Living Across Borders: Guatemala Maya Immigrants in the US South

• Main Authors: William Brown, Mary Odem
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Emory Center for Digital Scholarship 2011-02-01
• Series: Southern Spaces
• Subjects: Biography; Economics; Global South; Industry and Labor; Latino Studies; Migration
• Online Access: https://southernspaces.org/node/42627

William Brown and Mary Odem, Children dancing at the Santa Eulalia feast day celebration, Cherokee County, Georgia, 2003. This multi-media essay explores Maya migration to the US South through the journeys of two families from Santa Eulalia, Guatemala, who became part of the Maya population of north Georgia. The narratives of Maria and Antonio and Alfredo and Juana reveal conditions that led to the mass migration of the Maya, their struggles to adapt to new locations of life and work, and the effects of their migration on families and communities back home. These migration stories situate the journeys within the political turmoil of late twentieth-century Guatemala and social and economic developments in the US South. As they struggled to provide a better future for themselves and their families, Maya migrants forged transnational social and economic ties that connected indigenous hometowns in Guatemala with their new places of settlement. Text by Mary Odem; video by William Brown and Mary Odem. Ensayo en Español