Ritual, Identity, and the Mayan Diaspora

Nancy J. Wellmeier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367439026
• eBook ISBN: 9781000026924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1998, Ritual, Identity, and the Mayan Diaspora examines the lives and the continuing ritual traditions of the Mayas in the United States. The book focuses on a predominantly Maya town in rural Florida and shows how members of this ancient Central American civilization use their religious tradition to maintain their ethnic identity in an unfamiliar environment. Bringing together studies of Mesoamerican fiesta or cargo systems, religious ritual and migration studies, this interdisciplinary work describes the religious traditions of indigenous Guatemala, the crisis migration of the 1980s, and the Mayas' daily life in the United States, including Maya women's reflections on their new challenges. The book is unique in its focus on the transfer of the fiesta cycle to the diaspora and its analysis of the behind-the-scenes aspects of ritual. The rise of leadership contested interpretations of ethnic identity, choices about symbolic representation, and maintenance of ties to villages of origin all take place in the context of organizing public ritual events. This book will be of interest to academics of anthropology, history and sociology.

CHAPTER I

Meeting the Mayas

Francisco¹ consulted the sky, as much of it as he could see from beneath the thick leaves of the orange tree. The sun was beginning its descent. About time, he figured, to start his walk down the sandy road between citrus trees that would take him to where he would be served his only meal of the day. Maybe today he would get lucky and succeed in bringing back a blanket to his camp under the tree. The January nights were cold, his shirt thin. Shoes too, maybe, although the shoes the church people brought were almost all too large for his feet. He had worn out his shoes, and his feet as well, on the three-day walk across the Sonora desert. But he had come a long way, and was excited to be in Los Estados, the United States, where he hoped to find work as quickly as possible. Perhaps tonight he and his three companions, who had traveled together all the way from San Miguel Acatán, deep in the mountains of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, would find a ride to Florida. He had heard of a place there called Indiantown, where other Maya people from his hometown lived and worked and even held an annual fiesta for their patron, San Miguel. Francisco found that hard to believe, but maybe in Los Estados anything was possible. Meantime, he was hungry.

Since the early 1980s, the citrus groves around the periphery of Phoenix, Arizona have been a collection and distribution point for groups of indigenous Maya people coming into the United States from Guatemala.² In one particular grove, known from the Maya homeland to Canada as La Huerta, the orchard, from fifty to two hundred Guatemalans, mostly young men, arrived every week, on their way to connect with relatives and friends and to find work. Women and children sometimes accompanied the men. During their stay in La Huerta, they lived and slept hidden under the thick foliage of the orange and grapefruit trees, venturing out only for the daily meal provided by local church volunteers or to use the telephone and mail facilities at a nearby general store. To go farther, without the protection of the night, or of a vehicle, would be foolhardy; it would be to risk losing all the investment of time, money and physical effort required to reach this point. The migra, the United States Border Patrol, would escort them to the border and the whole difficult crossing would have to start over.³

Every day, between 4 and 5 P.M., several vans and cars pulled up to a central clearing deep inside La Huerta. Quickly, volunteers hauled out huge pots and tubs of steaming beans and stew, sandwiches, sweet rolls, coffee and clean water. The hungry travelers stepped up to the table to receive a plate piled high with food. Then the clothing, blanket, and shoe distribution began. On some days, there were toilet kits; other days a volunteer doctor was available for examinations and to dispense medicine.

This scene was repeated daily without fail from 1986 through 1997.⁴ Although statistical information is non-existent, the informal coalition of church volunteers agreed with the estimate made by a supervisor of the citrus ranch: five thousand Guatemalans per year, minimum, probably more during 1987 and 1988.⁵ The great majority were young men between the ages of fourteen and thirty-five; about half were single and the other half had left wife and children behind. They spent from two days to two weeks in La Huerta, dependent upon the availability of the “coyotes” or clandestine transportation providers, to take them to their destination. The most often mentioned places of origin were the departments of Huehuetenango and San Marcos in northwestern Guatemala, the home of the Q’anjob’al, Mam, Chuj and Jakaltek Mayas.⁶ Occasionally there were immigrants from other areas of western Guatemala, such as Quetzaltenango, El Quiché, or Totonicapán. After 1990, there were also groups of Maya and Mixtee people from Chiapas and Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Their destination was almost always the same: Florida.

POINTS OF ORIGIN IN GUATEMALA

Guatemala is a relatively unknown country, in terms of its geography, history and culture. Small in size, it is dwarfed by its large northern neighbor, Mexico. It boasts a cosmopolitan capital with colonial charm, and many colorful tourist destinations where visitors can see evidence of the high achievements of the Mayan golden age: temples, pyramids and ball courts. One is left with the impression that the Mayas exist only in memory and artefact. Yet the majority population in Guatemala descended from those ancient temple-builders.

In what follows, the reader is introduced to the living Mayas, some of the areas they inhabit in Guatemala and in the United States, and their life-style at the end of the twentieth century.

San Miguel, San Rafael and Santa Eulalia are three municipalities high in the Cuchumatán mountains of northern Huehuetenango, Guatemala. Each township includes a cabecera, or head town, with around fifteen hundred to two thousand inhabitants, which serves as a political, market and religious center for the surrounding aldeas or hamlets, home to twelve to fifteen thousand more residents. The population of these municipios is 98% Q’anjob’al Maya, with some differences in vocabulary, style and cultural emphases among the three (see Figures 1 and 2). The relative inaccessibility (five to eight hours’ drive from the departmental capital, on a one-lane gravel road that twists through and clings to the sides of the highest mountains in Central America), the altitude (over eight thousand feet) and the precipitous terrain have made it a classical “refuge region” where indigenous people were ignored by church and state for long periods after the initial conquest in 1524 by Pedro de Alvarado.⁷ Although it is not good com land because of thin soil, steep inclines and cold weather, com farming is what almost everyone in the region does. However, the com produced is not sufficient to last the typical family of six for a year, so other strategies are employed: selling the produce of vegetable gardens, long-distance labor migration to the coffee, cotton and sugar cane fincas (plantations) near the southern coasts of Guatemala and Mexico, and some commerce in the form of trucking, money changing, selling supplies to isolated villages on both sides of the border, and raising of chickens, turkeys and pigs.

Figure 1. Central America and Guatemala

Figure 2. Huehuetenango, Guatemala

People live in block, stone, or cane houses with corrugated tin or thatched roofs, and dirt floors. They cook at indoor fireplaces with wood, eat their meals at tables on plastic or china dishes, wash clothing in cement sinks or water holes, bathe frequently in the family chuj or steam bath house, and send their children to school, at least on the days when the teacher shows up. Those who live in the cabeceras enjoy streets paved with stone, weekly markets, electricity, and often, satellite TV and video cassette players. They travel extensively, and for many reasons. Bus travel to the departmental capital or to Guatemala City is neither unusual nor infrequent. Sports teams, political committees, church leaders, teachers, secondaiy school students, and individuals and families visiting each other fill the old Bluebird buses inching their way up and down Cuchumatán Highway 9 in first gear.

All Huehuetenango municipios are governed politically by an alcalde (mayor), three síndicos (trustees), and a town council of five, elected by their townspeople. The candidates are usually aligned with one of the several national political parties, but recently a movement by local committees to sponsor candidates is gaining ground (El Regional 23-29 May 1993: 14-19).

Religious practice can be divided into three types: traditional Maya-Catholic, evangelical Protestant, and modem Catholic. The first type is represented by the alcalde rezador (prayer leader) and his wife, who are appointed by the elders for service to individual townspeople when traditional Maya rituals, prayers or sacrifices are requested. These prayer leaders may or may not practice orthodox Catholicism in addition to their Maya religion. What is more important is that they know how to pray and make sacrifice to the spirits who govern rain, crops, and other forces of nature, as well as perform divination based on the ancient Maya calendar. In Santa Eulalia the office also includes a yearly divination in the cave of Jolom Conob, under the town, and the announcement of the agricultural fortune for the incoming year to the surrounding region (Siegel 1941, LaFarge 1947, Recinos 1954, Grollig 1959).

The evangelical groups are notable chiefly for their loudspeakers, which broadcast lively hymns and thundering sermons from largely empty churches in the town centers. Several denominations sponsor private elementary schools which are popular with parents more for the constancy of their teachers than for their Christian content. In general, the evangelicals in this part of Huehuetenango have only a small following, perhaps strongest in San Miguel, than in other areas of Guatemala, where some figures place Protestant adherents at 21% of the population.⁸

The Catholic church received an infüsion of new energy from Maryknoll missionaries who assumed responsibility for the Huehuetenango diocese in 1943 (Maryknoll archives; see also Comité de Vecinos 1969: 65). They brought organizing techniques, an emphasis on what they called “human promotion” (education for the laity and training into church leadership roles) and contact with the outside world. They established a school and medical clinic in each cabecera and promoted cooperatives, colonies in the Ixcan jungle and training for health promoters, lay ritual leaders, youth group organizers and teachers of doctrine. This “human promotion” only intensified after the second Vatican Council went on record promoting lay involvement in the church. Maryknoll missionaries lived and worked in San Miguel, San Rafael, and Santa Eulalia and many other Huehuetenango municipalities until around 1980, when both the increasing state repression in the area and the availability of a sufficient number of priests native to the area made it seem like a good time to leave. The young clergy, largely indigenous, many of them Maryknoll protégées, inherited their methods and spirit, as well as the infrastructure of clergy residences, schools, and parish meeting halls. At the present time, there is a resident native Catholic pastor in San Miguel and Santa Eulalia; San Rafael remains a visita or mission of San Miguel.

Each parish has several animadores de la fe (faith animators) who lead services when the priest is not present, translate all the prayers, songs, Bible readings and instructions of the Catholic rituals into the local version of Q’anjob’al, and generally serve as priest substitutes. There is also a corps of catequistas (doctrine teachers) for each section of the town (cantón) and each aldea, who hold weekly services and monthly instructions for the entire Catholic population of each unit. Their work is supplemented by the efforts of a parish council and its committees on youth, education, culture and social work. All of these leaders receive training, some of them attending several week long courses each year in Huehuetenango, along with others from other municipios. The health promoters receive training in the former Maryknoll hospital in Jacaltenango. The celebrations of major and minor fiestas of the church year are planned and carried out, insofar as their church-related aspects are concerned, by these lay leaders. Physical work of plant maintenance and any construction is done by volunteers donating a day or two per month, together with others from their aldea or cantón. This remaikable organization which involves hundreds of people in each municipio has operated for many decades, and can even be said to be “traditional,” a term heretofore reserved for the colonial and post-colonial cofradía and cargo system organization (Wagley 1949: 79-104; Comité de Vecinos 1969: 68; Earle 1992: 386; Watana...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter I: Meeting the Mayas
• Chapter II: Contexts
• Chapter III: Mayan Men and Women in Indiantown
• Chapter IV: Fiestas, Cargos and Identity
• Chapter V: Power, Leadership and Sacrifice in Indiantown
• Chapter VI: Toward a Mayan Renaissance and Transnational Ethnic Group
• Chapter VII: Conclusions
• References
• Index