Lilianna Quiroa-Crowell

This project examines the ‘forgotten place’ of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala to understand the relationship between urban Indigenous erasure, cartographic representations, and racialized national imaginaries. This banana corporate enclave city was once central to notions of modernity in Guatemala but is now narrated as a dangerous, male, and non-Indigenous peripheral space. I explore the sociopolitical impact of state/corporate cartographic representations and ask how urban Q’eqchi’ women unsettle the racial-gendered hierarchies built into national spatializations through their alternative geographies of urban Maya belonging and justice. This 12-month project utilizes archival methods to examine the transformation of cartographic representations of Puerto Barrios and the racial hierarchies linked to these shifting geographies that continue to shape the present. I utilize ethnographic and participatory counter-mapping methods to explore how urban Q’eqchi’ women question the limits of existing geographies of Puerto Barrios through their alternative urban spatial epistemologies and practices. I ask: How have overlapping interest groups imagined and constructed the spatial geography of (in)visibility of the Puerto Barrios across time? How is geographic erasure experienced, grappled with and made livable by Caribbean Q’eqchi’ women? What role does this spatially discontinuous city play in the construction of the racialized alterity in Guatemala and contemporary Indigenous resistance?