In this text by Gladys Tzul Tzul, we interrogate how Mesoamerican colonial borders are crossing Indigenous peoples, in particular the many Mayan communities who live on both sides of the Guatemalan-Mexican border, but also on the northern side of the United States militarized border wall. Through her words, we can see how Chuj, Akateko, Q’anjobal, and many other Indigenous peoples have learned to maintain kinship and some shared aspects of their identities despite the violence of these colonial lines.
I spent my childhood listening to the stories about the commercial circuits in Gracias a Dios, a small town in the municipality of Nentón, Huehuetenango, that marks the border between Mexico and Guatemala – what in academia and the media is known as the southern border.
When my father was a child, he was a K’iche’ merchant. He used to tell me that they had to walk for fourteen days from my community in Totonicapán to the border region. He said that multiple Indigenous peoples, including the Akateko, the Q’anjobal and Chuj, lived on both the Guatemalan and Mexican sides.
The Indigenous peoples aforementioned are those who, since pre-hispanic times, inhabit that territory where the dividing line between two countries separated families, crops, and waters in Nentón, La Trinitaria, San Miguel Aguacatán, San Mateo Ixtatán, among other territories on both sides of the southern border.
In the 1960s, my father, my uncles, and my grandfather traveled on foot and were accompanied by mules loaded with grains, textiles, batteries, and various items that they would sell in Indigenous communities and small towns.
My paternal family belonged to those networks of traveling merchants of the highlands, perhaps those Indigenous merchants referred to by Carlos Navarrete (1984) in Los Arrieros del Agua (The Water Carriers), those who, according to the author, “greeted the old natural men who came to grant license. Then they would go around the plaza offering, treating people nicely and half conversing with them.”
As a child, I thought that the border between Chiapas and Guatemala was a place with a high commercial flow and that it was crossed by Indigenous peoples from both sides. My father’s stories and those of the Quetzaltecan novelist portrayed and nourished these images.