Abstract

ARROYO CALDERON, Patricia. Racism and Devaluation of Indigenous Women’s Work in Guatemala: From Domestic Economy to the Sepur Zarco Court Case. Entrediversidades rev. cienc. soc. humanid. [online]. 2020, vol.7, n.2, pp.94-126.  Epub Feb 26, 2024. ISSN 2007-7610.  https://doi.org/10.31644/ed.v7.n2.2020.a04.

The Guatemalan 2013 genocide trial, where ex-President Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted, and the Sepur Zarco trial held in February of 2016 brought to focus the sexual violence suffered by Maya women at a massive scale during the over-three-decades long civil conflict. In this article, the instances of sexual violence and sexual slavery suffered by -at least-fifteen Q’eqchi’ women between 1982 and 1988 are addressed in parallel to a dimension of the Sepur Zarco trial which has been for the most part overlooked: the situation of domestic slavery that was also inflicted on the Maya women survivors. Specifically, I suggest that the process of devaluation of indigenous women’s reproductive work (intensified to the extreme during the Maya genocide) needs to be historically understood in relation to the capitalist modernization projects put into motion by Central American liberal elites during the last decades of the 19th century. The liberal modernization projects relied upon two opposing -and heavily racialized- concepts of work: the notion of “productive work” and the notion of “unproductive work.” These notions eventually found their way into the Central American households and actively contributed to the creation of a renovated hierarchical order structured around forms of domestic work considered to be “productive” (i.e., the domestic work performed by lettered and modernized housewives) and other forms of work considered “unproductive” (that is, the work performed by indigenous domestic servants). Ultimately, these imaginaries of inequality that thrived within the households of the isthmus have survived until today, when ample sectors of the population still equate “indigenous women” with “domestic servants,” and when different forms of devaluation, exploitation, and other forms of abuse are inflicted upon local domestic workers with total impunity.

Keywords : sexual violence; sexual slavery; domestic slavery; domestic economy; racism; genocide; Guatemala; Sepur Zarco.