Renewing the Maya World: Expressive Culture in a Highland Town

Chapter 1. Introduction

1. Introduction santiago momostenango The bus clanks and grinds down from the cold and barren finger of alpine prairie above San Francisco El Alto, a mountain fastness, a juyup , where flowering bunchgrass is collected each year to construct the body of San Simón during Holy Week. The rutted dirt road winds down through a misty forest of giant pines and ancient twisted oaks bearded with Spanish moss. Heading north, the bus breaks out of the forest into sunlight, into a world of maize fields, scattered homesteads, and wood lots, a cultivated world or takaj. Here Momostecan settlement begins on the southern edge of a great basin dipping gently to the north and northeast. Streams, muddied from milpa runoff, erode gullied shoulders of exhausted land and combine in valley troughs to form the northern drainage of the Chixoy, or Black, River (see fig. 1.1). The Chixoy, a tributary of the great Usumacinta, defines the Quiché country. Its ancient valley, holding the oldest known Quichean sites near the salt deposits of Sacapulas (Fox 1976, 1987), is the gateway to the mountains from the Western Rivers Region of the lowland jungles where a regional variant of the great Classic Maya civilization flourished . The Usumacinta flows between shaded banks in the jungles de- fining the Petén/Chiapas frontier. It glides past the ruins of Yaxchilán and Piedras Negras as it drops from the hilly Maya country onto the Gulf Coast plain. Back on the bus, at the southern end of this great watershed, the ground falls away on the left. Across the valley is a cluster of tan adobe houses with reddish tile roofs straggling up the hillside and along the ridge crest. This is a paraje, a tiny settlement amid stepped fields and islands of trees. In the parajes a house encloses a patch of earth with mud-brick walls and roofs it over with silvery thatched bunchgrass or 2 Renewing the Maya World fig. 1.1. The Maya area, showing Momostenango. (Redrawn from Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993, fig. 1.6. Used with permission of William Morrow.) fired red tiles. When a house is abandoned, the roof tiles are salvaged and the timbers fall in. The walls are eroded by rain. Milpa lives in the house again. The house is made of earth, and the earth is made of many houses. The parents and grandparents who lived in the house are melded into the common dead, a community of the dead counted and measured in generations and centuries of the dead, a world of the dead that vastly outnumbers its living children. From up on that ridge back, one could see the church of Momostenango , vague and soft with distance, where the valley broadens to the north. It is large and cold inside. It is a house of cold, often filled with murmured prayers. It is the home of faded wooden saints lining the walls in niches and glass cases. Little clumps of supplicants in poor ragged clothes, bare callused feet padding along the cold concrete floor, raise candles before the glass cases, tapping lightly on the glass doors. Shoulder bags of cracked vinyl or woven brown and white wool, sweatstained straw hats or narrow-brimmed gray or brown fedoras, and colorful cloth-wrapped bundles wait for them on the pews. The church, built on the old cemetery after the original church collapsed in the earthquake of 1906, is said to cover catacombs. Sacramento, the main altar, is located ‘‘above the hair,’’ over the heads of the dead. If the priest allowed it, the floor would be carpeted with pine needles, a forest of glowing candles and flowers, whenever certain holy days arrived. The great portal of the church opens to the west, facing the steep slope of a high plateau that looms over the little town. A rutted track curving off toward the distant Pan American Highway runs up and over this western ridge with its feathery skyline of pruned pine trees. Each tree is scarred from the harvesting of resinous sap. A few miles from town on this road is the entrance to Pueblo Viejo, also called Ojer Tinamit, the old town, the site of the ruins of Chuwa Tz’ak. There, perhaps six hundred years ago, a valiant war captain, an ojew achi’, from the Nim Jaib, the Great House lineage at K’umarca’aj, the Quiché capital, established a stronghold, a...