Guatemalan Americans

More than 535,000 people of Guatemalan origin now call the United States home. In adapting to a new life in the United States, they have faced unique obstacles—lingering impacts of intense political repression and poverty, obstacles to obtaining political asylum; and continued gender, racial, and ethnic discrimination even within Latino communities. To overcome these challenges, Guatemalans have formed transnational kinship and social networks enabling them to advance economically in the United States and provide support for family members and communities in Guatemala. This entry discusses their immigration and current situation.

Guatemalans have migrated to the United States through being “pushed” by a combination of negative economic and political conditions in their country of origin and being “pulled” by economic opportunities in the United States. Through the early 1970s, a small number of largely middle-class professional Guatemalans migrated to the United States seeking to improve their economic status. The influx of Guatemalans arriving in the United States increased sharply during the mid-1970s, however, in response to deteriorating economic conditions and deepening political violence in Guatemala.

Much of Guatemala's postindependence economic activity centered on the production of coffee and foreign-controlled banana enclaves. This led to a highly unequal wealth distribution and patterns of landholding in Guatemala. Poverty and social and political exclusion in Guatemala have also been exacerbated by deeply embedded patterns of discrimination against the indigenous Mayans, who make up approximately 40% of Guatemala's population, which was estimated in 2007 to be 13.4 million people.

An attempt by President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán to implement moderate land reform that included the [Page 565]expropriation of United Fruit Company's banana lands led the United States to support a 1954 military coup against Arbenz. Several decades of military rule and armed conflict between government forces and leftist guerrillas followed. Guatemala's civil war further intensified during the late 1970s, leading to the displacement of an estimated 1 million rural residents. During this period, military forces and death squads linked to the landowning oligarchy targeted Mayan peoples in Guatemala's highlands and political activists with violence. An estimated 200,000 civilians were killed in Guatemala's civil war, which officially ended with the 1996 peace accords. More than 90% of related deaths were attributed to the government and its allies.

During this period, more than 200,000 Guatemalans fled to the United States to escape violence and poverty, becoming the second-largest Central American group in the United States after the Salvadorans. Guatemalans settled in the urban centers of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston as well as in rural areas in Florida and the Farm Belt. Although political repression pushed thousands of Guatemalans to flee north, the U.S. government granted political asylum to less than 5% of Guatemalans during the 1980s, classifying them as economic immigrants rather than as political refugees. Through later court settlements and the 1997 Nicaraguan and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), however, a number of these initially undocumented Guatemalans have been able to remain legally in the United States.

Many Guatemalans in the United States have needed to cope with the psychological impacts of past political violence—posttraumatic stress, anxiety, and depression—with only limited access to the support available to recognized political refugee populations. In addition, although Guatemalans have a very high rate of participation in the labor force, they are employed largely in the low-paying service sector. Migrants who arrive illegally also often face the burden of paying off debts accumulated in their journey to the United States. Despite these limitations, Guatemalans sent $584 million in remittances to their families in Guatemala during the early 2000s.

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