Quiche Rebelde: Religious Conversion, Politics, and Ethnic Identity in Guatemala (review)

Ricardo Falla is Guatemala's most accomplished social anthropologist, and this is his well-known 1969-70 field study of the municipio of San Antonio Ilotenango, Quiché Department. The book's dramatic title is something of a misnomer, reflecting hopes that rebellious Mayan peasants would bring the Guatemalan Left to power. When Falla submitted his research as a doctoral dissertation in 1974, the only rebels in it were religious converts—upwardly mobile K'iche' Mayas rejecting their inebriated "idols behind altars" folk traditions for the more ascetic, orthodox Catholicism promoted by missionary priests like Falla himself, who is a Jesuit. Only four years later did the work acquire its resonant title, upon publication by San Carlos University, where someone coined "Quiché Rebelde" as a prophetic reference to the Mayan insurgents who in fact challenged Guatemala's military dictatorship in 1979-82.

But did the Catholic Action movement described by Falla lead ineluctably to a guerrilla uprising? That is what Guevarista intellectuals believed—including some of Falla's fellow Jesuits, ladino intellectuals at San Carlos, and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), which despite the name turned out to be led by more ladino intellectuals. There is no doubt that Catholic Action became part of the guerrilla story, because it was from this organization that the EGP and its clerical allies fished many of their first Mayan recruits. But judging from Falla's account, the first Mayas to join the EGP were not driven by the economic desperation imputed to them by the insurrectionary Left. In 1969-70, the Catholic Action catechists of San Antonio felt they were prospering thanks to the blessings of their new religion, which included chemical fertilizers that boosted maize yields and reduced hunger. A decade later, enough San Antonio catechists joined the EGP to attract the attention of the Guatemalan army, which horrible results that Falla describes in his 2001 epilogue. Yet few enough joined the guerrillas that San Antonio escaped the worst of the violence. Whatever induced large-scale recruitment of Mayas into the EGP—as did occur in certain other municipios—these factors were not to be found in San Antonio Ilotenango.

The rebellion that Ricardo Falla does describe was against traditional beliefs and K'iche' Maya elders, not the national power structure. Town traditions revolved around Maya-Catholic rituals, gerontocracy, and subsistence maize agriculture. As the San Antonio population grew rapidly in the early twentieth century, Falla reports, land became increasingly scarce and witchcraft rife. The need for protective curing increased the power of Mayan priests, or zahorines, along with the cost of their services. Eventually younger men revolted against their authority and, through much personal crisis and doubt, settled down into a new structure of authority in the Catholic Action movement (AC). AC also helped K'iche' converts break with patterns of subordination to ladino merchants and labor contractors. Fiestas in honor of Catholic saints had enabled ladino merchants and labor contractors to ply Mayan peasants with alcohol, put them into debt, and snare them for the plantations.

After the 1944 national democratic revolution that abolished forced labor, the most enterprising San Antonio families recaptured town commerce from the small laindo minority and widened their activities far beyond the municipio. According to the people of San Antonio, the same initiative and risk-taking qualities that made on a good comerciante also made for a good convert. And the most successful merchants, Falla discovered, were nearly all members of Catholic Action. AC merchants attributed both their conversion and their accumulation of capital to a nonempirical power beyond the confines of the traditional community. Conversion to the new movement reconfigured...