RURAL UPHEAVAL AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE MAYA
While Guatemala’s political and economic changes have had profound effects on indigenous cultures, the Mayans continue to maintain their unique identities. Many are traveling illegally to North America, others are clustering in the cities, and a significant portion are organizing and trying to cultivate lands in the coastal regions.
By Edgar Gutiérrez
Tomás, an animated 30-year-old Quiché-speaking catechist, came to the town’s parish priest with a request one cold morning typical of the Guatemalan highlands. “Father, I want to baptize my daughter,” he announced. “What are you going to name her?” the priest asked. “Iloveny, Father.” “Where does that name come from?” he asked again, a bit taken aback by the strangeness of the name. “Well, go see the notice written on some of the cars that pass along the highway,” Tomás calmly responded.
Days later, Tomás bumped into the priest in the largest indigenous market in Guatemala, San Francisco El Alto, in Totonicapán. He eagerly called him over. “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 truck had an extravagantly- lettered bumper sticker which said: “I Love NY.”
Tomás is not an ordinary man. He is a progressive leader, aware of his rights, and with a history of worthy service to his community. 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. Tomás is the owner of a tiny half-acre parcel of land which allows him to harvest corn and other crops to feed his family. He was able to attend a ladino school for three years, where he learned the basic notions of Spanish reading and writing. 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.
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.
Fifty years ago, people were prophesizing the progressive ladinization of the indigenous people. Today, these predictions have collapsed. 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. 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. This clothing emerged, however, as a mechanism of domination and control over indigenous peoples in early Spanish colonization. Many more examples exist in their religious ceremonies, languages, and even their diet.
The 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. From the dramatic “social earthquake” of the last 20 years, a new human geography has arisen. On the one hand, there was the fracture of the economic system which disrupted the main circuits of seasonal migration to the big coffee. sugar cane and cotton plantations along the Pacific coast. On the other, there was the cruel internal war that had as one of its goals the subjection of indigenous communities. The combined effect has been the greatest displacement of people in the last century.
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 Conference of 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. Some 75,000 adults fell victim to the “scorched earth” campaigns that the Guatemalan Army energetically undertook between 1981 and 1983. Around 400 communities were reduced to ashes. Others fled the country. 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. The remittances that these U.S. immigrants periodically send to their relatives in Guatemala cover part of the earnings shortfall.
The capital city of Guatemala, with a population of almost two million, is now more indigenous than ever. 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 square is the territory of the indigenous peoples. 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 passé.
In the outskirts of Guatemala City, entire neighborhoods inhabited by these rural migrants have sprung up. Usually, these communities have illegally occupied vacant lands. 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.
These urban migrants have maintained their indigenous identity in the city; they have not been assimilated into the culture of the poor ladino. Indeed many marginalized ladinos have now begun to identify themselves as indigenous. Moreover, a certain social differentiation is beginning to emerge among the original indigenous settlers. 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. 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. No religion has known a comparable explosion in Latin America in recent history.
Nobody outside the new urban neighborhoods knows for certain how these indigenous people organize themselves. No doubt, they have learned from their hard political experience. “When we began to flee the mountains in order to elude the violence,” Don Viviano, a 40-year- old elder of Achí 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.” At first, I thought that he was referring to a specific form of political organization. But it wasn’t so. The organization was them, their bodies and minds, their experience which will become the memory of their community.
Adolfo Jiménez, 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. At times, it is, the store or the market, or the two-minute daily walk to board the bus. It is in these places that agreements are reached which the community then rigorously respects. When I heard this conclusion, I remembered what a Tzutuhil widow once said some five years ago. “We learned,” she told me, “that heads in this country are good for only two things: to be bought or to be cut off.”
The 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. Those groups that weren’t near the Mexican border when the armed conflict arrived in their communities fled by the only route 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.
But by the mid-1980s, the demand for labor on the plantations had drastically diminished. The low international price of cotton had reduced production by 10%. The sugarcane farms introduced technology that required fewer workers and greater specialization. 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. They took jobs in anything that allowed them to scrape by. In the end, some 400,000 people of Quiché, Kackchikel, Mam and Achí descent swelled this over-populated zone of extreme poverty. The brusque change in ecological setting obliged some of the imgrants to stop using their colorful native dress which was more appropriate for cold climates. The majority, however, continued to use the traditional clothing.
Soon calls for land were heard. The eve of a civilian government, in 1986, activated many of these indigenous people. A priest, Andrés Girón, organized the first marches to the capital. He was able to take possession of several fincas through negotiations with the Cerezo government, but the process of putting them into production proved onerous. In addition, the large landowners were sending signals of extreme nervousness. The memory of the violence was too fresh. For both of these reasons, Girón’s movement ceased.
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. 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. Some of these groups waited between four and six years for the government to act. They got together weekly, and collected symbolic amounts of money to send their leaders to the capital to carry out the necessary procedures.
Don Juan Fernando López, from the Mam ethnic group, was one of these leaders. He knocked on the doors of all of the government offices, leaving no stone unturned in his search for help. The group he heads, made up of 125 families, had been assigned a farm of four caballerías which they weren’t, however, able to put into production. The machinery was unusable, and the coffee trees were old and sickly. A large part of the ground was flooded, and the rest was pasture land for cattle that the community did not own. They were tied to land whose debt was piling up, and yet they did not have the capital to cultivate it.
This precariousness left its grinn tracks. Undernourished children were ready victims of cholera. Women went to work as maids for part of the year in the capital or in the houses of the large landowners. People lived in homes made of nylon. But, despite everything, Don Juan Fernando’s group did not become discouraged. They now had land, and they would not lose it for anything in the world, “This is our future,” said Don Juan Fernando. “We can no longer return to our lands in Cuchumatanes. Others now occupy them. If we returned, they would kill us. Here, by contrast, we are all fish of the same size. For that reason, we don’t eat each other.”
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. 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 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edgar Gutiérrez is a researcher at the Myrna Mack Foundation in Guatemala City. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
