Documentary: Discovering Dominga (2002)

Directed by Patricia Flynn, Discovering Dominga premiered on PBS on July 8, 2003. It is a story about Denese Becker, a survivor Guatemala's Rio Negro massacre in 1982, who returns to her native village to discover how and why here parents were killed while also exploring who "Denese" would have become had she been raised "Dominga." I think I am seeing a case of Mignolo's decolonial thinking.  The crisis that Denese experiences -- I am talking about the crisis of discovering Dominga more than the trauma of the actual massacre in her village -- prompts a process of delinking for Denese whereby she sees the rhetoric of modernity that has covered up the atrocities (with a lake). She sees the Maya as already questioning the logic of coloniality by reclaiming their language, teaching the traditions that were silenced by colonialism, establishing memorials to name the victims of massacres, and demanding justice by exhuming remains and testifying in human rights trials. And Dense was to be a part of the delinking.

Dominga escaped the Maya highlands massacre of 70 women and 107 children by the Guatemalan army. The Rio Negro villagers were labeled "subversives"  for resisting their forced removal to make way for the World Bank-funded dam  (the river is now a lake).  Dominga was taken to an orphanage in Rabinal and was later adopted by a baptist minister from Iowa. The trauma of her childhood, however was minimized as "a wild imagination" of a child by the small town community and suppressed  until the memories returned as she was raising her own family.

With the help of her adoptive cousin, Denese researched her family in Guatemala and returned to Rabinal to meet them sharing memories of the village, her family, and also the massacres. The trauma of witnessing, surviving, forgetting, and remembering is captured in this documentary as a struggle to

• Dad went to the market. Dominga, nine years old,  waited for him by the river to return. A woman reported the men of Rio Negro had been killed. This was one month before the village had been attacked by government soldiers.  
• About a month after her dad was killed, the village was attacked. It was early in the morning, and the soldiers appeared in the doorway of the house putting a noose around her mother's neck. Her mother strapped a baby to her back and told her to run. She hid in the fields and watched as they marched the woman and children up a mountain -- she heard lots of gunshots. 
• Dominga came to Iowa at age eleven. She was put in second grade. Some thought she was Chinese, and they called her "chink." When she told her story, people told her she had a "vivid imagination," so she "closed up." 
• In high school, Denese began to feel like a typical American teenager. She met her husband on a blind date,and he was the first person she told her real name. She would wake up from nightmares as her memory returned.  Denese says she tried to make peace in her heart with her family. She told her cousin her story who did research on the Internet and found "massacres in Rabinal." Another survivor called Denese who knew her and her father told her about her family in Rabinal who had been looking for her, so Denese went to Guatemala. 
• What began as looking for her family, turned into a quest to bury her parents together, to uncover the motivation behind the massacres and to seek justice for the atrocities. 
• The images of Denese returning to Rabinal capture the moments when she meets her aunts, uncles and cousins. She is shown hugging her father's brother as she is surrounded by wailing women in  colorfully woven huipils. They take her to the monument of the 70 women and 100 children murdered on March 12, 1982; she finds the name of her mother, #59, on the list of victims. We see Denese crying as the monument holds her up. 
• A reenactment reveals Dominga carrying her sister through the mountains as Denese narrates her memory of trying to find a place to sleep, hiding in caves, squeezing berry juice in her sister's mouth; she got weak and so Dominga buried her under a big tree on a hill. She talks about how she thought maybe Rio Negro dis something wrong, but this was during the genocide when the government was hunting leftist rebels and killed Mayas forcing them out of their villages. viewed as potential guerrilla supporters.  Men were, perhaps, killed to prevent them from joining the guerrillas.
• Denese tells us she had forgotten her language I 'che. 
• The film then shows a conversation with a priest who explains that the village resisted the building of the dam in the river and that a peasant committee promoting land rights was also going on at the time, so the army concluded the Rio Negro was breeding guerrillas and this became a death sentence for Rio Negro. 
• We see Denese exploring her native lands -- images of fishing, mango trees, coconut trees - -and we see re-enactments of this as well. Then Denese goes to a market place, another memory of her and her mother smelling the cloth,  to try on  woven skirt, the same type of skirt her mother wore; she is brought to tears by the experience as she wishes she could be a "normal I'che Mayan woman."  
• Dedication of Survivors' Community Museum: The film moves to the museum where black and white photographs of the victims are hung on the wall. Denese finds her father's photograph with the date of death as  February 13, 1982. At this dedication, Denese gives a speech in English translated by her white cousin who speaks Spanish. She says her two names and how she wants to find out what happened to the innocent people who were killed. 
• The film cuts back to the scene of Iowa, and her husband talks about his searches for understanding the U.S. involvement in overthrowing the 1954 democratic government to a military government; the U.S. trained their military and gave financial backing to the government that killed the Maya in 1982.  We see Denese in Maya clothing speaking at her church in Iowa about her memories and the nuns who took her to an orphanage. The audience talks about the ignorance of the U.S. role in international affairs, especially atrocities. 
• Denese returns to Rio Negro, 5 miles up the side of the mountain in Guatemala for the commemoration of her mother's memory.  What was once a river is now a lake; the dam was built. We see the people doing a ritual for the spirits as Denese narrates her memory of the smells and how her parents used to mourn the dead. We see Denese looking into the fire in the dark of night listening to the chants as she narrates her wonderment: Is this what it is like to be these people, and if so, I think I would have liked it.  In the light of morning, we see Denese and her cousin putting on make up and talking (perhaps for the camera) while her husband stands off to the side. They meet an eyewitness to the massacre as he recounts the event. At 2-3 pm the patrollers were attaching a woman. She resisted and thew a rock. The patroller got angry and struck her in the back with a machete. She had a baby on her back, and the other half of the baby stayed on her back. He takes Dense to the spot on the mountain near the ravine that was covered in blood, hair, and human flesh.  He says, " Sometimes it hard for us humans to bear seeing such things, but these trees have more memories than we do. They saw everything thing and so did Mother Earth."
• In 1996, peace accords brought Guatemala "civil war" to a close. In 1999, A United Nations Truth Commission declared the massacre at Rio Negro a "genocide"; across the country, over 200,000 killed up to 1.5 displaced, raped, tortured, mutilated with the knowledge of the highest authorities of the state.  The Commission found the Guatemalan army responsible for 93 percent  of total war crimes. However, the perpetrators had not been punished at the time of the filming.
• The priest tells us they tried to exterminate the Maya and that it was form the racism that started with the Spanish. the 2001 charges were filed against the state and survivors demanded remains be exhumed as evidence. They wanedt to seek justice, but the system of justice is problematic. There are 75 secret graves, but only 17 have been exhumed. 
• In Guatemala, we see Denese preparing to go to court to get her father exhumed along with another survivor, and she talks about the realization that she needs to get involved politically. She decides to testify in a genocide case. The survivors organized themselves into a Widows and Orphans Committee  to document the massacre and speak out for justice. They want the commanders to go to court for murder. We see Denese and her husband talking to a Human Rights attorney about the risks in testifying. She says "my people" and talks about how she is torn between two worlds. She wants a home but hasn't found it; her white American husband makes it more difficult for her to fit in, and we hear and see the tension growing in their marriage as Denese struggles to make sense of her identity.
• The film moves to a family reunion without her husband's presence, and we hear Denese and her cousin talking about the unraveling of her identity and marriage -- torn between wanting to be in Guatemala and wanting to raise her children in Iowa, Denese is looking for answers.
• The exhumation of her father was approved, so Denese returns to Guatemala, and we see a scene in a Christian mass, in Spanish (rather than Maya language), with the sermon about exhuming the remains of the dead to rebury them with family. The priest explains that the process can be a few days of slow digging and that the forensic anthropologists have to examine the remains; there is talk about how some of the sites are empty and talk about one site in  Xococ where they found no remains but evidence it had been dug up by the people of that town who were the murderers --  innocent people who were forced to do the murders and who are now sorry, but Denese says "they are my enemy...I am very bitter."  The priest calls this her "inner violence." 
• A parade of people walk to the exhumation site with colorful baskets and flowers, across a ravine, through a cornfield  to a large tree where they begin the digging -- two police standing guard. We see Denese crying and a old woman attending to her with herbs and prayers. Denese narrates her struggle to forgive as a "pastor's kid" when her heart is tortured. The digging is arduous until they get six feet deep; the anthropologists sift through the dirt looking for bones and carefully carving away a at cloth remnants to uncover a rope that was tightened using a stick around the neck of the skeletal remains of the men in the mass grave.  We see the burial site after each day of digging where colorful clothing hides the skeletal remains of the men of Rio Negro. The forensic work begins while family members light candles and hover around the site drying their tears. 
• The voice of the anthropologist says out of 168 cases, only 3 have been brought to court. The prosecutors are afraid. We see the parade walk back across the ravine with boxes of the remains and Denese walking along the water saying : I hope my dad knows I am fighting for him and that he did not die for no reason. 
• Back in Iowa,  she talks about how  "something has to happen to change her mind" or possibly give her answers about who she is; having her father's body helps her feel more brave and independent. We see her teaching her Iowa friends how to make tortillas. She says, "The secret my mother told me...." She talks about her interviews and talk shows as the beginning of her efforts to raise awareness. She says it will be a lifetime of work for her -- as we see clips of newspapers flash across the screen. She talks about her separation from her husband who, she says, wanted the "old Denese back who covered up." He talks about how a war that happened so long ago and so far away is still affecting us today -- it took his family apart.
• She says, I have not come to terms with the American Denese and Dominga just that she needs both to survive.
• The film ends with text scrolling over a new burial site. We learn that Denese did return to bury her father with her mother and the genocide cases are ongoing.
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