Ch'orti'-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala: Indigeneity in Transition

4. A Sense of Centrality

91 F O U R A Sense of Centrality We’re always the same. —Lonjino, Ch’orti’ of Olopa One battles for the kids. —Paulina, Ch’orti’ of Olopa I t would seem that after such a long, brutal history, including various waves of religious persecution, that Ch’orti’s would have abandoned their distinctive indigenous lifestyle and integrated with the Guatemalan nation for self-preservation. Exploited like burros, exterminated like vermin, legally and socially regarded as children, and engulfed in a sea of Ladinos, why would anyone want to be labeled “Ch’orti’” or anything different from Ladinos? From a domination/resistance paradigm, one would argue that Ch’orti’s are resisting the dominant national culture and refusing to surrender. This makes sense to some degree, especially regarding what outsiders lament as some Ch’orti’s’ stubborn rejection of Western medicine, education, religions, and political control, but it is more the case that Ch’orti’s have such limited options in the national political economy that the subsistence agriculture lifestyle remains one of the most viable, reassuring, and even satisfying strategies for survival. For Ch’orti’s, the fact that some traditions seem to have been practiced roughly the same way since time immemorial lends credence to their Chapter Four 92 rightness and righteousness. Even if one wanted to take up Ladino ways, give up self-subsistence, and move to town, the transition would require access to resources, contacts, and the knowledge to embody Ladino culture. In this chapter I provide a summary of the Ch’orti’ subsistence lifestyle to evoke why it has such inertia (for a more in-depth perspective, see Lopez and Metz [2002]). Long ago, Girard (1949:296ff) described an idyllic Ch’orti’ culture and character with: exemplary ethics; natural, human, and social morals; a profound sense of community and reciprocity; charity, piety, and kindness to the weak; love of truth; respect of the foreign; neighborliness ; a highly developed sense of justice; the inability to mistreat others or practice usury; honesty in borrowing; frugality; no covetousness of spouses or property; communalism; sociability; industriousness; pacifism ; simplicity and purity of habits; frankness; tenderness towards animals, plants, and objects; respectfulness towards the elderly, dead, religious leaders, and other authorities; responsibility; respect for the government ’s maintenance of order; stoicism; and the same morality as the founders of Buddhism and Christianity, the “apex of civilized morality.” If Ch’orti’s lost their collective character—their “natural qualities”—he argued, then they would lose their purpose of opposingWestern individualism (Girard 1949:409). From my experiences among Ch’orti’s a half century later I know how Girard could draw such conclusions, but such one-sidedness is ultimately of service to no one. Self-Subsistence “Ch’orti’s” are actually a diverse group of people with the full range of personalities one would expect in any population, and their microenvironments are diverse, ranging from lowland savanna and desert to highland cloud forest. Yet, they share cultures that distinguish them from the surrounding Ladino population, which to themselves and Ladinos warrants the application of an ethnic term like “People of the Country,” “Indians,” or “Ch’orti’s.” With a combination of resourcefulness, collective memory, and physical endurance, Ch’orti’s continue to make do mostly with natural materials. Unlike the Occidente where many Mayas are merchants and commodity producers, the backbone of the Ch’orti’ distinctive lifestyle is subsistence agriculture. Almost all Ch’orti’s consider themselves subsistence farmers or “campesinos” and only secondarily wage laborers, craftspeople, and merchants. The tasks and responsibilities of self-subsistence inform most aspects of life, including ethics and values, A Sense of Centrality 93 social organization, worldview, and even humor and recreation, although due to dramatic changes to be discussed later it would now be misleading to call this lifestyle an integrated, functioning “system.” When Wisdom and Girard carried out their research in the 1930s and 1940s, Ch’orti’s of the old Jocotán Parish were almost completely selfsu fficient, exporting only sugar and tobacco and importing cloth, candles , metal implements, and salt from Ladinos (Girard 1949:3; Wisdom 1940:1–12, 19–20, 114). They were so confident of their cultural correctness that they defiantly criticized the more powerful Ladinos for being poor farmers, prostitutes, and gossips (Wisdom 1940:224–28). Tortillas and beans were supplemented with a cornucopia of greens, spices, cucumbers , onions, garlic, cilantro, radishes, cidra, pineapples, plantains, tomatoes...