Los discursos de autoridad y la construcción de la figura de la comadrona en Guatemala

Abstract

In Guatemala, Maya comadronas (midwives) play an essential role in the provision of maternal and infant health; comadronas attend two thirds of the births in the country and often act as important healthcare providers in rural regions of the country. Despite the scope of this work, health programs implemented in the 1970s to incorporate comadronas into the national health system also restrict and regulate the comadronas’ work. This paper explores the dominant discourses that shape the questioning of comadronas’ authority by examining the language of midwife training manuals and legal documents. I highlight the ways these discourses assert the authority of biomedical knowledge, question the comadronas’ knowledge, and contribute to an essentialized representation of indigeneity. I also examine the discourses that emerge from a comadrona collective’s political activism in order to analyze how these comadronas strategically make claims to rights and resources and discursively establish their own authority.