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three Jacaltenango is a remote, unkemptlooking town at the western edge of the Cuchumatanes Mountains close to the Guatemalan border with Mexico. It is known to the scholarly world as a stop on the route taken in 1925 by Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge, who afterward produced a two-volume record, Tribes and Temples (1926, 1927), about their reconnaissance. La Farge returned to Jacaltenango two years later with fellow researcher Douglas Byers, with whom he penned The Year Bearer’s People (1931), another classic contribution in the field of Mesoamerican anthropology. Both works, especially the latter, document an intriguing array of Maya survivals. One of the most remarkable was the persistence in Jacaltenango of a method of observing the passage of time according to a pre-Columbian calendar, complete with rites and ceremonies that date back centuries, if not millennia. In his introductory remarks to The Year Bearer’s People, Blom aptly likened the intent of La Farge and Byers “to that of a man trying to become familiar with the ritual of a Masonic Lodge without becoming a Mason himself .” All three men spent long and distinguished careers studying indigenous cultures in Guatemala and other parts of the Americas. As part of the decolonization of academic life in Guatemala, Jacaltenango is now being written about not by visiting anthropologists but by one of its native sons. Before he himself trained and became accredited in the discipline while studying in the United States, Victor Montejo engaged local lore and storytelling in two books, El Kanil: Man of Lightning (1984) and The Bird Who Cleans the World (1991). The first book presents an elaborate legend that La Farge and Byers recorded only fragments of; the second is a collection of fables that resonate with the moral authority of Aesop, Jakaltek folk tales that Montejo heard as a boy from his mother and community elders. In Testimony (1987), however, social not magical realism prevails as he grapples with Jacaltenango’s grim lot during counterinsurgency operations in 1982. jAkAltek AMeriCAn jaKalteK american 2 On the morning of September 9 that year, a Friday, Montejo woke in a small village some distance from Jacaltenango. His job then was to teach village children as resident schoolmaster. Friday, he writes, “has always been a happy day for me, full of anticipation,” for after class he would set off to return home to Jacaltenango to spend the weekend with his wife and children. An elementary school teacher, Montejo had worked for ten years as a government employee in the Department of Education, preferring to take a humble post within reasonable reach of his home rather than seek employment in a more illustrious setting farther away. Montejo was satisfied with his decision to go back to his roots after graduating from teacher’s college. That Friday class unfolded as usual until one of the villagers burst into the schoolhouse and screamed, “The guerrillas are approaching. . . . Everyone get ready!” The peal of the church bell confirmed the danger. Montejo recalls: I consulted my watch and saw it was eleven in the morning. At almost the same instant I heard the first shot fired. Behind it came a volley of machine gun fire. The peaceful community broke into confusion. The women wept and prayed to God to protect their husbands and older sons who had been forced to join the civil [defense] patrol. I ordered the students to stretch out on the floor and barred the door and windows with old broomsticks. The invaders had encircled the village and the hills echoed the furious explosions of grenades and the sputter of bullets that whistled past the corrugated tin roof of the schoolhouse. “Don’t make a sound,” I ordered my children. Some began to weep and others trembled with fear. Their fathers were in the midst of that gunfire, armed with sticks, stones, and slingshots and the children were fully aware of the danger they were in. It turned out to be a tragic case of mistaken identity.The local civil defense patrol had seen an armed group of men moving through village territory and assumed that they were guerrillas. The patrol opened fire, wounding one of the intruders, but then noticed that the guns the intruders replied with emitted the distinctive “coughing noise of Galil rifles,” the standard Israeli-made issue of the Guatemalan army. Realizing their error, the members of the civil patrol fled to escape retaliation. Chaos erupted as the army attacked the village. After a...

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