{"id":3637,"date":"2020-09-16T08:10:21","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T12:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/16.147.243.36\/?p=3637"},"modified":"2026-08-06T18:08:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T18:08:08","slug":"interview-with-cathy-komisaruk-author-of-all-in-a-days-walk-the-gendered-geography-of-native-migration-in-colonial-chiapas-and-guatemala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hahr-online.com\/es\/interview-with-cathy-komisaruk-author-of-all-in-a-days-walk-the-gendered-geography-of-native-migration-in-colonial-chiapas-and-guatemala\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Catherine<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Catherine Komisaruk is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of <\/em>Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence<\/a> (Stanford University Press, 2013). Currently she is writing a book about native families, migration, and activism in colonial Guatemala and Mexico. You can read her article \u201cAll in a Day’s Walk? The Gendered Geography of Native Migration in Colonial Chiapas and Guatemala<\/a>\u201d in HAHR 100.3<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 1. How did you come to focus on migration in colonial Chiapas and Guatemala as an area of research?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Migration has played a key role in Maya life since pre-Hispanic times, but I wasn\u2019t thinking about migration when I started doing research on this region.  I was interested in social relationships among people living and working together.  That interest resulted in my first book, Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence<\/em><\/a> (2013), which focused largely on Guatemala City and Santiago (now called Antigua). The research underscored the point that those cities were formed largely by the migration of people coming to work for the Spanish colonists, even though migration was mainly in the background of the study. I\u2019m working now on a second book in which one chapter focuses more squarely on migration in colonial Mexico and Guatemala.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A puzzle arose in the research for my first book, and that puzzle sparked this article: Why do census records for some of the pueblos de indios<\/em> show such incredibly uneven gender ratios?  I was unable to answer that question for a very long time, but I guess it stayed active in the back of my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other factor that probably played a role was personal observation. During the years that I lived in Guatemala I never had a car, so I spent a lot of time walking and taking buses. I first went to Guatemala just after finishing my undergraduate degree here in the US\u2014because I needed a job and was offered a job in Guatemala City teaching in a secondary school. I lived in a relatively wealthy neighborhood, and whenever I left town for the weekend, I noticed the same thing on my way home: on Sunday afternoons, most of the people riding the bus to my neighborhood were girls and women.  They were live-in domestic servants, returning to work after visiting their families for the weekend. That intrigued me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a few years I went home to the United States and started graduate study in history, and then I returned to Guatemala City to do research at the Archivo General de Centro Am\u00e9rica<\/a>. As I got to know the workers in the archives building, I learned that some of them were making the same kind of weekly commutes.  Sunday through Thursday nights, they would sleep on cots in a little room in the archives. Their commuting schedules were dictated by bus schedules. One man would leave his hometown on a bus at 2 a.m. every Monday to get to the capital in time for work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this got me thinking about people traveling long distances to work before there were buses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Your article employs a quite unique methodology, using contemporary computer tools to reconstruct migration patterns in colonial Guatemala and Chiapas. How did you come to this methodology? What promise do you see this methodology holding for future research?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s funny to think about this question because I\u2019m not very tech-savvy!  When I moved to San Antonio five years ago, I found that I needed my car to go most places, and I started using Google Maps to get driving directions. I still love looking at print maps, including the big paper road maps that fold up into letter size to fit in the glove compartment.  But Google Maps<\/a> is very convenient, and it\u2019s easy to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first impulse when developing this article was actually to use a print map. I started with a paper road map from the Guatemalan tourism agency that lists driving times between certain towns. But I quickly escalated to Google Maps because it includes a nearly infinite number of towns and roads, and it provides walking routes and walking times. Digital mapping is a really promising tool for research in a wide variety of fields. I\u2019m continually amazed at how powerful it is, especially given its accessibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the time I was working on this article, the news media were reporting on the \u201cCentral American migrant caravan\u201d of people walking toward the United States. I found myself following the migrants\u2019 journey by mapping it on Google Maps. The length and extreme difficulty of that trip, not to mention the uncertainties awaiting migrants at the destination, highlight the extent of the problems confronting people in Central America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n