Maya Yucatán: An Artist's Journey

Epilogue

Street scene, Umán. 133 Viewing the pyramids at Palenque, a tourist asks, “ . . . but where did all the people go?” Shaking his head, the tourist guide answers, “We’re still here. We never left.” —Guy Garcia Palenque Resistance and Endurance For the Spanish the Maya were the most difficult Native Americans to subdue. It required almost two hundred years before the last of the Maya kingdoms (the Petén Itzá at Tayasal) was conquered, and not until 1901 did the final, die-hard Maya forces lay down their weapons of the Caste War.1 In large ways and small they are still not completely reconciled. The 1994 New Year’s Day uprising of the Zapatistas in highland Chiapas was clearly a present-day episode in that ancient twenty-five-hundred-year-old tension between the Maya area and Central Mexico. The center of gravity in Mesoamerica has not rested always in highland Mexico, so this interlude of central power may be just that, an interlude. By the time of the first European contact, Mesoamerican power had shifted to the Valley of Mexico once again, and the defeat of the Aztecs there merely continued the concentration of power in the central zone, this time by imperial Spanish authority. Under this regime, the Maya have these past 450 years lived with genocide, slavery, oppression, and exclusion. But they have survived by living with determination in their villages and by insisting on following traditional Maya lives, strongly aided by sustaining belief, however submerged or unconscious, in a spiritual story that has endured from ancient times. Continuity Holding to this primal story as the undercurrent to their lives, the Maya demonstrated repeatedly their deeply conservative nature. Through five centuries of catastrophe they have retained at heart their essential Maya-ness. In many ways, they are living still in the so-called contact period. The Maya continue the struggle with and adapt to the arrival of the Europeans. They are painfully aware of the shortcomings of their existence: the malnourishment, the inadequate education of their children, the lack of medical care, the lack of opportunity in a society that viewed them before as mere slave labor and mostly dismisses them now. And, above all, they still endure violent oppression, for in the highlands, in recent memory, they have suffered genocide. In spite of all that, they stand unconquered. They have accomplished this through an implacable stamina and hardness that the Maya demonstrate on their lands. I traveled once with some farmers from Iowa through several backcountry towns where villagers were growing maize. These American corn farmers were astonished and impressed that anyone could coax any amount of produce from that stony ground. I won’t say soil, because to say soil is to be too generous. To the unpracticed eye the land we were traveling through looked practically like bare limestone. The Imagined Past I was prepared and indeed I have come to admire the Maya people. But it is an admiration from an outsider looking in. I had wished that these personal observations and many years of travel in the Maya world would lift me out of my culture—if even for a brief moment—and into a true and authentic understanding of their ancient ways. That was a fantasy. The closest I got was to experience the white-hot heat of the epilogue 134 / Epilogue The fiesta at Mama—a traditional Maya town on the old Convent Trail. The mission church at Mama with its fiesta colors. Devotions during the fiesta at Mama. Jarana dance—traditional Maya dancers waiting for the music to begin again. Epilogue / 135 Yucatán sun, the humidity of the field and forest, and the beauty of the village Maya, their landscape, and the ruined cities of their ancestors. I could sense, but could not experience, why the gods of the ancient Maya had come into being. I believe that what I had wanted, in an unconscious and inchoate way, was to find a lost heritage, a lost spirituality. In a way I did find it in the churches that the Maya had built under the Spanish conquest. In these places I could experience the depth of belief and emotion that a people must sustain in order to survive under the hardship and rigors of the maize cycle. This spirituality is a necessary response, as well, to the fierce face that Yucatán presents every day to...