Lilianna Quiroa-Crowell

LILIANNA QUIROA-CROWELL, then a graduate student at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “Forgotten Invisibility: Mapping the Erasure and Resistance of Urban Q’eqchi’ Women in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala,” supervised by Dr. Marc Edelman. Funding supported a 12-month ethnographic fieldwork in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala and archival research. The project examines this “forgotten” urban pace to understand the relationship between urban Indigenous erasure, cartographic representations, and racialized national imaginaries in Guatemala. Phase I involved analyzing early 20th century U.S. maps and consular records of Puerto Barrios, which provided data on the erasure of Indigenous presence and influence of the United Fruit Company throughout the city’s history. Phase II utilized ethnographic methods to document the lived experiences of Puerto Barrios residents experiencing the daily violence of organized abandonment linked to past/present corporate agro-extraction. It also provided data on the daily forms of erasure faced by Q’eqchi’ women and how these marginalized communities resist and reinterpret their urban environment despite their invisible status within the city. Phase II also included a participatory counter-mapping project with local women, during which Q’eqchi’ women created maps and took pictures reflecting their perspective on their neighborhoods, progress, and modernity. This culminated in a public exhibition of maps/photos selected by the women, in which they challenged dominant cartographic and social exclusions by highlighting their alternative spatial geographies of Puerto Barrios.