Todos Santeros y Yo: On Identities of Indigenous People: A Case of Mayan "Mam" People of Western Highland Guatemala

Todos Santeros y Yo

On Identities of Indigenous People: A Case of Mayan "Mam" People of Western Highland Guatemala.

Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j

I would like to talk about how the racial and ethnic category of “indio, indígena” (indigenous people) can be grasped as something that is being transformed from a stigma of indigeneity and inferiority (=representation of others) to an identity (=representation of self) that needs both self-formation and recognition from others in the process of reorganizing the nation-state in Guatemala after the Cold War, based on my 20-plus years of research in the region. -Presentation of the Japanese society of Cultural Anthropology on June 8, 2013. [Japanese edition is here.]

	I would like to talk about how the racial and ethnic category of “indio, indígena” (indigenous people) can be understood as an identity that is being transformed from a stigma of indigeneity and inferiority (i.e., representation of the other) to an identity that is both self-forming and requires recognition from the other (i.e., representation of self) in the process of reorganizing Guatemala's nation-state after the Cold War. I would like to talk about my research experience in the region over the past 20 years.
	The population under consideration is about the Mam, one of the Mayan indigenous peoples of the western highlands of the Republic of Guatemala. The Mam are the third most populous Mam-speaking linguistic group in Guatemala--more than several hundred thousand, according to several statistics and estimates--and are the only Maya “language community” recognized by the government-affiliated Guatemalan It is one of the recognized Maya “language communities” as well as a cultural group, recognized by the Academy of Linguistics. This seems to be related to the national institutionalization of the academy's definition of the “culture” of the area, in that the Mam language is used there in the compilation of a dictionary of new words for the needs of socioeconomic change and a dictionary of place names that incorporates etymological interpretation, both of which were prepared by the academy. In reality, of course, it is difficult to attribute the indigenous identity of the region simply to the Mam culture, as these politically desiccated “teaching materials” are not, in reality, sufficiently universalized in society or effectively fed back into public education. However, I would like to point out that the concept and name “Mam” or “Maya Mam” (Mam as Maya people), which is set in the classical or seemingly archaic anthropological and linguistic sense, may be incorporated as one of the elements of their own indigenous identity, depending on their own use in the future. I would like to point out that the concept and name “Mam” or “Maya Mam” (Mam as Mayan) may become an element of their own indigenous identity depending on their own use.
	On the other hand, within the framework of classical anthropology, which has focused exclusively on the study of indigenous peoples of Guatemala, the position of the municipio as a unit of regional research and as a municipality as an administrative community does not seem to be shaky at the moment. This is due to the theory of the American anthropologist Sol Tax [Tax 1937], which has been examined in detail by Hideki Nakata [2013] this year, and the “closed corporate community” as taken for granted by his successor, Eric Wolf [Wolf 1957], and others. The indigenous community, the municipio, as a “closed corporate community,” which was taken for granted by its successor, Eric Wolf [Wolf 1957], and others. I myself have taken the munisipio as the basic unit of a natural and natural object of research and investigation up to the present day [Ikeda 2012]. I have seen in the munisipio an intrinsic primordial attachment that is characteristic of the nature of their identity belonging. Of course, the indigenous group as a research unit does not always correspond to the tribal boundaries that the munisipio have, but rather to the boundaries of the etnies--Anthony D. Smith's term --I believe that the mam or maya, which is the boundary of the municipio, can have a greater reach under the influence of the media and various social movements, as I will describe in this presentation. I first visited the Mam community in the west-central part of the Cuchumatan Highlands in the province of Wewetenango in late 1987 or early 1988, dating back about 26 years, starting with a stay of about two months, adding another Mam community in the province of San Marcos in the Sierra Madre Highlands located in the neighboring province to the south, Five years had passed since the massacre in this town in the Cuchumatan highlands during the reign of General Rios Montt, the military council that overthrew President Benedicto Lucas Garcia in March 1982 by political upheaval. Despite the fact that five years had passed since the massacre in this town in the Cuchumatan highlands during the reign of General Rios Montt, the military council that had overthrown President Garcia in a political coup, the people had not healed from the trauma of the military violence, and the residents were very quiet and only gave essential responses to foreigners, and there seemed to be no talk among foreigners or among fellow citizens about the village's history. Incidentally, 1982, the year of the massacre, was also the time when the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples (WGIP, 1982-2006) was established under the UN Commission on Human Rights, following the submission of a report by the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on social discrimination against indigenous populations (Study of the problem of (Study of the problem of discrimination against indigenous populations, Economic and Social Council Resolution 1982/34.)
	At this time (1987-1988), I became very close friends with a family of civil war victims whose wives and children were already grown. These children were four male brothers and two female sisters, but we became especially close friends with her son and his brother, who had just married and were living in the home of their widowed mother at the time. Soon after our acquaintance, we entered into a compadre relationship with this young couple through the baptism of their daughter. Compadre means to enter into a pseudo kinship, or compadrinasgo, with them through becoming the religious and moral teaching parents, padrino/madrina, of their daughter (or son), aihadah/aihad, in baptism. My “daughter” as a teaching father is now 26 years old, and she is currently living in Oakland, California, after meeting and marrying a young man from the same community in the United States, where she immigrated. My compadre grandfather Domingo, then a 20-year-old local elementary school teacher, was the subject of a book by Maud Oakes (1903-1990), an ethnographer who did fieldwork in the area from 1945-47, The two crosses of Todos Santos: survivals of Mayan religious ritual. He was one of the servants (moso) and informants of the “survivals of Mayan religious ritual” [1951]. Domingo's child, my compadre's father, is shown as a small child in the photograph in the same book. This photo was taken by Hans Namuth, a photographer famous for his work during the Spanish Civil War (Civil War) who accompanied Oakes. This child eventually grew up to become my friend's father and was abducted in the middle of the night by members of the EGP (Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres), a rebel guerrilla group that (according to my friend's theory) had temporarily taken control of the town before the military invasion and was found dead in the milpa (cornfield) the next morning. The next morning, he was found dead in a milpa (cornfield).
	At the end of my research period in 1988, I invite Compadre to travel to San Cristobal de las Casas to cross the border and see the indigenous people of Chiapas, who are also Mayan. As the bus accelerates through the desolate Cuchumatán Plateau, he suddenly takes off the traditional costume his wife had made for him and puts it in a rickshaw, and then puts on a simple jumper that contrasts nicely with his flamboyant traditional costume. He then changed into a simple jumper, which was a sharp contrast to his flashy traditional costume. He told me that all natives who go into town change their clothes because they are mistaken for Indians once they enter the Mexican border, and even in the city of Wewetenango, mixed-race Ladinos are severely discriminated against - even those in the neighboring town of San Juan don't change their clothes in town, so how do you know what their culture is? They don't change their clothes, so their [culture?] He also said that the San Juan people in the next town over do not change their clothes even in town, so they still maintain a strong (fuerte) traditional practice. However, five years later, in the early 1990s, the town had changed dramatically. The town was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom through dollar money sent by parents and siblings who had immigrated to North America using brokers called coyotes, and ethnic tourism, which had returned again with the growing momentum of peace. It was then that the opportunity arose for them to begin talking about their indigeneity and self-representation of being a Mam to the foreigners they knew at home and abroad.
	Due to the “costume change operation” by Compadre, I was the more conspicuous target at the Mexican immigration checkpoint on the side of the road across the border past Comitan in Chiapas, and I was able to pass through without having to show identification because the man in the seat next to me was assumed to be a local Mexican Ladino. He was a local Mexican ladino, and we were able to pass through without having to show ID - people with Guatemalan IDs are not allowed in the state of Chiapas west of Comitán. After half a day we arrived at the town of San Cris, just before the Lenten carnival in San Juan Chamula on the Chiapas Plateau (Cuaresma), which we were to visit in a small shared-ride bus (combi). He was surprised by the warning at the entrance to the town that Indians had killed a foreign tourist who pointed a camera at him, and when he saw the “real Indians” church, which did not have a concrete floor like the church in his hometown, but rather bare ground in the former ancient Mayan style, he said, “(In my hometown) we abandoned traditional practices (costumbre ), so their town was attacked and torched by the army and the inhabitants killed,” he explained to me. Indios were a stigma of indigeneity and inferiority in Guatemala, but I was surprised when he pointed out that for him, Indios in Mexico were an expression of pride - a mixture of catholic nuances of his Mexican brethren ( He was moved by the nuestro hermanos, a mixture of catholic nuances. This was invierno (winter) 1988.
	It can be said that the dynamically changing economic situation has shaken the traditional views of class, gender, and traditional culture of indigenous peoples, creating a diversity of competing, cooperating, and mutually influencing self-representations of indigenous peoples. The following episode concerning Dominga (a pseudonym) is typical [Ikeda 2005; Ikeda 2004]. Dominga is the most prominent woman in the city and is considered powerful by the people. She was 39 years old at the time of the ...... survey. Dominga and her hairdresser husband have been running the hotel that has become the most famous tourist attraction in town for the past five years. Although she is illiterate, she is eloquent to both the townspeople and foreign tourists ...... and has started to donate the money she makes from running the hotel to various public activities in the town. ...... She is a woman of ideas, and has changed the town's inns, which until then had only rented out dimly lit rooms, by locating them in places with good views, enlarging the windows and creating balconies for foreigners, and creating a place where tourists could only peek in from the side of the road with a blank stare. She also made an effort to demonstrate and sell the traditional weaving of Indigena women in the courtyard of her hotel, which until then tourists had only been able to observe from the sidewalk. She believes it is important to entertain tourists well, as she does, in order to improve the status of women in the town and to retain young people who come to the U.S. because of their poverty. ...... It is also acknowledged that Dominga is in the middle of a series of social advancement initiatives for women, such as the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Rigoberta Menchu, which took place outside the town, and the movement for the advancement of Indigenous women, which is actively promoted by NGOs. It is also an acknowledgement of Dominga's economic success. The fact that it was an Indigenous woman who achieved economic success became the talk of the town. Hence, Dominga, who became the town's emerging female entrepreneur, was subjected to a variety of slurs from her peers in the neighborhood. These included accusations of aggressive touting, souvenir sales that falsely claimed to be cooperative operations, and the self-righteous canonization of the town's women's history in the eyes of tourists, an activity that had never been practiced by the town's population.
	I introduced Dominga in approximately this way during a session at the Margaret Mead Memorial Symposium, “Social Uses of Anthropology in the Modern World,” held at the National Museum of Ethnology in 2004. Dominga is the woman who appears as a masked figure in Olivia Carrescia (Dir.), “Todos Santos: The Surviviors”, First Run / Icaarus Films, 1989, on the town's post-civil war record, and at the time this documentary film was shot I don't think she was running the hotel at the time this documentary was shot. Dominga was the subject of Carrescia's first documentary (Olivia Carrescia (Dir.), “Todos Santos Cuchumatan: Report from a Guatemalan Village”, First Run / Icaarus Films, 1989), filmed more than a year before the arrival of the army in this town. ), and seven years later, in her 1989 film, as the narrator of a village patrolled by the military and vigilantes during the 1982 massacre. -victims of the civil war- appear in the film as victims of the civil war.
	Five years later, however, in the early 1990s, the face of the town had changed dramatically. The town was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom through dollar money sent by parents and siblings who had immigrated to North America using brokers known as coyotes, and through ethnic tourism, which had returned again as the momentum for peace grew. It was then that the opportunity arose for them to begin talking about their indigeneity and self-representation of being a Mam to the foreigners they knew at home and abroad.
	The year 1992, which coincidentally was the Quinquennial of the Discovery and Encounter of the New World, saw the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Rigoberta Menchu, and the following year the UN Decade of Indigenous Peoples (1994-2004) began. Indigenous teachers addressed in their school lessons that the Five Hundred Years of Indigenous Discovery was (using Eduardo Galeano's theory of place) Five Hundred Years of Conquest and Exploitation. A training project was started to teach Spanish to foreigners that my compadre was involved in. The residents of the town contracted for that project felt that allowing white (gringo) tourists to rent a room in their home and provide meals for their lodgers would be greatly appreciated and would be an ample addition to their household income. I also began to feel the significance of behaving in various ways as an indigenous person to these whites. They said they were more comfortable using the politically correct (corrección política) Spanish term “indígena,” or “indigenous,” as a self-identification than the term “indio,” which they had used in the past. In my field notes from my research on ethnic tourism at the time, there were several episodes in which innkeepers and innkeepers indicated how eager whites were to make friends with the “indigena.
	Returning to the terminology of collective identity, “Who are we?” we can clearly see that this consciousness is formed in conflict with situations that attempt to define them externally. It seems that the events and things that define indigeneity are semantically rearranged within a particular context. Of course, this can only be known through a constant dialogue between the informant and the researcher. In historical identity, the process of associative recall of historical episodes, or “historical memory” as we interact with what we believe the locals hold or should hold, as we often do in our oral history elicitation, is essential. It is essential to have a process that is like playing an association game. The memory of Mam as a “not so distant” historical entity, an object of exploitation by the “masters” or modern state of the non-indigenous criollos (colonial-born whites) who inherited their black heritage from the Spanish conquistadores (conquistadores), including forced labor laws (1934) and seasonal labor on the plantations that continues to this day The memory of how they were the “masters” of the Spanish conquistadores (conquistadores) is recounted.
	In school education, Tekun Umam of the Quiché Maya, a symbol of the indigenous rebels who resisted the Conquistadores by force and was killed in February 1524, is a major presence, and he too is spoken of as Guatemala's national hero rather than as a Mayan hero. On the other hand, the history of the epidemic that decimated the indigenous population, the tax collection by the church and encomienda, the Inquisition, and the control of moonshine is rarely mentioned. However, indigenous teachers are familiar with the history of these “own” oppressions, and the history that is not told in textbooks is also told in the school setting.
	Since the full-scale immigration to North America that began in the 1990s, I have often heard about the “excellence” of Guatemalan natives as a superior labor force in the neoliberal economy, more diligent, tough, and hardworking than other Latin Americans, especially Mexicans (choros). This is one example of a change in the opposite direction from the previous negative representation of indigenous peoples as labor force subjects. At a traffic roundabout on the outskirts of Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala's second largest city, a standing statue of a North American migrant worker is erected alongside the current giant standing statue of Tecun Uman. My friends in San Marcos proudly tell me that it was modeled after their fellow Indigena illegal immigrants, as if it were the Tecun Uman for them today.
	Women who spun textiles for their own use became victims of the civil war and later became handicraft producers or union members to rebuild their lives, and even microfinance borrowers for post-civil war social reconstruction. Their children would further plunge into the proletariat in the maquilas or maquiladoras of Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango, the major cities in the region, where sewing factories were owned by Chinese and Korean capital. The ethos of work preached by the indigenous parents who educate their children is that of hard work, diligence, and recognition by “good patrons”-but as one might imagine from the reality of the intense labor in the maquilas, the reality is not as sweet as the parents might expect. The reality, however, is not as sweet as parents might expect. I have witnessed the transformation of the indigenous Guatemalan population from penny capitalists (Sol Tax) to a proletariat that is in desperate need of ketzal and US dollars.
	In an article in an area studies journal, I argued that the birth of a new economic ethos among the booming bubble economy of the Kucumatan Plateau was the result of a violent post-civil war cleanup of old economic practices that made their rapid articulation into the global economy surprisingly easy [Ikeda 2000]. Ikeda 2000]. However, this claim apparently offended one of the reviewers. According to the reviewer, my argument was the same as “explaining that Japan's postwar economic growth required destruction by war,” and was criticized as nothing more than “condoning the existence of a military that destroyed villages for the sake of economic development in indigenous areas. I am not going to defend in the slightest the evil deeds of the abominable gods Mars and Pluto, the military that has no blood or tears for the indigenous peoples. I wanted to point out that economic ethos is not always rooted in cultural structures, but can change with changes in political structures. I simply wanted to describe the social context in which the townspeople themselves were surprised to find themselves so focused on “making money,” as I describe in my paper. I could not seem to bridge the gap between this reviewer, who continues to see indigenous peoples as victims of Guatemala's political violence, and me, who focuses on how those who were at the mercy of their “accidental fate” have developed a new identity as economic actors “after the violence.
	A little more than ten years have passed since then, and here we are today. In the town of Cuchumatan Plateau, hotel owners who have been visiting for a long time blame the murder of a Japanese tourist and a Guatemalan bus driver in May 2000 as the reason for the sharp decline in the number of foreign tourists. In reality, however, the decline in tourism has been gradual, beginning in 2007, when the U.S. subprime mortgage housing crisis surfaced, and continuing until the Guatemalan economic crisis of 2009, which seems to have dealt the fatal blow. This was followed by the frequent attacks and robberies (banditry) of private cars and buses at night and in the early morning, which became a regular occurrence around that time, and which made the region dangerous and unattractive to tourists.
	Under a former military president (2012-15 term) who won amid social unrest since the new millennium, with a drug problem and rising criminal population, a clash between a group of peasant protesters and police forces in the western highlands in October 2012 resulted in casualties. Last week, in a panel discussion I organized at another Japan Association for Latin American Studies conference, a political scientist who discussed the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state in a political action model made the eerie prediction that we are in a “bad” cycle of violence and violent exchanges, without calmly seeking rational solutions. Violent confrontations between indigenous peoples and the state could escalate demands for sovereignty and governance by the indigenous peoples themselves. Although the government has taken a forceful stance in response, including the deployment of the national army, I believe that the prediction will be wrong and that from some equilibrium point, a different political dimension will develop. This is because since 2002, with the implementation of the decentralization law, community autonomy has been gaining momentum, and the topic of entrenching democracy and good government is becoming a frequently heard theme in rural areas. The theme of local autonomy has also brought Western Enlightenment inquiries into who we are, what we can do, and what we should do to the cities of the western highlands of Guatemala, but they have changed in various ways in response to individual circumstances, such as the movement against mining development and the emergence of the circuit of opinion called the local council (COCODE). The reason is that they have undergone diverse changes in response to their individual circumstances [Ikeda a 2012, Ikeda b 2012].
	The term indigenous has the fictional anecdote of historical meaning assignment that it has been “discovered” by explorers and colonizers who were not indigenous to begin with. Similar to the identification of indigenous plants and animals, the term lacks the concept of reaffirmation or changeability of content by the parties themselves. Paradoxically, this is precisely why the concept of indigenous peoples may have the potential for “resistance” to external pressures when it comes to internalizing this kind of “unchanging” universality and essentiality. The lack of a clear definition in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), which consists of a number of prohibitions based on the history of human rights violations suffered by indigenous peoples, is another reason why the concept of indigenous peoples is not clearly defined in the Declaration. The fact that the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007) lacks a clear definition and consists of a number of prohibitions based on the history of human rights violations suffered by indigenous peoples to date is also a reflection of the mentality of the urgent need to protect specific human rights even if the definition of indigenous concepts is shelved.
	<<< Mitzub’ixi Quq Chi’j tuj Paxil, Chinab’jul, Ixim Tx’otx’, diciembre 1987 In a situation dominated by globalization forces that sweetly whisper that win-win is possible if we are flexible, any anthropologist who steadily and emotionally assimilates and approaches the lives of indigenous peoples will be fascinated by this practical concept of “resistance. However, having followed the Mamu community for a relatively long time, it seems to me that this entity of resistance is not a group that opposes everything in the dark. At times they seem obstinate and conservative traditionalists, and at other times they seem very flexible and flexible opportunists. In the national and international context, and in relation to the nation to which they belong, the indigenous Mamu people of today recognize, reinterpret, revise, and own the dynamism of their history as it happens. What I said at the beginning, that is, from the stigma of indigeneity and inferiority (i.e., representation of the other) as Indians, they gradually began to use their collective identity as a self-representation or nomenclature as Indigena, a politically correct term, and then to act as Mayans and Mamus, a historical background in which they have come to act as Mayans and Mamus. This is the argument of this presentation. This is the argument of this presentation, and it is my current impression. --Initium ut esset homo creatus est (The beginning is made as man is created: Augustine)