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The essay presents an analysis of the relationship between 
revolutionary mobilization and collective identity formation 
processes of K’iche’ women. What happens to women’s collective 
identity formation process if activists do not map a site for gendered 
expressions and demands within the revolutionary movement? 
The essay analyzes the way in which the interaction between 
centralized decision-making structures and decisions related to 
women’s bodily expressions of identity – such as traditional garb 
– have affected the dynamic of collective identity formation in the 
post-war period. It is argued that the modalities of K’iche’ women’s 
activism – specifically the demand of obedience and of laying 
down their traditional garb – have posed many obstacles in the 
process of constructing an empowered gender identity. However, 
activists have also been skillful in exploring niches in which they 
could critically reflect on their own emancipation on the basis of 
Mayan cosmovisión.
El ensayo presenta un análisis de la correlación entre la 
movilización revolucionaria y la creación de una identidad 
colectiva de las mujeres K’iche’. El proceso de creación de 
identidad empezó durante el conflicto armado, así que surge 
la pregunta ¿Qué sucede con ese proceso cuando activistas 
revolucionarias no crean un marco para expresiones y demandas 
genéricas? El ensayo analiza cómo la interacción entre estructuras 
centralizadas y decisiones relacionadas con la expresión corporal 
de una identidad femenina (como el traje indígena) ha afectado 
la dinámica de crear una identidad colectiva en el periodo de 
postguerra. Se cuestiona que las modalidades de activismo 
de mujeres K’iche’ - en concreto la demanda de obediencia y 
de abandonar su traje tradicional - han presentado varios 
obstáculos en el proceso de formar una identidad genérica 
empoderada para las mujeres K’iche’. Sin embargo, activistas 
han demostrado habilidad en la exploración de nichos en los 
cuales pueden considerar críticamente su emancipación, basada 
en la cosmovisión Maya.
Tine Destrooper is a political 
scientist and doctoral candidate at 
the European University Institute, 
Florence, Italy. She specializes in 
gender issues, ethnicity and social 
movements in Central America. 
E-mail: tinedestrooper@gmail.com
7 The impact of guerrilla participation on K’iche’ women’s 
collective identity formation process 
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Introduction
We did not have a gender consciousness, before and during the war, 
but unconsciously, we hoped that with change in society and from the 
class struggle, there was going to be a situation of equality for women. 
Unconsciously that was the feeling... They [the men of the Left] always 
said that this [the women’s] struggle was secondary; always said that the 
problem was capitalism and I think we believed that because we didn’t 
know the depth of our situation.
Lety Mendez (cited in Shayne 2004: 1)
This essay explores how the identity formation process of Guatemalan K’iche’ 
women has been shaped by their participation in popular movements in the late 
1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, it analyzes the impact of elite discourses – 
i.e., the discourse of the revolutionary leaders – on women’s collective identity 
formation process. It also considers women’s own assessment of the link between 
their activism and their collective identity formation process. The focus on 
revolutionary mobilization is inspired by the fact that this mobilization in many 
ways facilitated women’s entry into public life, and presented them with new 
possibilities, ideas, and skills (Light 1992; Ray and Korteweg 1999). Therefore, 
the civil conflict is often seen as the background against which indigenous 
women’s emancipation started to take shape (Luciak 2001; Berger 2006).
The essay pays special attention to the issue of bodily expressions and 
determinants of a collective identity, and to how these were dealt with during 
the period of revolutionary activism, both by K’iche’ women themselves and 
by the leaders – usually men – of the revolutionary organizations. The paper 
argues that initially, the formation of a collective identity was a priority neither 
for women activists nor for their leaders. This means that initially, relatively 
little explicit thinking had gone into how to shape the identity formation 
process, or into what type of collective identity was envisioned (e.g., a gender 
awareness tied to ethnic and class awareness, an empowered identity, the role 
of traditional indigenous beliefs for a shared gender identity, etc.). This initial 
absence of a preconceived strategy was soon replaced, however, by conscious 
efforts to critically rethink elements of K’iche’ women’s collective identity on 
the basis of Mayan cosmovisión in the aftermath of the armed conflict. Still, the 
relationship between gender awareness and ethnic awareness, and the role of 
authoritarian relations within the social movements, and the conceptualization 
of emancipation, needs to be considered when analyzing the link between 
revolutionary mobilization and K’iche’ women’s collective gender identity. To 
analyze these issues, the paper is structured as follows. Firstly, the theoretical 
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section sets out the framework on collective identity formation that underlies 
this research. Then the methods are outlined and the situation of Guatemalan 
K’iche’ women during and after the armed conflict is briefly discussed. The 
body of the text then sets out the key findings of the research in relation to 
the discourse on gender and the effects this had on K’iche’ women’s identity 
formation. The essay concludes with a discussion of prevailing understandings 
of an emancipated identity.
Theoretical framework
Underlying this paper is a is a constructivist view of identity, whereby identity is 
not seen as a pre-given, but rather as a symbolic representation with boundaries 
that are flexible and constantly reproduced through social interaction (Cooper 
and Brubaker 2000). The essay reckons that identity formation at the group level 
can have roots in objective interests or shared culture, as well as being an elite-
driven process. Especially in the context of the Guatemalan civil war, a focus on 
leaders’ discourses is justified, since revolutionary leaders had privileged access 
to information and controlled the transmission of knowledge, which increased 
their ideological power (see Foucault 1979; Laraña 1994). This justifies a double 
focus, on the one hand on how leaders discussed collective identities, and on the 
other, on how K’iche’ women activists experienced this issue. 
The essay sees identity formation processes at the collective level as a process 
in which the involved actors come to think of themselves as distinctive from 
members of other groups with whom they interact, and stresses the relational, 
processual, and contextual component of identity formation (Barth 1969). 
Collective identities can be empowering and emancipating in the sense that they 
trigger an awareness of common problems and resources, and nourish the idea 
of being an actor in one’s own life. Collective identity can, in other words, be 
a stimulus for collective action for the advancement of the group, since it tips 
the cost-benefit balance of any action towards the collective level and justifies 
engagement in activities that have no immediate benefit for the individual – 
such as participating in protest marches (Drury 1999). This also means that 
the stronger a collective identity of a group is, the more leverage this group 
will potentially have on policy, because its members will be more motivated 
to mobilize (Laraña 1994). An empowered identity is thus key to a successful 
emancipation and vice versa. 
This theoretical framework inspires a focus on women’s revolutionary 
activism during the civil war as a determinant of collective identity formation. 
As several studies argue, it is during conflict that women erode typical male 
arenas and redefine behavioral and institutional boundaries and borders. This 
questions traditional boundaries and redefines roles, and provides women with 
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opportunities for social participation (e.g., MacDonald 1987; Shayne 2004). 
This social participation has the potential to change social awareness and 
introduce women to new ideas of equality, a newly gained sense of rights. It also 
facilitates economic independence, and the creation of networks and skills that 
can be used later on (Molyneux 1985; Blumberg 2001).  
Methods
Since academic literature of the time does not focus on the participation of 
K’iche’ women in indigenous movements (Hernández 2005), interviews are 
the most important source of information. The essay is based on a discourse 
analysis of interviews with revolutionary leaders, K’iche’ guerrilleras, and 
current indigenous feminist activists. In the framework of research on the 
influence of armed conflict on protest strategies of the women’s movement in 
Central America, I conducted 74 interviews with Nicaraguan and Guatemalan 
women and former activists.1 As Silverman (2006: 10) underlines, interviews 
do not give direct access to facts or experiences because historical memory is 
constantly reworked in light of the current situation. Interviews can therefore 
merely offer people’s interpretations and representations of facts and events. 
However, accepting this means taking into account the fact that different 
interviewees have different relations to the phenomena they describe, which 
deserves attention in its own right. Moreover, I aimed partially to overcome the 
lack of stability by conducting a large number of interviews on similar topics 
and by triangulating interviews with documentary resources where possible. For 
analytical clarity, the number of direct citations is limited, and instead, the essay 
presents the findings of the analysis of the combined interviews.
In addition to this, I reconstructed the discourse of revolutionary leaders 
on the basis of documents from the recently discovered Guatemalan Historical 
National Police Archive (AHPN). This archive – to date – contains, among other 
things, a collection of 297 confiscated revolutionary pamphlets. I analyzed these 
documents in terms of gendered messages. The analysis was further refined and 
double-checked during focus groups and personal conversations on this topic 
with former guerrilleras. This way it was also possible to discern the interplay 
between the discourse of the leaders – expressed in the pamphlets – and the 
everyday discourse of activists in relation to gender and collective identity. The 
data gathering consisted of a constant movement between a close reading of 
the text2 on the one hand, and a consideration of the wider social and cultural 
processes on the other hand, because discourses can only be understood in 
reference to the culture and society in which they arise (Wodak and Meyer 2001: 
2). To understand this social context, the next section considers the situation of 
Guatemalan K’iche’ women during and after the civil war.
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Socio-cultural situation of K’iche’ women during the armed conflict
K’iche’ people are the largest indigenous group in Guatemala, and were one of 
the groups most heavily targeted during the civil war (Esparza 2005). This civil 
war was one of the fiercest armed conflicts the Latin American subcontinent 
knew in the last decades – in terms of duration, number of people killed and 
maimed, and repressive government strategies (Koonings and Kruijt 1999). Yet, 
at the same time, the conflict is often referred to as the background against 
which both indigenous people and women came to think of themselves as 
sharing a collective identity (Fagan 1999; Luciak 2001). In several respects, it 
can therefore be seen as the starting point for the emancipation of both groups. 
The motivation for analyzing the collective identity formation process of 
K’iche’ women in particular is twofold. Firstly, they present a case of a group 
that had little or no feeling of commonness on the basis of their gender before 
the armed conflict (Torres 1999). Secondly, because K’iche’ women were 
particularly active in the guerrilla forces (CEH 1999 par. 82: 108–23), they were 
exposed to the rhetoric of revolutionary leaders that acted as an – unintended 
– catalyst in their collective identity formation process.
Socio-cultural situation of K’iche’ women
For the purpose of this essay, three aspects are particularly important to point 
out in relation to the situation of K’iche’ women during the civil conflict.
Firstly, before the conflict, neither K’iche’ people as a group nor K’iche’ 
women shared a strong sense of common belongingness or collective identity 
(Kellogg 2010). It was not until the beginning of the early 1990s that indigenous 
women began creating spaces to organize themselves and recover the cultural 
demands of their people (Hernández 2005). Furthermore, K’iche’ people – and 
women in particular – had a history of deprivation and relative invisibility and 
were discriminated against in many ways (Stern 1998). K’iche’ women thus 
found themselves in a situation of double discrimination and invisibilization, 
and their daily activities were in many cases restricted to the domestic sphere. 
Limited economic power, lack of property and inheritance rights, low literacy 
and paid-employment rates, conservative gender-ideologies and conservative 
Catholicism further restricted women’s options at both the micro and macro 
level (Palencia Prado 1999).
Another factor that initially hampered the formation of an independent 
collective gender identity is the idea of complementarity – rather than equality – 
that is the fundament of Mayan cosmovisión. The concept of complementarity – 
an ideal rather than an experienced reality in many cases – refers to a wide scope 
of exchange and interrelations between animals, the cosmos, nature, and energy, 
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but also between men and women (Jocón Gonzales 2005). This idea appears 
incompatible with mainstream feminist demands for equality. Yet K’iche’ women 
have actually been able to use it as a resource in their emancipation struggle in 
the post-conflict period. By critically reinterpreting the idea of complementarity 
beyond the common understanding of complementarity in gender roles, K’iche’ 
feminists provided a source of inspiration for social transformation. Below, I 
return to the idea of complementarity, arguing that, despite its initial role, it 
served to refine and advance K’iche’ women’s emancipation struggle and process 
of collective identity formation (Marcos 2010: 205).
A last important factor when analyzing how the collective identity formation 
process of indigenous women was influenced by their revolutionary activism is 
the role of traditional garb. Traditional garb is a crucial boundary marker of 
group identity, because it functions as the physical and bodily expression of 
differences (Rupp and Taylor 1999). Because of this, it can be seen as an element 
at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and politics. By taking traditional garb as 
a case study, one can thus interrelate different societal dynamics and assess how 
the participation and the bodies of women were politicized. Given the symbolic 
value of traditional garb, it can potentially serve as a starting point for the 
construction of a gendered collective identity. I return to this in section 5.3.
K’iche’ women’s activism during the civil war
Despite the brutal nature of the civil war, the conflict also facilitated women’s 
entry into public life, and to some extent thus held the germs of K’iche’ women’s 
collective emancipation process (Torres 1999; Hernández 2005). On the one 
hand, women also mobilized and became activists during the conflict. On the 
other hand, women’s economic role changed because the civil war entailed the 
necessity for women to work outside the home. This increased their economic 
power and participation opportunities. Blumberg (1998) argues that when 
the economic power of a large enough proportion of women rises, this will be 
translated into an improvement in macro-level rules about women’s rights. Ray 
and Korteweg (1999) see mobilization and economic advances as a key aspect 
of emancipation and of an empowered identity, precisely because they present 
women with new possibilities, ideas, and skills. These new opportunities, they 
argue, will affect the identity formation process at the group level. As Kampwirth 
(2004) indicates, however, the effect of participation in popular movements 
is highly dependent on the nature of the movement and the position of the 
individual within it. This is an important point, and in the next section, I analyze 
what the modalities of the mobilization were in order to assess its effects on the 
identity formation process in the post-war period.
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The position of women in top-down and everyday discourse
I argue that the evolution of both a collective ethnic and gender identity was 
influenced by the discourses and actions to which K’iche’ people, and women 
in particular, were exposed during the civil conflict. Therefore this section 
considers the attention that was paid to the idea of collective identity formation 
during the period of civil conflict, both by the leaders of the indigenous guerrilla 
forces, and in everyday conversation.
Elite discourses
Strategies of the Guatemalan government, such as infiltration, killings, and 
disinformation campaigns, were aimed at destabilizing popular movements 
(CEH 1999). These actions have been of particular relevance in shaping the 
discourse and action of the leaders of these movements. Given the fierceness 
of the war, leaders focused virtually all attention – both discursively and in 
their actions – on the war effort, and were largely unaware of, or uninterested 
in, the gender identity-formation component (Lupe 1983; Interview P, Q). 
Fierce repression was at the origin of a discursive strategy that was aimed at 
creating the largest possible base for support, but also inspired the adoption of 
rigid organizational and communication structures on the part of the popular 
movements. These were needed to operate efficiently. The desire for efficiency 
can also be seen as one of the reasons why leaders started to stress the idea of 
a collective ethnic identity (Holland 2008): this identity – which was largely 
absent before – could be used as a basis for mobilization (Bayard de Volo 
2006a). However, given the context of war, most actions and decisions on the 
issue of identity were reactions to government actions, rather than expressing a 
conscious program in terms of identity formation. 
Moreover, the implicit construction of a collective identity was fostered 
only along ethnic lines. Gender played no role in this discourse. An analysis 
of the 297 revolutionary pamphlets in the AHPN shows that during the civil 
conflict, women hardly figured in the discourse of the leaders of the popular 
movements at the national level. There are also no significant differences 
between the different leftist groups that made up the National Revolutionary 
Unit for Guatemala (URNG).3 None of these groups addressed women as a 
group in their pamphlets, nor did they mention specific needs of women, or 
promise specific rights to women.4 While revolutionary movements in that era 
tended to be gender-blind in many cases, this was not the case in Nicaragua and 
El Salvador, where the FSLN and FMLN respectively used gendered discourses 
on many occasions – albeit in a pragmatic and functionalist way – to mobilize 
women as a group and play on their shared interests (FSLN 1980; FMLN 1990; 
Shayne 1999: 98). Examples thereof are the posters that call on women – as 
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a group – to mobilize for the revolution or the pamphlets promising better 
healthcare and childcare to women (Bujard 2010). While these initiatives too 
are not per se an expression of a great awareness of gendered needs on the part 
of Salvadoran or Nicaraguan revolutionary leaders, their reference to women 
as a group, implicitly, fostered the idea of a gendered collective identity (Drury 
1999; Bayard de Volo 2006b).
Because gender issues were deemed unimportant by Guatemalan 
revolutionary leaders, gender equality at the lower levels was a far-distant ideal 
rather than a daily reality. As one former URNG leader (P) puts it, “Sure, we 
believed in gender equality, but it was far from being one of our priorities. If it 
was there, it was there, we weren’t going to oppose it, but certainly we weren’t 
about to fight for it either, there were more important things going on.” Another 
testimony (Q) also describes how women’s and society’s lack of interest in 
gender equality influenced the lack of attention for gender. “The few of us who 
considered gender equality a relevant issue were unlikely to actually impose 
measures to arrive at it, simply because that could make conservative men turn 
their back on us. You should not forget that women weren’t even asking for it 
themselves.”
Everyday discourse and practice
Interviews confirm that also in the daily operating units in which women were 
active, gender hardly played a role, and that the situation was not conducive to 
the creation of a collective gender awareness or of an awareness of the specific 
needs and interests of women. As one interviewee (K) argued, women did not 
necessarily take issue with the absence of women’s needs from the goals of their 
leaders, as the war efforts were seen as a priority by women too. Women adopted 
the line of reasoning that they needed to fight for ethnic emancipation and the 
end of the civil war first, and only later on for their own needs as women. 
They thereby echoed the position of the leaders, for whom creating a collective 
gender identity was by no means a priority – not even for the pragmatic purpose 
of mobilizing women more efficiently. In all focus groups and interviews, 
participants confirmed that both in everyday conversations and in the speeches 
delivered by the leaders, women’s issues were not problematized, and women’s 
issues would presumably be solved if forces were united in the fight for the 
end of economic oppression and authoritarian rule. In ideal terms, this line of 
argument would result in equal gender relations at the organizational level. 
What most interviewees describe, however, was that this was not the case in 
daily life. While some interviewees stressed the fact that leaders of the guerrilla 
were on average more progressive than the rest of society, others describe how 
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this was hardly noticeable in everyday actions and relationships within the 
units. As one interviewee (H) commented, “It looked as if life was going to be 
better for everyone who joined the guerrilla, men and women all the same. Back 
then, I never considered that our starting point was different from that of men 
or that we had the right to demand that they solve this problem in their own 
communities first before trying to change the whole country. Maybe they never 
wanted us to come to that conclusion [laughs].” 
Discourses of obedience, body politics, and collective identity formation
Despite women’s absence from revolutionary pamphlets and propaganda, 
preliminary findings suggest that the collective identity formation process 
of women was heavily influenced by the discourse of the leaders of popular 
movements and by women’s participation in these movements. The large 
numbers of women who were active in the revolutionary movements5 could 
ideally draw on this experience to organize around gender issues later on. 
Moreover, the new ideals of equality that women were presented with could 
provide the basis for an empowered identity. It is precisely this involvement 
of women and how it was structured and impacted their identity formation 
later on that is important for this essay. Different aspects of this mobilization 
influenced the identity formation process in different ways.
For one thing, the collective gender identity that occurred was largely an 
unintended consequence of women’s mobilization in the popular movement. 
While this is understandable and not problematic as such,6 how this affected 
their collective identity formation process should be analyzed. How did the 
demands of uniformity and obedience, for example, leave their trace on K’iche’ 
women’s future collective identity? To analyze this, the effect of two elements 
surrounding women’s mobilization is crucial: closed decision-making models 
and subjugating body politics.
Closed decision-making models and obedience. Several interviewees (B, E, 
J) overlap in their assessment that within the popular movements, traditional 
structures of power were reproduced, if not in practice then at least in how 
women perceived them. As one interviewee (D) testified, “They [superiors and 
male comrades] were like my father and brothers, I could not but obey them.” 
Another interviewee (G) argued that, in hindsight, she experienced the group 
as a hierarchical structure and the leaders (men) as authoritative figures with 
whom she could not argue. So, de facto, through a series of decisions, the group 
had taken on a vertical structure of obedience that did not easily accommodate 
the emancipation of women within it. Decision-making structures became even 
more centralized and closed in March 1982. Operational rules on the part of 
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the popular movements became stricter in response to General Montt’s beans 
and bullets program (McClintock 1985: 242). Demanding obedience in a 
struggle for emancipation creates the impression of a contradiction, because it 
demands an attitude of submissiveness on the part of the people it is claiming to 
emancipate. Moreover, this situation impacted differently upon women than on 
men, because women came from a situation of double oppression: gender-based 
and class-based.7 This differential impact is especially visible in relation to the 
policing of the body, which is the focus of the next section.
The regulation of physical expressions of identity. The most prominent 
expression of their identity for K’iche’ women, interviewees argued (J, L, B), is 
their traditional garb. This garb can be seen as one of the boundary markers that 
allow groups to distinguish themselves from one another, and is therefore an 
important material element of collective identities. For practical reasons, activists 
– both women and men – were required to exchange this traditional garb for 
more practical or discreet outfits. The impact of laying down traditional garb 
affected women and men in different ways, for one thing because the difference 
between traditional and combat-style garments was greater for women than 
for men (cutting the braids, skirts vs. trousers, etc.), but also because K’iche’ 
women were – on average – linked to community life more strongly and their 
traditional garb was an expression thereof (Fulchirone 2009). Moreover, women 
had a different starting position. The latter, however, was not recognized by the 
leaders, as was illustrated by an ex-URNG leader (P): “The question you ask 
about women is not relevant here. These demands [about cutting hair, wearing 
military uniforms, and participating in the activities] were the same for men 
and women. We wanted an equal society, we treated men and women in an 
equal way. It’s as simple as that.” More importantly, however, demanding that 
women lay down their traditional garb was significant because it can be seen as 
a political act: the body is the domain in which politics are made visible. In that 
sense, imposing rules upon women’s bodies once more transformed them into 
cuerpos objetificados at the service of – male – leaders. This way, the – implicit 
– discourse and demands concerning women’s bodies shaped the way in which 
women mobilized and held the risk of investing women’s collective identity with 
a degree of submissiveness. 
Moreover, apart from appropriating women’s bodies into a struggle that was 
not necessarily their own, the act of imposing decisions related to the women’s 
bodily expressions of identity was an explicit political act because it deprived 
women of a vast array of tools for transgressing. According to Hernández and 
Krajewski (2009), the body can be seen as a means par exellence to fight and 
denaturalize established categories and to visibilize boundaries. Demanding of 
women that they conform to the group norm takes away women’s possibility 
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to render borders more visible and to relate to them and transgress them in the 
process of their identity formation.8 This transgression is a crucial part of any 
process of identity formation. Applied to the context of K’iche’ women, this 
argument suggests that the very act of demanding conformity and uniformity 
in terms of bodily expressions of identity challenged the occurrence of an 
empowered collective identity, because markers that identify different groups 
(men – women) were invisibilized, thus taking away the potential to contest and 
raise critical voices within the newly created group in which gender differences 
were not acknowledged.
Several women indicated that having to lay down their traditional garb 
under those circumstances was disturbing for them, because it was neither 
their own decision, nor something they were consulted about or prepared for 
psychologically, nor something they deemed necessary per se (Interview A, G, 
H). Moreover, interviews suggest that this touched upon women’s self-image. 
It affected their belief that they could make their own decisions as independent 
individuals, because others were deciding for them in one of the most intimate 
aspects of their life, namely their bodily experiences and expression of their 
identity (Interview A, C, K). At face value, it thus appeared that, by demanding 
that women – and men – lay down their traditional garb, traditional frames 
of reference related to gender were taken away, and that women were not 
encouraged to reconceptualize their collective gender identity within the 
movement, since there was very little room for maneuvering or independence. 
This is arguably a barrier to the construction of an emancipated collective 
gender identity. This is, however, only one side of the coin. The next section 
considers how the aforementioned obstacles to the creation of an empowered 
collective identity have been balanced by K’iche’ activists in finding niches for 
emancipation.
Exploring new ways to emancipation and new forms of empowerment
The fact that decisions within the movement were made top-down rather 
than enabling women to think critically and make their own decisions – albeit 
understandable given the context – can hardly be called emancipatory. One 
interviewee (F) comments, “They told us they needed us to do this or that, 
go here or there, believe in one thing or another, and that’s what we did.” 
Remarks like these were common during the interviews and illustrated how 
little room to maneuver women in the guerrilla had to be critical agents in their 
own emancipation struggle. Nevertheless, the argument can be made that their 
activism has been a resource for K’iche’ women to construct an empowered 
collective identity. There are two sides to this argument, one based on women’s 
experiences, one pinned on a theoretical consideration.
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Firstly, the gender blindness of social movements is nearly universal, but in 
several cases leads women – or other groups who are marginalized by the very 
organizations that claim to fight for them – to organize precisely in reaction 
to this invisibilization (Hale 1997; Zemlinskaya 2010). This has also been 
the case in Guatemala, where the overlooking of women’s concerns fostered 
critical thinking about this situation among women active in these mixed-
gender organizations. Hernández (2005) shows how the Guatemalan civil 
conflict has been fertile ground for indigenous women to organize and integrate 
elements of their cosmovisión into the political struggle to facilitate their 
own empowerment. In this same vein, women started to construct their own 
independent organizational spaces apart from those of the national indigenous 
movement and from feminist movements. Mama Maquín, for example, was 
women’s response to the overlooking of gender concerns in refugee camp 
councils. This means that despite the neglect of gender issues and despite the 
demand of obedience, women have been able to draw on their experience in 
revolutionary movements to organize their own spaces for critical reflection, 
in which they could conceptualize how they saw themselves as a group within 
their nation state, their class, their ethnic group, and against the background of 
their cosmovisión.
This acknowledgement triggers a second consideration with regard to the 
question of an empowered collective identity, which is also theoretical. The 
prevailing idea that emancipation is based on equality between men and women 
(e.g., Aasen 2009) was replaced with the idea of complementarity and duality 
by indigenous feminists. Based on their revolutionary mobilization and their 
re-appropriation of traditional beliefs, they developed a culturally relevant 
model of emancipation that allows for the existence of differences between men 
and women, and that sees these as desirable to arrive at “respectful, sincere, 
equitable and balanced relationships” (Gabriel 2004). In this model, the concept 
of complementarity is not used to avoid talking about power relations, but rather 
as a tool to highlight the need to rethink culture and collective identities from a 
perspective of gender equality. This is important to consider when analyzing the 
situation of K’iche’ women in terms of the nature of their collective identity, and 
suggests that we may have to rethink our concept of an emancipated collective 
identity altogether, because it is precisely the decentralization of the discourse 
of a collective identity and of equality that has contributed to the creation of a 
sense of emancipation in this case. In the face of the individualism promoted by 
globalizing capitalism, K’iche’ women are recovering the values of community, 
balance, complementarity, and duality as the basis for their shared – empowered 
– collective identity, and thereby challenging prevailing notions of emancipation 
and questioning the very premises that underlie feminism.
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Conclusion
The modalities of the ethnic emancipation struggle have critically shaped certain 
aspects of K’iche’ women’s emancipation process. Documentary and discourse 
analysis showed that, throughout, the issue of gender-specific needs was one of 
very low interest to revolutionary leaders, on the one hand because it did not 
fit the logic of wartime decision-making and priorities, and on the other hand 
because nobody was explicitly pushing for it. Hence, the discourse on women 
and gender issues remained characterized by what Edwards and Potter (1992: 
162) call “the systematic use of vagueness.” To the extent that women came into 
the discourse at all, there were no explicit policies or discourses related to them. 
Because the issues remained implicit, women, in most cases, felt as if they too 
would benefit from their participation in the civil struggle.
Nevertheless, women’s participation in these popular movements has been 
a trigger for the development of a gender awareness. Leaders played a marginal 
role in this process, and in some respects even presented a barrier to critical 
thinking by K’iche’ women about their own situation as a group. Moreover, 
the fact that there was only little awareness of, attention to, and interest in 
the modalities and dynamic of women’s collective identity formation process 
meant that several elements of K’iche’ women’s collective identity formation 
process were unintentionally shaped by decisions by leaders, and some aspects 
of identity were bypassed altogether. Hence, the participation in movements that 
were pinned on obedience and the forsaking of physical expression of identity 
is arguably a suboptimal starting point for women to establish an empowered 
gender identity.
Nonetheless, female participation in guerrilla movements indisputably 
also fostered the development of critical thinking on an emancipated identity. 
As soon as military tensions waned, K’iche’ women took the opportunity to 
organize spaces of their own in which they could critically reconsider their 
own identity. This effort has not only been relevant for K’iche’ – and other 
indigenous – communities, but it also challenges our concept of emancipation 
and empowerment. The form of emancipation that is advanced is pinned on the 
idea of complementarity rather than equality and offers interesting avenues for 
conceptualizing what constitutes an emancipated identity.
In conclusion, the modalities of K’iche women’s activism, whereby they 
were systematically denied a voice, has impacted the way in which these 
women conceived of themselves as a group, and has left them in a contradictory 
position. Interviews show that women activists were initially approached with 
an expectation of submission and that they were invisibilized. Yet, based on 
in-depth interviews with ex-guerrilleras and indigenous leaders, this essay 
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argues that the development of an emancipating collective identity of K’iche’ 
women that is emerging today can also be seen as a consequence of women’s 
mobilization, because women reacted precisely to the injustice they perceived 
in the movements in which they were active. Indigenous feminist thinkers are 
slowly aiming to overcome contradictions and elements of submissiveness, 
which entered their collective identity through the modalities of their initial 
mobilization, by turning to traditional cosmovisión as a resource and a 
framework against which to shape new emancipating identities and relations. 
They have used their experience of revolutionary mobilization to reject, respond 
to, and negotiate the structures of domination that frame their lives, and have 
more specifically done so in reclaiming both indigenous spirituality and feminist 
ideas long present in the region.
Notes
1 Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, most interviews are made anonymous, and only those that are directly 
cited in the text are mentioned in the appendix.
2 Text here refers to both written documents and the interviews.
3 I.e., the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (ORPA), the 
Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), and the National Direction Nucleus of the PGT (PGT-NDN).
4 Among the documents by rebel forces retrieved in the AHPN, the only one that makes note of women as a 
group is one by the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca stemming from 1982, and calls on them 
to join a protest march.
5 There are no precise figures, but accounts, for example, by Rigoberta Menchu, speak of women making up 
around 30 percent of the combat forces.
6 Much of the literature on women’s emancipation describes how emancipation comes about as a by-product 
of participation in social movements (Molyneux 1985; Ray and Korteweg 1999; Bayard de Volo 2006a).
7 Other war-related dynamics also impacted differently on men and women, such as the disintegration of 
community structures. As one woman argued, “I’m not saying that seeing your child die is not awful for a 
father, but for us it was different, we didn’t only suffer more [...] because we spent more time with them, we 
also suffered with every other mother’s son who died, because we see how – with them – our community 
died” (Interview C).
8 According to all of my indigenous interviewees it was perfectly possible to conserve the traditional garb while 
engaging in activities which are feminist, progressive, and emancipatory.
List of cited interviews
Interview A: ex-guerrillera FAR (Rabinal El Quiché Guatemala, 17 May 2010).
Interview B: ex-guerrillera, victim of wartime gendered violence, founder Actoras de 
Cambio and Q’anil (Guatemala City, 26 May 2010, 11 February 2011).
Interview C: ex-guerrillera EGP (Transvaal, Guatemala, 17 May 2010).
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Interview D: ex-guerrillera EGP (Guatemala City, 2 June 2010).
Interview E: double interview, ex-guerrilleras from the North of Guatemala 
(Huehuetenango, Guatemala, 14 May 2010).
Interview F: ex-guerrillera FAR, board member of UNAMG (Guatemala City, 24 May 
2010).
Interview G: ex-guerrillera PGT NDN, board member DEMI (Guatemala City, 7 June 
2010).
Interview H: double interview, ex-guerrilleras, founders Kaqla (Guatemala City, 21 
February 2011).
Interview I: ex-guerrillera, academic, member UNAMG, advisor Actoras de Cambio 
(Guatemala City, 26 January 2011).
Interview J: ex-guerrillera PGT NDN, member Actoras de Cambio (Guatemala City, 
26 January 2011).
Interview K: ex-guerrillera ORPA, member Actoras de Cambio (Guatemala City, 15 
February 2011).
Interview L: ex-guerrilera FAR, member UNAMG, academic (Guatemala City, 27 May 
2010).
Interview M: ex-guerrilera ORPA, member CONAVIGUA (Guatemala City, 26 May 
2010).
Interview N: former member Guatemalan Council of Mayan Women (Guatemala City, 
23 May 2010).
Interview O: ex-guerrillera, member CODEFEM (Guatemala City, 10 June 2010).
Interview P: male guerrilla leader URNG Quetzaltenango (Guatemala City, 24 May 
2010).
Interview Q: male guerrilla leader FAR (Guatemala City 17 May 2010).
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