Maya after War: Conflict, Power, and Politics in Guatemala

4. Reimagining Fiesta: Migration, Culture, and Neoliberalism

CHAPTeR 4 Reimagining Fiesta: Migration, Culture, and Neoliberalism “The fiesta is something more than a date or an anniversary. It does not celebrate, but reproduces an event: it splits open normal time so that, for the space of a few short immeasurable hours, the internal present reinstates itself. The fiesta becomes creator of time. Repetition becomes conception. Time is born. The age of gold returns.” OCtAviO PAZ, 1959, in chanGinG Fields oF anThroPoloGy: From local To Global (KeArney 2004) “As long as we’re still poor, peace hasn’t arrived for us,” a Todosantero told me, when the town formally marked war’s end in December 1996. This echoed the sentiment of the graffiti on the wall in downtown Huehuetenango that read: “No hay paz sin trabajo” (There’s no peace without work). These words reflected the historical inequality and structural violence later identified by the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) as crucial to understanding the genesis and escalation of Guatemala ’s war. Although it stopped short of calling for reform, the peace process was meant to provide mechanisms for addressing these circumstances , as outlined in the Accord on Socioeconomic and Agrarian Issues. Officially recognizing poverty as a problem for Guatemala, this accord also indicated that the state was responsible for the economic well-being of the population. A peace process without “redistributive justice” meant that Todosanteros (and all Guatemalans) were still subject to the structural violence of poverty, a historical constant in Guatemala. The neoliberal propensity for exacerbating inequality through free-market practices intensified these conditions. In the late 1980s, military-backed dictators began to introduce a series of new economic measures, and by 1996, a Guatemalan transnational elite had assumed control of the country, pro- Reimagining Fiesta 87 pelling Guatemala toward a market-driven free trade agreement with the United States, which further marginalized much of its population (Robinson 2003). Massive wage-labor migration is one of the consequences of the failure to address economic inequality and structural violence, evidenced in the severe poverty that characterizes Guatemala: more than fifty percent of the country’s population is below the national poverty line and fifteen percent lives in extreme poverty. Among the Maya, these statistics are more extreme: seventy-six percent live in poverty and thirty-eight percent live in extreme poverty (UNDP 2006).1 Guatemala also has one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world: approximately forty-three percent of children under the age of five are chronically malnourished.The country is characterized by massive inequality (it holds the second highest inequality rate in Latin America with a 0.55 Gini coefficient) and 60.6% of the income is earned by twenty percent of the population (UNDP 2008).2 The rich are getting richer and the poor are growing ever more miserable throughout the world. This is the result of the “success” of the neoliberal “ideological project,” meant to foster greater inequality by establishing the conditions of capitalism under which elites amass more wealth (Gledhill 2004, Harvey 2005 and 2010). However, the worldwide economic crisis, the termination of “peace dividend” funds so prevalent in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the implementation of the Dominican Republic Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) in July 2006 have exacerbated inequality in Guatemala. By the end of the first millennium, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in 2011, Guatemala had more citizens living in the United States than any other Central American country: as of 2009, there were 1.1 million, of a total population of 14.36 million.3 Consequently, Guatemala receives more remittances, an Top 3 Sources 2010 Amount ($US millions) exports† 8,470 Remittances 4,130 Tourism 1,380 † estimated Foreign Currency Sources in 2010 Sources: eFe Latin American Herald Tribune 88 Maya after War amount nearly one-half that of exports, or one-tenth that of the national GDP. These totaled 4.13 billion U.S. dollars in 2010 (Banco de Guatemala 2011).4 By the mid-2000s, at least one-third of Todosanteros engaged in wagelabor migration to the United States.5 Before changes in U.S. border and immigration policies reshaped possibilities for most migrants,6 many individuals moved back and forth between places where they lived in the United States and in the municipality, imagining their eventual permanent return to Todos Santos. In addition to sending remittances, they also performed valuable cultural work, guaranteeing the perpetuation of certain community...