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W hen I was in Los Angeles in September of 1992 for the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA),a group of Mayas invited me to the Feria de San Miguel. A feria, as everyone of Latin American origin knows, is the annual celebration (like a country fair) in honor of the patron saint that names a given town, and it has become traditional in Latin America, as well as in Spain, to commemorate it with three days of festivities. In the Guatemalan case, these include amusement games,a procession of the saint through the streets of the town, Maya games such as palo volador (flying pole), and street dancing by the various cofradías, or religious groups responsible for the saint’s upkeep. These groups reenact traditional dances such as moros y cristianos (Christians and Moors),el baile de la conquista (the Dance of the Conquest), and el baile del venado (the Deer Dance). The dances and games generally take place in the town’s main square, which is elaborately decorated and crowded with food and drink stands. The Feria de San Miguel, celebrated according to the Catholic calendar on 29 September, honors the patron saint of San Miguel Ixtatán, a town populated by K’anjobal Mayas in the western corner of Guatemala, in the department (province) of Huehuetenango, in the middle of the Cuchumatán Mountains. So what were we doing celebrating the Feria de San Miguel at the LASA conference? The answer might or might not be obvious, but on that particular date I myself became fully aware of it for the first time: Los Angeles is the second-largest city of Guatemala and the second-largest Maya city, to which the K’anjobal Maya fled to escape the massacres in their country of 184 9 Central American–Americans? Latino and Latin American Subjectivities origin. Today there are more K’anjobal Mayas in the United States than in Huehuetenango, so the Feria de San Miguel, their major yearly festivity, has also been displaced to California. The feria itself was held in a huge gymnasium in southeast Los Angeles. Once inside, however, the illusion was complete: except for the obvious fact that there was a roof over our heads, we felt as if we were in the town square of San Miguel Ixtatán. The Mayas had reconstructed the four sides of the “square”out of cardboard, and they performed the dances and music in the middle, just as if they were in their native town. The food and drink tables were a little to the side of the square, where the side streets would have been located in the original town. Ninety percent of the celebrants were Maya. Scattered among the crowd were one or two African-Americans and a few Anglos, most of whom obviously had married Mayas and were now part of the family. The only giveaways that we were in Los Angeles, other than the roof, were the punk haircuts of the Maya teenagers and the PA announcements in Spanish, K’anjobal, and English. After we had downed a couple of cuxas (the local brew of the Guatemalan highlands), the illusion seemed like the real thing, complete with the crisp air of the Cuchumatanes—until, that is, the time came to walk back to the “rancho,” when we suddenly realized that someone would have to drive us back to our hotel in their troca. This anecdote is my way of introducing the focus of this chapter: the invisibility of Central American culture, itself complex and contradictory, as we saw in the previous chapter, to the great majority of U.S. citizens despite its overwhelming presence in the United States. I will also point out those linguistic slippages that denote a lost, a past, identity and point out the difficulties involved in articulating the terms of that culture in a new, postnational space, difficulties that inevitably generate identitary conflicts that facilitate the aforementioned invisibility. The high numbers of Central Americans in the United States are an inevitable result of the wars fought in the 1980s, when about three to four million people fled from the nightmare of violence and massacres to the apparent safety of the United States. Despite this presence, however, they have been nearly invisible within the imaginary confines of what constitutes the multicultural landscape of the United States. When Latinos are mentioned in this country, most average Californians still think primarily of Chicanos, and...

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