Rural Upheaval and the Survival of the Maya
Gutiérrez, Edgar
In Guatemala, the cycle of indigenous life organized around the cultivation of corn is disappearing. The powerful symbols of cultural identity, however, are not easily rooted out. Tomas, an...
...Iloveny, Father...
...Those groups that weren't near the Mexican border when the armed conflict arrived in their communities fled by the only route Indigenous migrants from the countryside draw water from a public faucet in a Guatemala City shantytown...
...Where does that name come from...
...The combined effect has been the greatest displacement of people in the last century...
...The square is the territory of the indigenous peoples...
...Days later, Tomds bumped into the priest in the largest indigenous market in Guatemala, San Francisco El Alto, in Totonicapin...
...The low international price of cotton had reduced production by 10...
...At times, it is the store or the market, or the twominute daily walk to board the bus...
...Ladinos have been displaced some 600 meters to the south, to La Concordia park, where the clothing is less than salutary and the architectural design pass...
...Some 75,000 adults fell victim to the "scorched earth" campaigns that the Guatemalan Army energetically undertook between 1981 and 1983...
...They were tied to land whose debt was piling up, and yet they did not have the capital to cultivate it...
...The Economic Commission on Latin America (CEPAL) estimates that around one million Guatemalans-a significant proportion of them undocumented indigenous people-reside in the United States...
...Tomas, an animated 30-year-old Quich6-speak- ing catechist, came to the town's parish priest with a request one cold morning typical of the Guatemalan highlands...
...A reliable census of population and housing has not been done in Guatemala since 1970...
...We have only a rough idea of how many we are and where we live...
...The sophisticated indigenous apparel, which was the boom of international fashion until very recently, is a mark of the distinction of their art and identity...
...The coffee growers had enough available labor from the permanent settlements, and were even looking for ways to unburden themselves of those workers...
...The displaced indigenous refugees from the highlands little by little settled in the outskirts of urban centers such as Escuintla and Mazatenango...
...At first, I thought that he was referring to a specific form of political organization...
...Adolfo Jimtnez, a social scientist who studied the organizational forms of these new communities, concluded that vital decisions are not made in formal meeting spaces like the neighborhood assemblies, or in known structures like governing boards or committees...
...When we began to flee the mountains in order to elude the violence," Don Viviano, a 40-year-old elder of Achi descent, told me, "we talked among ourselves and decided that it would be best to hand ourselves over and in that way save the organization...
...Here, by contrast, we are all fish of the same size...
...While the economic and political upheaval in the countryside has had profound effects on indigenous cultures, Guatemala's Maya are adapting to their new circumstances-and, as they have through the ages, continuing to defend their way of life...
...The organization was them, their bodies and minds, their experience which will become the memory of their community...
...He was able to take possession of severalfincas through negotiations with the Cerezo government, but the process of putting them into production proved onerous...
...The cycle of life organized around the cultivation of corn is disappearing, but the powerful symbols of cultural identity are not easily rooted out...
...While some activists in the Maya movement find this anecdote shocking and even shameful, this kind of cultural interplay has, in reality, repeated itself innumerable times ever since indigenous societies suffered the Spanish invasion at the dawn of the sixteenth century...
...Around 400 communities were reduced to ashes...
...They now had land, and they would not lose it for anything in the world...
...When I heard this conclusion, I remembered what a Tzutuhil widow once said some five years ago...
...He eagerly called him over...
...No doubt, they have learned from their hard political experience...
...immigrants periodically send to their relatives in Guatemala cover part of the earnings shortfall...
...What are you going to name her...
...he southern coast, along the Pacific, is another of the geographic areas that has been reconfigured by the massive displacement of the indigenous population of the highlands...
...But by the mid-1980s, the demand for labor on the plantations had drastically diminished...
...If we returned, they would kill us...
...For that reason, we don't eat each other...
...The truck had an extravagantly-lettered bumper sticker which said: "I Love NY...
...And he can imagine a future for his five children, something that is frankly a rarity among the vast majority of the poor who live in this country...
...Soon calls for land were heard...
...Women went to work as maids for part of the year in the capital or in the houses of the large landowners...
...Indeed many marginalized ladinos have now begun to identify themselves as indigenous...
...On the other, there was the cruel internal war that had as one of its goals the subjection of indigenous communities...
...Some of these groups waited between four and six years for the government to act...
...Fifty years ago, people were prophesizing the progressive ladinization of the indigenous people...
...The remittances that these U.S...
...This clothing emerged, however, as a mechanism of domination and control over indigenous peoples in early Spanish colonization...
...Nobody outside the new urban neighborhoods knows for certain how these indigenous people organize themselves...
...settlers...
...Usually, these communities have illegally occupied vacant lands...
...Translated from the Spanish by NACLA, ing...
...The Conference of Mayan women sell handicraft Catholic Bishops claims that between a million and a million and a half rural dwellers (approximately 25% of the population in those zones) were forced to abandon their communities as a result of the political violence of the early 1980s...
...TomBs is not an ordinary man...
...He has the privilege of belonging to Guatemala's "society of 20%"-that segment of the population that still lives above the line of extreme poverty...
...Others now occupy them...
...Many more examples exist in their religious ceremonies, languages, and even their diet...
...This precariousness left its grim tracks...
...the priest asked...
...The struggle of Don Juan Fernando's group to reinvent highland Maya culture in the Pacific coast region is emblematic of the remarkable resilience of Guatemala's indigenous people...
...For both of these reasons, Gir6n's movement ceased...
...In the end, some 400,000 people of Quich6, Kackchikel, Mam and Achi descent swelled this overpopulated zone of extreme poverty...
...Campesinos who had organized themselves in cooperatives had their eye on those farms that, because of high debt loads, had been repossessed by the commercial banks...
...From the dramatic "social earthquake" of the last 20 years, a new human geography has arisen...
...New forms of solidarity have emerged in the form of chains of extended families or community networks that have found in neo-Pentecostal churches the spiritual comfort and the space they need to rebuild social bonds...
...The memory of the violence was too fresh...
...This is our future," said Don Juan Fernando...
...Thus their new urban life is sealed by a basic alliance of survival, as they struggle to defend the right to housing and negotiate the provision of services with government institutions or private non-profit aid organizations...
...The capital city of Guatemala, with a population of almost two million, is now more indigenous than ever...
...But it wasn't so...
...They took jobs in anything that allowed them to scrape by...
...No religion has known a comparable explosion in Latin America in recent history...
...Other groups, which also brought together a wide ethnic mosaic, waited patiently for the Institute of Agrarian Transformation, the state agency in charge of granting land titles, to begin distributing unused land...
...he asked again, a bit taken aback by the strangeness of the name...
...The majority, however, continued to use the traditional clothing...
...they have not been assimilated into the culture of the poor ladino...
...Don Juan Fernando L6pez, from the Mam ethnic group, was one of these leaders...
...The brusque change in ecological setting obliged some of the migrants to stop using their colorful native dress which was more appropriate for cold climates...
...These urban migrants have maintained their indigenous identity in the city...
...The Maya have a startling-seemingly limitless-capacity to absorb elements of foreign cultures and transform them according to their own code of understanding of the world and of the balance among its elements...
...Today, these predictions have collapsed...
...The sugarcane farms introduced technology that required fewer workers and greater specialization...
...It is in these places that agreements are reached which the community then rigorously respects...
...they knew: that which they seasonally took to the big cotton, coffee and sugarcane plantations where they harvested crops to supplement the meager incomes yielded by their small plots...
...A large part of the ground was flooded, and the rest was pasture land for cattle that the community did not own...
...He was able to attend a ladino school for three years, where he learned the basic notions of Spanish reading and writEdgar Gutierrez is a researcher at the Myrna Mack Foundation in Guatemala City...
...He is a progressive leader, aware of his rights, and with a history of worthy service to his community...
...That explains in part the rapid growth that these sects have experienced in recent years, to the point where 30% of Guatemalans now identify themselves as Protestant...
...In the outskirts of Guatemala City, entire neighborhoods inhabited by these rural migrants have sprung up...
...Undernourished children were ready victims of cholera...
...They got together weekly, and collected symbolic amounts of money to send their leaders to the capital to carry out the necessary procedures...
...One notes the colorful clothes of the Ixils, and the aprons with intricate embroidery of the Kanjobal women at the Sunday market in the Plaza Mayor, in front of the government palace, the symbol of political power...
...The group he heads, made up of 125 families, had been assigned a farm of four caballerias which they weren't, however, able to put into production...
...Moreover, a certain social differentiation is beginning to emerge among the original indigenous to tourists in Antigua, Guatemala...
...On the one hand, there was the fracture of the economic system which disrupted the main circuits of seasonal migration to the big coffee, sugar34NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMER S 34RURAL REPORT cane and cotton plantations along the Pacific coast...
...People lived in homes made of nylon...
...We learned," she told me, "that heads in this country are good for only two 35 35 ts VOL XXVIII, No 3 Nov/DEC 1994RURAL REPORT things: to be bought or to be cut off...
...In addition, the large landowners were sending signals of extreme nervousness...
...he sphere of greatest transformation in Guatemala in the final years of the twentieth century is, however, without doubt the sphere which contains 60% of the country's population: the indigenous societies...
...Well, go see the notice written on some of the cars that pass along the highway," TomBs calmly responded...
...A priest, Andrds Gir6n, organized the first marches to the capital...
...Father, I want to baptize my daughter," he announced...
...Look, Father, the name that I want for my daughter is written over there," he said, leading the priest to one of the imposing Mercedes-Benz trucks, the property of some indigenous merchants from the region...
...The eve of a civilian government, in 1986, activated many of these indigenous people...
...The machinery was unusable, and the coffee trees were old and sickly...
...But, despite everything, Don Juan Fernando's group did not become discouraged...
...Others fled the country...
...TomBs is the owner of a tiny halfacre parcel of land which allows him to harvest corn and other crops to feed his family...
...We can no longer return to our lands in Cuchumatanes...
...He knocked on the doors of all of the government offices, leaving no stone unturned in his search for help...
Vol. 28 • November 1994 • No. 3
