While psychosocial interventions are central to many of Guatemala's postwar reconstruction projects, defining, and understanding notions of distress and well‐being in indigenous communities remains problematic. This article proposes that, in order to avoid victimizing or generalizing approaches toward mental health in the postwar era, such interventions must take into account individual and community‐level discourses surrounding both vulnerability and resilience, which are shaped by complex local histories and geographies, as well as by broader structural inequalities. By providing an ethnographic description of the historic forces that have contributed to the social and psychological landscape in the K'iche' community of Tululché, the author suggests new ways of thinking about the connections between violence, culture, and mental health in rural areas living through continued social exclusion. In particular, she shows how the accumulation of both traumatic and resiliency processes inform the subjective and collective memories, as well as the future hopes and aspirations that together underlie people's psychosocial well‐being.