“Who would like to share their testimonio with the North American anthropologist?” a local woman asks a room full of men, women and children, survivors of genocide in Guatemala.
Testimonio is a ritual for the collective telling and sharing of stories of violence and loss. Alexa Hagerty, a US anthropologist who was present in the room, did not see this coming. She had spent months training with forensic teams in exhumation at mass grave sites, investigating human rights violations in Guatemala and Argentina, countries ravaged by dictatorships and genocide.
