On the question of ‘Where is home?’

 

Back in the airport, I drew an invisible circle pointing at each one of my children, my husband, and I, to respond to my son’s question: 

 

‘This is also my home’, I said. 

 

My son and his siblings feel the same way. Wherever we are together, that is where home is. Such sense of home captures the idea of home as a space of comfort that is created when we are around those we love and care about, whether we are in Canada, Guatemaya or in the middle of an airport. 

 

As my son said, I see both Guatemaya and Canada as my home. I see them as places I love and feel I belong. I have accumulated numerous lived experiences in both of these countries. I spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Guatemaya and share a collective history with the people there; and I have now spent half of my life in Canada studying, working, raising a family and have attained Canadian citizenship. In spite of this, I am not always welcome or made to feel that I belong in either of these places. 

 

Growing up in Guatemala (my use of the term Guatemala signals a history wracked by profound racism and gender discrimination, genocide, organised crime, drug trafficking and gang violence, flaccid democratic processes and neocolonial economic structures), under the shadow of state violence, war, and genocide against indigenous people had a significant impact on my feeling of belonging. Even within my family, this sense of home was not uncomplicated. As I have written elsewhere, it had an impact on the way I was brought up, my psyche, and socio-familial relationships. I grew up in a racialised and ethnically and culturally mixed family where relationships with extended family were dictated by class, ‘race’, gender and religious affiliation. It was, in the confines of my own home where I first learned the constructed social boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the privileged positions that such identity markers grant to some and deny to others in a society that openly discriminates against its original inhabitants. As an indigenous woman living in Canada, I experience persistent systemic racism and discrimination in new ways when I am in Guatemaya. 

 

As a Canadian, I have often made to feel I am not at home. I have been asked to go home many times, often imagined as an outsider, never recognised as a settler, and frequently considered a second-class citizen. Guatemaya and Canada, for me, are two different, yet interrelated, homes. At a personal level, it was my friendship with Canadian born friends that opened the door for me to come to Canada to study, and eventually set a home of my own here in Canada with long-lasting connections with my home in Guatemaya. At a more macro level, on one hand, is the interconnection between the indigenous peoples of Abya Yala (Central and South America) and Turtle Island (North America) that provides me with a sense of continuity, diversity and difference. I am grateful that being in Canada has allowed me greater freedom to explore the Mayan cosmovision and has made me more cognizant of the legacy in their similar colonial histories. While I recognised these countries are at different stages in their road to achieve multiculturalism and plurinationalism, I grieve their resistance to embrace diversity. On the other hand, it is their present economic interdependence that makes visible to me their differences and interrelation. I condemn their present imperialist relationship – more specifically, the role of Canadian mining companies in Guatemaya and the adverse effect this natural resource extraction has in Guatemayan life. I also feel anguish for the persistent social disparities, government corruption, and impunity that goes on there. 

 

Living in a state of multiplicity, not being considered Canadian and neither indigenous nor mestiza, little less Ladina, in Guatemala, while feeling you belong to multiple collectivities involves huge amounts of invisible emotional and intellectual labour  – particularly if you are a migrant mother – to carve a home. Learning from other feminists with similar experiences has provided me with concepts and terms to articulate and give meaning to my own. Chicana feminist and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, for instance, has aided me to rethink traditional conceptions of identity and history. She recognised what we know today as intersectionality and transnationality. That is, Anzaldúa described the experiences of those of us who move within and among multiple intersecting, often conflicting, socially, culturally, and infrastructural constructed worlds, geographical, social, economic and cultural borders as intrinsic to ‘borderland’ identities. The ‘borderlands’ in her writing are geographical, as well as in reference to multiple ethnicities, cultural heritages, nationalities, sexualities, religions and languages. I have experienced a similar borderland identity since I was a child. To explain my present experience, I add ‘home’ as a site of my intersecting identities. That is, I live and negotiate home, as a racialised migrant, as an indigenous woman with a Christian background, as a feminist, as a community leader and social artivist, as an academic, as a Canadian-Guatemayan, as a middle-class woman, as a Spanish speaker, and as a mother. As a result of these experiences, I embrace a homing desire for a world without borders, physical or imagined. 

 

Yet, living in a state of multiplicity is also extraordinarily empowering. It grants me the experience to live and negotiate my identity and sense of belonging in what sociologist Avtar Brah refers to as diaspora space. This describes a space that is inhabited ‘not only by those who have migrated but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous’. The term ‘indigenous’ here refers, for instance, to white European settlers in Canada rather than to First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples and to Ladinos (Guatemalans of Spanish descent or white Europeans) in Guatemala. This is a space where I actively work to dismantle racism and discrimination in many areas of social, economic, cultural and political life in Canada, while also supporting human rights in Guatemala. I constantly negotiate and selectively choose from both of these homes to carve my own. For instance, I work to embrace respect for diversity as a value to live by in our home, community and relationships. I have raised my children to speak Spanish and to embrace their multiple cultural and ethnic backgrounds. I follow Christian values and learn and draw from Mayan cosmovision to understand social justice and peace, to advocate for gender equality and equity and climate justice. 

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