Unlearning the Archive. A River as Trace

This contribution explores the archive as a site to practice collective mourning. Drawing from andrea ancira’s family archive, it examines questions of memory, trauma, and mourning in the context of the civil war in Guatemala (1960–96), one of the longest in Latin America. The author engages with the archival materials found in her grandparents’ basement as traces that seek to document, co-construct, and poetically negotiate a narrative with multiple voices, perspectives, truths, and meanings, offering a nuanced understanding of situated and transitional accounts #of social and personal histories. From an auto-ethnographic perspective, ancira reflects on the affective economies that archives produce and circulate when generating and exchanging alternative narratives of a shared history, with a particular focus on the materials from her family archive and their donation to Riij Ib’ooy Center in Río Negro, a community that witnessed and most directly suffered the consequences of the civil war.