Agustina Ramos Mejia

What does it mean to lose one´s world? What categories capture the experiences of Maya women during the counterinsurgency war in Guatemala? How do they make sense of the violence and the world they inhabit? My study explores these questions through the narrations of women’s lived experiences of violence, survival, and postwar rebuilding. It´s grounded on long-term committed, in-depth research and collaboration with mayan women in the Ixil territory that survived genocide by organizing and building life in the Communities of Population in Resistance in the highlands of Guatemala. My findings challenge dominant war narratives by analyzing memory as an “experiential world” where gender and ethnicity intersect with the “textures of the ordinary”. Unlike prior studies that homogenize Maya “victimhood” this work reveals how their lived worlds contain paradoxes and contradictions that fracture rigid identity constructions. During the Hunt Fellowship I will write a book entitled “Lived Experiences, Lives Recounted: Maya Women’s Memories from the CPR-Sierra”.