Author Archives: Luisa Madrigal Marroquín

Luisa, a Guatemalan native, is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests examine the intersections of race, gender, class and their influence on nutrition and health interventions in Guatemala.
Meeting room arranged with plastic chairs in rows facing a screen displaying a presentation titled "Programa de Nutrición."

Imagined Geographies: From Urban Expertise to Rural Health Intervention

Health interventions move across spaces and geographies that they themselves help to produce. I argue that health interventions organize relationships among places and people. They define where expertise is presumed to reside, who is expected to teach, and who is expected to learn. In doing so, they reproduce an imagined distinction between places even when everyday practice continually blurs those boundaries. This post contends that health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. They also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with nutrition and health interventions, I show that this distinction, between the urban spaces of Guatemala City and rural spaces of Indigenous Maya Communities, repeatedly breaks down in practice as communities and fieldworkers, those directly responsible for carrying out the interventions in the communities, reshape interventions and generate knowledge of their own. Yet the interventions themselves continue to reproduce the very rural/urban divide that everyday experience disproves. (read more...)

Una taza naranja contiene atol y se sienta sobre una manta de rayas azules y verdes.

Centavitos Against Food Insecurity: Structural Violence, Charity, and Technical Fixes in Guatemala

On March 23rd, 2021, the 2020 yearly results for the “Gran Cruzada Nacional por la Desnutrición” (Great National Crusade for Malnutrition) were presented in a press conference held in the Guatemalan National Palace. For a little over an hour, several ministers made short speeches about the success of their activities related to programs attempting to prevent food insecurity in the country. After, a company highlighted a donation for acquiring a nutritionally improved flour to complement children’s diets. The event ended with some words from the Guatemalan president, Alejandro Giammattei. He explained that lowering malnutrition rates in Guatemala is a communal effort that must be carried out by civil society, business, and the government. He then invited national banks to institute a new campaign in which account holders donate the leftover “little cents” (centavitos) from their bank account balance each month. (read more...)