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13 C H A P T E R O N E In Search of Indigeneity in Eastern Guatemala O n my first visit to Guatemala as a college student in 1984 I suffered acute culture shock. Stepping out of Aurora Airport into a steamy Guatemala City night, I was overwhelmed by throngs of ragged, darkskinned children struggling to carry my luggage in exchange for a tip. In my naïveté, I gave them candy. Now in June 1990, returning to Guatemala with an old photographer friend, Erich, to visit eight townships in Guatemala and Belize to find a field site for my dissertation, the children had been replaced by well-groomed men in coveralls performing the same services with equal vigor. Guatemala was modernizing. After a decade of allout war against any potential dissenters to Guatemala’s repressive and highly unequal status quo, the military was cleaning up the nation’s image. That same morning a colleague informed us of a Guatemalan Ministry of Culture seminar on ethnic politics at the national theater at noon. We interpreted “seminar” to mean a relaxed, academic affair in an auditorium of students and professors.We arrived in very casual attire amidst Guatemalan elites dressed to the hilt in three-piece suits, silk dresses, and heels. Rather than finding some academics discussing the intricacies of ethnicity, we entered the national theater to the Guatemalan national anthem as President Cerezo himself took the stage. El Presidente echoed Guatemala’s Nobel laureate novelist, Miguel Asturias, depicting Guatemala as a unique, magical nation where two civilizations, the Spanish and the Maya, had harmoniously converged. “Until we decide who we are,” he expounded, “we have no direction, no common strategy for resolving the country’s problems.” Ironically, Asturias (1985) had also adeptly captured Chapter One 14 Guatemalan political terror in his novel El Presidente, and a few months after the seminar the Presidential Guard (Estado Mayor Presidencial) assassinated anthropologist Mirna Mack for defying the army by her study of hundreds of thousands of Maya internal refugees. The most impressive speaker was Maya scholar Demetrio Cojtí, whose defiant proMaya , anticolonial speech roused the audience and signaled that a new era of political openness might be at hand, albeit in fits and starts. Erich and I were glad to be out of smoggy, congested, dangerous (or so we were often told) Guatemala City and on a bus eastward to the small city of Chiquimula in the Ch’orti’ region. As we descended four thousand feet in three and a half hours, the heat and desolation of the Oriente—the stunted trees, cactus, and desert—not to mention the crowded school bus with three to a seat, wore us down. Unlike the mild capital and western highlands , the cities of the east lie in low, hot, windless valleys where the sun is a mortal threat.We wondered why anyone would settle here and erect onestory towns of cement and corrugated sheet metal that doubled as human ovens, but we did notice some cattle, melons, and tobacco along the way. In Chiquimula, we felt like aliens with our backpacks, shorts, and sandals among the well-dressed townspeople clad in pants and skirts.We soon realized that the locals had seen plenty of shabbily dressed gringos1 like us before, as a steady stream of European, US, Australian, and Israeli travelers trickled through on their way to Copán Ruins, just across the border in Honduras.We found a hotel with prices to our liking, $2 a night per person. That night, after eating Chinese, we walked through the town park and witnessed Guatemalan politics in action: a Caribbean band sponsored by PAN (the oligarchy’s National Alliance Party) performed to a crowd of remarkably dispassionate campesinos in sandals, rubber boots, and cowboy hats. The next morning we started on the wrong foot. The shirt I had left to dry in the window of our room was stolen. I met a Peace Corps volunteer at the end of her service who took it upon herself to inform me that my intended study of the Ch’orti’ was hopelessly naive and that I could not possibly be prepared for the poverty I would encounter. After missing our bus to Jocotán, a town in the heart of the Ch’orti’ area, because it left a half hour before its scheduled time (buses leave when they are full), I entered 1. In eastern Guatemala it is common among campesinos and some poor Ladinos to...

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