Analyzes the forced migration of Maya women from highland Guatemala and their turn toward language and Indigenous clothing in their homeland
 
Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala analyzes how Indigenous women’s migration contributes to women’s empowerment in their home communities in Guatemala. This decolonial ethnographic analysis of Kaqchikel Maya women’s linguistic and cultural activism demonstrates that marginalized people can and do experience empowerment and hope for the future of their communities, even while living under oppressive neoliberal regimes. Joyce N. Bennett contests dominant frameworks of affect theory holding that marginalized peoples never truly experience unrestricted hope or empowerment, and she contributes new understandings of the intimate connections between Indigenous women, migration, and language and clothing revitalization.
 
Based on more than twenty months of fieldwork, the study begins with an ethnographic investigation of how economic policies force Indigenous women into migration for wage work. To survive, many, like the three young women profiled in this ethnography, are forced to leave their schooling, families, and highland homes to work in cities or other countries. They might work, for example, as vendors, selling crafts to tourists, or as housekeepers or waitresses. Their work exposes them to structural violence, including anti-Indigenous slurs, sexual harassment and violence, and robbery.
 
Furthermore, the women are pressured to wear Western clothing and to speak Spanish, which endangers Indigenous culture and language in Guatemala. Yet the Indigenous migrant women profiled do not abandon their Indigenous clothing and language, in this case Kaqchikel Maya. Instead, they find inspiration and pride in revitalizing Kaqchikel traditions in their hometowns post-migration. As women attempt to revitalize Kaqchikel Maya language and clothing, they seek to earn the title of “good” women in their home communities.
 
Unpacking women’s daily activisms reveals that women attempt to retain their language and clothing and also collectively seek to make space for Indigenous people in the modern world. Bennett reveals that women find their attempts at revitalization to be personally empowering, even when their communities do not support them.
 

Kemtzij: Weaving Reciprocal Indigenous Ontologies in Kaqchikel Maya Arts focuses on the artistic contributions of contemporary Kaqchikel Mayas in Guatemala and their diasporas. Rather than representing Kaqchikel Mayas as exclusively existing in their pre-Hispanic past, the contributors to this edited volume—Kaqchikel and non-Kaqchikel scholars—demonstrate the distinct interdisciplinary ways that contemporary Kaqchikels engage with present-day Maya aesthetics and artistic initiatives in Guatemala and abroad. With a focus on the key concepts of reciprocity and duality, the chapters in this book consider the myriad ways in which Kaqchikel Mayas express their identities, through poetry, textiles, community street art, and digital photo collages. Kemtzij is unique in being published bilingually in Kaqchikel and English, making it one of few texts to consider Kaqchikel lives and artistic production—and the ontological implications of that work—in and through the Kaqchikel language.