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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in southern Mexico negotiate belonging through inherited refugee histories while aspiring to mobile futures beyond rural life. It explores tensions between collective memory, fragmented present-day community relations, and mobility.

Paper long abstract

This paper discusses how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in Southern Mexico negotiate belonging against the backdrop of inherited stories from their families’ refugee pasts while aspiring to futures predicated on the promises of mobility. La Gloria is a town in the rural borderlands of Mexico’s South, founded by Akateko-speaking refugees from Guatemala in the 1980s. My interlocutors are part of successive generations that were born and raised in the 2000’s. Their relationship to the Guatemalan civil war and the re-building of Akateko communities in Chiapas takes place through inherited stories and collective memory. These young people mobilise the unity of their parents’ and grandparents’ narratives from the past when confronting a present characterised by economic, religious, political and generational divisions. They experience contemporary community relations as fragmented and appeal to a sense of ethno-linguistic (Akateko) and local unity of a time that predates their own birth. At the same time, young people aspire to futures that lay elsewhere and leave rural life behind in exchange for the cosmopolitan promises of modernity in El Norte. The paper will explore these productive tensions of (un)belonging and im/mobility in relation to how rural and indigenous identities are negotiated by young people in these volatile settings. The paper will further put these in conversation with wider changes and movements that have characterised the region in recent years; namely the Central American migrant caravans, the escalating cartel violence in the border region and the intensification of the US immigration regime.