Abstract
Gabriela Merida, a doctoral student at the University of Albany and a child of Guatemalan Maya refugees, interviews her grandmother and father about their lives in Guatemala and their subsequent experiences as migrants in the United States. Through life history interviews with each of them, Merida examines how foreign intervention shaped the economic and political realities that compelled them to migrate. She employs Giovanni Batz’s (2024) concept of the four invasions as an analytic frame to demonstrate how the historical arc of colonization, the plantation economy, the Guatemalan Civil War, and capitalism produce compounding forms of structural and quotidian violence that disproportionately harm Indigenous Mayas, campesinos, and working-class people. The life histories of her grandmother and father demonstrate how the legacies of the four invasions are linked, creating the conditions that drive Indigenous Maya and peasants to migrate to the United States. “Yet,” concludes Merida, “just as my grandmother and father resisted through small, everyday acts of survival, I know that my responsibility now lies in resisting for my community.”
Publication Date
8-5-2026
Keywords
Maya migration, Guatemalan history, family interviews, autoethnography
DOI
10.62915/2688-9188.1214
