Lucia Ixchiu is an artist, cultural manager, singer, community journalist, Indigenous feminist, and architect from Guatemala, where civic space is repressed. In 2023, Global Watch was concerned about the increased attacks on human rights defenders in the country. Here, she shares how she found art to be a tool for protest action while growing up in Guatemala and expresses that she continues to advocate for and dream of change while in exile.
I am Lucia Ixchiu, a 33-year-old K’iche woman from Iximulew (land of corn — Guatemala). Amid the challenging realities we had to live through as a country. As a people, I remember my childhood being happy and fulfilling, with economic limitations and dignity.
I was born in a country at war, where there was genocide and the murders of children. Living a childhood in peace and with access to food in the middle of the war was a beautiful gift our parents gave us, and I recognize that it was not the same reality for other children. I had shoes, could go to school, and had the right to play and live my childhood. Unfortunately, having these basic rights is considered a privilege in my country.
I remember that I liked to paint the walls and dream and imagine other worlds. My father also taught me and my sisters to sing when we were children, so art has been present all our lives and is part of our engines and work.
Lucía Ixchíu lights a candle to place in an altar in the center of the room as part of a symbol of Mayan cosmology during an event teaching indigenous and queer justice practices at a community organizing space in New York City on Sept. 28, 2024.
I am an artist, cultural manager, singer, community journalist, indigenous feminist, and architect. I have always been very rebellious, and I have always liked to break stereotypes. I started my work in cultural management when I was 11 years old in my town in Chwimeqenjá (Totonicapán- Guatemala) and embraced my identity as an Indigenous woman of the 21st century. I am what I like to call a “rocker,” rock music was also a space for me to break paradigms in my family and community at the beginning of the 2000s.
We started doing rock cultural events, then poetry and film screenings, and art embraced us as a way of life. This meant that from a very young age and in adolescence, my sister and I had to carry macho and patriarchal stigmas in my conservative town. Being a cultural manager and arts worker from a very young age opened my world to dream and create a world with art as a right, which our country denied and persecuted. Activism and art mixed and entered strongly in 2012, when we had to live in the town where a violent massacre on Oct. 4 changed the lives of our people and my life on a personal level as well. With a group of friends, we founded Festivales Solidarios, an anti-colonial art and communication space that has been narrating and telling stories for the defense of the land for over a decade through different artistic and narrative interventions focused on the environment. Art has saved my life, which is why it is our engine and tool to influence and change the world from what it looks like every day.
Festivales Solidarios
Lucía Ixchíu is pictured on Sept. 28, 2024 in New York as she holds postcard for Solidarity Festivals, an event she helps organize as a powerful alternative to fighting so indigenous peoples can simultaneously resist and heal with joy.
Festivales Solidarios
Pictured, a past Festivales Solidarios in Guatemala.
Festivales Solidarios
Pictured, a past Festivales Solidarios in Guatemala.
Festivales Solidarios
Pictured, a past Festivales Solidarios in Guatemala.
After what we experienced in my town, art became fundamental to healing the pain left by the massacre. It showed the harsh reality of extractive dispossession and persecution of land defenders. So, we began to center our artistic action on strategic communication toward the defense of the land. We began creating artistic caravans that traveled to different territories carrying art toward solidarity and direct action in defense of the land.
We also began to make music and various itinerant arts in support of the people who defended the land, and, above all, we began to carry out actions on social networks and the streets to ask for the freedom of imprisoned defenders for protecting water and land.
We started this volunteer work a decade ago and worked hard to position these issues on social networks. We’d broadcast the traveling caravans we did live, connecting us to many people outside and inside the country to make these problems known. From there, our vision of seeing how to amplify the voices of the territories arose because each person has their own voice to tell their story.
In 2018, there was a request from young people in communities that we share with them how we worked on the festivals, and that is why we created a school of art and communication called La Colmena, which travels with art and communication tools to share knowledge and also to take other alternatives to territories forgotten by the state.
Being a young Indigenous woman, raising your voice and imagining and dreaming that the country can be different has costs of violence, persecution, and defamation. I have even been forced into exile for my work and political action as a woman defender of the land. From 2014 to date, I have had to live through different types of violence, beatings, paramilitary detention, defamation campaigns, an assassination attempt, and several cases of criminalization of my work both as a journalist, Indigenous narrator, and activist.
Lucía Ixchíu speaks at an event teaching indigenous and queer justice practices in New York City, as she sits next to fellow Guatemalan indigenous activist Carmen Alvarez (left of Lucia) and queer organizer Quito Ziegler (right) on Sept. 28, 2024.
However, even while in exile, there is still a strong campaign of defamation and rumors about my work and activism because I have not stopped dreaming that things can be different. Having to leave the country against my will has undoubtedly been one of the greatest challenges of my existence. But I am clear that I am not a liar, and I am not a criminal for dreaming and using art to defend the Earth.
At the end of 2020, in the context of the pandemic, we organized a protest against the government’s crimes, which the government infiltrated. The state wanted to hold several activists like me responsible. However, the most delicate thing is that the criminal case does not appear in the records, and they have not delivered any files; ultimately, their strategy is to make us look like liars.
It’s been almost four years, and I went out to ask for asylum because of that; it is a complex issue. There was persecution by the police. I lived in a safe house in Guatemala, and many of us got out without being caught. There is a criminal case, and we believe they will revive it if we return. The discourse about us being exiled is that we are liars and invented the cases to get out (of the country) and become famous. It is a very complex and painful issue. Some people are not necessarily from the government but come from the movements and academia that have reproduced this discourse, defamation, aggression, and continuous violence, even outside the country.
Raising my voice in a country in doubt and being a young Indigenous woman has risks, but I am clear about knowing who I am and why I do this collective work, and it is also part of the work as living alternatives to climate destruction. I am with the people; I come from them, and I fight with them because in Guatemala, one of the most unequal and impoverished countries in the world, this is a transgression of racism and structural machismo that has been very comfortable with our forced silence.
More people have had to go into exile, and our future is uncertain. Still, amid adversity and uncertainty, we continue towards a bountiful life and joy because, in this story, we are not victims. We are protagonists and subjects of our history. I decided to leave my country to be able to continue doing my work because if I’m dead or imprisoned, I cannot continue to contribute to the defense of the land
Signs and banners made by activists hang at a community organizing space where activist Lucía Ixchíu and other indigenous and queer activists organized an event on Sept. 28, 2024.
Defending the land with art threatens the interests of transnational and local companies. We live in this reality and continue to do so from outside our territories to take action for life.
Guatemala is a judicial dictatorship that lost its constitutional order in 2017. Although there was a change to a democratic government in January of this year, the criminal actors within the justice system continue their actions. This is why we do not have real conditions to return. But we need to be left alone, to be allowed to do our work, for people to understand that making art and defending the land is a way of fighting. There are different strategies, but they are part of the struggle on the web of life.
We also need resources to help us continue changing power structures. The work we do, even outside the country, is to continue to sustain a digital loudspeaker at the service of the voices from the territories that defend the earth and Mother Earth. Most crucially, our school of communication, art, and cinema for the defense of biodiversity and our work of advocacy, denunciation, and positioning of the events that occur in the places and resistance where we are linked are where we need help and support in these projects. I also coordinate the Movement for Black and Indigenous Liberation, which is an articulation of 22 grassroots organizations at the continental level that defend the territory against the climate crisis.
Above all, what we need most is support and solidarity in this work that belongs to everyone. I dream of being able to return home. I dream of continuing to grow our spaces and transforming the world through art.
Guatemalan indigenous activist Lucía Ixchíu poses for a photo with one of the banners she made with other activists during climate week where it is now on display, at a community organizing space in New York City, on Sept. 28, 2024.
To contact Festival Solidarios, email admfestivalessolidarios@gmail.com and coordinacion@blackindigenousliberation.com for the Movement for Black and Indigenous Liberation
This article, as narrated to Gugulethu Mhlungu, has been slightly edited for clarity.
The 2024-2025 In My Own Words Series was made possible thanks to funding from the Ford Foundation.