For Every Indio Who Falls

A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, 1960-1990

Betsy Konefal

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780826348661
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In 1978, a Maya community queen stood on a stage to protest a massacre of indigenous campesinos at the hands of the Guatemalan state. She spoke graphically to the dead and to the living alike: "Brothers of Panzós, your blood is in our throats!"

Given the context, her message might come as a surprise. A revolutionary insurgency in the late 1970s was being met by brutal state efforts to defeat it, efforts directed not only at the guerrilla armies but also at reform movements of all kinds. Yet the young woman was just one of many Mayas across the highlands voicing demands for change. Over the course of the 1970s, Mayas argued for economic, cultural, and political justice for the indigenous "pueblo." Many became radicalized by state violence against Maya communities that soon reached the level of genocide.

Scholars have disagreed about Maya participation in Guatemala's civil war, and the development of oppositional activism by Mayas during the war is poorly understood. Betsy Konefal explores this history in detail, examining the roots and diversity of Maya organizing and its place in the unfolding conflict. She traces debates about ethnicity, class, and revolution, and examines how (some) Mayas became involved in opposition to a repressive state. She looks closely at the development of connections between cultural events like queen pageants and more radical demands for change, and follows the uneasy relationships that developed between Maya revolutionaries and their Ladino counterparts. Konefal makes it clear that activist Mayas were not bystanders in the transformations that preceded and accompanied Guatemala's civil war--activism by Mayas helped shape the war, and the war shaped Maya activism.

1

“Two Bloods!”

Defining Race and Nation

The indígena hides ever more obstinately in his ancestral customs. . . . By this attitude . . . the indígena becomes a deadweight . . . for social, economic, and cultural development.

—National Indigenista Institute,
¿Por qué es indispensable el indigenismo? 1969

Tecún Umán [conquest-era K’iche’ warrior] is a . . . representative of the land; as clean as our skies, above political conflicts and fratricidal struggles, sacrificed when the two bloods that run in our veins met, source of the river of our history.

—Revista Cultural del Ejército,
January–June 1979

What are they without traje [traditional dress]? Nothing but Indian trash.

—Hotel owner, Cobán,
Alta Verapaz, 2002

I speak for my race. . . . I speak for the blood that circulates in my veins, the blood of the kekchíes, the Maya blood! . . . They [Ladinos] try to incorporate us into their society so we can continue serving them and they can continue humiliating us, because that is what the indígena has always been: servant, . . . peon, beast of burden, . . . until he has become a thing.

—Eduardo Pacay Coy,
in La Ruta, September 26, 1971

Race has been a central and problematic theme in Guatemala’s vision of itself as a nation. It is a country of profound and remarkably lasting contrasts—linguistic, cultural, and economic—that tend to coalesce around the racialized and opposing social categories of “indígena” and “Ladino,” the latter term generally applied to Guatemalans not defined as indigenous. Yet the concept of race can seem problematic when applied to indigenous populations. Scholars usually view distinctions among Guatemalans as “ethnic” rather than “racial,” marked by cultural or economic specificities (language, dress, ways of life or work) that an individual or group can maintain, adapt, achieve, or discard. Race, on the other hand, smacks of biological determinism. In writing about Maya activism I have wrestled with the question of terminology: does “ethnicity” or “race” better capture the complicated construction of Maya identity? The term “ethnicity” focuses attention on important cultural and economic differences among Maya groups and Guatemalans more generally. But processes of categorizing indigenous groups as one—whether it be Mayas, indígenas, or the more disparaging indios—and ascribing qualities to them have revolved around ideologies of race.

In other words, ethnic differences and the racialization of those differences are important to understanding recent Guatemalan history. Central to the story, too, are the ways in which Guatemalans, Mayas and Ladinos, used the terms. In a society with a large Maya population and a genocidal civil war, when and why did Guatemalans see or assert “race”? For what reasons did people frame identity in ethnic terms? Varied framings have reflected historically produced understandings of difference, often alongside aims specific to the moment.¹

Activists like Eduardo Pacay in the epigraph wrote of la raza—“the race”—and insisted that Mayas across ethnic boundaries in Guatemala had blood-based links to pre-Columbian Maya ancestors and to each other. This was not only to stress connections between the Maya present and past. It also challenged a cultural and economic determinism that defined indígenas as tied to the bean patch and rendered nonindigenous those who were not so tied. In time, the discourse shaped Maya-specific activism as people like Pacay organized opposition to a violent state. Simultaneously, other Mayas and Ladinos on the political Left favored the term ethnic in part because it diminished distinctions between them, a construction of difference that was important as they sought to build class-based unity.

Ladino elites’ positions reflected other goals. State officials had long claimed for the nation the blood of ancient Mayas such as Tecún Umán, eulogized in the Revista Cultural del Ejército (Army Cultural Review). They sponsored homages and commemorations including an annual Day of the Indian, staged the annual Folklore Festival, and even featured an indigenous woman on the national currency. Their views on the present-day Maya were more ambiguous. Ladino elites tended to employ cultural notions to define and disparage contemporary indios, equating identity with traditional practices considered backward and with a low class status, and called for assimilation. Yet underneath official rhetoric were persistent beliefs about the contemporary indigenous “race” as fundamentally flawed, assimilationist views intertwined with a virulent racism that assumed inferiority based in blood.² This construction naturalized coercive labor practices that kept modern-day indios at work on Ladino plantations, a fact that Pacay points to: “Because that is what the indígena has always been: servant, . . . peon, beast of burden, . . . until he has become a thing.” As Joshua Lund writes of Mexico, the apparent split between revered ancient indígena and disparaged present-day indio is actually no separation at all: it is rather “the constitutive ambivalence of a single, expansionist nationalism. It is a nationalism enabled by a gesture that appropriates while vanquishing, sacralizes while destroying.”³

Categorizing Guatemala

For over one hundred years, official classification of Guatemalans has taken place and been measured through national censuses. Since 1880, census takers have duly noted whether individuals appeared to be indígenas or not, the latter category usually labeled “Ladinos,” or in some cases as the inverse of indígenas: “no-indígenas.”⁴ In the census data, the two categories coincide with striking material inequalities, within communities and nationally. In the mid-twentieth century—like today—people defined as indigenous were found to be among the poorest of Guatemalans and as a group, lagged behind Ladinos in terms of literacy levels, health, and political participation.⁵ The more recent armed conflict itself only widened the distance separating Mayas and Ladinos. Though Mayas make up a little over half of the Guatemalan population, they accounted for over 80 percent of the war’s dead and disappeared, an estimated 93 percent of them killed at the hands of the state.⁶

The damning figures measuring dead, illiterate, and marginalized Mayas, however, can mask other important social facts. First, Maya communities have long been stratified economically, and indigenous elites’ power is derived in part from class-based relationships with the indigenous masses, sometimes in alliance with Ladino elites and officials. A Maya middle sector is important; students, teachers, and social workers, for example, led many of the reform efforts of the 1970s. Second, while a majority of the poor are indigenous, it is also true that a majority of Ladinos are among the poor and are marginalized from economic and political power like their Maya counterparts. The Guatemalan state is understood as “Ladino” because Ladinos dominate positions of power, yet as anthropologist Diane Nelson warns, “Casual reference to a ‘ladino state’ ignores the enormous costs borne by the majority of ladinos who are not represented there.”⁷ And third, despite the findings that state counterinsurgency practices amounted to genocide, the war itself cannot be classified as a conflict between Ladinos and Mayas. Before the state adopted its strategy of attacking entire Maya communities, Ladino unionists, students, and leaders of all kinds were the most frequent targets of state assassinations.⁸ To complicate matters further still, Mayas filled the lowest ranks of the Guatemalan army, albeit often through forced recruitment, and the state organized a massive civil patrol system in the 1980s—complicit in much of the violence—that required virtually every rural Maya man to patrol his own community for “subversives.” Conflicts in Guatemala defy simple explanation. The profound divisions in society that lay at the root of its civil war and motivated activism were based in subordination of Mayas and the poor.

One more layer of complexity should be noted: the linguistic and geographic boundaries that delineate indigenous communities obviously differentiate and separate Mayas in Guatemala from each other. Collective identities as “indígenas” do not necessarily reflect the way individuals have thought (or think) of themselves. Self-identity for most Mayas was and is tied to their local community or language group, and only to a limited extent to a broader indigenous population. As we have seen, activist Mayas stressed links to hermanos indígenas (indigenous brothers and sisters) from the western highlands to lowland Panzós. Note that Pacay in the epigraph simultaneously referred to linguistic identity (“kekchí”) alongside the exclamatory label “Maya!” But communication among monolingual Mayas was limited, and distances separating them from each other were great. The partial breaking down of these barriers—linguistic and geographic—spurred the emergence of the kinds of organizing examined in this book.⁹

The terms Ladino and indígena thus imply multiple and contested understandings of blood, class, and culture as signaling identity. These labels reflect messy, constructed, and ever-changing social relationships. But despite their mutability, they do have a salience that makes them primary markers of identity in Guatemala. As one recent study argues, while the indigenous-Ladino formulation obscures the diversity found in both of these categories, this bipolarity is a necessary subject of analysis in part because it “occupies a place in the thinking of all Guatemalans.”¹⁰

Where Guatemala has differed (perhaps only in degree) from Mexico and other places in Latin America with large indigenous populations is in the rigid way it has continued to be conceived in binary terms, with two distinct races constituting the nation.¹¹ Through segregation (discursive and physical), the ongoing use of racialized and overwhelmingly negative images of contemporary Mayas, along with homages to a preconquest Maya past, Guatemala has been imagined and represented not as a merging of indigenous and Ladino cultures or blood, but as a nation of two separate peoples. An effect of a binary understanding and construction of race in Guatemala has been a denial of mestizo identities. In the epigraph by the National Indigenista Institute (IIN), it was argued in 1969 that the “deadweight” of indigenous customs must be left behind as indios become Ladinos. In a similar vein, the genetic element of ladinization (becoming Ladino) in Guatemala assumes that Ladino blood “dominates” or overpowers Maya blood. Ladinization, then, is a type of wishful, whitened mestizaje (mixing) in which the notion of actual mixing—cultural and genetic—is downplayed. Mestizaje is present in ladinization, but buried within a Ladino exterior understood as not indigenous. It is not uncommon in Guatemala for rude or obtuse behavior to be met with a nasty pronouncement that that Ladino exterior has been ruptured, that someone has let out the indio within: Te salió el indio.¹²

Beliefs about people of the indigenous “race” as culturally and genetically distant from and inferior to Ladinos have reflected, reinforced, and naturalized more material forms of segregation not only in the area of labor, but also education, health, access to land, and effective citizenship. Historian Arturo Taracena argues that such segregation—rhetorical and material—historically has been more powerful than ever-present calls for assimilation, a fact he attributes to the use and function of racialized difference in upholding the economic and political inequalities that have benefited Guatemala’s oligarchy.¹³ Indigenous resistance to assimilationist pressures, too, has contributed to ongoing segregation between Mayas and Ladinos, as have obstacles of geography and language. Whatever its explanation, a binary understanding of race, a classification of Guatemalans as “indígenas” or “no-indígenas,” has penetrated deep into the national psyche. Even at the most obvious and symbolic level of national pageantry, racial boundaries are solidified and naturalized by separate contests for the naming of Guatemala’s two national “queens.” A Ladina Miss Guatemala has long represented and set the standard for national beauty, before the nation and the world. An indigenous Miss Maya, called the “Rabín Ahau,” is the celebrated focal point of the annual Folklore Festival. She personifies the grandeur of the Maya past, an integral part of the nation, but to this day distinct from Ladina—and national—standards of beauty. Anthropologist Carlota McAllister attended the Rabín Ahau pageant in 1988 and described an impassioned President Vinicio Cerezo reminding spectators of the nation’s duality: “Guatemalans! We are a people of two bloods!”¹⁴

Like all racialized groups, the indígena in Guatemala, with his or her ambiguous connotations of blood, class, and culture, has been defined by historical process. The meanings assigned to that identity in Guatemala, the products of racialization, have differed over time and have depended upon who was doing the defining—Ladinos or indígenas, elites or the popular classes, even Maya clasistas or Maya culturalistas. As Richard Adams and Santiago Bastos warn, Guatemala’s racial duality does not mean that identity can be rigidly conceived or viewed as a “direct reflection” of what dominant forces may wish it to be. Relations between Ladinos and indígenas “arise . . . within the framework of a strategy of ideological domination but once set in motion, can take their own paths, sometimes at the margins of state control, sometimes”—as we will see in this book—“in opposition to it.”¹⁵ But before turning more fully to the contestations over Maya identity, we should consider in more detail the “framework . . . of ideological domination” that elites attempted to construct in Guatemala, the race-related policies and practices of the ruling class.

“Uncountable Corpses” or Soul of the Nation?

Official calls for the assimilation of Mayas into the nation, as mentioned, contradicted the labor practices of an elite sector that leaned on racial differentiation to ensure a ready and subser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “Two Bloods!”: Defining Race and Nation
• Chapter 2. Mayas Mobilized
• Chapter 3. Envisioning the Pueblo
• Chapter 4. Reinas Indígenas and the Authentic Maya
• Chapter 5. Radicalizing Violence
• Chapter 6. “Pueblo against Pueblo”
• Chapter 7. May All Rise Up?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index