For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, 1960-1990

4. Reinas Indígenas and the Authentic Maya

83 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Reinas Indígenas and the Authentic Maya On May 29, 1978, hundreds of Q’eqchi’ campesinos in the community of Panzós, Alta Verapaz, entered the town square to present a document to the mayor regarding land claims. In one of the first large-scale counterinsurgency assaults against Mayas, army soldiers fired into the crowd of men, women, and children, killing at least thirty-five and wounding dozens more. The violence did not end in the plaza. Campesinos fleeing into the hills and river were pursued by army helicopters, gunned down as they tried to escape the mayhem. It was a massacre on a scale not yet seen in Guatemala’s civil war, though such mass killings would become almost routine practice within a few years.1 In 1978—unlike the early 1980s—the killings were met with massive public protests, among them the symbolic denunciation of army violence by indigenous pageant queens in El Gráfico. Even considering the public outrage that followed the massacre, the audacity of the queens’ protest in the press was extraordinary. The ominous headline of an unrelated article (at least technically) hung above the young Mayas featured on El Gráfico’s page 1: “A ‘Death Squad’ Is Operating in the Country; Interior Minister Claims It Is Not Connected to Security Forces.” (The minister’s claim would prove to be false.) Amid mounting violence against oppositional organizing, how and why had these activists decided to make such a public repudiation of the army massacre? And again, why queens and pageants to protest state killings?2 * Originally published in a slightly different form as “Subverting Authenticity: Reinas Indígenas and the Guatemalan State, 1978,” Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 1 (2009): 41–72. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. 84 C H A P T E R F O U R Pairing Massacre and Folklore Years of repression and violence had preceded the killings in Panzós, but that massacre was perceived as different: the mass killings of Q’eqchi’ campesinos —it was believed at the time that there were over one hundred victims— ratcheted up tensions in Guatemala and gave state violence a racialized cast. Within three years of the Panzós killings, counterinsurgency practices Front page of El Gráfico, July 30, 1978. 85 R E I N A S I N D Í G E N A S A N D T H E A U T H E N T I C M A Y A that equated “Maya” and “subversive” in entire areas of the highlands— much of El Quiché, northern Huehuetenango, parts of the Verapaces, and elsewhere—would reach a level that the UN Truth Commission determined to be genocide. Yet at the same time and in the same department of Alta Verapaz, the Guatemalan government maintained its indigenista tradition of folkloric homage to the nation’s Maya “soul,” most visibly in the National Folklore Festival held each July in the departmental seat of Cobán. The festival aimed to showcase the nation’s Maya heritage, one folklorist explained, and to “keep watch over [velar] its authenticity.”3 As symbols of authentic Maya identity (as judged by non-Maya folklorists), Maya women—and especially reinas indígenas—played a central role in state indigenismo and in the annual festival. Since 1971, festival organizers had summoned local indigenous queens from across Guatemala to compete in the Folklore Festival’s centerpiece, a national competition for the title of Rabín Ahau.4 Through dress, language, and dance, contestants were called on to embody Mayaness for the nation. Government officials including the president typically attended the pageant. The Rabín Ahau was held up as the national representative of the indigenous race, embraced by the president himself.5 In Guatemala, indigenismo had long involved a supposed valorization of the country’s pre-Columbian heritage, primarily through folklore and homages to long-dead Mayas. As we saw in chapter 1, the same sentiments did not seem to extend to living Mayas themselves. Guatemalan officials were not alone in this—such incongruities underlay indigenismo everywhere—but in the late 1970s, discrepancies in attitudes toward past and present Mayas in Guatemala were extreme. Similar to other instances when repressive governments have professed to celebrate elements of the nation while in fact assaulting them, the...