10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4931
application/pdf
2239-625X
4931
2
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-28914
Julia Morris
Anuac
¿Por qué Quédate? Frontiering through development in Guatemala
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
11
Thematic section: Economic nationalisms in a world on fire
2022-11-25
2021-09-28
2022-12-23
2022-12-23
175-204
1
Julia Morris
2022/11/25
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4931
175
University of North Carolina in Wilmington, United States
2239-625X
2
en
204
urn:nbn:it:unica-28914
¿Por qué Quédate? Frontiering through development in Guatemala
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4931/5318
11
                                       2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204




¿Por qué Quédate?
Frontiering through development in Guatemala
Julia Morris
University of North Carolina in Wilmington




Abstract: Across the global south, regimes of labour and mobility control are reforming
that attempt to manage the northern movement of people. By combining financing devel-
opment projects with explicit forms of border enforcement (including border personnel
training and new securitization technologies), western governments and southern elites
attempt to encourage publics (invariably poorer people of colour) to stay in local regions,
rather than seek better livelihoods elsewhere. By reference to the USAID funded Centros
Quédate or Stay Here Centres in Guatemala, this paper explores the merging of devel-
opment and migration governance regimes through the concept of “frontiering through
development.” The paper argues that initiatives such as these fail to consider the root
causes of colonialism and imperialism that have long led people to migrate in the first
place. Moreover, migration is cast as something problematic under discourses of popu-
list economic nationalist sentiment, rather than beneficial to migrants, country-of-origin
and destination regions. However, rather than passive recipients of patronising develop-
ment, I show how participants rework the Quédate programme to fit their own onward
goals. Paternalist development paradigms should take into account how crucial and em-
bedded mobile livelihoods are in present-day realities.


Keywords: Migration; Development; Borders; Frontiers; Colonialism.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Julia Morris
¿Por qué Quédate? Frontiering through development in Guatemala.
2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4931
176                                                                            Julia Morris

Introduction1
      I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that
      dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come. Do not come.
      The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.
      There are legal methods by which migration can and should occur, but we,
      as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal migration. And I believe if you
      come to our border, you will be turned back. So let’s discourage our friends,
      our neighbors, our family members from embarking on what is otherwise
      an extremely dangerous journey, where in large part, the only people who
      benefit are coyotes. United States Vice President Kamala Harris, 7 June 2021.

   During her first international trip abroad as Vice President, Kamala Harris
pronounced these memorable words in the ornate surroundings of the Palacio
Nacional de la Cultura in Guatemala City. Flanked by Guatemalan President
Alejandro Giammattei, Harris pledged a tough on borders approach that cen-
tres on addressing ‘the root causes of migration.’ As part of their so-called
Root Causes Strategy, Harris is heading the Biden Administration’s efforts to
advance local livelihoods in the Northern Triangle region of Central Amer-
ica: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras2. This article examines the U.S.
government’s strategy as symptomatic of what I term a “frontiering through
development” approach. I use the concept frontiering through development
in two main ways. First, to denote first the territorialisation aspect of devel-
opment regimes that impedes people’s mobility. Second, to detail the vast
amount of capital in development regimes as “resource frontiers” (Cons, Ei-
lenberg 2019). This strategy of financing development aid as a softer means
of migration governance is not unique. In recent years, regimes of labour and
mobility control are reforming that attempt to manage the northern move-
ment of people from the global south. Under this strategy, wealthier countries
(invariably in the global north) and networks of southern elites cast their eyes
on so-called “migration transit” and “source” country regions or strategically

1. This research was supported by grants from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
   I am immensely grateful to my UNCW research assistant, Alan Calderon, and all of those
   in Guatemala who shared their time and knowledge with us. Thanks to Cayden Norman for
   helping with crucial research contact collation. Audiences at the Society for Applied An-
   thropology Annual Meeting 2022 in Salt Lake City provided helpful comments on portions
   of this argument, as did colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
   including Biao Xiang and Iain Walker. My special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for
   making this article all the stronger. And to the editors of Anuac and Ann Kingsolver for
   their commitment to this special issue.
2. See the U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central Amer-
   ica (2021). Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/
   Root-Causes-Strategy.pdf, accessed on 01/01/2022.


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                                           177

capitalise on their geographical position (Morris 2020). By combining financ-
ing development projects with explicit forms of border enforcement (including
border personnel training and new securitisation technologies), western gov-
ernments attempt to encourage publics (invariably poorer people of colour) to
stay in global south regions.
   The frontiering through development strategy I put forward here con-
nects directly to this special issue’s focus on “economic nationalism” in that
much migration policy gains traction from discourses of populist econom-
ic sentiment. Preventing immigration from Central America is represented
as preserving jobs for those in the US. Yet, as researchers have well shown
(Chomsky 2018; Holmes 2013; Muller 1994), the distinction between domestic
and international labour is a false one. In reality, foreign workers – undocu-
mented and documented alike – buoy the American and global economy. The
broader global economy thrives on mobile workforces (Xiang 2006), as much
as the persistent poverty of majority Black and Brown life (McKittrick 2013)3.
Discourses of American economic nationalist supremacy negates histories of
imperialism and the violence of transatlantic slavery through to present-day
exploitation and neocolonial extractivism. As this article will show in the case
of Guatemala, frontiering through development strategies map onto these
protracted colonial logics and are neither effective or deeply supportive of
people’s livelihoods.
   The article draws primarily on fieldwork in Guatemala’s western Sololá
region, and specifically the town of Santa María Visitación, high in the Si-
erra Madre mountains. Migration is everywhere palpable in Santa María. On
most blocks, stores advertise how to receive remittances from the US. Locals
say that the pilons jutting out from the roofs of the towering marble white
houses in town indicate the anticipation of more remittances from travel and
work in the US. Multiple-story homes with neoclassical facades and grand
window dressings are known locally as arquitectura de remesas or “remittanc-
es architecture.” Nearly everyone I speak with has a migration story to tell:
of precarious journeys hiding in border-crossing trucks under the crushing


3. Throughout this article I use uppercase “Black” to convey aspects of collective history
   and social identity of people and cultures of African origin globally. “Brown”, referring to
   race, ethnicity, and culture, is used to describe a wide range of people of Indigenous, Latin,
   Middle Eastern, and South Asian descent. Usually, “Brown” is not capitalized because of
   the diversity of individuals’ countries, cultures, and ethnicities. However, I have chosen to
   also capitalize Brown to show how Brown is also a social identity connected to histories of
   racialization in which people of colour are discriminated as a group.


                                        2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
178                                                                           Julia Morris

weight of fruits, vegetables, and other produce; of the going rate to make it
up through Mexico and across the US border. It is a town where migration
is an indelible part of daily life – most everyone has attempted the journey
or at least considered it. It is towns like Santa María that have garnered the
interest of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and affili-
ated development agencies in their Root Causes approach. Such programmes
include the development of the unabashedly named the Centro Quédate or
Stay Here Centre. Centro Quédate operates as a network of training schools
across regions in Guatemala where there are high numbers of young people
who migrate. This article zooms in on Santa María’s Centro Quédate as a clear
example of the frontiering through development approach.




           Fig. 1: Arquitectura de Remesas (Remittances Architecture). Photo by
           J. Morris.


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                                        179

   Basing myself between Santa María Visitación, Guatemala City, and Flores
for a total of five months across 2021 and 2022, I have been examining different
U.S.-funded migration development programmes. The US government funds
a number of initiatives to provide long-term skills-building and livelihood
opportunities for locals (particularly those who might migrate), internal
migrants, and migrants from surrounding regions. These initiatives, while
nominally supporting local livelihoods, are devised to govern lower-middle
income migrants’ – and quite often Indigenous Guatemalans – mobility4. Since
the Biden Administration entered office in 2021, there has been an increase
in the numbers of people attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Last
year, 17% of undocumented border crossers (279,033 people) were recorded
from Guatemala: after Mexico and Honduras, the third most significant coun-
try of origin in the region (Pew Research Center 2021). Guatemala is not only
categorised as a sending country but also a transit country, passed through
by the majority of Central Americans, and increasingly Venezuelan, Haitian,
and African migrants, in their passage to reach the U.S. As a result, Guate-
mala has become a key site in the U.S. government’s efforts to limit southern
border migration. These strategies look to appease a polarised American elec-
torate, riled by years of xenophobic – and often explicitly racist – discourses
surrounding non-western immigration.
   My interest emerges from previous research into the development of migra-
tion governance strategies on small Pacific islands (Morris 2019, 2020, 2022a)
and in the Middle East (Morris 2020, 2021). I have examined the controversial
roles of NGOs in facilitating some of these arrangements (Morris 2022b). Many
initiatives are part of the allegedly “softer” side of immigration enforcement,
which merge development strategies with blatant frontiering goals. As with
my previous research sites, in Guatemala, regional migrants – and those from
further afield – are similarly encouraged to stay in the country rather than mi-
grating elsewhere, in particular the US. So too, like my past fieldwork locations,
the locations where externalised border regimes take place are no accident, but
are structured by deep legacies of colonialism (Morris 2021). Years of violent co-
lonial upheavals, resource depletion, border drawings and their consequential
impacts cannot be removed from migrations and their governance (Samaddar
2020). The drive towards frontiering through development extends from these

4. Typically, it is not the poorest people who migrate. Migration is an expensive endeavour
   and often requires loans, leasing of land, and extensive familial support. Many people in-
   cur considerable financial debt to make these journeys including the seizure of their lands
   for defaulted loan payments. See Heidbrink 2019.


                                      2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
180                                                                 Julia Morris

histories. Part of what this article seeks to detail is the underlying structural
reasons that account for both the migration of Guatemalans to the US and the
willingness of the Guatemalan government to agree to such frontiering through
development arrangements. I bring in a focus on the longue durée to understand
the extreme contradictions inherent in root causes strategies. I argue that the
root causes approach fails to consider – and indeed exasperates – the very root
causes of colonialism and imperialism that, in Guatemala, have disproportion-
ately affected lower income migrant and Indigenous Maya communities: subject
to conquest by imperial Spain, conquest by local and international capitalism,
through to present day frontiering development regimes. The kind of interna-
tional development interventions furthered by the Biden administration call for
technical solutions and ignore the structural inequality and racism fostered by
colonialism in the first place. They also overlook the importance that migration
has to local and global economies except when it comes to the mobility of the
wealthy, international elite. Yet, in 2021, remittances to Guatemala totaled a
record $15.3 billion, which was an increase of 35% from the previous year, and
makes up 17.8% of the country’s entire economy (World Bank 2022). Simultane-
ously, Guatemalan labour and skills are also indispensable to the US and global
economy. Alternatively, to take a more insidious angle, developments agencies
and affiliated government divisions recognise the profitability of undocumented
low wage labour. Instead, such programmes are merely a gauze for perpetually
facilitating a low wage disposable labour force: what de Genova (2013) describes
as the purchase of “illegality.”
   Understanding these asymmetrical relations has important implications for
debates over open migration as a form of colonial reparation (Nevins 2019).
It is no coincidence that frontiering development projects retrace the fault
lines of colonial extractive regimes. Guatemala is certainly distinct in terms of
its colonial histories and political and geographical structures, as this article
goes on to describe. However, there are significant overlaps in the logics of
financed border regimes, showing how colonial linkages still have a lasting
impact on our contemporary world. The funding of border enforcement, in-
ternational development, and military presence zig-zags from global north to
south, including ever-more western government and organisational invest-
ment in containment regimes and militarised border technologies (Besteman
2020). Yet, as this article, goes on to show, those targeted by development
interventions are by no means passive and subaltern actors. Instead, they re-
work these development strategies to fulfill their long-term migration goals.



2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                             181

   This article proceeds as follows. I start by extending work on migration and
development to explore the dimensions of migration governance regimes. I
then move into the coloniality of frontiering through development, tracing
the colonial histories that extend into the present. The heavy involvement of
US imperial interests spurred on decades of displacement and economic dev-
astation that contemporary development programmes now seek to address. I
draw on the example of Centro Quédate as one such USAID-promoted project.
But rather than passive recipients of such policies, I show how participants
rework the programme to fit their mobile livelihood patterns.

Frontiering Through Development
   International migration is governed through a multilayered architecture of
binding transnational regulations, but also a variety of “soft law” procedures
split across different governance levels (Kunz, Levenex and Pannizon 2011).
Within this, development has long been a buzz word in migration governance
circles (Bakewell 2012; de Haas 2010). As a governance strategy, stimulating
economic development and funding local livelihoods opportunities is prof-
fered by governments as a way of reducing migration from global south to
north. This mode of governance follows market-based solutions and, as a form
of neoliberal governmentality, is designed to immobilise potentially mobile
transnational subjects within the globalised economy (Likić-Brborić 2018).
Buoyed by “the new migration and development optimism” (Betts 2011: xxiv),
the migration development approach promotes temporary labour migration
schemes and development initiatives to allegedly produce “triple wins” for
receiving and sending states, in addition to migrants themselves.
   A growing body of scholarship, largely from anthropologists and geogra-
phers, is more circumspect about the long-term efficacy and morality of the
frontiering through development approach (Heidbrink 2020; Paoletti 2010).
As post-development critics have long pointed out (Escobar 1995; Este-
va et al. 2013), triumphalist accounts of international development projects
depoliticise how they can serve “a duality of care and control coupled with
exclusion” (Samaddar 2018). Rather than a form of economic development to
be celebrated, international projects that link migration and economic devel-
opment policy ultimately attempt to restrict people’s movements (Bakewell
2008). While mobility is celebrated for wealthy international elite, it is rep-
resented as symptomatic of failure among poor people of colour in the global
south. Instead, camps and entire global regions become holding territories



                                2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
182                                                                 Julia Morris

of an enormous amount of labour, characterised by a cordoned division of
low-wage, labour-intensive production. People are kept in place or strategi-
cally held within wealthy urban and global north contexts through precarious
visa stipulations and other mechanisms of social control and “ghettoization”
(Wacquant 2009). Simultaneously, within the racialised economy, they be-
come part of the global supply chain of commodities, such as in agricultural
plantations (Murray Li 2015), special economic and outsourced manufactur-
ing zones (Morris 2020), garment and construction industries (Kathiravelu
2016), domestic labour (Rosenbaum 2017), and for providing an immobilised
captive labour force for mobile tourist economies (Sheller 2003). Bodily (im)
mobilities are a crucial part of these systems of transnational exchange, im-
mobilised in order to produce the mobility of commodities and other bodies.
While proffered as a form of meaningful local development, such frontier-
ing through development projects can become a way for networks of elites to
profit, disallowing the movement of those who need to – and in Guatemala,
majority Indigenous Mayans – in the process.
   Equally, academics and policymakers question whether development aid
does actually prevent migration, pointing out that economic growth and im-
proved education typically increase people’s capacities and aspirations to
migrate (de Haas 2010). There is increasing evidence that distributing develop-
ment aid to migrant-origin countries does not deter migration (de Haas 2007).
Rather, it generally produces an increase in emigration as people’s access to
education and international connections rise (Dao et al. 2016). More dispos-
able income also means not only an ability to pay the costs of migration, but
also the ability to invest in such aspects as Internet access, overseas business
connections, language skills, and tourism: all of which inspire and support mi-
gration. Yet, when it comes to global south people of colour-majority regions,
migration is cast as something problematic, rather than beneficial to mi-
grants, country-of-origin and destination regions (Bakewell 2008). Politicians
frequently rely on populist discourses of economic nationalist sentiment, ob-
fuscating the indispensability of global workforces to domestic economies. In
reality, as the COVID-19 pandemic showed, the contemporary global economy
is so globally interconnected that the concept of jobs having a national iden-
tity or reducing those jobs of people in the US is an erroneous one (Chomsky
2018). But these framings cyclically nurture xenophobic ideologies and racist
worldviews as countries in the global north look to protect themselves against
the mobility of people from the global south and guard hegemonic whiteness



2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                             183

(Hage 2000). Such racialised dynamics map onto the policing that occurs with-
in global south regions, where the Black and Brown poor can become racially
profiled as “illegal” by local police forces (Gazzotti, Hagan 2020). Government
efforts would be better deployed in shaping not deterring migration.
   Harris’ statement that “the only people who benefit are coyotes” belies the
political economic capital that is generated through these development re-
gimes, and beyond Guatemala’s borders. Indeed, the private sector constitutes
a substantial part of this strategy. Organisations have mushroomed across
“migration hot spot” regions (Cabot 2019) to provide a range of outsourced
governance strategies. This includes local livelihoods projects through to
explicit forms of border control: such as walls, drones, biometric tracking,
immigration detention centres, holding facilities, and other forms of polic-
ing and incarceration. NGOs, corporations, academic research institutes, and
other interested parties come together as part of this “immigration industrial
complex” (Golash-Boza 2009) centered on the capture and control of human
movement. Meanwhile, western governments in particular have extract-
ed exponential symbolic value from counterbalancing the representation of
hard-lined border enforcement with one of developmental care.
   Important to consider also is the coloniality of migration governance re-
gimes. Today’s population movements and migration governance regimes are
structured by colonial histories (Samaddar 2020). Root causes programmes
dehistoricise histories of Spanish colonialism then US imperialism in Gua-
temala, which set the stage for present-day frontiering through development
projects. Many development projects target Indigenous Maya in a country
where 21.8 percent of the Indigenous population lives in poverty as opposed
to 7.4 percent of the wider population. In fact, Guatemala is unique among
other Central American and Caribbean regions in that the Indigenous Maya
population still to this day constitute a majority: over 60% of Guatemala’s pop-
ulation. Yet, Indigenous Maya campesinos in particular have experienced land
dispossession, threats to livelihoods, and ultimately forced migration – fol-
lowed by development interventions designed to keep them in place. However,
migrants – and in Guatemala, Indigenous Mayan populations – by no means
passively accept these sorts of interventions. Rather, Guatemalan Mayans
are some of the most powerful actors in Guatemalan civil society, who have
forged transethnic alliances and led organisational and grassroots strategies
to constrain attempted domination (Grandin 1997; Tzul Tzul 2016). So too,
regional migrants also craft their own self-value, drawing attention to their



                                2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
184                                                                          Julia Morris

efforts by mobilising through transnational solidarity networks including mi-
grant caravans (Correa-Cabrera, Koizumi 2021) and asylum systems (Coutin
2011). Although individuals operate within a deeply unbalanced system, many
navigate through their own modes of survival and activist strategies.
   The next section turns to the coloniality of frontiering through devel-
opment – to adapt Anibal Quijano’s (2000) “coloniality of power.” Using
this expression, Quijano describes the structure of power, knowledge, and
hegemony that stretches from colonialism. Racialised and class-based hier-
archies persist in the present in the uneven distribution of wealth, resources,
health, life expectancy, rights and freedoms. By historicising the present-day
frontiering through development projects, this section illuminates the con-
tradictions inherent in root causes strategies.

The Coloniality of Frontiering through Development
      There is every likelihood that the payment of good wages, coupled with
      sanitary surroundings and civilizing influences, will breed in Guatemala and
      in all of Central America strong, self-reliant, and progressive races of people
      (Frederick Upham Adams, Conquest of the Tropics (1914).

      I will also continue to work with CEOs around the world to encourage
      investment in Guatemala. And Mr. President, I look forward to working with
      you on that. As I shared with you, in Washington, D.C., I recently convened
      some of our biggest CEOs who have a profound interest for many reasons
      on supporting the work that happens here and the work that can happen
      here in Guatemala to, again, uplift folks who may have been overlooked or
      neglected, but also uplift the natural capacity and resources of this beautiful
      country (United States Vice President Kamala Harris, 7 June 2021).

   Guatemala, located just south of Mexico, bordered by Belize to the east and
El Salvador and Honduras to the south, represents what Anna Tsing (2003),
Michael Watts (2014), and others have termed a resource frontier. Guatemala
has a long history around resource extraction, where natural resources and
people’s labour power have been enclosed, extracted, and incorporated into
circuits of production and consumption (Castro, Lavinas Picq 2017). Histories
of Spanish colonialism then US imperialism in Guatemala set the stage for
the economic and social dispossession experienced in present-day frontier-
ing through development projects. Indigenous Maya campesinos in particular
have been the target of immense upheavals. Mayan Indigenous peoples, of
which there are twenty-four ethnolinguistic groups, have experienced almost
five centuries of conquest, begun in 1524 by Spanish colonialists. The era of
Spanish colonialism resulted in highly unequal patterns of land distributions


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                                   185

for local farmers experienced through to ongoing processes of accumulation
by dispossession in U.S.-funded development.
   Under the policy of congregacion, Maya communities were forced out of
their homelands and corralled into settlements (Schwartz 1990). Through this
imposed nucleation, the Spanish colonial administration looked to manage
and control Indigenous populations by creating centralised pools of labour
that could be utilised for imperial objectives. Diverse Indigenous groups were
umbrellaed together as congregaciones, despite being far from homogeneous.
Organised akin to a feudal system, Indigenous communities were forced to pay
tributes to Spanish colonists in the form of goods and services (Farriss 1984).
Colonial resource extraction concentrated on the cacao-rich Pacific Coast and
the temperate hills east and south of the capital city, Santiago, where indi-
go was grown, cattle reared, and multiple corn crops harvested on an annual
basis. Maya from these regions were recruited to provide labour on planta-
tions, while those of the northwest highlands were ignored to the extent that
they were seen to inhabit “among imperial Spain’s least-prized possessions”
(Lovell 1988: 32). Many Maya fled to outlying rural areas to escape the brutal
exploitation of forced resettlement in the congregacion enclosure. This system
of forced agriculture was legitimised by promoting a national ladino identity
(originally those of mixed Spanish and Guatemalan Indigenous heritage, but
later taken to be “non-Indian”) that marginalised the Mayan majority (Colby
2006)5. By the time Guatemala gained independence and banana companies
stepped at the turn of the twentieth century, deep social divisions marked
Guatemalan society.
   After independence, Guatemala was governed until 1870 by a series of
conservative regimes, who focused on forging a paternalist state centered on
maturing Hispanic institutions and attracting foreign colonists. The coun-
try’s Spanish-descended Guatemalan elites called on the government to force
highland Maya to labour in agricultural plantations. The Guatemalan govern-
ment focused on sparking the local economy through a series of land acts in
1825 and 1829 that privatised communally held land (Handy 1985). During
the Mariano Gálvez regime (1831-1838), Indigenous Maya were forced off land
that they could not provide title to, regardless of any claims they might have,
unless they paid an exorbitant fee. Those who refused were arrested and some


5. Unlike the term mestizo, used in contexts such as Mexico to celebrate a mixed heritage
   through nation-building projects, nation-building in Guatemala focused on a process of
   whitening, whereby the status of ladino was elevated to white Europeans (Hale 2002).


                                    2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
186                                                                 Julia Morris

sold as indentured servants for local landowners. These legislative acts were
designed to benefit ladino landowners and foreign investors. The Barrios dic-
tatorship (1873-1883) initiated taxation and labour laws that forced Mayans
back into agricultural labour and vicious cycles of debt peonage. Vast tracts of
land were labelled as unclaimed by the Barrios government, moving into the
hands of ladinos and creoles. This land acquisition was spurred on by domestic
and foreign investments in the cultivation of coffee, especially in the relative-
ly untouched Verapaz highlands and Pacific piedmont. Indigenous Maya were
forcibly recruited to provide a disposable seasonal work force for the coffee
harvest under the mandamiento draft instituted by Barrios in 1876 (Carmack
1988). This was replaced by legalised debt peonage in 1894 and eventually
a vagrancy law in 1934, which required those farming less than 6.9 acres of
land to work part of the year as wage labourers for others. Any uprisings were
brutally stifled by government militia through capture, imprisonment, and ex-
ecution. These labour demands and forms of violent suppression contribute
to the preconditions for the present-day system that Maya encounter today –
and people’s efforts to move for better livelihoods (Greene 2009).
   The banana trade continued the ever-rolling expropriation of land and
drafting of labour experienced by Maya from Spanish colonisation. In the
wake of Guatemala’s independence from Spain (1821), the Monroe Doc-
trine sedimented U.S. imperial interest in the Latin American region. This
opened the floodgates for organisational interest, with Guatemala imagined
as a storehouse of natural riches, a source of future wealth (Striffler, Moberg
2005). Widely known as Banana Republics in the nineteenth century, Central
American countries, many in financially unstable situations, gave American
and other Western companies market access to advance the banana trade,
which yielded vast profits for Western producers and local elites. Multination-
al heavyweights, such as Standard Fruit (now Dole), Cuyamel Fruit Co. (later
acquired by United Fruit), and the United Fruit Company (UFC, now Chiquita),
exerted their powerful influence to gain control over local farmlands, manip-
ulate government officials and the media (Colby 2011). During the regimes of
Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) and Jorge Ubico (1931-1944), Maya were
further ostracised and repressed through extensive networks of draconian po-
lice forces, spies, and the mandamiento forced labour draft. By 1930, UFC was
the single largest landowner in Guatemala – leaving minimal habitable land
or self-governing economic opportunities for Indigenous rural farmers, who
experienced incredibly low standards of living and monocrop dependency



2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                             187

(Reyna 2016). Governments that blocked UFC from entering the country, such
as Honduras, found themselves overthrown, marking a succession of political
upheavals in the interests of the banana trade for western markets.
   The agrarian reform of Jacobo Arbenz, designed to promote peasants’ au-
tonomy and lessen the grip of banana corporates on Guatemala (Colby 2011),
resulted in a now infamous CIA-funded coup. Between 1945 and 1950, Ar-
benzʼs predecessor, Juan Jose Arevalo, helped organise the first cooperatives
in the Guatemalan countryside in combination with moves to improve the
education system and promote Mayan languages. Arevalo abolished the va-
grancy law and passed legislation allowing workers the right to organise. After
election in 1951, Arbenz, a left-leaning former military officer, pushed for-
ward these reforms, which threatened the political monopoly of U.S. banana
conglomerates. Arbenz was not only supportive of worker’s rights but also fo-
cused on undoing the imperial hold of UFC on Guatemala. Arbenz denounced
UFC’s rail, telephone, and telegraph system monopoly. Importantly, he also
signed a sweeping land redistribution law in 1952 to give undeveloped lands
held by large property owners to rural landless farmers, who constituted 90%
of the population. Then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Direc-
tor Allen Dulles both had economic interests in the Boston-based UFC. UFC
utilised their close ties to the U.S. government to persuade President Dwight
Eisenhower to approve a CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew Arbenz in 1954
and reversed the land reform. This operation pushed Guatemala into a brutal
36-year civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. The increasing turn of Maya
communities away from plantation labour, requests for titles to historically
Indigenous-inhabited tracts of land, and the encroachment of transnational
corporations onto their land (often with the support of the government) led to
direct confrontations with the state (Grandin 2000). Over these four decades, a
deadly system of widespread slaughter by successive military regimes claimed
the lives of hundreds of thousands of Mayans across Guatemala, culminating
in the massacres of the 1980s. During this period, the U.S. provided counter-
insurgency training and military supplies to Guatemalan military and police,
which heightened the escalation of violence.
   Large-scale Mayan migration began in the late 1970s. Many Maya ended up
in camps in southern Mexico run by the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (ibid). In the 1980s, the Guatemalan army identified the Mayan
population as subversive and supportive of leftist insurgency movements from
the Mayan highlands. A massive counterinsurgency war and genocidal policies



                                2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
188                                                                            Julia Morris

against Maya led to an estimated one million Maya leaving their homelands
between 1981 and 1985. Some 440 highlands villages were destroyed during the
1981-1983 period, with over 150,000 Maya were killed or “disappeared” during
this period alone (Greene 1999). Around one million Mayan villagers were in-
ternally displaced, and 200,000 sought refuge in southern Mexico, where many
remain. Many also sought refuge in the forests and mountains, while other so-
cial reformists became part of resistance movements, and still more moved to
squatter settlements in Guatemala City, eschewing their language and visible
cultural identity through “ladinoization” in an effort to survive (Manz 1988).
Eighty-three percent of those subject to violence were Maya, while others were
largely professional, middle-class Guatemalan political exiles (CEH 1999). The
violence across the country massively disrupted patterns of commercial trade,
resulting in the loss of livelihoods for many Maya, including huge unemploy-
ment that lingers to this day. In this context, migration has become a survival
strategy for Maya to find above-subsistence jobs with many attempting to make
their way up to the United States and Canada.
   The U.S. has long benefited from the wealth made on Guatemalan planta-
tions and the importation of Guatemalan-produced commodities. Indigenous
Maya in particular have exponentially contributed to the U.S. consumer econ-
omy, including providing arduous plantation labour for coffee, indigo, banana,
and palm oil production. Yet, the U.S. government militated against the move-
ment of Maya, deriving further profit from the spectacle – and material effects
– of “illegality” (de Genova 2013) as part of an expanded politics of consump-
tion. Because the U.S. was still supporting the Guatemalan political regimes,
the Reagan administration refused to acknowledge Guatemalan migrants
as refugees (Coutin 2011). Instead, Indigenous Maya and other low-income
Guatemalan migrants looking for protection were classified as “economic mi-
grants”6. As a result, many Guatemalans became undocumented in the U.S. A
vast number found work in agriculture, construction, and service industries,
and quite often in low-wage precarious working contexts, once again prof-
itable to American industry (Fink 2003). Many migrants stayed in the U.S.,
supporting the American economy in some of the most dangerous and low-


6. The Reagan administration’s denial of the asylum cases of Guatemalans and Salvadorans
   led to a class-action lawsuit in 1985 brought by migrants and their supporters against the
   INS and the Justice Department, later known as American Baptist Church (ABC) v. Thorn-
   burgh. The lawsuit ended in a settlement that required the INS re-adjudicate the cases
   of all Guatemalans and Salvadorans in the U.S. who had arrived by 1990 and been denied
   their asylum claims.


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                             189

est-paid jobs in the country, as their precarious status made – and continues
to make – them subject to heightened exploitation (Stuesse 2016). Others
were deported under the harsh ‘96 immigration laws of the Clinton admin-
istration, which mandated the deportation of immigrants convicted of minor
infractions such as traffic violations or marijuana possession (Golash-Boza
2015). The escalation of deportation has been profitable to a range of state
and private sector actors, including “not just police and immigration officials,
but airline executives, pilots, stewards, and other passengers” (Walters 2002:
266). So too, the detention industry, comprised of mammoth corporations but
also NGOs and other government agencies that provide contractual services
to facilities, has exploded in recent years (Morris 2017). This includes both
within the U.S. but also in Mexico and Guatemala, where securitised facilities
and NGO-run shelters have mushroomed along migrant trails in the region as
part of the outsourced governance of mobility (Olayo-Méndez 2017). Mean-
while, Guatemala continues to be a place of informal US imperialism where
companies extract capital from the country centered on the governance of
human mobility.
   Development projects have long been connected to colonial concerns with
the control of Indigenous mobility. USAID development began in earnest in
Guatemala in the 1950s as part of the post-war explosion of international de-
velopment in formerly colonised regions (Sundberg 1998). Following the 1996
Peace Accords, which signaled an end to Guatemala’s devastating 36-year civil
conflict, USAID focused their development efforts on regions in Guatemala
with high levels of out-migration. As much as development is presented as
a tool for social mobility, its use as a means of immobilisation is explicit in
that “irregular migration” now constitutes a central pillar of USAID’s work.
Regions that have historically been ravaged by the violence of U.S.-funded
genocidal regimes, such as the Western Highlands, have become hotbeds for
development interventions. U.S. funding has focused on financing private
sector industry in sectors such as agricultural plantations, healthcare, edu-
cation, environmental conservation, and ecological tourism. These initiatives
are ostensibly designed to support people’s livelihoods, while simultaneously
functioning as forms of governance and resource extractive projects that ben-
efit big business by fixing allegedly recalcitrant Indigenous subjects in place.
The final section turns to look at the system of frontiering through develop-
ment as it operates under the public campaign in the long-ravaged Western
Highlands, ¡Quédate Aqui! (Stay Here!).



                                2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
190                                                                  Julia Morris

(Im)mobility frontiers
   I sit inside the air-conditioned offices of Centro Quédate in Santa María
with Ernesto. Ernesto is just 17 years old, but he has already made the treach-
erous journey northwards to the US. With few economic opportunities locally,
and a minimum wage far at odds with what he could earn in the US, migration,
Ernesto describes, is his main option to support his family in a small village on
the outskirts of Santa María. At the time, Ernesto tells me, the going rate was
$15,000 overlanding to the US border through coyote networks: far beyond
the prices of a plane ticket and my own journey to Guatemala. Even when
taking into account these exorbitant costs, the personal safety risks, and the
back-breaking cash-in-hand labour on the other side of the border, the journey
was still worth it in Ernesto’s and many others I spoke withs eyes. Although
the minimum wage in Guatemala is roughly $12 a day, in Santa María it is far
less: sometimes as little as $5 daily. Ernesto describes how sleeping ten to a
room, as his father did in the hot crop fields of North Carolina, would be bear-
able, given the financial support it could lend, far above that available locally.
But Ernesto was stopped short of making this journey a second time, which is
how he came to be speaking with me here at Santa María’s Centro Quédate,
after I had come by in the hopes of finding out more about the programme.
After deportation back from the border following a failed crossing attempt,
Ernesto was recommended by local authorities and his family to enroll at Cen-
tro Quédate. This would, they told him, give him a kickstart in Santa María
through local enterprise. It would create a long-term future for the town, rath-
er than one sustained by overseas remittances. Alternatively, it would put off
the inevitable journey until a safer opportunity arose when Ernesto had the
qualifications to migrate with documentation.
   Santa María’s Centro Quédate is just one of a series of training day schools
that have opened in the last five years in 25 municipalities in the five depart-
ments of the Mayan Western Highlands (Huehuetenango, Quetzaltenango,
Totonicapán, Quiché, and San Marcos): the ethnically diverse region where the
majority of civil war massacres took place. Funded by USAID, Centro Quédate
offers a range of skills-training programmes to young people largely between
the ages of 12 to 19 who might be thinking of or have already attempted to
migrate undocumented to the US. The majority of public schools in Guatema-
la are free, but often come with prohibitive costs for educational supplies, far
beyond the means of many poor larger families. In contrast, Centro Quédate is
free and amply resourced. For some, it might be the only school that they can


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                                 191

afford to attend. Ernesto describes the options on offer including hairdressing
experience, computer and mechanical repairs, and English language training
for work in Guatemala’s growing multinational industry of call centres or as
tour guides in the nearby popular Lago Atitlán site. The latter call centre and
tour guiding options hint at some of the tensions of the programmes. Centres
such as that of Quédate are funded to impede the physical mobility of people
in the global south. Simultaneously, through their labour, participants sup-
port the mobility and economies of local elites and those in the Global North.




            Fig. 2: Santa María’s Centro Quédate, Photo by J. Morris.




                                    2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
192                                                                          Julia Morris

   The opening of Centro Quédate came in the wake of a huge publicity drive
across Guatemala that began in 20147. At this time, the numbers of unac-
companied children migrating to the US began increasing. Parents made
the difficult decisions to send their children to be with extended family
or friends in the hopes that their youngsters would have better long-term
opportunities. The then First Lady, Rosa Leal de Pérez, a psychologist, and
married to former President Otto Pérez Molina (2012-15), became heavily in-
volved in promoting the ¡Quédate! campaign in her role as Secretariat of the
Secretaría de Bienestar Social de la Presidencia (SBS): a position tradition-
ally held by the First Lady. The campaign built on US Customs and Border
Protection agency-funded initiatives such as the 2014 “Dangers Awareness”
campaign and the 2015 “Know the Facts” campaign. Across Guatemala, glossy
brochures and posters, radio broadcasts, songs, mobile phone jingles, and
school activities now all encouraged youth simply to “Stay!” Pérez toured
regions in Guatemala’s Western Highlands with substantial out-migration, as
well as majority Guatemalan schools, medical centres, and youth shelters in
the US. When launching the campaign at the National Palace of Culture, she
declared that, “It hurts my soul to see the problems that our children face, but
together we will get out of this crisis” (“Me duele en el alma ver los problemas
a los que se enfrentan nuestros niños, pero juntos saldremos adelante de esta
crisis”). In 2015, President Pérez Molina was forced to resign from office over
charges of corruption and human rights abuses during the civil war. However,
the ¡Quédate! campaign continued with the change of presidency, capturing
the interest of USAID. Between 2018 to 2023, USAID pledged an investment
of $65 million into the project. They visually backed it with a slickly produced
short film series with Golden-Globe-nominated director Jayro Bustamante
and actress María Mercedes Coroy. These ¡Quédate! films celebrate the beau-
ty and natural resources of Guatemala, highlighting the different initiatives
kickstarted among young people through the Centro Quédate programmes.
   Ernesto, like many of his fellow students, is Indigenous K’iche’. According
to the Guatemalan Secretariat of Social Welfare, 95 percent of unaccompanied
minors returned to Guatemala are Indigenous – primarily K’iche’ and Mam
children from rural communities in the departments of Quetzaltenango, San
Marcos, Quiché, Huehuetenango, and Totonicapán (Heidbrink 2020). Many of
Ernesto’s, and other young people’s, livelihood challenges connect directly to

7. See Heidbrink (2020) for a powerful historical account of Quédate and similar programmes
   in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States.


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                              193

the ruptures of past colonial regimes. The 1996 Peace Accords stipulated that
landless campesinos could receive land tenure from the state. However, the
vast majority of Maya returning from Mexico (including Ernesto’s family) were
unable to obtain any land, and endure landlessness to this day, renting their
house, as part of the systemic racism of Guatemala’s “pigmentocracy” (Hale
2002). Guatemala still has one of the most unequal systems of land tenure
in the world. 78 percent of arable land is concentrated in the ownership of 8
percent of landholders (Tramel 2019). The recruitment of Indigenous youth as
border enforcement patrols, park rangers, archaeological site guides, and for
a variety of extractive projects (including logging and tourism) reveals how
Indigenous bodies and their vulnerable mobilities become sources of profit
through their labour power. ¡Quédate! characterises how development agen-
cies do not address these root causes. Rather, migration is separated from the
actual structural factors that provoke it.
   The strategy of frontiering through development is noticeably stark across
the centre. Regularly, Ernesto and his fellow students receive lectures on the
dangers that they face in migrating. A poster on the wall depicts stick figures
falling off the tops of trains, being held at gunpoint, and drowning in rivers.
These sorts of narratives create a spectacle of danger and deterrence. Such
discursive and policy responses presume that it is a lack of education or mis-
information that is to blame for migration, rather than the social inequality
and structural violence that so many of my interlocutors spoke of. Meanwhile,
these strategies disregard the border controls that produce these precarious
pathways in the first place. Ernesto and others I talk to all intend to reattempt
the journey northward. Many merely bide their time in acquiring skills that
might be useful for living in the US. Increased border controls only put them
and others at more risk as they strive to navigate ever more restrictions on
their migration routes.
   Underneath the glossy ¡Quédate! spectacle, Ernesto and his friend Jorge
express more reservations. Jorge, also enrolled at Santa María’s Centro Qué-
date, and like Ernesto, K’iche’ Maya, asks, “What about the education system
here? What about healthcare? It’s good to learn a trade, but they think this
will help?” As Jorge makes clear, the programme has not addressed much of
the structural violence and inequality that both he and Ernesto endure on
a daily basis. Rather, it presupposes that misinformation around migration
dangers and a lack of education and skills are to blame for their migration
attempts. In reality, neither Jorge or Ernesto are naïve about the dangers of



                                 2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
194                                                                    Julia Morris

migrating northward. Nor are either of them lacking in skills or drive. We sit
by the row of computers in the Centro, which most of the students could not
afford, talking about it further. Jorge says, “Sure, I’d like to stay here, but if I
want to learn to be a mechanic, or fix computers, I’m going to need the mate-
rials for it. I don’t have the kinds of resources I’d need to buy them”. Ernesto
chimes in, pointing out that “migrating to the US isn’t something we want to
do, but the options are limited”. He continues, “I know it’ll be tough. I’ll have
to do things I don’t want to, like working in a restaurant kitchen in a big city.
I also know people in construction. I’ll do any of that, to earn money to help
my family here”.
   Both Jorge and Ernesto highlight the major failings of the ¡Quédate! ini-
tiative. No substantial resources or personal supplies were made available to
participants beyond those at the Centro. Nor have there been school schol-
arships or training programmes for high-skilled youth employment to earn
livable wages, which might change the economic conditions that prompt mi-
gration. Jorge and Ernesto could still make far more through cash-in-hand
labour in the US. This all speaks to the symbolic nature of ¡Quédate!. Little
thought has been given to addressing the structural inequalities that impact
on the lives of Indigenous youth, such as Jorge, making migration a logical
option. As we discuss Jorge’s and Ernesto’s motivations and desires to mi-
grate, I cannot help but notice the contradictions of the gleaming purple and
gold ¡Quédate! poster on the wall of the Centro. Jorge and Ernesto want to
contribute to the survival of their households: as financial providers through
migration. The sorts of skills on offer will largely not, they both point out, of-
fer economic stability for their families. Instead, the ¡Quédate! initiative will
merely reproduce the economic marginalisation their families face. Yet, as the
stark juxtaposition between the demanding rhetoric of ¡Quédate! and their
mobility desires make clear, and research on ‘development’ has so often found
(Escobar 1995), many of the paternalising initiatives on offer ignore these ex-
periences and perspectives.
   Both Jorge and Ernesto come from families who have long been high-
ly-skilled farmers. Yet, family-based agricultural practices are not valued in
the Centro Quédate programs. Past development initiatives radically altered
land use patterns. Now, ¡Quédate! programs compel majority Indigenous pop-
ulations to become part of unequal global markets, such as through call centre
work and tourism, that will likely not provide the promised benefits, and may
be socially damaging in the process. They gloss over the deep structural in-



2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                                   195

equalities that spurs on migration in the first place, whereby development and
state-led programmes have long displaced and regulated Indigenous mobility
and access to the region. The ¡Quédate! program also fails to recognise the
importance of the transnational social connections voiced by Jorge. Familial,
friendship, and diasporic ties reveal how long histories of migration – includ-
ing the impact of colonial wealth accumulation and extractive economies
on Indigenous communities in particular – play an important part in deci-
sion-making. For many Maya of Guatemala, migration is a survival strategy
connected to histories of land ownership, debt, and violence.
   Certainly, Jorge and Ernesto are not immune to these debates. They both
express deep feelings of rootedness or arraigo in their communities, as well
as a longing to support their families by whatever means. Jorge voiced this
clearly to me, saying:
     I was born here, I grew up here, this is my home, but I want to make money
     myself to help my family. I can’t earn enough to do anything but scrape by
     here. My dad did that before he came back to be with us, some of my cousins
     have also gone to America. They’ve built a house for their parents here in
     town. I want to be able to give my parents more of that, but I can’t do that
     with what they’re offering here.

   Ernesto nodded as Jorge spoke, adding, “I am going to return to Guatemala.
This is why I want to go to work, to give it everything I’ve got and then get
my family set up here. Start more local businesses that actually help people
and give a livable wage.” With these professional and personal goals in mind,
Ernesto and Jorge place mobility front and center of local development. Both
rework the skills on offer for their own long-term goals for livable futures for
them and their communities. They excitedly practice their English with me,
demonstrating how easily it will be for them to move to the US – or wherever
needed. By receiving computer skills accreditation, and taking advantage of
technological equipment ostensibly designed to territorialise them in place,
Jorge and Ernesto direct development towards their own onward frontiers.

Conclusions
   Classic critiques of development argue that local knowledge is eschewed in
favor of imposed technical solutions (Escobar 1995; Esteva et al. 2013). Instead,
development often does more harm than good, encouraging diverse regions
of the world to adapt to western capitalist ways of life. Development is also
predicated on exploitation, where certain regions and peoples serve as cheap
labour and are subject to immense resource extraction, ecological destruction,


                                   2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
196                                                                 Julia Morris

and violence. ¡Quédate! is unique in that the programmes explicitly focus on
the governance of people’s movement. These attempts are combined with the
channeling of people’s labour power through training programmes that bene-
fit foreign industry and mobile tourist elites. Seen in a historical perspective,
it is stark how closely the twenty-first century of US-led resource frontier de-
velopment resembles the colonial era of the sixteenth, for the continuities
between extractive regimes of conquest, dispossession, and control are strik-
ing. International development programmes in Guatemala are designed to
serve a similar function to colonial congregaciones – as an institutional means
by which political elites’ level authoritarian mechanisms of control on mar-
ginalised populations, under the guise of socioeconomic “development.”
    By taking a longue durée approach, this paper has argued that the contem-
porary extractive era of regional migration development projects exasperates
long-standing patterns of racialised inequality and labour segmentation gener-
ated by colonial extractive capitalism. Projects such as ¡Quédate! are proffered
as forms of development designed to address the root causes of mass migration
to the United States. However, they fail to address the structural inequality
and differential access to resources advanced by colonial regimes – and on the
contrary, exasperates them. From histories of dispossession and displacement
from their lands, Indigenous Maya are now subject to yet more interventions
that places them in enforced relationships with the land and global econo-
my: as tour guides and in outsourced call centres deemed profitable for global
markets. These industries attempt to function as boundary-making practices
over people’s socioeconomic and physical mobility. At the same time, political
economic value is also extracted from Black and Brown bodies in the spec-
tacle of enforcement. The US government counterbalances the presentation
of humanitarian benevolence towards “third world” populations with one of
authoritarian securitisation as Guatemala has become an explicit part of the
US enforcement frontier. By considering frontiering through development
strategies through the lens of economic nationalism, this article exposes the
fallacies of the domestic/international labour distinction advanced in popu-
list political rhetoric. Such a framing renders invisible the indispensability of
migrant workers to global and local economies, as much as people’s frequent
exploitation. It also obfuscates how crucial migration is to people in the global
north and south as a livelihood strategy. In the meantime, the “Make Ameri-
ca Great” line nurtures xenophobic and racist sentiments that are ultimately
harmful to social relations.



2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                            197

   Although represented as objects of policy, Indigenous youth are by no
means passive recipients of frontiering policies. Instead, they navigate at-
tempted forms of marginality by reworking development for their own onward
goals. With the global political penchant for the frontiering through devel-
opment approach, highlighting people’s efforts to challenge impoverishment
and marginalisation is crucial. It would be better if programs such as ¡Qué-
date! embraced migration and young people’s aspirations as a development
frontier.




                               2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
198                                                                       Julia Morris

References
Bakewell, Oliver, 2010, “Keeping Them in Their Place”: The Ambivalent Relationship
     between Development and Migration in Africa, Third World Quarterly, 29, 7:
     1341-1358.
Bakewell, Oliver, ed, 2012, Migration and Development, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar
     Publishing.
Besteman, Catherine, 2020, Militarized Global Apartheid, Durham, Duke University
     Press.
Betts, Alexander, 2011, Introduction, in Global migration Governance, Alexander Betts,
      ed, Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1-33.
Cabot, Heath, 2019, The Business of Anthropology and the European Refugee Re-
     gime, American Ethnologist, 46, 3: 261-275.
Carmack, Robert M., 1988, ed, Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatema-
    lan Crisis, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press.
Castro, Juan, Manuela Lavinas Picq, 2017, Statelessness as Landgrab: A Political His-
     tory of Maya Dispossession in Guatemala, American Quarterly, 69, 4: 791-799.
CEH (Commission for Historical Clarification), 1999, Guatemala Memory Silence: Con-
     clusions and Recommendations, Guatemala City, CEH.
Chomsky, Aviva, 2018, “They Take Our Jobs!”: and 20 Other Myths about Immigration,
    Boston, Beacon Press.
Colby, Jason M., 2006, “Banana Growing and Negro Management”: Race, Labor, and Jim
      Crow Colonialism in Guatemala, 1884–1930, Diplomatic History, 30, 4: 595-621.
Colby, Jason M., 2011, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in
     Central America, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.
Cons, Jason, Michael Eilenberg, 2019, Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of
     Resource Frontiers in Asia, Hoboken, Wiley.
Correa-Cabrera, Guadalupe, Rajendra Kulkarni, 2021, Explaining Migrant Caravans:
     Research hypotheses, academic activism or conspiracy theories?, Frontera
     Norte, 33.
Coutin, Susan Bibler, 2011, Falling Outside: Excavating the History of Central Amer-
     ican Asylum Seekers, Law & Social Inquiry, 36, 3: 569-596.
Dao, Thu Hien, Frédéric Docquier, Christopher Robert Parsons, Giovanni Peri, 2016,
     Migration and development: Dissecting the anatomy of the mobility transition,
     IZA Discussion Paper 10272, Bonn, IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
De Genova, Nicholas, 2005, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and ‘Illegality’ in Mex-
     ican Chicago, Durham, Duke University Press.
De Genova, Nicholas, 2013, Spectacles of Migrant “Illegality”: The Scene of Exclusion,
     the Obscene of Inclusion, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36, 7: 1180-1198.


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                                 199

De Haas, Hein, 2007, Turning the tide? Why development will not stop migration,
     Development and Change, 38, 5: 819-841.
De Haas, Hein, 2010, Migration and Development: A Theoretical Perspective, Interna-
     tional Migration Review, 44, 1: 227-264.
Escobar, Arturo, 1995, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the
     Third World, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Esteva, Gustavo, Salvatore Babones, Philipp Babcicky, 2013, The Future of Develop-
     ment: A Radical Manifesto, Bristol, Bristol University Press.
Farriss, Nancy, 1984, Mayan Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of
      Survival, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Fink, Leon, 2003, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New
      South, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
Golash-Boza, Tanya, 2009, The Immigration Industrial Complex: Why We Enforce
     Immigration Policies Destined to Fail, Sociology Compass, 3, 2: 295-309.
Golash-Boza, Tanya, 2015, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global
     Capitalism, New York University Press, New York.
Grandin, Greg, 1997, To End with All These Evils: Ethnic Transformation and Commu-
     nity Mobilization in Guatemalaʼs Western Highlands, 1954-1980, Latin Ameri-
     can Perspectives 24, 2: 7-34.
Grandin, Greg, 2000, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, Durham,
     Duke University Press.
Greene, Linda, 1999, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala, New
     York, Columbia University Press.
Hage, Ghassan, 2000, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural
     Society, New York, Routledge.
Hale, Charles, 2002, Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights, and
      politics of identity in Guatemala, Journal of Latin American Studies, 485-524.
Handy, Jim, 1985, Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala, Boston, South End Press.
Harris, Kamala, 2021, Kamala Harris & Guatemala President Alejandro Giammattei
      Press Conference, Transcript, 7 June, Guatemala City, www.rev.com/blog/tran-
      scripts/kamala-harris-guatemala-president-alejandro-giammattei-press-con-
      ference-transcript-june-7, accessed on 14/08/2021.
Heidbrink, Lauren, 2019, The Coercive Power of Debt: Migration and Deportation of
     Guatemalan Indigenous Youth, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean An-
     thropology, 24, 1: 263-281.
Heidbrink, Lauren, 2020, Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation, Stanford,
     Stanford University Press.




                                   2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
200                                                                       Julia Morris

Holmes, Seth, 2013, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United
    States, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Kathiravelu, Laavanya, 2016, Migrant Dubai: Low Wage Workers and the Construction
     of a Global City, Houndsmills, Palgrave Macmillan.
Kunz, Rahel, Sandra Levenex, Marion Pannizon, 2011, Multilayered Migration Gover-
     nance: The Promise of Partnership, London, Routledge.
Likić-Brborić, Branka, 2018, Global migration governance, civil society and the para-
      doxes of sustainability, Globalizations, 15: 762-778.
Lovell, George W., 1988, Surviving Conquest: The Maya of Guatemala in Historical
      Perspective, Latin American Research Review, 23, 2: 25-57.
Manz, Beatriz, 1988, Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in
    Guatemala, Albany, SUNY Press.
Mezzadra, Sandro, Brett Neilson, 2013, Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of La-
     bor, Durham, Duke University Press.
Morris, Julia, 2017, Power, Capital and Immigration Detention Rights: Making Net-
     worked Markets in Global Detention Governance at UNHCR, Global Networks,
     17: 400-422.
Morris, Julia, 2019, Violence and Extraction of a Human Commodity: From Phosphate
     to Refugees in the Republic of Nauru, The Extractive Industries and Society, 6, 4:
     1122-1133.
Morris, Julia, 2020, Extractive Landscapes: The Case of the Jordan Refugee Compact,
     Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 37, 2: 87-96.
Morris, Julia, 2021, The Value of Refugees: UNHCR and the Growth of the Global Ref-
     ugee Industry, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34, 3, 2676-2698.
Morris, Julia, 2022a, Managing, Now Becoming Refugees: Climate Change and Ex-
     tractivism in the Republic of Nauru, American Anthropologist, 124, 3, 460-574.
Morris, Julia, 2022b, Strange Bedfellows?: NGOs and Offshore Asylum, in Forced Dis-
     placement and NGOs in Asia and the Pacific, Gül İnanç, Themba Lewis, eds, Lon-
     don: Routledge: 190-206.
Muller, Thomas, 1994, Immigrants and the American City, New York, NYU Press.
Murray Li, Tania, 2015, Social impacts of oil palm in Indonesia: A gendered perspective
     from West Kalimantan, Bogor Barat, Center for International Forestry Research.
Nevins, Joseph, 2019, Migration as Reparations, in Open Borders: In Defense of Free
     Movement, Reece Jones, ed, Athens, University of Georgia Press: 129-140.
Olayo-Méndez, Alejandro, 2017, La 72: An Oasis along the Migration Routes in Mex-
     ico, Forced Migration Review, 56: 10-11
Paoletti, Emanuela, 2010, The Migration of Power and North-South Inequalities: The
     Case of Italy and Libya, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.


2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate?                                                                201

Pew Research Center, 2021, What’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border in 7 charts,
     https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/whats-happening-at-the-
     u-s-mexico-border-in-7-charts/, accessed on 14/08/2021.
Quijano, Anibal, 2000, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America, Inter-
     national Sociology, 15, 2: 201-246.
Reyna, Stephen P., 2016, Deadly Contradictions: The New American Empire and Global
     Warring, Oxford, Berghahn Books.
Rosenbaum, Susanna, 2017, Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American
     Dream in Los Angeles, Durham, Duke University Press.
Samaddar, Ranabir, 2018, The difficult subject of refugee economies, The Conver-
    sation, June 18, https://theconversation.com/the-difficult-subject-of-refu-
    gee-economies-98435, accessed on 01/11/2022.
Sheller, Mimi, 2003, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, London,
      Routledge.
Striffler, Steve and Moberg, Mark, eds, 2005, Banana Wars: Power, Production, and
       History in the Americas, Durham, Duke University Press.
Stuesse, Angela, 2016, Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep
     South, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Sundberg, Juanita, 1998, NGO Landscapes: Conservation and Communities in the
     Maya Biosphere Reserve, Petén, Guatemala, The Geographical Review, 88, 3:
     388-412.
Tramel, Salena Fay, 2019, The Tenure Guidelines in Policy and Practice: Democratiz-
    ing Land Control in Guatemala, Land, 8, 168.
Tsing, Anna L., 2003, Natural Resource and Capitalist Frontiers, Economic and Politi-
     cal Weekly, 38, 48: 5100-5106.
Tzul Tzul, Gladys, 2016, Sistemas de Gobierno Comunal Indígena: Mujeres y tramas
      de parentesco en Chuimeq’ena’ [Systems of indigenous communal governance:
      Women and lineage in Chuimeq’ena’]. Guatemala City: Sociedad Comunita-
      ria de Estudios Estratégicos y Centro de Investigaciones y Pluralismo Jurídico
      Tzi’kin, Editorial Maya Wuj.
Upham Adams, Frederick, 1914, Conquest of the Tropics: The Story of the Creative En-
    terprises Conducted by the United Fruit Company, Garden City, Doubleday.
Wacquant, Loic, 2009, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecu-
    rity, Durham, Duke University Press.
Walters, William, 2002, Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Policing of
     Aliens, Citizenship Studies, 6, 3: 265-292.
Watts, Michael J, 2014, Oil Frontiers: The Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico, in Oil
     Culture, Ross Barrett, Daniel Worden, eds, Minneapolis, University of Minneso-
     ta Press: 211-225.


                                   2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
202                                                                    Julia Morris

World Bank, 2022, The World Bank in Guatemala, https://www.worldbank.org/en/
     country/guatemala/overview, accessed on 01/06/2022.
Xiang, Biao, 2006, Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information
     Technology Industry, Princeton, Princeton University Press.




2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204
¿Por qué Quédate                                                               203

 Julia Morris is Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of
 North Carolina Wilmington. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology
 from the University of Oxford, where she was a research student at the Centre on
 Migration, Policy and Society. She also held a postdoctoral fellowship at The New
 Schoolʼs Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, and most recently a writing
 fellowship at the Max Planck Institut für ethnologische Forschung. Her research
 focuses on boundary making and extractivism, from ethnographic fieldwork in Na-
 uru, Australia, and Geneva to research projects in Jordan and Guatemala. Her book,
 Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, is forthcoming with Cornell Univer-
 sity Press.
 morrisjc@uncw.edu




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Julia Morris
¿Por qué Quédate? Frontiering through development in Guatemala.
2022 | Anuac. Vol. 11, n° 2, Dicembre 2022: 175-204.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4932
