Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora negotiate different temporalities of memory. By reflecting on the production of a theatre play I will explore how postmemorial complexities found their expression and how these informed the young people’s aspirations for the future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora negotiate different temporalities of memory. By reflecting on the production of a theatre play I will explore how postmemorial complexities found their expression through theatre and how these informed the young people’s aspirations for the future. The Guatemalan diaspora in Chiapas is situated in between two large migratory movements (civil-war refugees from the 1980s and contemporary US-bound migrants). This paper explores young people’s performative engagement with their town’s past and the ways in which their remembrances and future-aspirations are interlinked. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and now with young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in Southern Mexico and subsequently in the United States. My engagement with the young research participants was informed by ideas from ethnographic fieldwork as well as principles and practices from participatory and creative community & youth work. Through creative engagement with theatre and photography my interlocutors explored the refugee pasts of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation and contrasted them with their own aspirations and imaginations of migrating to the United States. Conceptually this paper explores how ‘imagining the future is just another form of memory’ and the role that performative and embodied registers play within this process. Storytelling and performance function as strategies which highlight young people’s active role in the social making of their hometown, the formation of diasporic identities and the creation of hopeful futures.