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

Introduction: What’s Indigenous, What’s Maya?

1 I N T R O D U C T I O N What’s Indigenous, What’s Maya? I n August 2001, Guatemala’s little-studied eastern Department of Chiquimula emerged from the shadows when international headlines reported ghastly scenes of a Central American famine. Dozens of international reporters invaded a local hospital and scoured the countryside in search of horrific cases of starvation. They were not disappointed. Well into 2002 they described mass starvation, hundreds of children dead, and thousands more in peril if aid did not arrive soon (e.g., Brosnan 2001, 2002; Hadden 2002; Williams 2002; Planet Ark 2002). The “famine” is ongoing to this day (2004) and has been explained as a convergence of low coffee prices, on which the campesinos (subsistence farmers) depend for wages, and irregular rainfall, on which they rely for corn and beans agriculture. Local health records, however, document malnutrition and other maladies of the poor for forty years, and malnutrition has certainly been endemic to the region since I began ethnographic fieldwork there in 1991, especially among the little recognized Maya population. How could reporters mistake chronic malnutrition among Mayas for a punctuated famine among “the poor” in a country spotlighted for its Maya heritage? Scholars and even western Guatemalan Mayas have generally characterized the Oriente (eastern Guatemala) as “Ladino” or nationalized and non-Indian. Ch’orti’ Mayas of Chiquimula were presumably long acculturated to the Guatemala Ladino nation. Absent are obvious indigenous markers exhibited by Mayas of western Guatemala, Chiapas, and the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Only a fraction still speak Ch’orti’, most no longer wear distinctive dress, and civil-religious community organizations have long been abandoned. While an army-led scorched-earth campaign in the 1980s has drawn international attention to the Occidente Mayas, the political violence in the Oriente from the 1960s to 1980s, if acknowledged at Introduction 2 all, is whitewashed as nonethnic. The most recent academic focus in Guatemala, the Maya Movement, is also thought to be active only in Guatemala City and the Occidente, and the Maya organization that influenced the Ch’orti’ region the most, Majawil Q’ij, was labeled leftist or “popular” and not “culturally” Maya. Only on national maps that exaggerate the extent of Maya linguistic“territories” does Ch’orti’ ethnicity tend to be recognized (Vaughn 2002). Consequently, despite a veritable academic industry of Guatemalan Maya studies, which has produced more ethnographies than all the rest of Central America combined (Bolanos and Adams 1994), no major English-language monograph has been published on the Oriente for a half century. This raises the question of what criteria are being used to define indigeneity (indigenous-ness) and Maya-ness. Some academics claim that they do not define indigeneity or indigenous identity; they study it. Nevertheless, they cannot help but make judgments about what qualifies as “indigenous” and “Maya”; otherwise, someone would have published an English-language monograph on the self-proclaimed Ch’orti’ Mayas since 1940. In the very application of terms like “indigenous” or “Maya,” including to such things as ethnic maps and coverage in edited volumes, judgments are made about who and what is and is not indigenous. No one puts quotations around Indian, indigenous, Maya, etc., or uses the qualifier “so-called” all the time. The concept of indigeneity is maintained by ongoing conscious and subconscious social reproduction. The problem of identifying “the indigenous” is far from new in Mesoamerica .1 At the start of the twentieth century, anthropologists studied indigenous cultural survivals to shed light on the ancient Mesoamerican past (e.g., Tozzer 1907; Gann and Thompson 1931; Girard 1949; Roys 1965). Native American civilization was being abandoned, or contaminated, as Western civilization advanced, and the progression from Indians to peasants to civilized city dwellers was the subject of Redfield’s and Tax’s acculturation models in the 1930s–50s (e.g., Redfield 1941, 1953; Tax 1952). For Redfield, 1. Mesoamerica is itself a contentious term that encompasses the “great civilizations ” of the Mayas and the Aztecs, among several other large-scale, literate societies of central and southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras, western Nicaragua, and northwestern Costa Rica. Among the characteristics that unify the cultures of this area are highly complex and stratified social organizations, similar linguistic structures and poetics, a strong dependence on maize and beans agriculture, and similar cosmologies and literary traditions (Carmack, Gasco, and Gossen 1996). What’s...