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Chapter 3 MAM JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES NEW RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES AND REJECTION OF THE NATION By the mid-seventies a group of Mam peasants decided to seek new paths and abandon the Mariscal region. Crossing borders of geography and identity, about sixty families migrated to the southwestern zone of the Lacandon rain forest, the so-called Cañadas de Las Margaritas. Most of these families had previously been converted to a new religious creed, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this chapter I explore the history of the inhabitants of Las Ceibas, one of the many ejidos founded in the borderland of Las Margaritas at that time. My long stay there allowed me to learn the history and origins of the settlement, which otherwise I would not have been able to identify as Mam.1 After several afternoons of conversation , the people began to tell me about their Mam identity. There may be other ‘‘mestizo’’ communities in that zone whose history is linked to the Sierra Madre and whose ancestors defined themselves in some historical moment as Mam that the official census has not recorded. Because the official record overlooks their indigenous past, their identification as Mam is difficult. It is equally difficult to define what percentage of the Mam population has been converted to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for it is a minority group and their presence in the Sierra and rain forest regions stands out more for the confrontational character of their religious and antinationalist discourse than for their numerical importance.2 The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ millenarian ideology was born in an industrial town, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a mainly English-speaking Tseng 2001.4.30 17:41 DST:103 6289 Hernandez / HISTORIES AND STORIES FROM CHIAPAS / sheet 103 of 317 82 Mam Jehovah’s Witnesses white membership, and reached Mexico’s southern border almost a century after Charles Taze Russell laid the foundation of this new organization by establishing in 1879 the religious magazines Watchtower and Herald of Christ’s Presence. The Association of Bible Students, called Jehovah ’s Witnesses since 1932, made its first incursions in Mexican territory in 1893, and their magazines have been translated into Spanish since 1931 (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society 1985:10).3 Because their proselytizing efforts are conducted primarily through the written word, this religious group at first focused its attention on urban and semiurban areas, which possess a higher level of literacy. After the 1950s the Jehovah’s Witnesses extended their influence to the country’s rural areas, mainly among Spanish speakers. The first publisher arrived in the Mam region by the end of the 1960s, from the towns of Comitán and Tapachula. At that time the Mam population had been almost 100 percent Hispanicized and the literacy level was much higher than in other regions of the state. Comitán publishers were the first to reach the Frontera Comalapa region and offer Watchtower and Awake! to those landless peasants who in 1973 would found the Las Ceibas community in the heart of the Lacandon rain forest.The end of this world and the beginning of God’s kingdom, where Jehovah’s Witnesses would live happily ever after, was announced from door to door throughout the Frontera Comalapa colonies.4 The historical experience of the region’s inhabitants with the Mexican state as well as their exclusion from the modernizing project of the 1950s and 1960s might have aided the acceptance of the ideology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses among many of the dispossessed peasants. The antimodernization ideology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a reaction against the nineteenth century’s modernist philosophy and the advance of industrialization (Beckford 1975:3), was appealing to Mam peasants, who had experienced a violent encounter with the modern Mexican state. The millenarian discourse brought to the borderland by Comitán publishers expounded the rejection of all the institutions of this world, especially nations and their rulers, who are presented as incarnations of evil forces.5 The need to form a new nation of God governed by a theocracy headed by Jehovah himself has led the Witnesses to reject all the ‘‘governments of this world’’ (Stevenson 1967; Kaplan 1989). The voices of the inhabitants of Las Ceibas are those of a religious minority within an ethnic minority and can tell us about the experience of being marginalized among the marginalized.They are the peasants ‘‘without a culture’’ whom indigenism has ignored. Their histories, filled with Tseng...

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