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

5. The Dis-Integration of Subsistence Cultures

141 F I V E The Dis-Integration of Subsistence Cultures There used to be everything, everywhere there were trees. —Cheo Oh but today, as the population has grown, there are already people that want to do whatever they want. —don Chico W hen I initially set out to investigate the relationship between religion and the market economy, I presumed that Ch’orti’ campesinos had a choice between self-subsistence and making money, including wage labor, marketing, and craft production. It did not take me long to realize that Ch’orti’s have very limited options for income, and they must use any opportunity for survival, regardless of religion. It took me much longer to understand the structure behind this poverty and its social and psychological impacts. Ultimately, these impacts lead Ch’orti’s to believe that they are, for better or worse, at the end of an epoch. While they reproduce longstanding traditions and create cultures distinct from the Ladino population, some of which contribute to survival in harsh circumstances , poverty above all undermines a sense of positive identity, especially when the poor are surrounded by a population that is fairing much better economically and politically. In this sense, extreme political Chapter Five 142 and economic circumstances motivate Ch’orti’s to question their subsistence lifestyle and explore alternative worldviews. Too Little Land, Too Many People Guatemala, like most world areas, has undergone a phenomenal demographic transformation over the past two centuries. The population doubled from roughly 600,000 at independence in 1821 to 1.2 million by 1880 (Lovell and Lutz 1997:120), and nearly tripled again to 3 million from 1880 to 1950. From 1950 to 2003, the population quadrupled to 12 million, despite massive emigration (Lutz and Lovell 1990:123) and mass political violence. Growing populations are linked to economic growth in industrializing countries, but for a country like Guatemala, in which so many inhabitants live off a land base that is in the hands of an oppressive few, population growth means mass malnutrition, disease, a low quality of life, and early death. Given that the elite are unwilling to sell the lands they value as status symbols, campesinos are quickly clearing the last stands of virgin forest in Guatemala (Bilsborrow and Stupp 1997:607). If campesinos and loggers continue to clear forests at the current rate of 1.2% of the national territory annually (seventy-four to one hundred thousand acres; Cerigua 6/12/97:4), forests will be only a memory by midway through the twenty-first century (Bilsborrow and Stupp 1997:595). This seems inevitable given that even if the 1980 birth rate of six children per woman miraculously falls to two by 2030, the population will still double to 24 million (Bilsborrow and Stupp 1997:589). One might hope that a growing economy could accommodate all of these people in jobs off the land, but the oligarchy and international companies favor mechanization over manual labor, exacerbating inequality, underemployment, and colonization of forests (Bilsborrow and Stupp 1997:595–96). Another solution is more emigration to the United States. Few social scientists of Mesoamerica have taken population growth very seriously, if they have even recognized its problems at all, because they believe it to be strictly an effect of poverty, not a cause. From an orthodox Leftist perspective, attention to overpopulation and family planning overshadows the real and only cause of poverty: inequality. If resources were distributed equally in Guatemala, Central America, or the world, then overpopulation would not be a problem. From a modernization perspective, “overpopulation” is an outmoded term because development and industrialization can take a few acres of land on which fifteen campesinos cannot The Dis-Integration of Subsistence Cultures 143 subsist, and create sustainable enterprises that can employ hundreds. Unfortunately, it is never as simple as this. Investors in development are rarely partners with their campesino-cum-proletarians, who are integrated as cheap labor at the bottom rungs of the global economy, where all minimum standards or worker and consumer protections, as ignored as they already are, are being made obsolete in “free” trade agreements. Others, including many Mayas themselves, hold a power-in-numbers logic, believing that family planning is a scheme to repress Maya power and even destroy their culture. The coercive family planning abuses of the past, though, do not obviate the fact that a poor and starving population is not a strong one...