How A Maya Leader Uses Ancestral Wisdom to Heal
“I began to understand that it’s good not to feel defeated — that we should keep moving forward, loving life, and our existence.”
Rosalina Tuyuc. Photo provided by Prensa Comunitaria.
ANTIGUA, Guatemala — Like countless other Mayan women, 66-year-old Rosalina Tuyuc has been scarred by the decades-long civil conflict that officially ended in 1996 — but from which the country has yet to recover.
Speaking recently about her remarkable life, Tuyuc recalled that what Guatemalans call “the time of the violence” was so painful it almost destroyed her spirit. Several of her relatives, including her husband and her father, were killed or captured by the Guatemalan army.
“I’m still looking for the remains of my father,” she said. “He was detained and forcibly disappeared.” The bloody civil conflict — which lasted for decades and intensified for Indigenous people during the 1980s — took the lives of over 200,000 Guatemalans, most of them Indigenous, said this Mayan Kaq’chikel community activist from the Western Highland community of San Juan Comalapa.
Tuyuc said her family’s pain over the decades comes from the constant search for her father’s remains and the memory of other loved ones lost to violence. Like it or not, she said, this will always be a source of anguish:
“Even after all this time — the war officially ended more than two decades ago — it’s hard to heal the wounds of the past.”
This isn’t just the case for Tuyuc but for thousands of other Mayan women who endured similar losses. University of Arizona anthropologist Linda Green writes about the challenges these widowed women faced — not only emotional loss, but the fight to survive and support their children.
“First there was the very real trauma of what they experienced, either the disappearances or the actual husbands being killed right in front of them,” Green said.
Then, amid the trauma, they faced the sudden responsibility of being the sole family breadwinner while perhaps having to flee the violence in their home community to keep their families safe.
“For several years, there were no corn crops planted because of displacement,” said Green. “There was enormous food insecurity. Women didn’t have the money to buy fertilizer. They themselves either had to work those fields, or they had to hire hands to do it for them. Or, they had to travel to start anew somewhere else.”
As fear and necessity drove many from their homes, these war widows also suffered in other ways, with many manifesting physical and emotional ailments, according to the anthropologist: “Chronic headaches, gastritis, inability to sleep, and also the physical manifestations of what we call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome...”
Healing from these challenges was a long process for Rosalina Tuyuc — one that took her from depression and doubt of the Catholic faith in which she was raised to a role as an activist for war widows and their children.
In 1985, she founded an organization known by its Spanish acronym as CONAVIGUA, the National Coordinator of Guatemalan Widows, which fights for the rights of women who were raped and widowed during the conflict that lasted from 1960 to 1996. Now, Tuyuc says she’s “profoundly grateful to the universe to fight alongside other women.” But she came to this understanding gradually.
Ancestors with answers
For more than 25 years, Rosalina Tuyuc questioned why the tragedies of the war had happened: “Why was there no father, no husband? Why did the Guatemalan army kill so many people?”
Tuyuc found answers to these questions in the teachings of her ancestors, passed down through the generations.
After her husband disappeared in 1980, Tuyuc said, she sought out the spiritual assistance of an elder. He told her, “Your husband won’t be found, nor will you hear about your father.” He continued, “Now you must start thinking about yourself, about your children. Now you have to live for you and for them.” He also counseled the young widow, “Live out your life’s mission.”
The conversations with the elder began to put this young Mayan woman back in touch with her Mayan spiritual roots. Only then, she said, did she begin to gain a fuller understanding of what is called “Mayan cosmovision.” It’s an all-encompassing way of viewing the world, humans, their surroundings and the universe. “It’s not a religion,” she explained. “Many call it spirituality; it’s very complex and holistic. It encompasses everything — the cosmos and nature.”
Tuyuc began to remember that when she was small, her music teacher father did some work with the Catholic Church. She also recalled that people from her community would call on him when they were ill. Indigenous healing traditions — part of Mayan cosmovision — were part of her life even from a young age, although few people publicly acknowledged or valued them at the time.
“Sadly,” she said, “the colonization of the Indigenous made us believe that our knowledge and our practices weren’t worthwhile. It’s something that was ingrained in us since we were little.”
Because her family was Catholic, as she grew up, Tuyuc didn’t realize Mayan healing and spiritual practices were all around her. “My maternal grandmother was a midwife, and my paternal grandfather was a great farmer,” Tuyuc said. “He would give thanks to the earth and salute the sun when it rose and set. He would give thanks to the rain and to the air. … He would ask the earth for permission to work the land.”
These were traditions not taught inside churches, she said, “but in the collective customs of a people.” Because of her very Catholic upbringing, Tuyuc said that as an adult, it was at first difficult to accept these Mayan cosmovision spiritual practices as valid.
She recalls that when the Mayan elder asked, “Do you know what your mission is?” the only way she could respond was that she was a woman with a desire to heal and to help people. At the time, she couldn’t connect her desire with Mayan healing traditions in her own family. But now she acknowledges, “It’s something that one carries in one’s blood, from knowledge passed down by the grandfathers and grandmothers.”
There were other insights Tuyuc gained from her conversations with Mayan elders. “I began to understand that it’s good not to feel defeated,” she said, “that we should keep moving forward, loving life and our existence — no matter what’s happened in the past.”
“If it weren’t for these wise teachings,” she adds, “I might be like so many women who suffered and basically stopped living because of their pain, who died with no hope for a better life. Traditional religion had taught them to accept suffering in return for a happy afterlife. … I think that sometimes conventional religion condemns us to suffer — to not live life fully and in balance.”
She expresses gratitude “to the many elders — men and women who told us it isn’t good to keep on suffering, because we were meant to be happy; we were meant to take care of Mother Earth, to protect all life, be it human or animal, the life of everything that lives on this planet.”
“That’s when I began to understand that it’s good not to feel defeated,” she said. “That we should keep moving forward, loving life, and our existence.
Embracing her culture, she said, allowed her to make sense of all that had happened, and to heal.
Now she can proclaim that even with the suffering and what she calls “threats to life,” she is now “profoundly grateful to the universe to be alive, to have grandchildren, to fight alongside other women. “
Rosalina believes the understanding she gained from Mayan spirituality gives her ”the strength to continue with my life’s mission.” Eventually the insights from Mayan cosmovision provided impetus to her human rights work.
Rosalina’s journey as a healer
For more than three decades, Rosalina Tuyuc has made contributions as a healer, a community organizer, a leader for the rights of war widows and Indigenous women in general, and even as a member of the Guatemalan Congress.
Central to her motivation for working with CONAVIGUA, the organization she founded to help war widows — and really, what spurred her activism — are the experiences she underwent during the period of heavy repression of the country’s Indigenous population, especially the “Bloody 1980s.”
“In 1985, when I began my work with the women, and there was also the commemoration of the 500 hundred years of colonialism,” she said, “that’s when I began to understand how Maya cosmovision connected with my social and political work. I began to understand that this cosmovision is also about organizing, about politics, about economics. So I started to defend the rights of Indigenous people, their way of being, of acting, of thinking.”
Her work with the widows in the late 1980s and early ’90s coincided with a reawakening of Mayan identity — not only for Tuyuc but for other Indigenous leaders, like her fellow activist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu. “Sister Rigoberta Menchu helped me understand the profound complexity of Indigenous communities,” Tuyuc said.
By the time peace accords finally ended Guatemala's conflict in 1996, the widows’ association CONAVIGUA had become one of the leading human rights organizations in the country. Four years after the war ended, Tuyuc became the first Kaqchikel — Mayans of the midwestern highlands in Guatemala — to serve in the Guatemalan Congress.
That time was key, she recalls. “Out of 80 congressmembers, six of us were Indigenous. Some important legislation was passed, such as outlawing amnesty for crimes of genocide.” Still, she said it was an uphill struggle being in the minority and maintaining her identity as an Indigenous woman.
Wearing her traditional ”traje,” a woven skirt and top, Tuyuc would bring her baby to the congress, nursing her when needed. Some criticized her for this. “But I would say, if the popular vote brought me to congress, then I must be accepted in my totality—as a mother, as a peasant, as Indigenous,” Tuyuc recalled. “We Maya women always carry our small children with us when we’re shopping, or weaving, or working, because that’s when the learning starts.”
Following the war, the Guatemalan government established a reparations program for war widows, and Tuyuc became its director. She worked to dignify the memory of the dead by leading the effort to exhume mass graves and identify the remains. And she fought to offer war widows and orphans financial and emotional support.
“I went to one of these ceremonies when they were giving money to these women,” said Eliza Strode, an American who’s spent many years in Guatemala. “And she would just open her arms and envelop them in a hug. It was so moving. She was so totally present.”
The government funded the reparations program for only a few years. Now, with no consistent institutional support, Rosalina Tuyuc continues working with the widows — many of them elderly and dying — in whatever way she can.
Dr. Bill Clemens, an alternative medicine practitioner working with the poor in Guatemala, has known Tuyuc for some 15 years. Together, they’ve conducted medical missions in neglected communities. Clemens described Tuyuc as “very loving and caring.”
“I remember when an 88-year-old woman came in through the rain,” Clemens said. “No shoes, no children. The cutest little grandma. I remember Rosalina dried her off, combed her hair, hugged on her to warm her up.”
Guatemala's human rights ombudsman, Jordán Rodas, believes Tuyuc has become an icon representing brave resistance to military brutality. “She went to Congress and came out with her head held high,” he said. “She’s truly a role model to emulate.”
Although international human rights groups have recognized Tuyuc for her human rights work over the decades, she said she doesn’t do it for awards but to validate cultural practices that have often been marginalized and belittled.
“When I was growing up, we were taught that the Maya had disappeared and the only thing that remained of them were tourist attractions,” she said. “We grew up being taught we were just worthless Indians.”
Despite some social progress, Guatemala’s Maya still strive to achieve parity and respect in their own country, where opponents feel increasingly free to attack Indigenous human rights defenders and practitioners of Mayan spirituality.
In June 2020, witnesses watched in horror as members of an evangelical sect dragged the internationally recognized Mayan healer and plant medicine expert Domingo Choc into a field, doused him with gasoline and set him on fire.
His attackers accused Choc of witchcraft. His death, and other attacks against Mayan spiritual practitioners since, have called attention to continuing discrimination in Guatemala against those who practice traditional Mayan religion.
Thus, Rosalina Tuyuc said she has a renewed commitment to vindicate her culture and its spiritual traditions, and to honor those who’ve perished to keep it alive.
“It’s a revindication,” she said, “not only of art and culture, but of rights and history. And it’s not a gift. it has a cost. And so, we must continue to struggle to maintain our culture and spiritual practices, especially in memory of those who shed their blood on this sacred land.”
Maria Martin is an independent journalist based in Guatemala. She's the author of "Crossing Borders, Building Bridges: A Journalist's Heart in Latin America" and “Reporting Across Borders: A Short Guide to Becoming a Foreign Correspondent.”
This report was made possible by funding from the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust, and the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture.