Grassroots documentation and archiving practices in Guatemala

About this episode

The episode explores grassroots documentation and archiving practices in Guatemala, highlighting the transformative efforts of community actors.

In this new episode of our mini-series on documentation and archiving, co-hosts Kim Baudewijns and Gretel Mejía Bonifazi explore how community actors in Guatemala are reimagining archiving and documentation practices today. Guatemala is known for its longstanding civil society efforts in truth-seeking,accountability, reparations, and memory. Yet, as our guests show, these practices are not static: they transform as new generations continue mobilizing and draw on documentation and archives in new ways. We speak with Paulo Estrada , president of the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared (FAMDEGUA), and Miriam de Paz , member of the Historical Memory Consortium of the Ixil region and long-time advocate working with Ixil survivors and affected communities. Both guests emphasize that documentation and archives do more than preserve facts, they sustain identity, culture, andintergenerational knowledge. Miriam highlights how community initiatives link archiving with cultural survival: “These practices, in one way or another, continue in the spaces of the victims’ organizations that remain committed to rescuing cultural heritage and ancestral knowledge, while also…

People in this episode

Host: Kim Baudewijns

Guests: Paulo Estrada, Miriam de Paz

Topics covered

• documentation
• archiving
• Guatemala
• civil society
• truth-seeking
• cultural heritage

Keywords

• identity
• memory
• intergenerational knowledge
• cultural survival

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Guatemala, Ixil, the Ixil Region, Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, Argentina

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