There is no more room: Cemeteries, personhood, and bare death

Abstract

This article addresses the practice of disinterment in Guatemala City’s public cemetery. The city has grown too fast and too many people have been killed. The cemetery is now at its limits. There is no more room. This problem of space has meant a reimagining of liberal ideals in the midst of a neoliberal moment, making the cemetery’s disinterment policy ever more aggressive. And while disinterment has always been policy, it is the pace of disinterment today that is exceptional. Once a loved one fails to pay the cemetery dues, the body is disinterred. This event does not erase a corpse’s personhood so much as reconstitute it just enough to announce that the corpse no longer belongs. It is this concomitant reconstruction of personhood and of not-belonging (of exile, of marginality, of trash) that echoes key aspects of Guatemalan citizenship today. This is how and why the disinterred corpse both affirms and denies the liberal virtues of order and progress, of purity and danger, of security and space, with a harried, free market exchange of death for more death, of one body for another.