Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala

Kay B. Warren

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691058825
  9780691058818
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691225302
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics.


The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Transcription of Maya Languages and Personal Names
• Introduction. Democracy, Marginality, and Ethnic Resurgence
• Chapter One: Pan-Mayanism and Its Critics on Left and Right
• Chapter Two: Coalitions and the Peace Process
• Chapter Three: In Dialogue: Maya Skeptics and One Anthropologist
• Chapter Four: Civil War: Enemies Without and Within
• Chapter Five: Narrating Survival through Eyewitness Testimony
• Chapter Six: Interrogating Official History
• Chapter Seven: Finding Oneself in a Sixteenth-century Chronicle of Conquest
• Chapter Eight: “Each Mind Is a World”: Person, Authority, and Community
• Chapter Nine: Indigenous Activism across Generations
• Conclusions: Tracing the “Invisible Thread of Ethnicity”
• Appendix One: Summary of the Accord on Identity and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
• Appendix Two: Questions from the 1989 Maya Workshop Directed to Foreign Linguists
• Glossary: Acronyms, Organizations, and Cultural Terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index