Ch'orti Maya Area: Past and Present

18. Copan Past and Present: Maya Archaeological Tourism and the Ch'orti' in Honduras

18 Copan Past and Present Maya Archaeological Tourism and the Chorti in Honduras Lena Mortensen Western Honduras is known to most international travelers and scholars as the setting for the ancient city of Copan, recrafted in the twentieth century as an archaeological tourist attraction. In recent years investment from the Honduran government, local entrepreneurs, international aid organizations, and multilateral lending institutions has transformed archaeological tourism, based almost exclusively on the Maya past at Copan, into a focal point for regional development. Once an out-of-the-way stop for specialized Mayanist scholars and intrepid backpackers, the Copan Archaeological Park is today the second most popular tourist destination in Honduras,1 welcoming upwards of 140,000 foreign and local visitors annually. The Copan tourism sector, centered in the neighboring town of Copán Ruinas and spread throughout the Copan Valley, has grown exponentially to accommodate the ever-increasing number of package tours, school groups, and independent travelers that now represent a nearpermanent yet mobile feature of the social and physical landscape. The surge in tourism to the Copan park, and its attendant offshoots, has generated a host of benefits for many local residents and boosted the country ’s international profile.Yet, as with tourism development anywhere, the economic benefits of this rapid rise have been unevenly distributed, and the consequences of archaeological tourism yield conflicting outcomes for those who look to the archaeological past as a source of more than mere financial gain (Chambers 2004; Meskell 2005). The ambiguous nature of the rise of archaeological tourism at Copan is perhaps best encapsulated by the situation of the Maya-Ch′orti′ of Honduras , who define themselves as the indigenous descendants of the ancient 246 Maya Archaeological Tourism and the Ch′orti′ in Honduras · 247 builders of Copan and have been largely left out of the regional boom in tourism development.2 As with many contemporary Maya groups, Ch′orti′ lives and interests are often eclipsed by the attention given to their spectacular ancestors (Hervik 1999, 2003; Watanabe 1995). Over the past 150 years, scholarship, travel writing, and entrepreneurship have worked symbiotically to institutionalize the “ancient Maya” as an archaeological cultural group,3 iconized by features such as majestic temples, intricately carved sculpture, and the widely cited “Maya mystique” (Castañeda 1996; Ehrentraut 1996; Hervik 1999, 2003). The popular promotion of these features through the intersections of archaeological research and tourism development have transformed the ancient Maya into a commodity with significant international value, one that circulates globally among specialists and tourists, as well as more locally among politicians, entrepreneurs, and indigenous activists (Mortensen n.d.). Maya archaeological tourism is now an important growth industry in the region, seen as a lucrative development opportunity as well as a potential means for providing a financial base and rationale for archaeological site conservation. Continuous research and myriad new tourism ventures help sustain the ancient Maya’s prominent position in the international media. It is the market for the Maya past, and to some extent the Maya present, that fuels the specific tourism development in western Honduras under discussion here. Some years ago, the Ch′orti′ began themselves to generate headlines by using protests, hunger strikes, and other activist tactics to draw attention to their struggle for land rights and social recognition within Honduras . In 1998, in the first of several such demonstrations, an estimated two thousand local Ch′orti′s from Honduras and Guatemala, together with supporters from other indigenous groups throughout Honduras, blocked the entrance to the Copan Archaeological Park for twelve days.4 By physically and symbolically making themselves the gatekeepers to Copan—the public face of the Maya in Honduras—this group of Ch′orti′ forced the touring public, the international media, and most importantly the Honduran government, to take notice of their power to mediate tourism of the Maya past. This skillful act of protest also highlighted the alarming disconnect between the public’s contemporary worship of the Ch′orti′’s rich and powerful Maya ancestors and this group’s impoverishment today. Making Ch′orti′ “Count” Ch′orti′ identity, and Ch′orti′s’ status as “indigenous Maya,” especially in Honduras, is a matter of debate among scholars, government officials, and even Ch′orti′s themselves. In Honduras, scholars and census takers have historically attempted to assess the number of members of ethnic, indige- 248 · Lena Mortensen nous, or otherwise defined cultural groups by using the limited method of...