La Muerte de Farruko Pop /The Death of Farruko Pop

In May 2024, the body of Farruko Pop—a Q'eqchi’‐Maya singer and social media influencer—was found buried in a shallow grave in Guatemala City. Although he was just 18 years old and from a small rural community, his murder made front‐page news and became the major subject of commentary and speculation in the country. This open‐ended narration of that event explores the uncertainties of life and death facing young indigenous people in contemporary Guatemala. Drawing on contemporaneous observations of how the case was talked about in print media, social media, and word‐of‐mouth, I reconstruct the social and cultural implications of the murder. If on the one hand, the case illustrates the multiple and continuing forms of violence that Indigenous people face in Guatemala; on the other, the reasons the case became front‐page news suggest how some young people are finding the means and opportunity to contest the conditions that enable those forms of violence. I highlight how Maya cosmology—in particular its conceptualizations of dreaming and death—in conjunction with access to new media technologies affords people from these communities new imaginaries for how to live in contemporary Guatemala

CONTEST · Face (sociological concept) · Indigenous · Maya · Narrative · Speculation · Subject (documents) · Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies · Latin American Literature Studies · Politics and Society in Latin America