Ch’orti’-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala: Indigeneity in Transition (review)

This is an important contribution to Mesoamerican ethnographic scholarship and provides an engaged and engaging account of the lives of the Ch’orti’-Maya in the region around Jocotán and Camotán in Guatemala’s comparatively under-studied eastern highlands of the Oriente. Metz’s writing also vividly captures the personal and professional complexities of working in and writing about Guatemala in a period that saw the final signing of the Peace Accords, the expansion of Pan-Maya cultural activism, and efforts to document the nature and scale of human rights violations during the country’s decades of civil war. This is a fluidly written ethnographic analysis that uses the works of Rafael Girard and Charles Wisdom from the 1930s and 1940s as a point of departure and comparison

Metz also provides a brief background on the area with a particular focus on the towns and aldeas of Jocotán’s parish from 1524–1930. In roughly 20 pages he brings together a solid account of conflicts over land, labor, and tribute during the colonial period. Quickly and thoroughly integrating historical background into a study of the ethnographic present is not easily done, and Metz’s account will not satisfy those with a strong grasp of the historical processes at work in Guatemala generally and the Oriente in particular. As the book moves into the twentieth century, however, Metz captures community member’s recollections of the Ubico period, the October Revolution of 1944, and the land reform of 1952. Local historical perspectives on these events help provide insights into the roots of tensions and violence after the U.S.-backed coup of 1954.

Metz’s richly contextualized ethnographic study of the Ch’orti’-Maya in the 1990s is where he is at his best. Given the fact that the nation’s first counter-insurgency war took place in the region in the 1960s, he is able to make a particularly important contribution by documenting the long-term impact of violence on communities. Metz gives us a nuanced and complete account of local campesinos’ experience of state-sponsored violence in the region around Jocotán from the 1954 counter-revolution staged from the nearby Honduran border through the first guerilla activity and counter-insurgency war of the 1960s, into the harrowing repression of the 1980s.

Another major strength of Metz’s book is in documenting how the Movimiento Maya, or Pan-Maya Movement, has played itself out among the Ch’orti’-Maya. With several major studies of this phenomena in the western highlands and the movement generally, this locally rooted and fine-grained analysis of local manifestations of Pan-Maya activism as well as campesino responses to cultural revindication provides an important new perspective. While unequivocally and unapologetically identifying himself as a supporter of “the Ch’orti’-Maya Movement,” Metz also captures the dilemmas of cultural activists seeking to create a base for the movement among a reticent population of townspeople and rural campesinos. Metz’s admiration for the goals of the local movement does not interfere with his ability to describe in detail the miscommunication and misunderstandings between Ch’orti’ leaders and the vast majority of their presumptive base. His sensitive account of the impact of both long-term processes of racial discrimination and economic marginalization reveal a population conflicted about the best path to a better future. To his great credit, Metz is able to provide an insightful portrait of locals’ ambivalence about both the Ch’orti’-Maya movement and numerous other initiatives to improve their lives and livelihoods.

A final dimension of the book that makes it worth reading carefully is Metz’s attempt to articulate and reframe the study of indigeneity. In the context of both a sustained critique of anthropological practice from within scholarly circles as well as the emergence of indigenous scholars/activists who provide their own analysis of the proper role of...