Preserving Maya memory and history across borders

When Floridalma Boj Lopez was preparing to graduate from UC Santa Cruz in 2008, she wanted to use the commencement ceremony to honor her elders and her own journey to self-understanding as a young Maya K'iche woman from Guatemala living in the United States.

Months earlier, during her first visit to her hometown since immigrating to Los Angeles at age 2, she found out her uncle was a weaver. Excited to meet him and to discover new aspects of her cultural heritage, she asked if he would weave her first po't, a brightly colored blouse, often referred to as a huipil, that is embellished with designs that reflect Maya cosmology, spirituality and geography.

To her amazement, her request activated an entire network of family members and extended relatives that spent months weaving, transporting and eventually demonstrating how to properly wear the garment on graduation day. Wearing her po't on commencement day was empowering and celebratory, but also a deeply emotional moment for her family, triggering memories of loss, grief and dispossession.

That experience marked a turning point for Boj Lopez, now an assistant professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. It was then that she began to more fully appreciate the complex circuits of the Maya diaspora and the way cultural objects carry memory and meaning as they travel across settler borders.

Drawing from her scholarly research and the "echo of her own lived experiences," her new book, "Indigenous Archives: The Maya Diaspora and Mobile Cultural Production," from Duke University Press, documents how Maya migrants - especially second-generation youth in Los Angeles - craft and circulate cultural narratives through photography, traditional clothing and children's literature to preserve memory, history and their experiences across borders.

Boj Lopez spoke about her book's findings and how she hopes the publication will inspire other Mayas to create their cultural spaces and share their own story.

Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.

First off, tell me a bit about yourself.

I was born in Guatemala City, but my family is originally from Xelajuj No'j, or Xela (pronounced "Shay-la"), a major urban city officially named Quetzaltenango in the western highlands of Guatemala. It's about four hours away from the capital city, and it's a major seat of political power, culture, and also known for its strong emphasis on education and its universities.

I'm also the daughter of a deportee, somebody who grew up in South Central and now lives in East L.A. Those identities feel vulnerable sometimes, because they're very personal. But I think it's important for people to know that it's possible for someone from my community to become a writer. Writing is something that my people have practiced for centuries; before the colonizers came, my people wrote books. So I'm not the first or the only.

Tell me about your scholarly research at UCLA.

My research focuses on the experiences of Guatemala and Maya people, especially migrants and second-generation Mayas, born and raised in L.A. I want to understand why, despite the violence they face, both in Guatemala and through their migration to the United States, they continue to uphold their Indigenous community and their Indigenous cultural practices and epistemologies. I want to understand what draws these young people back to their culture.

Tell me about the concept that your new book introduces, "mobile archives of Indigeneity."

I often do a comparison; I tell students that I think about the stuff that's behind glass cases when you visit the special collections at libraries or museums - the institutional or mainstream archives. Those archives, a lot of times, are dependent on the theft of items from Indigenous people, historically and in the contemporary period, so they're difficult to access and to experience.

Then I think about how even though Indigenous people don't always have access to "mainstream" archives, it doesn't mean we don't have history, and it doesn't mean we don't have memory. Our families have a wide array of techniques and items that they use to hold histories and transfer those histories to the next generation. That's what "mobile archives of Indigeneity" are - they're the items, the materials we have or that we create when necessary to sustain our memory and history.

Can you talk about the importance of community when it comes to Indigenous cultural preservation?

One of the points that I drive forward in the book is that our archives are not individual archives. They require a much larger network of either kin, community or even extended families, and the way that for us, to even have cultural items, required the effort of more than one person.

So our archives are communally produced, and they rely on ancestral knowledge. For example, we are taught about the value and significance of weaving, which is ancestral, through our extended families.

What are other examples of "mobile archives" that your book explores?

I also wanted to look at the creation of materials when we migrate; those are new experiences that a lot of people don't talk about.

One of the chapters of my book focuses on La Comunidad Ixim, a young adult group of Maya, Xinca and Guatemalan people raised in Los Angeles, of which I am a member. We wanted to create something to reflect some of the experiences of migration and diaspora we all had in common. So, collectively, we wrote a children's coloring book and a couple of members illustrated it, and then we sent it to a print shop and got it printed.

This was a community-driven, do-it-yourself project which resulted in "Las aventuras de Gaby," which centers on Gaby, a young, gender-neutral child who experiences memories in the forms of dreams. I would argue that the use of multiple dreams as part of the narrative and visual structure of the coloring book reflects the multiplicity of experiences of growing up as part of a diaspora.

What do you hope is the biggest takeaway for readers of your book?

I think that it's really important for the audience to recognize that we are here.

Because there are so many narratives that exist about Maya people, especially in Guatemala, focused on the ancient Maya civilization - narratives that say we disappeared, that we don't exist and that our ancestors are not really connected to Maya people today.

I want this book to serve as an intervention against that and to remind people that we're still here, and we're critical cultural producers.

Who was the audience you envisioned reading this book?

For me, it was always young Maya students at the universities who will hopefully get assigned the book. I want them to see that they are also capable of creating spaces where their community and their culture is centered. And I hope that a lot more Maya people will write their own stories.

What surprised you the most about your book project as you consider it in retrospect?

What surprised me the most was how central joy is to our everyday experiences in community. So much of what I had read in the academy had been so focused on the war and the genocide that happened in Guatemala - it's a brutal history of violence.

Yet, despite that, when we gather, there's so many jokes and storytelling, and there's a depth to our memory that is powerful. I have always said that I wanted my book to center on connection and building community.

And while I must talk about the violence to contextualize things historically, hopefully readers will understand this is part of what makes our desire to push back against these structures of erasure so powerful. We deeply and intimately know the violence of the state, and regardless of that, despite all of that, alongside all of that, there's also a lot of joy and care that happens too.