For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, 1960-1990

3. Envisioning the Pueblo

55 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Envisioning the Pueblo Local organizing like that in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Santiago Atitlán, and Huehuetenango developed throughout Guatemala. At the same time, organizing spilled over municipal and departmental boundaries, and growing numbers of community activists got involved in regional and national efforts. In the 1960s and especially the 1970s, connections among different communities and across language barriers were facilitated in many ways: through priests, cooperatives and other agrarian organizations, schools, and radio programs. Both informally and in more formal meetings, Mayas from different areas began to focus collective attention on shared problems of poverty, discrimination, and political exclusion. Many also developed an interest in pan-Maya cultural revitalization, in discovering and promoting indigenous history and identity. Over the course of the 1970s, as Mayas engaged in broadening struggles for cultural, economic, and political rights and justice, the two basic tendencies among activists materialized: some activists articulated their efforts primarily around ideas of “la raza” or indigenous identity specifically; others infused their work with ideas of class struggle. Yet Mayas involved in different forms of activism created a web of connections that reached from the western highlands to the Verapaces, relations that activists would deepen and depend on as the full force of counterinsurgency violence hit the highlands. Race, Class, and Revolution Mobilization by Mayas in the 1960s and 1970s, and especially its regional and national manifestations, emerged amid intense ideological debates among students, intellectuals, and activists on issues of ethnicity and 56 C H A P T E R T H R E E race, class, and social revolution. Attention to the competing ideas that shaped these debates is important for contextualizing the movements of the 1970s and beyond. Guatemala’s national University of San Carlos, USAC, was the intellectual home to a leftist critique of the nation and its socioeconomic and political structures, a critique most famously articulated by Severo Martínez Peláez in La patria del criollo, first published in 1970. Regarding Guatemala’s “indigenous problem,” Martínez Peláez rejected the idea of racial difference . He argued instead that indigenous ethnic identity was constructed during the colonial period and functioned in modern Guatemala to divide and weaken the struggle between the rich and poor. This perspective was embraced by activists in what came to be known as Guatemala’s “popular” movement. They were mostly Ladino unionists, students, and intellectuals , especially at USAC, where Martínez Peláez was a faculty member. But through Ladino students working in the countryside, these ideas came to be shared by activist Mayas like Emeterio Toj and Domingo Hernández Ixcoy. Drawing on Martínez Peláez, leftist revolutionary theorists argued that oppression of Mayas, fundamental to the system they sought to overthrow , would disappear in a social system based on equality. While not denying the endemic discrimination faced by Guatemalan indígenas, the theory insisted that focusing on differences between Mayas and Ladinos was, in fact, counterrevolutionary, since it would undermine a unity of the oppressed that was crucial to a successful revolution. Sociologists Carlos Guzmán Böckler and Jean-Loup Herbert at the same time articulated a contrasting perspective, arguing that discrimination against Mayas undermined would-be revolutionary unity. They set out the notion of ongoing “internal colonialism” that subjugated the Maya in Guatemala and challenged the inevitability and desirability of ladinization. Also affiliated with USAC in the capital, Guzmán Böckler and Herbert undertook what they called “social investigations” around the city of Quetzaltenango in 1967, in conjunction with local Maya students and intellectuals. Three years later, in 1970 (the same year that Patria del criollo appeared), their most well-known work was published, Guatemala: Una interpretación histórico-social. The Guzmán Böckler–Herbert treatise argued that racial ideologies based on superiority of the Ladino and inferiority of the indígena underlay Guatemala’s problems, which would not be resolved through “integration” or “acculturation ” while these rested on assumptions of inequality. Only if a “real and objective dialectic” between Ladinos and indígenas took place, 57 E N V I S I O N I N G T H E P U E B L O they said—and only if indígenas could recuperate their lands and their history—could guatemaltecos together work for a more just “appropriation ” of the nation. If...