Faces of Resistance: Maya Heroes, Power, and Identity

FACES OF RESISTANCE

FACES OF RESISTANCE

Maya Heroes, Power, and Identity

EDITED BY S. ASHLEY KISTLER

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2018 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Sabon and Optima

Cover image: Street art depicting a statue of Aj Poop B’atz’, San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala; photograph by S. Ashley Kistler

Cover design: Designer

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1987-8

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9189-8

For Chow

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Maya Heroes, Resistance, and Identity

S. Ashley Kistler

1. Tekun Umam: Maya Hero, K’iche’ Hero

Judith M. Maxwell and Ixnal Ambrocia Cuma Chávez

2. Unsung Heroes: Cahí Ymox, Belehé Qat, and Kaqchikel Resistance to the Spanish Invasion of Guatemala, 1524–1540

W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz

3. Discovering Aj Poop B’atz’: Collaborative Ethnography and the Exploration of Q’eqchi’ Identity

S. Ashley Kistler

4. The Man at the Crossroads: Mapla’s Sojuel, Ancestral Guardian of Tz’utujil-Mayas

Allen J. Christenson

5. Jacinto Pat and the Talking Cross: Caste War Heroes in the Yucatán Peninsula

Stephanie J. Litka

6. The Hero Cult of Carrillo Puerto Versus the Maya Heroes Who Were Not Heroes: Historical Memory, Local Leadership, and the Pathology of Politics in Yucatán

Fernando Armstrong-Fumero

7. Heroines of Health Care: Germana Catu and Maya Midwives

David Carey Jr.

8. Rebellious Dignity: Remembering Maya Women and Resistance in the Guatemalan Armed Conflict

Betsy Konefal

9. We Will No Longer Yield an Inch of Our Identity: Antonio Pop Caal, 1941–2002

Abigail E. Adams

10. There Are No Heroes/We’re All Heroes: Kaqchikel Vendors’ Reflections on National Holidays and National Heroes

Walter E. Little

References

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

Figure 2.1. Selected historical sites in Guatemala

Figure 8.1. Indigenous queens condemn state violence in Panzós, 1978

Figure 8.2. Political street art, Guatemala

Acknowledgments

First, and most importantly, I thank the contributors to this volume whose tireless efforts made this book possible. In Guatemala, I thank the people of San Juan Chamelco for sparking my interest in Maya heroic figures and supporting me in my research in the community since 2004. In the United States, I thank Ed Royce for his patience and mentoring and Norm Whitten, Rachel Newcomb, and Robinson Herrera for their feedback on my book proposal. I also thank Susan Harris for copyediting this volume and Bonny McLaughlin for her index. I extend the greatest of thanks to Wendi Schnaufer at the University of Alabama Press for her support of this project.

I dedicate this volume to my dear friend, Wiliams Cu Can (Chow), who passed away suddenly in Chamelco in March 2014. Wiliams was my constant companion during my fieldwork in Chamelco, as I lived with his family in their home and he served as my assistant during my research on Aj Poop B’atz’ in 2005 and 2006. I will forever be thankful for his support, kind spirit, great sense of humor, and mischievous laugh. Wankat sa’ inch’ool, Chow.

Introduction

Maya Heroes, Resistance, and Identity

S. Ashley Kistler

In the highland Guatemalan town of San Juan Chamelco, tales of sixteenth-century Q’eqchi’-Maya leader Aj Poop B’atz’¹ recount that the acts of this heroic figure changed the course of local history. According to Q’eqchi’ oral tradition, as Aj Poop B’atz’ watched Spanish forces invade and devastate western Guatemala, he faced a choice: fight, which would risk the death of his people, or accept the Spaniards’ arrival to his homeland in hopes of sparing his community. Recognizing the inevitability of Spanish invasion, he welcomed the Spaniards to Chamelco in peace. For this choice, he is revered today as a powerful symbol of Q’eqchi’ agency and identity. Today, more than 450 years after his death, his story remains a key part of community discourse and ethnohistoric memory in Chamelco. In local oral tradition, Chamelqueños attribute their strength, perseverance, power, and cultural authenticity to his gallant actions.

Today Aj Poop B’atz’ is just one of many figures recognized by contemporary Maya groups as emblems of resistance and affirmations of indigenous cultural legacies. During more than ten years of ethnographic and ethnohistoric fieldwork in Guatemala, I learned through conversations with community members, scholars, and activists that other indigenous communities in Guatemala and Mexico celebrate similar figures as representations of their historic power and indigenous agency and the persistence of indigenous culture in the face of national and global challenges. Stories of Tekun Umam, Gonzalo Guerrero, and Jacinto Kanek, among others, abound in official historical discourse, indigenous oral tradition, colonial records, written documents, anthropological work, and popular culture. These figures are commemorated by countless statues, poems, newspaper articles, and paintings and in written accounts of regional history, community members’ oral narratives, and national celebrations. Nevertheless, not all such figures are celebrated widely or accepted as heroic by the region’s indigenous communities. Figures afforded this status by some may hold a markedly different status for others. Some figures celebrated in state politics, including Tekun Umam or Felipe Carrillo Puerto, have been the subjects of widespread controversy as heroes imposed on Maya life through national hegemonies (see chapters 1, 6, and 10 of this volume). For example, although Guatemala has celebrated its national hero, Tekun Umam, annually on February 20 since 1960 in accordance with national law designating this day Día de Tecún Umán² (Tekun Umam Day), many indigenous Guatemalans do not recognize this figure as important or heroic (see Maxwell and Cuma Chávez, chapter 1, and Little, chapter 10, this volume).

Contributors to this volume contemplate who and what Maya groups have deemed heroic throughout their history, though the chapters presented here offer diverse approaches to and stances in doing so. Some contributors examine heroic figures in their historical and biographical context, while others take an applied approach to examining the contemporary significance of these iconic leaders. Some contributors explore the ways in which Maya communities have held up heroic figures as symbols of resistance, while others examine heroic figures that did not resist colonial influence but rather accommodated foreign intervention in Maya life. Contributors explore how heroic figures embody and model contemporary indigenous values, qualities, and aspirations and consider how Maya groups draw on these figures as empowering cultural memories that link them to their extraordinary past. In contrast, a few contributors consider how the Guatemalan and Mexican states have appropriated and promoted figures such as Tekun Umam and others as heroic symbols of nostalgic indigenous authenticity, erasing Maya agency, autonomy, and value. In this volume’s final chapter, Walter Little questions whether the concept of hero is even a part of Maya worldviews. Although the chapters presented here offer differing and, at times, contradictory perspectives on Maya heroes, the essays unite in exploring the cultural significance of and controversies surrounding these classic agentive characters remembered through Maya oral history, in state propaganda and colonial records, and as part of revitalization projects led by Maya scholars and foreign anthropologists, among other means.

History and Historicity in Maya Life

Following centuries of persecution and oppression, many members of contemporary Maya groups use historical memory to generate and fortify their indigenous identities, reconnect with their history, and ground their practices, beliefs, and morality in the authenticity of their indigenous past. The processes through which history is created and the ways that indigenous groups challenge official histories constructed by dominant hegemonies have been the focus of a great deal of recent anthropological inquiry in the Maya area and beyond. Whitehead (2003:xi) suggests that history is never a factual account of past events but rather reflects the experiences of a given group and the cultural significance of recalling the past. As a result, multiple historical accounts may emerge from the same past events. Sahlins (1981, 1985) and Whitehead (2003) term this process of creating history historicity.³ Foucault (1980:133) states that those who produce knowledge dominate the oppressed by creating regimes of truth.

Trouillot (1995) states that the information left out of official histories, or silences, often holds greater meaning for the dominated than historical facts. As a result, subaltern communities produce alternative historical narratives to encode important cultural information and convey political messages. Connerton (1989) and Benjamin (2003) similarly explore how societies create collective memory through historical reconstruction and commemorative ceremonies. Scott (1990) argues that indigenous groups often challenge the official histories created by national hegemonies by creating hidden transcripts. Although subaltern communities may appear to believe dominant truths perpetuated by national hegemonies, they unify against them through folklore, gossip, songs, or other narratives that serve as forms of resistance. For many Maya communities, stories of many historical figures, even ones shaped by national hegemonies and external interpretations of indigenous life, serve as hidden transcripts of resistance.

The works of Bourdieu (1990), Shore (1996), and Sommer (2006), among many others, argue that culture is the result of agency and intentional action. Sommer (2006:1) defines cultural agency as a range of social contributions through creative practices. Agency, then, refers the ability of social actors to make lasting and meaningful impacts on their society, in constructing identity, defining cultural practice, and creating value. In Fischer’s (2001) work on Maya identity politics, he writes that scholars must consider how dominant ideologies and power relations shape the creation of culture. For example, the use of Maya as an ethnic designation has been heavily critiqued by scholars studying the region as essentialist and the result of national and international hegemonies that seek to erase or valorize Maya cultural difference (French 2010:6; see also: Restall 1998; Fischer 1999, 2001; Hervik 1999; Castañeda 2004; Hervik and Kahn 2006; Beyyette 2017). Colonial governments, church officials, national politics, and even indigenous activists have used Maya as a homogenizing and false designation to imply a common core of experience, history, and practice among Mayan language–speaking communities. While many contemporary residents in this region may self-identify as Maya based on perceived biogenetic descent from the ancient Maya or shared history, languages, or cultural traditions, they did not identify in this way historically, instead preferring to be recognized according to local or regional connections, such as the municipio (municipality) of their birth and/or residence or their ethnolinguistic affiliation to one of approximately thirty Mayan languages (Tax 1937, 1941; Warren 1978; French 2010; Beyyette and LeCount 2017).

In recent years many indigenous citizens in the region have adopted this designation to denote their membership in a broad, collective community with shared values, history, experience, and politics (Cojtí Cuxil 1994, 1997, 2006; French 1999, 2010; Fischer 2001; Warren and Jackson 2002; Little 2004a; Goldín 2006; Bastos 2012; Samson 2017). A faction of pan-Maya activists popularized this term as a political strategy to unify diverse Maya communities into a single pueblo (people) (French 1999, 2010:5) and build a critical mass of people fighting for indigenous rights. Identifying as Maya has become a form of resistance for many. As a result, many indigenous residents of this region identify both as Maya and according to their territorial or ethnolinguistic affiliations.

Nevertheless, despite the acceptance and use of this collective term of identity by many Maya in the twenty-first century, their diverse communities are not static, unchanged/unchanging, or uniform in their lived experiences. They have experienced and continue to experience historical acts and national hegemonies in unique ways. The extent to which each Maya community interacted with Spanish or other European colonists, experienced forced conversion to Christianity, was targeted by state-sponsored violence, has become integrated into the global economy, or has accepted and adopted new, syncretic cultural practices varies widely (Little 2004a; Goldín 2006). Maya culture is dynamic and flexible, having persisted despite centuries of external contact, oppression, and violence precisely because of its ability to embrace changes and integrate them into established ways of life. The term Maya as used throughout this book, then, does not imply a uniformity of experience, worldview, or practice. Instead, the contributors to this volume and I recognize and consider how unique experiences and historical circumstances of the Maya communities we discuss influence their understandings of heroism and perceptions of heroic figures. When possible, we refer to each group using their preferred form of self-identification and not by the generic designation of Maya. We occasionally use Maya, however, in a way that is consistent with the established body of scholarly literature as a collective referent to the members of Mayan language–speaking communities who share similar history and values. To address this issue further, contributors have included a note in their chapters to clarify the intent that grounds their specific use of the Maya designation.

For many in Maya communities, ethnohistory represents a form of power (Clendinnen 1987; Wilson 1995; Warren 1996, 1998; Carey 2001; Montejo 2001, 2005; Kistler 2010, 2013). Although shaped in part through colonial ideologies and national hegemonies, historical memory has long served as a form of agency in Maya communities. Clendinnen (1987) argues that for the colonial Maya of Yucatán, historical memory provided a means of resisting Spanish domination by linking their lived realities to the strength of their past. Many contemporary Maya activists do the same, using historical narratives to generate a Maya identity grounded in historical memory. Warren highlights the significance of learning Maya history for a group of intellectuals who translated segments of the sixteenth-century chronicles Annals of the Kaqchikels. She writes, Culturalists are reviving the heroic imagery of Maya warriors in an attempt to deal with the passivity they see as one of the scars of Ladino racism and its language of inferiority for indigenous populations (1996:100). Her work reveals that, though written by colonizers, Spanish colonial manuscripts hold value for Maya activists attempting to reconstruct and reconnect with their community’s history.

Both written and oral ethnohistories play an essential role in constructing Maya historical understanding. Since pre-Columbian times, Maya groups have used written language to preserve their history. Whereas ancient Maya elite recorded extensive hieroglyphic texts, colonial Maya groups recorded their cosmologies under Spanish supervision in the Annals of the Kaqchikels, the Books of Chilam Balam, and the Popol Vuh. Maya activists consider written documentation, even when written by non-Maya authors, as key in proving their historical importance, yet oral tradition continues to be a key form of education and resistance in most Maya communities (Montejo 2005). For residents of some Maya communities, stories of prominent indigenous figures, regardless of their origin, help to define indigenous agency by embodying the core values of indigenous life. Nevertheless, the authenticity of these histories is sometimes called into question, as Maya understandings of their past have invariably been altered, first by Spanish colonialism and later by government efforts to disempower the Maya.

Numerous scholars explore the authenticity of Maya historical understanding, revealing that the concept of authenticity itself is both complex and convoluted. Fischer (1999, 2001) explores how essentialized representations of historical Maya identity help to establish the authenticity of cultural practice. Maya activists and others learn about Maya history and integrate historical practices into their contemporary ways of life by studying ancient and colonial Maya texts, often interpreted through the lens of outsiders, including archaeologists, historians, and ethnographers. Fischer (2001:116) writes that the efforts of Maya leaders to construct and promote viable elements of a pan-Mayan identity are fundamentally conditioned by received cultural norms and by desires to remain true to a perceived Maya past. Successful new elements are widely adopted precisely because they are seen as somehow continuous with an established tradition (it perhaps in ways that appear ironic to foreign observers), and thus essentially authentic. Although this historical knowledge becomes integrated into Maya life through cultural change and exchange, it is nonetheless regarded as authentic.

Hobsbawm’s (1983) work on the invention of tradition provides a theoretical foundation for understanding these arguments, as does Sahlins’s (1993:21) concept of the indigenization of modernity. In Hobsbawm’s seminal work (1983), he states that indigenous communities regularly invent traditions as part of resistance efforts during political movements, rebellions, or other situations of oppression. Hanson (1989) similarly argues that invented traditions are a routine cultural practice, as most cultural discourse has been invented by some stakeholder at some point in time. Although such traditions may not be a factual part of a community’s history, they gain legitimacy when they are perceived as such (Hobsbawm 1983; Hanson 1989; Sahlins 1993).

Sahlins considers the authenticity of tradition in his exploration of how indigenous communities respond to globalization. When faced with global changes, indigenous communities adapt in ways consistent with established cultural logics, Sahlins posits. He suggests that in many indigenous societies, people embrace capitalism, modernity, and development to reinforce long-standing cultural practices and beliefs and define contemporary identities. He states, The very ways societies change have their own authenticity, so that global modernity is often reproduced as local diversity (1993:2).

McAllister (1996) further explores questions of authenticity in her work on Guatemala’s Rabín Ahau pageants. For many, these folkloric pageants present authentic representations of Maya culture, as judges evaluate competitors on their understanding of indigenous language and culture. McAllister suggests that the images of Maya life highlighted in these pageants come from national hegemonic views of Maya life. Contestants must perform invented images of Mayaness to be deemed authentically Maya and crowned as winner. McAllister (1996:107) states, Authenticity . . . is always emergent and never more so than when the authentic representation is not an artifact, but a person, a producer of representation.

While many believe that folkloric pageants oppress Maya communities by imposing national ideas of indigenousness on them, others suggest that pageants elevate Maya culture to the forefront of national consciousness. Event speeches provide candidates with an opportunity to express political views and lobby for Maya rights (Konefal 2010). The images of Maya life presented during these pageants, then, both empower and oppress Maya communities (Konefal 2010). These works on the complexity of authenticity in Maya life, among many others, reveal that Maya practice, including Maya historical memory and notions of heroism, have been inextricably altered by many historical forces, including perceptions of indigenous and national hegemonies.

Heroes and Heroism in Maya Discourse and Memory

The chapters in this volume present analyses of interconnected themes related to the place of Maya communities in Latin American societies, including their acts of resistance to or accommodation of colonialism and globalization, their marginalization from official histories, their interactions with state politics and hegemonies, their lived experiences of ethnic and political oppression, and their agency and identities. Contributors examine the stories of those individuals who earned heroic status in Maya discourse for having led acts of resistance or accommodation during the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion, in independence-era rebellions, and throughout the contemporary battle for Maya equality. They also consider those individuals who have been elevated to heroic status by state politics.⁴ This volume looks diachronically at Maya notions of heroism and considers the historical forces that have acted on, shaped, and challenged these ideas. In examining Maya perceptions of these figures, either as symbols of indigenous power and resistance or as controversial representations of state hegemonies, contributors explore the role of Maya leaders in fighting for indigenous autonomy in colonial times, during the Guatemalan Civil War, and beyond. They consider how the Guatemalan and Mexican governments have appropriated and created indigenous heroes as part of official national histories and have shaped Maya communities’ understandings of their own past. Contemporary Maya groups’ recognition of those ancestors who bequeathed them sacred rituals and practices as heroic is another focus of this collection. Finally, contributors examine the agentive, and sometimes conflictive, work of the leaders of the Maya resurgence movement in Guatemala in revitalizing pan-Maya spirituality.

We define a hero as a figure, whether a historical person or mythological character, revered by a group at some moment in its history and recognized in part for his or her personal assets, including wisdom, intelligence, strength, abilities, or bravery. Throughout Latin America and around the world, heroic figures serve as widely recognized symbols of cultural or national identities (e.g., Eva Perón in Argentina [Fraser and Navarro 1996], Ayrton Senna in Brazil [Kapadia 2010], Gandhi in India [Easwaran 2011], Haile Selassie for the Rastafari [W. Lewis 1993], and Jumandy for the Napo Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon [Uzendoski 2005, 2006]). Nevertheless, who or what a community deems heroic is shaped by many interconnected factors, including, among others, local values, gendered norms, social hierarchies, political ideologies, historical forces, and colonial and national hegemonies.

Contributors to this collection consider what Maya communities in Mexico and Guatemala have defined as heroic at distinct historical moments and how they do so today. Maya notions of heroism have varied considerably over time, having been defined in novel ways by distinct Maya groups at different points in time. Definitions of heroism are constantly fluid, changing, shaped by national and local interpretations of state politics and local values and norms. They are open to and up for debate. How Maya communities have defined heroism has been shaped, in part, by the national hegemonies that have marginalized them for centuries, alienating them from their history and culture, limiting their historical understanding, educational opportunities, and political power and relegating them to the lowest levels of their countries’ social hierarchies. The celebration of certain historical figures as heroic has been imposed on Maya communities historically and continues to be imposed today. Although the Maya with whom I have worked rarely use the word hero, except to reference Tekun Umam, Guatemala’s national hero controversially promoted by the Guatemalan government as a representation of indigenous resistance and used to marginalize the Maya, they do recognize and revere other individuals as having a unique status that transcends time because of their personal characteristics, including humility,⁵ their sacrifice for their communities, and other feats. The stories and understandings of these individuals may have been altered or even originally constructed by Spanish colonial hegemonies or national political agendas, although these individuals have nevertheless become a part of Maya oral discourse and are recognized by the Maya communities that share their stories as individuals worthy of emulation. Thus, while the term hero (héroe) and notions of heroism may have been introduced to Maya communities through colonial or Western ideologies, these categories have come to play a valued role in Maya discourse and memory throughout history. In fact, stories of notable figures have played an important role in Maya ethnohistories, agency, and resistance.

The essays presented here examine the myriad factors that have shaped who and what the Maya have viewed as heroic from the colonial era through the present. Armstrong-Fumero and Little suggest in their chapters that the Mexican and Guatemalan governments have elevated historical figures to heroic status to seem sympathetic to their countries’ indigenous populations while repressing indigenous rights. For these reasons, some national heroes promoted through state hegemonies, including Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Mexico and Tekun Umam in Guatemala, are the subjects of great controversy. Local gendered norms also shape how Maya citizens classify heroes, as the masculine bias emphasized by the Spaniards during the colonial era and perpetuated in Ladino values have led many Maya communities to prioritize male over female heroic figures in historical discourse. In fact, when writing this introduction, I found it difficult to find stories of female heroines in Maya discourse or the published body of academic literature on this topic. Although Adelina Caal (Mamá Maquín) became a symbol of indigenous resistance during the 1978 protest in Panzós, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala (see Konefal, chapter 8, this volume), few works have been written about her. Despite Rigoberta Menchú Tum’s Nobel Peace Prize and her continued work with the Fundación Rigoberta Menchú Tum for Maya education, human rights, and political equality, her aspirational status is highly contested within Maya communities because of the controversy surrounding her testimony (Stoll 1999, Arias 2001).

While such renowned figures remain important in Maya oral and written tradition, few published works explore their prominence as cornerstones of Maya historical memory and resistance. Although several books present brief accounts of Maya heroes in their discussion of other facets of Maya life, including Victor Montejo’s Maya Intellectual Renaissance (2005), W. George Lovell and Christopher H. Lutz’s "Strange Lands and Different Peoples" (2013), and Greg Grandin, Deborah T. Levenson, and Elizabeth Oglesby’s edited collection, The Guatemala Reader (2011), no other works bring together stories of Maya heroes from Guatemala and Mexico and across time. Only Victor Montejo’s El Q’anil (2001) focuses exclusively on a legendary Maya heroic figure, examining a mythological Jakaltek-Maya figure as a symbol of his community’s indigenous identity. In contrast, this collection presents a diachronic critical look at heroic figures from across the Maya area. Thus, the contributors to this volume examine Maya life through a unique lens, analyzing the controversies surrounding the celebration of national heroes and exploring heroic figures and their stories as a way that many Maya communities connect with their past, define their present, and legitimize their place in their countries’ historical and political landscapes.

Maya Communities in Historical Perspective

The indigenous communities of Mexico and Guatemala have faced innumerable challenges to their cultural identities and have shared a narrative of oppression over the last five hundred years, from the subjugation of the contact and colonial periods to the brutality of state-sponsored violence and the introduction of new global technologies. Not all Maya communities confronted these events firsthand or experienced these encounters in the same ways, but the history of most contemporary Maya groups has been shaped by them in some way. I do not presume a uniformity of experience in this historical background or present a complete account of Maya history but rather aim to situate the stories and significance of the agentive figures explored in this volume within key historical moments in this shared history of oppression, trials, and violence.

The arrival of Spanish forces in Mesoamerica in the mid-1500s presented a significant challenge to Maya communities of the time. The indigenous population of the region, which is estimated to have been more than one million inhabitants during the pre-Columbian era, fell to a fraction of its previous size within a single generation of the invasion due to the effects of armed conflict and the spread of new diseases introduced by Spanish soldiers (Todorov 1999; Townsend 2003). After invading Maya communities in southern Mexico in the early 1500s, Pedro de Alvarado and his forces moved southward into western Guatemala, seizing control of the Maya communities there (Lovell 2010).

Many Maya groups faced drastic cultural and political changes during Spanish colonialism. As Lovell (2010:110) writes, The Spaniards introduced various institutions to implement and meet their imperial expectations. Two of the institutions with the greatest impact on Maya life were encomiendas, a grant of land, labor, and tribute given to Spanish settlers; and congregaciones, or the resettlement of rural Maya groups into centralized Christian communities (Lovell 2010). Recipients of encomiendas were awarded not only the goods produced on their assigned plots but also the labor of those who resided on the land. Maya living on encomienda land worked essentially as slaves for landowners until the system was abolished in the eighteenth century. Those Maya resettled into congregaciones were forced to convert to Catholicism and live under the watchful eye of the Spanish settlers. Not only were these residents ripped from their land and forced into reservation-style communities but they were required to pay tribute and provide manual labor for the Spanish Crown. As many Maya were coerced into accepting Spanish culture and religion, they faced the loss of key elements of their own culture, as long-standing practices were lost or forced underground at the penalty of death. Nevertheless, colonial efforts were not led by the Spaniards alone: indigenous residents often helped to lead such initiatives, as Lovell and Lutz write in chapter 2 of this volume and other sources suggest.

The colonial era officially ended with the independence of Mexico and Guatemala from Spain in 1821; yet, this independence did not mean freedom for Maya communities. In addition to facing marginalization from the countries’ new, independent governments, they faced new battles for their land as European immigrants continued to flock to the region in pursuit of fertile land on which to cultivate crops for export. In Yucatán, Mexico, Spanish landowners continued to run haciendas (plantations) as they had for centuries before Mexican independence (Wells 1997). Immediately after independence, agricultural production on these haciendas centered on cattle, corn, and sugar. It later shifted to the cultivation and processing of the henequén (sisal) plant, a central focus of hacienda life and the Yucatecan economy in the late nineteenth century. In many parts of the region, Maya laborers worked as indentured servants on haciendas until the early twentieth century, suffering harsh working conditions, abuse from overseers, and economic exploitation (Alston, Mattiace, and Nonnenmacher 2009).

Some Maya communities in Guatemala, especially those in Alta Verapaz, faced similar circumstances. Lovell (2010:122) writes, Land was transformed from a cultural into an economic resource, wrestled from community and spun into commodity, by liberal desires to capitalize on Guatemala’s untapped potential as a producer of coffee. Near Cobán, German immigrants established plantations dedicated to the cultivation of sugar, coffee, and cardamom (King 1974; Diaz 1996; Henn 1996). Tending to these plantations required extensive manual labor and landowners forced the region’s residents to work for them. This example is just one of many that demonstrate the oppression and repression that some Maya communities faced during this era. Despite numerous uprisings and rebellions (King 1974; Lovell 2010), including the Caste War of Yucatán (Rugeley 1996; Dumond 1997; Gabbert 2004b), the exploitation of Maya laborers continued in various forms in Mexico and Guatemala for generations.

In Guatemala, Maya communities also suffered directly or indirectly from nearly forty years of state-sponsored violence. In 1954, a coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Pres. Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, ending a ten-year period of democracy. Árbenz became president in 1951 after helping to lead the October Revolution in 1944. This revolution overthrew the country’s longtime dictator, Jorge Ubico, whose policies had regarded the country’s Maya as an obstacle to modernization. During Ubico’s fourteen-year rule, his government seized much of the agricultural land used by Maya farmers in Guatemala to force them to support Guatemala’s industrialization