Participatory and Action Research as a ...

APA NLM tapraid4/z2n-amepsy/z2n-amepsy/z2n00813/z2n4100d13g xppws S⫽1 9/17/13 11:21 Art: 2013-3069

Participatory and Action Research as a Transformative Praxis: Responding to Humanitarian Crises From the Margins M. Brinton Lykes Boston College

AQ: au

This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.

DOI: 10.1037/a0034360

This article reports on a small set of community-based participatory projects designed collaboratively by and for survivors directly affected by armed conflict in Guatemala and and some of their family members in the North (i.e., in New Orleans, Louisiana, and New England). Local protagonists deeply scarred by war and gross violations of human rights drew on indigenous beliefs and practices, creativity, visual performance arts, and participatory and action research strategies to develop and perform collaborative community-based actions. These initiatives constitute a people’s psychosocial praxis. Through their individual and collective narratives and actions, Mayan and African American women and Latinas perform a psychology from the “two-thirds world,” one that draws on postcolonial theory and methodology to retheorize trauma and resilience. These voices, creative representations, and actions of women from the Global South transform earlier, partial efforts to decenter EuroAmerican epistemologies underlying dominant models of trauma that reduce complex collective phenomena to individual pathology, refer to continuous trauma as past, are ahistorical, and universalize culturally particular realities. Keywords: participatory action research, psychosocial trauma, humanitarian crises, war

Humanitarian crises, including natural and technological disasters and complex emergencies due to armed conflicts and gross violations of human rights, are all too frequent occurrences today. Despite the challenging problems—and frequent inaccuracies—in estimating the effects of such crises, civilians frequently outnumber armed combatants as primary victims. Moreover, these consequences are deeply gendered. In 2011, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimated that 40 million people were “on the move” in the wake of such crises, with internally displaced people numbering 26.4 million and those forced beyond their countries’ borders numbering 14.4 million. Women now comprise 50% of migrant populations (United Nations, 2011). Patricia Hynes (2004), among others, has argued that the only way to estimate the full extent of war’s effects on civilian populations and, more specifically, on women and children, is to recognize it as a cyclical set of processes, not Month 2013 ● American Psychologist © 2013 American Psychological Association 0003-066X/13/$12.00 Vol. 68, No. 8, 000

a circumscribed conflict between groups or nations in which both sides bear arms. These latter definitions exclude the war-related disruption of economic activity and social services infrastructure, the displacement of people within or outside their country, the increased rates of crime and sexual violence . . . and the culture of hypermasculinity and male “warrior” narratives in military culture, . . . [and thus] fail to document the more systemic, gender-based, and enduring impacts of war on women. (Hynes, 2004, p. 432)

Furthermore, families are separated, and ongoing threats of physical violence, including sexual violations and death, contribute to the undermining of social and cultural cohesion and community life from which many draw strength, meaning, and identity (Hynes, 2004; Martín-Baró, 1994). Just as significant, although there is growing evidence that levels of violence diminish in the wake of peace accords and the introduction of postconflict transitional justice mechanisms (Human Security Report Project, 2012), many of the contexts in which these humanitarian crises have occurred continue to be plagued by ongoing violence and impunity for the violence perpetrators. Thus, poverty, violence, and social disruption and discord attendant to war and humanitarian disasters and their aftermath require particular, culturally responsive, and context-relevant responses. These include interventions that promote sustainable social, cultural, economic, and human development strategies that can redress the effects of disasters while addressing their root causes (see, e.g., Martín-Baró, 1994).

Psychological Responses to Humanitarian Disaster Psychologists are among those responding to humanitarian crises, and over the past three decades they have generated multiple strategies for addressing the direct effects of these violations and their disruption of social and community functioning (Reyes & Jacobs, 2006). Moreover, they have developed guidelines, seeking to support “best practices” in

Editor’s Note. M. Brinton Lykes received the International Humanitarian Award. Award winners are invited to deliver an award address at the APA’s annual convention. This article is based on the award address presented at the 121st annual meeting, held July 31–August 4, 2013, in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Articles based on award addresses are reviewed, but they differ from unsolicited articles in that they are expressions of the winners’ reflections on their work and their views of the field. Author’s Note. Thanks first and foremost to the many women, children, and men whom I have had the privilege to accompany over nearly three decades. Thanks also to my co-researchers from multiple universities and community organizations. Finally, thanks to Ramsay Liem and Alice McIntyre for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to M. Brinton Lykes, Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology, Boston College, Campion Hall Room 308, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3813. E-mail: [email protected]

1

APA NLM


tapraid4/z2n-amepsy/z2n-amepsy/z2n00813/z2n4100d13g xppws S⫽1 9/17/13 11:21 Art: 2013-3069

these contexts (see, e.g., American Psychological Association [APA], 2008; Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2007). Yet, as Michael Wessells (2009) has argued, despite increased attention to “cultural competence” by psychologists evident in, for example, APA-approved training programs, “psychologists trained in North American and European universities lack the cultural, humanitarian, and other competencies needed to do responsible, contextually appropriate psychosocial work in large-scale emergencies” (p. 843). Voicing similar concerns, feminist and critical theorists of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991; McCall, 2005) and postcolonial methodology (Mohanty, 2003) challenge those from the North working in the Global South to critically interrogate and deconstruct our EuroAmerican meaning systems while attending to indigenous and postcolonial activist scholarship emergent in the Global South. This article offers one set of responses to these challenges. It reports on community-based interventions designed collaboratively by and for (a) Mayan survivors of war, (b) Central Americans who traveled north and became first responders to the unnatural disaster in New Orleans, Louisiana, and (c) those who live as unauthorized migrants and members of transnational and mixed-status families in New England and Guatemala. Local protagonists whose lives, communities, and cultures had been fractured by war, unnatural disasters, and gross violations of human rights drew on indigenous beliefs and practices, creativity, visual performance arts, and participatory and action research strategies to develop and perform collaborative communitybased actions. I argue that these actions—survivors’ narratives of an “ever-present past,” their search for truth and justice, and their activism geared toward realizing a better future for themselves and their children— constitute a people’s psychosocial praxis. Thus Mayan, African American, and Latina psychosocial praxis exemplifies a psychology from the “two-thirds world,” that is, from the Global South or majority world (Hernández-Wolfe, 2013), one that draws on postcolonial theory and methodology to retheorize trauma and resilience. As such, the voices, creative representations, and actions (including grassroots organizing, economic and social development projects, and health advocacy) of these women transform earlier, partial efforts (see, e.g., Martín-Baró, 1994, among many others) to decenter the individualist, ahistorical, and culturally disembodied psychological trauma theories. I argue that local protagonists, such as those whose experiences are reported here, are best positioned to analyze, engage, and sustain systemic responses to the interlocking circulations of power that give rise to and continue to operate in the wake of humanitarian crises. Yet, it is their bodies, communities, geographies, and cultures that have been deeply scarred by war, by violations of human rights, by unnatural or environmental disasters. Thus “outsiders” 2

can sometimes accompany them on their journeys toward a better future. Intermediaries who bring a critical analysis of the historical context and the interlocking systems of racism, classism, and sexism at the root of these crises are sometimes able to position themselves alongside processes through which local protagonists’ analyze the causes and take actions to redress the consequences of, for example, armed conflict (Lykes & Mersky, 2006). Through informed empathy and passionate solidarity, these accompaniers bear witness to survivors’ mid-term and longer term personal and collective struggles, as they rethread the social fabric of their lives through transformative praxis. The praxis described herein critically engages existing approaches to psychosocial trauma in communities engulfed by humanitarian crises, challenging a focus on victims’ pathologies. People’s psychosocial praxis is historically contextualized and self-critical. It focuses on the capacities and rights of survivors, protagonists who resist and seek to transform structural oppression. It is informed by Latin American participatory and action research (FalsBorda & Rahman, 1991), critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), the theater of the oppressed (Boal, 1979), feminist-infused participatory and action research (Lykes & Hershberg, 2012), intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1991), and postcolonial methodologies (Mohanty, 2003). I conclude by examining several challenges that face those of us from the “one-third world” (Hernández-Wolfe, 2013) who have been invited to accompany protagonists “on the margins.”

Psychologies That Speak of/to the Margins Clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and many in the mental health field who work in humanitarian crisis zones have typically documented a constellation of survivors’ symptoms, which they describe as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; van der Kolk, 1984). This dominant perspective has been variously critiqued as ahistorical and/or culturally disembodied, as reducing complex collective phenomena to individual pathology, and as characterizing continuous trauma as past or singular (Lykes & Mersky, 2006; Summerfield, 1999). Contributions toward an alternative, critical rereading of PTSD that inform and are transformed through a people’s psychosocial praxis are briefly summarized below. Liberation and Community Psychologies

The Salvadoran social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994) argued that the aftereffects of government-sponsored terror and repression were one of the thorniest problems confronting Latin American states hoping to transition to democracy. In addition to damages wrought on personal lives, social structures themselves, that is, the norms, values, and principles through which people make meaning and the institutions that govern their lives as citizens, were Month 2013 ● American Psychologist

APA NLM



ruptured (Martín-Baró, 1994). Psychosocial trauma thus “resides in the social relations of which the individual is only a part . . . [and can be] a normal consequence of a social system based on social relations of exploitation and dehumanizing oppression” (Martín-Baró, 1994, pp. 124 – 125). Martín-Baró (1994) stressed the individual’s social character, articulating a psychology in which the liberation of a whole people accompanies personal liberation. He argued for a new epistemology in which the popular majority created “truth,” that is, constructed it from the base of their experiences. Such work requires a repositioning of those educated within the EuroAmerican psychological tradition, wherein psychologists often find themselves or their theories supporting dominant or oppressive views and practices. This new positioning alongside the dominated or oppressed constitutes an ethical commitment and choice, grounded in the truths of reason and compassion, and means engaging in overtly political processes (Martín-Baró, 1994). Martín-Baró echoed Franz Fanon’s (1967) social psychiatry and African American or Black psychology that drew heavily on Black liberation theology and on Africanist traditions. The latter urged practitioners to develop collaborative relations with Black communities and required them to hone new research competencies and roles as advocates, lobbyists, information resource persons, and watchdogs that “facilitate the advancement of our collective interests” (Gordon, 1973, p. 94). Community psychologists engaged in political struggles and in the community mental health movement of the 1970s sought to reposition psychologists in similar ways (Albee, 1996). Critical, Cultural, and Creative Representations

Critical and cultural psychologists, anthropologists, and social constructivists argue further that labeling symptoms inadequately represents survivors’ meaning-making processes (Marecek & Hare-Mustin, 2009). Meanings, they suggest, are co-constructed by those who experience them in relationships in a particular sociohistorical time, culture, and place (Gergen, 1994). Dialogue and engagement are critical strategies for constructing knowledge and understanding what is inherently value laden, rather than value neutral. This postmodern emphasis on inquiry and action (Reason & Rowan, 1981) calls our attention to the multiple meanings survivors construct from their experiences of war and unnatural disasters. Further, meaning-making processes are best represented through thick descriptions of contextually embedded events constructed by survivors in dialogue and/or interaction with those who accompany and/or witness their social suffering (see, e.g, Kleinman, 1997). Month 2013 ● American Psychologist

Situating Myself: Feminist and Postcolonial Praxis I have worked much of my professional life among communities of the Global South or majority world: with Maya in rural Guatemala (Crosby & Lykes, 2011; Lykes, 1994, 2010; Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000), with transnational families that traverse Guatemala and the United States (Brabeck, Lykes, & Hershberg, 2011; Hershberg & Lykes, 2012; Lykes, Brabeck, & Hunter, 2013), and with Latinas and African Americans in my hometown of New Orleans (Scheib & Lykes, 2013). I have engaged epistemological and methodological challenges through passionate solidarity with local communities that continue to be overshadowed by ever-present histories of colonization and imperial intervention. As a White, privileged, and highly educated United Statesian, I benefit from the hegemonic power of Northern academics “to know” the colonized Other of the Global South. I seek to reposition myself through explicitly problematizing the encounter between my EuroAmerican self and the colonized Other, to critically interrogate how I benefit from systemic privilege, and to contest circulations of power through which I am implicated in sustaining oppression. This requires my critical attention to the interlocking relations of power, including gender, racialization, class, sexuality, and ability in the contexts in which I accompany local victims/survivors/protagonists. The feminist-infused participatory and action research through which I have accompanied communities from the Global South constitute a set of iterative processes and outcomes performed to critically reposition gender, race, and class; excavate indigenous cultural knowledge; generate spaces through which stories are transformed into speech; and deploy intersectionality as an analytic tool for praxis (Lykes & Hershberg, 2012). Creese and Frisby (2011) argued that postcolonial feminist scholarship’s focus on community, “race,” and racialization at the intersection of other oppressions emphasizes the historical sites in which relations of power are embedded and operationalized and seeks to deconstruct these structures of power and “create space in a constructive maneuver for agency of subaltern and subjugated knowledges” (p. 21). I argue here and elsewhere that reflexivity, particularly the acknowledgement of and critical engagement with “outsider” researcher privilege, is central to such feminist participatory and action research processes. The work reported below explores how accompaniers witness protagonists’ performance of a people’s psychosocial praxis. I argue that their praxis from the global margins represents an alternative psychosocial understanding of and response to trauma in the wake of war, postconflict transitions, and postcrisis. 3


Mayan Women Re-Present Psychosocial Trauma Toward a Better Future


Mayan Women, War, and Transformative Praxis

Guatemala endured the brutality of nearly four decades of armed conflict from the 1960s to the signing of peace accords in 1996. Estimates are that over 200,000 people were killed, nearly a million or more were displaced, and more than 600 rural Mayan communities were destroyed through genocidal violence (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [CEH], 1999; Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala [ODHAG], 1998). This violence was gendered as well as racialized, and Mayan women were marked in particular ways by these gross violations of human rights (Fulchiron, Paz, & Lopez, 2009). Despite the cessation of armed conflict, subsequent and entrenched violence in everyday life and, in particular, the violence of women’s extreme impoverishment, persist. Mayan women have been historically positioned within “interlocking systems of oppression” (Razack, 2002, p. 16) wherein, for example, the Maya have been more likely to be impoverished than Ladinos, Mayan women have been more likely to experience sexual and gender-based violence than men, and Mayan women have been more impoverished and vulnerable to such violence. These entrenched structures of oppression persist in the systematic targeting of women, or femicide, in the midst of ongoing impunity for the perpetrators of such violence. Moreover, for rural Mayan women in particular, gendered racialized experiences of war and impoverishment have been silenced over several decades. The projects discussed below facilitated women’s breaking of these silences. The performance and analysis of their stories complement more public ongoing and historic struggles for justice, truth, and reparations (see, most recently, the trial of Efrain Rios Montt and Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez [Malkin, 2013]). Entering Chajul, Designing PhotoPAR, Multiplying Creative Workshops

Elsewhere I have recounted—and reflexively critiqued—my accompaniment of the Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women of Chajul, a rural town in the Guatemalan highlands (Lykes, 2010). There, local women sought to develop programs for widows, orphans, and displaced families who survived military occupation, guerrilla–military confrontations, and the massacres described briefly above. Creative and visual resources, including dramatization, community mapping, and collective drawings, were central to our initial collaborations. Many of these resources were familiar to local communities. Thus I embraced them as means to facilitate women’s engagement with fears, losses, and anxieties from their past as a step toward the perfor4

mance of alternative possibilities and concrete initiatives in service of a better future. Participatory workshops were organized to include (a) corporal expression, including role playing or dramatic play, theatre, and dramatic multiplication; (b) drawing and all forms of physical creativity “outside of ourselves,” including individual and collective drawings, models made with newspapers or other materials, and collages; and (c) verbal techniques, that is, word-play organized to reveal the liberating character of words. Traditional Mayan resources from the community, for example, the Mayan cosmovision, complemented and/or infused these creative resources (see Lykes, 1994, for more details). Psychosocial workshops deploying these resources were sites for exploring the causes and effects of war and for practicing new roles through which women sought to, for example, build and operate a corn mill. Through dramatic play and creative storytelling they explored and transformed fears about current experiences of gendered oppression, family conflict, and violence that resignified previous terrors from war. In 1996, we undertook a project focused on telling war’s story in the women’s own voices. The photovoice work of Caroline Wang (1999) and the “talking pictures” methods of Ximena Bunster (Bunster & Chaney, 1989) informed these participatory photography and action research processes. Local voices were more easily expressed through combining them with visual resources and served as a corrective to the United Statesian “voiceover” in which others, including myself, rather than the Maya, all too frequently spoke about the atrocities of war and the truthseeking actions of survivors. The PhotoPAR methodology—taking and storying individual pictures, analyzing them in small groups, and restorying them as individual phototexts and, subsequently, a collective story—facilitated processes of embodied psychosocial self-discovery, a centering of Mayan beliefs, traditions, languages, and rights, and also the creation of a collective truth-telling process. The community’s story was documented in women’s words and images and then read back to men, other women, and children in Chajul. It was also introduced into national and international circles through the publication of Voices and Images: Mayan Ixil Women of Chajul (Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI & Lykes, 2000; see also Lykes, 2010). Moreover, women continued to work locally, initiating youth programs and multiplying creative psychosocial workshops with women in 10 of 30 rural villages surrounding Chajul, including sites of massacres in the early 1980s. Forming Women’s Community

More recently, Alison Crosby, the National Union of Guatemalan Women, and I have collaborated in the documentation of reparation-seeking processes of 54 Mayan women from four different linguistic groups (Crosby & Lykes, 2011; Lykes & Crosby, in press). These rural Mayan Month 2013 ● American Psychologist

APA NLM



women (Chuj, Mam, Q’eqchi’, and Kaqchiquel) between the ages of 40 and 70 have self-identified as survivors of sexual violence. In 2003, a group of local Guatemalan feminist activists and psychological practitioners began to work with them to address the individual and collective psychosocial effects of their experiences of war in search of truth, justice, and reparation for the harm suffered. Many told their stories of violation for the first time as part of a four-year oral history project (Fulchiron et al., 2009). More recently, Alison and I have facilitated a series of creative workshops in which representatives from this group of 54 survivors and the lawyers, feminist activists, and psychological practitioners who accompany them have participated. We have documented and reported on rural Mayan women’s understanding of the contributions of these creative resources and the Mayan cosmovision to addressing the effects of the armed conflict on their lives and to voicing their understanding of and demands for reparations (Lykes & Crosby, in press). Some of the participants in these processes also testified openly before a Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence During the Armed Conflict that was held in March 2010 (see Crosby & Lykes, 2011), and others are participating in a court case against their alleged perpetrators. This suit is pending in the Guatemalan courts while a separate case seeking reparations for losses has been presented before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Assessing Creative Resources, Generating People’s Praxis

In the wake of war and in a context of ongoing violence and impunity, where the tension and stress from living in situations of “normal abnormality” (Martín-Baró, 1994) are carried in one’s body, Mayan women in both sets of projects reported that performing narratives of pain and resistance offered possibilities for personal transformation through individual and small-group experiences. In participatory workshops, women described group dynamics and warming up exercises as “helping [them to] share feelings and emotions—sadness, negative memories, suffering that we have lived through.” Others suggested that the participatory techniques are “energizers that get rid of our pain”; “we stop being shy.” One woman noted, “It’s harder to put things into words. With creative methodologies, you use gesture to express yourself through your body.” Another woman described “engagement with her body as a process of becoming aware of changes in herself.” One woman talked about speaking “within the group” as a resource for “organizing ourselves.” Another talked about collective drawings as a resource through which “some of the leaders could organize women so that they wouldn’t feel so much fear, so that they could begin to feel free.” The women noted that nonverbal techniques were helpful in “explaining new ideas and/or helping us to understand Month 2013 ● American Psychologist

what is being said— especially if we don’t speak Spanish,” and they explained, “When we don’t understand the language in a workshop, they [the facilitators] don’t take us into consideration and then we don’t pay attention and we don’t learn things.” Dramatic play and dramatizations were described as resources to develop new ideas about how to move forward: “to share our lives with each other and generate alternative ways of doing things”; “to discover that we are not alone and that we all have the same problems”; “[to feel] relieved and calmer and more able to face the reality of the everyday”; and “[to be] better able to understand what we as women do to take care of the basic necessities of our lives.” Thus, these non-formally-educated rural Mayan women valued creative resources and these participatory workshops. Through passionate solidarity and informed empathy, we outsider intermediaries accompanied the emergence of these Mayan women’s people’s psychosocial praxis. This praxis includes (a) processes of group formation and maintenance, (b) personal and collective processes of healing, (c) collective efforts to build women’s organizations, (d) public performances of justice and truth seeking, and (e) the development of family-sufficiency projects. Thus these Mayan women have gathered across multiple and diverse sites to creatively perform and re-present their losses and embodied pains. Although we were less likely to hear them systematically analyze the power held and exercised by those occupying their communities during the armed conflict, these women performed embodied understandings of their communities’ militarization and the impoverishment that gave rise to the conflict and persists in the postconflict period. People’s psychosocial praxis facilitated important moments of self-discovery in the context of community and beyond. Women gained some small degree of relief and control while developing potentially important resources for protagonism, engaging with the wider community and transformative processes on the national level. Additional examples of people’s psychosocial praxis from the margins are discussed below through the responses of Latina and African American women health workers five years after the unnatural disaster in New Orleans and from undocumented transnational Mayan migrants in New England and elsewhere, “sentenced home” by the increasingly intense enforcement policies of the Obama administration vis-a`-vis unauthorized migrants (Kanstroom, 2007).

Migration North, Forced Return, and Living in the “Unauthorized” Borderlands War is both a cause and an effect of ongoing conditions of extreme poverty in countries such as Guatemala, and both poverty and war have forced many to flee their countries of origin (Hamilton & Chinchilla, 1991). The U.S. economic downturn in 2005 as well as ongoing workplace raids by the 5


Bush administration pushed many economic migrants south again, this time to New Orleans.


Latinos in New Orleans Post-Katrina

Many modern conflicts occur in what Greitens (2001) has called debilitating or collapsing states. Thus, the process of reconstructing societies after humanitarian disasters is often not only one of short-term recovery but also one of longterm development (Agerbak, 1991). Although the United States is clearly not such a state, some have suggested that the unnatural disaster of Katrina exposed a U.S. city in decline, if not collapse (Dyson, 2006). As a native of New Orleans who had “headed north” at the age of 17, I watched in awe as childhood urban landscapes were submerged by failed levees and Mississippi coastal towns were engulfed by raging salt waters. Having been assured of my family’s safety, I eschewed the impulse to join first responders who flocked to the city, focusing instead on the multiple longer term challenges facing those in the wake of this unnatural disaster. I noted the rapid recovery of community health service agencies in the midst of a dysfunctional hospital system. Two organizations with longstanding roots in the city emerged as leaders in the recovery efforts: Kingsley House and Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans. Yet they were experiencing the unique pressure to address the needs of their own staffs, who were working to navigate services and stabilize their own lives, and to serve as first and mid-term responders, a situation blurring the boundary between service provider and service recipient. Health service systems were also overwhelmed by the challenges facing arriving linguistic and ethnic groups who sought rebuilding-related employment. From 2000 to 2010, the Latino population in the New Orleans metro area spiked 57%, a rate greater than the nation’s 43% increase in this group (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Drawing on my experiences with community-based participatory and creative resources described above, I sought to accompany historically rooted but displaced African American women (working as Walkers-Talkers at Kingsley House) and relatively recently arrived Latinas (working as promotoras with the Latino Health Access Network [LHAN] of Catholic Charities) engaged in similar employment as health outreach workers. Both groups wished to document and build on their primary health care work, their ongoing recovery processes, and their nascent cross-community collaborations in hopes of strengthening responses to organizational upheaval and population changes. I hoped that through documenting the critical but often unseen or undervalued knowledge of women’s cross-community health promotion, they might consolidate an emerging model of African American and Latina women’s leadership as one resource for responding to postdisaster contexts (see Scheib & Lykes, 2013, for details). 6

Despite parallels between the Guatemala and New Orleans accompaniment processes, including a focus on intersectional identities and women of color’s “circuits of dispossession” (Fine & Ruglis, 2009), the color-lines deeply embedded in New Orleans’s racial politics generated new challenges. The two insider-outsider accompaniers—myself and Holly Ann Scheib—are White, while the project coordinators were migrants from South America and the Caribbean. Latina community health promoters included firstgeneration Central American and Caribbean migrants and Puerto Ricans, while all of the African Americans were long-time New Orleans residents who varied in skin color as well as access to educational and economic resources. These complex, intersectional identities situated and challenged us to develop a shared understanding of the “big foot” of racism and of our internalized racial superiority and inferiority (Chisom & Washington, 1997). Local participants engaged in a PhotoPAR process similar to that described earlier to analyze health disparities in Katrina’s wake and to document their praxis as cross-community health promoters. One collective phototext reflecting these processes was titled Analyzing Systemic Racism and Oppression. Through individual pictures and stories about them developed by the photographer, small groups of African American women and Latinas restoried the phototexts to generate a collage of pictures and words. The “bright picture” that local government seeks to paint of its response to health disparities in Katrina’s wake was juxtaposed with African Americans’ high unemployment rate and the racialization of unauthorized Latino migrants now in New Orleans. The women represented these personal struggles and the structural constraints while urging the government to shift policies in order to collaborate with local workers who are, in their own words, seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Interviews with all health promoters following multiple presentations of the PhotoPAR exhibit to local community organizations and groups reflected the promoters’ recognition of “differences” among themselves due to race, culture, language, and education as well as an appreciation of the similarities across their struggles. Further, health promoters demonstrated a critical awareness of multiple interlocking systems causing health disparities affecting their communities and an enhancement of their capacities to describe and critically analyze both the effects as well as the causes of illness locally and within cross-community contexts. They reported new self-understandings, increased empathy for each other and each other’s communities, and greater capacity to self-care, thus better sustaining the challenging work of responding to their own and their communities’ postdisaster needs. Finally, they described forging solidarity within a city all too frequently in conflict and fractured Month 2013 ● American Psychologist


along racialized class lines, generating another iteration of a people’s psychosocial praxis.


Migration and Human Rights: Transnational and Mixed-Status Families

Contemporary U.S. deportation policies and practices threaten the integrity of immigrant families, including those described above in New Orleans, and pose risks to the emotional well-being of immigrant parents and children. Although not humanitarian disasters per se, many have documented their disastrous economic and social effects for the approximately 11 million unauthorized migrants and their U.S.-born citizen children living within U.S. borders— and for the many more millions in their countries of origin (Brabeck et al., 2011). As one response to the limited knowledge about transnational and mixed-status families living in the United States, my law school colleague Dan Kanstroom and I sought to accompany local community organizations in New England to develop a series of community-based educational workshops and participatory action research projects designed to better understand and respond to the impact of detention and deportation policies on transnational families living in the Northeastern United States. We sought to join migrants in collaborative policy development, advocacy, and actions to disrupt these injustices (see http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/centers/human rights/projects.html). The iterative action and reflection processes of the Migration and Human Rights Project are now entering a sixth year. Within that context, participatory workshops have focused on migrants’ rights, strategies for self-protection in the face of the threat of arrest due to migrants’ unauthorized status, racism and immigration, and plans for caring for children in the event of detention and deportation. Boalian theater techniques, sociodrama, and small group discussions have been deployed as resources to elicit knowledge from participants and engage them in practicing self-protective strategies while ensuring that they receive correct information about laws that constrain their movements here in the United States (see http://www.bc.edu/content/bc/centers/ humanrights/projects/deportation/aboutpdhrp.html). The first participatory and action research with 18 migrant parents was undertaken with two local community organizations (Brabeck et al., 2011). It aimed to document the threat of U.S. detention and deportation policies and practices. Despite this focus, a central thesis that emerged from analyses of participants’ stories was that current threats and experiences of deportation are narrated by unauthorized migrants within a context of related risks to these individuals and families, including economic marginalization (in their country of origin and in the United States), state-sponsored war and violence, previous internal and external migrations, and living in divided and “mixed status” families. Thus migrants’ meaning-making resignifies Month 2013 ● American Psychologist

past experiences of trauma in new historical and cultural contexts. One participant described the workplace raid that led to her arrest, stating, “What happened last year . . . it starts to open up the wound, or the fear, that you have held [from the war in Guatemala], because these things are not easy to erase. Because the wound is always there and when you open it, it burns anew.” Another described the current assault on immigrants as a “second war,” noting that families are once again being displaced and communities broken: “If they are taking children away and everything, then for me, that’s a second war.” Thus participating parents argued that their current experiences of U.S. detention and deportation can only be understood and effectively responded to in relation to intersecting historical and contemporary forces. More recent triangulation of data from interviews, surveys, and performances in community workshops has contributed to a rethinking of undocumented migrants’ decisions not to openly communicate with their citizen children about how they will be cared for in the eventuality that their parents are detained and/or deported (Lykes et al., 2013). This U.S.-based work is anchored in the Guatemalan town of Zacualpa, “home” to many migrants who fled massacres and military occupation during the armed conflict described above (CEH, 1999; ODHAG, 1998). Local work there has included direct services for “sending families” as well as projects with deportees (e.g., a theater group) and children and youth “left behind.” Analyses of data produced through creative and participatory workshops with the latter have contributed to shifting local adults’ seemingly unqualified emphasis on the benefits of U.S.-based parental remittances for their youth’s material well-being, to a growing awareness of the socioemotional costs to children of prolonged parental absences. As important, U.S. students, researchers, and lawyers have accompanied local leaders in the development of a people’s psychosocial praxis, offering sending families spaces of empathy and concrete assistance as well as opportunities to educate themselves, their families, and their communities about transnational life. Deportees living in one of the villages of Zacualpa extended this work to the wider community by dramatizing their experiences of crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. They performed this dramatization within the town’s parade, a central element in the town’s annual festival. The 10-minute production re-presented the horrors of crossing the desert, women’s experiences of sexual violence, and encounters with recent surveillance technologies, including computerized fingerprinting. The performance heightened awareness of the underside of migration— often celebrated as a source of remittances and local economic sustenance—and gave visibility to the local project. Further, it contributed to politicizing what had heretofore been an exclusively cultural event and affirmed local Mayan youth and deportees as community educators. 7

APA NLM



Another iteration of this transnational work has included in-depth semistructured interviews with girls on both sides of the border (Hershberg & Lykes, 2012), interviews in which the girls revealed their own and their mothers’ experiences of vulnerability due to domestic and political violence. They also described their engagement in a range of political and social processes to resist violence in their countries of origin and in deportation processes initiated against them in the wake of workplace raids. Their and their mothers’ participation in creative workshops on both sides of the border afforded sites for re-presenting their socioemotional responses to these experiences. The documentation and analysis of their community-based participation suggest some of the creative ways in which a new generation of Mayan women are sustaining—and transforming— their self-understandings and mobilizing these intersectional identities through a people’s psychosocial praxis. Moreover, feminist intersectional theory, as described above, frames the varied and mobile performances of gender by Mayan men and women through migration, resettlement, and transnational processes.

Toward a People’s Psychosocial Praxis: Responses From the Margins Dramatizations, drawing, storytelling, community theatre, and photography are a few of the creative resources used within the participatory and action research processes and projects that have facilitated women’s and their families’ and communities’ storying of their experiences of survival, protagonism, and resistance. Falling outside the scope of traditional social scientific research norms, this work has psychopolitical validity (see Prilleltensky, 2003); that is, it attends to how power circulates within and among psychological trauma and racialized, gendered, and class-based interlocking systems of oppression, contributing to struggles for justice and personal and transformative change. In each of these projects, women and girls created spaces of engagement and contention, all too absent in the surrounding, conflicted, fragile, fractured and, in the case of Guatemala, increasingly remilitarized, social worlds. The women and girls could momentarily risk expression of their fear and anxieties when they were enacted through a character in the context of a dramatization. Anger against perpetrators was also performed in an imagined space and, thus, brought under local control. Creative expression facilitated laughing at the unlaughable, sometimes generating potential alternative responses to ongoing fears or sorrows. In the small group’s creation and in the broader community’s recognition of what had been created, both in its descriptive as well as its analytic dimensions, participants played with forces that constrained and oppressed. Through creative and performative practices, local protagonists sought to reestablish social networks, develop their capabilities and sense of self-efficacy, and, in some 8

sites, build local organizations and income-generating projects. These scaffolded processes facilitated women’s critical analysis of and responses to some of the multiple effects of the racialized, gendered, and class-based structures of violence that ruptured their communities and marked their bodies while supporting grassroots efforts to rethread the social fabric. Their meaning-making reflects more localized translations or vernacularizations (Merry, 2006) of the embodied loss and pain attendant to survival of humanitarian crises. I argue here that this confluence of local knowledge generated, engaged, and performed collaboratively in the face of ongoing social oppression represents a people’s psychosocial praxis. It draws on knowledge and practices from liberation psychology, Freirian pedagogy, and Boal’s theater of the oppressed. As suggested above, the lines between provider and recipient are blurred and fluid, and praxis is performed in the borderlands: in geographic sites militarized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in areas controlled by armed forces in Guatemala, near underfunded levees that fail to protect local residents, and in intersectional spaces with “just enough trust,” where intermediaries accompany victims, survivors, and protagonists through passionate solidarity and informed empathy. These are transitional and generative spaces from which activists from the Global South press for transformative change, reclaiming power, cultural resources, and voice. The opportunity to walk alongside these protagonists has been perhaps the most profound experience of my life.

Deconstructing Gendered White Privilege I have argued here that knowledge constructed through processes in which intermediaries from the Global North, such as my North American White colleagues and myself, accompany survivors from the Global South is, at best, hybridized—and transitional—what I have called a “third voice” (Lykes, Terre Blanche, & Hamber, 2003). As long as the hegemonic control of knowledge systems and structures remains within EuroAmerican centers of power, hybridized voices may more easily travel beyond local contexts of humanitarian crises to national and international listeners. My presence as sole author of this article is one such example and argues for critical engagement with these hybridities, acknowledging the primacy of survivors’ lived experiences while neither reifying nor essentializing their rethreaded discourses and actions that strive to disrupt interlocking gendered, racialized, and class-based structures and to infuse shared struggles toward personal and social transformation. Moreover, I am challenged to continue my critical engagement with “undoing racism” and the internalized racial superiority that has marked me from birth and from which I continue to benefit. Through such critical engagement of these circuits of privilege I seek to reposition Month 2013 ● American Psychologist


my power through passionate solidarity and informed empathy. Critical reflexivity is one, albeit limited, resource in these transitional spaces. Through repositioning myself— and EuroAmerican knowledge systems—from the center to the margins in accompaniment of people’s psychosocial praxis I seek to contribute to transforming entrenched hegemonic and dichotomous discourses and inequitable power structures.


REFERENCES

AQ: 1

Agerbak, L. (1991). Breaking the cycle of violence: Doing development in situations of conflict. Development in Practice, 1(3), 151–158. doi: 10.1080/096145249100076341 Albee, G. W. (1996). Revolutions and counterrevolutions in prevention. American Psychologist, 51(11), 1130 –1133. doi:10.1037/0003-066X .51.11.1130 American Psychological Association. (2008). APA statement on the role of psychologists in international emergencies. Retrieved from http:// www.apa.org/international/resources/emergency-statement.aspx Boal, A. (1979). The theatre of the oppressed. New York, NY: Urizen Books. Brabeck, K. M., Lykes, M. B., & Hershberg, R. (2011). Framing immigration to and deportation from the United States: Guatemalan and Salvadoran families make meaning of their experiences. Community, Work & Family, 14(3), 275–296. doi:10.1080/13668803.2010.520840 Bunster, X., & Chaney, E. M. (1989). Epilogue. In X. Bunster & E. M. Chaney (Eds.), Sellers & servants: Working women in Lima, Peru (pp. 217–233). Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Chisom, R., & Washington, M. (1997). Undoing racism: A philosophy of international social change. New Orleans, LA: People’s Institute Press. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [Commission for Historical Clarification]. (1999). Guatemala: Memoria del silencio [Guatemala: Memory of silence]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Author. Creese, G., & Frisby, W. (2011). Feminist community research: Case studies and methodologies. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: University of British Columbia Press. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. doi:10.2307/1229039 Crosby, A., & Lykes, M. B. (2011). Mayan women survivors speak: The gendered relations of truth-telling in postwar Guatemala. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 5(3), 456 – 476. doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijr017 Dyson, M. E. (2006). Come hell or high water: Hurricane Katrina and the color of disaster. New York, NY: Basic Civitas. Fals-Borda, O., & Rahman, M. A. (1991). Action and knowledge: Breaking the monopoly with participatory action research. New York, NY: Apex Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York, NY: Grove Press. Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Reinventing the self and other in qualitative research. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 70 – 82). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Fine, M., & Ruglis, J. (2009). Circuits and consequences of dispossession: The racial realignment of the public sphere for U.S. youth. Transforming Anthropology, 17(1), 20 –33. doi:10.1111/j.1548-7466.2009 .01037.x Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Seabury Press. Fulchiron, A., Paz, O. A., & Lopez, A. (2009). Tejidos que lleva el alma: Memoria de las mujeres mayas sobrevivientes de violación sexual durante el conflicto armado. [Weavings of the soul: Memories of Mayan women survivors of sexual violence during the armed conflict]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Community Studies and Psychosocial Action Team, National Union of Guatemalan Women. Gergen, K. (1994). Toward transformation in social knowledge. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gordon, T. (1973). Notes on White and Black psychology. Journal of Social Issues, 29(1), 87–95. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.1973.tb00063.x

Month 2013 ● American Psychologist

Greitens, E. (2001). The treatment of children during conflict. In F. Stewart & V. Fitzgerald (Eds.), War and underdevelopment: Vol. 2. The economic and social consequences of conflict (pp. 149 –167). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, N., & Chinchilla, N. S. (1991). Global economic restructuring and international migration: Some observations based on Mexican and Central American experience. International Migration, 34, 195–231. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.1996.tb00523.x AQ: 2 Hernández-Wolfe, P. (2013). A borderlands view on Latinos, Latin Americans and decolonization: Rethinking mental health. New York, NY: Jason Aronson. Hershberg, R. M., & Lykes, M. B. (2012). Redefining family: Transnational girls narrate experiences of parental migration, detention, and deportation. FQS (Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research), 14(1), Article 5. Retrieved from http:// nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs130157 Human Security Report Project. (2012). Human Security Report 2012: Sexual violence, education, and war: Beyond the mainstream narrative. Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada: Human Security Research Group. Hynes, H. P. (2004). On the battlefield of women’s bodies: An overview of the harm of war to women. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27(5– 6), 431– 445. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2004.09.001 Inter-Agency Standing Committee. (2007). IASC guidelines on mental health and psychosocial support in emergency settings. Geneva, Switzerland: Author. Kanstroom, D. (2007). Deportation nation: Outsiders in American history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. AQ: 3 Kleinman, A. (1997). Writing at the margin: Discourse between anthropology and medicine. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/california/9780520209657.001.0001 Lykes, M. B. (1994). Terror, silencing, and children: International multidisciplinary collaboration with Guatemalan Maya communities. Social Science & Medicine, 38(4), 543–552. doi:10.1016/02779536(94)90250-X Lykes, M. B. (2010). Silence(ing), voice(s) and gross violations of human rights: Consulting and performing subjectivities through PhotoPAR. Visual Studies, 25(3), 238 –254. doi:10.1080/1472586X.2010.523276 Lykes, M. B., Brabeck, K. M., & Hunter, C. (2013). Exploring parentchild communication in the context of threat: Mixed-status families facing detention and deportation in post 9/11 USA. Community, Work and Family, 16, 123–146. doi:10.1080/13668803.2012.752997 Lykes, M. B., & Crosby, A. (in press). Creativity as intervention strategy in feminist and psychosocial accompaniment processes with Mayan women in Guatemala. Intervention, the International Journal of Mental Health, Psychosocial Work and Counselling in Areas of Armed Conflict. Lykes, M. B., & Hershberg, R. (2012). Participatory action research and feminisms: Social inequalities and transformative praxis. In S. HesseBiber (Ed.), Handbook of feminist research II: Theory and praxis (pp. 331–367). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lykes, M. B., & Mersky, M. (2006). Reparations and mental health: Psychosocial interventions towards healing, human agency, and rethreading social realities. In P. de Greiff (Ed.), The handbook of reparations (pp. 589 – 622). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/0199291926.003.0018 Lykes, M. B., Terre Blanche, M., & Hamber, B. (2003). Narrating survival and change in Guatemala and South Africa: The politics of representation and a liberatory community psychology. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(1–2), 79 –90. doi:10.1023/A: 1023074620506 Malkin, E. (2013, 16 March). In effort to try dictator, Guatemala shows new judicial might. The New York Times. Retrieved from http:// www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/world/americas/victims-of-guatemalacivil-war-eagerly-await-dictators-trial.html?pagewanted⫽all&_r⫽0 Marecek, J., & Hare-Mustin, R. (2009). Clinical psychology: The politics of madness. In D. Fox, I. Prilleltensky, & S. Austin (Eds.), Critical psychology: An introduction (2nd ed., pp. 76 –109). London, England: Sage. Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology: Ignacio Martín-Baró (A. Aron & S. Corne, Eds. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

9

APA NLM



McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30(3), 1771–1800. doi:10.1086/426800 Merry, S. E. (2006). Transnational human rights and local activism: Mapping the middle. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 38 –51. doi: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.38 Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala [Office of Human Rights of the Archdiocese of Guatemala; ODHAG]. (1998). Guatemala, nunca más: Informe del proyecto interdiocesano recuperación de la memoria histórica [Guatemala: Never again: Report of the inter-diocescan project on the recovery of historical memory]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Author. Prilleltensky, I. (2003). Understanding, resisting, and overcoming oppression: Toward psychopolitical validity. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(1–2), 195–201. doi:10.1023/A:1023043108210 Razack, S. H. (Ed.). (2002). Race, space, and the unmapping of a white settler society. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Between the Lines. Reason, P., & Rowan, J. (Eds.). (1981). Human inquiry: A sourcebook of new paradigm research. Chichester, England: Wiley. Reyes, G., & Jacobs, G. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of international disaster psychology (Vols. 1– 4). Westport, CT: Praeger.

10

Scheib, H. A., & Lykes, M. B. (2013). African American and Latina community health workers engage PhotoPAR as a resource in a postdisaster context: Katrina at 5 years. Journal of Health Psychology, 18, 1069 –1084. doi:10.1177/1359105312470127 Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1449 –1462. doi:10.1016/S0277-9536(98)00450-X United Nations. (2011). United Nations Global Migration Database. Retrieved from http://esa.un.org/unmigration/ U.S. Census Bureau. (2012). American FactFinder. Retreived from http:// www.factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml van der Kolk, B. A. (1984). Post-traumatic stress disorder: Psychological and biological sequelae. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Wang, C. C. (1999). Photovoice: A participatory action research strategy applied to women’s health. Journal of Women’s Health, 8(2), 185–192. doi:10.1089/jwh.1999.8.185 Wessells, M. G. (2009). Do no harm: Toward contextually appropriate psychosocial support in international emergencies. American Psychologist, 64(8), 842– 854. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.64.8.842 Women of PhotoVoice/ADMI, & Lykes, M. B. (2000). Voces e imágenes: Mujeres Mayas Ixiles de Chajul/Voices and images: Mayan Ixil women of Chajul. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Magna Terra.

Month 2013 ● American Psychologist