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eighteen Unlike native peoples elsewhere in the Americas, whose memory belongs to history, whose trace on the earth is faint, the Maya of Guatemala are very much a living culture. They sustain a presence no visitor to the country can fail to notice, can avoid being struck by. I recall how unusual I felt the first time I realized that I was the odd one out, a foreigner travelling alone in a busload of Mayas north of Huehuetenango. Even modern government censuses, which enumerate fewer indigenous inhabitants than there actually are, record sizeable native populations: 1 million in 1893, 1.6 million in 1950, and 3 million in 1973.Today, between six and seven million strong, Mayas are challenging the Guatemalan state as never before, pressing for community autonomy, lobbying for land and language rights, and articulating the cause of self-determination with canny, characteristic persistence. Commentators and protagonists alike speak of a Maya nationalist movement in Guatemala, a development that has given a decidedly ethnic dimension to political struggle. Who are these native peoples? How, through the centuries, have they managed to survive? What sorts of lives have they lived? Why should their lot concern us? These questions have charged my research interests for some time: I am inspired by the stand made by Spaniards like Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who championed native rights in the sixteenth century; I am moved by the courage of Rigoberta Menchú, the Maya woman whose award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 focused international attention on more recent burdens, more recent iniquities, more recent threats to survival. Survival itself is the fundamental issue, but one we must tackle with caution . I try my best as a geographer not to romanticize or oversimplify what happened in history, but the tendency to do the opposite is common practice. National Geographic, for instance, is apt to portray the Maya as an assortment the ColoniAl experienCe a Beauty that hurts 10 of relics, timeless throwbacks to a golden age before the Spanish conquest. Marxist texts often cultivate another image, one in which the Maya emerge as inert victims forged and preserved by colonial exploitation. Neither representation fits satisfactorily what we now know to have been a variable experience , for the confrontation in Guatemala between natives and newcomers was something that differed quite markedly from region to region, if not from place to place within a region. If we view Mayas as subjects and not as objects, if we look at the particulars of the historical record and do not make do with myths and stereotypes, we can see them instead as social actors, as human agents who responded to invasion and domination in order to shape, at least in part, key elements of their culture. Viewing Mayas in this light, I believe, allows a more active emphasis to be placed in depicting their fate under Spanish rule. When, in 1524, Spaniards first arrived in Guatemala, they found themselves in a challenging situation: wars of conquest would have to be waged not against a cohesive, hierarchical state, as had been largely the case in Mexico, but against quarrelsome, disparate polities long accustomed to harboring grudge and grievance amongst themselves. Under these circumstances, conquest would neither be sudden nor sure. It began with an incursion led by Pedro de Alvarado, whose forces entered Guatemala from Mexico three years after the fall of the Aztec capital,Tenochtitl án, to Hernán Cortés. The Spaniards and their Mexican allies encountered no appreciable Maya resistance along the Pacific coast, but following an ascent into the highlands a number of battles ensued. Alvarado’s main opponents were the K’iche’, but after their defeat other Maya peoples had to be dealt with, one by one by one: the Mam, the Ixil, and the Ch’orti’, only three among many. On several occasions Kaqchikel warriors fought alongside the Spaniards, as in the conquest of the Tz’utujiles of Atitlán. Kaqchikel allegiance , however, withered after barely six months, when excessive demands for tribute caused them to stage a rebellion that lasted almost four years. Maya scribes wrote down their version of events in an account known as the Annals of the Cakchiquels: Ten days after we fled from the city [Yximché], Tunatiuh [Alvarado] began to make war upon us. On the day 4 Camey [September 5, 1524] they began to make us suffer. We scattered ourselves under the trees, under the vines. . . . All our tribes joined in the fight...

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