Ixim: Celebrating trans lives in Abya Yala

A still of Monica Chub from the documentary IXIM: el amor no tiene género, courtesy of Alex Pérez V.

Review • Ann Louise Deslandes • February 20, 2025 • Leer en español

It’s a summer day in 2023, and Monica Chub, a Maya Q’eqchi’ trans woman and human rights defender, leads a contingent in the Pride march that makes its way through the streets of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. She’s surrounded by brightly dressed people who march, smile, and dance, waving rainbow flags and creating clouds of colored smoke.

“That's what it's all about, isn't it?” said Chub, speaking to Ojalá by video call from her home in San Pedro Carchá, Guatemala. “Despite this situation in which we are immersed and entrenched, there must also be joy; we also have to celebrate our existence.”

Chub, who has organized and led Pride and LGBTIQ+ memorial events throughout Central America, is the subject of Maya Mam director Alex Pérez V’s documentary film Ixim: el amor no tiene género, which was released on 26 June 2024 and has shown at festivals in Central America. 

A self-described “activist and defender of Indigenous LGBTIQ human rights,” Chub’s story has particular vitality against a global moment of hate and backlash against transgender people. 

Considering seeds, food and people 

In the Mayan way of seeing, says Chub, who is currently the Alta Verapaz co-ordinator of the J’alanil aj Q’eqchi Organizing Collective for Plural Resistance, the experience of gender is plural and not binary.

“In Mayan cosmovision, there isn't a specific gender,” said Chub. “Our people have always been made up of a plurality of existence, in which everything isn’t gendered, and within which we are all different within that plurality.”

Ixim, which means ‘corn’ in many Mayan languages, is a 34 minute film filmed over one year in San Pedro Carchá and Guatemala City. Director Pérez V portrays Chub’s life in three chapters of differing lengths and intensities: Self-determination, Discrimination, and Struggle and resistance.

In Self-determination, Q’eqchi’ spiritual guide Jonathan Sosos joins Chub to explain how male and female energies combine and reproduce.

“If a human being is born with feminine energy, it doesn’t mean they have to be a woman, if they have more qualities of feminine energy, but their physical features are masculine, or vice-versa,” said Sosos, who appears seated on a short stone column next to an offering of different-coloured flowers, as incense burned in a chalice at the centre of the altar. “What is important in the Maya cosmovision of being is the integration of the genders.”

In the documentary Chub says colonisation by the Spanish and the Catholic Church, imposed a rigid sex and gender binary on Maya peoples. “That changed how our people saw themselves,” she told me, and led to stigmatization of LGBTIQ+ people.

In 2024 Guatemala’s National LGBTIQ+ Observatory recorded the ‘violent deaths’ of 15 gay men and 5 trans women. Local advocacy groups such as Visibles Guatemala frequently record acts of homophobic and transphobic violence and discrimination.

In Ixim, we learn that 33-year-old Chub’s journey to activism was marked by the femicide of her friend Nancy. 

Nancy, says Chub, was a Q’eqchi’ transgender woman rejected by her rural community and compelled to leave for Guatemala City, where she became a victim of a hate crime.

Among scenes of Chub’s daily life, in which she creates an altar for Nancy, carries out household chores, and participates in marches for human rights, we meet Chub’s mother, Teresa Caal, psychologist Julia Cal, and director Alex Pérez V, who appears as himself. Together with the audience, they bear witness to Chub’s efforts to thrive by centering a Maya ancestral worldview. 

Process and perspective

In an interview with Ojalá, Pérez V said the process of making the film caused him to recall his grandparents, who would call each other “Mother Corn” and “Father Corn.”

“I asked my grandparents, ‘why is corn sometimes mother and sometimes father, sometimes man and sometimes woman?’” he said. “They told me that it depends on the context, because in the end corn is very sacred and respected… It has no gender.”

Corn is central to the diversity of Maya communities, and to Ixim: el amor no tiene género. The milpa system, in which corn, beans, squash and other vegetables and herbs are grown together, creating an agricultural polyculture, has been practiced by Mayan people for millenia, 

“In the milpa system a great variety of colours of corn are harvested from the same sowing,” said Pérez V. “Nothing happens if they grow together, in the end it’s a variety of types coexisting in the same community.”

As Maya gender identities co-exist like plants in the milpa, observes Pérez V, so too do Indigenous languages.

“In Guatemala there are 22 languages apart from Spanish and they are diverse, Quiché, Mayan, Zutuhil, Siapacapense peoples,” he said. “In our diversity, we should live together within the same community and understand each other, which is exactly what happened before colonization.” 

During the filming of Ixim, the director experienced what he calls learning and unlearning about gender, community and territory. 

“I grew up in a Christian family, very macho,” said Pérez V. He was motivated to make the film to educate viewers on the rights and reality of LGBTIQ+ people in rural communities in Guatemala after he learned that one of his friends was gay but could not come out for fear of violent retribution from their family and community.

“In researching for the film and meeting Monica, I think it also made me reconstruct my way of thinking and seeing things,” he said.

Decolonizing gender beyond Hollywood’s latest dumpster fire

Neither Chub nor Pérez V have seen Emilia Pérez, the multi-award-winning and Oscar-nominated screen musical made by French director Jacques Audiard about a Mexican cartel boss responsible for thousands of kidnappings and murders who becomes a trans woman that leads searches for the disappeared in Mexico City. 

Emilia Pérez has been the subject of widespread criticism in Mexico and Latin America and was labelled “retrograde” by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in the United States. It has been pilloried for presenting transgender people and Mexican experiences through a colonialist, white European lens.

Camilia D. Aurora, the Mexican co-creator of the parody film Johanne Sacrebleu, told broadcaster Gaby Meza Emilia Pérez is not only transphobic but also deeply offensive to Mexico’s culture and the pain of widespread violence against the people. 

“There have been many films about Guatemala where the same thing happens, they are directed or produced by people who are not from the country and the narrative is distorted,” said Pérez. In contrast, he said, he wants Ixim to present a respectful, authentic view of trans and Indigenous life. 

Decolonization is key to undoing the many categories of discrimination revealed in Ixim, says Chub, who has also been the coordinator of the Alta Verapaz Office for Sexual Diversity and of Gente Positiva, the Alta Verapaz branch of an HIV/AIDS health promotion organization.

“In our communities, we are diverse, we exist as a diversity of bodies,” she said. “Our identity should not mean we face violence, or that our bodies must go through the dispossession of our rights within our communities.”

Ixim: el amor no tiene género will be available via Kablaj Films’ YouTube channel later this year.