Yetu – Nanik – Satajtoj: Young People and their engagement with Past, Present and Future in the Guatemalan diaspora.
In this talk, I will give an overview of ongoing fieldwork that I started in 2017 in a town called ‘La Gloria’, located in Southern Mexico. This town was founded by Guatemalan refugees in the 1980’s and I was particularly interested in the engagement of the younger generations (who were born in Mexico) with the town’s processes of collective remembrance. The talk will highlight the role played by young people in the negotiation and performance of collective memories and I will particularly highlight a number of participatory projects I collaborated on with a local youth group (namely a theatre play and a photography exhibition). I will also elaborate on a number of follow-up visits I carried out in the United States where many of my research participants currently live, which triggered conversations around the anticipatory features of memory and how remembrance can shape imaginations of the future.
I am a social Anthropologist interested in youth-work, Central America, memory and migration. My PhD research is concerned with young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in Southern Mexico and looks at their narrative agency in retrospective and anticipatory terms. I use creative and participatory youth work and theatre as ethnographic methods.