Catholic Indigenous Settlements in the Ixcan Jungle in Guatemala, 1966–75

On the morning of April 5, 1966 fourteen Indigenous peasants from the department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, with the support of Father Edward Doheny (a priest from the Maryknoll mission) and the Guatemalan topographer Carlos García walked from the community of Barillas, Huehuetenango for two days with the goal of colonizing new territories for landless people. This new settlement eventually became the municipality of the Ixcan and, in the 1970s, redefined new borders between the department of Huehuetenango and Quiche; while the story of this region has been explored in relation to the state-sponsored massacres that happened in these new communities, new studies have revealed that the case of the colonization of the Ixcan is part of the effort of Indigenous communities of Guatemala to continue living and surviving according to their ways of knowing. In this presentation, I discuss how the colonization of unoccupied territories and living in a borderland created by Indigenous people, opened up space for the configuration of new identities that would eventually become an important and immediate precedent of the Mayan movement in Guatemala in the 1980s.