EXCERPT FROM MAYA IN EXILE: GUATEMALANS IN FLORIDA (1990, by Allan F. Burns)

In the early 1980s Guatemala was engaged in a bloody civil war between rural, leftist guerrillas and the right-wing military forces of the government. The government's "scorched-earth policy of rural destruction" forced over 600,000 rural Maya Indians into exile in Mexico and the United States. Though at least one-third of these refugees is estimated to be living in the United States, few have been granted political asylum. The Mayans' immigrant experience reflects many of the difficulties faced by refugees fleeing late-twentieth-century conflicts.

Many of the Mayan refugees settled in the rural, agricultural area of southeast Florida, which is among America's most multicultural states. By examining how new Mayan immigrants found work and housing, cultural anthropologist Allan F. Burns studied the ways that the Mayan people adapted to their new environment. In his book, Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida, from which this excerpt is taken, Burns says that Mayans in Florida endeavor to retain their language and other cultural expressions while integrating themselves into American life.

Leah R.Shafer,
Cornell University

See also Florida ; Guatemala, Relations with ; Immigration ; Political Exiles to the United States ; Refugees .

Escape and Arrival

The number of Maya people who have to come to the United States as refugees is difficult to assess. Since 1981 the number of Guatemalan refugees inside and outside Guatemala has been estimated as being as high as 600,000, with up to 200,000 in the United States (Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo 1989:212). Of these, only a very few have been given political asylum. Between 1983 and 1986, when the first wave of close to 100,000 Guatemalans fled to the United States, only 14 petitions for political asylum were granted while 1,461 were denied (United States President's Advisory Committee for Refugees 1986:9). The numbers of people applying for either temporary or permanent worker status, those receiving legal papers through one of the provisions of the Immigration and Reform Control Act of 1986, and those here illegally have not been assessed.

Nor are there accurate figures for the number of Mayas in Florida. According to one newspaper account in late 1988, there were probably between fifteen and twenty thousand Maya in the state at that time (Palm Beach Post, Dec. 12, 1988). Of this number, probably close to five thousand live in Indiantown during the harvest season. Other communities with significant Maya populations include West Palm Beach, Homestead, Boynton Beach, Immokalee, and Okeechobee. These communities each have between five hundred and several thousand Maya immigrants. Small groups composed of individuals and families are found in most other agricultural communities in the state. But Indiantown is the historic, cultural, and numeric center of the Maya in the state. Indiantown and Los Angeles are considered the two major centers of Maya immigration in the United States.

As we saw in Chapter One, the violence in Guatemala in the 1980s was overwhelming for many Maya groups. Hundreds of villages were destroyed, lands were appropriated, and people were tortured and murdered with a ferocity that traumatized much of the indigenous population. The Maya of northwestern Guatemala were caught between the military forces of the government and the guerilla movement. The guerilla movement sought food, recruits, and ideological legitimacy from the Maya. The military sought to destroy the subsistence base of the guerrilla movement by a scorched-earth policy of rural destruction.

Not all Maya were caught by the military violence, nor were all communities in Guatemala affected. Some groups were able simply to stay isolated and outside of the zones of conflict. Others sided with the government in order to save their villages. Still others stood up to both the government forces and the guerrillas and were left alone. But many were not so fortunate. The area of the Cuchumatan Mountains was especially susceptible to both guerilla and military campaigns through the 1980s. This chapter focuses on the stories of some of the people from this region who have now come to the United States.

The Maya who fled this modern devastation of their culture their homes, and their families did not know where they were going or what they would find. Once in Mexico they set up temporary camps, which were soon raided by the Guatemalan military (Carmack 1988). Forty-two thousand of them were given refugee status by the Mexican government and put in camps near the Guatemalan border. When the Guatemalan army made several attacks on the camps in 1982 and 1983, several thousand were taken to isolated lands in the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo, Mexico.

One community leader, Joaquim Can, recounted the forced journey between the camps in Chiapas and Campeche:

allan burns: What was it like to travel from the camps in Chiapas to Campeche?

joaquim can: They brought us in big school buses from Chiapas. It took several weeks to bring us all here. I remember that at night they would put us in big warehouses and we had to all sleep on the floor next to each other. It was crowded and many people died, especially children and those who had infections. There was no sanitation and no way to care for those of us who were sick. Many people died.

In Campeche, the refugees constructed stick shacks with corrugated cardboard roofs. In 1989, when I interviewed residents of the camps, the same cardboard was there, only now the rains and storms had opened many houses to the elements. Despite the pathetic conditions, however, people preferred to live here than to live near the border or return to Guatemala.

Those who could fled farther north, through Mexico and into the United States. They crossed deserts at night, where they saw the bodies of people who had gotten lost in the wilderness of the border, and eventually they arrived in Phoenix and other cities. Once in the United States many applied for political asylum, while the majority entered the illegal alien world.

Receiving political asylum has been an important hope for many of the Maya. During the early years of the Maya immigration to the United States and especially to Florida, American Friends Service Committee and Florida Rural Legal Services worked to secure documentation for political asylum cases. As more and more Maya arrived in the United States, however, asylum hearings turned hopeless; only a small handful of applicants achieved legal status through these means. Application for political asylum was still a viable strategy in the short term, however, since it enabled those Maya who applied for the status to receive temporary work permits. This temporary status allowed people to work legally and have access to hospitals and other facilities.

One of the problems with applying for political asylum status for the Maya was the fear that had been engendered in Guatemala and in the United States concerning government institutions. Refugees feared that providing their names or any information about their families to a lawyer or an immigration judge would lead to their immediate deportation to Guatemala. For this reason, individuals were loath to step into the limelight of a court hearing, especially when it became well known that asylum application hearings seemed always to lead to denial.

The case of one woman, Maria Gonzalez, is illustrative of the summary nature of the hearings. Paralegals wrote up their experience with the case in a letter to the public after her immigration hearing:

From the first defendant, Juan Francisco, the judge heard of the brutal massacre of eleven men, including his father and two brothers, in his village of Ixcanac. Juan was away working on a coffee plantation during the massacre and received a warning from his mother never to return. Another defendant, Carlos Juan, spoke of the killings in the town of San Rafael by guerrillas of the people who did not support their movement. Maria Ana, the last defendant to be heard described in detail how she witnessed the army massacre of El Mul in which eleven men were killed, and on the stand Maria described to the court how many soldiers stormed into her home and brutally beat and hacked her father and two brothers to death with machetes. The soldiers also beat women and children, stole villagers' animals and possessions, and burned homes to the ground.

The contention of the authorities all along has been that the Kanjobal people have come here for economic reasons rather than fleeing political violence. Another position of the government is that the refugees should have gone to UN-sponsored refugee camps in Mexico rather than continue on to the United States. Judge Foster told the defense attorneys that it was not enough that one's family had been killed for one to prove persecution and qualify for asylum.

In many ways the trials showed the cultural conflicts between a Maya people …and the court. An example was Maria. Confident in the telling of the brutality she experienced, she nonetheless is not even sure of the months of the year, is unschooled in numbers and mathematics, and during her long flight she was often sick and unable to document how long she remained in each place. So afraid was she by what she had witnessed that she assumed a false name in Guatemala to protect herself, and continued using it when caught by the immigration authorities and put in detention in the United States. (Camposeco, Silvestre, and Davey 1986)

It is difficult to convince the U.S. immigration authorities of the reality of the violence and fear that are at the heart of the Maya immigration to the United States, and attitudes about work and being a productive member of society contribute to misunderstanding as well. Maya people take great pride in their dedication and commitment to work. Their abilities to work well in diverse places such as the mountains of Guatemala, coastal coffee plantations, and now the migrant streams of the United States are a source of pride. To work hard and long is a value assumed to be appreciated in any country. When Maya women or men are asked why they are here in the United States, it is much more common for them to say that they came to work than to say that they came to escape repression. The violence, the betrayal of families and communities by neighbors, and the brutality of the Guatemalan government during the 1980s are issues that are simultaneously overwhelming and difficult to express. It is much easier to tell someone that you came to the United States because you are a good worker, in the hope that this virtue will be better received than will a sad story of your homeland. A newspaper article titled "Strangers in a Strange Land" (Palm Beach Post, Aug. 19, 1990) quoted a Maya who was learning English. The first phrase he proudly spoke was, "I need a good work."

The irony of this is that identifying oneself as a good worker or in immigration terms, an "economic refugee," is the one sure way not to have a chance at gaining legal status through political asylum. Economic refugees are popularly seen as workers who take jobs from U.S. citizens, even though this is not so and as unskilled laborers, even though many of the Maya once held positions as shopkeepers, cooperative officials, and school teachers. Economic refugees are seen as a drain on the U.S. economy because of the remittances they send back home. As George Waldroup, the assistant district director of the INS in Miami, said in a newspaper interview, "Most of these claims are based on economic need, but there is no such thing as economic asylum" (Palm Beach Post, Aug. 22, 1990).

A final problem with political asylum as a strategy for achieving legal status in the United States is the time that it takes for Maya people to travel from Guatemala to the United States. The United States is not a country of "first asylum" for most of the Maya. A very few have managed to fly directly to the United States, but the vast majority who come by land often spend months or even years moving surreptitiously through Mexico. Sometimes individuals spend a year or more in Mexico earning enough money to move slowly toward the U.S. border. Once here, they continue with the same strategies of being unobtrusive migrant workers.

Jose Xunche, a recent arrival to Florida, had spent several years in Mexico, working in the oil fields of Tabasco and in a restaurant in Mexico City, before coming to the United States:

allan burns: When was the last time you were in Guatemala?

jose xunche: I left on January 10, 1982, and went to Mexico for two years. I heard that the military was going to come into our hamlet. I came back in 1984. I lived near Rio Azul and every day the army would come there with a truck of guerrilla captives. They would stand at the bridge, cut them up with machetes, and throw them into the river. Half of them weren't dead but they just threw them in with the dead ones. I couldn't stay, so I left and made my way up here.

Rodrigo Antonio, another immigrant, talked with Julian Arturo, a University of Florida anthropology student from Colombia, about his journey from Guatemala through Mexico:

Well, it was for the war. There in Guatemala. In my town, I am from San Miguel. But I am from Guatemala. Well, then, when there was war there it was hard for us to leave. Also we didn't have any money. Then finally I left there, fleeing. I left without hardly saying goodbye to my family because of the fear I had of the army, the ones that were killing people. It was of the government, as we say. The guerilla was also active, killing people once in a while. But it was the army that I feared more; I feared that they would come and kill me. For example, if you went out to work there and the army came upon you, it was really easy for them to kill you, because the army could do it there. The guerilla was up in the mountains, but the army could come upon you on the road or in the milpas or wherever. This is what happened to my best friend. He was in his milpa and the army came upon him and killed him there. This is what happened to him. That's why it frightens you to live there. And that's how I came here. I hardly said goodbye to my family because I left so quickly. I came here.

Since recording this interview, Rodrigo has returned to Guatemala to bring his wife and children to the United States.

Rodrigo's matter-of-fact telling of the personal terror in Guatemala is common in refugee accounts of terrorism. For him and others, the conditions in Guatemala can be described, but the killings and destruction of villages need no stress when told to others. Victor Montejo's Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village (1987) has a similar style of unexaggerated description: "Before going down to rescue the captives I had learned of the death of one patrol member: the boy of fourteen.…It was now two thirty, and the day had begun to cloud over. The bullet-riddled bodies of the dead civil defenders remained where they had fallen. No one, not even the widows, dared to leave the group to weep over the bodies of their husbands" (Montejo 1987:29).

In Rodrigo Antonio's case, the journey through Mexico to California and subsequently to Florida was in itself traumatic. After staying in Mexico City for several months, Rodrigo and a group of four companions (three men and a woman) made their way by train to the U.S. border:

rodrigo antonio: Well, we got there to Mexicali and we got a ticket for Tijuana. We got to Tijuana and we arrived—how do you say it?—real nervous. There were two women with us as well.

julian arturo: Two women with you?

rodrigo antonio: Yes, two women with their husbands. They were almost dead. When we were on the train, we couldn't even get up. People just walked over us, because we felt so weak for lack of food. When we got to Tijuana, we still had a few pesos. The brother of the coyote [a person who brings people across the border for money] found us and we went to his house. There we bathed, ate some eggs, then we went to buy a few beers, so that was the end of that money. That was the last dollar I had; we spent it on beer with that coyote. We were in the hands of one of those coyotes, in his house.

I went with the coyote myself. The migra [Immigration and Naturalization Service agents] was there in front of a church. I was really tired and hungry. But when I saw the migra, I didn't worry about being tired or hungry, nothing! Thanks to God the church had something, a little park with flowers and everything. That's where I hid.

julian arturo: The Mexican migra or the United States?

rodrigo antonio: The United States migra! We were in the United States, in Chula Vista, in California. We had already passed on to California. And the migra chased me, but thanks to the little park that was in front of the church, I was able to get away. I hid in the flowers and then escaped out the fence to a road that was in front with a lot of cars. I was running behind the coyote. We got to another house where they had—how do you call them, those things to carry horses?

julian arturo: Horse trailers.

rodrigo antonio: Horse trailers. An old one was parked there by the side of the house. The migra was still after us, but I was hidden in there, in the trailer. I waited while the migra stopped looking. After a while they came back, but I was still hidden in there. Luckily there was a little hill there. That's where I hid myself. I lost the coyote; I was all alone; everyone else, including the coyote, was gone.

Rodrigo Antonio's story is similar to that of many of the Maya who have come to the United States. California is often the first place that they try to find work, as it is the place where most Mexican coyotes, the people who are paid for bringing people across the border, know well. Connover's book Coyote (1987) presents a powerful story of what it is like to come across the United States—Mexican border with the help of the coyotes.

Rodrigo describes his life in both California and Florida almost as if they were neighboring villages:

rodrigo antonio: Yes, one of my cousins left when I was in California, the other later. I was by myself. I went up north by myself. The other one stayed in Fort Myers. There a lot of people in Alabama. Too many people. We didn't get anything for our work. It was really hot. Everyone was sweating a lot, even the women who were working there in the sun. We were all sweaty. It was like it was raining; you couldn't even go to the bathroom. And we didn't get anything for it. So after this I went to Michigan.

julian arturo: And did you do well there?

rodrigo antonio: Yes. I went with a woman friend up there to Michigan. We got up there and began picking cherries. We went in June. In one week we made three hundred dollars. "Ay, here there is money," I said. We stayed there for the entire cherry harvest, three weeks. Then we picked apricots, cucumbers. It was really good there. I had work there usually every day. After the apricots, then we picked apples. Then after the apple harvest, when it gets cold in November, we came back here again.

julian arturo: Where did you go?

rodrigo antonio: First I spent a few days in Fort Myers; then I came here to Indiantown.

julian arturo: How did you know about Indiantown?

rodrigo antonio: I had a friend there who had a car, and he brought me here once to visit some friends who live here. I knew about Indiantown because when I was living in Fort Myers I came here to visit now and again. I knew how it was here. I had friends who gave me a ride here.

One of the first places the Guatemalan Maya can find to live in Indiantown is in the apartment complexes built to house migrant workers. These apartment buildings are privately owned but are called "camps" like the farmworker housing found in the citrus and vegetable farms of the area.

julian arturo: Did you come to one of the camps, like Blue Camp when you came?

rodrigo antonio: No, I always came here to Seminole Street. Near the house of Luis. That's where my friend lives. I picked oranges.

When Rodrigo Antonio returned to Guatemala to find his family, he found himself conscripted into the "civil patrol," one of the more burdensome organizations now instituted in many of the villages such as San Miguel, where Rodrigo was born. These patrols are made up of local men who are expected to give up their time to defend the villages from guerrilla soldiers. A list of every adult man is made in each village, and the men take turns doing "guard service." Suspicious strangers are reported to military authorities by these patrols, and often jealousies or old conflicts between families are settled by a patrol member's telling the military government that the other party is "subversive." In this way the current system installed by the Guatemalan government to lessen the threat of guerrilla insurgency has been transformed into a means for indulging feuds and personal conflicts. Some men pay others to take their turn at patrol. Many who now work in the United States send back money for years to pay a neighbor or relative to do their patrol duty.

rodrigo antonio: When I went back, it had changed a lot. It wasn't at all like it was when the war was going on. Now there is the patrol. You have to be a part of the patrol and not miss a day. When I went back, I had to patrol three times a week. You can't work at all. You have to be on patrol so much that you can't get any work done.

julian arturo: They don't let you work?

rodrigo antonio: No. There is no time to work. You have to patrol when it's your turn.

julian arturo: In the camps?

rodrigo antonio: No, in our town. We are, as we say, guarding our town. The army is there making sure we do.

julian arturo: So you can't work more than four days a week?

rodrigo antonio: Yes, you can't work five days, just four days a week. Most of the time you can only work two or three days a week. You see, that is why the people are so …in poverty now. It's because of the patrols, the war. Lots of things have been destroyed.

As we have seen, because political asylum was the most viable strategy for staying in the United States, the Maya like Rodrigo who came here were encouraged to apply for it, even though it was seldom granted. The year or more that it took for cases to go through the appeals process at least gave applicants a period of relative safety when they could legally find jobs and live without fear of deportation. With support from the Indian Law Resource Center in Washington, Jerónimo Camposeco began working with lawyers and other advocates to advance as many political asylum cases as possible through the court systems. The strategy taken by Jerónimo and other advocates was to be forthright about the presence of the Maya in the United States. The filing of political asylum applications provided people with legal status as long as the process of deciding on the individual cases continued. The Maya did not want to remain "undocumented aliens," illegal people. They wanted a chance to maintain their families until it was safe for them to return to Guatemala.

The case of Jerónimo Camposeco is indicative of this process.

allan burns: Were you working there in the seventies on a school project or what?

jeronimo camposeco: Yes, I was a teacher there in the parochial school teaching little kids. I was teaching them how to write and literacy. And many of these refugees here were my students.

allan burns: Were you teaching them to write in Maya as well as in Spanish?

jeronimo camposeco: Yes I was, because they don't speak Spanish. I was teaching Maya, in Kanjobal language. It's a Maya language, one of the many Maya languages in Guatemala.

allan burns: So you devised an alphabet that could be used.

jeronimo camposeco: Yes, we have an alphabet. We are using the modern alphabet of the modern script, but we have to have some changes in the alphabet. We need to learn and then to teach the children. In other words, we teach the children in the modern alphabet, because when they are going to school, they can read in Spanish also. So this is a good help for them. Not only [because to] learn from their own language …is more easy, but because if you impose the Spanish since the beginning then.… There is a program of the government that is called "Castellanización" that is for the little Indians to learn Spanish before starting school. What I did was teach directly in the Indian language.

allan burns: Did the people accept that; did you have a lot of students?

jeronimo camposeco: Yes, it was very …they accepted that, because they didn't have to do big …they didn't have problems to understand the teacher; because they trusted the teacher because the teacher speaks the language. Of course the teacher was another Indian like them.

allan burns: You grew up in Jacaltenango, speaking Jacaltec.

jeronimo camposeco: Yes, Jacaltenango is a village not too far from San Miguel. We are only divided by two rivers and a mountain. So the Kanjobals go to the market place in Jacaltenango every Sunday carrying their …they make, from the maguey fiber, crafts like bags and ropes and all those good things. And also pottery, and also wood for construction. They are very good for those kinds of things like carpentry.…So I learned Kanjobal because my father was some kind of instructor also and he had many deals with the Kanjobal.

In the 1970s, Native Americans from New York and Pennsylvania contacted the Maya of Guatemala as part of a pan-Indian movement that crossed national boundaries. Jerónimo and several others from the northwestern highlands were invited to speak and perform marimba music in reservations across the United States and Canada.

allan burns: But how did you end up here in Indiantown; why did you leave Guatemala?

jeronimo camposeco: Because I could learn Spanish. I am an Indian like everybody else. Since I was a kid I helped my father in the fields, working in the lands and working to grow milpa and bringing wood to myself. And so I had the opportunity to go to the school. Later I worked at the National Indian Institute. We were a team of people there, and we were connected with the North American Indians. And some of them were working with us in the villages, because in 1976 was an earthquake, and so some just came to work. And some of them stayed there after the earthquake until 1980. And this work, for the government, for the paramilitary groups and the death squads, and even the army was looking for all the people who were working to try to have a better life in the countryside. Because we are the people in Guatemala, we are very poor. You know that since colonial times the people in power took our lands—we only have tiny lands in the mountains, and the good lands are in the lowlands in the hands of the companies. Exporting all the products like sugar cane, coffee, bananas, but there is nothing for our consumption, so I teach the Indians how to develop their own lands.

allan burns: Did the army come for you?

jeronimo camposeco: Yes. First of all the army came and killed some of my friends and my co-workers.

Even a North American Indian was killed by the army; his name was Kayuta Clouds. He was tortured. And because we worked together, the death squads found my name in a letter I sent to him inviting him to come to Guatemala. And so the American Embassy called to my office saying that I need to be careful because some people are looking for me because they found the body of Kay. After that they were looking for me. So I went to my house and told my wife and my children that I am leaving because the death squads are looking for me. So I escaped to Mexico. My family went to another house. There was a store next to my house. The people there saw three men in a car looking for me, but fortunately my family and I were not there. So I could escape to the United States. And I came to Pennsylvania because there is a place where my friends there, American Indians, farm. And so they gave me refuge there for six months. My family came later, and they joined me in Pennsylvania.

When the Maya of Florida immigrated to the United States in the early 1980s, like many groups of people before them they found the new language, customs, and communities both fascinating and frightening. On the one hand, they found a haven from the disarray of Guatemala, a community that was hospitable to their plight and their work ethic. One woman, Maria Andrés, put it quite succinctly:

maria andres: Well, we left Guatemala for the problem that was there, for the war. We wanted to save ourselves in Guatemala, so we came to this land. We looked for each other here in this land. We like living here in this land. Now we don't want to go back to Guatemala.

allan burns: What year did you come here?

maria andres: In '80 or '81.

allan burns: Did you come directly to Indiantown?

maria andres: No. We first came to Los Angeles. We came to Los Angeles first. We can't live in our own country, because they are killing a lot of people there. It's because of that. We don't want to die; we want to live in peace, and so we came here. That is the problem that we have.

allan burns: And are these your two daughters?

maria andres: Yes, one is a niece, but her mother was killed, so she's here with me.

allan burns: Did they come with you?

maria andres: One of them, yes; the other arrived earlier.

allan burns: When did your mother die?

eugenia francisco (the niece): In '79.

allan burns: Did she die here or where?

eugenia francisco: In Guatemala. There was an accident.

allan burns: And here in the United States, how is life for women?

maria andres: No, we don't have problems here. We just want to work here. We just want to live and work here.

allan burns: What did you do in Guatemala?

maria andres: There in Guatemala, we didn't work. We were in the house, taking care of it and raising our children. That's what we did in our houses.

allan burns: Were you making things of clay?

maria andres: No, it was others who did that. Where we lived we didn't. We made food for those who worked, the campesinos. That is what we were doing. Now, we have to go and look for work elsewhere, well, because here there isn't any work. We won't be able to work anymore here. We'll leave and then we'll return here again after the work.

allan burns: Where will you go?

maria andres: To New York.

allan burns: To New York?

maria andres: All of us, the whole family will go. We are taking the number of the center here with us in case our application comes up and they have to call us for an appointment. If they do, we'll come by plane for the appointment for political asylum. That's what we're going to do.

allan burns: What do you need here in Indiantown?

maria andres: If the president would let us, we would buy a little land here so we could live better.

Maria Andrés and others from Guatemala came to Florida and found jobs, first in the citrus groves, later in construction and the service industries. They found their friends who had fled several years earlier, and some went back to bring wives and children. With the passing of years, their children learned English and some went to college. Others moved away from Indiantown to see other parts of the United States and to see what it means to be a Maya American.

The narratives of the violence of Guatemala, the flight to the United States, and the difficulties of staying in the United States legally now make up a new oral history among the Maya of the United States. The narratives are not just stories of a journey, but are at the intersection of personal history and political adaptation. People like Maria Andrés who are not practiced in public speaking have had to talk about events that are personally tragic and that run counter to the prevailing beliefs of U.S. citizens and immigration authorities. Their stories are met with incredulity, an incredulity often fueled by the legal expectation of precision with regard to dates and locations. The narratives have been honed through interactions with lawyers working for political asylum, but even when dates and places are precisely given, new challenges are brought forward. Sometimes it is the challenge of time itself: after a few years threats and persecution are thought to disappear, and dangers experienced a few years ago are not seen as real today. Sometimes the challenge is to the veracity of the asylum seekers, as when an immigration hearing judge doubts that a gentle Maya person could recall such tragic events in a voice without emotion.

SOURCE: Burns, Allen F. Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.