concerned with isolated indigenous (Maya) communities, often ignoring women and gender

issues. During the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, researchers occasionally referred to Maya

women, but most often these references concerned the women's traditional roles as wives and

mothers or as artisans (Reina 1966). In the 1980s, the first substantive research on Guatemalan

women was published. This work concentrated on women's roles as producers of wealth in the

context of universal female subordination and Guatemala's integration in the world economy

(Ehlers 1990; Bossen 1984). In the 1990s, research on women examined gender as a construction

of race and descent, linking gender construction to the process of Mestizaje (racial mixing) and

connecting Maya and Ladina to their relation to one another as well as the state (Causus Arzu

1992; Nelson 1999). Research in the post-conflict era has returned to looking at "women only"

and their struggle with reconstruction of individual and communal memory, reconciliation, and

survival (Green 1999; Sanford 2000; Zur 1998). While research on post-conflict issues is still

important at the beginning of the 21st century, new work on immigration treats gender relations

and women as a central theme, depicting them as more active participants in the transnational

migration process (Moran-Taylor 2003).

 Early research in Guatemala was concerned with indigenous communities as isolated

entities and thus ignored the ways in which these communities are affected by the state. While

early Guatemalan ethnographies (Gillin 1958; Nash 1967; Reina 1960; Tax 1953; Tumin 1945,

1952) were concerned with recording important cultural details of Mayan communities, they

have been criticized because their examinations of ethnic relations, acculturation, and

modernization neglect women, and tend to construct women only in terms of their reproductive

roles (Bossen 1984). Tumin's (1945, 1952) work in San Luis Jilotepeque was one of the first to

compare Ladinos and Mayans, and while he made extensive and detailed observations on gender