Semillas: Art and Indigenous Defiance in Guatemala Available to Purchase

During the Guatemalan civil war, the military labeled a generation of Maya Indigenous children as “bad seeds” to justify their elimination. Some grew anyway, and some became artists. These Maya artists now use their bodies in public spaces to expose hidden sounds, language, and memories of the disappeared and turn them into decolonial gestures of healing. They create object-based works to expose the hidden underside of modernity, revealing Maya views and experiences of history, time, and space that precede art historical labels. Some artists bring light to the hidden function of coloniality in contemporary religion and in impeding justice for Indigenous peoples. Others reveal an ongoing defiance through self-preservation and safeguarding the spiritual. They address an array of experiences from rural violence, forced assimilation, migration, and the importance of language and ancestral memories. As defiance to the state and visual coloniality, their visual disobedience also indigenizes Central American art.