In and out of rights: Security, migration, and human rights talk in postwar Guatemala

This article examines the interconnections between security, migration, and human rights in a Mam Maya community in postwar Guatemala. It does so by exploring so-called maras (gangs, often of young wage-labor migrants returned from the United States) and the security committees that have formed to control them. In the resulting nexus of relationships and powerful contradictions, individuals move in and out of rights entitlement in Guatemala and in the United States, producing a flexible and fluid concept of rights, their meanings, and potential uses. Tracing one case in particular, I show how naming rebellious migrant youth as mareros in this context has the consequence of denying their rights and justifying summary forms of justice, neither just nor exercised predominantly by the state, but rather, in their own communities. These issues, embedded as they are in different kinds of community and intergenerational conflicts as well as local and national historical contexts, go beyond the commensurability of rights talk and security concerns: they speak of the ability to imagine collective futures.