In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities. Patricia Foxen. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 2007. xxiv+358pp.

Reviewed in conjunction with the publication of Ethos 36.2 by: Brian Montes, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

How do individuals and communities recover from a brutal and genocidal civil war? What are the psychological and physical effects of state terror and how do communities heal when divided by ideological, cultural, economic, and spatial differences? In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities (2007) by Patricia Foxen is an attempt to answer these questions by situating the multiple experiences of K’iche’ Mayas, the largest indigenous group in Guatemala, as they struggle for survival in the aftermath of Guatemala’s civil war in two distinct geographical locations; in the village of Xinxuc in the highland department of El Quiché, Guatemala and in Providence, Rhode Island.

Foxen begins her analysis of K’iche’ Maya identity by highlighting the fluidity and heterogeneity of indigenous identity throughout Guatemala’s colonial period. By contextualizing contemporary K’iche’ identity within a historical framework, Foxen provides, to readers, an analytical paradigm that gives room to conscious and constantly evolving definitions of self and community. Ranging from micro definitions of community (i.e. family, municipio) to attempts of enforced and violent forms of incorporation by church and state, to Guatemala’s decade of democracy, to the brutality of its Scorched Earth Campaign, Foxen demonstrates that what outsiders and insiders define as “Indio” or as “Maya” is as fluid, complex, and paradoxical as the specific histories that produce them. Foxen also highlights the push and pull factors that have historically motivated the K’iche’ to include migration as a socio-economic survival tactic. Immigration, Foxen demonstrates, has always played an important role in the cultural and socio-economic survival of the K’iche’ Maya of Xinxuc. Transmigration to the United States is only but another process of cultural and economic survival to which K’iche’ identity is consciously (although not always) and ideologically (re)-constructed and (re) imagined. It is in the consciousness of identity and in the construction of identity politics that the K’iche’ strategically redefine notions of “Mayaness” and indigenous identity.

These changing definitions of Mayaness and in particular of Xinxuc indigenous identity are evident in present-day Xinxuc and Providence, R.I. However, as Foxen demonstrates, these definitions are not always congruent. Following Guatemala’s vicious campaign to assimilate their indigenous population, a large number of Mayas, including those from Xinxuc immigrated north, with many settling in the city of Providence, R.I. For some of those who stayed behind, a new Pan-Maya movement of ethnic consciousness emerged, rooted in essentialist discourse and informed by foreign NGO’s, anthropologists, indigenous intellectuals, and public support. A benefit of the Pan-Maya movement, as demonstrated by Foxen’s research, was the ability to help individuals and communities heal from the psychological wounds of a fragmented and morally insulted society by building alliances and creating an imagined egalitarian and homogenous ethnic landscape.

For those who had relocated north to Providence R.I., dealing with the psychological effects of Guatemala’s civil war demanded different strategies and discourses. It also demanded that (trans)-migrants deal with new psychological anxieties, including deportation, economic failure, separation from family, and racism by their new host community. The various accounts of racism and classism to which the K’iche’, as (trans) migrants, are exposed in Providence, R.I. provides a very compelling component to Foxen’s ethnography, particularly with regard to current U.S. immigration policies. The juxtaposition of fear and anxiety, what Foxen identifies throughout the text as a “dual vulnerability,” in both host (United States of America) and home (Guatemala) countries, although disheartening, demonstrates the nuances of trepidation that all those in search of providence continue to negotiate and confront, even after leaving the terror and fear of home.

The greatest strength of Foxen’s ethnography is her analysis of the multiple factors that influence individual and group K’iche’ Maya identities. Whether through memories of violence (“la violencia”), cultural and ideological differences (costumbristas vs. catequistas vs. transnational), citizenship or lack thereof, poverty, remittances, cultural fear of envidia, or the transnational effect of capitalism and commodity on individual or communal ambitions, how K’iche’ identify themselves is based on a multitude of factors that have profound emotional and psychological effects on the self-conscious processes of ethnic and self identification.

More importantly, however, it is the power of the narratives that give Foxen’s ethnography its spirit. Through a myriad of ethnographic accounts that detail individual successes, fears, and failures; Foxen’s ethnography becomes an ambitious project as she considers the pathologies of families with members dispersed across international borders. The book serves as an ethnographic lens into the lives of those who live in two worlds, “un pie aquí y otro alla,” “los péndulos,” the pendulums who swing back and forth, living with one foot here and another over there but who nevertheless remain marginalized in both, “ni de aqui ni de ella,” neither here nor there.

Considering the diversity and complexity of identity formation, the fact that an ethnic movement as popular as the Pan-Maya movement has found success as a transnational movement is a testament to the individuals who negotiate difference, confront fear, and struggle for survival in post civil war Guatemala, both at home and as a diasporic community. Foxen’s ethnography speaks to the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of these individuals and communities. As such, Foxen’s ethnography ultimately serves as a comprehensive, albeit depressing, narrative about survival, or at least the attempts to survive and the paradoxes and hardships of surviving in specific contexts. Although much has been written on Maya identity following the aftermath of Guatemala’s civil war, this ethnography makes an important contribution to understanding Maya identity beyond the “closed corporate community” model.