seek to disrespect those social scientists who have dedicated their lives to the study of violence, such as Myrna Mack Chang. Further, as the tireless efforts of Nobel Peace

Laureate and K’iche’-Maya activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum illustrate, international solidarity work is central to the amelioration of this violence. However, I do seek to challenge some core tenets that frame the anthropology of genocide, war, and militarization. Specifically, I argue that these tenets disguise the function and calibration of this research as a philosophy and technology of travel, freedom, and upward mobility. I engage in this risky discussion because I am interested in the work of abolition as opposed to, for example, my own professional advancement. As outlined in the introduction, I begin

92 by examining the relationship of political violence to the nationalization of Guatemala’s tourism industry.

Admittedly, this chapter leaps from one century to the next; such time travel is intentional as I hope to illustrate a certain, profound, and troubling continuity in the consolidation of power/capital. Painstakingly outlined in the previous section, this continuity enables my time travel. First, I sketch how terror and repression influenced initial attempts to develop a national tourism sector, as well as the concurrent production of transnational knowledge about Guatemala, during the dictatorship (1931–1944) of

General Jorge Ubico Castañeda. Next, I trace how the Civil War further vitalized these processes. As I begin to argue here, and take up again in Chapter Four, this vitalization depended upon and re-enacted the Invasion as a geocorpographic exercise and fantasy. I conclude by illustrating how the “post-modern turn” affected the imperial geopolitics of knowledge production vis-à-vis Guatemala. As I insisted in Chapter One, these politics capture a dynamic alteration of world power and capital in terms of the re/signification of

Truth via the fetishization of violence, chaos, and pain. As I explore presently, this emergence also reveals how the dialectic of trauma scaffolds coloniality in Guatemala and beyond.

The advent of Guatemala’s tourism sector reflects a deeply troubling history of trespass, profiteering, and bloodshed. Specifically, the military dictator General Jorge

Ubico Castañeda undertook the first efforts to bureaucratize and regulate a national tourism industry in the direct face of the state-sanctioned violence and terror wrought by his administration. Similar to many who hold positions of power in Guatemala, Ubico was from a wealthy family of Spanish ancestry, one directly tied to the office of president, the

93 military, and the oligarchy (Handy 1984). However, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Ubico possessed a unique vision; he perceived the development and regulation of a national tourism industry as a “new” way of garnering transnational capital, power, and influence (Munro 2014). In 1932, Ubico founded the Comité Nacional de

Turismo/National Committee of Tourism (CNT), which was renamed INGUAT in 1967

(Devine 2016). Although the CNT would never be as organized or successful as INGUAT, its creation reflected Ubico’s larger vision to “modernize” Guatemala for the ultimate benefit of the country’s ruling elite.

Prior to these efforts, international travel to Guatemala was not a state-regulated or centralized activity per se. Extending the apartheid of the Invasion, European and Euro-

American leisure travelers certainly visited Guatemala, but they tended to stay with wealthy expatriates, peers, family, or members of the oligarchy (Dosal 1995). In addition, as I outline in Chapter Three, these combined stakeholders generally oversaw, frequented, and/or inhabited colonial strongholds, such as Antigua (Hinshaw 1988; Martínez Salazar

2014). Transnational and US-based travel agencies, such as Clark Tours, were operating in

Guatemala by 1917, but there was not a well-developed transportation/hospitality system in place for these firms to utilize (Clark Tours 2019). Given the fragmented nature of

Guatemala’s nascent tourism sector, Ubico’s dictatorship saw very little profit from these

“traveling” stakeholders. Thus, in a bid to consolidate his power vis-à-vis international leisure travel, Ubico created the CNT (Munro 2014). The CNT was particularly concerned with the promotion of Guatemala as a premier destination for Europeans and Euro-

Americans—for imperial white capital/power. That is, the CNT sought to capitalize upon the geocorpographic hierarchies installed by the Invasion.

This motivation reflects longstanding eugenicist goals and initiatives, which center the “whitening” of Guatemala’s population as a means of addressing the “problem” of the

“Indian,” one allegedly impeding the country’s progress, advancement, or “civilization”

(Martínez Salazar 2014; Valle Escalante 2009). The temporal deficit of the Other was, and continues to be, the focus of major debate about the geocultural installment of modernity in “Guatemala.” For example, in the name of eradicating this “deficit,” the government offered up huge amounts of land to potential European and Euro-American settlers in the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Grandin 2013). Establishing Guatemala’s role in the world system as an extractive and agro-export colony, these land grants allowed wealthy German and other European nationals to enter the oligarchy as coffee, sugar, and/or fruit barons (Dosal 1995; Handy 1984). Later, US and other transnational corporations, such as the United Fruit Company (UFC), benefitted from the necropolitical largess of such initiatives. However, these corporations tended to join forces with the national elites only when politically and economically expedient; in general, they dictated the terms of their involvement in Guatemalan political economy, especially if based in the

US (Handy 1984). Nevertheless, these imperial, parasitic, and capitalist relationships were able to exist and persist precisely because coloniality informs the ideological, affective, and material moorings of world power (Martínez Salazar 2014).

Despite the toll exacted from the land and its peoples, Guatemala’s ruling class continues to collude with the US and other countries from the Global North in order to fatten its coffers and further entrench its reign. As scholars (Casaús Arzú 2010; Dosal 1995;

Handy 1984; Martínez Salazar 2014) note, the astoundingly persistent ability of the oligarchy and its various partners to accumulate imperial white capital/power—at the

95 brutally apparent expense of “Guatemala” as a geocultural constellation or nation-state— knows no bounds. Disturbingly, in an echo of the country’s Spanish colonial past, the lands and labor of impoverished Indigenous, Ladino, and Garífuna peoples are still exploited to secure and harness this capital/power.

However, the creation of the CNT marked an important change to “business as usual.” A dangerous and despotic visionary, Ubico undertook some of the first attempts to charge tourism as a hegemonic vehicle for subjectification, political economy, and governance in the country. Specifically, Ubico’s dictatorship established the folkloric motifs and seductions that continue to commodify and sensationalize Maya peoples, cities, sartorial styles, and cultural practices as tourist attractions, as well as signs of a unique and abiding “Guatemalan” nationalism (Munro 2014). Crucially, Ubico did not differentiate between “tourists” and “researchers” in his efforts to court imperial white power to

Guatemala, a fact capturing the role of coloniality in the sculpting of capital as a social formation and relationship (Quijano 2007).

For instance, Ubico approved the filming of two Tarzan serials in a bid to advertise

“Guatemala” to mass audiences in the US and Europe (Way 2012) and thus attract tourists from the Global North (Munro 2014). Although he hoped that these movies would display the country’s rich heritage and modern comforts, Ubico would be sorely disappointed

(Munro 2014). In a depiction that “shocked audiences with sensationalized visual images of native savagery and backwardness,” Maya extras played the role of cannibal-like savages, stalking the jungles for human prey (Munro 2014, 161). As established above, the

“cannibal” was a geocorpographic technology refined during the Invasion. Therefore, these movies contributed to and reflected an enduringly imperial perception of Guatemala as a

96 place existing outside of the temporal, geocultural, and embodied parameters of

“civilization,” “modernity,” and the “human.”

Concurrently, through the institution of various cultural ministries, Ubico recruited the travel of European and Euro-American archaeologists and anthropologists; he knew their publications would reach academic and lay audiences, helping him to further develop and nationalize Guatemala’s tourism sector (Munro 2014). To facilitate this development, as well as the accumulation of capital/power in a general sense, Ubico approved the construction of an international airport in Guatemala City. This airport allowed firms such as Clark Tours to fully establish themselves in the country (Clark Tours 2019), bringing more middle-class and white travelers to “Indian Villages” (e.g., Tecpán) and Antigua on packaged tours (Little 2004, 36).

Ubico’s efforts to develop a national tourism industry helped to foment an international craze (Munro 2014)—the county became known as the “home” of all things

“Mayan.” However, this “craze” occurred against a backdrop of extreme violence and repression. As noted by historian J. T. Way (2012, 29), many nationals “struggle to find words strong enough to describe” Ubico’s regime, which put into place some of the apparatuses of terror utilized during the Civil War. Ubico extended police/state surveillance into the private sphere in an attempt to quell any resistance to his dictatorship.

In addition, Ubico established the infamous “vagrancy laws,” under which anyone considered to be unemployed could be arrested and forced to work on the landholdings of wealthy Criollo, European, and Ladino families (Handy 1984). Paid minimal wages, Maya peoples were targeted and exploited by these laws in ways that evoked the systems of debt peonage first established by the Spanish. Following in the footsteps of one of his

97 predecessors, Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920), Ubico granted the UFC considerable land and other concessions. These concessions ultimately strengthened the UFC’s foothold in Guatemala, one enriching the US’s own white elite and further guarded by their sentinels, the CIA. As the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán proved in 1954, this foothold would eventually spark a civil war.

Arbenz wanted to redistribute a small amount of land owned by Guatemala’s ruling class and the UFC to a burgeoning proletariat, in a move to enhance the latter (Handy

1984). In his own bid to “modernize” Guatemala and make the country a force to be reckoned with on the world stage, Arbenz’s goal was to transform Indigenous peoples into productive capitalists (Handy 1984). As this redistribution undermined the system of land use and ownership in place since the Invasion—as well as the global pecking order of imperial capitalism—the oligarchy and military colluded with the US (e.g., the CIA) and its allies (e.g., Israel) to reverse Arbenz’s agrarian reform (Grandin 2013). Arbenz, along with anyone else who challenged imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist violence in

Guatemala, was labeled a communist insurgent. Replacing and updating the “cannibal,” the “communist” represented an “irremediable” savagery and deficiency, signaling impunity’s exceptional (Agamben 1998) parameters, i.e., those who could be immediately killed.

In the name of eradicating this “insurgency,” a series of brutal military dictatorships took control of the country’s government. These dictatorships marked over four decades of despotic and corporate-sponsored terror, as Maya and Ladino peoples, activists, and others were figured, targeted, and killed as “communist insurgents” by the Guatemalan nation-state (Nelson 1999). Various insurgent or “guerilla” forces attempted to fight and

98 overthrow these dictatorships but with little success and at high mortal cost. Guatemala’s military heavily out-armed these forces thanks to the support of the US and Israel (Handy

1984). Caught between the political desires and designs of these opposing factions, impoverished Ladino and Indigenous campesinxs bore the terrible brunt of wartime violence (Grandin 2013).

Less well known, however, is that, during Ubico’s reign, the UFC played a central role in developing the national tourism industry (Munro 2014). Like most other efforts to

“modernize” Guatemala (Way 2012), this sector displays a long history of war by other means, especially concerning the materialization of individual and collective trauma.24

Through acts of political violence and intimidation, the UFC monopolized a budding port, train, and highway system in Guatemala, allowing it to transport fruit and other goods around the world (Handy 1984). Initially, corporations such as Clark Tours utilized this infrastructure to take UFC employees on sightseeing trips. Later, in partnership with the

UFC, Clark Tours made use of the system to bring other travelers from the Global North to various sites, including Antigua (Clark Tours 2019).

Furthermore, akin to Ubico, the UFC did not separate “sightseers” from “scientists” when it came to the promotion and development of Guatemala’s tourism industry. One of the land concessions granted the UFC included the former Maya city-state of Quiriguá.

Drawing hundreds of researchers and other travelers, the UFC established Quiriguá as the country’s first archaeological park and tourism attraction (Munro 2014, 35). These tourists were primarily white men from Western Europe and North America, with the necessary time, income/funding, and social capital to “leisurely” pursue science.25 Despite mounting hostilities concerning US control of Quiriguá, which was considered an heirloom of

“Guatemalan” patrimony by many Criollos and Ladinos, the UFC profited from its prescient shepherding of tourism (Munro 2014). Quiriguá was transmuted into a haven for imperial white travel, leisure, and knowledge production, meeting the consumer needs of academics and tourists alike.

In short, against an unfolding backdrop of fear, state-sanctioned violence, and imperial capitalist exploitation, international leisure travel to Guatemala flourished. Yet, this travel was not motivated by an urge to analyze or engage this trauma, as I argue it would be in the wake of the “post-modern turn.” Instead, as historian Lisa Munro (2014,

10) documents, “a surge of romantic notions” concerning the timelessness, naiveté, and mystique of Indigenous cultural traditions drew Europeans and Euro-Americans to

Guatemala, a romanticism that reflected the coetaneous zeitgeist of the social sciences (see

Chapter One). As discussed above, Ubico’s zeal for development certainly cultivated and bolstered this “surge.” However, popular archaeological and anthropological research of the time, including the work of Franz Boas and his various protégés, further empowered this “surge” as a transnational process and seduction (Munro 2014).

As Munro (2014, 10) notes, this research brought travelers from the Global North

“into direct contact with the native peoples of the [US] desert Southwest and Pacific

Northwest.” Indeed, the movies produced by the school of Boas effectively established ethnography-as-genre, one that the Tarzan serials directly embraced and mirrored (Munro

2014). Admittedly, most of these travelers were not concerned with the heated debates sparked by this school, such as those surrounding cultural relativism. Rather, they wished to encounter the fantastical subjects of these scientific and cinematic endeavors—the “real

Indians.” Thus, as Castañeda (1996) argues, the “contact” fostered by these endeavors

100 inaugurated ethno-tourism as a district sector and behavior in the US, México, and

Guatemala. This tourism became a way for Europeans and Euro-Americans to experience a purportedly “authentic” and disappearing indigeneity (i.e., the temporal deficit of the

Other) as an act of bourgeois consumerism and pleasure—leisure.

Alongside their ideological transmutation into “national” commodities and ethno- tourism attractions in Guatemala, Munro (2014, 14) contends that Maya peoples became the focal point of a growing number of social scientific studies during the 1930s:

Both foreign amateur and professional social scientists began to conduct an increasing number of new field research studies in Guatemala because of the widespread perceptions of the unadulterated nature of Mayan cultural traditions. Believed to be untouched by the culture clash of the Spanish conquest or corrupted by outside influences, the Maya seemed ideal subjects for the application of new research methodologies and theories of cultural development.

Similar to their touristic counterparts, social scientists came to Guatemala, driven by a yearning to investigate and document Truth via the temporal deficit of the Other.26 As I show in Chapters Three and Four, this “deficit” continues to delineate the “proper” subjects of social science and touristic inquiries,27 as further evidenced by the artifacts produced by these parties (e.g., travel blogs and ethnographies).28 Notably, as these scientists and travelers visited Guatemala, Ubico’s vagrancy laws barred “the Maya”—the lost objects provoking the melancholic travel in question—from moving about the country.29 Unless hired for a pittance as research assistants, informants, or movie extras (Castañeda 1996;

Munro 2014; Way 2012), most Maya peoples were walking a thin line between de facto imprisonment/enslavement on the landholdings of the rich and subsistence farming/survival, a cartography of struggle forged by the Invasion and exacerbated—

“modernized”—by the colonizer’s heirs (Martínez Salazar 2014).

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In other words, the preservation of white power, privilege, capital, and cosmological knowledge in Guatemala has long occurred at the necropolitical expense of

Maya and other marginalized peoples—those made to populate, negotiate, and survive

“history as catastrophe.” It is the uncanny, simultaneous, and pedestrian co-existence of the “catastrophic” and the “placid” empowering leisure travel as a graded practice and philosophy of Empire, including the conduct and business of “science.” These variable orientations to time and space empower “modernity” as an unfolding, contested, and

“historical” reality, one supported and mediated by the dialectic of trauma as a bodily process and topology. As I presently illustrate concerning the rise of INGUAT, this dialectic engenders and buttresses “the tortured materiality of power” (Lugones 2007, 188) or coloniality, ensuring that, while the “commonplace” is horrifically catastrophic for some, it remains profitable, beneficial, and enjoyable for others.

Ubico’s attempts to place tourism development under the auspices of a government run by-and-for the elite languished in obscurity until around the second decade of the Civil

War. As mentioned above, this was when INGUAT rose from the ashes of the CNT, at least on paper. For the most part, tourism remained a decentralized, informal, and marginalized national industry (Burtner 2004). International travelers still purposefully visited the country to encounter, research, and write about “the Maya” (Burtner 2004). The military-run government continued to see little profit from these “leisurely” pursuits, while transnational and US-based travel agencies reaped the lion’s share of this global capital/power. Much as it had during Ubico’s reign, agribusiness dominated Guatemala’s political economy. Coffee remained the country’s top earner and thus one of the oligarchy’s most cherished export commodities (Handy 1984).

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Extending the caste system installed by the Invasion, poor Indigenous, Ladino, and

Garífuna peoples continued to be brutally blockaded from land ownership, in addition to also being paid minimal wages for backbreaking work on coffee and other plantations

(Handy 1984). Further locking the country into a position of dependence upon the Global

North, most of the available land in Guatemala was harnessed to meet the imperial market desires of Europe and North America. Consequently, agricultural cooperatives and unions were ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed; leaders, members, and affiliates of these organizations were labeled communist insurgents and summarily “disappeared” (Burtner

2004). Maya peoples and lands became the particular focus of death squads and paramilitary units (Green 1999).

Thus, as Way (2012, 125) concludes:

From 1970 to the elections of 1985 the military high command built a complex structure of the state that, by the end of the period, was institutionalized both to look like a modern democracy and to interact with the transnational government and nongovernmental institutions that characterized late capitalism. […] This epoch of intense modernization in Guatemala culminated in genocide. The period from 1970 to 1985 was one of transformation through terror.

Alongside configurations of race and class, gendered and sexualized differentials complicated these escalating violences. Due to the cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist, and capitalist organization of power (i.e., coloniality), militarized cadres targeted impoverished Indigenous womxn for physical and sexual assault (Martínez Salazar 2014).

Further installing modernity as a national timescape and philosophy, the Civil War reworked and exacerbated the violence of imperial/colonial geocorpographies.

Paradoxically, this terrifying “transformation” occurred alongside a phenomenon that might seem, at first glance, quite strange—international leisure travel to Guatemala

103 was slowly but surely increasing. This disquieting argument is evidenced by travel trends and revenue from this timeframe. As Burtner (2004, 104) highlights, in 1974, 421,342 international tourists visited the country, generating an estimated US $71.1 million in foreign revenue.30 In 1979, these numbers increased to 503,980 and $132.4 million, respectively. In 1980, these numbers slightly decreased to 449,707 and $118.8 million. In spite of the nominal attention paid to the sector by the oligarchy, “tourism was one of the few industries that the government could claim was still growing at the end of the 1970s”

(Burtner 2004, 103). Until the early 1980s, international leisure travel to and from

Guatemala was not acutely impacted by the mounting Civil War. Paralleling this uncanny period of “growth” in the travel industry were initial attempts to fund and formalize

INGUAT. Against a backdrop of bloodshed, rapine, terror, and other traumas, the government began to more fully develop, centralize, and regulate a national tourism sector.

As presciently apprehended by Ubico, leisure travel provided a viable channel for the accumulation of transnational capital/power in the face of state-sanctioned violence and terror, both catastrophic and chronic. As Indigenous, feminist, and other scholars (Aldama

2001; Deloria, Jr. 1988; Martínez Salazar 2014; Pratt 1992; Teaiwa 1999; Trask 1999;

Vicuña Gonzales 2013) argue, the sociocorporeal legacy of the Invasion empowers such geopolitical privileges, restrictions, and contradictions—colonial wanderlust, profiteering, settlement, and governance are obscured as enduringly genocidal/ecocidal acts vis-à-vis modernity and the civilizing mission. However, unlike some of Ubico’s contemporaries, the country’s dictators were beginning to grasp the potential of this legacy, specifically regarding the nationalization of the tourism industry.

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As noted in the introduction, on October 12, 1977, President and General Kjell

Eugenio Laugerud García publicly celebrated the opening of INGUAT’s offices in

Guatemala City. Although I cannot verify the dictator’s intentions, the choice of this date, which marked the 485th anniversary of the Invasion’s first wave, reverberates with an intuitive and terrifying logic, one that appears to ask and answer its own question: Why would leisure travel to and from Guatemala be irrevocably deterred by imperial and colonial bloodlust when this travel has long depended upon and enacted the same? In effect, Laugerud García was honoring the “New World” geocorpographies shaping wartime violence in Guatemala, including the havens and refuges from this violence, such as Antigua.31 While “history as catastrophe” destroyed the lives of so many marginalized people in the country, INGUAT was charged with the development of tourism and the bulwarks thereof, some of which had been founded and garrisoned in the sixteenth century;

I return to this topic in Chapter Three. That is, this event captures the precise functions of the dialectic of trauma as a dynamic, geopolitical, economic, and somatic process, one extending and exploiting the coloniality of power as an established topology and matrix.

By 1978, INGUAT was an official line item in the national budget, which was drafted and overseen by military dictators, officials, and generals (Way 2012).

Shortly thereafter, INGUAT implemented a series of tourism campaigns, which portrayed Guatemala as an “idyllic, colorful, and friendly” paradise with a particular fondness for “the Maya” and “their fascinating and mysterious way of life” (Burtner 2004,

134). By capitalizing on imperialist nostalgia as a longstanding enterprise and affect,

INGUAT tried to lure more travelers to tourism centers (e.g., Antigua). Thus, INGUAT deliberately downplayed and obscured the war. In a grotesque caricature of reality, tourism

105 brochures were decorated with pictures of smiling brown-skinned men, women, and children, all dressed in the colorful and handwoven clothing attributed to Maya peoples, colloquially known as “traje” (Burtner 2004).

In particular, the social figure and force of what Nelson (1999) terms the “Mujer

Maya/Maya Woman” was fixed as a travel commodity and lure (Devine 2016). A powerful mythological seduction, this figure continues to be depicted as a beckoning, attractive, and light brown-skinned woman, whose (alleged) indigeneity, nationality, and gender is further signaled by the traje she wears.32 I return to this discussion in Chapter Four, where I argue that this figure is used to re-enact and commodify the Invasion as a travel fantasy and desire, fomenting the ideology that colonized peoples welcome imperial wanderlust, profiteering, and assistance. Given the above noted increase in foreign travel/revenue, these tactics appear to have worked. As “the national conflict escalated and international awareness of the situation grew during the late 1970s” (Burtner 2004, 126), leisure travelers were visiting Guatemala in increasing numbers.

Concurrent with their fantastical commodification as objects of travel desire and melancholic curiosity, “the Maya” were targeted by the military dictatorship for imprisonment, assault, de facto enslavement, and murder, much as they had been during the advent of the CNT. Indeed, INGUAT became an official bureau in the midst of these already-occurring behaviors, practices, and regimes. To reiterate, the pursuit of imperial pleasure in Guatemala has continuously relied upon the fraught and simultaneous co- existence of the catastrophic and the propitious, timescapes that install and maintain modernity/civilization as an unfolding and targeted project of material and psycho- affective loss, wounding, and death (slow or otherwise). As the remainder of this

106 dissertation advances, these spatiotemporal and cultural requisites of leisure, “scientific” knowledge production, and consumption make the popular, well-funded, and ethnographic study of violence a hegemonic project, at best. As such, this study must account for, and reckon with, the filaments of power thus far outlined (i.e., coloniality). Crucially, as the body transmits modernity’s necropolitical limits and registers, these ranked timescapes travel. The “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 1987, 67) capacitate the dialectic of trauma as a mobile, transportable, and individualized force field.

Admittedly, by focusing on the rise of INGUAT to trace these arguments, I run the risk of rendering the agency a central “villain” in the “tale” of my dissertation. INGUAT, which is comprised of a multitude of stakeholders and agendas, by no means controls the totality of “life” in the country. As geographer Jennifer Devine (2016, 3) suggests,

Guatemala’s tourism industry is “not simply a site of neo-colonial power relations, but is also a political space for forging community solidarity, historical memory and alternative futures.” For example, as Little (2004) shows, this industry allows some Maya womxn to secure gainful employment and participate in the civic sphere because the “Mujer Maya” is one of its central draws.33 These arguments mirror those made by Nelson (1999, 28–31), who understands the Guatemalan “state” as a politically repressive and hopeful apparatus, one that can be utilized by marginalized people to win gains—albeit in “the colonizer’s own terms,” to borrow from Pratt (1992, 7). That is, in my mind, “neo-colonial power relations” make these efforts, these apparatuses, and these politics necessary. Viewed through an abolitionary analytic lens, the above arguments muddy the waters by making it seem as if these ultimately lethal “relations” can be redeemed (see also Coulthard 2014).

Part of the work I undertake here is to illustrate how coloniality makes such a redemption

107 impossible, a label and viewpoint typically applied to the work of abolition (Abolition

Collective 2017).

Thus, INGUAT is not so much the antagonist of my “story” as are the social fields of force (Roseberry 1998) generated by the global coloniality of power. The discussion to follow captures the responsive nature of these fields and thus the reason for my focus.

Initially, INGUAT’s existence hung in precarious balance—the bureau was understaffed, undersupplied, and very circumspect about its activities (Burtner 2004). Necessitating these humble beginnings was the fact that the dictatorship and the oligarchy had a difference of opinion concerning the role of tourism in national political economy (Castañeda and

Burtner 2010). In general, the oligarchy and dictatorship worked together, especially concerning the mutually beneficial accumulation of capital/power (Dosal 1995; Handy

1984; Solano 2013). Tourism development was an area where the interests of these stakeholders had diverged. Agro-export remained of primary import to the oligarchy, even though the Civil War had direly affected the planting, harvest, and sale of agricultural goods. Maya peoples and other laborers were actively fleeing their homes, fields, and places of employ to escape wartime atrocities (Burtner 2004). Conversely, the dictatorship sought to diversify its grasp upon the means and modes of capitalist exploitation (Way

2012), as further evidenced by INGUAT’s creation. However, given the oligarchy’s political reach and influence, INGUAT’s continuance remained in delicate question.

In addition, the Civil War, which had once so strangely enabled INGUAT, was taking its toll on the burgeoning tourism industry (Burtner 2004). Succeeding Laugerud

García, the consecutive military dictatorships of Generals Fernando Romeo Lucas García

(1978–1982) and Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–1983) undertook a series of devastating

108 scorched earth campaigns. In the name of preserving capitalist “civilization” via the total annihilation of “communist insurgents,” these campaigns explicitly targeted Maya peoples, cultures, and lands (Handy 1984). As is well known, the allies, administration, and evangelical following of former US President Ronald Reagan helped to fund these efforts

(Handy 1984). Disturbingly, the civilizing mission was evolving, reflecting the ever- expanding promises of modernity/coloniality as geocultural projects and standards. The terror and death wrought by these crusades incited a near collapse of Guatemala’s tourism sector, as chaos and violence engulfed the country (Burtner 2004). Seemingly, the dialectic of trauma had reached its limits. Modernity’s violent “elaboration of loss” (Moraña,

Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 3)—the homicidal/suicidal cultivation and preservation of imperial white capital/power in Guatemala—appeared to be foreclosing its own terrains of possibility. However, in terms of just “who” could escape, navigate, avoid, or wait out the escalating and murderous rampages of coloniality, this dialectic was still very much in play.

The soaring violence of the Civil War initiated an associated, transnational, and white flight. Social and “hard” scientists, sightseers, missionaries, and others from the

Global North began to leave Guatemala, taking their capital with them (Burtner 2004).

Select members of the oligarchy, dictators, and other affluent nationals likewise departed

(Martínez Salazar 2014). By 1984, only 200,000 tourists visited the country, representing a 60% decrease in foreign revenue (Devine 2016, 14). Almost three decades after the eruption of civil war, leisure travelers were finally avoiding Guatemala. However, as these figures highlight, even during the terrible height of the war’s violence, some tourists still visited the country, a topic to which I return shortly. Be that as it may, this “flight” captures how the dialectic of trauma travels via imperial and colonial geocorpographies. In addition

109 to carving out “spaces of death” (Taussig 1987), this dialectic can facilitate safe passage and sanctuary for “the benefit of a small European minority—and, above all, of its ruling classes” (Quijano 2007, 168). Enshrouding white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism as embodied logics of rule, freedom, and mobility, this “protection” structures, buttresses, and orders the world system. Indeed, as I have argued thus far, this lethal and tyrannical conservation of power is one of the most troubling legacies of the Invasion.

In the face of the above evacuation of imperial white power/capital, “both part and fulltime participants in the formal and informal sector of the tourism industry began to quietly […] withdraw, transferring their time and resources to other survival and profit- oriented activities” (Burtner 2004, 105). INGUAT was thus on the verge of “quietly” disappearing when the agency was suddenly and emphatically transformed “into a theater of national identity formation and international relations” (Devine 2016, 3). In particular, two key occurrences spurred INGUAT’s transformative politicization and its resulting organizational solidification.

The first was a worldwide boycott of Guatemalan tourism, spearheaded in 1979 by the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF) and affiliates. Lasting until around 1986, this boycott thrust INGUAT into the global spotlight by charging the industry with the covering-up and funding of genocide.34 The boycott’s organizers sought to raise international awareness about the Civil War, including the role of the US therein, in a bid to bring about its end (Burtner 2004). They also wanted to derail a tourism sector thriving upon the commodification of the “same colorfully-dressed Mayan Indians the government massacres on a daily basis” (Guatemalan News and Information Bureau 1980, quoted in

Burtner 2004, 142). The boycott thus “took travel and tourism out of the realms of pleasure,

110 education and elite consumer privilege and right and placed it within the highly polarized political and moral debates of social responsibility […] and international solidarity”

(Burtner 2004, 130). Due to the broad publicity and alliances fostered by the boycott, it served as a catalyst for the development of worldwide networks and movements dedicated to the cessation of wartime atrocities in Guatemala (Burtner 2004).

The second occurrence was a series of travel warnings issued by the US State

Department in 1981 that cautioned US nationals against visiting Guatemala due to the war.

These warnings were triggered by the bombings of a tourist hotel in Panajachel, a telephone office in Antigua, an Eastern Airlines flight, and a Guatemalan airline office; presumably, guerilla forces carried out these bombings (Castañeda and Burtner 2010). Further sensationalized by the State Department as “attacks from well organized communist insurgents” and “terrorists” (Castañeda and Burtner 2010, 8–9), these advisories dealt an almost mortal blow to the tourism industry (Burtner 2004).35 Specifically, the industry was brought to heel for its failure to protect the imperial capital/power it so voraciously fed upon. This failure was marked by the unfolding vulnerability of seemingly impenetrable colonial fortresses (e.g., Antigua), as well as modes of imperial transport (e.g., airplanes).

Prior to these particular bombings, the US State Department had not issued any travel warnings because of the Civil War (Castañeda and Burtner 2010).

Together, these disparate events incited an important evolution and consequence— the localized fields of force, within which INGUAT was decidedly waning, took on a distinctly transnational momentum and scope. The international public relations nightmare left in the wake of this expansion briefly united the oligarchy and dictatorship around

INGUAT’s political utility, thereby resuscitating an otherwise dying organization. That

111 said, INGUAT would not be made a national priority until its first director and member of the oligarchy, Álvaro Enrique Arzú Yrigoyen, was elected President of Guatemala in

1996.36 At this point in time, tourism was starting to outpace coffee as the country’s top earner, motivating the oligarchy to embrace the centralization and development of a national tourism sector (Castañeda and Burtner 2010).37

In an effort to undermine the boycott and advisories, Arzú Yrigoyen and other

INGUAT representatives networked and met with various global agencies, such as

Amnesty International. In addition to denying any instances of genocidal violence,

INGUAT argued that the boycott and advisories were acts of imperial aggression and hypocrisy, especially given the US’s track record in human rights violations (Castañeda and Burtner 2010). Concurrently, INGUAT launched a US $1.5 million promotional campaign (Burtner 2004). Relying upon tested ethno-tourism tropes, such as the “Mujer

Maya,” this campaign tried to redefine Guatemala as “safe, relatively peaceful, and home to happy and friendly indigenous people” (Devine 2016, 6). Although these combined attempts failed, with many travelers markedly avoiding Guatemala, they established

INGUAT as a public relations arm (and army) of the government (Burtner 2004). INGUAT was gifted with its enduring mission, which was to further the accumulation of transnational capital and power, undeterred by the targeted losses, wound-ings, and catastrophes of “history.” Currently, INGUAT houses “over 300 employees charged with designing and implementing sophisticated marketing campaigns, coordinating industry development with state ministries and hosting prestigious international dignitaries”

(Devine 2016, 6). These employees are primarily affluent Ladinos, and the country’s

112 president determines its executive management team (Devine 2016). In the end, INGUAT was not dented by the boycott and advisories, a point to which I will return.

However, the primary reason that INGUAT’s tactics failed during this time is quite interesting, given their previous (and current) efficacy. The IUF Boycott, the US State

Department travel advisories, and “the onslaught of negative international news coverage had helped to change the very meaning behind the act of travelling to Guatemala” (Burtner

2004, 147). INGUAT—and thus the dictatorship and oligarchy—had not yet caught onto these changes. In the face of mounting awareness and condemnation of the Civil War,

Guatemala’s standing as an enriching paradise for Europeans and Euro-Americans was revoked, especially for ethno-tourism/research. Due to the devastating reach of the war, it had become nearly impossible to fantastically imagine, investigate, commodify, and pursue an untouched Other in Guatemala. Concurrently, a new type of traveler was starting to fill the void left by its ethno-touristic predecessors. Mirroring the “post-modern” trends outlined in Chapter One, this “new” subject sought to witness and document political violence, pain, and other traumas as part of an “engaged” academic and social justice praxis, in addition to marking “authentic” travel experiences.38 As the Civil War, boycott, and resulting bad press had reconfigured Guatemala as a “forbidden” tourism landscape, this witnessing and documentation were considered the only “acceptable” forms of intranational leisure travel.

As Burtner (2004, 136) further notes:

Within the politically charged environment of Guatemala during the 1970s and 1980s, many non-nationals who spent time in Guatemala were quick to clarify that they were not tourists who had come, paid a fee, and were being led about the country for the purposes of seeing monuments, towns, and local populations for entertainment […]. Rather many identified themselves as travelers who were there as part of a longer, broader journey, the stated

113

goals of which transcended or had little to do with pleasure seeking. Many of these individuals explained that they were in the country in order to study, work, volunteer, or take part in political and solidarity related activities-but not to tour, and certainly not as tourists.

I refer to these “new” traveling subjects as anti-tourists in a bid to capture the above noted identifications. Burtner (2004) points out that many of these anti-tourists, who were from

North America and Europe, located themselves within the discipline of cultural anthropology. They framed their travels as emergently necessary to challenge attempts to erase wartime atrocities, such as those undertaken by the government and INGUAT

(Burtner 2004). A new pathos thus gripped the conduct and business of international travel, fueled by the pursuit of trauma as a particular kind of sign, fetish, and object: Truth.

The below admission from Nelson (1999, 52), who began her travels in Guatemala as a journalist, solidarity activist, and social scientist in the mid-1980s (i.e., the timeframe in question), captures the general tone of these ontoepistemological shifts:

As solidary researchers, activists, or anthropologists, we like to believe that we are obviously different from the other kinds of gringos, such as the military advisors, embassy people, journalists (seen as trafficking in the same information without the commitment […]), and especially the dreaded tourist.

This quote describes and owns up to the representational acrobatics executed by many anthropologists during the “post-modern turn.” As I argued in Chapter One, such acrobatics worked to justify the discipline’s existence and privilege the travel of social scientists as

“fieldwork” (instead of tourism). Given the transnational happenings noted above, these semiotic maneuvers carried particular weight in Guatemala. Nelson and peers were not engaging in the travel behaviors that the IUF Boycott had globally called out and signified as harmful, apolitical, and problematic. Unlike “other kinds of gringos,” “especially the dreaded tourist,” Nelson and company were “committed” white people: “solidary

114 researchers, activists, or anthropologists” dedicated to social justice. Indeed, throughout her canonical work, Nelson insists that this dedication motivates her investigations of

“wounded” body politics and “catastrophes” in Guatemala, investigations she describes as ethnographic in their nature and scope. That is, despite her ready candor, Nelson ultimately invokes her research praxis and philosophy to distinguish her travels from those of “the dreaded tourist.” As part of mitigating the harm caused by “other kinds of gringos,” Nelson traffics and trades in Truth and Justice.

These delusions of grandeur allow Nelson to make the following statement, which reflects the troubling and positional blindness provoked by the global coloniality of power.

Nelson (1999, 53) claims that, when she initiated her fieldwork in 1985, “I was one of the only white people around and Guatemalans would thank me for interviewing them.” I do not question whether or not “Guatemalans” were thankful to be interviewed by Nelson, although, in the next chapter, I document how such imperial imaginings inform the recalibrated civilizing mission. For now, I wish to flag some of the reasons why this claim is so deeply disturbing.

To be blunt, Nelson was in the country because she wanted to be. Unlike many of the “Guatemalans” she wrote about, Nelson’s race, class, gender identity, nationality, ability, and professional affiliations granted her a direct, profound, and unique choice in the matter. Surrounded by Indigenous and Ladino peoples, who were engaged in the life- and-death work of struggle, resistance, and survival, Nelson wants her readers to know that she was the “exceptional” person in the room. The fact that Nelson believes her presence in Guatemala to be remarkable betrays a macabre excitement or titillation, one unmasking

115 the fantasies of discovery, conquest, and rescue that continue to embolden “anthropological fieldwork” as an imperial mission, philosophy, and benefit.

As I have shown, the expanding violence of the Civil War, as well as mounting global awareness of its devastation, incited a transnational white flight from Guatemala.

Consequently, the dialectic of trauma was dramatically contracted as a national process.

Nonetheless, as evidenced by the presence of Nelson, likeminded “gringos,” and around

200,000 other leisure travelers, this dialectic persisted. Carving out a small space of geopolitical mobility and privilege in the midst of “catastrophe,” this dialectic enabled

Nelson to pursue “urgent” business, indeed: it allowed her to secure tenure in one of the most enduring bastions of Euro-American world power and capital, the academy.39 Nelson and company were able to initiate and advance their careers because their research subjects were marked for death (slow or otherwise). As is her wont, Nelson (1999, xi) openly laments these parasitic relationships, which she explicitly terms the “vampirism of transnational research.” However, the inevitability of this bloodletting does not deter

Nelson from her “just” and “righteous” cause, which ultimately lands her a prestigious and coveted position at Duke University. In the end, Guatemala’s “catastrophic” history proved to be quite beneficial for Nelson, much as it had for her anthropological forefathers.

By illustrating its shifting and contiguous presence in Guatemala, I am not arguing that the dialectic of trauma perennially guarantees the safety of leisure travelers and other power brokers from the Global North. As I show in Chapter Three, white womxn from the

US can be marked for sexual assault in Guatemala because their gender identity and nationality render them vulnerable proxy targets for attacks against Empire. However, as I also demonstrate in this chapter, sociojuridical responses to such attacks tend to be swift

116 and severe because they are considered insurgent strikes against imperial white cisheteropatriarchy. The analytic utility of this dialectic lies in the fact that the microphysics of embodiment determine its legible terms and parameters in concert with the ebbs and flows of world power. These physics authorize, and depend upon, the classification and ranking of all nations, peoples, and lifeforms in terms of their expendability (i.e., imperial and colonial geocorpographies). As the coloniality of power continues to mediate and incentivize the necropolitical organization of the known world,

“history as catastrophe” will always favor some nations, peoples, and lifeforms at a lethal cost to others. This mediation and incentivization make it impossible to claim immunity or exemption from the lures and pulls of power precisely because the latter remains a technology, strategy, economy, and cosmology of imperial and colonial rule.

Further, as I documented in Chapter One, the suffering and trauma left in the wake of this rule became the ideological means to a “post-modern” end, ultimately revitalizing and resignifying anthropological Truth. The discipline was given “new” life as an arbitrator and maven of social/epistemic justice despite the calls from insurgent activists and scholars for its irrevocable destruction. By helping to empower and demarcate an elitist vanguard of both the social sciences and the tourism industry (i.e., the rise of the anti-tourist), this resurrection also significantly affected Guatemala’s position in the world system. In the name of international solidarity, equity, accountability, and peace, “Guatemala” became a prime destination for this vanguard to visit, tour, and study. Motivated by a seemingly

“innocent yearning” (Rosaldo 1989, 108), this vanguard sought to help, rescue, and ultimately preserve the lost object of its professional, personal, and imperialist melancholia—the abject Other. These “new” travel desires and designs would be especially

117 popular in Guatemala because the IUF, the US State Department, and “solidary researchers, activists, or anthropologists” had essentially barred “the dreaded tourist” from the country.

Therefore, in the face of its (alleged) prohibition, the conduct and business of international leisure travel was re-legitimized in the country, broadening the dialectic of trauma at the national level. Modernity’s (and thus coloniality’s) targeted and intrinsic elaboration of loss was further entrenched as political violence and pain became the

“proper” objects of imperial zealotry, wanderlust, and consumption. Certainly, these

“humanitarian” drives reflected an increasing awareness about the world’s cataclysmic problems; this awareness directly influenced the pursuit and praxis of leisure, in addition to the geopolitics of knowledge production. For example, business scholar L. J. D’Amore

(1988) famously argued that the interchanges fostered by international tourism were a

“force for world peace,” spawning a whole school of thought dedicated to this purpose and cause (see Blanchard and Higgins-Desbiolles 2013). Nonetheless, this dogma of travel found especially fertile ground in Guatemala due to the sociohistorical factors I have painstakingly outlined in this chapter.

After the fraught and “democratic” election of Vinicio Cerezo in 1986, the presence of the anti-tourist vanguard (and thus the dialectic of trauma) became even more pronounced in Guatemala. In response to international outcry and pressure, Cerezo was the first civilian to hold the office of presidency since the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954.

However, behind the scenes of this political theater and subterfuge, military and other

“security” forces continued to wage genocidal/ecocidal war against Maya peoples and lands (Grandin 2013). Nonetheless, in the face of Guatemala’s ostensible return to democracy, international solidarity organizations and networks relaxed their assorted

118 campaigns, causing “the formal and informal effects of the tourism boycott to reside”

(Burtner 2004, 171). The US State Department likewise relaxed its indictments against the country’s travel industry as Antigua and other colonial strongholds and regional tourism centers resumed their fortress-like impenetrability. A successful public relations strategy and stunt, Cerezo’s election had loosened the political and economic stranglehold placed upon Guatemala’s ruling class by an outraged international community.

The effect of these changes on the national tourism industry was immediate and dramatic. In 1986, foreign travel and revenue increased by 14% in Guatemala, rising another 23% by 1987 (Burtner 2004, 171). Facilitating and legitimizing the intranational restoration of the dialectic of trauma, Cerezo’s election marked the return of imperial white power/capital to Guatemala. Despite the fact that civil war continued to rage, leisure travelers from the Global North rapidly resumed their various sojourns to the country.

Indeed, the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 publicly marked the war’s official and juridical end, an event presided over by the then-president, former head of INGUAT, and virtuoso of the silver-tongue, Arzú Yrigoyen. As noted in the introduction, these accords likewise enacted a specious spectacle of “post-war” democracy, stability, and equity.

Imperial and colonial geocorpographies ensure that “war continues in Guatemala today, even though it is a war called peace” (Green 1999, 172).

However, following the “post-modern” trends described above, the melancholic drives of imperial capital/power had evolved, especially concerning the Other as a

“historical” figure and standard. Where once the Other and Its deficits were held up as perfectly preserved artifacts of “pre-modern” time and space, “now” these relics of imperialist whimsy were considered shot through by the targeted losses and wound-ings of

119 modernity. As an act of “humanitarian” assistance and coaching, international leisure travel was posed as a solution to these spatiotemporal violences and quandaries. Human rights workers, missionaries, cultural and forensic anthropologists, sightseers, and other travelers from the Global North began to flood Guatemala, in particular the central and western highlands (Burtner 2004, 22). Brimming with intentions to help “the Maya,” these travelers wanted to address the deleterious impacts of war upon Indigenous communities via research, solidarity tourism, evangelism, and development initiatives (Barrera Nuñez

2009). Embracing the tone set by the IUF Boycott and “post-modern” social scientists, these stakeholders rebuked the label of “tourist”; instead, they were activists, students, scholars, volunteers, and/or members of a global civil society (Barrera Nuñez 2009;

Burtner 2004). Invoking a “peculiar sense of mission” (Rosaldo 1989, 108), these travelers transformed themselves into globetrotting ambassadors of peace, justice, and goodwill, thereby conceptually fixing an imagined Other within the geocultural folds of

“catastrophe.”

The below example helps to illustrate the nuances of this transformation and fixation. Drawing from his fieldwork in Todos Santos, Barrera Nuñez (2009, 114) contends that, in “post-war” Guatemala, travelers from the Global North actively seek out and fetishize “the Mayas” as

objects of social reconstruction, recipients of charity, subjects of ideological conversion through human rights advocacy, […] objects of social research (primarily on topics involving violence), and subjects of all kinds of humanitarian intervention to “better” the life of the Mayas.

In other words, like the ethno-tourists who came before them, these travelers seek to rescue and venerate the “very forms of life” (Rosaldo 1989, 107) threatened or harmed by their imperialist ascendency and nostalgia. However, by engaging in “altruistic” or “committed”

120 forms of leisure, these travelers are able to ideologically distance themselves from their

“terrible” predecessors and from their particular relationship to the malignancies of world power and capital.40 Barrera Nuñez (2009, 115) adds that these motivations result from the fact that “violence as an icon of Guatemala has become appealing to foreigners, and academic scholarship has contributed to the lure.” As I have shown, this “iconic” rendering was minted by the “solidary researchers, activists, or anthropologists” infiltrating

Guatemala in the early 1980s, who beatified their presence in the country during wartime.

In so doing, these travelers cleaved a chimerical caesura between themselves and the

“dreaded tourist,” establishing a semiotic regime for the demarcation of “appropriate,”

“authentic,” and “helpful” travel behaviors in Guatemala (as well as for professional advancement within a “post-modern” academy).

As I have endeavored to illustrate via my conception of the dialectic of trauma, these convenient and contrived distinctions elide a very important phenomenon and milieu, the likes of which capture the enduring and global coloniality of power. Pilgrims, supplicants, and crusaders from the Global North are able to travel the world, “helping” everyone they meet, precisely because their fantastical Others are denied this agency and capability. That is, these “humanitarian” travel practices and imaginaries return marginalized peoples to their “proper” time and place as subjects of imperial law, beneficence, cartography, and knowledge production—or, more precisely, of History,

Justice, and Truth. Crucially, this time travel hinges upon the mystification and commodification of trauma and other wound-ings as geocultural sites for the enactment of the above scripts and philosophies. An enduring icon of savagery and violence,

“Guatemala” remains a key location for the realization of imperialist fantasies of trespass

121 and rescue. Re-sculpting and re-fixing the hegemonic terrains of the “New World,” these fantasies continue to evolve as material and psycho-affective processes and artifacts. By refusing to seriously engage the “dreaded tourist” as an entry point for understanding this evolution vis-à-vis the “anthropologist,” the geocorpographic operations and objectives of

“history as catastrophe” are sorely overlooked and therefore revitalized.

INGUAT, however, appeared to fully grasp the financial and political implications of these shifting operations and objectives. The agency seemingly jumped at the chance to use these emerging leisure travel trends to help rebrand “Guatemala” as a peaceful, inclusive, and democratic country, thereby supporting the farce of Cerezo’s election.

Specifically, INGUAT began to adapt existing tourism packages and practices to reflect

[…] what would soon become known within the literature and industry as “New Tourism” for the “New Tourist,” the international tourism industry’s response to the recent growing consumer consciousness about the world’s social and environmental problems (Burtner 2004, 500).

In the name of “post-war” reconstruction and reconciliation, INGUAT billed itself as the arbitrator and guarantor of “highly localized, low-impact, ‘soft-foot,’ ethno- and eco- tourism projects which focused on archaeological restoration, cultural revitalization, and environmental conservation and preservation” (Burtner 2004, 501). These efforts were quite successful. By accurately responding to the fluctuating impulses of imperial capital/power, INGUAT became the face of the country’s tourism industry, one that was dominated by a transnational ruling class and, during the timeframe in question, a de facto military dictatorship. INGUAT emerged as the administrative nexus of a new field of force that, by controlling Guatemala’s most profitable industry, continues to play a central role in the organization of contemporary subjectivities. If a given person wants an above-board job in the tourism industry—one of the only ways to earn anything resembling a living

122 wage in Guatemala’s licit economy—they must play by INGUAT’s rules. I return to this topic throughout as part of elucidating “the political economy of trauma,” borrowing from anthropologist Erica Caple James (2010, 25) and her work in Haiti.

In the end, the changing zeitgeist of imperial curiosity and pleasure, as well as the intranational restoration of the dialectic of trauma, enabled INGUAT’s rise. In this way, the nationalization of Guatemala’s tourism industry was accomplished vis-à-vis an active war. Of course, INGUAT played a direct role in ensuring this ascension. In particular,

INGUAT created, maintained, and promoted an entire world for the “new” visitor or anti- tourist, one that capitalized upon the enduring geocorpographic distribution of power (i.e., coloniality). Dubbing this timescape “El Mundo Maya/the Maya World,” INGUAT linked different sites, attractions, and experiences for travelers via an easily accessible and identifiable route. A tongue-in-cheek response to the racialized and gendered optics of imperial capital/power in Guatemala, this route continues to be known as the Gringo Trail

(Burtner 2004). As part of ensuring “ethical” forms of touristic engagement and exploration, “El Mundo Maya” ostensibly centered the preservation and protection of

Indigenous cultures, languages, and lands (Burtner 2004; Devine 2017). In addition, its then-burgeoning infrastructure—hotels, restaurants, archeological parks, dedicated policing forces, transportation systems, etc.—promised a certain level of comfort and safety for travelers, even during wartime. Ironically, any Maya peoples standing in the way of the installment of this “world’s” carefully curated borders were violently displaced

(Devine 2017). Moreover, beyond the field of view afforded by these borders, impoverished Maya and Ladino peoples continued to fiercely negotiate the Civil War as a lived necropolitical reality.

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Certainly, INGUAT had guidance and instruction when it came to the creation of these timescapes. In 1989, National Geographic showcased the lowlands of Guatemala and

Belize, in addition to the Yucatán Peninsula in México, famously hailing and reconfiguring these regions as “The Maya World” (Devine 2016). In a series of stunning exposés that I avidly consumed as a child, National Geographic depicted the beauty and magnificence of

Maya city-states, such as Tikal. Against the thick veil of a vivid green jungle, the fantastical spires, pyramids, and stelae of these sites were exquisitely photographed. In their scope and form, these efforts mirrored the expedition style of ethnographic documentation that, some fifty years earlier, had inspired the scripting and filming of the Tarzan movies in

Guatemala (Munro 2014). This style sparked my own longing to be one of the archeologists depicted by the magazine, who I thought were so lucky and blessed to be able to excavate the mysterious temples littering El Petén. Who knew what wondrous creatures lived amongst these ruins, just waiting to be discovered by archeologists and thus spoken into imperial be-ing?

I was too young to understand that, as National Geographic catalogued these treasures, their rightful inheritors, caretakers, and wards were being killed in a civil war.

As a hardened activist and scholar, I now know that the “real” stories of most texts and photographs are the ones not being pursued or told, “that what appears to be invisible or in the shadows is announcing itself” (Gordon 1997, 15), shattering Truth like so much glass, with a piercing and deafening cry. A startling example of necropolitics-in-action, National

Geographic’s “Maya World” grotesquely eclipsed and romanticized the enduring violences of imperial and colonial geocorpographies. These violences allowed photographers, journalists, and other stakeholders from National Geographic to safely

124 enter and leave Guatemala during an active war, one occurring just outside the magazine’s frame of reference. My theorization of the dialectic of trauma is an attempt to wrap my head around the “how” and “why” of such maneuvers in the hope of illuminating the shadowy workings of the global coloniality of power.

INGUAT later co-opted the sensational, profitable, and topographical lexicon developed by National Geographic—a lexicon that reflected a longstanding tradition of

European homicidal/suicidal ideation and world hegemony—to segue “into a multi-billion dollar Central American marketing campaign and tourism industry” (Devine 2016, 6).

Picking up where Ubico left off, INGUAT worked with venture capitalists from the Global

North as well as governmental leaders and tourism bureaus throughout Central America, to brand the entire Isthmus “El Mundo Maya” (Devine 2017). Reviving established forms of ethno-touristic exploitation in “post-war” Guatemala, “Maya Fever” infected the Global

North once again. In 1993, Guatemala’s tourism industry earned around US $265 million, a 9% increase from the previous year (Burtner 2004, 524). To reiterate, this renaissance in international leisure travel occurred alongside the still-active Civil War. In Chapter Four,

I further detail the ideological geographies of “El Mundo Maya,” in regard to these troubling socioeconomic processes. Suffice it to say, this “world” heralded a troubling reconfiguration of capital/power in Guatemala, one that ultimately enacted a modern

Reconquista/Reconquest via the business and conduct of leisure travel.

2.4 Conclusion: The Invasion as an Enduring Geocultural Project and Matrix

In 1995, in the hopes of singling out Guatemala’s unique place in “El Mundo

Maya,” INGUAT contracted a Spanish marketing and public relations expert (Devine

2016). As part of advertising the country’s primacy within this “world,” as well as the

125 government’s supposedly tolerant attitude toward Indigenous people, the trope of the

“Mujer Maya” returned with a vengeance. With her beckoning smile and carefree attitude, the “Mujer Maya” was seemingly unaware that civil war was raging around her. This figure was depicted as friendly and easy-going, untouched by the daily concerns of life and living, and much less by the ethno-femicide shaping quotidian governance in the Isthmus since the Invasion. As Devine (2016, 9) further notes:

These representational practices from the 1990s defined indigenous identity as non-threatening precisely at the time that Pan Maya rights activists were demanding equality in all aspects of society and former indigenous revolutionaries were fighting to implement the terms of peace.

In other words, as it had since its inception, INGUAT utilized the “Mujer Maya” as a strategy to wage imperial and colonial warfare on the front of global public relations.

However, unlike her deployment during the IUF Boycott, the “Mujer Maya” successfully secured the attention and capital of international travelers in the 1990s

(Burtner 2004; Nelson 1999). Further, this figure continues to draw tourists to contemporary Guatemala (Devine 2016). Ultimately, the enduring allure of this figure was not solely established by INGUAT’s transnational maneuverings and conspiracies. In effect, the rise of “new” tourism transmuted the “Mujer Maya” into a geocultural site for the articulation of all sorts of imperialist romances and melancholies. Nonetheless, the bulk of these desires centered on “helping” this figure—and Indigenous people, more generally—via research, development, tourism, and religious initiatives, the majority of which were based in the Global North.

As I have insisted throughout this chapter, these initiatives effectively reinstalled imperial white power and capital as ontoepistemological orientations in “post-war”

Guatemala, thereby keeping coloniality intact as a logic, economy, and philosophy of

126 governance. An artifact of “post-modern” yearning, the “Mujer Maya” remains a powerful anti-tourism draw because she advertises “Guatemala” as a place to experience “history as catastrophe,” but from the geocultural remove cleaved by the dialectic of trauma. This figure transforms travelers from the Global North into civilizing saints, ideologically enshrining their ability to traverse the world and “rescue” her from the exact violences empowering this travel (e.g., white supremacy, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy). These practices and imaginaries extend the Invasion as a conceptual project and terrain by exploiting the hierarchical organization of all lifeforms in terms of their expendability.

Currently, this exploitation hides itself via the commodification of trauma and other wound-ings as signs, fetishes, and objects of Truth, History, and Justice, further delineating the reconfiguration of imperialist desire as anti-tourism. In so doing, such exploitation holds itself up as the enemy of “the dreaded tourist,” even though it likewise depends upon the necropolitical incentivization of the “New World.” In the next two chapters, I continue to advance these arguments, but with a caveat: I do not challenge how research, development, tourism, and religious initiatives make life more “livable” for their target populations; nor do I question how marginalized peoples utilize these initiatives to survive and thrive. Instead, my goal is to set the terms for abolishing the structural violence necessitating these maneuvers and responses.

The below example further elucidates these troubling interdependencies. Another result of INGUAT’s collaboration with its Spanish partners was the “post-war” parsing of

Guatemala into “seven territorially demarcated regions saturated with racial meaning,” with the “aim of spatially disaggregating Guatemala’s tourism activities” (Devine 2016,

9). These demarcations are as follows: “Adventure in the Maya World (Northern

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Guatemala),” “The Living Indigenous Highlands (the Central and Western highlands),” “A

Natural Paradise (North Central Guatemala),” “A Different Caribbean (Eastern

Guatemala),” “The Pacific Coast (Southwestern Guatemala),” “A Guatemala to Discover

(Southeastern Guatemala),” and “Guatemala Modern & Colonial (South Central

Guatemala).” As Devine (2016, 25) observes, this remapping “illuminates how mundane practices of tourism development infuse territory with racial identity, ideas of antiquity and modernity, as well as notions of racialized belonging.” I add that these practices would be meaningless, falling upon deaf ears, without the continued support of the Invasion as a matrix for the necrotic classification of contemporary “life.” This classification includes the naturalization of these perennially lethal operations via the “vampirism of transnational research” (Nelson 1999, xi).

In other words, INGUAT and its Spanish conspirators did not just magically conjure these divisions from thin air. They drew them from an evolving and established regime of embodiment, perception, and “history” that had been installed by the global coloniality of power. In particular, these divisions capture the Invasion as a lingering fantasy and economy that transmutes imperial wanderlust, profiteering, and nostalgia into acts of assistance and rescue, figured in the contemporary moment as “anti-tourism.” By embracing and responding to these “new” forms and expressions of imperial leisure and pleasure, INGUAT effectively revitalized the national tourism industry during an active war. For instance, Antigua, the focus of the next chapter, is located in the “Modern &

Colonial” zone. Given the arguments I have made thus far, it should be of no great surprise that most of my research participants were based in “The Living Indigenous Highlands.”

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By the early 2000s, INGUAT and its transnational investors “concluded that if

Central America is the ‘Maya World,’ then Guatemala is the heart of it” (Devine 2016, 6).

The slogan, “Guatemala, Corazón del Maya Mundo/Heart of the Maya World” is currently emblazed on tourism brochures, billboards, and every other form of tourist media in the country. By offering up this “heart” to leisure travelers, INGUAT seemed to take a page from the book of Bartolomé de Las Casas, in terms of intimately apprehending the homicidal/suicidal impulses of imperial capital and power. The agency understood that nothing less than this bloody organ would do for many travelers from the Global North, who wished to figuratively consume “Mundo Maya”—in part, to outrun the existential angst provoked by their imperialist nostalgia, ennui, and culpability. In the next chapter, I engage in a similar act of unmasking by likewise fleshing out and territorializing the “real” cannibals who stalk and inhabit the world system.

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3 Chapter Three: Security Logics, Gender(ed) Violence, and the Recalibrated Civilizing Mission

In a bid to further illustrate how configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation extend the optics and tyrannies of the “New World,” this chapter more fully explores the recalibrated civilizing mission. As touched upon in Chapters One and Two, I argue that this mission persists as an ideological, somatic, and spatiotemporal flashpoint for the consolidation of imperial power/capital. To advance this argument, I illustrate how ranked and enfleshed conceptualizations of civility, savagery, and salvation continue to undergird global “life” and political economy. As I show, one example of these troubling and lingering processes is the scripting and enforcement of nation-state borders via the body, which directly determines one’s ability and capacity to safely traverse the world system.

Departing from most social science research conducted within and about Guatemala

(Becklake 2020; Little 2004), I center my analysis on the profitable, established, and

“modern” tourism center of Antigua. Engaging in another act of investigative time travel, my historical point of departure for this discussion is the “Central American Immigration

Crisis” (hereafter referred to as the “Immigration Crisis”), which hit its media-frenzied peak during the summer of 2014 (the timeframe of the fieldwork in question).

3.1 Leisure Travel, Sexual Violence, and World Power

“If Americans want to keep our children in prisons like animals, well, what happens to your women while they are in Guatemala is justice,” Juan—a Ladino man, licensed guia/tour guide, and activist—angrily declared.1 As he had done many times during that muggy summer of 2014, Juan found me on the regular bench I occupied in Antigua’s

130 central park (El Parque Central), one of the city’s most vibrant centers of tourism activity and commerce. My favorite interview and observation spot, this bench was directly across from the park’s most scandalous and renowned feature: a large fountain, with four intricately carved and topless mermaids, water pouring from their pendulous cement breasts. I had chosen this bench because it was a key gathering spot for leisure travelers and industry workers alike. These workers included shoe shiners, photographers, food and handicraft vendors, drug dealers, sex workers, and guias like Juan. In the wake of Juan’s remarks, this fountain suddenly appeared obscene to me, causing me desperately to wish that I had picked another location from which to engage and interview research participants.

Juan was referring to the news that had all of Antigua buzzing with speculation.2

The night before, a Guatemalan man had allegedly raped a white woman from the US, outside a “gringo” bar and with the help of two male accomplices.3 It was not clear from the initial gossip surrounding this event if the men identified as Maya, Ladino, or otherwise.

Nonetheless, a week later, many of the city’s full time-residents, who were largely Ladino,

European, or North American, insisted that those responsible “had” to be Maya gang members, working for drug cartels. In particular, well-off Ladinos declared that it was in the blood of Maya peoples to be violent. After all, some unabashedly explained, the Indians used to eat people before the Spanish came.

Juan was also responding to the issue that many Guatemalan nationals were deeply mourning that summer—the “Immigration Crisis.” Over 162,000 children from El

Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were risking their lives on the migrant trail to escape drug cartel violence, oligarchic impunity, economic imperialism, and systemic poverty

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(McQuade 2015). Some of these children died crossing Central American, Mexican, and

North American borders due to starvation, dehydration, exhaustion, and military/paramilitary violence. Those who survived and made it to the US were jailed in detention centers across Arizona, California, and Texas.4 At the time of this writing (2020), such genocidal practices continue. As Juan could not directly confront the powers forcing children to take flight on the migrant trail or keeping them in prisons, the rape of the tourist in question became an affective location or springboard, one enabling him to articulate his grief and rage. Juan argued that this rape was “justice,” given the horrifying imprisonment of children like “animals” and the long-standing role of US immigration law in the enforcement of eugenicist policies in Guatemala and around the world.5 The framing of these methods as “crises” occludes their quotidian nature, or the fact that “small wars and invisible genocides” are integral to modern governance, to borrow from Scheper-Hughes

(2002; 1992). Thus, in the end, Juan understood this rape as a proxy attack against the suicidal/homicidal mandates of Empire.

Anti-tourists from the Global North, who reported being in Guatemala to “help” migrants, Indigenous peoples, and the poor during this time of “crisis,” were also captivated by the above sexual assault. My research participants were primarily social scientists, humanitarian volunteers, and missionaries. During interviews, a majority condemned the survivor in question, arguing that she deserved what happened to her because she moved about the world in questionable ways. What, they asked, was a woman doing traveling in a country like Guatemala, without a boyfriend or husband? What was she doing at a bar? What was she thinking, staying out late, in the company of strange men?

These people are barely out of the cave, one research participant (a missionary) exclaimed.

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You know how American girls dress and act, another (a cultural geographer) observed. For these participants, the rape in question signaled an emergent need to “return” to the colonial gender system as a sociocorporeal standard (e.g., “traditional” gender roles and values), including the segregation of white women from “strange” peoples, places, and things.

Inevitably, their eyes fixed on me. A white woman from the US, also traveling alone, they assessed, confirmed, and catalogued my moral shortcomings. Reflexively, I glanced down at my pants and shirt: men’s clothing, large and bulky on my frame. I had purchased this clothing in a bid to avoid any unwanted attention while in Guatemala, an act that signaled my internalization of these troubling mores, as well as the global reality within which I lived.

Certainly, no one I spoke with could confirm these and other “details.” There was a decided lack of information about this assault, although many talked about it in mythological proportions in an attempt to legitimize imperialist capitalist interference, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy. To borrow from Taussig’s (1987, 3) work concerning European dominion in South America, accounts of this assault were epistemically “murky,” to say the least. As Taussig argues, epistemic murk occurs when no one can pinpoint the exact circumstances driving the terrors of daily life in colonized locations, precisely because paradox, abstraction, and confusion are compelling political tools. Epistemic murk thus enshrouds and gives meaning to the chaotic, violent, and nonsensical operations of Empire, generating what Taussig (1987, 3) calls the “real” or

“truth as a social being” (i.e., Truth). In particular, Taussig argues that the genesis of certain social figures was key to this operationalization of Truth.

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As I documented in Chapter Two, one such figure was the “cannibal” or “savage

Indian,” the creation of which resulted in “the inscription of a mythology in the Indian body, an engraving of civilization locked in struggle with wildness […]” (Taussig 1987,

23). As I further illustrated, in the name of subjugating, slaughtering, or “humanizing” this barbaric “New World” creature—one held to possess a particular and rapacious taste for white Europeans—the civilizing mission was born (Pratt 1992; A. Smith 2005; L. T. Smith

2012). A penultimate example of the weaponization of epistemic murk, I suggest that this mission persists as “the central myth that Europe has employed to misrepresent its depredations around the globe, starting with the Spanish conquests [sic] in the Americas”

(Alam 2004, 1). In this chapter, I argue that the civilizing mission continues to transmute, install, and frame white supremacy, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy as global markers of the enlightened, the decent, the proper, and the rational, i.e., the human and the genocidal/ecocidal cultivation thereof.

For example, as documented by the above responses, and to borrow from Puar

(2007) and Spivak (1999), select research participants held that savage brown men forever threatened and violated white women. Simultaneously, white womxn were blamed for any sexual violence they experienced due to their innate lack of morals; this “lack” was further evidenced by the audacity of their presence in Guatemala. As captured by Juan’s comments, white womxn were also held culpable for this violence because of their embodied relationship to the homicidal/suicidal imperatives of Empire (i.e., to world power and capital). Of course, this same relationship augured that some sort of political response and punishment would be forthcoming, given the threats posed by unruly bodies (Mintz

2007) to “civilization” or the tyrannical distribution of power/capital. Further capturing the

134 perceived imminence of these corporeal insurgencies (Pugliese 2013, 4) is the fact that involved participants never mentioned the ongoing ethno-femicide in Guatemala.6 As I argued in the previous chapter, such elisions, excesses, and artifacts are the “stuff” of which imperial and colonial geocorpographies are made. In an attempt to capture how these and other bodily mythologies continue to be zealously enforced, in a haunting echo and extension of their “New World” past, I have coined the term the recalibrated civilizing mission.

Juan seemed to likewise understand this mission as a powerful, prophetic, and contemporary force. He wryly noted:

Now, your country will issue a travel warning saying how dangerous Antigua is or something like that. I will not be able to feed my family because tourists will be too scared to come. Look, right now, your World Bank people are here working with us on tourism projects. Crazy! Look, you know and I know that America’s whole communication system would crash if they issued a warning every time a woman was raped there!

As Juan’s statement evinces, bodies are circumscribed by complicated, uncanny, and murky histories, which determine who “counts” as a be-ing worthy of respect, protection, and life. In this way, some violences are prioritized or rendered hypervisible, such as the rape of a white woman and US national in Guatemala, while others are strategically occluded (Casper and Moore 2009). As articulated by Juan, examples of such occlusions are systemic and gender-based violence in the US, the predatory lending practices of the

World Bank, and the “Immigration Crisis” as an unfolding colonial wound and trauma. To be clear, my attempt to contextualize Juan’s perspective is not meant to excuse his disturbing, sexist, and violent remarks. Rather, I hope to understand what such remarks reveal about how particular mythologies come to be inscribed upon particular bodies in a bid to rank, exploit, harm, or “civilize” the latter.

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As Juan predicted, on June 27, 2014, the United States Embassy Guatemala City and Department of State issued a “Security Message for U.S. Citizens: Sexual Assault.” In what follows, I draw from the murky logics that saturated and engendered this message in order to center the recalibrated civilizing mission as a contemporary problem and process.

I rely here on the discursive analysis of interview and observation sessions conducted with guias, vendors, tourism and policing officials, and anti-tourists from the Global North. The following section contextualizes this mission by highlighting Antigua’s unique role in global and national political economy. I argue that this positionality captures how the

“civilized” and the “savage” are configured as geocultural locations and embodied timescapes, and thus the peoples, places, and things targeted by the recalibrated civilizing mission. To further illustrate these social figures and legends, I detail the responses of research participants to the “Immigration Crisis.” I also begin to examine the relationship of this mission to the geopolitics of knowledge production, a topic I return to in Chapter

Four. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss the sociojuridical consequences incited by the above assault and warning, such as the increased militarization of Antigua. My goal is to illustrate ways in which the Invasion continues as an ontoepistemological project.

3.2 Encountering the Global South, the Global North, and Antigua in the Imperial Imaginary

Despite the marked increase in Guatemala’s political and economic instability,

2014 was a good year for the national tourism industry. Over 1.37 million tourists visited

Guatemala that year, an increase from 1.22 million tourists in 2013 (Eglitis 2018). New

Link (2014, 1), a US-based public relations firm, attributes this miraculous boost to “the recent initiatives taken by the Guatemalan Tourism Institute (INGUAT) […], among them

136 their 2014 campaign, ‘Life Lessons’.” Given that INGUAT partnered with New Link to execute this campaign, such “recent initiatives” presumably included the burgeoning relationship between the two agencies, a topic I return to in Chapter Four. Suffice it to say, this campaign is both disturbing and impressive in terms of its successful utilization of imperialist nostalgia as a marketing scheme. As I demonstrated in Chapter Two, INGUAT is a well-oiled machine when it comes to waging war on the front of global public relations.

Nonetheless, I, along with the other regulars of El Parque Central, could only guess where these tourists were going—they were simply not in Antigua. The city was a virtual ghost town that summer, and the eerie quiet unnerved me. I had never before seen the park so void of selfie sticks, Bermuda shorts, fanny packs, and the overpowering smell of industrial-strength sunscreen. Selfishly, I began to fear for my research. The usual ethno- tourists, who I had been interviewing and shadowing since the summer of 2010, were visiting Antigua less and less.

“No hay gringos/There are not any white people [in the city],” industry stakeholders lamented, confirming my suspicions. They worried about how they were going to feed themselves and their families. Over 15% of people in Guatemala are employed by the tourism industry, which produces “nearly one quarter of the national GDP [Gross Domestic

Product]” (Williams 2011, 2). By 2014, tourism had officially outpaced coffee as the country’s top earner of foreign capital (Little 2014). Consequently, the national tourism industry continues to provide some of the only avenues for viable employment. Antigua remains the centralized hub of this industry, with most tours to and from various sites on the “Gringo Trail” beginning and ending in the city. Poor, working-class, and Indigenous peoples depend on the seasonal migration of gringos and their money to and from Antigua;

137 some of these workers travel by foot to the city, from towns two or more hours away (Little

2004), precisely because it is a center for transnational power/capital.

Industry stakeholders told me that tourists were avoiding Antigua because of

Guatemala’s growing reputation as a drug cartel hub, compounded by the negative publicity the “Immigration Crisis” was receiving around the world. A report published by

Euromonitor International in 2015 supports their conclusions. Drawing from survey data, this report documents that tourists were “reluctant to travel to Guatemala due to the threat of violence” (Euromonitor International 2015, 1). Specifically, they were afraid of being robbed, extorted, or assaulted by gang members (Euromonitor International 2015). As discussed in the introduction, these fears were not unfounded. Citing that “security is a growing concern of both local residents and international tourists in Antigua,” Little’s

(2014, 396) research collaborates such realities. Little (2014, 396) further notes that city officials were “ill prepared for the rise in crime associated with tourism and drug trafficking.” Fueling the fires of this recession was the fact that the World Cup games were being held in Brazil that summer.

However, as evidenced by the above numbers, leisure travelers were still visiting

Guatemala. These tourists were not deterred by the mounting hostility and violence directed toward foreign nationals, drug cartels, or the “Immigration Crisis.” I only had to look in the mirror to confirm their presence: they were anti-tourists, who, like their counterparts during the Civil War, were able to enter and leave the country while its nationals were being detained, terrorized, or killed (see Chapter Two). As sociologist Sarah

Becklake (2020, 39) notes, “due to a lack of official oversight,” it is impossible to differentiate between the various types of tourists who visit Antigua. Nevertheless, I was

138 kept quite busy that summer interviewing many of the only leisure travelers present in the city: social scientists, missionaries, humanitarian volunteers, and students, all of whom distanced themselves from the “dreaded” tourist via their “good” deeds.7

In general, these stakeholders reported that they were in Antigua on a “break” from their work in “less developed” parts of the country. Held to be where the “real” Maya peoples lived, these areas tended to be the rural central highlands, or the region marketed by INGUAT as “The Living Indigenous Highlands.” As Burtner (2004) documents, on the heels of Cerezo’s election in 1986, this area became a transnational center for the anti- tourist, a fact not lost on INGUAT (see Chapter Two). I suggest that the noted increase in tourism activity in Guatemala, which coincided with a decrease of the same in Antigua, captures the mainstreaming of these “committed” and “helpful” travelers. More precisely,

I understand these agents to be the protagonists of the recalibrated civilizing mission, one that centers places like the highlands in its crosshairs, instead of “Modern & Colonial”

Antigua (as INGUAT dubbed the city).

Here, I begin to unpack this mission. First, I discuss Antigua’s historical role in the installation of “civilization” as a regime in the Isthmus. To illustrate the contemporary workings of this regime, I document how research participants positioned Antigua relative to the Global North, the Global South, and Guatemala. I have created four composite characters based on my sample: Paul, a Baptist minister from the US; Tess, a young woman from Paul’s missionary group; John, a cultural geographer and doctoral student from the

US; and Emma, a nurse, professor, and humanitarian volunteer from French Canada. As I show, these participants were drawn to Guatemala because of its renown as a

“catastrophic” place (see Chapter Two), one they believed “needed” their guidance and

139 assistance. To further evidence this “need,” participants invoked the “Immigration Crisis,” which they notably fixed outside the geocultural boundaries of Antigua as a “civilized” and

“modern” locale. I pay particular attention to how these stakeholders justified their presence in the country while so many of its nationals were being assaulted, murdered, or imprisoned across Central America, México, and the US. My goal is to illustrate how bodily constructions of civilization, savagery, and salvation endure as “New World” cartographies of struggle, the likes of which directly determine one’s ability to traverse the world system.

Antigua has long played a key role in the civilizing mission by serving as its figurative launching pad. Antigua, the former capital of Guatemala, was once the most important seat of Spanish government, culture, and religion in the Americas (Lutz 1994).

The city was the beating heart of the “New World.” A testament to the tenacity and zeal of settler-colonialists, this capital has been relocated and rebuilt on three occasions. The first was in 1524, on the heels of the Invasion of Guatemala, when Pedro de Alvarado appropriated the Kaqchikel-Maya capital and city-state of Iximché as the center of “New

Spain.” However, de Alvarado was forced to move this center because all of the Kaqchikel people who lived there fled, leaving him with no one to exploit for labor or tribute (Lutz

1994). In 1527, the capital was re-established in close proximity to Antigua’s current location, in an area of town presently known as Ciudad Vieja/Old City. This capital was named Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala. The second occasion was in 1541, after a torrential downpour that lasted for several days, causing one of the three volcanoes surrounding Antigua to unleash “a tree and boulder-laden wall of mud” upon the city (Lutz

1994, 7). Another capital was thus constructed near the site of the old one, also named

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Santiago, which grew to house over 60,000 people (Lutz 1994). In 1773, an earthquake destroyed Santiago, and the capital was moved a third and final time to its current location,

Guatemala City.

The remains of Santiago were preserved and restored, becoming what is now La

Antigua Guatemala/The Old Guatemala. Antigua, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is renowned as a “museum of Spanish colonial history” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2011), capturing in freeze-frame the inauguration of a specifically Euro-American form of world power. By linking México City, México, to Lima, Perú, Antigua connected the primary administrative centers of the “New World” to those in Spain (Lutz 1994). The Spanish sought to consolidate an empire that was always under attack precisely because the

Invasion could not quell Indigenous forms of resistance and knowledge production in the

Americas (Martínez Salazar 2014; Montejo 1999a). As I argued in Chapters One and Two, the ongoing nature of this resistance and production captures the endurance of the Invasion as an ontoepistemological site of struggle. Crucially, it was from Antigua that European configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation were enforced as actual species determinations across the Americas, or as technologies for the installment and cultivation of “civilization,” “modernity,” and the “human” as ranked logics of power and capital.

Then, as now, this enforcement hinged on controlling the mobility, freedom, and earning potential of certain bodies, so that others could earn a tidy profit or politically advance.

For example, Santiago housed the most elite of white Spaniards, who made important decisions and consolidated their rule from the safety and luxury of their municipal estates. Following Spanish regulations for “New World” settlements, these estates were scattered around the city’s center (what is now El Parque Central), in close

141 proximity to high-status Catholic churches and the administrative offices of colonial governance (Lutz 1994). These elite appointed white compatriots and light-skinned castas, who were from more humble or middle-class backgrounds, to govern their profitable plantations and farms located outside of Antigua. “Casta” was a term used by the Spanish

Crown to describe and classify “people of mixed Maya, European, and African descent”

(Lutz and Lovell 1990, 39). In general, these appointees were men, thirsty for an advancement denied to them in Spain due to their nationality, race, and class. However, their fairer skin color, gender, and status allowed them to function as proxies for the national elite precisely because “civilization,” “modernity,” and/or the “human” was coded as Catholic, white, and male in “New Spain.” Some of the descendants of these early settlers, or the colonizer’s heirs (Martínez Salazar 2014), continue to rule in Guatemala.

Claiming a particular affinity to the first wave of Spanish invaders, they are known as “the

Eight Families” (Mills and Herbst 2012), and they remain powerful governing members of the oligarchy (Casaús Arzú 2010; Dosal 1995).

As I documented in Chapter Two, those made to work the landholdings of the elite were African slaves and Indigenous peasants, whose alleged, graded, and specific relationship to the “cannibal” (and thus to the unhuman and uncivilized) determined their place in the colonial order of people, places, and things. Indigenous and Black men were particularly prized and exploited for agricultural projects. In addition, these men were sent to their deaths in the silver and gold mines owned by the intranational ruling class and maintained by their treacherous proxies (Lutz 1994). The vampiric Crown likewise received a share of this blood money (Handy 1984). Although the enslavement of

Indigenous people was abolished in 1550, the encomienda and repartimiento systems

142 ensured that they remained de facto slaves (Lutz and Lovell 1990). Indigenous and African peoples were essentially imprisoned on these various landholdings as part of the rise of global capitalism, including the advent of the wage-labor relation as a bodily schematic

(Lugones 2007; see also Chapter Two). These relationships continue in the present day, although Maya and Garífuna laborers now receive a meager wage for their backbreaking work on plantations and in the mines owned by Canadian, Israeli, and US corporations. In an act of transnational conspiracy and capitalist collusion, Guatemala’s ruling class has deployed the national military, forcing many of these laborers to work at gunpoint

(Amnesty International 2014).

I add that the “blood and fire” (Marx 1990, 873–931; see also Banerjee 2008) of these imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist hierarchies were established and fueled by

Guatemala’s parsing into “civilized” and “savage” terrains, with Antigua placed at the far end of the “civilized” spectrum. As placeholders for the unhuman, uncivilized, and/or pre- modern, these laborers were forced to live and work outside of Antigua. In fact, these workers were barred from entering the city unless employed, enslaved, or otherwise accompanied by a white Spaniard (Lutz 1994; Martínez Salazar 2014); this practice persists, albeit in a different form, as I soon discuss. The conceptualization and administration of this colonial cartography generated and enforced “new constructions of what it meant to be European” (Stoler 2010, 24), and in relationship to equally nascent identifications, such as “Indian,” “Black,” or “casta.” In this way, “civilization,”

“modernity,” and “humanity” were installed as geographic, economic, and sociocorporeal indexes, rendering Antigua the “proper” home of the European, and thus of imperial white power/capital.

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Certainly, a subset of Indigenous, Black, and casta men lived within Antigua’s bounds. However, given their limited, provisional, or non-existent access to the “human,” they were denied free movement around the city. Instead, they were made to stay within the municipal estates of the elite as slaves or servants. In addition, they were relegated to specific barrios or slums, located on the very edge of Antigua’s municipal boundaries (Lutz

1994). These barrios were established following the colonial caste system (Lutz 1994), which depended on European configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation for intelligibility (Martínez Salazar 2014). For instance, relying on the color of one’s skin and social standing (and thus one’s approximate relationship to the “human”), this system determined who would be a slave (e.g., impoverished African people) or an indentured servant (e.g., impoverished Indigenous people), or who would pay tribute to the colonizer in coin, food, or other goods (e.g., former Indigenous nobles). Antigua’s barrios were then organized around these bodily and socioeconomic logics.

Specifically, Black slaves were made to live with other Black slaves, Indigenous servants with other Indigenous servants, and so forth. “To save themselves from the onerous […] task of governing and policing the barrios,” (Lutz 1994, 35), the Spanish selected and encouraged men from these communities to do their “dirty work” (Hughes

1962) for them. These men policed members from their barrios and those from other neighborhoods, competing with each other for positions of limited political power (Lutz

1994)—for example, as alcaldes/mayors, who ultimately answered to the colonizer. Later, through acts of sexual violence (Martínez Salazar 2014) and intermarriage (Lutz 1994), barrios could no longer be segregated and governed in this manner. In particular, Ladino men came to dominate barrio life, rising to positions of true power in Antigua.

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Historian Christopher Lutz (1994, 50) argues that these Ladinos were “castas who, by 1700, after nearly two centuries of mestizaje [mixing], had become the dominant phenotype in Santiago de Guatemala; racially indistinguishable from each other, all could lay claim to some Spanish heritage, if only cultural.” Further fueling the (ongoing) fires of plantation capitalism, Ladinos displaced “full blood” Indigenous and Black peoples from

Antigua’s barrios, forcing them into Guatemala’s “periphery” or rural locales (Lutz and

Lovell 1990). The rapacious needs of the expanding “pure blood” or white elite also pushed these peoples out of the city as it was slowly and surely gentrified (Lutz 1994), a process continuing to this day. Thus, in a very real sense, the organization of “life” in Antigua actualized “civilization,” “modernity,” and the “human” as hierarchical, socioeconomic, and embodied standards in Guatemala and broader Central America.

The following example further captures the sociocorporeal nuances of this process.

When Santiago was somewhat more established, elite Spanish women started to arrive in the city, joining their powerful husbands (Martínez Salazar 2014). In general, these women were garrisoned inside the city’s bounds, as anything outside of Antigua was considered savage and hostile territory and thus unsuited for the “delicate,” “vulnerable,” and

“impressionable” constitution of rich white women. Proving that “the enclosures and border regimes of colonial confinement are far more extensive than those sealed with barbed wire” (Stoler 2010, xvii), these womxn were forbidden to “mix” with casta,

Indigenous, or Black men. These men were considered monstrous threats to the virtue and purity of rich white women, who were charged with the breeding of future “humans” or members of the master race. In the name of “protecting” the progeny of (white, capitalist, and cisheteropatriarchal) Empire, the mobility, freedom, and earning potential of these

145 womxn were strictly controlled (Martínez Salazar 2014). I return to this argument in the next section, where I show how these practices persist via tourism security logics. Suffice it to say, the sequestering of rich white women in Antigua rendered the “enclosures and border regimes of colonial confinement” all the more clear. The latter were scripted on the bodies of the former in a bid to justify the homicidal/suicidal mandates of the civilizing mission, one that was enabled and empowered vis-à-vis “Antigua,” the geopolitical and symbolic center of a “new” world.

The position and treatment of Indigenous, Black, and dark-skinned casta womxn in

Antigua further captures the implementation of these mandates as targeted and complex processes for the exploitation of “life.” Similar to their male counterparts, these womxn were largely barred from the city except when put to the gendered, classed, and raced service of “civilization”: e.g., raising rich white children, cleaning rich white houses, preparing food for rich white people, grooming the bodies of rich white womxn, etc.

(Martínez Salazar 2014). Another exception was the Indigenous, Black, and casta womxn who were employed as sex-workers in Antigua. Every night, these womxn were arrested because “the authorities wanted to portray the city as a disciplined, aristocratic, Christian, and uncontaminated place” (Martínez Salazar 2014, 44). That is, the movements of these unruly bodies (Mintz 2007) were controlled within the city, in an additional bid to inscribe, transmit, and enforce the European civilizing mission. Ensuring that “only colonizing men were entitled to enjoy the pleasures of their city” (Martínez Salazar 2014, 44), the ability of Indigenous womxn and womxn of color to enter and leave Antigua, to earn a wage within its bounds, was severely surveilled and constrained.

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For the most part, these womxn were made to live and labor on the colonial plantations, farms, and estates located outside of Antigua, which kept the national elite fat and happy. Even after the manumission of all slaves in Guatemala, they rarely received a wage for what was perceived to be “women’s work” (Martínez Salazar 2014). Despite its gendered connotations, this work was no less backbreaking than that undertaken by men.

For example, “Indigenous women were forced to produce thread from cotton harvested by

Indigenous men on colonizers’ largescale plantations” (Martínez Salazar 2014, 41), painstaking and arduous work that cost many laborers their eyesight. They were also put to the unpaid task of fashioning this thread into the cotton, candles, rope, and other products gracing the homes of Antigua’s elite (Martínez Salazar 2014). Indigenous womxn came to be particularly prized for their “delicate” touch in harvesting coffee (Carey 2008). To put it bluntly, Indigenous, Black, and dark-skinned casta womxn were considered Empire’s beasts of burden (Lugones 2007; Martínez Salazar 2014). As “animals,” these womxn were not sheltered from imperial violence but rather made its central objects. As evidenced by the ethno-femicide targeting Indigenous womxn across the Americas, such objectification continues.

To be clear, I do not wish to paint a picture of Indigenous, Black, and mestizx peoples as the always-already “victims” of European rule. As evidenced by Maya-authored chronicles of the Invasion, such as the Annals of the Cakchiquels (Brinton 2009), as well as letters written by so-called “conquistadors” (Restall and Asselbergs 2007), resistance to this rule occurred at all levels. Indigenous peoples waged large-scale war, organized massive labor strikes, outran and outmaneuvered Spanish attempts to exact tribute, and preserved their languages and cultures despite all efforts to eradicate the latter (Montejo

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1999a). This resistance also included other acts, generally taken for granted, as they were carried out by Indigenous womxn (Carey 2008). Some of these womxn stole food from the colonizer’s table to feed their families, taught the colonizer’s children Indigenous languages and customs, and engaged in domestic labor slowdowns, thereby waging war on a different front (Martínez Salazar 2014). Further, when released from jail in Antigua,

Indigenous, Black, and mestizx sex workers picked up where they left off, in recognition of their cardinal place in the colonial order (Martínez Salazar 2014).

My goal, rather, is to illustrate Antigua’s historical function in the cartographic arrangement and sustenance of “civilization” as a raced, classed, gendered, and geocultural logic in Guatemala and beyond. As I have shown, Antigua was an administrative nexus for the development and deployment of these logics as sociocorporeal indexes for the distribution of “New World” power and capital. In this way, the “uncivilized,” “pre- modern,” and “unhuman” were fixed outside the city, delineating the peoples, places, and things in “need” of the genocidal/ecocidal imperatives of the civilizing mission (e.g., enslavement, exploitation, expropriation, or slaughter). Even when this “outside” bled into

Antigua’s “insides,” the suicidal/homicidal mandates of “civilization” were still enforced as district, ranked, or biopolitical caesurae (Pugliese 2013) via the aforementioned logics and indexes. Hauntingly, this cartography continues to depend upon the imperial and colonial conceptualization of “Antigua” as an enduring and exceptional bulwark of

European modernity, refinement, progress, and thus necropolitics.

As I began to argue in Chapter Two, Antigua remains an administrative center of imperial and colonial power/capital via the business and conduct of international leisure travel. Ultimately benefitting a transnational ruling class, Antigua is a place where

148 impoverished Ladino and Maya people have to labor every single day, commuting from towns and villages outside of the city, in a bid to earn something resembling a living wage.

Expanding the optics and rationales of coloniality (e.g., white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism), powerful and rich stakeholders from Germany,

France, the UK, Canada, the US, Israel, México, and broader Central America have joined the city’s Spanish and Ladino elite (Martínez Salazar 2014). Dominating the country’s most profitable industry, these elites own most of the businesses in Antigua, as well as the domiciles within the city. In addition, the majority of the European and Euro-Americans travelers who visit Guatemala call the above nations “home” (Becklake 2020).

Given its integral role in the national tourism industry, INGUAT has a satellite office in Antigua; likewise housed in the city are representatives and contractors from collaborating agencies who enforce INGUAT’s requirements and regulations. Together, these administrative entities determine one’s ability to earn a wage in Antigua. As I learned during my fieldwork, by imposing and overseeing various training initiatives, these stakeholders decide where tourism industry workers can gather, who workers can approach and talk to, and what workers can say. The expense and politics of these initiatives ensure that primarily Ladino people are sanctioned to work with tourists, allowing them to move freely about Antigua.8 Acting as a “passport” of sorts, a laminated identification card is worn around the neck to further signal this privilege, containing a photo of the worker in question, an assigned number corresponding to their field of employ and the permissions thereof, and INGUAT’s logo. In a disturbing echo of the colonial “past” detailed above, impoverished Maya peoples—especially those who do not have this card—are removed from public spaces in Antigua, such as El Parque Central. A dedicated tourism police force,

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INGUAT spies and supervisors, and others effect such “removals” of the paperless. In short, the mobility, freedom, and earning potential of Maya peoples continues to be violently curtailed in Antigua, and in a way that hauntingly recalls the city’s colonial

“past.”

In addition to serving as a hub for the national tourism industry, Antigua is also a transnational center for the promotion and conduct of qualitative research about

Guatemala. For example, the city boasts two prestigious research institutes: Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala (AVANSCO) and Centro de

Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA). As evidenced by their ongoing projects and publications, most of the research sponsored and housed by these agencies focuses on locations outside of Antigua’s bounds.9 Antigua is a place where social scientists from all over the world meet, interact, and further their professional development, but it is not where they typically base their qualitative studies.10 In what follows, I attempt to elucidate some of the geocultural rationales that help to guide or calibrate this focus.

In his seminal work, Little (2004, 64) argues that these differing peoples, roles, and identities make Antigua a heterotopic “place of contradictions.” However, as I have tried to establish thus far, I understand Antigua to be a more unified or consonant space, one made so by the endurance of the Invasion as a “local history” (Mignolo 2012) in terms of the organization and exploitation of “life” in Guatemala. To highlight the “global designs”

(Mignolo 2012) or imperial aspects of this process, I now turn to my ethnographic data set.

As noted above, I have ordered this set around the perceptions and experiences of four composite characters: Paul, Tess, John, and Emma. My goal is to illustrate how Antigua

150 remains a conceptual springboard for “civilization” as a sociocorporeal hierarchy, standard, and mission, albeit in reconfigured form.

Paul

I was sitting on my usual bench in El Parque Central, enjoying the late morning sun on my face, when a white missionary from the US sat down abruptly beside me, a folded newspaper in his lap. Introducing himself as a Baptist minister named Paul, he explained that he had recently arrived in Guatemala, having finished an extended missionary stint in

Haiti. Paul was in Antigua with his missionary group of about twenty people, on a short vacation from their post in the rural central highlands, where he was the pastor of a growing

Evangelical church. Seeking to minister to Kaqchikel-Maya parishioners, Paul and his group provided food and clothing to Indigenous converts, in addition to teaching the latter how to read the Bible (in English). As Paul languorously stretched his legs out in front of him, taking up what little space was left on our shared bench, he sighed happily and declared, “It sure is nice to be back in civilization! Next week, it’s back to dirt floors, mosquitos the size of your head, and no electricity.”

In Paul’s eyes, Antigua was a bastion of “modern” comfort, a place where he could avoid sleeping upon dirt floors, the relentless onslaught of mosquitos, and the lack of reliable electricity purportedly shaping life outside of regional tourism centers and colonial metropoles. In Antigua, Paul could take a “break” from the perceived austerity of his divinely ordained mission, one bestowed with its integrity and clarity because it was carried out in “harsh,” less-“civilized,” or “pre-modern” terrains (in this case, occupied Kaqchikel-

Maya lands and, before we met, Haiti). That is, Paul actively engaged the temporal deficit

151 of the Other as a geopolitical commodity and cartography in terms of his travel desires, plans, and trajectories.

Specifically, Paul relied on this deficit to conceptualize and pinpoint the “Global

South” as an imaginary and destination. When asked what made him different from the run-of-the-mill tourist, Paul responded, “I’m not a tourist because I help the Maya. I do

God’s work. You would not believe the things I have seen [in Haiti and Guatemala], how these [Third World] people live!” As evidenced by this quote, Paul focused his efforts on

“those people” thought to exist outside of the embodied, cultural, and temporal parameters of “civilization” as a hegemonic construct, and/or within the Global South as a mandate and reflection of the “geography of Empire” (L. T. Smith 2012, 63). As a gesture of good will and altruism, Paul invoked these parameters to delineate the fantastical and “savage” locations in need of his civilizing “help” and influence (e.g., Haiti and Guatemala). In doing so, he distanced himself from the “dreaded” tourist, transmuting his particular brand of leisure travel into an act of salvation and edification, what he termed “God’s work.”

Crucially, this “work” depended on colonial configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation for its geocultural vitality. For instance, when asked why his church was based in the rural highlands instead of Antigua, Paul gave two reasons. The first was that he thought Antigua to be an incorrigibly corrupt and “modern” place, further evidenced by the immoral behavior of tourists and residents from the Global North. Paul felt that white womxn from the Global North were particularly deleterious, a point to which I will return. In addition, Paul was not thrilled by the Spanish colonial architecture and history drawing so many to Antigua, such as the numerous crumbling churches documenting the former sway of Catholics, or what he referred to as “pagan nonsense.”11 Paul was deeply

152 concerned that the sinful allure of the city would seduce Indigenous converts, spoiling what he understood to be their “childlike” and “innocent” nature. Hauntingly, in an early manifestation of epistemic murk as a “New World” technology of rule, Spanish colonists once argued something very similar. Specifically, they insisted that the segregation of

Antigua’s barrios would protect “redeemable” or “good Indians” from the negative influence of Europeans and their Black slaves, allowing the former to retain an innocence that would otherwise be lost (Lutz 1994).

Paul explained that the second reason for his ministry’s rural location was that

“everyone knows there are no real Indians in Antigua.” Similar to Antigua’s founding fathers, Paul believed that the “true” targets of the civilizing mission—“real,” “pure,” and

“redeemable Indians”—lived outside of the city. According to Paul, those who resided within were irrevocably damaged white people, who had been ruined by the vices, ravages, and trappings of modernity. Nonetheless, he planned to visit Antigua again in order to

“sleep on a real bed every now and then.” As much as Antigua repulsed Paul, he considered the city to be a source of succor and strength; the comforts and luxuries it offered were so familiar to him, a fellow “corrupted” Euro-American.

Tess

“I don’t think Pastor Paul is right when he says ‘borders [between nation-states] are there for a reason,’” Tess declared, her brow furrowed in deep thought. She continued:

“Jesus didn’t care where the sinners he saved were from. Borders have nothing to do with

God.” I looked up in surprise, almost dropping my steaming mug of coffee. We were sitting in a café directly across from El Parque Central, engaged in a conversation I never thought to be having with a member of Paul’s missionary group. However, this seemingly insurgent

153 moment would soon be lost, as Tess went about the geopolitical work of restoring the exact borders ignored by her God.

A first-time visitor to Guatemala, Tess was a white woman, barista, and US national in her early twenties, who volunteered at Paul’s church. Concerned that I was spending too much time in Antigua, Paul had invited me to pass a day at his church. He wanted me to experience “God” and the “real Guatemala” simultaneously. When I duly visited, Tess was teaching a Bible literacy class. Two weeks later, she was part of a second wave of missionary group members, brought to Antigua by Paul, for a respite from the rural highlands. Although Paul was to remain in Guatemala indefinitely, members of his group were transient. They visited his church for a month at a time, volunteering on the various humanitarian projects he headed.

Tess explained that all of the members of her missionary group, herself included, visited Guatemala that summer because of the “Immigration Crisis.” She was particularly haunted by the pictures circulating during this time, which depicted Central American children locked in wire cages, covered in aluminum emergency blankets that deliberately hid their faces (see McQuade 2015; L. Nelson 2018). Although Tess was grateful for the luxuries of Antigua—specifically, internet access, the strong coffee we shared, and the city’s mind-boggling assortment of stores and restaurants—she was anxious to get back to the rural central highlands, or what she, like Paul, deemed the “real Guatemala.”

Specifically, she wanted to return to Paul’s church, where she worked with repatriated migrants, including Kaqchikel-Maya men, womxn, youth, and other converts.

When asked to describe “real Guatemala,” Tess, like Paul, invoked the temporal deficit of the Other, one she located in less developed and less white parts of the country.

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Specifically, Tess explained that “real Guatemala” included those “Mayan” peoples, places, and things existing outside of and apart from Antigua. Tess sought a more intimate and credible engagement with the Other that did not feel artificial, trivial, or “modern,” which is how she described Antigua. To support her claims, she cited the nearby presence of a McDonald’s restaurant. That is, Tess wanted the quintessential anti-tourist experience or what INGUAT has so astutely branded as “Life Lessons.” Allowing her “to take on highly valued identities and to earn considerable cultural capital” (Becklake 2020, 38; see also Chapter Two), Tess used these imperialist markers of “authenticity” to calibrate the focus of her “helpful” efforts on “real Guatemala”: the rural central highlands.

According to Tess, the poverty and suffering endured by Maya peoples, as well as a certain effect arising from these negative circumstances, further delineated “real

Guatemala”:

The [Kaqchikel-Maya] people I teach the Word [the Bible], they have nothing, less than nothing. But they are so happy. Because they are poor, they live simpler [lives]. They enjoy the little things. No one is happy back home [the US]. We [US nationals] just have too much. That’s why I give back.

In other words, by denying access to the necessities and comforts of life, Empire “saves” colonized people, “preserving” the latter in their “pure” form. As Rosaldo (1989, 108) has so powerfully shown, this fantastical juxtaposition relentlessly fuels imperialist nostalgia, in which the genocide/ecocide of the civilizing mission is cloaked as an “innocent yearning” to rescue that which is being actively destroyed by said mission. More precisely, this “yearning” does not seek to change or abolish the unequitable distribution of world power/capital but rather to preserve the latter in the name of a greater imperial good, or

“giving back,” to borrow from Tess. As Taussig (1987) notes, such representational

155 acrobatics likewise charge epistemic murk by transmuting the fantastical into the material, lived, and historical: “reality” or Truth.

Tess’s unique understanding of the “Immigration Crisis” further illustrates how the above transmutation affects people’s ability to live, love, labor, and travel:

If things here [Guatemala] weren’t so terrible, if Guatemala was more like America [the US], then [Maya] kids wouldn’t have to leave. But since they [Maya children] are in America anyway, the [US] government should give them away [to US citizens] ‘cause we will take better care of them. Their parents aren’t.

Capturing a “moment in which the very ideology of white supremacy is so naturalized, as to become invisible” (Pugliese 2013, 29), Tess cast the US as a heroic savior, erasing the role of the latter in harming the exact objects of her imperialist nostalgia: Maya children.

That is, Tess understood the ongoing detainment of these children as a “necessary violence” (Dussel 2000, 472) in terms of the maintenance of “civilization” as a geocultural standard or mission. As is well documented (for example, Gonzales 2012; Martínez

Salazar 2014; Maxwell 2009; Morgensen 2010, Ortiz 1992; A. Smith 2005), this mission has long facilitated the removal of Indigenous children from their families, in the name of protecting the “future” of white supremacy, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy:

“civilization.” Across the Americas, Indigenous children were kidnapped, locked away in boarding schools, made to live in the homes of rich white people, forced into slavery or indentured servitude, and/or killed. By framing the ongoing imprisonment of these children as an act of “care,” Tess continued to chart the “murky” course of this genocidal history.

Indeed, as Tess’s “helpful” presence in the country was meant to convey,

“Guatemalans” could not raise or take care of their children because the country was

“terrible.” Tess believed that the US, as the perceived global center of the “enlightened,”

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“exceptional,” and “humane,” was morally obligated to pick up the slack. To “save” migrant children from their “savage” or “inhumane” parents, the US was “forced” to intervene at local levels (e.g., via the proxy of citizen-subjects like Tess) and international levels (e.g., the continued separation of these children from their families via imprisonment or adoption). That is, Tess embraced and emulated the civilizing mission as a contemporary process, travel experience, and ontoepistemology, one that further informed her understanding of “fake” vs. “real” Guatemala. In the end, Tess did not seek to challenge or confront the socioeconomic impunity and violence enabling her various travels. Instead, she pursued these travels as a means of confirming the “European self-image of well- deserved privilege and priority” (Stoler 2010, 25), thereby invoking and restoring the colonial order of people, places, and things.

John

Finding me on my usual bench in El Parque Central, John, a cultural geographer and doctoral student from a prestigious university in the US, jubilantly sat down next to me. He was bursting with news that he wanted to share with someone he perceived to be a peer. In addition to the fact that we were both in our thirties, we were “committed” gring@s, pursuing ethnographic research in Guatemala for our respective dissertations.

However, John was based in the northern part of the country, where he was documenting the “Immigration Crisis.” John would be one of the few participants in my study who was not pursuing a travel/research experience in the rural central highlands.

As was the general case concerning the majority of participants, John and I first met in El Parque Central. Like many city centers across Latin America, this park is a key place to meet and converse with strangers and friends on a daily basis, hence the reason it

157 was my primary fieldwork site. In Antigua on a weeklong “break” from his fieldwork, John eventually found his way to the park and thus to me. Later, John agreed to participate in my research; he thought it would be a “fun” way to spice up his stay in Antigua. John’s cavalier attitude hinted at something that would be revealed as time went on, further emulated by other social scientists, scholars, and students who participated in my research.

John considered my research trite, trivial, and unimportant because it was based in Antigua and focused on people like him, i.e., travelers from the Global North, the majority of whom were white, middle class, well educated, and anxious to distance themselves from the

“dreaded” tourist.

He excitedly asked me, “Have you told your advisor yet what’s going on? I can’t believe we are lucky enough to be here right now! There is no way that I won’t get that

NSF [National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant]!”

John was excited because his fieldwork site was figuratively exploding with the presence of migrants, children primarily among them. John knew that his career would most likely take off because he would be one of the “first” social scientists to write about the

“Immigration Crisis.” “Of course,” he added hastily, “I’ll help migrants by telling their story.”

As I argued in Chapter Two, the particular “help” offered by John, as an imperial

“storyteller” and translator of suffering, was conditioned on and central to his professional development. I return to this phenomenon in Chapter Four in order to elucidate the political economy of trauma. For now, I wish to flag how the hardship endured by migrants titillated

John in terms of the potential funding and prestige he would secure as a “social scientist” or anti-tourist. That these and other acts of exploitation are framed as “assistance” is one

158 of the many problems plaguing John’s discipline. For example, as I advanced in Chapter

One, this framing camouflages how the social sciences are imperial philosophies and praxes of power. Certainly, I was not immune to these ontoepistemological sorceries or

“murky” seductions; right before John sat down next to me, I had just sent my advisor my own “excited” email about the then-emerging “Immigration Crisis.” Causing me to flinch in a moment of self-realization and inventory, John’s titillation mirrored my own.

Eventually leading to this dissertation, I began to seriously question my motives for being in Guatemala.

Suddenly, John looked at me quizzically, as if assessing me for something. Given the look on his face, I was failing his test. After a few minutes, he finally asked:

Are your advisors really okay with you doing fieldwork in Antigua? I know mine would have a problem. Don’t you want to be where the people are? There are no real Mayas here; everything is for show. It’s disgusting, but at least I can take a hot shower. You just have to come [to my fieldwork site] with me. I will show you [Maya] ceremonies that will blow your mind. The jungle is a crazy place!

Similar to Paul and Tess, John believed that Antigua represented all that was fake and trivial about the tourism industry and the world. Nevertheless, also like Paul and Tess, John found a small measure of comfort in the city’s “disgusting” relationship to civilization/modernity (in John’s case, hot water). Ultimately, however, John rejected this

“comfort” in the pursuit of a more “authentic” anti-tourism experience, or what he insisted was “fieldwork.” For example, his understanding of this travel or “fieldwork” was the viewing of “mind-blowing” jungle ceremonies led by “real Mayas.” Crucially, John argued that “real Mayas” could only exist outside of Antigua because the city personified and manifested Euro-American power, history, and culture as geocultural norms or mores, the likes of which he called a “show.”

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Moreover, akin to Paul and Tess, John framed his particular brand of imperialist voyeurism, consumption, and nostalgia as “assistance,” i.e., a “helpful” act of storytelling.

By framing this exploitation as a “good” deed, he likewise articulated some of the affective and ideological moorings of the recalibrated civilizing mission. John transmuted his privileged ability to enter and leave Guatemala into an act of salvation, thereby eliding the embodied relations of rule granting him safe passage and allowing him to profit from this passage (e.g., the dialectic of trauma as described in Chapter Two). By installing himself as a heroic collector and curator of stories that were never really his to tell, John reaffirmed the colonial order of people, places, and things; he retained a vice-like grip upon the production and commodification of Truth. Simultaneously, John charted and objectified the topographical folds and temporal deficits of “real Guatemala,” a location he pinned inside of the “crazy jungle.” In other words, as “real Guatemala” existed outside of Antigua, it also existed outside of the modern, civilized, human, and sane: the European. Indeed, this juxtaposition enabled John to term his travels and stay in the country as “real” fieldwork or research (i.e., as anti-tourism).

Emma

I met Emma—a nurse, humanitarian volunteer, and tenured professor—in a popular restaurant in close proximity to El Parque Central, where we would come to share a lively meal. Emma was a French Canadian in her late forties. She was part of a study abroad program and group of about thirty people, comprised of medical anthropology, social work, public health, and economics professors and students, who were from various places across the US, Canada, and the UK. Visiting Guatemala annually, the group was based in a small town in the central highlands, located a good distance from Antigua. There, they ran,

160 maintained, and evaluated several public health projects that embraced an interdisciplinary and social justice focus. In a volunteer capacity, they targeted mostly impoverished

Kaqchikel-Maya peoples for these initiatives. Emma was in Antigua with this group for a week; part of her program included touring and networking with an established research institute in the city, after which they were to return to the “field.”

Figure 3.1: Encountering the tourist. I was almost crushed by these travelers in their frenzy to capture “real Guatemala” or the syncretic ceremony occurring on the foremost steps of this church. This church is located in the popular tourism destination and market town known as Chichicastenago. Picture taken by the author, April 2009.

Upon learning about my study, Emma spontaneously volunteered to be a participant. She believed it would be a way to turn the tables and experience the interview process the way that her Kaqchikel subjects did, a “fun” thing to do while on a “break.”

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Calling my project “cute,” she exclaimed that her students would “kill” to have my fieldwork setup. Emma said that I was “smart” (read: soft) to surround myself with

“modern” comforts—specifically, hot water, a plethora of food choices, internet access, and the safety of being in a heavily patrolled city. Nonetheless, Emma declared that she preferred the rural central highlands. Making the city a stale and dangerous theater of

“mindless consumerism” and “brutish ignorance,” Antigua had by far too many white people and “Castellanos” for her liking.12 Emma was anxious to return to “real Guatemala, where the people are.” Emma’s perceptions of Antigua and its denizens eventually led to a series of friendly debates between us and other members of her team, during which the value and utility of my research was put on trial.

By expressing these travel yearnings, Emma shared some striking commonalities with Paul, Tess, and John. As I have endeavored to show, these commonalties capture the construction of “real Guatemala” as a geography, commodity, and boundary. They highlight the perceived location and sensibilities of “civilization,” “modernity,” and the

“human” as cultural standards—the invocation and installation of the temporal deficit of the Other, the denial of coevalness, as ontoepistemological signposts and ciphers. These perceptions likewise seize upon the imagined boundaries of the “Global North” and the

“Global South” from the perspective of imperial power and privilege. However, Emma did diverge from the above stakeholders in one important way. Although the “Immigration

Crisis” deeply disturbed and upset her, it was not something actively drawing her to the rural central highlands. Reflecting her level of education and involvement in Guatemala, she understood this “crisis” as an expression of structural violence (Farmer 2004) at global and national levels, the likes of which her team sought to address.

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Specifically, Emma believed these highlands “needed” her team because this area had been markedly devastated by the Civil War; this devastation was the main educational focus of her study abroad program, as well as a driving force of the international and community partnerships developed to sustain it. As Emma further explained:

I am tired of being so uncomfortable all the time. All of these trips to the middle-of-nowhere [Guatemala] have ruined my digestive system. I can literally see things moving around in the water [that I drink]. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I feel like I have to help the Maya because of everything they suffered during the [Civil] War. I want to use my white privilege to do good. So, it’s okay if I suffer in the field. This work gives me a life high. There is nothing like it.

Emma continued that the historical trauma left in the wake of the Civil War delineated

“real Guatemala” and/or “where the people are,” a topic and framing that permeates this dissertation. According to Emma, Antigua could never house her public health project because the city had not been “traumatized” by the war. Emma detested Antigua because she believed that most of its residents were war criminals who would never see the inside of a courtroom, a perception that was not entirely unfounded (see Chapter Two). Taking pity on me—“I would go crazy if I had to talk to as many white people as you do”—she concluded our interview by inviting me to tour the site of her project and fieldwork.

To be clear, I do not question the value of Emma’s team in terms of making life more “livable” for their impoverished Kaqchikel-Maya clientele. I do not have evidence to evaluate this work one way or the other. However, I do wish to bring attention to the imperialist mythologies allowing Emma to position herself as a savior vis-à-vis the Others she “served.” Despite the fact that she was trying to use her “white privilege to do good,”

Emma had the temerity to equate her “suffering” in the “field” to that endured by Maya peoples during the Civil War. This “suffering” was Emma’s cross to bear because she believed herself to be working outside of the geocultural and temporal parameters of 163 modernity. Adopting a “quasi-ritual character of sacrifice” (Dussel 2000, 472), Emma distributed the blessings and commendations of Empire to those she believed lived apart from the “civilization” that she detested. Drawing her to “real Guatemala” again and again, this distribution gave Emma a “life high.” Emma’s pursuit of this “high” effectively transformed the suffering of marginalized peoples into figurative stops or “life lessons” along the way, in terms of her metamorphosis into a “good” white person, civilizing hero, or “committed” gring@. That is, by framing her imperialist melancholy as an exceptional

“saving sacrifice” (Dussel 2000, 472), Emma articulated and enacted the recalibrated civilizing mission.

As I have been arguing, these “murky” reckonings and imaginings re-enforce the exploitation of global “life” via the installment and maintenance of Euro-American power/capital as ontoepistemological matrices or realities (i.e., Truth). For example, this power/capital enabled Emma’s ability to traverse the globe, “helping” those whose geopolitical immobility allowed her to bask in the glow of her benevolence, without altering the technologies of control installed by the Invasion, such as the nation-state. Of course, the strict enforcement of North American, Mexican, and Central American

“borders” would mean that anti-tourists like Emma could not enter Guatemala, leaving the country’s ruling elite bereft of the imperial capital/power upon which it so voraciously feeds. “Guatemala” would not be a popular qualitative research site, a thriving location for humanitarian and development projects, or the concentrated recipient of Christian capital/charity. The ideological preeminence of the “Global North” as a bastion of civilization, modernity, and the “saving” graces thereof would effectively collapse, leaving imperialist marauders and masqueraders in its imploding conceptual wake.

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In Chapter Five, I offer some solutions to these quagmires, such as the promotion and adoption of epistemic humility (see also Chapter One). However, although I am passionate about my subject, I do not seek to shame research participants. Instead, my goal is to evidence how the Invasion continues as an ontoepistemological project in a way that is beyond conscious control. As Fanon (2008; 2004) argues, it is because European colonialism persists as a psychology, philosophy, and economy that undoing its various hooks is the work of many lifetimes. The involved and delicate nature of this “work” makes it impossible to claim that any space of knowledge production and cultural interaction is uncontaminated by the local histories/global designs (Mignolo 2012) outlined here. As I have endeavored to illustrate, such claims entrench Euro-American power/capital as a global scale for the classification, ranking, and exploitation of all known forms and expressions of “life” or be-ing.

By centering Antigua in my analysis of this exploitation, I have attempted to capture its dynamic and pernicious persistence, or what I announce as “the coloniality of power,” following Latin American, queer, and feminist scholars (e.g., Lugones 2007). In what remains, I return to an analysis of the sexual assault with which I introduced this chapter, in a bid to further illustrate the workings of coloniality vis-à-vis the recalibrated civilizing mission. In so doing, I hope to continue my endeavors to analytically contract the semiotic distance between the anti-tourist and the imperialist.

3.3 Tourism Security Logics, Corporeal Moralities, and the Fomentation of Imperial Panics

A different day, a different time, Paul and I sat together in companionable silence upon my cherished bench; we were enjoying the chaotic sight of tourists, Maya handicraft

165 vendors/vendedoras, guias, and others, as they went about their business in El Parque

Central. I was about to close my eyes for a catnap when Paul broke our shared silence. He asked me, “Have you read the latest travel warning? The one the [US] State Department released today about that girl who got raped?” Recalling Juan’s prediction, I shook my head and waited for him to tell me more. Paul responded:

She was asking for trouble. I heard that she was wearing a mini skirt and drinking in public—in Guatemala, of all places! I could have told you what was going to happen [to her]. These people [Guatemalan nationals] are barely out of the cave. She should have known better!

As I struggled to find the words to respond, Paul said that he had to leave. His missionary group was holding an emergency meeting in his hotel to review the modes of “proper” comportment—dress, public behavior, and curfews—so that “our girls don’t get raped and act like ladies.” Paul looked at me seriously and cautioned: “You should think about leaving [Guatemala] ASAP. You know it’s time to get out of dodge when Antigua makes the travel warning list.” As if on cue, a patrol of the national military police marched directly in front of us. This patrol was comprised of ten men with dark brown skin, who were all staring straight ahead and marching in exact time. They were dressed in camouflage and combat boots, with semi-automatic weapons perched across their shoulders. They looked to be no more than 18 years old.

As Little (2014) notes, Antigua is the most heavily patrolled city in Guatemala. The small city houses five separate security and policing forces: the military police, the national police force or the Policía Nacional Civil de Guatemala (PNC), municipal transit/traffic police, municipal tourism police, and private security guards (Becklake 2020; Little 2014).

Despite the political instability, impunity, and violence shaping life outside of the city, these forces continue to be concentrated in Antigua. For example, Guatemala City, which

166 is known as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, exhibits a marked absence of the national and municipal police (Dickins de Girón 2011; Thomas, O’Neill, and Offitt

2011). Drawing from Agamben (1998), Little (2014, 396) argues that security measures in

Antigua capture the city’s suspension in “a permanent state of siege” because of its

“exceptional” role as a transnational hub, profitable tourism attraction, and home of

Guatemala’s elite. However, despite this suspension, crime continues to increase in the city. Little (2014, 413) thus asks: “Why is Antigua not secure?”

Answering his own question, Little (2014, 413) responds that the “tourism spectacle” in Antigua, the city’s function as a cultural heritage attraction, commodity, and theater, makes the “surveillance and containment of residents, tourists, and criminals difficult.” Consequently, “ethnicity and […] crime in Antigua do not easily overlap and become located in one particular ethnic group as perpetrators or victims” (Little 2014, 413).

The “unpredictability” of an “ethnically difficult-to-decipher (to the Guatemalan state) transnational mobile population” exposes the fault lines of Antigua’s state of siege (Little

2014, 413); as policing and security forces cannot distinguish the “good guys” from the

“bad,” criminal acts go unchecked. Thus, Little (2014) concludes, policing and security in

Antigua is likewise a spectacle. I agree that these limits are revelatory in terms of the operations of modern power/capital. However, Little’s arguments elide the nuances of embodiment that make the siege state a potent weapon of governance and politicking.

I contend that raced, classed, and gendered optics differentiated, actualized, surveilled, and contained “residents, tourists and criminals” in Antigua. As painstakingly detailed above, these hierarchical, biological, and political classifications were grounded within the matrices, scales, and schemas of classification left in the wake of the Invasion.

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In other words, very particular geocultural rationales enabled and structured Antigua’s state of siege during the timeframe in question, rendering its “transnational mobile population” entirely apprehensible and governable. Antigua was thus quite “secure” in regard to the sustained role of the city in the consolidation of imperial white power/capital.

In what follows, I attempt to illustrate how “New World” configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation were used to leverage an increase in security forces in Antigua in order to “protect” this power/capital or “civilization.”

Figure 3.2: National military police as they patrol Antigua’s Central Park. Picture taken by the author, May 2016.

I begin by discussing the sociojuridical nuances of the security spectacle in Antigua, or what Becklake (2020, 34) has termed “touristic securitization.” Becklake (2020, 34) defines this as “the practice of securing tourists to sustain tourism,” which she argues “is informed by and informing of intersecting inequalities and (re)producing human

168 insecurities, especially for poor, often Indigenous, Guatemalans […].” Her contention echoes that of anthropologist Paul Amar (2013, 6), who insists that the implementation of

“human” security regimes across the Global South represents a “new kind of governance

[…] aimed to protect, rescue and secure certain idealized forms of humanity identified with a particular family of sexuality, morality and class subjects.” However, unlike these scholars, I do not understand these logics as capturing a “new” form of governance or capital accumulation. Instead, I understand these measures as capturing something quite

“old”: the civilizing mission and its recalibration as a “modern” technique and philosophy of rule.

As Little (2014, 406) observes, until 1997, policing in Antigua was conducted by a couple of “aging, over-weight sheriffs.” Although I do not agree with the ageist and body- shaming tone of this quote, the point is that something changed regarding public perceptions of Antigua’s security. Specifically, as political violence, impunity, and corruption increased throughout Guatemala, nationals argued that Antigua’s security and profitability as a cultural heritage and tourism site was being threatened (Little 2014).

Notably, international leisure travelers in Antigua, as well as the businesses serving these travelers, were experiencing an increase in criminal acts, such as robbery.

Thus, in 1997, the municipal tourism police were created (hereafter referred to as the tourism police) in order to explicitly “protect” tourists and industry stakeholders. In general, these police ignored middle-class community members and their concerns

(Becklake 2020; Little 2014). For example, they accompanied tourists to major destinations and attractions throughout Antigua in order to protect them from robbery or assault.

According to Little (2014, 406), this police force was created in consultation with “a retired

169 police officer from the U.S.” and “with support from the U.S. government.” That is,

Antigua’s diminishing security was a transnational concern, given its global popularity as a tourism destination.

Little notes that these policing practices (i.e., the protection of international leisure travelers at the expense of middle-class residents and nationals) remained unchanged until

2008. Following a marked increase in the robbery and physical assault of tourists, this was also the year that Mayor Adolfo Vivar Marroquín (2008–2012) was elected to his first term

(Little 2014). In response to governmental pressure, he “reformed and professionalized the municipal police force to include divisions dedicated to tourism, a special criminal investigative team, and traffic police” (Little 2014, 409). Simultaneously, the PNC were deployed to patrol Antigua, which included increased surveillance activities, “primarily through security cameras and plain-clothes detectives” (Little 2014, 410). These changes occurred under the auspices of the “Plan Cuadrante de Seguirdad Preventica/Preventative

Security Quadrants Plan,” a community policing program first developed in Chile around

2001, which was implemented in Antigua after Vivar Marroquín’s election. The goal of this program was to curb “crime through the better integration of police officers in neighborhoods” (Little 2014, 410). Thus, by 2008, there were four district forces dedicated to touristic securitization in Antigua: the tourism police, the municipal police (within which

I lump traffic police), the PNC, and private security/bodyguards.

By and large, Antigua’s residents were not happy with this “new” policing plan; the security spectacle angered nationals because it markedly bypassed their concerns.

Residents were quoted as saying that they “consideran que el programa División Plan

Cuadrante de Seguridad Preventiva en Antigua Guatemala nació muerto/consider that the

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Preventive Security Quadrant Plan in Antigua, Guatemala was born dead” (López 2014,

1). One reason for this dissatisfaction was that municipal and national police forces did little to address the rising tide of drug cartel violence directly affecting residents within the city and throughout the country (Little 2014). However, that this crime was starting to negatively impact the tourism industry raised major concerns, rousing the government to further action. In 2013, former Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina (2012–2015) implemented a revised tourism security plan: “El Programa Antigua Segura/Plan Secure

Antigua” (López 2014).13 Business owners and other stakeholders were given electronic tablets or iPads so that they could immediately report any suspect behavior or people to the

PNC, who were then to respond promptly to these reports.

In addition, the military police began to regularly patrol Antigua in small cadres, focused mostly on banks. In effect, these police were deployed to explicitly “protect” transnational capital. As these patrols did not address the concerns of nationals or full-time residents, public dissatisfaction only increased. For example, further capturing the spectacle of security in the city, technological issues prevented shopkeepers and community members from actually using said iPads (López 2014). To recapitulate, by

2013, Guatemala’s military police became officially involved in touristic securitization.

The public were also made a part of these efforts, albeit in a contrived or limited manner.

Nonetheless, despite these “spectacular” measures, concerns about Antigua’s security continued to escalate.

International leisure travelers, as well as the businesses serving their various consumer desires, were now regularly targeted for robbery, extortion, and assault. The government responded to these violences by increasing military and paramilitary forces in

171 the city. In 2014, the military police began to patrol the entire city in earnest, and they became a visual fixture of daily life (See Figure 3.2). In 2015, Expert Security Resources— a Mexican corporation that protects diplomats, politicians, and celebrities from drug cartel violence in the US, México, and Central America—was hired by INGUAT to consult with industry stakeholders in Antigua about how to address mounting crime against tourists

(INGUAT 2015). In May 2016, tourism security became an official department of the PNC, resulting in the formation of a separate division, División de Seguridad Turística de la

PNC/Tourist Security Division of the PNC (DISETUR). DISETUR added 54 agents to “el estado de fuerza/the state of force” that was already 300 officers strong (PROATUR 2017).

These officers were placed throughout the country at “los destinos turísticos prioritarios/priority tourism destinations,” which, of course, included Antigua (PROATUR

2017). Alongside this “estado de fuerza,” many oligarchic and industry stakeholders continued to hire private body/security guards. If one can afford it, this remains a common practice, due to the infamous corruption of the PNC (Dickins de Girón 2011).

In sum, by 2014, touristic securitization in Antigua was a distinct “state of force,” one explicitly focused on the “protection” of international travelers and their capital, including, by proxy and design, anti-tourists. Antigua’s siege state has made it one of the most militarized cities in Guatemala. In the words of one uncertified guia, “Gringos get an army to protect them and those of us who live here, we die every day!” Further bringing this point home is the fact that policing and security agents were stationed directly outside

ATMs, expensive hotels, popular restaurants, and the airport. They patrolled major tourism destinations, such as El Parque Central. Enacting a powerful show of military might, these

172 forces shed light on the concrete socioeconomic relationships buttressing Antigua’s political economy (Little 2014)—tourists were to be “secured” by any means necessary.

However, as I detailed in the preceding section, the city has long been the focus of such initiatives because of its complicated and evolving relationship to imperial white capital/power or “civilization.” In other words, “modern” security measures in Antigua depended on and invoked the geocultural hierarchies shaping life in Guatemala since the

Invasion. For example, as indicated by the above quote, impoverished and working-class

Ladino and Maya peoples were quite aware that military and paramilitary forces were in

Antigua to protect white people from the Global North. These stakeholders intimately understood that security and police officers were in the city to guard white supremacy as a local history/global design (Mignolo 2012).

As people who live and work in Antigua were also aware, this sector required such

“spectacular” protection because the government, as well its international partners, take the national tourism industry very seriously. Antigua’s “security” is not a small or trivial matter when it comes to Guatemala’s bottom line (Little 2014). Thus, the stability of Antigua is a national priority, addressed as such by Pérez Molina, a lethal member of the oligarchy and infamous war criminal. I add that this “prioritization” of Antigua depended upon its established function as a “resting” place for imperial white capital/power, one left in the wake of its configuration as a colonial metropole or oasis of European civilization, modernity, and/or “humanity.” To further advance this argument, I now turn to a discussion of the 2014 “Security Message” generated by the US Department of State in response to the sexual assault of select tourists in Antigua. In an attempt to unmask the civilizing

173 mission as a “modern” problem and process, I pay particular attention to the occlusions, excesses, and fantasies enacted by this message.

To begin, consider the following passage from the travel warning in question, which captures the role of imperialist statecraft in the fomentation of geocultural panics, especially concerning unruly bodies (Mintz 2007) and other terrifying bumps in the night:

The U.S. Embassy Guatemala City, Guatemala reminds U.S. citizens in Guatemala of the dangers of sexual assault. It has come to our attention that at least three U.S. citizens have been the victims of sexual assault in the city of Antigua since April. We are aware of similar crimes committed against other foreign tourists in Antigua in this same time frame. In some scenarios, date rape drugs may have been used to disable the victims [emphasis added].

The vague and cryptic wording of this warning—terminology such as may have, similar, at least—is quite striking, given that most of Antigua was buzzing with news of the latest sexual assault encompassed by this warning. Many knew of its general circumstances, the name of the “gringo” bar where it occurred, and that a gringa, a white woman from the

US, had been raped. Gender, race, and nationality were hypervisible in public discussions about this assault. Indeed, as captured by Paul’s response, many missionary and study abroad programs were holding emergency meetings in an effort to “protect” their participants, particularly white womxn.

I contend that this strange and fictive rhetoric was a strategic response, with the effect of punishing perceived corporal insurgencies via the cultivation of epistemic murk.

In effect, this security message neutralized and enfolded the embodied differences and experiences of involved survivors via the sterile, universalizing, and sociojuridical category of “U.S. citizens.” The message reconfigured the sexual assaults of “at least three” tourists in Antigua as attacks against “U.S. citizens” throughout all of Guatemala. By erasing the raced, classed, and gendered hierarchies that make some people more

174 vulnerable to sexual violence than others, this warning politically leveraged the aforementioned assaults as attacks against Empire. It generated a mythology about “U.S. citizens” in Guatemala that decontextualized the networks of power, which shaped the intelligibility of “the tourist” as a distinct, distinguishable, and sociocorporeal representative of the imperial nation—specifically, as a citizen-subject or member of this nation. That is, this warning figuratively whitewashed the histories, politics, and economies recorded by the body of “the tourist,” such as its ranked and varied ability to safely navigate the world system. As Juan angrily noted, this freedom of movement was obscene, especially when juxtaposed against the simultaneous imprisonment of Central American children across the US Southwest.

Given its documentation of the manifold terrors menacing “U.S. citizens” in

Guatemala, this security message begs the following question: Just how many tourists experienced violent crime during the timeframe in question? INGUAT (2015) reports that, from September 2013 to September 2014, there was a small increase in the robbery and physical assault of international leisure travelers, from about 148 to 181 instances.14 As I witnessed during my fieldwork, this increase, along with the above travel warning, incited a marked intensification of municipal, national, and military security forces. For example, the day the warning was released, military patrols doubled throughout Antigua, from four times a day to eight. Industry stakeholders and community members felt that this increase signaled Antigua’s devolution as a “nice place” to live. The following remarks made by a certified Ladino guia, who commuted to the city every day for work, captures these sentiments: “Ten years ago, Antigua was the safest place in all of Guatemala. Now, I do not let my children come here.” However, most of these stakeholders were grateful for the

175 presence of the military because of the perceived ineffectiveness and corruption of municipal and national police forces (see also Little 2014).

As this count indicates, in 2014, international leisure travelers faced a noticeable but not significant increase in the threat of experiencing robbery or other violence in

Guatemala. If one’s business was on shaky ground due to this increase, the presence of the military might be a welcome sight and relief. However, the above count pales in comparison to other priorities, woundings, losses, and deaths, the likes of which capture the function of Antigua’s siege state as a biopolitical caesura (Pugliese 2013), a technology for the cultivation of “certain idealized forms of humanity” (Amar 2013, 6) over Others.

Most notably, also reported in 2014, 759 Ladino and Maya womxn were raped and murdered in rural Guatemala, Guatemala City, and along the Guatemala–México border

(Bessler 2014). Capturing the geographic logics of ethno-femicide in Guatemala, most of these womxn lived, loved, and labored outside of Antigua’s militarized walls. As I have shown, these walls have historically separated the “civilized” from the “savage,” ensuring that these women lived and died in the well-fortified shadow of imperial white capital/power. National response to this femicide remains non-existent (Bessler 2014), capturing the persistence of European bodily hierarchies in terms of the violences inflicted on colonized bodies and lands (Lugones 2007; Martínez Salazar 2014; A. Smith 2005).

During interview and observation sessions, no one ever mentioned the shocking number of

Ladino and Maya womxn who have died, a silence gesturing toward the fact that these deaths are such a part of quotidian life in the Americas that they go almost unnoticed.

However, many different people in Antigua were discussing the sexual assault of “U.S. citizens” in “Guatemala,” a point to which I will shortly return.

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As Martínez Salazar (2014) argues, ethno-femicide in Guatemala reflects a brutal legacy of gender-specific and racialized violence that has continuously targeted impoverished Indigenous, dark-skinned mestizx, and Black womxn. She further contends that this legacy is rooted in the sociocorporeal rationales of the civilizing mission— specifically, the eugenicist logics of hegemonic mestizaje, the “crossing” or “mixing” of

European and Indigenous “blood,” as part of nation-building projects across Latin America

(see also Gutiérrez Nájera, Bianet Castellanos, and Aldama 2012). In particular, European invaders accomplished this “mixing of blood” via rape and murder, with the ultimate goal of eliminating Indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures from Guatemala (Martínez

Salazar 2014). As I established above, this historical legacy also shaped how people were classified, ranked, and treated inside Antigua’s bounds, where Indigenous, dark-skinned casta, and Black womxn were forced to occupy the disposable and abject category of the

“animal” (see also Chapter Two).

The lack of political response to ethno-femicide in Guatemala reveals the troubling endurance of these colonial scales or the continuing influence of the Invasion as an ontoepistemological project. A deeply embedded feature of “reality” or social life, this project intrinsically shaped Antigua’s state of siege during the fieldwork in question. As evidenced by the marked abundance of security officials in Antigua, leisure travelers from the Global North were highly valued, and at the mortal expense of impoverished Maya and

Ladino womxn. “Residents, tourists and criminals” were thus “decipherable” in Antigua as discrete, biological, and political categorizations, as populations to be managed or controlled via the absence or presence of security forces. More precisely, I contend that

Antigua’s siege state captures how attacks against white womxn were considered corporeal

177 insurgencies (Pugliese 2013, 4) or attacks against Empire. In this way, touristic securitization in Antigua waged contemporary colonial warfare, one further captured by the ongoing murders of Maya and Ladino womxn across Guatemala, which were occluded or rendered “unremarkable” by the needs and priorities of imperial white capital/power.

Another example of this warfare can be illustrated by tracing government expenditures and prioritizations in 2014. Despite the extreme poverty afflicting most

Guatemalan nationals, Pérez Molina partnered with INGUAT to invest over US $8 million of public monies in the development of international tourism campaigns, including “Life

Lessons.” Advertising the country’s commodious tourism infrastructure, these campaigns were meant to “tell the world that Guatemala has more to offer than what has been said about it in the past” (Bevan 2012, 12). Rather than using these monies to improve social welfare, Pérez Molina instead fortified Guatemala’s tourism sector in a public relations bid to display the country’s “progress” (i.e., modernity). Pérez Molina and INGUAT invested serious resources in the production and promotion of “Guatemala” as a “civilized” member of the world system. Ultimately benefitting the oligarchy, this promotion sought to consolidate Euro-American power/capital, luring tourists to Guatemala in the face of all sorts of state-sanctioned violences, including ethno-femicide.

Thus, the security spectacle in Antigua (Little 2014) was never meant to seduce community members, Guatemalan nationals, or industry stakeholders. Instead, policing forces were in the city to glorify and genuflect Antigua’s siege state as an established relation of rule, rendering hypervisible its “civilizing” promises and codes. In order to ensure the integrity of the colonial caste/gender system as a transnational relationship and imperative, the sexual assault of white womxn from the Global North would be met with

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“exceptional” force. The resulting show of militarized might was an attempt to assuage imperial white capital/power, thereby ensuring the stability of the geocultural and bodily hierarchies shaping life inside and outside of Antigua since the Invasion. In this sense, it did not matter if Euro-American and European travelers were actually safe, as long as they thought they were. The menacing issue at stake was that the sexual assault of “U.S. citizens” placed these theatrics in a precarious abeyance; tourists from the Global North were catching onto the fact that Antigua was not so “exceptional” after all.

Hard upon the heels of the 2014 “Security Message,” tourist dialogue shifted from the “Immigration Crisis” as a pressing humanitarian emergency to the “savage” assault of

“U.S. citizens” in Guatemala. Tess anxiously exclaimed, “We are here to help them

[Guatemalan nationals] and they thank us [US nationals/women] by raping us! I am never coming here again!” Paul remarked, “What happened [the sexual assault of a US woman and tourist] makes me think really hard about border security [between the US, México, and Central America].” A social worker and volunteer with Emma’s group explained, “I don’t like what the US has done to Guatemala, and that’s basically why I’m here. But I can’t believe that they [Guatemalan nationals] would rape us [white womxn from the US].

What a way to thank us for trying to make things better between our countries!”

As evidenced by these quotes, the travel warning in question fostered a type of nationalistic solidarity, grounded in the sexual assault of “U.S. citizens” in “Guatemala.”

This solidarity caused some research participants to question their “benevolent” presence in the country, effacing the systemic, political, and subjective conditions transmuting the bodies of individual tourists into accessible targets for harm. According to these participants, the sexual assault of “U.S. citizens” was particularly difficult to fathom, given

179 that they were in Guatemala for “humanitarian” purposes. These rapes violently rejected the ideological positioning of these “helpful” travelers as civilizing heroes and saints, further unmasking the contrived, artificial, and imposed distance between them and the

“dreaded” tourist.

Meanwhile, back “home” in the US, the Department of Justice reported that

346,830 womxn were sexually assaulted in 2012 alone (Truman, Langton, and Planty

2013). As Juan observed, if the US issued a warning every time one of these assaults occurred, the country’s entire infrastructure would crash. Apparently, the sexual assault of

“U.S. citizens” was only noteworthy when these citizens were traversing “Guatemala’s” savage terrains. When “U.S. citizens” were sexually assaulted in North America, it was business as usual, the everyday warfare of gendered coloniality. Although this particular count is not separated by race, data collected by the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

2003–2014 indicates that Indigenous, Latinx, and Black womxn were disproportionately targeted for sexual assault and murder in the US (Petrosky et al. 2017). For example, this report found that Indigenous womxn were being murdered and sexually assaulted across the US at rates higher than 10 times the national average, with the US Department of Justice reporting these findings in 2010 (Rosay 2016). Resembling the unfolding ethno-femicide in Guatemala, these assaults and deaths capture how certain bodies are prioritized over others, in terms of the colonial order of people, places, and things.

Certainly, the everyday warfare of coloniality takes on a different form in

Guatemala—for instance, an escalating ethno-femicide eclipsed by the pronounced deployment of five different security forces in Antigua. In other words, the sexual assault of “at least three U.S. citizens” fomented a transnational panic because these assaults

180 threatened the preeminence of imperial white power/capital in Guatemala. Antigua was becoming known as a place that was unsafe for the representatives of Empire, i.e., leisure travelers from the Global North, white womxn in particular. By using policing and security forces to assuage this capital/power, the ruling elite tried to regain control over the means and modes of production. Yet, it is important to note that, although the ruling elite sought to protect imperial white power in Guatemala, it was the primary object of its censure.

Specifically, the travel warning in question brought into sharp relief the failure of the oligarchy to properly comply with or enact imperial designs, a failure that required

“diplomatic” intervention and punishment, such as an international security message.

Of course, as I have tried to show, the US Department of State was able to politically leverage these assaults because the contours of modern power/capital are raced, classed, and gendered. As I began to argue in the previous section, rich white womxn have continuously embodied the eugenicist fears and anxieties of Empire (Stoler 2010; 1995).

Said anxieties and fears were markedly heightened in colonized locations such as

Guatemala because these womxn were emblematic of imperial corporeal moralities—they transmitted the latter as actual geocultural codes for “proper” behavior and belonging, especially when in transit. Specifically, as Alexander (2005) notes, the autonomy of bourgeois white womxn was strictly controlled in the “New World” in the name of preserving the white, heterosexual family; in effect, this family became a stand-in for

“civilization” or the imperial white nation. Alexander (2005, 22) argues that this policing occurred because “loyalty to the nation as citizen is perennially colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality; erotic autonomy brings with it the potential of undoing the nation entirely.”

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Thus, Indigenous, Black, and Latinx people were not the only bodies coded as erotic, political, and biological threats to European rule in the Americas, although they were prioritized as the primary enemies of modernity/civilization. The potentiality of white womxn to act outside of the borders and boundaries installed by white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism—to become queer strangers (Ahmed 2000) and race traitors—was also a looming threat. As A. Smith (2005) notes, it was anathema for white womxn to marry Indigenous men in the US due to the transnational threat posed by such a marriage. If too many white womxn abandoned the suicidal/homicidal mandates of the settler-colonial state, the future of the latter as a caste system would be foreclosed, its

“pure-blood” heirs abandoned to the four winds. Certainly, then, the rape of white womxn at the hands of Indigenous, Latinx, and Black men could never be tolerated, given these genocidal imperatives. However, European men raping white womxn and/or womxn of color was another story entirely, as these violences preserved the colonial caste/gender system (e.g., cisheteropatriarchy and white supremacy) as a global logic of rule and citizenship.

Lugones (2007, 187) insists that this history and production of corporeal moralities captures how “gender, heterosexuality, capitalism and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other” in terms of the allocation of world power/capital. As she argues,

I arrive at this conclusion by walking a political/praxical/theoretical path that has yet to become central in gender work: the path marked by taking seriously the coloniality of power. […] it is also politically important that many who have taken the coloniality of power seriously have tended to neutralize gender. That position is also one that entrenches oppressive colonial gender arrangements, oppressive organizations of life (Lugones 2007, 187).

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Treading in these footsteps, I position touristic securitization as a contemporary springboard for the generation of “oppressive colonial gender arrangements, oppressive organizations of life”—the global coloniality of power. In the case of Antigua, touristic securitization enacted these oppressive arrangements and organizations via the geocultural and somatic mythologies outlined here, which, as I have shown, were initially installed by the Invasion. In particular, these mythologies, in both their historical and contemporary forms, transmitted the legible boundaries and parameters of “civilization” as a transnational mission, standard, and orientation (e.g., in both Guatemala and the US).

In other words, as Enloe (1990, 57) argues, “any government’s tourism dependent development strategy could be undermined if the country garnered an international reputation as a place unsafe for women.”15 Enloe (1990, 47) suggests that this phenomenon results from the historical significations attributed to the immigration of rich white womxn to the Americas, an arrival signaling that the “New World” was completely and officially

“civilized.” More precisely, this immigration indicated that the civilizing mission had reached its horrific conclusion (A. Smith 2005; Stoler 2010). Euro-American colonies were finally “safe” and “secure” for the reproduction of the white, heterosexual family-as-nation, as Indigenous, Latinx, and Black “contagions” or threats had been murdered or “contained” in jails, boarding schools, plantations, etc. (Wolfe 2006).

As evidenced by tourism security logics in Antigua, the safe passage of white womxn to and from colonized locations continues to determine if a given country is considered a “civilized” member of the world system. If a country in the Global South is thought to be too dangerous for white womxn to visit, it will lose capital/power. In an act of imperial statecraft and hypocrisy, it will be punished by the US Department of State

183 with an international travel warning. In the name of preserving “civilization” as a standard and hierarchy, the subtleties of structural violence in the colony and the metropole will be elided, eclipsed by the imperial creation and containment of corporeal insurgencies. In other words, I argue for a conceptualization of Antigua’s state of siege that accounts for the contiguous role of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism in the organization, consolidation, and corporealization of world power/capital. Indeed, as I advance in the next section, this state has long relied upon “New World” configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation as actual technologies for the inscription of its paradoxical philosophies of enforcement and containment.

3.4 Turismo es Chingar: The Raced, Classed, and Gendered Prosthetics of Coloniality

During a fieldwork stint I conducted in the summer of 2016, I was taking my own research “break” in Panajachel, a popular tourist town located on the occupied lands of

Kaqchikel-Maya peoples and along the shores of Guatemala’s impossibly beautiful Lago

Atitlán/Atitlan Lake. My partner and I were enjoying a late-night drink at a local bar and listening to music when six PNC officers lined the wall behind us, after noticing that we were the only gring@s in the establishment. Ostensibly, they were there to “protect” us; apparently, the geocultural logics of the siege state traveled, following in the footsteps of those held to represent the rapacious needs of imperial white capital/power. Suffice it to say, I was already feeling anxious, when the band suddenly stopped playing and a spotlight came out of nowhere to fall on our table.

“We would like to thank the Americans who are here tonight for coming to

Guatemala, for seeing for yourselves that it is not dangerous, that we love tourists, we love

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Americans,” the lead singer said in English. “God bless you! And tell all of your friends that Guatemala loves Americans. That it is safe here.” Everyone in the bar then turned toward us and began to clap.

My partner and I were horrified and embarrassed; tears of frustration and empathy stung my eyes. Since beginning this project, I had witnessed a steady decline in tourism activity and commerce in regional centers such as Antigua and Panajachel due to oligarchic impunity, a crumbling national infrastructure, the “Immigration Crisis,” and other structural violences. I knew that poor and working people were hurting because the national tourism industry provides some of the only stable avenues of employ. However, I was also aware that international travelers were not exactly “loved” and that white womxn from the

Global North were particularly targeted for sexual violence. For example, in 2017, three

“armed bandits” hijacked a tourist shuttle leaving Antigua for Nicaragua (Devlin 2017, 1).

All ten tourists aboard this shuttle, who were from Australia, Canada, and other countries across the Global North, were robbed and physically assaulted. Horrifically, all of the womxn on this shuttle were separated from their partners and systematically raped (Devlin

2017).

Before I could process what had just occurred in the bar, still blinded by the spotlight aimed at my table, a Ladino woman in her seventies passed me an open bottle of rum. She declared, “Turismo es chingar/Tourism is to fuck. ¿Sabes que significa esto?/Do you know what this means? Quizas no, porque eres gringa/Probably not because you

(informal) are a white woman.” She sighed, and then said in fluent English, “Tourism is to fuck, to be fucked. You understand? But we need you gringos all the same. That’s the way that the world works. Please, please have a drink.”

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These events and conversations haunt me because they gesture toward the various forces of repulsion, attraction, pleasure, and violation that make Guatemala’s tourism sector an unfolding and crucial site of transnational struggle. These forces reveal how touristic securitization wages war by other means, including the resulting installment and enforcement of the siege state. As I have argued thus far, this state figuratively inscribes the “murky” priorities of Empire onto the bodies of those it “protects.” In this section, I show how this inscription, which determines the allocation of power/capital via the national tourism industry, captures the technological or prosthetic function of imperial and colonial configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Specifically, by paying attention to “where, precisely, a prosthesis stops and a body starts” (Pugliese and Stryker

2009, 1), I continue my attempt to reveal the recalibrated civilizing mission as a “modern” process and problem.

I use the term “prosthetic” in the sense advanced by Pugliese (2009, 16) in his framing of whiteness:

[…] not in terms of a biologically essentialized attribute, exclusively determined by one’s phenotypical features (colour of skin, texture of hair, etc.); rather, whiteness must be seen to operate in terms of a transnational technology of racialized power that is simultaneously contingent upon specific sites, subjects and relations.

According to Pugliese, whiteness is an instrument of transnational power that can be adopted, rejected, or otherwise brandished. Pugliese (2009, 16) continues that, because whiteness is a technology, it remains “visibly an adjunct to the non-white body,” never quite fitting or resting seamlessly upon this body. Whiteness can be “placed” upon the non- white body but not “corporeally owned or nativised” by the latter, a phenomena capturing what Pugliese (2009, 16) terms “prosthetic white citizenship,” which is “conferred upon

186 non-white subjects of the white nation.” As Fanon (2008; 2004) establishes with his theorizations of colonial mimicry and recognition, this citizenship incites abiding pain, trauma, and cognitive dissonance because it is imposed as a racializing logic via European imperialism and colonialism. In conversation with feminist scholars (Alexander 2005;

Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Anzaldúa 1987; Desai 2002; Enloe 1990; Luibhèid 2002;

Martínez Salazar 2014; Stoler 2010), I add that prosthetic white citizenship is also an intrinsically gendered and sexualized installment and that it extends the Invasion as a contemporary cartography of struggle in the “New World.”

This process can be further instanced by how anti-tourists, policing officials, and other research participants utilized the rape of select US nationals as a foil for the reassertion of cisheteropatriarchy as a local history/global design (Mignolo 2012). As I have shown, the blame for these rapes was laid at the feet of what I term the “slutty gringa,” i.e., white womxn from the US, figured as queer, unruly, and hypersexual citizen-subjects who “deserved” sexual assault as a disciplinary or “civilizing” force. I contend that these figurations were an attempt to resolve the occult instability (Bhabha 1994) left in the wake of these womxn, who “dared” to leave the familiar shores of the imperial white nation.

Their presence in Guatemala challenged the foundational role of cisheteropatriarchy in the determination and enforcement of “proper” modes of imperial white citizenship.

As I argued above, these modes have historically transmitted the raced, gendered, and classed boundaries of European empire in Guatemala via the strict control and surveillance of rich white womxn. As I documented, these women were the geopolitical focus of a myriad of anxieties and fears, the likes of which helped to sculpt and transmit the cultural, somatic, and psychic boundaries of civilization/modernity in Central America

187 vis-à-vis “Antigua.” In what follows, I insist that touristic securitization became a contemporary theater for the enactment of these sociojuridical fears, anxieties, and inscriptions, which hinged on controlling the “slutty gringa” as a transnational corporeal insurgency. This legendary figure fomented an international panic because she transgressed the gendered and sexualized borders of the imperial white nation as installed in Antigua and the US. Building upon Pugliese’s (2009) work, I hope to show how these figurations and installments reveal the workings of what I term prosthetic gendered citizenship, and thus the endurance of the Invasion as an ontoepistemological project.

For many participants, the “slutty gringa” was the main reason that Antigua’s stability and profitability was in jeopardy. Escobar, a security guard, exclaimed in exasperation:

How can we [Guatemalan nationals] fight the image of Antigua as an unsafe place when you gringas come here, wearing what you wear, acting crazy, having sex with everyone, and then you cry “rape” when you get what you deserve? It is an impossible situation! I wish your men would teach you better or make you stay in your hotels!

According to Escobar, the immoral behavior of the “slutty gringa” was to blame for

Antigua’s negative image. In addition, Escobar held her “men” culpable for this behavior and Antigua’s unfolding public relations crisis. White men from the US had never properly disciplined the “slutty gringa” via force or imprisonment, allowing her “crazy” behavior to go unchecked. The “slutty gringa” thus floated within a liminal space, “impossibly” suspending the force and fiction of the colonial order for a brief “moment.” That Escobar directed his venom at me further captures this “suspension,” or the prosthetic nature of gender and sexuality, with implications for womxn’s (my) ability to travel the world system. It simply did not matter that I dressed conservatively, kept my back against the wall, and tried to hide everything about my body that transmitted its potential and unique 188 vulnerabilities (i.e., the dialectic of trauma as writ upon my flesh). In Escobar’s eyes, that

I was even in Antigua illustrated my unnatural, queer, and strange gender identity, or that

I was an unruly “woman” who needed to be disciplined by my “men.”

John expressed similar sentiments, which enraged me, given his level of education and where he was pursuing his studies. I expected better from him, especially in light of the “post-modern turn.” Specifically, John readily embraced the seductions and promises of imperial white cisheteropatriarchy. When asked about the recent sexual assault, he responded:

I have a sister, and I wouldn’t want her acting like I have seen other girls from the States act here [Antigua]… sort of like, I hate to use this word, but like sluts. I have even seen girls make out with other girls in the bars here. Maybe because this [Guatemala] is a Third World country, American girls go crazy? But I am glad the military came, because I do have a sister. I’d want her to be safe if she were here.

John coded the survivor in question as both a victim and perpetrator in terms of the somatic laws and hierarchies of Euro-American power/capital. He framed her very presence in

Guatemala as evidence of transgression of the moral codes (e.g., heterosexuality as a marker of the “civilized” nation-state) that make imperial and colonial geocorpographies potent technologies of rule. To contain this trespass, John supported the presence of the military police in Antigua, something that continues to shock me because of his research topic and/or knowledge of what these police are capable of doing. In the end, the potential of these police to act out in a violent manner paled in comparison to the manifold horrors of his beloved sister becoming a “slutty gringa,” someone able to escape the draconian prison of his “love.”

Given her “hopeless” nature, most research participants agreed that it was an exercise in futility to protect the “slutty gringa.” For example, Sara, a white Peace Corps

189 volunteer from the US explained that “women from the States think they can do whatever they want. It’s that kind of attitude that got that girl raped.” For Sara, the survivor in question was to blame for the violence she experienced because of her allegedly carefree and entitled “attitude,” one held to be intrinsic to her nationality and person and thus impossible to address or change. Alicia, a Ladino woman and manager of a homestay business in Antigua, similarly declared:

I do not like gringas staying here [Alicia’s house] because they have no morals. They [gringas] sleep with anyone! I tell them that they are going to be killed if they act like they do, but they do not listen! They are so bad that now the military police are here!

Like Sara, Alicia believed that the “slutty gringa” was a lost cause; not only was she going to be murdered because of her lack of morals, but her queer behavior had also rained down a storm of hellfire and brimstone upon the city, inciting the presence of the military police.

This perception, in particular, reveals the prosthetic nature of race and gender in terms of the relationship of the latter to the consolidation of imperial white power/capital. The close proximity of gringas to this power/capital ensured that the military police would be deployed to Antigua eventually, regardless of how “bad” these travelers might be.

For some research participants, the “slutty gringa” was especially emblematic of the regimes of impunity enabling the “Immigration Crisis” as a US imperialist violence.

For instance, Juan felt very strongly that the “slutty gringa” had been allowed to run amok in Antigua for far too long and at the direct expense of Guatemalan nationals. He cautioned:

The military [police] is going to fuck things up for everyone [in Antigua] except you gringos. While our [Guatemalan] children die in your [US] jails, gringo money will be protected. I would still be careful if I were you. You never know who will be waiting for you [gringas] outside your [gringo] bars.

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As discussed earlier, Juan understood the rape of the survivor in question as a proxy attack against Empire. In addition, as evidenced by the above quote, he also understood this attack as disrupting the smooth accumulation of “gringo money,” thereby causing the military occupation of Antigua. As V. L. Smith (1998) argues, these psychosomatic maneuvers are possible because the tourist body is a stand-in for its nation-state of origin. Vicuña

Gonzalez (2013) further notes that violence against US travelers, white people in particular, is common when they are in locales negatively shaped by their country’s terrible economic policies and war mongering. These circumstances certainly apply to Guatemala, as illustrated throughout. Given these geopolitics, Vicuña Gonzalez (2013, 218) argues that these travelers embody a “consumption and mobility,” which “stands out in almost obscene contrast,” making them targets for violence.

I add that these circumstances and politics render the body of the international leisure traveler a prosthetic, in and of itself, one that can be “used” to access, adopt, or challenge imperial capital/power. As evidenced by his remarks, Juan understood this capital/power as something figuratively cathected onto the bodies of white womxn from the Global North. As I argued above, imperial overlords categorized and treated these womxn in much the same way. That is, Juan’s reading of the sexual assault in question captures how “New World” configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation function as adjunctive technologies in terms of the accumulation of capital/power. The technological nature of these configurations engendered Juan’s understanding of the sexual assault in question as a corporeal insurgency or way to strike back at the US, especially during the “Immigration Crisis.”

Those working within Antigua’s illicit economy, such as drug dealers and sex

191 workers, likewise expressed the belief that the “slutty gringa” was to blame for vice and corruption in the city. The majority of these participants were impoverished Guatemalan nationals and men, although I occasionally crossed paths with European, Mexican, and

North American dealers and sex workers. In general, these stakeholders argued that the only reason they were able to engage in illicit economies was because gringas were debauched, immoral, and lascivious citizen-subjects. Further positioning themselves as the victims of the “slutty gringa,” these workers blamed white womxn from the US for the fact that they were drug dealers or sex workers. Like many of the tourists they served, these workers felt that the “slutty gringa” deserved to be raped because she was undisciplined, unruly, and queer.

These perspectives can be illustrated by this quote from Carlos, who was an uncertified guia, sex worker, and drug dealer:

It is not like I woke up one day and decided to have sex for money or sell drugs. Two years ago, I met this gringa from Kansas, and she was so crazy. At first, I helped her get drugs because that was all she wanted. We threw these parties for all of her friends at her hotel, and I went to jail once because of her. We started to have sex, but I was never sure about it. She was four years older, and she corrupted me. On the day that she left, she gave me money. A lot of money, three hundred dollars. Look, who am I to complain? So, gringas pay me for sex and drugs. But I wouldn’t be able to do this work if they were not so corrupted.

According to Carlos, he was initiated into Antigua’s illicit economy by an older gringa who

“corrupted” him. He understood this “corruption” as creating municipal demand for sex work and drugs because it was exclusive to the “slutty gringas” who visited Antigua. By serving as a figurative key, the “slutty gringa” provided prosthetic access to Antigua’s underworld. Thus, Carlos reasoned, gringas could not be sexually assaulted. Qualifying that violence against gringas was “always bad for business,” Carlos further explained,

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“Because I know personally that gringas will do anything, I doubt that tourist was raped.”

To be clear, my aim here is not to elide the geocultural avenues of power allowing some tourists from the Global North to travel to Guatemala, in addition to contracting guias like Carlos for drugs or sex. Rather, I hope to illustrate how “the burden of criminality” was transposed onto the bodies of select (white) womxn in Antigua, “drawing them more tightly into the state mechanisms of surveillance—positioning them simultaneously as victim and manager—all under the ideological gaze of the heteropatriarchal state as protector” (Alexander 2005, 26). I do so in a bid to highlight the hypervisible channels that can develop in terms of the inscription of particular mythologies upon particular bodies, a hallmark of epistemic murk. In addition, I wish to illustrate the unique role of cisheteropatriarchy in the charging of whiteness as a technology of citizenship or belonging vis-à-vis Guatemala’s tourism sector. In my mind, this captures why Antigua’s state of siege was so dramatically enforced, and in the horrific face of an actively unfolding ethno- femicide. In effect, touristic securitization in the city suspended white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism in a state of transnational emergency. This

“emergency” was made even more visible by the (alleged) behavior of the “slutty gringa,” a conceptual flashpoint for the articulation and containment of corporeal insurgencies in

Antigua and “back home” (e.g., the US).

A quick return to the travel warning in question further illustrates this violent and

“murky” production of tourism security logics. This warning outlined a set of six

“precautions” that all “U.S. citizens in Guatemala” should embrace to avoid sexual assault in Antigua, such as “do not go out alone at night,” “do not walk alone in isolated areas,” and “do not accept drinks from strangers or casual acquaintances” (United States Embassy

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Guatemala 2014). Given the transnational reach and grasp of cisheteropatriarchy, this was arguably sage advice. That is, these precautions glossed over the fact that sexual assault is a structural violence, one informing post-Invasion life and political economy across the

Americas.16

For example, as noted above, some “U.S. citizens” faced a large and disproportionate threat of sexual assault in their nation-state-of-origin due to their contextual, individualized, and unstable citizenship within the white supremacist, capitalist, and cisheteropatriarchal body politic. This warning suggested that, by following its patronizing directives, “U.S. citizens” could somehow navigate these necropolitical realities and technologies. Given its spectacular theatrics, its remarkable representational acrobatics, this warning was clearly meant to intimidate those white womxn who had left the imperial nation, thereby threatening the colonial caste system. Crucially, by erasing the embodied differences that make some people more vulnerable to structural violence than others (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation), the US was able to center itself as the benevolent protector of its “traveling” citizen-subjects and, by proxy, of the

“civilization” these subjects were held to represent.

In sum, perceptions of white womxn from the US as queer, out of control, and entitled informed how many research participants responded to the sexual assault of select leisure travelers. The fact that these travelers had been hurt, in a terrible and violent manner, never seemed to cross the minds of these participants. Instead, survivors were held up as examples of everything that was wrong with white womxn from the US who “dared” to visit Guatemala. As Nelson (1999, 41) points out, “a North American [woman] is not a gringa until she crosses a [Latin American] border.” Something happens to white womxn

194 from the US when they visit Central America—they change; they decide they can do

“whatever they want” and become “gringas.” They make “out with other girls,” they act like “sluts,” and they mingle with unsuitable and foreign men. They metamorphose into queer strangers and race traitors—unruly, uncanny, and uncivilized citizen-subjects, tainted by their regressive time travel to the lands of the temporally deficient Other.

Therefore, it would be “better” for everyone concerned if the mobility, freedom, and wild appetites of gringas were violently curtailed by “their men” so that their adjunctive access to power/capital via international leisure travel could be neutralized.

In other words, these perceptions reveal something important about prosthetic gendered citizenship in the imperial white nation. This citizenship was granted some womxn by virtue of their ability to travel to and from Guatemala, but could never be

“corporeally owned or nativised” because they were not men. Figurations of the “slutty gringa” in Antigua capture the provisional, limited, and imposed nature of this citizenship.

A corporeal insurgency, the “slutty gringa” placed the European caste/gender system in a state of emergency, threatening this system as a transnational matrix for the consolidation of power/capital. As evidenced by tourism security logics in Antigua, this threat was so large that it necessitated an international travel warning and a dramatic increase in security forces, further entrenching the military occupation of the city. As I have argued throughout, this occupation has long delineated the somatic and geocultural boundaries of “civilization” in Guatemala and beyond vis-à-vis the colonial order of people, places, and things.

3.5 Conclusion: The Recalibrated Civilizing Mission and the Geopolitics of Embodiment

As Paul walked away to attend his “emergency” meeting, Isabel, a long-time friend

195 and vendedora, took his place next to me. She sighed and said, “I have had the worst week!

Tourists are not buying anything, and now I have to deal with this!” She kicked off her threadbare sandals and showed me a horrifically swollen ankle. Despite the fact that she was almost seventy years old and could barely stand on this ankle, she had walked two hours from the town where she lived to sell handmade goods (rugs, wallets, jewelry, and other items) to tourists in El Parque Central. Generally, Isabel earned around five US dollars a day.

I asked Isabel what had happened, and she responded that she had injured her ankle fleeing the tourism police. If caught by these police, they would have confiscated her goods, making it impossible for her to earn the money that she needed to eat. As I put my hand on her arm to comfort her, she began to cry. She said:

These soldiers came to my house one night; they took my husband [from our bed], and I think they forced him to serve in the [civil] patrols [during the Civil War]. I do not know because I never saw him again. I raised our three sons alone, and God knows that I tried my best, but these [Ladino] devils make everything hard.

As I dug around in my bag for a bottle of Tylenol to give to Isabel, her landlord screamed from across the park, “Isabel! You dirty woman! Where is my rent money?” This violent scene attracted the tourism police to Isabel, who frantically began to get up. “I have to go!” she exclaimed, her whole body shaking with panic. “I do not have the money, and I cannot get caught by the police!” I told her I would try to distract her landlord and the tourism police so she could get away. She nodded and ran away on her injured ankle as fast as she could.

Suffice it to say, the sexual assault of “at least three U.S. citizens” was likely to be the last thing on Isabel’s mind as she struggled to negotiate the quotidian violences

196 affecting her life and work—the raced, classed, and gendered hierarchies transmitted by the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 1987, 67). Travel warnings were not issued to

“protect” Isabel; she would not receive the same attention as US nationals because “the body, in any of its manifestations, is always geopolitically situated and inscribed by signs, discourses, regimes of visuality,” abstracted “through a process of symbolic and political violence” (Pugliese 2013, 86). The “violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body” is inseparable from “the geopolitics of empire” (Pugliese 2013, 86). I argue that tourism security logics also illustrate the “geopolitics of empire” via the seemingly paradoxical policing of Maya womxn who work as vendedoras in El Parque Central.

Specifically, I maintain that this policing illustrates the recalibrated civilizing mission.

As captured by Little’s prolific work (2014; 2004; 2002), Maya vendedoras are the particular targets of municipal security measures, especially at the hands of the tourism police, which continues to be comprised mostly of Ladino officers. As I illustrated above, this composition is grounded in Antigua’s municipal “past.” In a bid to don, access, or adopt white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism as “acceptable” modes of conduct and comportment, many Ladinos continue to uphold the colonial order. In addition to explicitly protecting Euro-American world power/capital, the tourism police also enforce a set of racist, sexist, and classist codes that have been in place since 2004. These codes bar Maya vendedoras from the major zones of commerce in Antigua, such as El

Parque Central, allowing tourism police to remove vendedoras from these zones, confiscate their goods and earnings, and fine them (Little 2014). These codes enact an accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003) in its most basic sense. In the face of these codes and policing, many vendedoras remain steadfastly defiant (Little 2014). As one vendedora

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(who did not disclose her ethnic affiliations to me) stated: “Everyone knows that without us, this park would be empty of gringos and their money. So, we rebel.”17 Despite the risks, many vendedoras continue to work in El Parque Central.

At first glance, it might appear that this enforcement “contrasted with what the

[Guatemalan] state advocated, which corresponded with the tourism industry—to leave colorfully dressed Mayas alone” (Little 2014, 409). For example, all of the leisure travelers

I interviewed felt that vendedoras were the only “real” thing about Antigua, further signified by the fact that many of them wore traje. In other words, vendedoras were emblematic of the “Mujer Maya” as a social figure, legend, and force. As I illustrated in

Chapter Two, this figure was successfully and internationally marketed by INGUAT as an anti-tourism attraction, creating a unique economic niche in the national tourism industry for Indigenous womxn (see also Little 2004). The comments made by a Spanish language student from Scotland capture the powerful draw of this figure, legend, and force:

I would have left Antigua last week except for the Mayan women [in El Parque Central]. They teach me so much about their culture. I really love their pretty blouses and skirts [traje]. They have a story for everything [that they sell]. The rest of Antigua, I can’t stand it! It’s so fake!

Thus, many tourists from the Global North intentionally visited El Parque Central to encounter the “Mujer Maya.” They wanted to take pictures with vendedoras, interact with them, and/or purchase “authentic” handicrafts from “real” Maya womxn.

Despite the centrality of Indigenous womxn to Antigua’s socioeconomic stability, many of the police and security officials I interviewed insisted that Maya vendedoras were like “flies in the park.” A large majority of these participants referred to vendedoras as

“thieves” or “liars,” bent on swindling tourists. In general, they likened Maya womxn to pests, to be swatted away or removed, in the name of tourist safety and comfort. In so

198 doing, these stakeholders invoked the colonial master narratives (Aldama 2001; Miller

2008) described through this dissertation, which linked Indigenous womxn to a cultural contamination and criminality against which “society must defend itself,” to borrow from

Foucault (2004).

Importantly, these officials insisted that Maya vendedoras were signifiers of a bygone era, visual reminders that the civilizing mission had yet to reach its genocidal conclusion. These womxn transmitted and embodied a geocultural contagion or threat that had been “contained” since the founding of Antigua by its figurative excision from the city.

The centrality of Maya womxn to the national tourism industry thus blurred the lines, borders, and boundaries installed by the colonial order, the hard edges of “an engraving of civilization locked in a struggle with wildness” (Taussig 1987, 23). As one tourism police officer who identified as Ladino remarked: “It is shameful that these envueltas walk around

Antigua in their dirty clothing, with their dirty faces and their dirty children, when they should know better.”18 As discussed previously, some of these children were actively taking flight on the migrant trail, in part because their figuration as disposable and “dirty” nuisances made it impossible for them to stay in Guatemala and live.

As Martínez Salazar (2014, 66) notes, the apparently contradictory “appreciation of Maya women as an image” while depreciating them as “inferior humans” occurs because:

[Maya women] are regulated, controlled, commercialized, and policed. In this context the state, the hegemonic classes, and foreigners, especially as tourists, commoditize and publicly celebrate Guatemalan and Maya women’s trajes […] as “authentic” symbols of Guatemala’s “vernacular folklore.” On an everyday basis, Maya women wearing their customary clothes become the targets of various racist expressions, both overt and covert. The contrast between Maya women as valued symbols and as objects of everyday exclusion, is dramatic, but nothing new.

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That is, there is “nothing new” about the utilization of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation as flexible technologies and techniques of colonial governance and capital accumulation, as many other scholars argue (for example, Alexander 2005; Alexander and

Mohanty 1997; Coulthard 2014; Lugones 2007; A. Smith 2010; L. T. Smith 2012; Stoler

2010; Teaiwa 1999; Trask 1999). I would add that the “dramatic” veneration and abjection of the “Mujer Maya” forms a crucial, semiotic, and phantasmagorical nexus where “sense and nonsense intersect and collide in the production of meaning and meaninglessness”

(Pugliese 2009, 9). She captures the necessarily uncanny, incomplete, and haunted production of knowledge left in the wake of imperial and colonial governance in the

Americas, which Taussig (1987) has termed epistemic murk. Consequently, paradox is exactly what lies at the heart of this social figure and force, its various manifestations, sensibilities, and meanings.

When seen in this queer or strange light, the simultaneous veneration and abjection of Maya womxn is a strategic response. This stratagem accumulates transnational capital/power and curtails the earning potential and mobility of Maya vendedoras, thereby

“securing” the raced, classed, and gendered parameters of coloniality in Antigua and beyond. In other words, these paradoxes capture the techniques and processes of what

Alexander (2005, 25–26) calls “recolonization,” the settler-colonial state’s “neutralization of political struggle through its control over the instruments of co-optation and coercion.”

As I have argued, this channeling depends upon the organization, classification, and ranking of all lifeforms in terms of their expendability—the colonial order of people, places, and things. The seemingly “contradictory” policing of Maya womxn in Antigua is thus a tactical, measured, and “commonsense” response to the fracturing artifacts and

200 effects provoked by this order, such as the imposition of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation as distinct relations, technologies, and philosophies of rule.

As I have endeavored to illustrate in this chapter, the recalibrated civilizing mission plays a central role in endowing these “murky” artifacts and effects with tangible meaning, thereby transmuting them into Truth, “reality,” or social fields of force (Roseberry 1998).

Specifically, I argued that white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism empower this mission as a necropolitical standard, orientation, and hierarchy. By outlining Antigua’s unique role in the world system, I attempted to center this mission as a contemporary problem, one captured by the imperial pursuit of leisure, pleasure, and knowledge vis-à- vis the melancholic romance of “Guatemala.” In addition, I insisted that the violent imposition of “New World” modes of conduct and comportment (i.e., imperial and colonial geocorpographies) and the resulting enforcement of tourism security logics further reveal this mission as an ongoing issue. In advancing these arguments, I tried to problematize any easy or clear distinctions between the lived and the imagined, the past and the present, and the authentic and the counterfeit. My analytic goal was to likewise blur the conceptual lines separating the anti-tourist from the colonist, in a bid to unmask the recalibrated civilizing mission as a contemporary and cartographic feature of statecraft, capital accumulation, and embodiment. Conversely, and with this same goal in mind, I attempted to adumbrate the hard and fast boundaries separating the Global North from the Global South, the metropole from the colony, the civilized from the savage, and the imperialist hero from their

“sacrificial” rescuee.

Three intertwined events informed my examination of these distinctions and boundaries: the “Immigration Crisis,” the sexual assault of “at least three U.S. citizens” in

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Antigua, and the city’s resulting and escalating militarization. As I showed, research participants invoked the colonial caste/gender system to make sense of these happenings.

For example, participants held white womxn from the US culpable for all three occurrences because of their approximate relationship to the eugenicist dreams and desires of Empire.

These same mores ensured that the ongoing murder and rape of Indigenous, Latinx, and

Black womxn across the Americas would not be the subject of public debate, censure, and outrage. These silences further advertised the fact that these woundings and deaths were not corporeal insurgencies or threats to imperial power/capital.

In undertaking the analysis presented in this chapter, I sought to illustrate the endurance of the Invasion as a matrix or scale for the exploitation of planetary life, and in an insurgent bid to interrupt its relentless forward march as a “history.” I attempted to document how configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation vitalize and materialize this “history” as an unfolding necropolitical timescape and reality. In the next chapter, I examine the fetishization of colonial wounds and related traumas as travel desires and fantasies given shape through Guatemala’s tourism industry. I focus my investigations on the psychic, geocultural, and embodied contours of “Mundo Maya” as an anti-tourist hotspot and destination, arguing that it has been rendered an imperialist commodity and romance via “modernity’s elaboration of loss” (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 3) and the political economy of trauma (Caple James 2010, 25).

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4 Chapter Four: The Political Economy of Trauma and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

In this chapter, I explore the role of modernity, trauma, the commodity, and related colonial wound-ings in the production of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent as an overlapping and intertwined timescape. As I argued in Chapter One, this timescape authorizes imperialist wanderlust and profiteering by eliding, romanticizing, or cloaking the relations of rule that allow some people to freely traverse the globe at the expense of

Others. More precisely, it excises the “tourist” and “social scientist” from the scope of these relations. In what follows, I seek to illustrate how this timescape is grounded within and reflective of its political and economic context, one I insist inherently shapes and guides the geopolitics of knowledge production. In addition, I continue to develop my argument that contemporary configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation unmask the persistence of the Invasion vis-à-vis this politics. To help me achieve these goals, I turn my analytic eye toward Guatemala’s global positioning, mystification, and commodification as “Corazón del Mundo Maya.”

4.1 Introduction: Mundo Maya and the Crossroads of “New World” Power/Capital

In 1987, in the midst of the still-erupting Civil War, governmental representatives from Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, and México met with venture capitalists in Brussels to discuss a cooperative and regional tourism plan (Burtner 2004). By the end of this meeting, an entire “universe” would be created for the anti-tourist, a social figure and force who symbolized and broadcast the shifting desires of imperialist whimsy. In a bid to recolonize “post-war” time/space in Central America, this “universe” deliberately

203 invoked and obscured the “world” left in the wake of the Invasion, where the

“hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 1987, 67) determined if one would be allowed to live or made to die. Thus, in one of these timescapes, “the Maya” were venerated, objectified, and sought after for their geocultural and embodied relationship to the “pre-modern”; in the other, Indigenous peoples were targeted, imprisoned, or “disappeared” due to their alleged, temporal, and sociopolitical deficits or modernity’s elaboration of loss (Moraña,

Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 3). That these timescapes could so profitably and comfortably coexist gestures toward the tensions and paradoxes provoked by the global coloniality of power, which allow some people to ruthlessly and strategically exploit Others.

Enabling oligarchic, corporate, and other war criminals to profit from the work of death in a multitude of ways, the pursuit of capital bridged these parallel “universes,” enfolding them into the “world history” (Dussel 2000, 470) provoked by the Invasion.

Specifically, this esteemed gathering decided to “revive” ancient Indigenous travel, trade, and ceremonial routes for the pleasure of national and international tourists as part of installing and advertising what later became “Mundo Maya.” As I documented in Chapter

One, some of these roads wind all the way to the land of my birth, Farmington, NM, where they have long called out to me with their veiled promise and prophecy: Things do not have to be the way they are now. In a project initially sponsored and dubbed by the

National Geographic Corporation as “La Ruta Maya/The Maya Route,” these venerable roads were made to link México and Central America in a shared path for the development of a “new” tourism industry. Involved stakeholders hailed this industry as a novel means of preserving and celebrating Maya peoples and lands (Devine 2016), even though they

204 remained “directly connected to the region’s ongoing socio-political and economic conflicts and violence” (Burtner 2004, 461).

As I began to argue in Chapter Two, it was the “colonizer’s heirs” (Martínez Salazar

2014, 34) seated around that negotiating table in Brussels, converging to strategize a lucrative response to an emerging, transnational, and bourgeois consumer consciousness: anti-tourism. As I documented in Chapters Two and Three, this “consciousness” wanted its relentless and systematic exhaustion of global “life” to be somehow kinder, gentler, and

“helpful” in its “post-modern” expanse. In this chapter, I explore the historical material processes enabling this consciousness to function as a discrete and uncanny “universe,” one that mystifies the structural violences of world power/capital. As I argue, this process of mystification allows the “tourist” and “social scientist” to seek out and chronicle various

“catastrophes” as acts of social justice or altruism. Terming this ideological void the social scientist and touristic nonpresent, I seek to highlight its role in the commodification of

Guatemala as a place to encounter trauma-as-Truth. In Chapter One, in conversation with

Bruner (2005), I established how this “absent presence” (Derrida 1997) obscures the geocultural force fields that enable select tourists and social scientists to safely cross nation-state bounds.1 In what follows, I attempt to highlight the unique role of capital in the articulation of this timescape as an imperialist entitlement and philosophy. I hope to prove how the geopolitics of knowledge is intrinsically shaped by economic forces that complicate efforts to “put” the social sciences “squarely on the side of humanity, world- saving, and world-repair” (Scheper-Hughes 2000, 13).

Introduced in preceding chapters, I begin by detailing three concepts that are central to my arguments: the colonial wound, the commodity, and modernity. To assist me, I bring

205 together theory generated by the coloniality of power school, trauma studies, Marx, and

Fanon. As I hope to show, this combined scholarship allows for an understanding of capital as something that molds space and time, leaving a “political economy of trauma” (Caple

James 2010, 25) in its wake. The next section centers this economy as a problem by engaging in a qualitative analysis (Stoler 2008; 2002) of contemporary ethnographies, published travelogues, and electronic travel blogs, an analysis that I enhance with data gleaned from my fieldwork. As I contend, these seemingly different artifacts of travel and authority have one thing in common: they capture the constitution and commodification of

“history as catastrophe” (Nelson 1999; see also Chapter Two) in Guatemala. In cataloging these artifacts, I wish to accomplish two things: first, I seek to further unmask anti-tourism as the “new imperialism,” to borrow from David Harvey (2003); and second, I hope to illustrate how the political economy of trauma influences the production of knowledge via my examination of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent as a collapsible timescape.

The third section of this chapter documents the circulation of this timescape as an actual commodity in terms of the mystification, enfleshment, and consumption of

Guatemala as “Corazón del Mundo Maya.” I hope to show how this fetishization transmutes the colonial wound into a travel fantasy and romance. In particular, I argue that assemblages of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation enable and augur this transformation. To advance my arguments, I analyze a commercial produced by INGUAT in a bid to lure anti-tourists to the country as part of its “Life Lessons” campaign. I pay particular attention to the geopolitical fictions and mythologies enacted by this commercial via certain figures and forces, such as the cannibal and the “Mujer Maya.” I conclude with

206 a discussion concerning the implications of my analysis for the production of insurgent forms of knowledge, a topic I return to in Chapter Five.

4.2 Bridging Trauma Time and Hegemonic Time: The Colonial Wound and the Commodity

As discussed in Chapter Two, scholars from the coloniality of power school (Dussel

2000; Lugones 2007; Martínez Salazar 2014; Mignolo 2008; Quijano 2007) consider modernity to be a persistent geocultural landscape and promise of loss that enacts the

“progressive” classification of all lifeforms in terms of their historical “deficits” or expendabilities. Given the metaphysical gymnastics required to transmute this “loss” into a shared or recognizable aspiration, site of contention, and/or spatiotemporal orientation, the study of trauma, pain, and suffering is of great concern to this school. Indeed, drawing upon Anzaldúa’s (1987, 1–13) framing of the Invasion as una herida abierta/an open wound, Mignolo (2012; 2011) and Martínez Salazar (2014, 146) insist that this study is one of colonial wounds and wound-ings.2 Presently, I outline the operations and manifestations of such wounds as global histories. Next, I advance my understanding of the unique role of trauma in furthering these “histories.” I conclude this section by discussing the colonial wound as a political economic process, philosophy, and object.

Mignolo (2009, 161) defines the colonial wound as an unfolding regime of racialized identifications that targets and interpellates oppressed peoples and lands “as underdeveloped economically and mentally” (i.e., as temporally deficient). By manifesting race as a “logic of the disposability of human life in the name of civilization and progress,” the colonial wound is “historically true and still open in the everyday experience of most people on the planet” (Mignolo and Vásquez 2013, 17). According to Mignolo (2012;

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2011), this wound is as much a material process as it is political and psychological. It can be seen, heard, touched, felt, and studied via the ongoing installment of race as a hierarchy and at the level of the psyche, the body, political economy, and the nation-state. In other words, the colonial wound is a contentious site from which people adopt, reject, or otherwise negotiate coloniality/modernity as a caste system, bodily orientation, and epistemic regime (i.e., as Truth).

Mignolo’s understanding of the colonial wound provides important insight into how “the rhetoric of modernity, the rhetoric of salvation” (Mignolo and Vásquez 2013, 17) continues to infect contemporary modes of subjectification, knowledge production, and governance. That is, Mignolo charts the pernicious course of what I termed the recalibrated civilizing mission in Chapter Three. However, although Mignolo (2012; 2011) invokes

Anzaldúa’s work to frame his own, his myopic focus on race elides her more nuanced understanding of the colonial wound as a multivariate orientation, philosophy, and/or determiner of be-ing.

In Anzaldúa’s (1987, 3; emphasis in original) oft-quoted and moving words:

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. […] A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. […] The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.” […] Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only “legitimate” inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with the whites.

Here, Anzaldúa argues that the US–México border is an open wound, “unnatural

208 boundary,” and “emotional residue” of the imperial/colonial imaginary (see also Pérez

1999). It demarcates and distinguishes the Global North from the Global South via the mind, body, and nation-state (i.e., the colonial caste system). However, race is not the only technology used by “the whites and those who align themselves with the whites” to enforce this system.

Specifically, sexual and gender(ed) “deviants,” the differently bodied, “mixed” bloods, and other corporeal insurgents are also targeted by those in power; such a focalization reveals how architectures of gender, sexuality, class, and nation work in tandem with race to vitalize the colonial wound as a bleeding and coagulating psychology, philosophy, and economy. These assemblages ensconce or embed trauma as a “natural” state of be-ing, an unavoidable “fact” of global life and living. As I argued in Chapter Two, for those made to live in the necropolitical margins of Empire, “pain, fear, torture, rape, and mutilation are the language of interpellation” (Aldama 2001, 22). This language, the colonizer’s tongue, ensures that there is no “peaceful” or “passive” way to adopt or

“accept” world power/capital in its currently codified forms (KatherineKellyAbraham

2020). This is why I elsewhere argue for the “impossible” abolition of coloniality as an enduring logic of rule (KatherineKellyAbraham 2020; Freeman 2016; Freeman 2015).

However, although the colonial wound looms large over planetary life, there is a way to dismantle this wound as a “bureaucracy of death” (Martínez Salazar 2014, 143).

Anzaldúa (1987, 3) argues that a “third country—a border culture” keeps the colonial wound from ever finding hegemonic “closure” or resolution, ensuring that it remains a necessarily incomplete installation. In particular, the uncanny inhabitants of this strange country, los atravesados, are able to evade the colonial caste/gender system because they

209 cannot be easily classified. Their liminal be-ings burst through and tear apart its diaphanous scabs or “borders,” unmasking the colonial wound as something entirely imposed, and thus as something that can be destroyed. Indeed, their reign in the borderlands incites great violence because these be-ings challenge the inexorability of the colonial wound as a state of existence (Anzaldúa 1987). In Chapter Five, I return to a discussion of these insurgent challenges. Suffice it to say, although chronic and catastrophic acts of violence guard the colonial wound, this violence can also undo the latter because it shatters the “normal.” It can unmask European modernity as a contrived social order, a fact of “life” similarly captured by the insurgent flight path of los atravesados.

More precisely, as trauma studies scholars insist, this violence interrupts the smooth flow of linear space/time as a biopolitical reality, orientation, continuum, or apparatus

(Caruth 1995; Edkins 2003; Nichanian 2003; Stevens 2011; Tumarkin 2005; Wertheimer and Casper 2016). As argued by involved scholars, the “conceptual heart” of trauma studies is thus:

[…] a set of centripetal tensions: between the everyday and the extreme, between individual identity and collective experience, between history and the present, between experience and representation, between facts and memory, and between the “clinical” and the “cultural” (Wertheimer and Casper 2016, 4).

As trauma bridges multiple fields of reality and perception, its study must likewise be

“subject to reinterpretation, contestation, and intervention” (Wertheimer and Casper 2016,

3). Presently, I engage these studies to help me understand what Anzaldúa (1987), Martínez

Salazar (2014), and Mignolo (2012) have termed the colonial wound. My interest in these studies emerges from their fraught entanglement with “trauma” as an affective, temporal, and material concern. As I hope to show, by refusing any easy or clear distinctions between

210 the lived, observed, and felt, these studies help to elucidate the colonial wound as a similarly complex process. I pursue this discussion to set the stage for the remainder of this chapter, which links the social scientist and touristic nonpresent to an annulment of what I term the time of insurgency: the necropolitical suturing of the colonial wound as a contrived standard and philosophy of be-ing.

As scholar and theorist of trauma Jenny Edkins (2014; 2003) argues, the above tensions are necessarily spatiotemporal because they are also stopgaps; they are moments of pause or reflection, engendered by the life-altering impacts of state-sanctioned violence

(Caruth 1995; Cvetkovich 2003; Nichanian 2003). According to Edkins (2014, 127), these interruptions are insurgent because they unmask the contrivances of the “sovereign political symbolic order,” or what I more simply term the “normal,” following Anzaldúa

(1987). They are time lags (Bhabha 1994) or delays that blockade the “progressive” unfolding of one event after another, halting the (re)production of modernity as a psychology, caste system, and Truth—as a bleeding and coagulating wound. Heralds of revelation and revolution, these stopgaps announce that linearity “is not a natural phenomenon, but one that is socially constituted—it is a notion that exists because we all work, in and through our everyday practices, to bring it into being […] as an empty, homogenous medium in which events take place” (Edkins 2003, xiv–xv).

Edkins (2003, xiv) terms these insurgent interruptions “trauma time”: a spatiotemporal continuum erupting like a phoenix from the ashes of state-sanctioned violence, its fiery wings incinerating all hegemonic attempts to make “sense” of this violence, if only for an “instant.” Trauma time unmasks linearity as a geocultural imposition, something already well known by many colonized people, whose different

211 understandings of time and space were targeted by the civilizing mission as part of installing “modernity” and the “human” as genocidal/ecocidal logics (Anzaldúa 1987;

Dussel 2000; Martínez Salazar 2014; Mignolo 2012; L. T. Smith 2012; see also Chapters

Two and Three). However, for many other people, it sometimes takes a violent event (or events) to reach this same understanding, to grasp that the contemporary organization of space and time is a political decision and tyranny.

An example of such a realization can be illustrated by a brief discussion of

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). One of the central diagnostic indicators of this

“illness” is that a person has experienced a violent event (or events) that rendered them incapable of separating the “past” from the “present.” Instead, they experience the “past” and “present” simultaneously via what Western medical authorities call “flashbacks.” The

“past” intrudes upon or bleeds into the “present” as a person relives the violence (or violences) that made them incapable of relating to linear space/time, causing them to be diagnosed with PTSD. Soldiers returning from war often receive this diagnosis because they cannot (re)integrate into “peacetime” or linearity due to the brutality they witnessed and/or carried out (Edkins 2003). However, as evidenced by the fact that I have received this diagnosis, it is not necessary to have served in an official military capacity to possess said understanding of time and space.

As scholars of trauma note (Ball 2000; Cvetkovich 2003; Stevens 2011), the history of this diagnosis is tied to the industrial revolution (e.g., railroads and railroad accidents) and the ascension of the US as a global power in the twentieth century (e.g., World War I and the “shell shock” experienced by returning soldiers). That is, they argue that PTSD is a direct result of modernity, which likewise ushered in the contemporary “age” (Miller and

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Tougaw 2002) or “empire” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009) of trauma. However, as this dissertation chronicles, scholars of coloniality argue that the Invasion inaugurated modernity, thereby launching the “age” or “empire” of trauma. Therefore, in my mind, the

“history” of PTSD is also one of colonial wound-ings. As further evidenced by my particular case, this diagnosis captures how the local histories/global designs (Mignolo

2012) of capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy are structural violences that bestow upon some people a “wartime” understanding of the world—even during moments of so-called “peace.” In “the colonizer’s own terms” (Pratt 1992, 7), this diagnosis narrates and enshrouds the fracturing experiences and liabilities of living in a world structured by

European and Euro-American cultural hegemony. Specifically, it attempts to pathologize those alternative temporalities that threaten to unmask modernity/civilization as “an irrational praxis of violence” (Dussel 2000, 472; emphasis added).

Given the emancipatory potential of such identifications and exchanges, Edkins

(2014; 2003) argues that one of the greatest political tasks of all “time” is to figure out how to sustain the revolutionary temporality provoked by trauma, especially in the face of the bureaucratic efforts inevitably levelled against this timescape precisely because it threatens

“everything.” In the next chapter, I discuss these “threats.”3 In sum, as modernity relies almost exclusively upon violence for its “historical” integrity, it requires constant doctoring or spin. Thus, the work of “healing” the colonial wound is necessarily the counterinsurgent work of necropolitical statecraft, ensuring that the “colonizer’s heirs” (Martínez Salazar

2014, 34) continue to be the primary beneficiaries of “world history” (Dussel 2000, 470).

As noted above, one example of this statecraft is the “diagnosis” of PTSD, which places the onus of structural violence on the individual, and in an ultimate bid to mask the

213 fact that space/time is not necessarily linear; “modernity” is a geocultural contrivance, system, and tyranny. In Edkin’s (2003, 1) haunting words, another example is that:

In the aftermath of war or catastrophe comes the reckoning. The dead and missing are listed, families grieve and comfort each other, and memorials are erected. […] The nation is renewed, the state strengthened. The authorities that had the power to conscript citizens and send them to their deaths now write their obituaries.

Far from being a benevolent or charitable act, memorialization can help to resolve the spatiotemporal ruptures provoked by state-sanctioned violence, ultimately strengthening this violence as a “patriotic” relation of rule (Gómez-Barris 2009; Gordon 1997; Nichanian

2003; Taylor 2003; Tumarkin 2005). Drawing on Marx, I add a third example to these initiatives and measures: the commodification of the colonial wound, which likewise neutralizes the time of insurgency.

In Capital Volume I, Marx (1990) argues that capitalism is a social regime and geography of suffering. In terms of the “tender annals of political economy,” Marx (1990,

874) notes that “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part.” Marx (1990, 874–876) insists that this gratuitous violence maintains global capitalism, the process of which he terms “primitive accumulation.”

Crucially, Marx (1990, 915) traces the origins of this accumulation to European imperialism and colonialism, such as the Invasion:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.

Marx (1990, 915) continues: “The different moments of primitive accumulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England, in more or less

214 chronological order.” In this way, Marx (1990, 915) understands these “moments” of capitalist production to be responsive or particular, depending “in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system.” Marx (1990, 874) further insists that these brutalities go unnoticed because they are sanctioned as “tender,” “idyllic,” and “existing from time immemorial.” That is, they are considered “civilizing” necessities (Dussel 2000, 472).

I advance that Marx’s unraveling of these cosmological sorceries gestures toward an early understanding of the colonial wound, albeit from a totalizing and Eurocentric point of view. Marx actively theorizes “trauma” as a sociohistorical, material, and economic process (Cvetkovich 1992) that he argues was presaged by the “colonial system” and later taken up or exploited by “modern” political economy (i.e., capitalism). Crucially, Marx

(1990, 165) insists that this economy, “like the misty realm of religion,” magically transforms its requisite terror, rapine, and bloodshed into consumer objects, goods, and/or desires: commodities.

Eliding the brutal conditions of its genesis, Marx (1990, 165) argues that the commodity “is nothing but the definite social relation between men [sic] themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Commodity fetishism, then, is the process whereby “the products of labor […] become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supersensible or social” (Marx 1990, 165).

Commodity fetishism conceals or recasts capitalism as a social hierarchy; in the stead of polluted lands, mutilated animals, and broken bodies, the commodity becomes the apprehensible sign of economic exchange and consumption. It transmutes death into a marker of refinement, mastery, pleasure, or accomplishment. That is, the commodity carries representational weight because it has been constructed by an irrational praxis of

215 violence: modernity. However, at the same “time,” the commodity renders “the invisible visible in so far as it is the tangible material product […] of abstract relations” (Cvetkovich

1992, 191). Put another way, the commodity is a social hieroglyphic (Cvetkovich 1992; see also Appadurai 1986 and Taussig 1980) that obfuscates and encapsulates the various lives and deaths creating, nurturing, or sustaining it.

In terms of the construction of hegemonic time and space, I insist that the implications of these socioeconomic processes are profound. By lending meaning and purpose to capitalism’s perpetual or “insane” cycle of violence (i.e., primitive accumulation), the commodity embodies and evades trauma time. The commodity is a phantasmagorical bridge that spans the voids provoked by this cycle or modernity’s promise of loss. Neutralizing the time of insurgency, it advertises and passes over the colonial wound. In so doing, it cleaves a new timescape: the time of survival, compromise, and consumption or what Fanon (2008) terms colonial recognition. As the commodity is a signifier or emblem of modernity/coloniality, it helps to install the “civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture,” against which citizen-subjects are forced to “position themselves in relation” (Fanon 2008, 2). In so doing, it restores linearity as a vehicle of this “language” and “culture.” As Quijano (2007, 171–172) argues, capitalism assists in the production of an “intrasubjective universe” or “a universal paradigm of knowledge and of the relation between humanity and the rest of the world.” This relationship hinges upon the sacrificial thingification of every possible form and expression of be-ing in order to endure the world system or “progress” (Martínez Salazar 2014). In the next section, I draw from and add to these understandings by illustrating how colonial recognition and commodity fetishism enact and shore-up European and North American imperialism.

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Given these enduring and powerful cosmological sorceries, it seems to me that capitalism has always functioned as a political economy of trauma. I borrow this concept from Caple James (2010), who uses it to describe the consequences of “humanitarian” interventions and organizations in Haiti (e.g., UN “peacekeepers”), the violences of what

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (2007) broadly term the “non-profit industrial complex.” Caple James (2010, 26) advances that these intercessions are “a source of profit for the intervener” because they extract and commoditize the pain and suffering of those who have survived natural disasters, war, or other calamities. For instance, instead of enacting profound or emancipatory social change, these arbitrations ultimately sustain the administrative apparatuses of non-profit and governmental organizations, which are largely based in the Global North (Caple James 2010). That is, these mediations cash in on the dialectic of trauma (Chapter Two) and the recalibrated civilizing mission (Chapter Three).

Caple James (2010, 26) concludes that these organizations and interventions (re)produce a political economy of trauma.

However, I use this term to describe capitalism in its entirety, including the geopolitics of knowledge production. In so doing, I seek to trouble the “post-modern” severance of this politics from historical material “reality,” in particular its elision as a

“source of profit for the intervener,” here figured as the anti-tourist. For example, the ethnographic study of violence is a capitalist strategy or response because it is leveraged to advance within an institution that “continues to become more irrelevant to the needs of people” (Deloria, Jr. 1988, 93), the European/Euro-American academy. Its extrapolation and objectification of pain helps to uphold the academy as an administrative apparatus of power and capital, thereby promoting the advancement, adoption, or acceptance of a certain

217 type of knowledge or Truth. Thus, even though this study might “elucidate and bring analytic precision” to its subject, it is “much more part of the problem […] than part of the solution” (Santos 2014, 72).

In the analysis that follows, I suggest that the “post-modern” pursuit of violence (as a travel/research experience, desire, and design) is an act of primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, and colonial recognition.4 It manipulates and extends capitalism as a dedicated, strategic, and targeted economy of trauma. In so doing, I argue that this pursuit exploits and fetishizes the colonial wound, thereby neutralizing the time of insurgency.

Indeed, as I attempt to illustrate via an archival and qualitative analysis of “Mundo Maya,” this wound is made to circulate as an actual commodity via the social scientist and touristic nonpresent. I seek to prove how these combined timescapes mystify the relations of rule allowing for “trauma” to be exchanged and consumed as a material and cultural object. As

I endeavor to show, this production ultimately fortifies “modernity’s elaboration of loss”

(Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 3) or linearity as an unfolding necropolitical “reality.”

4.3 Excavating Imperialist Desire: “Mundo Maya” and the Political Economy of Trauma

The burner cellphone on my nightstand shattered the black silence of midnight with its shrill electronic ring. Frantically fumbling for my phone, I awoke. I did not immediately recognize where I was, and I began to panic. “It’s the summer of 2016,” I reminded myself,

“and I am in my home-away-from-home in Antigua.” Taking a steadying breath, I picked up the phone; a very upset colleague was waiting on the other end. She was in South

America, completing her requisite year of fieldwork, which was focused upon documenting the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands by resource extraction

218 corporations. She anxiously called out, “Kate? Is that you? I know it’s late, but I had to call.” “It’s okay,” I groggily responded. “What’s wrong?” Without further ado, she exclaimed, “Our discipline [cultural anthropology] cannot be salvaged! We are fundamentally colonists! We mine information from oppressed people and take it back with us to the metropole so that we can benefit. We are like the corporations I study!” Trying to lighten the mood, I jokingly responded, “All anthropologists feel something like that. We torture ourselves with our imagined importance. It’s our specialty. Go to sleep!”

She replied:

I’m serious. No matter how we [anthropologists] dress it up, what we do is wrong. My advisor says that I’m too attached. She says I need to be more objective and professional. I need to have boundaries. But I can barely look in the mirror.

My colleague was deeply disturbed by the “irredeemable” relationship of anthropology to the extraction and commodification of human suffering. That this bloodletting emulated the corporate practices she investigated only furthered her unease. Of course, we were friends because we were both discomfited by our chosen discipline. However, even though the discipline made us both uneasy, we carried on with our respective research efforts. In this section, I unravel the historical material processes engendering this pursuit, and in the direct face of the existential deviations (Fanon 2008, xvii) or crises it inevitably fosters because something is “wrong.” In particular, I attempt to trace the workings of capitalism as a “traumatic” and contradictory orientation that renders the fetishization of death a seemingly “necessary evil,” in terms of surviving or mastering the colonial wound (and, by proxy, the world system).

I begin by excavating the ideological and geocultural contours of “Mundo Maya,” which I understand as a fully functioning and profitable “universe” for the enactment of

219 imperialist trespass, opportunism, and knowledge production. I likewise detail my understanding of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent, which I insist undergirds the melancholic scripting and exploitation of “Mundo Maya.” To support my arguments, I survey a curated archive of three heavily cited and contemporary ethnographies, two published travelogues, and two electronic blogs from popular travel sites.5 I conclude my analysis with data gleaned from the “field.” In concurrently cataloguing these disparate artifacts of wanderlust and authority, I am driven by the following goals: 1) To continue to unmask the anti-tourist as a “post-modern” figure and force; 2) to continue to document how this citizen-subject intentionally visits Guatemala to encounter and/or chronicle

“history as catastrophe” or trauma-as-Truth; and 3) to advance my argument that these

“scientific” pilgrimages are acts of primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, and colonial recognition. I conclude by summarizing how these operations help to constitute hegemonic time and space vis-à-vis trauma.

As noted above, “Mundo Maya” was established as a productive zone for the accumulation of capital/power during the Civil War (Burtner 2004; Devine 2017). On tourism brochures, maps, and other related propaganda, “Mundo Maya” continues to be sumptuously presented as a discrete, interconnected, and bounded “universe,” one held to harbor and champion the mysterious and “bygone” glories of Maya peoples. Travelers seeking to explore the whole of “Mundo Maya” can theoretically do so in a single, multi- destination package; for example, they could visit Chichén Itzá in El Yucatán, México, and

Tikal in El Petén, Guatemala, in one coordinated voyage. However, the analytic journey that I am about to embark on does not “tour” such renowned destinations, although these traumascapes (Tumarkin 2005) compass the shadowy backdrop of my investigations.

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Instead, as part of my efforts to unearth the colonial wound, I explore the inauguration and maintenance of “Mundo Maya” as a biopolitical reserve, a space for the cultivation and protection of certain “lives” at the direct expense of Others.

As I argued in Chapter Two, the dialectic of trauma engendered this cultivation and protection precisely because “history as catastrophe” exploits very particular citizen- subjects, i.e., those excised from “modernity,” “civilization,” and the “human” via the colonial caste/gender system. Thus, in the face of “centuries of state-sponsored Maya genocide,” regional tourism centers were fortified and augmented across México and

Central America; comfortable and accessible transportation and hospitality networks were likewise established and guarded (Burtner 2004; Devine 2017). In the midst of civil war, these enhancements transmitted the inaugural borders of “Mundo Maya” as a secure place for imperial white capital/power. From the very moment of its inception, then, “Mundo

Maya” was flanked on all sides by the careful administration and control of trauma.

As I presently advance, this management depended upon and exploited an established, evolving, and imperialist nostalgia, which also worked to broadcast the geocultural borders and imaginaries of “Mundo Maya”: the “romance” of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent. As I take up in the next section, by exploiting this melancholia as a material phenomenon, INGUAT created (and maintains) one of the most globally successful tourism brands and “cosmoses” to date. In what follows, I argue that this timescape strangely invoked, obscured, and canonized the colonial wound, as leisure travelers from the Global North increasingly visited Guatemala to document its expanding and bloody margins. Fostering the rise of anti-tourism in Guatemala, these conjurations helped to reframe international leisure travel as a “civilizing” necessity via the “righteous”

221 documentation of “history as catastrophe” and/or the “post-modern turn” (see also Chapter

Three). To advance these arguments, I now turn to my archive.

A curious counterpoint to the “1920s ethnographic accounts that omitted any reference to the colonial governments around them […], which anthropologists call […] the ‘ethnographic present’” (Bruner 2005, 8; see also Chapters One and Two), the narratives comprising my “post-modern” archive are saturated with descriptions of violence. The titles of influential scholarly works from this period, such as Harvest of

Violence (1988) and Gift of the Devil (1984), capture the general tone of this

“reformation.”6 Linda Green’s (1999) Fear as a Way of Life likewise evinces this dramatic change. By centering colonial wound-ings in its title, Nelson’s (1999) seminal work is another sound example: A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial

Guatemala. Further instancing this shift is Jean-Marie Simon’s (1987) infamous and contemporaneous travelogue7 Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.8 Compare the above to Sol Tax’s (1963) canonical and “modernist” ethnography Penny Capitalism: A

Guatemalan Indian Economy or Jean Hersey’s (1947) travelogue Halfway to Heaven: A

Guatemala Holiday.9 Certainly, “post-modern” travel narratives about Guatemala sought to raise global awareness about the Civil War in an attempt to stop its manifold horrors.

However, what unites these differing titles and timescapes is that they were all produced against an unfolding and carefully managed backdrop of violence, terror, and chaos in

Guatemala.10

Consequently, I argue that “post-modern” ethnographies and travelogues about

Guatemala were harbingers of an important and enduring change concerning the imperial geopolitics of knowledge or Truth. This geopolitics, like its predecessor in the 1920s, still

222 guarded the regimes of mobility, pleasure, and privilege, which allowed leisure travelers from the Global North to enter and leave Guatemala in the midst of “catastrophe.”

However, in its “post-modern” form, this geopolitics was severed from historical material

“reality” via its “nostalgic” framing as an act of “world-repair” and “justice”—anti- tourism. By virtue of their suspension in a timeless, “pure,” and romantic void, the role of the “social scientist” and “tourist” as capitalist producers, consumers, and entrepreneurs was, and continues to be, particularly sentimentalized and erased. Helping to enshrine the unequal distribution of world power and capital, I contend that this melancholic “void” persists in marking the social scientist and touristic nonpresent as an analytic problem.

Glossing over its economic drives and actualities, I advance that this timescape exploits the colonial wound as a global cartography of struggle, an exploitation that further materializes “Mundo Maya,” as I endeavor to show.

I begin my analysis by illustrating how the social scientist and touristic nonpresent enacts “a purposeful ignoring of that which is present but that ethnography finds embarrassing or threatening to its privileged position” (Bruner 2005, 8). That is, I unpack how this timescape affects the figurative “absence” of its namesakes as geocultural catalysts, as part of producing “professional,” “objective,” or “scientific” knowledge about

Guatemala. I further illustrate how this erasure consecrates the denial of coevalness (Fabian

2014) or the temporal deficit of the Other, thereby fetishizing modernity’s promise of loss as a historical “romance.” To help with this endeavor, I put the following travel narratives into conversation, which were both written by well-educated, successful, and Euro-

American men: Little’s (2004) seminal and well-cited ethnography Mayas in the

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Marketplace: Tourism, Globalization and Cultural Identity and Peter Canby’s (1992) journalistic travelogue The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya.11

The below passage from Little’s (2004) ethnography particularly captures the chimerical scripting of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent. Recounting an exchange he had with a Kaqchikel-Maya family in San Antonio Aguas Calientes,

Sacatepéquez, Guatemala,12 Little (2004, 4; emphasis in original) writes:

Tomás said to me, “We saw you the other day when we were walking in the Central Plaza in Antigua. You are an indígena the same as us.” “Thanks,” I answered, “but why?” Tomás explained, “Because you speak our language [Kaqchikel- Maya] well. You like our food. Also, the Ladinos treat you badly.” I replied that I did not understand what he meant. Alejandra continued, “When we passed through the plaza, we saw that you were with some vendors from Santa Catarina […]. The Ladinos said foul words to you and spit at you. You are indígena like us.” Seizing the moment to talk about identity issues, I asked them what they thought about the debates going in in the newspapers about Maya and Ladino identity […].

I do not question whether Tomás or Alejandra made these remarks. Instead, I question

Little’s “innocent” (Rosaldo 1989) documentation of said remarks to evince his (alleged)

“insider” status, one meant to advertise Little’s particular “ethnographic” genius.

Specifically, Little’s uncritical presentation of Tomás and Alejandra’s assertions is meant to convey the spectacular notion that his research participants considered him an

Indigenous person. Indeed, as evidenced by his casual “thanks,” Little takes a certain amount of pride in this “acceptance” or recognition. That these participants might be exploiting Little’s imperialist yearnings—for example, in a similar prosthetic bid to access the power/capital he embodied, represented, or offered as a gringo anthropologist—is seemingly never considered.

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Believing he has struck anthropological gold, Little “seizes the moment to talk about identity issues” in regard to Maya and Ladino subjectivities. Excising his person and presence from the analysis of these subjectivities, Little moves on from his “reflexive” probing of why Tomás and Alejandra hailed him as an “indígena.” He appears to accept their explanation that Ladinos treat them all the same terrible way, even though the

“hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers 1987, 67) most certainly have another tale to tell. The modernist dream was alive and well in 2004, it would seem. However, what distinguishes this imperialist romance as a “post-modern” narrative is its invocation of violence to materialize Truth—specifically, Little’s documentation that his experience of “racism” brought him that much closer to the lost objects of his melancholic desires and designs (i.e., his Kaqchikel-Maya research participants).

Repeating the “sins” of his “anthropological ancestors” (Bruner 2005, 8), Little’s staging of the above scene glosses over the exact relations of rule, which make him perennially legible as a Euro-American man, anthropologist, capitalist, and traveler.13 In so doing, his ethnography elides and fetishizes the colonial wound as a “research” destination and fantasy. These relations are further evidenced by the fact that Little could visit and leave Guatemala at will, his daughter safely in tow, whose friendships with “the children of vendor families helped strengthen my social connections with them, associated me with particular hearth groups, and integrated me into Kaqchikel towns” (Little 2004,

21). Once again, Little’s readers must negotiate the uncanny void produced by his ethnography as an imperialist romance. Little erases and sentimentalizes the cartographies of struggle, the negotiations and quagmires of necessity provoked by the sacred and indomitable will to live, which allowed him to (allegedly) access “vendor families” and

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“hearth groups” via his daughter. His child’s age, class, gender, and nationality opened a door that Little walked through to advance professionally. That this “door” might have been left open for him, intentionally and strategically, is likewise omitted from his analysis.

Indeed, as Little (2004, 6) assures his readers, the work in question is not “concerned with discussing specific categories of identity, such as ethnic, national, cultural, gender, or class identities.”

Another example of the fantastical social scientist and touristic nonpresent is

Canby’s (1992) popular travelogue, which describes his travels in “Mundo Maya” (i.e., southern México and Guatemala) during the later stages of the Civil War. It is saturated with thick descriptions (Geertz 1973) of mysterious jungles, where insurgents and soldiers once teemed. Canby (1992, 158) explores these jungles, at his own sensationalized risk, because he wishes to locate and document “real backwoods Maya” for the pleasure of

North American and European audiences (i.e., to pique, harness, and exploit imperial curiosity about a “Mayan” Other). Canby (1992, xi) begins by explaining:

There are certain logistical problems implicit in writing any experiential book on the modern-day Maya. The Maya speak thirty distinct, mutually unintelligible languages. […] Early on, I decided that the way to overcome this obstacle was to try to approach different Maya groups through people familiar with specific languages and customs. I hoped thus to understand what otherwise would have been inaccessible. […] As a result, many different kinds of people appear in this book, from those I met on buses to world-renowned experts in various fields.

As the text progresses, it becomes clear that Canby’s various “recruits” are the benevolent, civilizing, and “traveling” representatives of Empire. He enlists the help of development administrators, anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, and other “experts” from the

Global North, who all happen to be working on their assorted and funded projects during an actively unfolding genocide/ecocide.14

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What has always struck me about the above passage is its studied or careful tone, which mimics the introduction of many an ethnography about Guatemala. Canby’s narrative style broadcasts his belief that his work with “experts” has paid off—he is now one of “them,” someone who knows all sorts of Things about “the Maya,” thereby allowing his readers to “understand what otherwise would have been inaccessible.” In this, Canby and Little occupy a shared modernist dreamscape of imagined Invasion or crafty imperial trespass. For the sake of comparison, Nelson (1999, 7) uses a very similar tactic to situate her “professional” study:

The country’s indigenous population (estimated to be from 45 percent to over 70 percent of a population of around eleven million), itself divided among some twenty-three ethnolinguistic groups (twenty-one Maya and two others), has historically been disempowered on the national and political and economic scene.

By positioning the European traveler-observer as the all-knowing subject (Mignolo 2009), this narrative style (re)establishes modernity as a cosmological economy for the production of Truth. “From a detached and neutral point of observation,” this subject “maps the world and its problems, classifies people and projects into what is good for them” (Mignolo 2009,

159). Notably, this “scientific” approach enacts a curious elision of the “tourist” and “social scientist” as observers with motives, such as the desire to be lauded as an “expert,” to sell books, to secure a prestigious job, and/or to otherwise “progress” in the world system. This timescape erases the “social scientist” and “tourist” as actual people—messy, complicated people who can do more harm than good because they think they are the “exception” to the rule of coloniality.

However, Canby’s masterful manufacture of this dreamscape is abruptly halted when he meets the world-renowned activist, scholar, and Maya nationalist Demetrio Cojtí

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Cuxil. In the next chapter, I hold up one of Cojtí Cuxil’s (1994) works as an example of how to challenge the global coloniality of power. Canby meets this esteemed activist- scholar during a meeting of the Academia de Lenguas Mayas/the Academy of Maya

Languages in Guatemala City.15 Cojtí Cuxil was delivering a political speech about structural violence in Guatemala, during which he argued that the Maya “live in a typical colonial situation. The pattern is to assimilate, to destroy the Maya languages” (Cojtí Cuxil

1992, quoted in Canby 1992, 337). This speech, which Canby (1992, 336) says was delivered in a “clear, confident, rapid-fire, and sarcastic manner,” reminded him of

“Malcom X in the early sixties.” It inspired him to approach Cojtí Cuxil and ask for a meeting:

After the presentation I introduced myself to Demetrio and asked if I might talk with him further. He suggested we meet for breakfast the next morning. When I asked him where, he suggested a McDonald’s on the edge of the capital. I was staying in Antigua […], so I got up at six the next morning and flagged down a rickety school bus bound for the capital. At the periférico, on the outskirts of town, I […] trudged across a parking lot toward the all-too-familiar golden arches. I suspected that the locale of our meeting had been chosen for ironic effect—mass culture, the gringo’s burden (Canby 1992, 337; emphasis in original).

Or, maybe, just maybe, Cojtí Cuxil wanted to eat at a McDonald’s?!

To be clear, I have no way of knowing if Cojtí Cuxil chose this location for “ironic effect.” The point I wish to make is that Cojtí Cuxil’s desire to meet at a “modern” fast- food chain brutally undercuts Canby’s understanding of “El Mundo Maya,” forcing Canby to document his disbelief and discomfit. Canby becomes immediately paranoid that a joke is being played on him and that he will be held responsible for the violences enacted by his presence in Guatemala—“the gringo’s burden.” In chronicling this existential deviation

(Fanon 2008, xvii), Canby archives some of the power relations sentimentalized by the

228 social scientist and touristic nonpresent, such as those installed by the colonial wound. By crossing underneath “the all-too-familiar-golden-arches,” Cojtí Cuxil is a spatiotemporal fugitive, disruption, and threat. In Canby’s mind, Cojtí Cuxil has left the deficient and disappearing lands of the Other in his “rearview,” evacuating his “proper” time and place.

This act of rebellion challenges Canby’s conceptualization of “Mundo Maya” as a pre- modern “universe,” one that only Canby and his imperial “experts” can access, explore, or understand because they know Things. For a fleeting “moment,” Cojtí Cuxil disrupts

Canby’s installation of linearity as an imperialist cosmology, history, and narrative style.

In the end, Canby cannot reconcile his nostalgic documentation of “Mundo Maya” with

Cojtí Cuxil’s ability to time travel, an ability that makes him Canby’s geocultural equal if not superior.

The second aspect of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent that I wish to discuss is its relentless commodification of trauma and/or the time of insurgency as a means of promoting the “authority” or “expertise” of the observer-traveler in question. As I show, this promotion further erases the “presence” of the “tourist” and “social scientist” as geocultural agents and forces. In particular, I argue that this erasure depends upon the fetishization of the Civil War as an anti-tourism attraction. To advance my arguments, I draw from the following narratives: 1) The published travelogue Sweet Waist of America:

Journeys around Guatemala, written by British national, retired prison doctor and psychologist, and professional pontificator Anthony Daniels (1990, 1), who wrote this book as part of a vacation he took to chronicle the “ravages of war and foreign intervention” in Guatemala. 2) Two travel blogs written by as many tourists from the US, which likewise capture the commodification of the Civil War as a vacation experience. These blogs are

229 respectively hosted by the websites TravelPod and TravelBlog, both of which archive hundreds of thousands of narratives written by international leisure travelers. 3) The popular ethnography Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar

Guatemala, edited by Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Kedron Thomas (2011), which, as I contend, eerily echoes the sensationalized focus of the above narratives.

By engaging in this analysis, I hope to concurrently demonstrate how “Guatemala” is configured an anti-tourism hotspot vis-à-vis “history as catastrophe.” In addition, I seek to prove how this “history” reflects and materializes “Mundo Maya” as a biopolitical reserve for imperial capital/power. Further, in charting the course of these demonstrations and histories, I hope to evince the particular role of capitalism in modernity’s promise of loss.

I begin with this passage from Daniels’ (1990, 1) travelogue, which documents his impressions of Guatemala upon entering the country:

When I crossed the frontier from Mexico [sic], I alternately lifted up my eyes to hills and scanned the roadside for corpses. There weren’t any and I felt slightly cheated by the books about Guatemala that I had read; such was the reputation of the country that I expected its evil to be immediately manifest.

As captured by this introduction to “Guatemala,” Daniels is drawn to the country because of its international renown as an “evil” place, one where corpses are “supposed” to litter the roadside, according to the various books he has read. When Daniels is instead presented with a peaceful and bucolic Guatemalan–Mexican border, he is “immediately” disappointed; the corpse-free roadways make Daniels feel “slightly cheated.” His “post- modern” desire to tour the “ravages” of war in Guatemala is stymied by his inability to immediately view, photograph, or otherwise chronicle these phantasmagorical dead bodies.

However, do not fear—Daniels ultimately manages to document “wartime” in Guatemala, 230 thereby assuaging the appetites of those who might have read his (1986) seminal travelogue

Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America.

For example, Daniels painstakingly details his (alleged) encounter with insurgent soldiers during his requisite stay in Panajachel. Daniels (1990, 157) describes this popular tourist destination as “bizarre” and “incongruous” because “on the opposite shore of the lake a guerrilla war has raged for more than a decade.” As noted in Chapter Two, foreign travel to this fortified tourism bulwark, as well as to other protected centers of imperial power/capital (i.e., Antigua), increased during the Civil War. This travel decreased during the scorched earth campaigns of the early 1980s, after which it resumed its upward trend

(Burtner 2004). Thus, on Panajachel’s “opposite shore” was a more vulnerable Indigenous-

Maya township, one plausibly being occupied by insurgent forces and/or otherwise targeted for colonial genocide/ecocide as a “communist” hotbed (Hinshaw 1988).

However, this traumatic and unfolding “history” does not deter Daniels. Instead, it titillates him, causing him to explore this Other shore, where he is subsequently stopped by a “group of armed men” (Daniels 1990, 157). As they are in a “ragged condition,” he assumes they are “guerillas.” However, given the potential danger of this encounter, Daniels (1990, 157)

“didn’t think it polite to ask and remained silent.” Although these men ask Daniels who he is and why he is in the area, they do not harm or detain him. Still, he is spooked enough to terminate this “tour” and returns to Panajachel without incident.

These and other (alleged) brushes with travel danger inspire Daniels (1990, 3) to pontificate about America’s “sweet waist”:

[…] I do not believe in tragic cataclysm as a method of moulding character; yet I have little doubt there is more human nobility, as well as viciousness, to be found in Guatemala than in many fortunate countries. And it is surely

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the sense of living on the edge of a precipice that attracts some to Guatemala.

A “modern” conquistador, Daniels successfully triumphs over “evil” Guatemala, undeterred by the “tragic cataclysm” of the Civil War. Indeed, he sees this war as a mixed blessing, one whose “viciousness” builds “character,” fostering a “nobility” that does not otherwise exist in the “fortunate” (read: civilized) Global North. In promoting this

“romantic” interpretation of the Civil War, Daniels’ narrative advertises “Guatemala” as a

“perfect” place to tour, chronicle, or otherwise experience modernity’s promise of loss.

However, as evidenced by his ability to hastily retreat from Panajachel’s “opposite shore,” the only reason Daniels can tour this “promise” is because he can conveniently outrun it.

As a traveling representative of Empire, Daniels can “cross back” into the territories, sanctuaries, and havens that have been intentionally carved out and garrisoned in order to nurture and guard white capital/power in Guatemala.

In other words, Daniels sentimentalizes the biopolitical remove, cleaved by the dialectic of trauma, which enabled him to seek out and “document” historical

“catastrophes” in Guatemala. He effaces the relations of rule that not only fostered his ability to visit the country during “wartime” but also protected him because he is a white man, British national, and mobile source of power/capital. Given the date of his travel epic,

Daniels visited the country in the late 1980s, around the time when Cerezo was elected

Guatemala’s first civilian president in fifteen years. After this election, the worst of the

Civil War’s violence receded from the central highlands (Burtner 2004). This recession allowed anti-tourists such as Daniels to brush up against the Civil War without having to bloody their hands in its still-erupting carnage. They were able keep their hands clean precisely because the colonial caste/gender system had been restored as an intranational

232 technology, one that could resume its strategic protection of imperial capital/power (see

Chapters Two and Three).

Notably, Daniels’ (alleged) infiltration of a prohibited and “dangerous” timescape mystifies or fetishizes this system as a travel fantasy and desire. Fabricating “Guatemala” as a destination for only the most daring of travelers, Daniels (1990, 1) observes that it is

“the sense of living on the edge of a precipice that attracts some” to the country. Similar to

Little’s (2004) and Canby’s (1992) displays of imperialist cunning and craft, Daniels’ travelogue is bestowed with its “authority” because he explores that which is (allegedly) forbidden. More precisely, in a bid to distinguish his particular brand of leisure travel as an act of heroic geocultural rebellion, Daniels “clandestinely” navigates the time of insurgency, trauma, and wound-ing in Guatemala.

His “intrepid” explorations of this timescape allow him to meet its “vicious” denizens—animal-like savages or “guerillas,” people in “ragged condition,” the “less” fortunate, and the “tragically” cataclysmic. That is, Daniels happens upon los atravesados and makes them the “villains” of his travel epic. He uses these “villains” to evince his prowess and superiority, i.e., his ability to emerge unscathed from his encounters with armed and ragged Others as Someone Who Knows Things. In so doing, Daniels commodifies trauma time as an anti-tourism destination, allowing him “to take on highly valued identities and to earn considerable cultural capital” (Becklake 2020, 36) via his carefully negotiated assumption of risk. Simultaneously, by transmuting this timescape into an imperialist master narrative and romance, he neutralizes its insurgent potentials— specifically, the lessons the colonial wound has to offer, in terms of rethinking the current organization of planetary life. Instead, Daniels exploits this organization to accumulate

233 capital/power, an accumulation that hinges upon his sensationalized infiltration of

“wartime” in Guatemala. More precisely, Daniels relies upon “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force” (Marx 1990, 874) to enact this accumulation, but from the safe, nostalgic, and “innocent” vantage point afforded by the dialectic of trauma.

Disturbingly, as evidenced by the travel blog below, this “romantic” form of primitive accumulation helps to script and enforce “Mundo Maya” as a bounded reserve for the same. This blog describes the intentional efforts undertaken by its author, Tenasians

(2010), to collect a travel story about the Civil War from a Maya guia named Felipe, who he reportedly hired to tour Tikal. According to his blog, Tenasians is an undergraduate student from the US, who visits Guatemala for the first time during a summer break from university. Tenasians does not detail his race, class, or sexuality. Below is Tenasians’

(2010) account of the moment when he “got” Felipe’s personal recounting of the Civil

War:

Guatemala has had a very tumultuous past and yesterday, I got Felipe's personal account of 8 hellacious days he spent as a victim of war. Felipe told me that Guatemala was involved in a civil war that lasted 30+ years. It was basically Mayans fighting other Mayans. For most of the 30+ years the war was not super bad but 1978–1981 was really bad. According to Felipe and the history books, more than 200,000 people died or went missing as a result of this war.

Tenasians (2010) then describes Felipe’s experiences as a prisoner of war in a very troubling and disturbing manner, which I do not recount here out of respect for Felipe and all others who survived the Guatemalan Civil War.

After spending what Tenasians considers an inordinate amount of time with Felipe,

Tenasians finally “gets” the travel “prize” he has been searching for as Felipe guides him through the mysterious jungles of Tikal. Reminiscent of an Indiana Jones movie, these

234 jungles foreground Tenasians’ quest to secure the most exotic of “Mayan” relics: a story of “wartime” devastation and loss, which has been “stolen,” “taken,” or otherwise wrung from its owner due to the cunning and craft of the anti-tourist. Like any other diligent student of anthropology, Tenasians triangulates the data he collects from the “field.”

Felipe’s account, along with “the history books,” fuels Tenasians’ confident declaration that the Civil War’s “more than 200,000 deaths” were due to “Mayans fighting other

Mayans.” That is, Tenasians “authoritatively” maps “Mundo Maya” as an unpredictably dangerous terrain. In so doing, he advertises “Guatemala” as a place where Indigenous peoples kill their own kind, without Reason, because they occupy the “savagely” deficient territories, temporalities, and psychologies of the pre-modern Other.

In scripting this “history,” Tenasians accomplishes two things. The first is that he erases the “tourist” as a geocultural force by failing to recognize that Felipe, like himself, is a capitalist entrepreneur in the modern/colonial world system. As such, Felipe might have anticipated or discerned Tenasians’ travel desires because Felipe is a professional guia. He regularly works with leisure travelers from the Global North, who have a decided penchant for the Civil War, as evidenced by this chapter. To be clear, I do not question the veracity of Felipe’s reported story. Instead, I am observing that global political economy fundamentally influences what people say and what they do not say; this “reality” is something that the social scientist and touristic nonpresent particularly excises or romanticizes, as I have argued thus far. The second thing accomplished by Tenasians’ narrative is that, in enacting the above erasure, he transmutes the Civil War into an anti- tourism attraction, displayed as such via the “trophy case” of his blog. Moreover, he does so to accumulate transnational capital/power as an anti-tourist. This accumulation is

235 evidenced by Tenasians’ sensationalized documentation of Guatemala’s “hellacious” past, his studied attempts to adopt the persona of the “scientist,” and his insistence that he knows secret Things about “Mayan” savagery. Further advertising Tenasians’ (alleged) expertise is that these “secrets” can only be accessed via his particular blog, an entrepreneurial and representational move mirroring Canby’s (1992) efforts to promote and legitimize The

Heart of the Sky.

The blog featured below also captures these uncanny processes of erasure, capital accumulation, and knowledge production. It likewise hinges upon the commodification of the Civil War as an anti-tourism attraction as well as the signification of “Mundo Maya” as a “traumatically” violent place. It is written by a man from the US, who visited

Guatemala with his girlfriend in 2009. Similar to Tenasians (2010), his blog does not indicate his race, class, or sexuality. As the author uses his real name, I do not cite it in the passages that follow. Instead, I refer to him as “Wanderlust,” a term used by the author to describe why he and his girlfriend decided to visit Guatemala. In the author’s own words:

We pieced together a spontaneous trip to Guatemala for two weeks, with the help of wanderlust and the time afforded by transitions between graduate school and the real-world. In that short span, we’d cover some ground (and water) while adrift in this former “Banana Republic” and Civil War ravished country of Guatemala. We immersed ourselves in the colorful, thoughtful, flavorful, and danger-full aspects of this Central American hotspot in our short microcosm experience.

From the outset, Wanderlust wants his readers to know that his reasons for visiting

“Guatemala” are far from mundane. Unlike the “traditional” ethno-tourist, Wanderlust is drawn to Guatemala because it is “a former ‘Banana Republic’ and Civil War ravished country.” According to Wanderlust, these violent and/or ecstatic “ravishments” have molded Guatemala into a “colorful, thoughtful, flavorful, and danger-full […] hotspot.” At

236 first glance, “Mundo Maya” is seemingly, strangely, and strikingly absent from this imperialist, melancholic, and anti-touristic introduction to “Guatemala: A Place to

Encounter Historical Catastrophes.”

However, this “world” and its precarious temporalities soon take center stage, when

Wanderlust and his girlfriend reportedly hire a Maya guia to lead them through the mysterious jungles of Tikal. Wanderlust describes this encounter as rife with potential danger and death:

My man [the contracted guia in question] carried a machete that had us a bit anxious. As it turns out, he took us through a non-standard hiking route through more bush and overgrowth (in order to skip the park fees) so that he could pocket extra money and bypass park officials. He needed the machete for opening the trail and possibly for protection (as the hiking trails in this region are notorious for armed robbery). Whether or not he had other intentions with us, thankfully we’ll never know.

Briefly entering the time of insurgency, Wanderlust and his girlfriend are out of their element. All sorts of racialized, gendered, and spatiotemporal threats menace their explorations of “Mundo Maya,” suspending them in an uncanny void of uncertainty—the inability to Know.

First and foremost, his “man” is carrying a machete, for reasons Wanderlust cannot immediately discern. This display of savage masculinity unsettles Wanderlust; the

Indigenous “help” could turn on him and his girlfriend at any moment, easily gaining the upper hand. Wanderlust’s “man” could figuratively render him impotent. Further upsetting

Wanderlust is that the “help” is clearly at home in the jungles of Tikal. Wanderlust has no idea where he is or where they are going; he is forced to trust an armed and Indigenous man in a country renowned for its “catastrophic” violences and savages. In this scenario,

Wanderlust’s “man” is the One Who Knows Everything, and this sets Wanderlust on edge.

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Adding fuel to this fire is the fact that his “man” might be carrying a machete because “the hiking trails are notorious for robbery.” Wanderlust not only has to worry about the “help” killing him and/or his girlfriend; he also needs to look out for murderous and random strangers who stalk the jungles of Tikal and lie in wait for unsuspecting human prey, much like their cannibal ancestors.

This dramatic accounting of travel risk and danger begs the following question:

Why did Wanderlust continue with his “terrifying” exploration of “Mundo Maya?” As evidenced by his painstaking recording of this experience, Wanderlust “bravely” persisted because he wanted to feature its danger as a means of distinguishing his leisure travel as anti-tourism. Similar to Tenasians’ (2010) testament, Wanderlust’s blog was the “trophy case” for his assumption of risk, a “risk” that relied almost exclusively upon the colonial caste/gender system for its intelligibility. In so doing, Wanderlust “romantically” commodified “Mundo Maya” as a destination for the most “intrepid” of travelers, i.e., the brave few who “dare” to visit Guatemala despite its infamy as “a small country, known for volcanoes and cruelty” (Daniels 1990, 1). Crucially, in order to enact this fetishization,

Wanderlust intentionally pursued the “documentation” of the colonial wound and/or the time of insurgency as an act of anti-tourism.

Before I move on to my next discussion point, I would like to first illustrate an explicit example of how the “social scientist” can commodify trauma time vis-à-vis

“Guatemala.” To help me, I rely upon the below excerpt from the popular edited collection

Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala. Kedron

Thomas, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, and Thomas Offit are the authors of the passage in question, all three of whom are white and employed as professors of anthropology at universities in

238 the US and Canada. Kedron Thomas is the only author out of the three who identifies as a woman. They write (2011, 1):

Even after the close of Central America’s longest and bloodiest civil war, which reached genocidal proportions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Guatemala remains a violent country, though the political and cultural coordinates of this violence have changed significantly […]. Guatemala has one of the highest homicide rates in all of the Americas averaging about 17 murders per day, with much of the violent crime concentrated in the capital city. […]. “It’s sad to say, but Guatemala is a good place to commit murder,” one international observer remarked […].

Mirroring the focus of most ethnographies about Guatemala, the authors kick off their study by featuring “Central America’s longest and bloodiest civil war.” Echoing Daniels’

(1990) and Tenasians’ (2010) macabre fascination, they are fixated upon the “factual” documentation of the country’s broken and dead bodies. “Guatemala,” they want us (the readers) to know, is “a good place to commit murder.” The picture featured on their book jacket further supports this claim; it is of a brown-skinned man waiting menacingly in front of a dilapidated structure made of corrugated steel, a gun in his right hand and his back to the camera.

However, as I argued in Chapter Three, a similar case can be made about the US, using similar quantitative and qualitative tactics. In making this statement, I am not suggesting that the US is a “worse” place to live. Rather, I am challenging the pervasive and “post-modern” framing of “Guatemala” as the most terrifying country in known

“history” in an ultimate bid to distinguish and market the authority, tenacity, and benevolence of the “social scientist” in question. As I have insisted thus far, this framing cloaks the embodied regimes of pleasure, power, capital, and privilege that allow the

“social scientist” to visit and leave Guatemala at will.

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Further, as evidenced by my dissertation, many other events can and should be called upon to “introduce” an ethnography about “insecurity” in Guatemala—namely, the

Invasion. In so doing, the sustained role of genocide/ecocide in the inauguration and maintenance of “world history” (Dussel 2000, 470; emphasis added) becomes patently clear; this violence is the promise of modernity, the civilizing mission, the political economy of trauma, Truth, etc. By grounding this “promise” firmly within the borders and confines of “Guatemala,” the authors in question capitalize upon coloniality as a global hierarchy, psychology, economy, somatic regime, and temporality. Specializing in the traffic and trade of “Third World” trauma, they exploit the European caste/gender system as an imperialist philosophy, protection, and benefit. In so doing, they fetishize the colonial wound as a means of “progressing” in the world system (e.g., as celebrated scholars, journalists, travel writers, influencers, etc.) vis-à-vis “savage,” “cruel,” and “horrifying”

Guatemala and its “homicidal” (read: pre-modern) peoples.

In the end, what I find so deeply disrespectful about this passage is that many Maya,

Ladino, and other nationals regard Guatemala as a good place to live—to work, love, raise a family, etc. They believe Guatemala to be a country capable of cultivating and sustaining life. Indeed, many of these people are in the streets every single day fighting for Guatemala because it is their beloved home. In other words, not everyone buys into the cosmological, homicidal, and suicidal positioning of the Global North as a superior, safer, better, and/or more “civilized” place to exist. Certainly, the Civil War left an indelible scar on the country’s geocultural landscape. Certainly, economic imperialism, poverty, impunity, and other structural violences make things particularly hard for impoverished Maya peoples and other marginalized citizen-subjects. However, as long as the colonial wound remains

240 the standard by which planetary life is organized, ranked, and/or judged, these and other violences will continue to intrinsically shape “world history” as a shared and sedimented cartography of struggle structured around the management, containment, and exploitation of trauma.

The third and final aspect of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent I wish to unpack is its sacrosanct invocation of “justice” to enact a fanciful abrogation of itself as an imperialist romance, protection, and privilege. For this discussion, I rely mostly upon the ethnographic data gleaned from the social scientists who participated in my research.16 The reason for this focus is that these participants inspired me to think about trauma as a political economy. Largely doctoral students or newly minted professors, these participants were aware that their pursuit of qualitative research concerning violence was a socioeconomic strategy, one they adopted in a bid to secure an academic job. As I hope to show, this “awareness” captures how the “civilizing language: the metropolitan culture”

(Fanon 2008, 2) drives the production of imperial knowledge about “Guatemala” via the political economy of trauma. That is, I wish to unpack the role of colonial recognition

(Fanon 2008, 2) in the navigation of global capitalism as an established philosophy, practice, and hierarchy of wound-ing and loss; this navigational skill further unmasks said recognition as an imperialist reckoning, acknowledgement, and process. As I contend, this recognition complicates the “post-modern” drive to place the social sciences “on the side of humanity, world-saving, and world-repair” (Scheper-Hughes 2000, 13). I conclude this section with an excerpt from Nelson’s (1999) canonical work, which likewise chronicles these existential deviations (Fanon 2008, xvii) and complications.

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Tracy, a cultural anthropology PhD student from Canada, articulated one “instance” of imperial recognition and in direct relationship to political economy. In particular, Tracy was made uncomfortable by the fact that her pursuit of ethnographic research concerning violence in Guatemala was a gambit to professionally advance or “progress,” to become a lauded and employed scholar. Tracy was from a relatively wealthy family; she identified as a white, queer, and cisgender woman or “gringa.” She was educated in mostly private schools. Her well-funded fieldwork, which was based in the rural central highlands, investigated the ramifications of the Civil War upon the development of local security initiatives, a topic that continues to be in academic vogue because of the popularity of books such as Securing the City (2011). Similar to many of the research participants described in Chapter Three, we met during the summer of 2016 because her research was hosted by a renowned research institute in Antigua, requiring her to be in the city on a monthly basis. Although she was dedicated to advancing equity in Guatemala, as further evidenced by the delicate partnerships she fostered and maintained with Kaqchikel-Maya research participants and community groups, Tracy did not see her project as something that would bring about lasting sociopolitical change.

During a lengthy interview session, Tracy expressed her frustration concerning what she understood to be her exploitation of Guatemalan nationals to advance her “First

World” career. Mirroring my own discomfort with the “post-modern turn” and with the discipline of anthropology, I found Tracy’s candor to be strangely refreshing. She further explained:

Sure, I want to help Guatemalans. But, at the end of the day, I am here [Guatemala] because I want to be a professor. It makes me uncomfortable, but violence is sexy. War sells books. Why else are so many of us [gringo anthropologists] here [in Guatemala]?

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According to Tracy, the pain and suffering of Guatemalan nationals lured people from the

Global North to the country, people who wished to sell books or build a career in the belly of the imperial beast (e.g., Canada, the US, the UK, etc.) As documented above, these aspirations are erased by the social scientist and touristic nonpresent because they are actual conditions for the production, exchange, and consumption of Truth as a commodity.

For example, the majority of my research participants took it for granted that their studied pursuit and documentation of “Third World” trauma could be turned into some sort of a career, academic or otherwise. That Tracy did not take this transmutation for granted is one reason why she was uncomfortable. She grasped that her future career depended upon her ability to “sell” Guatemala as a “violent” and “insecure” place to other academics because, in her words: “Why else are so many of us here?” However, in the end, her discomfit did not stop her from pursuing her professional goals because she wanted to secure the recognition of Empire via the academy.

Another participant named Justin, who had recently defended his cultural geography dissertation back “home” in the US, told me during this same fieldwork stint

(summer 2016) that he actually deselected Guatemala as a research site. He (allegedly) did so because Guatemala was, in his words, “completely overpopulated with white saviors

[from the Global North].” As Justin liked the country, he continued to visit; we met in

Antigua because he was there on vacation, celebrating the fact that he had just secured a tenure track job in the US. Justin was also from a wealthy family and had received his PhD from a renowned university in the US. In his mid-thirties, Justin self-identified as an “NPR- listening gringo with a guilt complex.” Similar to my experience with Tracy, I generally found Justin’s honesty to be refreshing.

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Justin claimed that he decided to change his already funded fieldwork project, which focused on securitization in Guatemala City à la Thomas, O’Neill, and Offitt (2011), to an urban location in the US. Echoing Tracy’s observation, Justin said that he switched research gears because “everyone is in Guatemala. No one is in [Justin’s US fieldwork site]. I wanted to separate myself from the herd.” Consequently, in his “new” research site,

Justin continued to focus on securitization, but with a strategic goal in mind. In a bid to distinguish and fund his work, and thereby secure a prestigious job in the academy, he would use his research to challenge the centering of the “Global South” in the study of securitization.17

As John further explained:

How many more books need to be written by academics [from the Global North] about how terrible Guatemala is? During the [Civil] War, a case could be made that their research was necessary, consciousness raising and all that. Now, it [this research] is overkill. If I wanted [to get] a tenure track job, I had to research somewhere new.

Justin calculatingly and purposefully approached his professional development. As he perceived “Guatemala” to be an overdetermined research site, he decided to base his fieldwork in the US, thereby “separating” himself “from the herd.” Justin believed that, because he had nothing “new” to say about how “terrible” Guatemala was, he needed to jettison the country as a fieldwork location in order to keep up with academic trends in the social sciences. That is, Justin seemingly accepted the political economy of trauma as a

“necessary evil” in terms of securing a high-status job as a celebrated professor of cultural geography. To successfully reach this goal, Justin “recognized” that he would need to pursue, research, and commodify modernity’s promise of loss as a research object, but in a “new” place—the Global North.

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In confronting and inventorying their professional motivations, struggles, and strategies, Tracy and Justin unmask the “social scientist” as a world traveler, capitalist entrepreneur, and privileged citizen-subject. They reveal how this “scientist” is an actual, flawed, and well-meaning person, one who wants a particular life for themselves and accordingly pursues the opportunities afforded them by “the hieroglyphics of the flesh”

(Spillers 1987, 67). In so doing, they challenge the hegemonic or “innocent” erasure of the

“social scientist” as a geocultural figure and force, especially in terms of the resulting production of knowledge about “Guatemala.” More precisely, Tracy and Justin archive how the political economy of trauma drives this production, especially in terms of what

“counts” as innovative scholarship. As evidenced by Tracy and Justin’s “awareness” of these geopolitics, this scholarship hinges upon the commodification of trauma as an

“acceptable” or “fundable” research design. In my mind, by intentionally adopting this economy as a cultural regime, Tracy and Justin also capture the workings of imperial recognition as a local history/global design (Mignolo 2012). For those who wish to secure the accommodations of Empire via the humanities or social sciences, the pursuit of this recognition follows a clear path or trajectory.

For example, both Tracy and Justin were cognizant of the fact that if they wanted to secure a lucrative professorship in the social sciences, they had to structure their projects around the study of historical “catastrophes” or trauma-as-Truth. As evidenced by Justin’s desire to “separate” from “the herd,” the bulk of this research was to be based somewhere in the Global South, a place researched by “everyone” from the Global North because it was considered an “exceptionally” violent, savage, and/or pre-modern locale (see Chapter

Three). Guided by this “civilizing” language, culture, and mission, Tracy and Justin

245 accordingly structured their research projects, but from a sort of harm-reduction perspective. They wanted to further their careers while promoting an awareness of global social oppression. Nevertheless, they “recognized” that this research was not going to fundamentally alter the lethal trajectories of world power/capital. Thus, one key difference between their “post-modern” predecessors and themselves is that Tracy and Justin acknowledged the above as a political economic “reality.” They rejected the “innocent” positioning of the social sciences as technologies of “world-repair” and “justice.” As I documented in Chapter One, insurgent and subjugated scholars similarly saw this “repair” and “justice” for what it was—epistemic and economic imperialism, although this

“revelation” is exactly what the “post-modern turn” tried to subdue or neutralize.

Indeed, as captured by the passage below from Nelson (1999, xi), Tracy and

Justin’s “post-modern” predecessors articulated a much more “romantic” orientation toward their calculated maximization and commodification of “Third World” trauma:

Sitting on her spring-entranced, tree-shaded front porch in May 1985, just before sending us on our first trip to Guatemala, Beatriz Manz [a famous anthropologist and Latin Americanist] warned Paula Worby [another famous Latin Americanist] and me that there was something about Guatemala that got into your blood, that stayed with you. Now it is October 12, 1998, and I am still writing about Guatemala and thinking about blood. It has been a central concern in writing about the country and the catastrophe of war and counterinsurgency, but it is also metaphoric for the kinlike ties that have made possible the knowledge I have. […] It somehow doesn’t seem strong enough to say that this document is only meaningful in its relation to the interactions, flows, transfusions, spills, and donations of many, many other people to whom I am deeply indebted (of course, the blood metaphorics also rightly conjure the vampirism of transnational research).

As evidenced by how often I quote portions of the above, I return again and again to

Nelson’s (1999) canonical work. The reason for my obsession is that this passage captures a very important “moment,” one “when” trauma time became a cultural, material, and

246 economic object of imperialist melancholy and wanderlust vis-à-vis Guatemala. More precisely, this passage captures a capitalist minting of this timescape as something that could be objectified, consumed, and exploited as part of the “post-modern” re-framing of imperial recognition, profiteering, and knowledge production as “social justice.” As I have argued throughout this chapter, this counterinsurgent temporality erases or sentimentalizes the role of the “tourist” and “social scientist” in this recognition, profiteering, and production.

To advance this argument, I return one final “time” to Nelson’s (1999) oeuvre.

From the safe, “spring-entranced, and “tree-shaded” remove cleaved by the dialectic of trauma, Nelson looks forward to her first “deployment” to Guatemala. It is there that she will join an imperialist force and cohort of anti-tourists, whose members are similarly dedicated to the ethnographic examination of the blood-violently-shed-by-Others. Even though Nelson acknowledges that this “study” makes her a vampire, she frames her blood feast as an “innocent” gift, one “given” to her by “many, many other people.” The fact that the colonial caste/gender system allowed her to take and/or “accept” these blood offerings is glamorized via her professional pontifications about “the catastrophe of war.”

Specifically, Nelson claims that these offerings fostered intimate “kinlike ties,” thereby granting her the coveted position of cultural insider. Further validating her ability to traverse the world system at the expense of Others, these ties ensure that Nelson Knows

All Sorts of Things about “Guatemala” and “the Maya.” Articulating an early “post- modern” instance of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent, Nelson (1999) thus romanticizes her particular exploitation of the colonial wound, one that did eventually allow her to become a well-fed, internationally renowned, and tenured “vampire.”

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Crucially, by successfully marketing her vampirism as social justice, Nelson’s (1999) epic tome helped to establish new terms for the “science” of imperial recognition and capitalism. “Blood metaphorics,” indeed!

In conclusion, I contend that the narratives examined herein illustrate a counterinsurgent suturing of the colonial wound via the “post-modern” reconfiguration of

Truth-as-trauma. More precisely, by suspending “Guatemala” and “Mundo Maya” in the raced, classed, gendered, and geocultural void of “history as catastrophe,” these narratives rely upon and commodify the time of insurgency or trauma time. As I have argued throughout, this “suspension” marks the contemporary workings of imperialist nostalgia, recognition, and entrepreneurialism. By engaging in these representational acrobatics, I insist that the authors of these narratives tried to valorize their particular and capitalist exploitation of the colonial caste/gender system. Indeed, as I have shown, this exploitation is romanticized or hidden by the social scientist and touristic nonpresent. In other words, these narratives embalm modernity’s elaboration of loss (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui

2008, 3) as an ineluctable and operable condition for surviving, mastering, and/or profiting from the world system. They consecrate, rework, and extend “the colonizer’s own terms”

(Pratt 1992, 7), which are the terms of wound-ing and death. As I argued in Chapter One, insurgent and subjugated scholar-activists articulated a much more hopeful vision in regard to the irrevocable destruction of these “terms” via the production of anti-imperial, anti- colonial, and anti-capitalist forms of knowledge, a topic that I return to in Chapter Five.

In making these arguments, it is not my intent to paint a totalizing picture of the

“tourist” and “social scientist” as perennially malevolent forces of Empire. Instead, my goal is to illustrate how these figures are products of their time and place, including their

248 historical material “realities.” I engage in this exercise because I want to challenge the

“innocent” relations of rule enabling these figures to freely pursue their interests or “live,” while so many Others are made to die. Therefore, as I have insisted throughout this dissertation, the coloniality of power and modern world system are the “true” targets of my analytic wrath. Guided by this wrath, in the next section, I continue to unpack the social scientist and touristic nonpresent as a historical material process, benefit, and cosmology.

Specifically, I attempt to show how INGUAT exploited this timescape to fetishize and offer up “Guatemala” as the consumable “heart” of “Mundo Maya.” To advance my arguments, I discuss INGUAT’s “Life Lessons” campaign. Similar to the narratives surveyed above, I contend that this campaign exploits modernity, linearity, and the colonial wound in an effort to channel and accumulate imperial white capital/power. To help me with this analytic endeavor, I feature a commercial from this campaign entitled Deja Que

Guatemala Te Enseñe ‘Lecciones de Vida’/Let Guatemala Teach You ‘Life Lessons’.18 This commercial was produced in 2014 by INGUAT, in cooperation with the transnational public relations firm the Newlink Group.

4.4 Exploiting the Cannibalistic Drives of Empire: Fabricating the “Heart” of “Mundo Maya”

In May 2014, when the drug cartel violence, economic imperialism, and oligarchic impunity spurring the “Immigration Crisis” began to negatively affect Guatemala’s reputation on the world stage, INGUAT was already knee-deep in the “business” of damage control (see also Chapter Three). In an ongoing effort to “tell the world that

Guatemala has more to offer than what has been said about it in the past” (Bevan 2012,

12), INGUAT had partnered with the Newlink Group. Founded in 1988 by a US national

249 and journalist named Sergio Roitberg, Newlink is a public relations and technology transfer corporation, currently headquartered in Miami, Florida. In addition to maintaining “partner networks” in the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, Italy, Australia, and France, Newlink has satellite offices in México, the Dominican Republic (DR), Perú, Argentina, Chile, and

Spain. Topping the list of its “client collaborations” are Coca-Cola, Chevron, MasterCard, and Cisco Systems.19 In regard to the waging of war on the front of global public relations,

Newlink, like INGUAT, is a well-oiled and tested machine.

Interestingly, in 2008, a branch of El Consejo Centroamericano de Turismo/the

Central American Tourism Council (CCT) also opened in Miami, although it is unclear if this office continues its Florida operations.20 Regardless, INGUAT was intimately involved in the establishment and running of this branch, which was further comprised of and beholden to members of the Central America Four Union or the “CA-4” (La Gente

2008). The CA-4 was originally comprised of ruling elite from Guatemala, Honduras, El

Salvador, and Nicaragua, who joined forces to form a dedicated and regional power bloc

(International Democracy Watch 2020). The CA-4 has since expanded to include brokers from Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, and the DR (International Democracy Watch 2020). In what follows, I attempt to show how the business and conduct of international leisure travel played a central role in allowing these stakeholders (including Newlink) to recolonize the

Isthmus. Specifically, I document how these power players exploited the imperialist yearnings, temporalities, and drives thus far reviewed in order to manage and control trauma as a biopolitical and dialectical reality.

An example of this administration of trauma can be evidenced by the privileges, protections, and benefits bestowed upon some travelers at the expense of Others, namely,

250 migrants. In 2006, the founding nations of the CA-4 agreed to lessen border enforcement regulations between their countries so that international leisure travelers no longer have to secure separate visas to visit (Hubbard 2019). Instead, these travelers are issued a single visa, which grants them permission to visit any and all of these countries for up to 90 days.

One result of this initiative is that international leisure travelers can more easily spend or distribute their monies across these nation-states, thereby fattening the bellies of those who control the means of production in Central America and beyond. Further evidencing this diversion of funds is the fact that, in its totality, the CCT represents capitalist and oligarchic interests from the CA-4, Costa Rica, Panamá, Belize, and the DR, including those housed and guarded by INGUAT. Notably, the CCT maintains branches throughout Europe, including the Netherlands (Caribbean News Digital 2020). As reflected by these initiatives and partnerships, the international travel and hospitality industry is central to the maintenance of oligarchic control and impunity in Central America and beyond. This control and impunity extends well into the Global North, where migrants are denied the right to travel, live, work, and love where they will.

Suffice it to say, when INGUAT partnered with Newlink in 2014, these agencies were already acquainted and/or possibly working together on other projects, especially given Newlink’s specialization in the tourism industry. Shortly, I will return to a discussion of this specialization. In addition, as noted in Chapter Two, many of the same players were involved in the “post-war” scripting of Central America as “Mundo Maya,” including the centering of “Guatemala” as its “heart” in 2000 (Devine 2016).21 Corporations from Spain and the US played particularly strong roles in this capitalist and geocultural exploitation of

Guatemala’s renowned population of Maya peoples (Burtner 2004). I suggest that these

251 convergences are not coincidental. Instead, they apprehend the appreciation of coloniality/modernity via the business and conduct of international leisure travel.

A brief discussion of the striking commonalities that bridge Newlink, the CA-4, and the CCT is quite revealing in this regard, proving how said agencies function as an almost singular geopolitical assemblage.22 All three organizations are headed by light- skinned people, mostly men, whose requisite professional photos show them dressed in gender-normative and conservative clothing (e.g., expensive suits, with not a single hair out of its cultural place). Almost all of these administrators have names that indicate

Spanish, European, and/or Euro-American ancestry. Further, their appointment to top-level positions in these agencies signifies that they are power players. For example, the President of Guatemala hand selects INGUAT’s directors, who generally go on to secure prestigious cabinet positions in the national government (Devine 2016; see also Chapter Two). Largely from Guatemala’s prominent, wealthy, and ruling class, these directors sit on both the CA-

4 and the CCT (La Gente 2008). This fact captures the vital role of the travel industry in the consolidation of world power/capital. In sum, the leaders of all three organizations are poster children for the corporealization of white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism—the markings, trappings, and registers of modernity/civilization—as local histories/global designs (Mignolo 2012). That is, these power brokers capture the vitality of the colonial caste/gender system as an enduringly transnational logic enforced, in this case, through the development and administration of leisure travel as a geocultural and economic practice, benefit, philosophy, and sector.

Given the astounding persistence and persuasion of these relations—relations that

I understand as constituting, vitalizing, and extending the colonial wound as a dynamic,

252 cognitive, spatiotemporal, and somatic orientation—it simply does not matter if it is a

“social scientist” or a “tourist” who visits Guatemala. It does not matter precisely because their money spends the same. This money goes into the pockets of those who seek to control and maximize “life” in Central America and around the world, thereby sustaining modernity as a stratified, targeted, and global economy of loss. In other words, there is not really an “ethical” way to engage in the business and conduct of leisure travel without fortifying the coloniality of power, an “impossibility” that captures one of the many reasons why the abolition of this power is a sociojuridical priority.

In making these polemic statements, my goal is to decisively cast off the “post- modern” framing of the “social scientist” as an “exceptional” figure and force— specifically, as a citizen-subject who “repairs,” saves, or otherwise rescues the “world” via ethnographic research methods. Due to the operations of power and capital outlined throughout this dissertation, the “social scientist” remains a type of leisure traveler, opportunist, and consumer. To be clear, I am not arguing that all leisure travelers uniformly experience or exploit the world system. Moreover, these travelers visit Guatemala for various reasons—although, as I have shown above, these differences can be subtle. What

I am pointing out is that the distinction between the “tourist” and “social scientist” magically disappears when it comes to the accumulation of imperial white power/capital in the Global South (see also Chapter Two). As argued throughout, this accumulation hinges upon the management of trauma as a geocultural hierarchy and bodily philosophy of wound-ing. However, as I presently show, the idea/reality that white travelers would be the primary beneficiaries of this regime was taken up and promoted by Newlink (and

INGUAT) as part of its “Life Lessons” campaign.

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Of course, the Civil War taught those heading the CA-4 and CCT very important lessons concerning the international travel and hospitality industry. These elites had learned that, even in the face of active ecocide/genocide, this industry could be relied upon to accumulate imperial capital/power as long as this violence was contained. More precisely, as long as Maya peoples and other marginalized citizen-subjects were made to populate “history as catastrophe,” the benevolent representatives of Empire could freely enter and leave the region. They could be protected from the worst of the violence that enabled and valorized their ability to traverse the world system as “anti-tourists” or technicians of “world-repair.” Indeed, as I have proven, these capacities seize upon the dialectic of trauma as well as the function of “Mundo Maya” as a biopolitical reserve.

Therefore, when Newlink picked up INGUAT’s (and, by proxy, the CA-4 and CCT’s)

“post-war” PR woes in 2014, the corporation already had a tried and tested strategy at its disposal in terms of how to promote travel to Central America during the region’s latest

“catastrophe”—the “Immigration Crisis.”

As noted above, Newlink was not new to this game, especially in regard to stabilizing or otherwise capitalizing upon the international travel and hospitality industry.

Newlink was thus an appropriate, experienced, and reliable corporate partner for INGUAT.

As stated on its website, Newlink (emphasis in original) specializes in “enhancing” the reputation of a given country as a leisure travel destination because:

When organizational reputation comes under fire—or new ambitions call for enhancing public image—airlines, hotels, and destinations must take immediate steps to elevate their brand. Proactively manage any issue, using competitive landscape analysis to inform media relations and internal and external messaging, ultimately rebuilding brand equity.23

Newlink can handle “any issue”—war, hotel bombings, airline crashes, it does not matter—

254 because this corporation “gets” the political economy of trauma.24 “Using competitive landscape analysis” to figure out exactly why a target population might be upset about this economy’s intrinsic violences, Newlink effectively “manages” and spins modernity’s promise of loss. That is, Newlink knows how to “proactively” cover, exploit, and advertise the colonial wound as a “new ambition,” “brand,” and/or targeted necropolitical timescape that can be contained as such because it does not immediately kill “everybody” within its reach and grasp.

Indeed, as I hope to show via my analysis of the “Life Lessons” campaign,

Newlink/INGUAT utilized “media relations and internal and external messaging” to assure current, potential, and primarily white travelers that these traumatic economies would not touch them; these travelers had nothing to fear because the colonial caste/gender system empowered and guarded their explorations of Guatemala. As I attempt to illustrate, one of the most salient successes of this campaign was its disturbingly smart advertisement of this system as a biopolitical covenant of safety. In particular, I argue that Newlink/INGUAT relied on depictions of Maya and Ladino women, as well as of Maya and Ladino children, to transmit this “covenant” during the “Immigration Crisis.” In enacting this exploitation and maximization of coloniality, I contend that this campaign captures another way that the social scientist and touristic nonpresent circulates as a commodity. As I endeavor to prove, this circulation further illustrates how the “business” of necropolitical statecraft sutures the insurgent timescapes and potentialities of the colonial wound, specifically by fetishizing modernity’s elaboration of loss (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 3) as an imperialist gain and asset.

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As indicated by a press release written by Sabrina Lacle (2014) of Newlink, the

“Life Lessons” campaign was a global initiative that cost INGUAT over US $4 million.

Given that many migrants were concurrently fleeing Central America because they did not wish to die from starvation, this expenditure was obscene. However, much like the tourism campaigns developed by INGUAT during “wartime,” the goals of Newlink’s year-long drive were “to showcase the country’s authentic wonder, while capturing the attention of discerning travelers seeking an enriching cultural experience like no other” (Lacle 2014).

Apparently, “discerning travelers” would not be bothered by well-publicized “trivialities” such as mounting drug cartel violence, intranational poverty, economic imperialism, and oligarchic impunity (i.e., the “Immigration Crisis”). Indeed, as I illustrated in Chapter

Three, these and other violences actually drew some anti-tourists from the Global North to

Guatemala as part of the recalibrated civilizing mission and other imperial crusades.

To lure more of these crusaders to Guatemala, the “Life Lessons” campaign utilized a “multi-platform social media plan as well as broadcast advertising placements in top-tier networks in North and South America, and a global digital advertising program” (Lacle

2014). This campaign focused upon the depiction of “visual narrative vignettes,” which illuminated “the charm of Guatemala including the ancient Maya sites, walking the cobblestone streets of colonial towns, climbing volcanoes and interacting with the welcoming locals” (Lacle 2014). These vignettes graced the digital billboards of major city centers across the Global North, including Times Square, New York (Central America Link

2014). As the then-director of INGUAT Pedro Duchez explained, the “Life Lessons” campaign was an “invitation” for international travelers to “discover Guatemala with new eyes. Our [INGUAT’s] hope is that after coming to the country, travelers leave feeling

256 more complete, with new stories to share and a desire to continue to discover themselves and the country for years to come” (Lacle 2014). In other words, by visiting “Guatemala” to (re)enact imperialist fantasies of voyage and conquest, travelers would finally resolve their pesky existential angst. Learning invaluable and enduring “Life Lessons,” they would return to their various homes as “whole” citizen-subjects.

In capitalizing upon these fantasies and angst, I argue that Newlink/INGUAT effectively materialized, fetishized, and promoted the social scientist and touristic nonpresent as an expansive, national, and secure geography. This geography perpetuated the nostalgic notion that “welcoming locals” waited with open arms for those international leisure travelers who would be anthropologists, seeking to form “kinlike ties” (Nelson

1999, xi) with “Guatemalan” families. By fomenting this nostalgia, Newlink/INGUAT occluded the historical material realities occasioning not only their campaign, but also the willingness of “welcoming locals” to “befriend” the travelling representatives of Empire as exploitable sources of power/capital. That is, Newlink/INGUAT strategically bypassed any possible or uncomfortable associations between the “discerning traveler” and the

“dreaded tourist.” Instead, they centered international leisure travelers as intrepid heroes, explorers, and/or amateur social scientists (i.e., as anti-tourists). In so doing, they romanticized the relations of rule enabling these travelers to visit Guatemala during the

“Immigration Crisis.” As noted above, a commercial from this campaign, Deja Que

Guatemala Te Enseñe ‘Lecciones de Vida,’ further evinces these ideological presentations, to the analysis of which I now turn.

The commercial in question opens with a prolonged shot of a young, white man staring pensively out of the window of a chicken bus, which has just pulled into Antigua.25

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His long red hair partially covers his passably handsome and unassuming face, signaling his gendered membership in some sort of European countercultural group (because his hair is not cut short). All by his lonesome, our protagonist debarks this bus. Apparently, he is so confident of his safety that he has chosen to travel alone via a medium well known to be dangerous for white travelers from the Global North. As almost any travel guide about

Guatemala will inform said travelers, chicken buses are infamous for being places where gringos are robbed, assaulted, or worse.26 That is, these buses are targeted zones for the primitive accumulation of imperial white power/capital. From the very start of this commercial, our protagonist is depicted as possessing “exceptional” powers of immunity in regard to the embodied parameters of this accumulation.

In addition, most importantly, his chosen mode of transportation unmasks him as an anti-tourist. Our protagonist is someone who wants to pursue an off-the-beaten path travel experience by becoming “one” with the “locals” who rely on chicken buses for transportation because they are affordable. As our brave explorer debarks this bus, the camera zooms in on his clothing, further capturing his gendered and racialized membership of some sort of European anti-tourist vanguard. He is dressed in a hand-woven, multi- colored poncho, durable brown cargo shorts, and practical hiking shoes, with a red backpack casually tossed over his shoulder. He looks like many other gringo anthropologists, archaeologists, Peace Corp volunteers, activists, students, and other anti- tourists who visit Antigua (including myself, see Chapter One). In fact, this stereotype is immortalized in all of its geocultural glory by Antigua’s English-language magazine Revue in a cartoon by Thomas Lamothe (2010, 36), which features a white woman dressed in much the same way as our protagonist—she wears sandals, brown cargo pants, a T-shirt,

258 and sunglasses, with a bandanna covering her medium-length hair. Capturing the perceived entitled nature of the gringa traveler, this figure is depicted as waiting impatiently and petulantly outside a Spanish-language school in Antigua.

The moment our brave explorer touches down upon Antigua’s renowned cobblestone streets, two dark-skinned women dressed in traje immediately pass by him, effortlessly balancing colorfully wrapped bundles of unknown goods upon their heads.

These women mark his first encounter with Maya indigeneity, nationalism, and femininity in Guatemala, effectively introducing our protagonist to “Mundo Maya.” As I illustrated in Chapter Two, drawing from Burtner’s (2004) work, such geocultural, racialized, and feminized tropes gained traction during the Civil War. INGUAT deployed these tropes in a calculated bid to feature “Guatemala” as a non-violent, non-threatening, and accommodating place, where “the Maya” were happy, well cared for, and not being killed in an active genocide/femicide/ecocide. To reference the enduring influence of these tropes, I continue to use the term “Mujer Maya” as coined by Nelson (1999). Specifically,

I utilize this term to describe Newlink/INGUAT’s contemporary invocation of this colonial master narrative (Aldama 2001; Miller 2008) to court imperial white capital/power during the “Immigration Crisis.”

As our protagonist pauses for a moment to take in the sight of the Mujer Maya and the city of Antigua, his face lights up in wonder. As the camera’s focus widens to capture more of the city, he is depicted as the only white person occupying its streets. Given that

Antigua is home to many white ex-pats, capitalist entrepreneurs, and others from the Global

North, as well as light-skinned Ladino and European war criminals, this depiction is a bold- faced lie (see Chapter Three). Nevertheless, this scene captures the fantastical fiction of the

259 social scientist and touristic nonpresent; as I have tried to show in this chapter, this timescape hinges upon, features, and enshrines the “exceptional” presence, fortitude, and force of the white anti-tourist. Even in a city alternatively despised and celebrated for its racialized and socioeconomic relationship to European modernity/civilization, our protagonist is depicted as a stranger in a strange land. Further, as evidenced by his

“exceptional” presence in Antigua, he is clearly not bothered by the mounting drug cartel violence and impunity keeping his “mainstream” compatriots from the city. In fact, these dangers mean little to him because he is driven by a noble quest; he wants to become one of the gente/people, forming intimate and familial bonds with Guatemalan nationals, in a bid to learn “Life Lessons.”

The “narrative visual vignettes” (Lacle 2014) that follow reveal the full extent of our hero’s nostalgic mission. Suddenly, the scene fades to black, and the words, “Riquezas más allá del dinero/Riches beyond money” flash before the viewer’s eyes. Simultaneously, a deep, masculine, and authoritative voice declares in Spanish, “Para conocer bien a

Guatemala, tienes que conocer bien a su gente/To know Guatemala well, you (informal) have to know its people well.” Although the remainder of the commercial is punctuated every now and then with this authoritative voice and narration, the following images ensure that it is not necessary to understand Spanish to apprehend this particular imperialist romance.

Our protagonist is then shown sharing a meal with a large group of dark-skinned people, the majority of whom are dressed in traje. Judging from the sparsity of other people and buildings, they are in a rural location. This location, as well as the skin color and dress of those gathered around the featured communal table, signals that our hero has somehow

260 managed to penetrate the “heart” of the “Maya world.” How he came to be at this particular table is not clear; it would seem that his imperialist desire was enough to catapult him into the lap of “Mundo Maya.” As the camera pans down the length of the table, he is once again featured as the only white person for miles and miles.

The next shot is of our hero sharing an intimate meal at this table with the Mujer

Maya. This scene moves a little slower than those preceding it and focalizes her studied efforts to teach him how to unwrap a tamale-like delicacy called pache. Like traje, pache is typically attributed to Maya peoples and culture. In unwrapping this mysterious food, the Mujer Maya signals her willingness to unveil all of “Guatemala” for our protagonist to consume, most especially its Indigenous mysteries and customs. That is, she offers up the

“heart” of the “Maya World” for him to eat, as one of the “real” cannibals of the world system. Returning the Mujer Maya’s dazzling smile, our hero is shown licking pache from his fingers, his eyes alight with joy. She looks on, nodding in approval at his mastery of

“Maya cultural ways.” The next scene is of him dancing with a different Mujer Maya; both are shown grinning ear-to-ear, laughing and enjoying one another, as they glide across the dancefloor.

Similar to the racialized, gendered, and “New World” phantasmas of La Malinche and Pocahontas, these scenes depict the Mujer Maya welcoming our protagonist as if he were a European civilizing hero. In addition to acting as his cultural guide, the Mujer Maya willingly submits to his affections; she encourages and engages his curiosity about “Mundo

Maya.” In effect, she feeds this “world” to him as a culinary and geocultural delicacy. In so doing, she centers “Mundo Maya” as a place where our protagonist will be worshipped, protected, and indulged as an “exceptional” representative of white supremacy,

261 cisheteropatriarchy, and global capital. Living the “dream” of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent, our protagonist is shown as being fully accepted by the “Mujer

Maya”; he is her beloved ward and confidant. Do not fret, however; the momentary threat posed to the colonial caste/gender system by these inter-racial shenanigans will be neutralized at the commercial’s end by INGUAT/Newlink.

Next is a series of random “visual vignettes” about Guatemala’s “authentic wonder”

(Lacle 2014). In the analysis that follows, I focus on two of these vignettes, the first of which is of two children with dark skin, a boy and a girl, running joyfully through a milpa/cornfield. They are flying one of the “traditional” giant and colorful kites attributed to Maya peoples. However, just in case the viewer is unable to ascertain this association, one of these children, the girl, is dressed in traje. Given the slow-motion depiction of their bucolic frolic, these children do not have a care in the world. Following is an extended shot of our protagonist playing basketball with a group of Indigenous and Ladino children, in what looks to be one of any number of small towns outside of Antigua or Panajachel. In a scene meant to tug at imperial heartstrings, our protagonist puts his arm around two of these children, who cling affectionately to his embrace.

As captured by the above, “Guatemala’s” children do not blame our intrepid hero for the imperialist incarceration of their siblings. Apparently, as long as these children stay in their “proper” time and place, everything is fine, everything is perfect. These children run jubilantly through their families’ milpas, where they most likely work all day to help these families live hand to mouth. These children play basketball with gringo anti-tourists, adopting them as doting uncles or brothers, in a bid to accumulate the power/capital embodied by these “exceptional” and “traveling” citizen-subjects. In other words,

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INGUAT/Newlink sentimentalize and commoditize these and other necessities of

“modern” life and living in Guatemala. As evidenced by the commercial in question, they

“nostalgically” suspend these political economic obligations in an uncanny temporal void, one I have termed the social scientist and touristic nonpresent. Specifically, in the case discussed here, INGUAT/Newlink transmute the trauma, pain, and suffering provoked by the colonial caste/gender system into imperial “Life Lessons.” Accurately discerning the desires of the anti-tourist as a contemporary market audience, INGUAT/Newlink likewise successfully shill the colonial wound as an exploitable “reality” and matrix.

The final shot of this commercial is of our protagonist watching some sort of

Indigenous cultural festival in what appears to be El Parque Central in Antigua. This

“time,” he is with a group of Ladino youth who are close to his depicted age (late teens or early 20s). The reason I know that these youth are supposed to be “Ladino” is because they all have light-brown skin and wear Western clothing, such as T-shirts, sneakers, and jeans.

As the camera closes in upon their smiling faces, it is quite clear that a romantic relationship is developing between him and one woman from this group. They flirt, laugh, and sit very close to one another. So, even though our protagonist briefly dallied with the Mujer Maya, it was clearly not serious. In the end, he chooses a partner more befitting of his imperialist station. That is, INGUAT/Newlink feature our hero intentionally courting colonial white femininity as a local history/global design (Mignolo 2012) in Guatemala. He embraces the

“commonsense” of white supremacy, capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy as transnational logics of rule. As the screen fades to black for the last time, the words “Guatemala Presenta

Lecciones de Vida/Guatemala Presents Life Lessons” end the commercial, which also

263 happens to be the title of the press release authored by Newlink (Lacle 2014) to announce this campaign.

In my mind, this commercial’s most startling achievement is its strategic centering of modernity’s elaboration of loss (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008, 3) or linearity as an imperial asset and gain. It explicitly advertises the colonial caste/gender system as a

“progressive” history, one that will “protect” white power/capital (i.e., “civilization”), regardless of the “catastrophes” shaping quotidian life throughout Central America. By capitalizing upon this covenant, INGUAT/Newlink effectively fetishize the colonial wound as an actual anti-tourism destination. In so doing, these corporations try to neutralize its insurgent ruptures and potentialities, the likes of which I have termed trauma time, following Edkins (2003). Oligarchic impunity, economic imperialism, and drug cartel dominion (i.e., the “Immigration Crisis) are minimized as detrimental, targeted, and structural violences. Instead, “Guatemala” is focalized as a productive place for the enactment of imperialist nostalgia, for the realization of capitalist, white supremacist, and cisheteropatriarchal fantasies of exploration, conquest, and repair. Modernity/linearity are likewise restored as primary technologies for this “realization” precisely because said fantasies perennially hinge upon the temporal deficit of the Other and/or the denial of coevalness.

As I have tried to illustrate, such desires, designs, and temporalities link the “social scientist” and the “tourist” as geocultural forces or assemblages of power/capital. More precisely, these imaginings, which reflect the sensational workings of the social scientist and touristic nonpresent, erase the unequal relationships allowing for the travelling representatives of Empire to “save” the world. Ultimately benefiting a transnational ruling

264 elite (e.g., INGUAT, the CA-4, the CCT, Newlink, etc.), this timescape further captures the continued influence of the Invasion as an evolving project, hierarchy, and economy.

4.5 Conclusion: Rethinking the Necrotic Organization of Planetary Life

In this chapter, I endeavored to illustrate how historical material processes influence the imperial geopolitics of knowledge vis-à-vis “Guatemala.” To help with this illustration, I surveyed some of the contemporary artifacts of imperial wanderlust, authority, and desire, such as published travelogues, electronic travel blogs, ethnographies, and tourism campaigns and commercials. In so doing, I tried to illustrate how the “post- modern” pursuit of trauma as a travel/research goal or experience is an act of primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, and imperial/colonial recognition. In particular, I argued that these capitalist operations and performances neutralize the insurgent challenges posed by trauma time and the colonial wound to “business” as usual; I further engage this topic in the next chapter. To help illustrate these political economic “realities,” I linked the aforementioned pursuit to anti-tourism as a consumer practice and philosophy in

Guatemala. As I documented, this practice and philosophy continue to hinge upon and vitalize the global coloniality of power.

In advancing these arguments, I sought to challenge the “innocent” framing of the social sciences as technologies for saving the world. To uphold this challenge, I attempted to document how these sciences reflect, and are grounded within, a decidedly imperialist timescape and cosmology: the social scientist and touristic nonpresent. Specifically, I highlighted the various ways that this temporality “romantically” erases the relations of rule, enabling its namesakes to traverse and profit from the “New World” order. As I documented, this timescape sentimentalizes and effaces the European caste/gender system

265 as a regime of mobility, thereby consecrating the colonial wound as an operable and/or

“necessary” evil.

My main goal in pursuing this analysis was to lay the foundation for thinking about what would be required in terms of producing forms of knowledge that can dismantle modernity as a persistent, global, and pernicious elaboration of loss and wound-ing. As I endeavored to illustrate here, it is because anthropology/the social sciences endure as imperial entitlements and conventions of leisure, privilege, freedom, and consumption that their “innocent” positioning as life-saving technologies is extremely problematic. As I have shown, in the end, the only “world” preserved, rescued, or saved by these sciences is the

“universe” left in the wake of the coloniality of power. As I take up in the next chapter, if one’s political goal is the irreversible destruction of this power as a geocultural regime, the social sciences are only useful in so far as they can highlight some of its workings (Santos

2014). Nonetheless, as this “illumination” ultimately exploits and buttresses the political economy of trauma, these sciences cannot be called upon to abolish the same, an argument that drives to the heart of the next and final chapter of this dissertation.

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5 Chapter Five: Toward Abolishing the Global Coloniality of Power

They call you the New World But I close my eyes and the cold is a cloud that envelopes history. Sorrow is ancient. —Fernando Valverde (2020, 542)

With those people who interpret and explain and examine trauma survivors, I have had great difficulty. —Dorothy Allison (2016, 244)

How can we possibly not hear that voice again tumbling down the steps of History: “It’s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it.” —Frantz Fanon (2008, 1)

I begin this chapter with the above quotes because each of them sums up the key issues examined by this dissertation with all of the grace, insight, and sacred sorcery of the poet-healer, someone and something I wish I could be. However, I long ago accepted that

I lack the necessary restorative magic and skill required to cast such healing spells because the “cold clouds” of science cover me. For better and worse, I am an anthropologist, even though I will not have the discipline—nor will it have me, as further evidenced by my long, charged, and frustrating entanglement with the field. Of course, such realizations, rejections, and paradoxes lie at the heart of my particular existential crisis, one left in the wake of my unshakable role as an imperial storyteller, translator, traveler, and trespasser in Guatemala and elsewhere.

This crisis has constantly kept me on the disciplinary move, marking my fraught engagement with the academy. I have no regrets. However, I do have some things to say about this academy, which I summarize here in all of my clumsy over-eagerness, being the raging bull-in-the-china-shop that I am. However, if I rage it is because my “sorrow is

267 ancient.” It is grounded in something much larger than myself, a fact I have always honored as a solemn gift and awakening. In the end, this recognition caused me to write this dissertation as an act of love for myself, my family, the Land, all living be-ings, the planet, and even the discipline in which I was trained. Although I ultimately believe this discipline should fade quietly into that dark night, it still made me who I am. As I have tried to show throughout this particular narrative of travel, desire, and hope, such “love” evinces the contradictory nature of the existential deviation.

In the end, similar to the protagonist of Valverde’s (2020) beautiful poem, I gaze upon the shores of the “New World” with great sadness because I know that things do not have to be the way that they are now. As Allison (2016) argues, this sort of deep and abiding pain should never be interpreted, explained, or examined because it must exist on its own terms, breaking through the daily grind of life and living as a problem. This problem, as Fanon (2008) points out, is one already well known to those who read and write the annals of History: some people thrive, grow, and profit from the world system while Others are made to die by it. These determinations are writ on the flesh and the Land, telling a story that continues to vitalize the colonizer’s tongue as a global language, geography, and economy of trauma and wound-ing. Given the fact that these determinations have been copiously studied and commoditized as part of the “post-modern turn,” the world does not need yet another social scientist to write yet another a book about how terrible it is, to paraphrase the research participant I quoted in Chapter Four. As Fanon

(2008, 1) stridently notes, “It’s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it.” In what follows, I advance some initial recommendations for this transformation, in conversation with insurgent and subjugated scholars. To lay the

268 groundwork for these recommendations, I begin by summarizing this dissertation’s main points.

5.1 Dissertation Chapter Summary: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

In Chapter One, I introduced my understanding of anthropology as a philosophy and practice of imperial leisure, upward mobility, and knowledge production. Specifically,

I illustrated the intractable relationship of this “science” to the Invasion as a continuing project, perspective, and history in the Americas and around the world. To further illustrate this relationship, I highlighted the disciplinary yearnings, crises, and reconfigurations attendant upon the “post-modern turn” in anthropology and the broader social sciences. By centering the ethnographic study of violence as “social justice,” I argued that this “turn” tried to silence the calls made by insurgent scholars for the irrevocable dismantling of anthropology as an imperialist benefit and priority. In so doing, I insisted that this “turn” effectively transmuted trauma into Truth, thereby carving out a place for anthropology in an academy still reeling from these demands.

In addition, I highlighted the concurrent rise and fall of a very “dangerous” moment in anthropology, during which select social scientists seriously grappled with the discipline as the “ultimate form of tourism” (Van Den Berge 1994, 8). In so doing, these scholars tried to focalize and problematize anthropology as the “ultimate form” of imperialism and colonialism. I then documented how an opposing and ultimately victorious majority neutralized this “danger” by invoking and (re)installing strict, “ethical,” and

“methodological” criteria. In a bid to further separate the “anthropologist” from the

“imperialist” and “colonist,” the professional pursuit of qualitative research was to firmly

269 distinguish “tourism” from the “social sciences.” Turning my analytic eye toward the manifestation and enforcement of these logics in Guatemala, I noted that the remainder of my dissertation would break down the above categorizations. Specifically, I began to advance my argument that these hegemonic determinations capture the need to abolish world power/capital as oppressive, imperial, and colonial ontoepistemologies (e.g., as

Truth).

In Chapter Two, I drew from the global coloniality of power school to further unpack this argument, and in direct relationship to the hierarchical organization and maximization of “life” in Guatemala. I documented how “New World” configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation (i.e., the colonial caste/gender system) endure as embodied and geocultural timescapes, which perennially install modernity as a

“progressive” and targeted forecast of loss, wound-ing, and other traumas. I argued that this broadcast determines one’s ability to freely and securely travel the world, including the resulting production of anthropological knowledge about said world. To illustrate these points, I traced the initial efforts undertaken by General Jorge Ubico Castañeda to nationalize Guatemala’s tourism industry during his military dictatorship in the 1940s. As

I charted, these efforts occurred against an unfolding backdrop of colonial terror, violence, and capital accumulation, which had barred Maya peoples from moving about the country.

Instead, they were forced by Ubico’s administration (which included the UFC) to live and work on the landholdings of the ruling, Ladino, and European elites. Simultaneously,

Ubico encouraged the intranational travels of European and Euro-American anthropologists, archeologists, and other sightseers. In particular, Ubico successfully exploited a growing, imperialist, and ethnological obsession with “the Maya” to lay the

270 organizational foundation for what later became INGUAT (i.e., the CNT). I then illustrated how the “post-modern” turn uniquely fired and reworked this “obsession.”

Specifically, I chronicled how “heroic” and “helpful” anthropologists, solidarity activists, missionaries, humanitarians, tourists, and others from the Global North were able to enter and leave Guatemala during the Civil War. I argued that these transnational flows of power/capital hinged upon a “new” imperialist desire—the production, documentation, and commodification of “history as catastrophe” and/or trauma-as-Truth. Linking this pursuit to the rise of anti-tourism as a “post-modern” consumer practice, philosophy, and logic of mobility, I insisted that “the Maya” remained the primary focus of imperialist wanderlust, nostalgia, and profiteering. However, in a slight divergence from their

“modernist” predecessors, I illuminated how these “new” imperialists directly engaged the

Civil War to valorize their particular brand of melancholia, voyeurism, and opportunism as “social justice” (as opposed to “tourism”).

Meanwhile, as I further documented, impoverished Ladino and Maya peoples continued to be rendered immobile by colonial warfare, terror, governance, and profit- making. Indeed, it was during the Civil War that Guatemala’s tourism sector was successfully nationalized. On the 485th anniversary of the Invasion (October 12, 1977),

INGUAT opened its doors, an effort spearheaded by military officers. To account for these differing regimes of mobility, I advanced my understanding of trauma as a dialectical process. I argued that this dialectic was writ on the flesh via the colonial caste/gender system, one that still determines a given person’s ability to safely cross nation-state bounds.

I concluded that this ability likewise illustrates how the exploitation of the colonial

271 caste/gender system remains a requisite for the production of imperial knowledge about

“Guatemala,” including that undertaken by anthropologists from the Global North.

In Chapter Three, I continued to advance this argument by drawing on an analysis of the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in Antigua during the summer of 2014. As I noted, this timeframe marked the media-created onset of the “Immigration Crisis.” I documented how research participants, who were largely social scientists, humanitarians, missionaries, and other similarly-motivated travelers from the Global North, came to

Guatemala for a shared and “heroic” purpose. They wished to “help” Maya peoples navigate this “crisis.” I argued that this “assistance” was problematic for one key reason: it romanticized the necropolitical regimes of mobility, allowing said participants to visit

Guatemala during this “crisis,” while keeping the lethal terms of these regimes in place

(e.g., the ability of these participants to cross nation-state bounds without fear of imprisonment or being separated from their children). In so doing, I argued that these

“helpful” travelers or anti-tourists reworked and extended the European civilizing mission because they exploited the hierarchical organization of the world system in the name of a specious, chimerical, and imperial good.

To advance this contention, I detailed how these research participants invoked the colonial caste/gender system to position “Guatemala” as a “savage” terrain in need of perpetual rescue. Specifically, I chronicled how these participants alternately despised and celebrated Antigua as a bastion of European “civilization.” They visited and/or rejected the city because of its “modern” offerings and comforts, such as luxury hotels, restaurants, and other trappings of what they termed “fake Guatemala.” These participants argued that “real

Guatemala” was where “authentic” Maya peoples lived in impoverished and rural

272 conditions, the likes of which necessitated their “benevolent” presence. These areas tended to be the rural central highlands, an area successfully marketed by INGUAT as “the Living

Indigenous Highlands,” following in the footsteps of the anthropologists flocking to the area in the late 1980s. I concluded that these practices and perceptions capture what I term the recalibrated civilizing mission. I argued that this mission collapses the perceived differences between the “tourist” and “social scientist” because it genuflects an imperialist imaginary similarly and continuously exploited by both in order to exalt and embalm their particular world travels.

In addition, I illustrated the continued vitality of the colonial caste/gender system by showing how it was deployed to entrench and exacerbate the military occupation of

Antigua. For example, I documented how the rapes of select white womxn or “gringas” were politically leveraged to intensify this occupation. I argued that a security warning generated by the US Embassy in Guatemala City helped this occupation along by fomenting imperial panics. In an effort to calm its European and Euro-American patrons via the spectacle of tourism security, the Guatemalan government increased the presence of policing forces in the city. Paradoxically, I chronicled how research participants invoked colonial conceptions of white bourgeois femininity and heterosexuality to condemn these survivors of rape for “daring” to travel to “savage” and “dangerous” Guatemala. In so doing, I argued that they shored up white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism as transnational logics of mobility, securitization, and citizenship. Further capturing these logics was the fact that an ethno-femicide raged in the geopolitical background of these violent debates, one not mentioned by a single research participant. Much as it had since the Invasion, this ethno-femicide centered impoverished Maya and Ladino womxn in its

273 crosshairs. Thus, I argued, “New World” configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation continue to bestow value upon certain bodies at the expense of Others. To further illustrate this disturbing appreciation, I documented how the mobility and earning potential of Maya womxn continue to be violently curtailed by policing agents in Antigua

(and throughout Guatemala) vis-à-vis the colonial order of people, places, and things.

In Chapter Four, I analyzed the political economic processes extending the Invasion vis-à-vis the imperial geopolitics of knowledge production—specifically, the “post- modern” reconfiguration of trauma-as-Truth. To further collapse the perceived differences between the “social scientist” and the “tourist” in this geopolitics, I curated and surveyed an archive of published travelogues, electronic travel blogs, and ethnographies, as well as qualitative data from my fieldwork in Antigua. I found that an uncanny romance united these narratives, rendering them all artifacts of imperialist wanderlust, authority, and opportunism.

Sentimentalizing and erasing the relations of rule empowering its namesakes as geocultural and capitalist forces, I termed this strange spatiotemporal void the social scientist and touristic nonpresent. I argued that this timescape depended upon the continual, racist, classist, and sexist consecration of Guatemala as a “catastrophic” place.

In particular, I documented how this “consecration” enabled anti-tourists from the Global

North to enact and enshrine the recalibrated civilizing mission because they were so uniquely shielded by the dialectic of trauma. To script, produce, and market this mission and dialectic as “romantic” imperialist entanglements, I illustrated how social scientists and pedestrian tourists alike objectified political violence and pain in Guatemala. In so doing, I insisted that these travelers were able to frame their particular “bleeding” of the

274 country as “just,” “courageous,” and “ethical” (i.e., as anti-tourism). This “bleeding,” as I further illustrated, allowed some of these travelers to advance their careers as renowned anthropologists, journalists, travel writers, etc. More precisely, I maintained that this

“advancement” was problematic because it invoked and upheld the necrotic covenants, hierarchies, and histories of the modern/colonial world system.

In addition, I unpacked my argument that global capitalism has always functioned as a dedicated, strategic, and political economy of trauma. I insisted that this economy automagically renders the colonial caste/gender system a “necessary” evil in regard to navigating, surviving, and/or mastering the “New World” order. Terming this necessity the

“colonial wound,” I illustrated how the insurgent timescapes and possibilities it generates

(e.g., trauma time) are neutralized via its commodification as a “post-modern” travel/research object of desire. I documented how social scientists and other anti-tourists, venture capitalists, and Guatemala’s ruling elite each accomplished this necropolitical suturing of time and space by maximizing the colonial wound as a historical material

“reality.” In so doing, I argued that these stakeholders extended modernity/linearity as a

“progressive,” targeted, and global elaboration of loss. To further illustrate these counterinsurgent collusions, I analyzed INGUAT/Newlink’s “Life Lessons” campaign.

Specifically, I showed how this campaign invoked the social scientist and touristic nonpresent to accumulate imperial white capital/power during the “Immigration Crisis.” I argued that this endeavor was successful because INGUAT and its corporate/oligarchic partners (e.g., Newlink, the CCT, and the CA-4) accurately apprehended the consumer desires and drives of a pernicious, cannibalistic, and evolving imperialist imaginary—anti- tourism.

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Motivated and supported by the combined arguments I have advanced in these chapters, I draw the following conclusions. The first is that the Invasion endures as an ontoepistemological scale, matrix, and process. As my dissertation documents, the

Invasion persists via the colonial caste/gender system, the necrotic organization of time and space, and the political economy of trauma, all of which operationalize modernity/coloniality as unfolding world “histories” or cartographies of struggle. The second is that the production of imperial knowledge about Guatemala, including that promoted and encompassed by the discipline of anthropology, exploits these cartographies as established and evolving regimes of upward or geopolitical mobility. The third is that the “post-modern” framing of anthropology and/or the social sciences as technologies for global salvation is extremely problematic because it romanticizes this exploitation, ultimately furthering the Invasion as an ontoepistemological project and hierarchy (i.e., as

Truth). The fourth is that anthropology and anti-tourism in general continue to characterize, express, and uphold imperialist notions of pleasure, freedom, consumption, capital accumulation, and “justice.” Driven by these conclusions, I make the following recommendations, in conversation with insurgent and marginalized scholars. I pay particular attention to what Santos (2014) terms “epistemologies of the South,” including

Indigenous and feminist intellectual traditions in Guatemala and broader Latin America.

5.2 Toward Abolishing the Coloniality of Power: Recommendations and Thoughts

1. If one’s political goal is to liquidate the Invasion as an enduring, global,

spatiotemporal, and somatic cosmology, hierarchy, and economy, the social sciences

cannot be called upon as agents of its destruction because they sentimentalize, fortify,

and commodify Truth.

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As scholars like Dussel (2000), Martínez Salazar (2014), Mignolo (2012; 2009), and Santos (2014) further insist, it is because of this enduring and productive relationship to Truth that the social sciences must be concretely understood as imperial philosophies for the organization and exploitation of all peoples, places, and things, according to their

(alleged) “historical” deficits or expendabilities. As Santos (2014, 44) argues, these enduringly oppressive relations of rule require a (re)prioritization of “the suppressed or marginalized smaller traditions within the big Western tradition” because “we [all lifeforms of the world] face modern problems for which there are no modern solutions.” To resolve these problems, Santos (2014, 94) contends that the social sciences must stop committing what he terms “epistemicide.” To generate innovative and effective responses to world power/capital as homicidal, suicidal, and ecocidal regimes, insurgent and marginalized scholars must be allowed to produce knowledge on their own terms. In particular, they should not be forced to rely upon the language of death (i.e., science) to make said knowledge legible and profitable as Truth. In what remains, I attempt to promote various ways to address these demands.

2. It is far past time for the discipline of anthropology to humbly and fearlessly accept

that it is an intractable technology for the enactment of imperialist and capitalist

pleasure, travel, upward mobility, cosmological knowledge, and consumption.

As I argued throughout my dissertation, this sort of epistemic humility and fearless inventory is exactly what is required to challenge the discourses of exceptionalism left in the wake of the “post-modern turn,” which would make the “social scientist” the savior of the world via the production of qualitative knowledge. As I have shown, this

“exceptionalism” actually furthers the necrotic organization of planetary life, despite all

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“good” intentions. Indeed, the entrenched and structural nature of this exploitation was what insurgent and marginalized scholars were trying to confront and dismantle before, during, and after the “post-modern turn.” In Chapter One, I tried to re-center these analytic problems and quagmires, by drawing from the work of Black, Latinx, Third World,

Indigenous, working-class, queer, and feminist scholars. Specifically, I focalized their combined insistence that insurgent and marginalized scholarship should be treated as coeval systems of perception and thought, especially in regard to the “problem” of world power and capital. The continued, systemic, and violent denial of this coevalness vis-à-vis the alleged, methodological, and philosophical “reformation” of disciplines such as anthropology brings me to my next recommendation.

3. Given its role in vitalizing, materializing, organizing, and accommodating the global

coloniality of power, the utility of the European and Euro-American academy to the

enactment of insurgent social change must be carefully evaluated.

As evidenced by the manifold critiques advanced by scholars in fields such as gender and women’s studies (e.g., Anzaldúa 1987; hooks 1994; Lorde 2007), Latinx studies (e.g., Castillo 1994; Lugones 2007; Martínez Salazar 2014), Indigenous studies

(e.g., Deloria, Jr. 1988; L.T. Smith 2012), and others (e.g., Fanon 2008; Freire 2018), this academy continues to guard and buttress white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism as fundamental logics of upward mobility and “acceptable” knowledge production. Indeed, such fields of inquiry formed in an initial gambit to challenge the academy as a garrison of imperial/colonial recognition, capital, and power. However, as scholars from the Abolition Collective (2017) argue, these “challenges” have not been able to fundamentally alter the academy as such a garrison—in part because they are inevitably

278 subsumed, neutralized, reworked, and/or re-appreciated by the very institution they are trying to change (see also KatherineKellyAbraham 2018). My examination of the “post- modern turn” further supports this contention. I acknowledge that the academy can give as much as it takes, in terms of providing a space to write a dissertation like mine.

Nonetheless, I truly believe that this “gift” comes at too high a price because it upholds the colonial order of people, places, and things as an operable or necessary “evil” for advancement within the modern world system. Thus, in my humble opinion, the academy should be abandoned as a potential springboard for the enactment of profound, lasting, and radical sociopolitical change.

4. If the academy is a place where scholars, activists, and others choose to pursue the

abolition of the “New World” order, analytic focus and energy should be placed on

how to practically and irrevocably transform History in a way that respects, upholds,

and honors planetary life.

I acknowledge that I live in a world where people who are not born into serious money have to make a living—to earn a wage—in order to survive and thrive. Given how short a single lifetime is on this planet and how hard this lifetime can be, I would never condemn anyone for carving out small spaces of happiness for themselves and their loved ones, including securing a job they like. I understand that, for many people, the academy is a desirable place to work. However, given the processes outlined by my dissertation, this academy needs to be called out for its never-ending vampirism, including its consumption of people’s pain and suffering to shore up the bloodletting of imperialist knowledge production, recognition, vice, corruption, and primitive accumulation. Therefore, I embrace Fanon’s call for a transformative research praxis capable of abolishing History as

279 a social, psychological, and material reality. I echo insurgent demands for a research praxis capable of building an army or force of people that can successfully confront and dismantle

History as a fracturing, polarizing, and necropolitical timescape. In terms of strategizing or mapping potential avenues for the ontoepistemological detonation of coloniality/modernity, social science research methods might prove useful. However, these sciences should not be let anywhere near trauma because they ultimately exploit, consume, and objectify the latter as a professional “means to an end.” In so doing, they can flatten or neutralize the insurgent lessons afforded by the colonial wound or trauma time. Therefore, as the next recommendation further takes up, those made to live in the time of the colonial wound must be allowed to talk about its insurgent potentials per their own languages, truths, histories, and philosophies.

5. Los atravesados must be centered and respected as knowledge keepers, teachers,

healers, and leaders in their own right.

As Anzaldúa (1987, 78–79) argues, the colonial wound can be annihilated as Truth by following the insurgent flight path of los atravesados, specifically by developing an intransigent “tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity.” Given the processes outlined in this dissertation, this intransigent tolerance is what the social sciences target or enfold as part of producing knowledge that is legible as Truth. Specifically, this production ensures that world power/capital is accumulated in its currently codified forms, i.e., the registers of modernity/coloniality. As I have insisted throughout my dissertation, one consequence of this production is that trauma is translated into Truth, thereby extending modernity/coloniality as “progressive” promises, cosmologies, and economies of loss.

Therefore, as further articulated by Indigenous, Latinx, Black, queer, working-class,

280 trans*, and feminist scholars (Aldama 2001; Castillo 1994; Coulthard 2014; Fanon 2008;

Freeman 2015; Freire 2018; hooks 1994; Lorde 2007; Lugones 2007; Mignolo 2009; Ortiz

1992; L. T. Smith 2012; Trask 1999; Weheliye 2014, to name but a few), subjugated ways of relating to and understanding the world must (and should) take center stage.

As evidenced by current events such as cataclysmic climate change, the biological warfare being waged via the coronavirus, and the increasing impunity enjoyed by transnational elite to these events, Western ontoepistemologies have almost destroyed the planet. No more should any lifeform be made to depend upon these “sciences” of death for succor, comfort, or assistance. In my mind, these and other events signal an emergent need to cede geopolitical power and representational ground to subjugated knowledges. This succession goes far beyond including marginalized scholars and activists in the cannons of the major academic disciplines, prominent leadership roles, etc. It means actually focalizing different ways of perceiving, ordering, and making use of the world as viable modes of thinking, knowing, feeling, working, and living. By allowing these modes to circulate alongside Truth as valid ontoepistemological regimes, the colonial wound can be unmasked as a geocultural artifact and imposition. These combined knowledges can help to reveal this wound as a cosmological installation that does not have to guide the totality of planetary life and living precisely because there are many different options for organizing, expressing, and understanding biocultural power. In this way, more life-giving and life-sustaining orientations to the world can be likewise unmasked and revealed.

6. As part of bringing about the above succession, insurgent and subjugated knowledges

should be focalized as key technologies for the mapping of “trauma” as a spatiotemporal, psycho-affective, economic, somatic, and geocultural regime.

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To advance this final recommendation, I draw from two very important works written by Guatemalan nationals Egla Martínez Salazar (2014) and Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil

(1994). In my mind, these works are important because they center marginalized knowledges as actual analytics in terms of understanding political violence and the colonial wound, trauma writ both large and small. In so doing, I argue that these scholars break through Truth as a totalizing, oppressive, objectifying, and necropolitical barrier.

As my dissertation evinces, I heavily cite Martínez Salazar’s (2014) work because it is something I deeply respect as a practical handbook for the transformation of History, i.e., the dismantlement of “Euro-North American-centric knowledge” (Martínez Salazar

2014, 18) as a white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, and capitalist regime of death.

Writing from Guatemala as a self-identified “working-class peasant woman with

Indigenous ancestry,” Martínez Salazar (2014, 10) is intimately familiar with this History as an unfolding and coagulating wound. For example, Martínez Salazar (2014, 18) recounts how she was “taught by the agents of dominant social worlds” to accept “North American cultural and physical superiority, and the social classification of the […] Guatemalan state and society,” to “celebrate” (read: neutralize) her insurgently mestiza ancestry as “Ladino.”

This “celebration” caused her great pain because it required her to deny a crucial part of her identity; this pain was further sharpened by her supposedly inferior sociobiological role as an impoverished and brown-skinned woman. The cognitive dissonance left in the wake of these denials and losses effectively revealed the colonial wound to her as a lethal regime of subjectification (e.g., the European caste/gender system).

Due to these and other “revelations,” Martínez Salazar entered the academy, driven to produce knowledge that could help emancipate the poor, womxn of color, and

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Indigenous peoples via the imperial social sciences. However, she fully acknowledges and is deeply troubled by the relationship of these sciences to fortifying the structures of power she seeks to dismantle (see Chapter One). To keep this relationship in check, Martínez

Salazar (2014, 17) relies on what she calls the “Maya Cosmovision,” which she understands as enacting and ensuring a “set of philosophical, social, economic, political, and spiritual principles, the main axis of which is the articulation of the human and non- human-worlds without any supremacy allocated to humans.” In other words, she refuses to center the “human” as a supreme be-ing, thereby rejecting the conceptual proxy position of the straight, wealthy, cisgender, Christian, and European man as the same. She rebukes coloniality/modernity as a framework for classifying and exploiting all peoples, places, and things. Instead, she understands her research as a philosophical, social, economic, political, and spiritual offering in terms of rethinking the necrotic organization of the planet—the colonial wound. For her, this involves a consistent evaluation of how much Euro-North

American-centric power continues to drive the production of even subjugated knowledges.

Importantly, she fearlessly and humbly includes her study in this evaluation because she knows that the work of dismantling coloniality is the work of many lifetimes. In so doing, she ultimately rejects the imposition of Truth as an ecocidal/homicidal/suicidal mandate and species division.

Another example of the production of emancipatory forms of knowledge via the

Maya Cosmovision is Cojtí Cuxil’s (1994) groundbreaking work Políticas Para La

Reivindicación de los Mayas de Hoy: Fundamento de los Derechos Específicos del Pueblo

Maya/Politics for the Vindication of Today’s Mayas: Foundation of the Specific Rights of the Maya People. What makes this work so unique is that it captures the simultaneous

283 circulation and collusion of several different “worlds,” the likes of which Cojtí Cuxil cogently apprehends and bridges as an experienced time traveler, activist, and scholar trained in European and Indigenous traditions.

For example, this book is written primarily in Spanish, immediately signaling that

English is not the only imperial tongue that insurgent and marginalized scholars have to master in order to negotiate the colonial wound. In addition, all around Cojtí Cuxil’s text are “signs” of the subjugated knowledges that this language would happily annihilate from cultural memory. These knowledges are further captured by the strident demands Cojtí

Cuxil makes throughout his book concerning the intractable, political, and economic emancipation of Maya peoples. Bursting forth from the book’s cover, title page, and table of contents are the complicated, intricate, and beautiful hieroglyphic scripts that comprise the Maya written language and numeral system. Indeed, every page number of this epic text is indicated via its corresponding Maya glyph and symbol so that the reader is forced to directly confront the fact that the Invasion failed. It did not and could not eradicate

Indigenous ontoepistemologies from the “New World.” By engaging in this subversive act of reckoning, Cojtí Cuxil produces knowledge as someone who lives in the time of the colonial wound, without compromising its insurgent lessons. Specifically, Cojtí Cuxil’s scholarship captures how the installation of this wound is always incomplete, the light always shines through the cracks of its expanding and bloody edges, and things do not have to be the way that they are now.

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Notes

Chapter One: Investigating Leisure Travel and the Consolidation of World Power

1. I use “Euro-American” to refer to the current geopolitical configuration of a “world

order” that began with the Spanish invasion of “the societies and cultures which inhabit

what today is called Latin America…culminating, five hundred years later, in a global

power covering the whole planet” (Quijano 2007, 168). This power, “although

occasionally moderated when faced with the revolt of the dominated,” continues to

primarily benefit “Western European dominators and their Euro-North American

descendants” (Quijano 2007, 168). I elaborate upon this argument in the second chapter

in regard to the coloniality of power school.

2. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I contextualize my usage of “world system,”

which departs from Wallerstein’s (1987) formulation. Suffice it to say, I use this term

to reference the particular cartographic intrusions, global connectivities, and modes of

be-ing provoked by ongoing Euro-American imperialism and colonialism, or what

Walter Mignolo (2012, 37) terms “Western geohistorical mapping.” Crucially, this

“mapping” determines one’s ability to traverse the Americas without the threat of

death, incarceration, sexual assault, or other structural violence.

3. Blending the terms “ontology” and “epistemology,” Barad (2007, 9) coined this term

to capture the inexorable, contextual, processual, and “entangled practices of knowing

and being.” In Barad’s (2007, 979) words: “Knowing is a direct material engagement,

a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material

configuring, its ongoing articulation. The entangled practices of knowing and being are

material practices.”

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4. “Ladino,” a sociocorporeal identification unique to Guatemala, “refers to a complex

social construction” that is “not synonymous with a particular phenotype” (Little 2004,

279). In its current configuration, the registers of this identity are transmitted by skin

color (the fairer, the better), Western clothing, and the Spanish language, all of which

are used to adopt and perform whiteness as a geocultural regime and benefit in

Guatemala (Martínez Salazar 2014, 46). This identification harnesses biopower by

distinguishing itself from Maya/Indigenous culture, languages, and sartorial practices.

Certainly, configurations of race, class, gender identity, and sexuality complicate

Ladino and Maya subjectivities. Nonetheless, Guatemala’s oligarchy is primarily

comprised of male-dominated, wealthy, Ladino, Spanish, North American, and

Western European elites. Guatemalan sociologist Egla Martínez Salazar (2014, 36)

calls these elites “the colonizer’s heirs”; Fanon (2004, 22) describes similar

stakeholders in the Caribbean and Algeria as “the nationalist bourgeois.” I discuss these

“Guatemalan” subjectivities and histories in Chapter Two.

5. I ground insurgent and subjugated knowledges within what Mignolo (2012, 17) calls

the “colonial difference,” the generative, fracturing, and “extended moment of conflict

between people whose brain and skin have been formed by different memories,

sensibilities, and belief between 1492 and today.” In other words, by virtue of their

ability to survive, resist, and/or conceptualize Euro-American power as a distinct

cultural system, economic process, and ontoepistemological regime, insurgent and

subjugated knowledges respond to and capture the intimate workings of white

supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism (as technologies and relations of rule).

Throughout this dissertation, I endeavor to advance and unpack this argument.

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6. I use the term “Anglo” throughout because this is how Diné peoples described me

and/or people of my race when I was growing up. This term informs how I understand

or talk about whiteness in the US Southwest. In addition, I understand the Four Corners

as southwestern Colorado, southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, and northwestern

New Mexico. Although born in Farmington, NM, I spent a large part of my childhood

in Kayenta, AZ. Kayenta is a small town located upon the Diné Nation. My family was

part of a small minority of white people living in the area due to transnational resource

extraction. Given my young age, I did not fully comprehend the regimes of rule that

had brought my family to the Diné Nation. Nonetheless, my upbringing imparted to me

a certain awareness—there are many, many, many ways to organize and express

cultural, political, embodied, epistemic, and economic life.

7. I use the term “heteropatriarchy” as advanced by Alexander (2005, 23) in order to

describe the complex system of somatic, economic, and political governance in which

imperial, landed, white, and heterosexual masculinity remains the standard by which

the enforceable norms of “proper” global citizenship are determined. I have added “cis”

to this term in a bid to reference what María Lugones (2007, 201) terms “the

modern/colonial gender system.” She argues that this system hinges upon the

configuration of “gender” as a biopolitical binary, as part and parcel of installing the

“human” as a homicidal/suicidal/ecocidal relation of rule. I return to this discussion in

Chapter Two.

8. NAGPRA is a bill ostensibly meant to enforce the “rights of lineal descendants, Indian

tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations to Native American cultural items, including

human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony”

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(NAGPRA 2018). NAGPRA enraged many stakeholders in the Four Corners—such as

museums, colleges, and archaeological institutions—who were forced to return said

items, objects, and remains to Indigenous peoples throughout the US Southwest.

Although passed in early 1990, NAGPRA was not really enforced in the Four Corners

until this decade’s end (an enforcement continuing to the present day). Suffice it to say,

various court battles and other arbitrations kept this bill in limbo for a long time. To be

clear, in this paragraph, I scratch only the mere surface of these complicated tensions

and conflicts. For a more detailed review, please see: Fine-Dare, Kathleen S. 2002.

Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA.

Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. See also: Lonetree, Amy. 2012. Decolonizing

Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. North

Carolina: University of North Carolina Press.

9. Unless invited and/or contracted by tribal entities, archaeologists have no business in

places like Chaco Canyon, especially if the archaeologist in question is Anglo. By

imposing Western ontoepistemology where it is not wanted, Euro-American colonial

and imperial power is revitalized, including its cognitive, embodied, and historical

regimes. That is, the archaeologist dons the spectral mantle of the crusading,

conquering, and “civilizing” invader.

10. As I discuss in Chapter Three, most research participants immediately claimed a

“straight” (heterosexual) orientation and affinity, typically within the first few minutes

of meeting me. They also emphasized this orientation and affinity during interviews.

Queer sexualities and transgender identifications were not similarly disclosed, except

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in a few instances. These absences and omissions of power haunt and circumscribe my

sample.

11. My use of the term “humble” is intentional and reflects my take on a working-class

ethic that acknowledges and embraces uncertainty when it comes to anything regarding

this world. In my case, this humility results from a class position considered inferior

and disposable by the larger culture, compounding the geopolitical oppression

attendant upon my gender identity, queer desires, and spiritual practices. My humility

is rooted in the constant threat of layoffs, sickness, poverty, and abuse haunting my

childhood, as well as the violence shaping daily life in my family because of the

relentless persistence of these threats. However, as these experiences fostered my

indomitable will to live, one that completely rejects Euro-American supremacy, I bow

my head to different ways of loving, worshipping, relating to, and understanding the

world. By embracing a similar humility, rejecting ontoepistemological superiority as a

political possibility or choice, the academy could perhaps become more relevant to the

needs of the poor. However, I am not holding my breath.

12. Certainly, the “post-modern turn” affected many disciplines across the Euro-American

academy. For example, in archeology, it sparked the development of “post-processual”

methodologies and theory. The archeologist-in-question was to acknowledge that the

“scientific” interpretation, writing, and presentation of “history” was rife with cultural

biases and violences. They were to own that the “scientific” understanding of “history”

was contingent, at best. For more on this, see: Wylie, Alison. 2002. Thinking from

Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

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13. As I have stated elsewhere (KatherineKellyAbraham 2020, 45), I understand insurgents

and insurgent-scholars as those who refuse the sociojuridical seductions of Euro-

American world power, including its comforts and promises of safety. Consequently,

these subjects are rendered disposable or become the concentrated focus of violent

forms of coercion and control (e.g., imprisonment, torture, execution, unemployment,

etc.). That is to say, insurgents put their lives on the line for their politics. In my work,

I do not attempt to make distinctions between “good” or “bad” insurgents, precisely

because of the way imperial and colonial power is recuperated via these

categorizations. I continue to wrestle with these and other ethical dilemmas.

14. Although I may appear to deride cultural anthropology throughout, I was initially

drawn to the discipline because of its willingness to engage in the painful inventory

described here.

15. In the citations listed here and in the following paragraph, I use the original date of

publication. I do so in order to illustrate how insurgent and subjugated knowledges

were tackling so-called “post-modern” concerns well before the canonical, white, and

primarily male scholars who built their careers upon the same. That is, I seek to

highlight the erasure of feminist, Indigenous, Black, Third World, and queer

scholarship during this timeframe. When quoting from these texts, however, I use their

later editions (i.e., books that I am able to access or already own).

16. In the discussion that follows, I do not seek to position insurgent and subjugated

scholars as “exceptionally” and “heroically” exempt from the socioeconomic violences

shaping the production of knowledge (and global life, in general). For example, Fanon

(2008, 139) pathologizes queer desires and sexualities, as evidenced by his infamous

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argument that “homosexuality” is a “European” disease or neurosis, grounded in

capitalism (in particular, sex work). Instead, my goal is to illustrate how these scholars

focalized Euro-American ontoepistemology as a distinct, analytic problem that needed

to be addressed as such, in order to ensure the continuance of planetary “life.”

17. As an aside, in my humble opinion, this quote evidences how Deloria, Jr. (1988) very

much anticipated “studying up” as an anthropological praxis, as well as the

anthropology/sociology/geography of tourism. That is, Deloria, Jr. (1988) predicted the

exact field of inquiry guiding this dissertation.

18. I use this term with an intentionally militant, critical, and political agenda. Colonized

nations and subjugated knowledges continue to thrive, survive, and persist in the “New

World” despite all attempts to eradicate, annihilate, or assimilate these nations and

knowledges. Thus, Indigenous peoples of the Americas were not “conquered” but

rather invaded.

Chapter Two: Leisure Travel, World Power, and Cartographies of Struggle in Guatemala

1. For scholarship that details or theorizes life in Guatemala prior to the Invasion, see

Altman 2017; Restall and Asselbergs 2007; Montejo 1999a; Valle Escalante 2009.

Other sources include Montejo’s (1999b) translation of the K’iche’-Maya sacred text,

Popol Vuh.

2. The dates listed here are for context only. As Nelson (2009, 40) observes:

Most agree that the war started in 1962 with the outbreak of guerrilla struggle. […] Or maybe it started in 1954 with the [CIA-sponsored] overthrow of [president Jacobo] Árbenz and the ensuing slaughter of activists and rollback of basic social and economic reforms […]. Or maybe it started in the late nineteenth century as liberalism attacked the basis of highland indigenous survival in the interests of export plantation

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production. Or maybe it started even earlier […]. The postwar, like most posts, is likewise rather difficult to pin down.

3. I return to this and other “historical catastrophes” in the sections that follow.

4. In an attempt to highlight its political, embodied, and economic logics, scholars also

refer to this conflict as a “counterinsurgency war” (for examples of this framing, see

Green 1999; Montejo 1999a; Nelson 2009; Way 2012), as well as a transnationally

coordinated act of genocide, ecocide, ethnocide, and primitive accumulation (for

examples of these framings, see Carmack 1988; Handy 1984; Montejo 1999a; Martínez

Salazar 2014).

5. As noted by historians, anthropologists, and others (Davis 1988; Green 1999; Handy

1984; Martínez Salazar 2014; Tzul 2016; Way 2012; to name a few), these apparatuses

of terror were developed with financial and technical assistance from the US and Israel.

6. In a strange and haunting spatiotemporal coincidence, this date is also my birthday.

7. As I detail in Chapter Three, Panajachel, a bustling town located along the shores of

Lago Atitlán, was the place I visited most often when on “breaks” from my fieldwork

in Antigua. In so doing, I was following a path established by the oligarchy and its

international partners in order to accumulate and consolidate imperial white capital and

power.

8. The export of coffee and other agricultural goods remained in first and second place,

respectively (Burtner 2004).

9. As mentioned in Chapter One, the oligarchy is primarily composed of the following

members: light-skinned people who claim Spanish and/or European descent; Ladino

elites; and various US, German, and Canadian corporate stakeholders, further linked to

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the oligarchy through marriage, business, or other means (Casaús Arzú 2010; Martínez

Salazar 2014). I return to this discussion in the next section of this chapter.

10. This is not to say that the military always followed oligarchic directives. Occasionally,

the military did turn on the oligarchy, especially when the political and economic

interests of the former were at stake (Handy 1984). Indeed, military dictators ruled

Guatemala during most of the Civil War. Further, as I discuss in the third section of

this chapter, the development of a national tourism sector sparked controversy because

these parties did not agree on the utility of said development. Nonetheless, military

dictators were generally linked to the oligarchy via direct membership, marriage,

business, and/or the formation of strategic alliances. These parties tended to cooperate

in order to maximize the accumulation of transnational capital/power (Martínez Salazar

2014).

11. I use brackets here to indicate the addition of “cishetero” to hooks’ (2000) original

phrase. Of course, this addition still falls short in terms of describing the embodied

hegemonies, complexities, shades of grey, and joyful lines of flight that shape the world

system. Nonetheless, I find this phrase helpful in regard to the issues examined in this

chapter.

12. For an introduction to this school of thought and its extremely prolific canon, please

see the expansive volume Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial

Debate, edited by Mable Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui (2008).

13. I use the term “automagically” to reference the arguments I made in Chapter One

concerning the world system. I argue that this system does not have to exist in its

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current form, given its contrived, artificial, and imposed nature. I see the continued

vitality of this system as an act of ontoepistemological wizardry and seduction.

14. As these critiques bring to light, “the idea of race” is not the only mode or philosophy

of embodiment provoked by coloniality. Architectures of gender, class, nation, and

sexuality likewise inform and adjust coloniality. My focus on “the idea of race” in the

paragraphs that follow is an attempt to outline Quijano’s original arguments and ground

my resulting interventions, which rely upon, and are in conversation with, Indigenous,

feminist, and critical race scholars.

15. Indeed, given this intractable relationship, scholars writing in this school of thought

sometimes use “coloniality/modernity” to reference the enduring organization of world

power and capital. Although I mostly rely upon “coloniality” to describe this

organization, I do sometimes deploy the above-mentioned terminology. In addition, I

utilize “power/capital” and “civilization/modernity” with the same descriptive and

analytic goals in mind.

16. According to Quijano (2007), these “structures” include Catholicism/Christianity. This

religion played a key role in the establishment of “race,” “civilization,” and

“modernity” as schematics for social classification and exploitation in the Americas. In

particular, the early religiosity of the Invasion foregrounded the hegemonic framing of

European civilization/modernity as divine “gifts,” further occluding white supremacy,

heteropatriarchy, and capitalism as genocidal/ecocidal logics of rule. I return to a

discussion of these “gifts” in Chapter Three.

17. Of course, this “reservation” has not been pleasant for most working-class white folx,

as discussed in Chapter One. Nonetheless, the wage-labor relation is a central way that

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the necrotic terms of coloniality/modernity are installed and maintained via the body,

further determining one’s ability to traverse and negotiate the world system.

18. As Quijano (2008, 184) notes, “beginning in the eighteenth century, in Hispanic

America an extensive and important social stratum of mestizos […] began to participate

in the same offices and activities as non-noble Iberians.” Those with fairer skin were

able to rise through the ranks, eventually becoming the nationalist bourgeois (Fanon

2004) and/or part of a transnational ruling class. As I described in the preceding section,

the term “Ladino” captures these embodied nuances of political economy and

hegemony in regard to the “colonizer’s heirs” in Guatemala (Martínez Salazar 2014,

36).

19. Concerns about the existence of “American” cannibals continue to fascinate the

imperial and colonial imagination, further influencing the production of “scientific”

knowledge about Indigenous peoples. For instance, in the cases of both Chaco Canyon

and Tikal, archaeologists regularly and systematically investigate bodily remains for

signs of human teeth marks. That different institutional stakeholders have carried out

these investigations highlights the persistence of the “cannibal” as a fetish and marker

of “Indigenous” alterity. For an example of this morbid fascination in Chaco Canyon,

please see the following article, which continues to guide efforts to “prove” the

presence of “cannibals” in the area: Preston, Douglas. 1998. “Cannibals of the

Canyon.” The New Yorker 11 (30): 76–89. In the case of Tikal, please see the following

example: Harrison, Peter. 2000. The Lords of Tikal. London: Thames and Hudson.

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20. I use “sic” here (and in other similar textual contexts) to acknowledge that terms such

as “men,” “women,” “masculine,” and “feminine” are products of the colonial gender

system. I do not take such terms for granted, or as absolutes, or as Truth.

21. By using “matriarchal,” I do not mean to reify the colonial gender system. I use this

term with an awareness that it has been produced by the colonial gender system and in

a bid to highlight how female-identified bodies remain this system’s special targets. As

has been well documented by the authors cited here, European colonizers ruthlessly

subjugated and slaughtered those Indigenous peoples perceived to be led by “women.”

I use scare quotes to indicate my understanding of this term as a colonial concept and

installation, following Lugones (2007) and Oyěwùmí Oyèrónkẹ (1997). As advanced

by A. Smith (2005), one reason for this slaughter was that these groups provided a

potent, visible, and insurgent alternative to European cisheteropatriarchy, so much so

that select white womxn left burgeoning colonies in the US to join these groups. I return

to this topic in Chapter Three.

22. Specifically, I take up this argument via an analysis of Guatemala’s tourism sector as a

potent socioeconomic site for the adoption and maximization of coloniality/modernity.

I contend that the desire to access or don “the power of Empire”—to use the master’s

tools to dismantle the master’s house, to borrow from Lorde (2007)—is the biggest

analytic and political problem facing insurgent scholars and activists. This desire is

such a looming problem because it reflects “the colonization of the imagination of the

dominated” (Quijano 2007, 169) or the cognitive resurfacing provoked by colonial

recognition. Of course, in order to survive or live within the contemporary world

system, some level of conformity is required. Insurgent political interventions would

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need to occur at all levels of sociohistorical existence—a daunting but necessary task.

Hence, my argument is that contemporary power must be abolished (in its entirety).

Certainly, I recognize the impossibility of this project in regard to the practicalities of

daily life and living. Nonetheless, in the hopes of making this goal more realistic and

attainable, I seek to engage in a critical dialogue about what such an abolitionary project

might look like or entail.

23. This research, which was conducted mostly during the summer of 2014, anticipates

some of the logics currently being used to legitimize the jailing of Central American

migrants in the US, including the separation of migrant children from their families.

24. Certainly, the relationship of European and Euro-American leisure travel to war and

militarization is not unique to Guatemala, as evidenced by the coining of the term

“militourism” by Banaban, I-Kiribati, and African American scholar Teresia Teaiwa

(1999). Teaiwa (1999, 260) coined this term to capture how “militarism and tourism”

are “overdetermining and undermining factors in Pacific Islands cultural and political

economies.” In a similar vein, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzales (2013) and Haunani-Kay

Trask (1999) explore the relationship between imperialism, colonialism, militarization,

and tourism within the context of Hawai'i. Cynthia Enloe’s (1990) Bananas, Beaches,

and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics continues to be utilized by

many scholars interested in these relationships (including myself). These thinkers each

uniquely illustrate how configurations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation are

potent sites for subjectification and resistance in regard to the relationship of “leisure”

to militarization and colonialism.

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25. Of course, European and Euro-American womxn also visited Guatemala during this

time, producing some of the most popular travelogues of this period. Please see:

Agosin, Marjorie and Julie H. Levison. 1999. Magical Sites: Women Travelers in 19th

Century Latin America. New York: White Pine Press. In addition, husband–wife

research teams were very common; women generally took notes, cooked, typed,

interviewed “informants,” and/or engaged in other forms of labor, ultimately enabling

their male counterparts to be successful “scientists.”

26. It is not my intention to elide the production of social science and archaeological

research by Guatemalan nationals, which has its own fraught history, one that in many

ways parallels that in the US precisely because the coloniality of power is a global

ontoepistemology. For a detailed review of this history, please see: Burtner (2004);

Castañeda (1996); Martínez Salazar (2014); Montejo (1999a); Munro (2014); Nelson

(1999); Tzul (2016); Valle Escalante (2009); Velasquez Nimatuj (2018); Way (2012).

I do not review this research here because I am more interested in the “travels” of

scientists from the Global North as part of tracing how these travels relate to the

imperial geopolitics of knowledge production.

27. As I further unpack in Chapter Three, both parties still “yearn” for contact with a

fantastical Other who exists suspended outside of the homicidal/suicidal parameters of

modernity/civilization. Drawing on Tausig (1987), I argue that this spatiotemporal

paradox captures the role of epistemic murk in the production of transnational

knowledge about Guatemala.

28. In Chapter Four, I am directly concerned with these “artifacts” in regard to how the

mystification of trauma shapes the articulation of imperial white power/capital as

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global praxes, terrains, and problems. In this chapter, I draw from an “archive” of

contemporary travel blogs, travelogues, and ethnographic research to advance my

arguments.

29. I use “lost object” in the Freudian (2005) sense in terms of his understanding of how

the interminable longing and sadness provoked by melancholia is sustained. This

abiding yearning bridges both material and psycho-affective realms; it is fueled by a

“lost” something/someone, a traumatic event precipitating this loss, but it is given a

new, powerful, larger, and symbolic “life” via the mind. Thus, this yearning can never

be fully resolved; its object, the object of loss, is something/someone that exists yet

paradoxically does not exist, ensuring that “reality” will always fall short in

comparison. I find this concept to be a wonderful complement to Rosaldo’s (1989)

imperialist nostalgia, which he notes is a melancholic process in its own right.

30. Burtner (2004, 104) observes that, “although the negative impact of the civil war on

the tourism industry is mentioned by several authors […], tourism receives minimal

attention and analysis in secondary sources. Hence, the majority of this data comes

primarily from primary sources.” These sources include Inforpress Centroamericana,

El Gráfico, the Guatemalan News & Information Bureau, and INGUAT (Burtner

2004).

31. As I advance in Chapter Three, Antigua’s specious aura of tranquility, comfort, and

convenience has long marked the city as an “exceptional” bastion of Euro-American

modernity/civilization. Indeed, research participants consistently invoked this “aura”

to question Antigua’s “authenticity” as a fieldwork site and tourism attraction. They

insisted that the “real Guatemala” was located in more rural and impoverished parts of

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the country, where “the Maya” were held to live. As I show in said chapter, these

“parts” of Guatemala are the primary foci of the recalibrated civilizing mission.

32. I use the term “alleged” to reference the various acts of cultural “cross-dressing” that

occur due to the embodied nature of world capital/power, especially in terms of

transmitting the haptics and optics of imperial and colonial geocorpographies. As the

works of Arias (2008), Carey (2008), Little (2000), and Nelson (1999) corroborate,

womxn who otherwise identify as Ladino sometimes don traje to secure employment

and the patronage of international leisure travelers. The latter occurs, in part, because

the “Mujer Maya” is a commodity fetish. Conversely, some womxn who identify as

“Maya” can claim “Ladino” affiliations by wearing Western clothes; indeed, this tactic

saved lives during the Civil War (Carey 2008). To be clear, I am not interested in

proving or disproving the “authenticity” of these identifications. Instead, I wonder what

these abilities reveal about modern “life.” In my mind, by furthering the particular

accumulation of capital in “Guatemala,” the coloniality of power enables these acts.

These capacities evince the arguments I outlined in the previous section concerning the

contextual calibration of capital. As I noted, this calibration reflects, and is determined

by, the unique configurations of race, class, gender, and sexuality, which work to

transmit the boundaries of the nation-state and/or the “New World.”

33. I use the term “women” here to reflect Little’s research focus and topic, which does not

overtly include or mention LGBTQ+ identifications or participants. When I use this

term without an accompanying “x,” it is to signal a more normative or mainstream

identification, which closely aligns with or reflects the colonial gender system. I tend

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to float between these terms and identifications in a constant bid to signal the inherently

unstable and contrived nature of the colonial gender system.

34. Similar to Castañeda and Burtner (2010), boycott strategies are a particular interest of

mine, especially in regard to how these strategies further systemic oppression and

violence. Please see: Freeman, Katherine. 2016. “Neocolonial Biopolitics in Southern

Arizona: Lessons Learned from the SB 1070 Boycott.” Feminist Formations 28 (3):

222–243. Due to the manifestations and workings of power outlined here and in the

above article, this interest incited my immersion in the theory and work of abolition.

35. As I argue in Chapter Three, such warnings attempt to contain and obscure the

geopolitical circumstances that make the tourist body an accessible and vulnerable

target for strikes against imperial capital/power. For example, in the case discussed

here, by blaming “communist insurgents” for the violence shaking colonial strongholds

such as Antigua, the State Department nimbly downplayed the role of the US in

fomenting this exact violence.

36. As indicated by the date of his election, Arzú Yrigoyen participated in the drafting and

signing of the 1996 Peace Accords.

37. By 2014, tourism would be the country’s central and most profitable economic engine,

the ramifications of which I discuss in Chapter Three.

38. Indeed, some scholars (MacCannell 2011, 1–34; Munt 1994; Urry 1991) have dubbed

this type of traveler “the post-modern tourist.” However, I do not use this terminology

because I understand this travel to reflect and express a sociohistorical continuum and

culture first installed by the Invasion. As I have argued thus far, terms such as “post-

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modern” distract from this legacy as an enduring global and social reality. See also

Kaplan (1996) for a similarly grounded critique of “post-modern tourism.”

39. I do not mean to single out Nelson for excoriation or critique. As I show in Chapter

Four, a wide variety of touristic stakeholders engage in these behaviors. Here, I center

my critique on Nelson due to her sweeping conception of “history as catastrophe,”

which is challenged throughout this chapter.

40. As I documented in Chapter One, I am not immune or unsympathetic to these impulses

and timescapes.

Chapter Three: Tourism Security Logics and the Recalibrated Civilizing Mission

1. In Antigua, two main types of guias seek out tourists for employ: certified and

uncertified. Certified guias receive official licensure by INGUAT, after undergoing an

intensive, lengthy, and expensive training process. This process resembles the pursuit

and acquisition of a master’s degree in a US context. Prior to beginning the certification

process, most interested parties already possess a bachelor’s degree in Guatemalan

history and/or a major tourist language (e.g., German, French, or English). The expense

and requirements of this process ensure that most certified guias are middle-class

Ladino men, with a few North American and European exceptions. Uncertified guias

tend to be impoverished Maya men. At the end of this training regimen, certified guias

receive a laminated card from INGUAT. To be worn around the neck during working

hours, this card allows certified guias to move freely about Antigua. As they do not

possess this card, uncertified guias can be removed from public spaces in Antigua. In

the next section, I review the INGUAT certification process and its relationship to the

global coloniality of power.

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2. All documented quotes from research participants are drawn from interview and

participant observation sessions conducted in Antigua during the summer of 2014.

Most of these sessions took place in El Parque Central, at various bars or hotels around

the city, or other similarly popular and populated tourist destinations. If these sessions

occurred in other places, I indicate where in the text. To protect participants, I do not

use their real names. In addition, I have changed any other identifying information as

needed. All translations from Spanish to English are my own.

3. As I explore in the fourth section of this chapter, many Ladino and Maya peoples use

the term “gringo” to describe white people from the Global North, particularly US

nationals. In addition, this term is used somewhat interchangeably to describe North

American anthropologists (Little 2004; Nelson 1999). However, as noted by

Indigenous scholar and US national Victoria Bomberry (2012, 213), regarding her

fieldwork in Bolivia, “I have noted a change in the past four or five years in that

American citizenship trumps indigenous national and ethnic affiliations.” I have also

noticed this change in Antigua, as US immigration policies have increased in their cruel

scope. Thus, as I argued in Chapter Two, “race” as a “biological datum” (Pugliese

2009, 16) is simply not adequate for understanding the function of world power/capital

as embodied or material regimes. Hence, the reason I prefer “imperial and colonial

geocorpographies.”

4. For more information on this “crisis,” please see: Bacon, Christopher et al. 2015. “7

Reasons to Scrap the $1 Billion Aid Package to Central America.” Americas Program,

July 8. www.cipamericas.org/15371. For an example of the detainment practices that I

reference, please see: Kiefer, Michael. 2014. “Immigrant Kids Detained in Warehouse

303

of Humanity.” USA Today, June 18. www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/06/

18/immigrant-children-detention-centers/10798643.

5. For a succinct overview concerning how US immigration policies helped to spark the

“Immigration Crisis,” please see: Quintana, Ana. 2014. “Misguided US policies fuel

Central American Immigration Crisis.” Washington Times, July 7.

www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/7/quintanta-us-policies-fuel-central-

american-immigration. For a detailed analysis of the historical use of this same law to

further racist, classist, and sexist social agendas in the US and around the world, please

see Luibhèid (2002).

6. In Chapter Two, following Lugones (2007) and Martínez Salazar (2014), I argued that

ethno-femicide is a terrible and persistent feature of modern governance, one installed

by the Invasion and maintained by the global coloniality of power. In the third section

of this chapter, I return to a discussion of ethno-femicide in regard to its ongoing elision

as a “New World” reality of rule.

7. As I explained in Chapter One, the nature and composition of my shifting sample

caused me to expand my definition of leisure travel (as both a philosophy and praxis),

eventually leading me to the topic and focus of this dissertation, as well as the body of

scholarship summarized by the aforementioned chapter.

8. US, Canadian, German, and other white nationals from the Global North are also

favored when it comes to these privileges and permissions, and in specific regard to

guia political economy. Elizabeth Bell, who is a US national, self-appointed historian

of Antigua, and certified guia, is an example of the latter. In addition to publishing a

book about the city in 2010 (Antigua Guatemala Its Heritage. Guatemala: Antigua

304

Tours), Bell owns and operates a well-known tourism agency. She can regularly be

seen leading various walking tours of Antigua, a gaggle of tourists in tow. As of my

last fieldwork stint in 2016, she had hired two bodyguards to protect her as she went

about her work in the city.

9. For more information on these projects and publications, please see:

https://avancso.org.gt/and http://cirma.org.gt/glifos/index.php?title=Publicaciones.

10. Of course, there are exceptions to this “rule,” cited throughout this dissertation.

Nonetheless, for reasons I shortly unpack, such scholarship is in the minority.

11. As in other locations colonized by Europeans, the history of Christianity in Guatemala

is a testament to the paradoxically terrible and wonderful capacity of “humans” to either

deeply care for or carelessly slaughter their brethren. The depth of this history is quite

beyond the scope of this dissertation. Suffice it to say, on the heels of the military coup

that put war criminal Efraín Ríos Montt in presidential power (1982–1983)—funded

and supported by Evangelicals in the US and around the world—it became extremely

dangerous to be a “Catholic.” Given the contemporaneous draw and insurgent power

of liberation theology, the choice that one made between being a Catholic or an

Evangelical was also one of life and death. To this day, members of the national ruling

elite tend to be Evangelicals or another brand of Protestant. For more information,

please see: Falla, Ricardo. 1994. Massacres in the Jungle: Ixcán, Guatemala, 1975–

1982. Colorado: Westview Press. See also: Stoll, David. 1988. “Evangelicals,

Guerrillas, and the Army: The Ixil Triangle Under Ríos Montt.” In Harvest of Violence:

The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis, edited by Robert M. Carmack, 90–116.

Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.

305

12. “Castellanos” is a term largely used by Maya peoples to describe Ladino and Spanish

nationals; it references the language, customs, and values of these nationals from the

perspective of the colonized. As I observed throughout my fieldwork, white social

scientists, expats, and humanitarian volunteers from the Global North used this term to

describe the same, especially if they worked with Maya peoples in some way.

Presumably, this usage was to signal a certain solidarity with Maya peoples. However,

I would argue that white people from the Global North also use this term to establish

their relationship to the “real Guatemala” (as an imaginary, geography, bodily

orientation, and research site/commodity).

13. Due to immense public pressure and unprecedented national protest, Pérez Molina was

forced to resign from the Guatemalan Presidency on September 2, 2015. This

resignation was attendant upon the discovery of his prominent role in an international

finance scheme, where importers of goods paid hefty bribes to Guatemala’s ruling elite

in order to receive tariff discounts (Watson 2015). However, long before this event,

Pérez Molina’s presidency troubled many in Guatemala and around the world. Pérez

Molina commanded the “counterinsurgency” units—dispatched by the oligarchy and

its transnational partners—that committed genocidal violence against Ixil-Maya

peoples during the Civil War (Nelson 2009).

14. INGUAT did not separate acts of rape from robbery in terms of this statistic

documentation of violence against tourists. In addition, INGUAT did not indicate the

nationality and gender of those involved. Thus, this count should be considered

necessarily vague and incomplete.

15. As Puar (2004) argues, this sort of determination also plays a central role in “pink-

306

washing”—the cloaking of imperial and colonial violences in Palestine and Iraq in the

name of securing mainstream/cisheteronormative LGBT rights and hegemony.

16. Reading between the lines, the ones forever seeking to humiliate and kill me, this

message taunts, torments, and chides. Silly girl! What made you think that you could

walk around Antigua alone, at night, carrying on with strangers, when you knew what

would happen to you if you tried the same back home? Better get gone, girl, before

someone teaches you the lesson that you clearly still need to learn, one better taught to

you by your own kind.

17. To be clear, in this section I do not rehash or challenge the important arguments made

by other scholars concerning the various ways that Maya womxn resist policing

strategies in Antigua. My goal here is to unravel the hegemonic mores shaping these

strategies in the first place in an effort to chart the global coloniality of power. Thus,

this section documents the cultural rationales used to justify and enforce tourism

security logics, as opposed to actual resistance strategies, which have been well

documented by others (e.g., Castañeda and Burtner 2010; Little 2004; 2002; 2000;

Krystal 2000).

18. Loosely translating to “wrapped-up woman,” envuelta is a derogatory term for Maya

womxn in Guatemala who wear traje (Martínez Salazar 2014).

Chapter Four: The Political Economy of Trauma and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

1. Specifically, I drew from and expanded upon Bruner’s (2005, 8) definition of the

“touristic nonpresent.” He uses this term to describe how most contemporary

ethnographies fail to mention the inevitable and concurrent presence of tourists in the

“field,” thereby romanticizing the latter as a “pure” space for the production of

307

“anthropological” knowledge. Insisting that this timescape further erases how the

“anthropologist” and “tourist” similarly exploit established, imperial, and colonial

regimes of power to travel the world, I added the “social scientist” to the above elision

and romance. In the third section of this chapter, I more fully engage and analyze the

touristic and social scientist nonpresent.

2. In the following paragraphs, I return to Anzaldúa’s particular understanding of how the

Invasion endures as a geopolitical, embodied, and affective cartography via the

installment and enforcement of nation-state borders.

3. In particular, I offer recommendations and suggestions in terms of sustaining insurgent

temporalities and in the hopes of advancing the “impossible”: the abolition of

coloniality.

4. To reiterate, I do not consider my work to be the “exception” to the political economic

“rules” examined herein. As I established in Chapter One, I consider this dissertation

to be an exercise in fearless self-inventory and epistemic humility. I do not delude

myself that this document has any utility or application outside of the academy; I write

this dissertation as a social scientist speaking to other social scientists. Indeed, I fully

situate my work within the anthropology of violence. Thus, my work, too, remains

“much more part of the problem […] than part of the solution” (Santos 2014, 72).

5. Of course, I reviewed a numerous array of documents and texts in order to arrive at the

conclusions presented in this section. The ethnographies I discuss here are drawn from

my extensive review of the academic literature, which I conducted to write this

dissertation. In addition, I analyzed fifteen published travelogues or books that

document the impressions of first-time visitors to Guatemala. These books bridge a

308

timeframe from the late 1800s until the late 1990s, which is around the time when these

texts were replaced with electronic travel blogs. I also reviewed 115 electronic blogs

drawn from three popular travel sites: TravelPod (http://travelpod.com), Tripadvisor

(www.tripadvisor.com/ShowForum-g292002-i1599-o40-Guatemala.html), and Travel

Blog (www.travelblog.org/Central-America-Caribbean). My selection criteria for

published travelogues and electronic travel blogs were that the document in question

concerned a leisure travel excursion to Guatemala and was authored by a tourist from

the Global North. I did not select for gender, age, race, class, or sexuality.

6. Indeed, I heavily cite these works throughout my dissertation because they are

considered canonical and groundbreaking texts in terms of their seminal role in the

investigation and documentation of the Civil War.

7. As far as the analysis presented in this section is concerned, I use the terms “travelogue”

and “travel blog” to indicate that a pedestrian tourist, journalist, or other non-academic

entity has written the narrative in question. However, I only make this distinction so

that I can later break it down, using my analysis to unmask it as a geocultural

contrivance and convenience. Indeed, I consider all of the works analyzed in this

section to be forms of European and Euro-American travel writing, although I

acknowledge that the tone and language of these works differs according to the

professional background and social standing of their authors.

8. As reviewed by Kurt Vonnegut (quoted on the book jacket of Simon 1987), French

photojournalist and consultant “Jean-Marie Simon shows us the hell that is modern

Guatemala, and shames any of us who may have held the lazy opinion that everything

is probably more or less OK there.”

309

9. A regular contributor to Women’s Day, Jean Hersey was the “Martha Stewart” of her

day. Born in 1902, she wrote numerous books about gardening, homemaking, and rural

life in Connecticut. In addition, Hersey authored autobiographical works about her life

struggles, such as A Widow’s Pilgrimage, which was published in 1979 by the no longer

existing Continuum International Publishing Group.

10. Please see Chapter Two for a detailed discussion of this evolving landscape and

context, which further genuflects the perniciously persistent and dynamic “world

history” (Dussel 2000, 470) installed by the Invasion (as I have argued throughout this

dissertation).

11. Peter Canaby is a journalist and senior editor at the New Yorker.

12. San Antonio Aguas Calientes is a town and tourist attraction about twenty minutes

outside of Antigua. Many Maya people, who commute to Antigua to sell goods to

tourists as shopkeepers or mobile vendors, reside in this town. Tourists can also visit it

to view any number of weaving demonstrations and tours.

13. Given these relations, Little’s (2004) book might be more aptly retitled “A White Man

and Anthropologist in the Academic Marketplace.”

14. As reviewed by Nancy M. Haegel (1993, 22), Canby’s documentary “journey brought

him into contact not only with the Maya, but also with many noted scholars who have,

in recent years, made major breakthroughs in our understanding of Columbian Maya

history.” For an in-depth analysis of why and how such research could occur during a

war, see Chapter Two.

15. Along with like-minded supporters and allies, Cojtí Cuxil established the Academia de

Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala (ALMG). ALMG united over twenty-two different

310

Maya sociolinguistic groups under a shared nationalist umbrella, and in a strategic bid

to secure political protection and gains for these groups during (and after) the Civil

War. One result of this group’s efforts is that K’iche, Kaqchikel, and other dialects are

currently taught in Guatemala’s public schools. For a detailed review of these issues,

see Cojtí Cuxil (1994); Maxwell (2009); Nelson (1999).

16. For a discussion concerning the role of other types of anti-tourists in the processes I

examine here—for example, missionaries and humanitarian volunteers—please see

Chapter Three.

17. See Amar (2013) or the aforementioned Thomas, O’Neill, and Offitt (2011) for an

introduction to the literature in question. To be clear, I am not interested in challenging

where said research is focused. Indeed, as I argued in Chapter Three, I understand

modern security initiatives as extending the European civilizing mission as an

established imperialist “romance” or ruse. Instead, I hope to show how Justin carefully

approached this study in a bid to secure an academic job, a strategy that depended upon

the fetishization of political violence, but in a “new” place (i.e., the US).

18. To access this commercial, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpgj-

UqeIYU.

19. This information about Newlink was gleaned from the following websites: https://

www.newlink-group.com and https://www.linkedin.com/company/newlinkglobal.

20. For more information about the CCT, please visit the following website:

https://www.visitcentroamerica.com. At the time of writing (2020), there is a marked

lack of information concerning the present-day operations of this branch of the CCT.

311

Therefore, I can only gesture toward the possible flows, interactions, connectivities,

and/or power blocs reflected by the latter.

21. To the best of my knowledge, notable exceptions are as follows: the DR, Panama, Perú,

Argentina, Chile, Italy, Australia, and the Netherlands. However, given that “Mundo

Maya” was funded by venture capitalists from all over the world, it is possible that

stakeholders from these and any number of other countries were involved in the “post-

war” mapping and capitalization of Central America.

22. For Newlink’s management team, please visit: https://www.newlink-group.com/en/

profiles. For the same information concerning the CA-4, please visit: https://es.travel

2latam.com/nota/50249-caribe-belice-recibe-la-presidencia-del-consejo-centroameri

cano-de-turismo.html. For information about those who head the CCT, please visit:

https://sitca.info/que-es-el-cct.

23. This quote is gleaned from the following website: https://www.newlink-

group.com/en/expertise/view/tourism/156.

24. Please see the above website for examples of Newlink’s various campaigns, which

address these exact issues.

25. “Chicken bus” is the colloquial term for the colorful, decorated, and souped-up buses

transporting goods and working-class people throughout various countries in Central

America.

26. Please see the following website for an example of these travel cautions:

https://www.worldnomads.com/explore/central-america/guatemala/chicken-buses-and

-guatemala-transport.

312

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