Kesté: Refuge and Rebirth
“I feel happy here. I have my children, my grandchildren, my children studied, we have a house, a piece of land. Here, we feel like it was a rebirth for us, like the promised land because we never expected to find a place like this.”
-Ventura Morales, Guatemalan war survivor.
The brutal Guatemalan Internal Armed Conflict suffered its most violent period between 1981 and 1982, when State-sponsored scorched earth campaigns literally razed hundreds of rural villages from the map. Aimed at eliminating the local population seen as the support base for the guerrillas, the mostly Indigenous Maya populations fled towards the jungles and mountains in Western and Northern Guatemala. Eventually, over 50,000 Guatemalans crossed over into Southern Mexico seeking refuge while forming temporary camps.
Towards the end of the 1990’s, once the Peace Accords had been signed, most returned to Guatemala. Nevertheless, thousands decided to permanently remain in Mexico, land that many thank for saving their lives.
Santo Domingo Kesté, a town of roughly 5,000 people in Champotón, Campeche, is one of these camps that eventually formalized into a Mexican township. Yet 40 years after their arrival, due to their Guatemalan origin, the community lives complex processes of identity that clearly distinguishes from neighboring villages.
This project, the result of 3 years of work in Santo Domingo Kesté (2022-2024) thanks to a grant from Mexico’s National System of Art Creators (SNCA), aims to show how these war survivors and former refugees maintain direct ties to their native land, in particularly the Ixcán region where most of the families originate from, while navigating integration into Mexican society.
