Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas (review)

Christine Kovic tells the story of Tzotzil-speaking Maya who are among the 20,000 expelled since the 1970s from rural communities of San Juan Chamula, Chiapas. She both describes the history of the expulsion and explores how these "ordinary" people define and defend human rights in the newest poorest urban neighborhoods of San Cristobal de las Casas. Many scholars and journalists have written about the "expulsados," particularly of the Protestant converts driven from their lands and homes by fellow townspeople. Kovic includes the Protestants in her complex history of the expulsions. Her focus, however, are the lesser-known expulsados, those Catholics who renewed their faith under the guidance of missionaries, but also challenged the PRI-ista privileges of local Chamulan authorities.

Kovic studied and served as an activist with the expelled Tzotzil since her first field trip to San Cristobal de Las Casas in 1993, shortly before the Zapatista uprising. She collaborated with the Chiapas diocese's Center for Human Rights, and researched the urban communities for several years while working as a literacy volunteer and then ethnographer. She also conducted fieldwork in the rural communities from which the Guadalupe residents were expelled. She writes from a Catholic point of view. After the Introduction, her book's opening chapters tell the histories of the urban community of Guadalupe, then the Catholic diocese renovation and conversion after Vatican II, and then the expulsions. The diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas is famous for its former bishop Samuel Ruiz García, who arrived in Chiapas in January 1960 as a fervent anti-communist. The chapter describes his "conversion to the poor," in which he turned away from his drive to modernize and Christianize the Indians to become known as "El Caminante," the bishop who walked with the Maya, respectful of their faith and struggle for a dignified life. He slowly came to incorporate traditional Maya practices into the Catholic liturgy. Nevertheless, his and other Catholic pastoral workers' focus on the poorest Maya posed a direct challenge to local caciques and traditionalists allied with Mexico's ruling PRI party. The consequences of that challenge were visited on the local Maya working with the diocese, as well as with Protestant missionaries.

The second set of chapters explores the various human rights discourses involved in the expulsions: the human rights framework of the expulsions; the way in the residents of Guadalupe have drawn on Catholic, international legal and their own traditional understandings of human rights to develop a flexible but integrated discourse; and finally, their concrete actions to secure rights from a government that stood to the side during the expulsions. As is true throughout the Americas and indigenous world, the expelled Chiapas Tzotzil emphasize economic, social and collective rights rather than just individual civil and political rights. Their conception of human rights includes a critique of national and global structural inequities. Their demands for human dignity draw on religious terms, particularly Catholic terms, for human value.

This book adds to the considerable scholarship on Chiapas from before and after 1994. Its first half is more strongly told than the second half. At times, Kovic's care with complexity is overshadowed by the tentative language in which she frames her conclusions. This reviewer wishes Kovic would have written more from her extensive research in Guadalupe, the portrait of which remains fragmented and thin. Instead, she builds much of the story from other sources. Nevertheless, Kovic documents the local variation of expulsions and the numerous actors involved. She demonstrates the politico-economic conflict at the heart of the expulsions, and the utter complicity of federal and state PRI officials who claimed the expulsions were indigenous religious conflicts and none of their business. Her work will be of interest to scholars of Chiapas and the Maya, to NGO staff working in Latin American human rights and development, and all connected...