Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp.

269287, 2005

Mayahood Through Beauty: Indian Beauty Pageants in Guatemala1

JON SCHACKT
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Troms, Troms, Norway

The election of a Rabin Ajaw constitutes the climax of the National Folklore Festival (Festival Folklo rico Nacional), which since 1969 has taken place in Coba n during the last week of July. All participants are Maya Indians and must wear the traditional folk costume of their native township. The intention of this and other Indian pageants has been to preserve and reinvigorate traditional forms of cultural expression. Different from Ladina beauty queens, Indian queens are elected not so much on the basis of their looks as on their aptitude for representing cultural authenticity. However, as the notion of the authentic relates to how cultural identities are constructed in the present, the beauty pageant has increasingly been troubled by a tension between a traditional folklorist type of orientation and a more recent and politicised Mayanist one. Indeed, the Indian pageants, originally formed within a folklorist paradigm, have become important arenas for the communication of Maya consciousness and identity. Keywords: Maya Indians, beauty pageants, Guatemala, authenticity, folklore festivals.

The spread of Maya consciousness and identity among Guatemalan Indians is a recent phenomenon. For the most part, it can be associated with the growing influence of the Maya Movement after the violent phase of the civil war of the early 1980s, and the recognition gained by this movement through the concessions that were granted some of its objectives in the course of the Peace Process (19861996). The Maya Movement is not a cohesive organisation, but a term used for a heterogeneous collection of ethnocultural and ethnopolitical organisations that started to appear after
1 The article builds on fieldwork carried out between 1998 and 2002. This research was financed through my participation in Maya Competence Building, a joint research and education project of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and the University of Troms (Norway), financed by NUFU (The Norwegian Council for Higher Educations Programme for Development Research and Education). Thanks to Cristel Ruiz Bode for assistance in Guatemala and to Georges Midre , Bente Mhlum, Vibeke Unneberg and two anonymous reviewers of the Bulletin of Latin American Research for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
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Guatemalas return to civilian government in 1986 (Warren, 1998; Fischer, 2001). In earlier years, it was rare to hear Guatemalan Indians identify as Mayas, although some intellectual roots for the current surge of pan-Mayanism appear to date back to the 1940s (Fischer, 2001: 83114). Some have claimed that candidates at the Indian/ folkloristic beauty pageants in the 1970s a time when the Maya Movement had not yet been heard of were among the first to identify as Mayas. The pan-Mayan identity currently endorsed by people who are connected to the Maya Movement or identify with its goals challenges the assumption long established in Guatemala that Indian cultures are inferior to the hegemonic culture of the Ladinos. Indeed, the hierarchical character of the traditional relationship between Ladinos and Indians is so pervasive to the orientation and culture of both groups that some authors have preferred to describe it in terms of caste rather than ethnicity (Tumin, 1952; Schackt, 2001).

Ethnicity and Gender

The division between Indians (or natives, Ind genas) and Ladinos in Guatemala each group making up about one-half of the countrys population manifests itself in many ways, among others, by a factual segregation of beauty pageants. Generally, only Ladinas participate in beauty pageants. The rules for a different, folkloristic order of pageants require that participation is limited to Indians. Different from Ladina beauty queens, Indian queens are primarily elected on their aptitude for representing cultural authenticity. What constitutes cultural authenticity, however, has become a matter of discord. I shall here give special attention to the characteristics of these folkloristic or Indian pageants and the agency shown by many of their participants for redefining the significance or profile of their Indian identity. This kind of discourse takes on a political dimension as the candidates, in their addresses, emphasise their Maya (rather than Indian) identity and heritage to the point of condemning the folkloric paradigm on which the festival and pageant was founded. While men tend to dominate other arenas of Indian/Maya ethnopolitical action (Warren, 1998: 54; Pessar, 2001), the folkloristic beauty pageants define a space for the political expression of young women. Guatemalan Indians are, as a matter of fact, divided between 23 different ethnolinguistic groups, of which 21 classify as Mayan on the basis of linguistic affiliation.2 However, the names of these ethnolinguistic groups (such as Qeqchi and Kaqchikel) have only held limited significance as focuses for ethnic identification. Traditionally, the community or township (municipio) has served as the principal point of identity reference for Indians (Tax, 1937). Ladinos, on the other hand, have tended to identify primarily with the nation state, its Spanish heritage and language, and much less so with their particular township or region.3 Although the term Ladino originated in
2 3 The exceptions are the Garifuna (Garinagu, also known as Black Caribs) who speak an Arawakan language and the Xinca whose linguistic affiliation is uncertain. In a few regions, Ladinos also speak the local Indian language. This has been the case in Alta Verapaz where Ladinos as well as Indians used to speak Qeqchi, a custom that has lost ground among recent generations of urban Indians as well as Ladinos (Schackt, 2000).
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colonial times, as a label for Indians who had adopted the Spanish language and culture, it developed into a category in contrast to that of the Indian, including all people sharing a Spanish heritage in the cultural sense (Adams, 1997: 166). Most Ladinos, however, are of mixed European and Amerindian descent and, in some regions the Amerindian component can be quite dominant. Thus, a prevalent racial ideology that assumes modern Indians to be an inferior or degenerate race can also have implications for social relations among the Ladinos, among whom a physiognomy revealing a dominant European ancestry is usually considered desirable. According to Casau s Arzu (1998), racist attitudes in Guatemala are particularly common among the whiter and well-educated upper class Ladinos. Nevertheless, on the level of public discourse, Indian inferiority is more frequently construed as an interlinked problem of culture and poverty, in principle a correctable condition. The cultural division between Indians and Ladinos tends in most regions to overlap with an economic gap between poor rural zones and relatively rich and modern urban zones. Generally, and especially in the parts of the country where Indians constitute the majority population, Ladinos tend to live concentrated in urban areas, while Indians dominate the rural areas and smaller towns. In the minds of the urbanised elite, rural poverty is typically associated with Indian culture, commonly considered an obstacle to progress and development (Midre and Flores, 2002). Thus, in the context of this way of thinking, helping Indians to become more like Ladinos can be considered a prerequisite for development. Also many anthropologists who wrote about Mesoamerican Indians around the middle of the twentieth century looked to the phenomenon of passing the adoption of Ladino identity by individuals or whole groups of Indians as an aspect of the general modernisation process (de la Fuente, 1968: 8283). So far, most Guatemalan Indians have kept their identity, although by adopting a Ladino style of dress Indian men have, in the course of the last half-century, become more akin to Ladinos in outward appearance. Today, traditional male costumes are only used in a few communities. As the maintaining of outward signs of Indian culture and identity has come to depend more on one of the sexes, ethnicity has taken on a gendered dimension. This is the perspective of Diane M. Nelson (1999: 181185) who points out that the Indian woman in traditional costume (traje) has become a symbol and a generator of identities on multiple levels: her style of dress identifies herself and her family not only as Indians or Mayas (as opposed to Ladinos) but also as belonging to particular townships or regions. Moreover, the image she offers with respect to cultural authenticity also makes her an obvious emblem of the nation, notwithstanding the emphasis that national leaders until quite recently put on the need for modernising and assimilating the Indians. In the development of the modern nation state in Europe, emphasis was placed on traditional as well as on modern values (Hobsbawm, 1991). This apparent contradiction was usually solved by the folklorisation of tradition: the conversion of assumed authentic traditions into show or items of display. The search for authentic traditions, distinguishing them from fake and constructed traditions, salvaging them in purified form for the future has been the conventional pursuit of folklore studies (Bendix, 1997). In this way, the Indian beauty pageants in Guatemala originated as a project for making Indian traditions (thought to be vanishing) part of a national
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heritage. Ironically, by transforming particular cultural forms into performance or show, folklorisation can seem to undermine the real-life authenticity of the cultural forms caught up in this process.

The National Folklore Festival and the Rabin Ajaw Beauty Pageant
The election of the Rabin Ajaw the Indian princess or kings daughter constitutes the climax of the National Folklore Festival (Festival Folklo rico Nacional), which since 1969 has taken place in Coba n during the last week of July. This festival was started on the initiative of Marco Aurelio Alonzo: teacher and folklorist of mixed Indian and Ladino background.4 Working as a schoolteacher in the rural areas of his home province, Alta Verapaz, in the 1960s, had realised that little could be achieved in the way of teaching the children or influencing the attitudes of parents unless one knew their language and ways of thinking. With this background, he took an interest in learning about Indian culture in depth. Through his friendship with the Rev. Esteban Haeserijn, a Belgian Catholic priest with a thorough knowledge of Qeqchi language and culture, he also gained knowledge of the older ethnological literature covering the region and became aware that many traditional practices and uses seemed to be in danger of getting lost. Industrial production of textiles and other consumption goods had obviated the needs for various local handicrafts and, in Alta Verapaz, the traditional township-specific styles of Indian costume (traje t pico) were rarely seen. Some of the most spectacular dances, like the famous Rabinal Ach (of Rabinal in Baja Verapaz), had not been performed for a long time and there were other dances that seemed to be in peril of disappearing. Alonzo dedicated himself to salvaging what could be salvaged and started to work on the idea of organising an annual folklore festival in Coba n. Succeeding in attracting interest for his project among journalists, artists, teachers at San Carlos University and other influential people in the capital, he managed to mobilise enough support from the Guatemalan governments Institute of Tourism (INGUAT) and other sources to get the festival started in 1969. Folk musicians, dance groups and artisans from around the country were invited to Coba n for a few days in the last week of July so that the festival could be held in connection with the fiesta for its patron saint: Santo Domingo (August 4). At the time, Alonzo was particularly concerned about the survival of some of the less-practised dances and takes special pride in their revival over the following years. Another of his concerns was the demise of the local dress styles. Although most Indian women in Guatemala dress Indian-style, in corte and huipil (i.e. long skirt and embroidered mantle or blouse), the use of locally correct (authentic) costumes was no longer common in many regions. In Alta Verapaz, for example, women rarely dressed
4 In this article I am using the term folklorist in the wide sense of including all people who have in one way or another engaged themselves in writing about, salvaging or promoting customs and collecting specimens. They are not necessarily people with university degrees in folklore studies.
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in the supposedly authentic costumes of their native townships. The local township styles of the past had been superseded by a more diluted regional style, mainly based on the traditional costume of Coba n. Thus, in this region, it was no longer possible to determine the township identities of women on the basis of their dress, only that they considered themselves to be Indians and not Ladinas. Indian men in Alta Verapaz shed their Indian costume several generations ago and were no longer distinguishable from Ladinos on the basis of their dress. For the sake of displaying authentic traditional costumes, Coba ns established tradition of electing an Indian queen (India Bonita Cobanera) in connection with its town fair was reinvigorated. The following year (1970), the winner of the Coba n title was, in connection with the Folklore Festival, made to compete with candidates representing the other townships of the province of Alta Verapaz. Each candidate was required to make her appearance in the authentic traje of her native township. For the festival of 1971, invitations were sent out to attract candidates from the whole country and that year the first Rabin Ajaw was crowned in Coba n. The regional beauty pageant was sustained as a separate event. Up to the present, the election of Princesa Tezulutla n has taken place in Coba n about one month ahead of the national festival.5 The pageant held to pick Coba ns local candidate for the regional and national contests now takes place early in June. Although many local people still refer to the winner here as the India Bonita Cobanera, her official title has actually changed several times over the years. For a period, her official title was Princesa Maya Cobanera and in more recent years it has been Rabin Koban. These changes reflect the growing symbolic importance of Maya identity and official use of the local native language (Qeqchi). Regional Indian folkloristic pageants have sprung up also in other parts of the country, and in many townships local pageants have become annual events. Where local pageants existed previously, they have been tailored to the purpose of choosing candidates for regional pageants and the national level Rabin Ajaw pageant. As the main intention of all these pageants is to put the authentic trajes on display, thereby disseminating knowledge about them (and inspiring their revitalisation where they have gone out of use), the basic requirement for participants in these contests is to wear the officially correct traje of their respective townships. It has also become a requirement that they must demonstrate mastery of their native Indian language as well as Spanish. In terms of the increased fame it has gained over the years, the Rabin Ajaw beauty pageant can be considered a success. It has in a sense become a national event, regularly transmitted by television and always reported on by the national newspapers. It usually gets more coverage in the media than other beauty pageants and is sometimes attended by major political figures. However, much of the attention is of a critical nature. Opinions about it range from the most conservative, dislike of the attention it gives to Guatemalas Indian heritage, to the most radical, a critique of the way it communicates a distorted and commercialised view of Maya culture. Many write it off as generally non-authentic and mainly serving the interests of the tourist industry. The
5 Tezulutla n is an ancient name for the two Verapaz provinces: Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz.
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folkloristic and commercial associations of the pageant are also commonly criticised by many of the candidates themselves, who may also condemn it for poor management and presumed put-up jobs. Indeed, some years, particularly in 2001, the media have reported on scandalous events relating to the pageant. I attended the Rabin Ajaw pageant for the first time in 1998 and through the last five years (19982002), I have followed it and the other pageants that take place in Coba n.6 The family I have lived with during my stays in this town has for many years been in charge of the paabanc, a traditional feast organised in connection with the Folklore Festival on the day after the election of Rabin Ajaw.7 They have also hosted some of the candidates and their families and have sometimes organised soirees in connection with the different pageants. Several of the younger women belonging to this family have been candidates for the local title, now called Rabin Koban.

Indigenism (indigenismo), Folklore and Authenticity

The circumstance under which an enthusiastic folklorist could find sufficient support in the late 1960s to instigate a national folklore festival can be understood against the background of the regimes belated acceptance of indigenism (indigenismo) as a political strategy for coopting and controlling Guatemalas Indian majority. As an intellectual movement, Latin American indigenism had originated early in the twentieth century in reaction to the positivist philosophy that had dominated the politics of authoritarian liberal regimes that had come to power in several countries during the second part of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the positivist liberals who had seen nothing but embarrassing backwardness in the Indian cultures of their day, indigenists sought to glorify the Indian pasts of their respective nation states, considering it desirable that their countries should indianise a bit in the process of assimilating contemporary Indians. Especially in post-revolutionary Mexico, indigenist ideology was used for constructing a new sense of nationhood rooted in the New World (Dawson, 1998). All over Latin America, indigenism gave rise to an interest in anthropology and folklore studies and inspired important tendencies in art and literature. However, by keeping its liberal dictatorship until 1944, Guatemala came to lag behind in its development of an Indian politics based on indigenist ideas. Despite the folklore-oriented spectacles that were sometimes staged by the countrys last and most
6 I attended the Rabin Ajaw pageant for the first time during a short stay in Coba n in 1998 (which was also the thirtieth anniversary of the National Folklore Festival). The next year (1999) I attended the annual elections of the regional Indian queen (Princesa Tezulutla n), the elections of local and regional Ladina beauty queens (Sen orita Coba n and Sen orita Monja Blanca) as well as the Rabin Ajaw pageant. Thereafter, I attended the Rabin Ajaw contests in 2000 and 2002. In 2000, I did a formal interview with that years winner of the Rabin Ajaw title, Mercedes Adelina Garc a Marroquin, and Marco Aurelio Alonzo, the founder of the National Folklore Festival and for many years the President of its organising committee. In 2001, I was present at the election of Coba ns local Indian princess, that year known as Princesa Maya Cobanera. The paabanc is held at the temple (ermita) of the Santo Domingo cofrad a. Santo Domingo de Guzma n is the patron saint of Coba n.
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eccentric liberal dictator, Jorge Ubico,8 indigenism did not become an integrated element of domestic politics until the reformist regimes of Juan Jose Are valo (1944 1951) and Jacobo Arbenz (19511954). A national indigenist institute, IIN (Instituto Indigenista Nacional), was created in 1945, and various initiatives showed that the preservation of Indian cultural forms was now considered a government responsibility. In 1947, a law was promulgated to fix textile designs that were being adulterated. Diane M. Nelson sums up this law in the following way: The law created three categories of authenticity to be administered and guaranteed through the IIN. Autochthonous Indigenous Textiles were made and used by indigenous people since before 1940. Authentic Indigenous Textiles expressed indigenous peoples own artistic conceptions, and Guatemalan Textiles had typical designs but were mass-produced and could not claim to come from a specific region (Nelson, 1999: 89). Although not in this way defined by law, the standards for what the local trajes t picos the traditional costumes of each single township should look like were established at this time; they became based on specimens collected around the middle of the twentieth century (McAllister, 1996: 116117). Lila M. ONeales (1979: 15) documentation of local textile traditions and costume components was based on four such collections. This highly technical book and, with far more popular appeal, the book reproducing the watercolours of Carmen L. Pettersen (1986), showing Indian women (and a few men) in local traditional costumes, substantiates the folklorist vision of an original variety of local authentic forms which, in confrontation with modernity, appear to be threatened by decadence or demise. Of course, local costume traditions were never fixed before these and other folklorists intervened to preserve the variation of their day and they have not been since. The local styles were always more like local stylistic traditions in which elements were adopted and discarded through time (Hendrickson, 1995: 51). Whether the multitude of local stylistic traditions originates in a more or less distant past has been an issue of some dispute. Generally, folklorists recognise that the great variety of local styles are in origin creations of the Colonial era and include many elements of European origin.9 Mayanist writers, on the other hand, tend to look to the

8 According to folk memory in Coba n, Ubico used to order Indian musicians from Alta Verapaz to perform in Guatemala City. It is said that in those days, they had to walk the whole distance and received little or no pay. 9 Many, including the founder of the Folklore Festival, Marco Aurelio Alonzo (interview), hold that the Spaniards in colonial times imposed a different dress code on each Indian community. According to Mart nez Pela ez (1994: 605607, 768771), however, elaborate costumes (at the time actually known as: a la espan ola) appear only to have been used by the nobility or elite of the Indian communities. Commoners dressed in simpler garb more akin to, but not identical with, the type of dress used in pre-Colombian times. Modes of dress varied with different climate zones but were not specific to each community. Thus, the development of township-specific styles of costume can seem to have developed first in post-colonial times.
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colonial influences as superficial. Emphasising textile patterns and motifs rooted in indigenous symbols and conceptions they point to likely continuities from preColombian times (Otzoy, 1992: 99). However, the particular elaborate costumes that folklorists defined as authentic trajes t picos those that are now worn by Indian beauty queens might paradoxically have been developments of the Liberal era, reflecting resistance against Ladino encroachment on Indian communities combined with some internal stratification of the Indian society. This circumstance is reflected in Pettersens judgement (1986: 265): Maya Quiche textiles reached their peak of beauty and fine workmanship more or less during the first quarter of this century. By in this way extricating for esteem and embellishment certain forms of cultural expression from the flow of time, folklorist preservation projects have typically provided the symbolic material for rooting emergent national identities in authentic traditions (Bendix, 1997: 4567). Images of rustic but culturally opulent peasant traditions had been important in the formation of European national identities, and with indigenism, this trend was transplanted to Latin America.10 As a result of the USsupported counterrevolution of 1954, the influence of indigenism on government politics was halted for some years, as its symbolic language became associated with the left-leaning Arbenz regime. It reappeared in the late 1950s but this time in military garb. In 1959, President Miguel Yd goras proclaimed 19 April as Indian national day, raised a monument in honour of Tecu n Uman,11 gave Maya names to military units and encouraged beauty pageants for electing Indian queens (Gonza lez-Ponciano, 1999: 3132). Until then, such elections had only been sporadic events in connection with the fairs of some of the bigger towns.12 The emphasis on developing an Indian or a Maya imagery for the military became no less important during the civil war of the early 1980s. Richard Wilson (1995: 241243), for example, writes about how the army in Alta Verapaz cynically identified the soldiers with the mountain gods of the Qeqchies, as the powerful masters of the terrain. As the Rabin Ajaw pageant, in the course of the 1970s, had grown to become an event of national significance, its founder was ousted from the Folklore Committee that was filled with people approved by the military regime. In the early 1990s, the committee again became fully civilian (McAllister, 1996: 112113).

Dividing and Promoting the Nation

The Rabin Ajaw was created on the model of (Western) beauty pageants for the explicit purpose of countering the demise of Indian cultural forms. As folkloristic beauty pageants in the Guatemalan context are by definition limited to Indian
10 Also, in many parts of Europe, the discovery of peasant popular tradition and its transformation into a representative culture of the nation was often the work of enthusiasts from a foreign ruling class or elite (Hobsbawm, 1991: 104). Tecu n Uman was a legendary Indian warrior who in 1524 defended the Kiche kingdom against the Spaniards. The election of Coba ns India Bonita Cobanera appears to date back to the 1930s (McAllister, 1996: 112).
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participants, other beauty pageants could well be labelled Ladina pageants, although they are not expected to promulgate any particular cultural identity or intended to exclude any candidate on ethnic grounds. The Ladino category is also rather heterogeneous, including immigrant groups of different geographical and racial origins. Thus, although these beauty contests may at times include candidates with non-Spanish surnames or even non-Caucasian physiognomies, it is curious to note that they never seem to include candidates with an evident Indian identity. Of course, as the candidates in these contests do not wear folk costumes, possible Indian participants are not easily recognisable, and I cannot say that such persons have never existed. In Alta Verapaz, however, where most Indians have Indian surnames,13 I have never seen girls with such surnames among the participants.14 This is notable because 89 per cent of the total population of this province are Indians,15 and Indians also constitute the majority population of Coba n and other urban centres. In Coba n, the way of life led by Indians and Ladinos is generally not so different. Urban Indians have adopted many Ladino practices, including the use of Spanish as their everyday language. There is also more intermarriage between the two groups here than is common in other parts of Guatemala (Schackt, 2000: 1718). Thus, despite the intermixed character of social life in Coba n and the general hybrid character of its culture and population (including the circumstance that a fair number of its Indian women dress and live in Ladina-like ways), the beauty contests that take place in Coba n appear, like no other field or activity, to divide participants entirely by this ethnic boundary. The beauty pageants have become an arena for communication of cultural difference (Barth, 1969). Two Ladina beauty contests take place annually in Coba n, constituting the first and second part of one pageant. The first part of this pageant is dedicated to the election of Sen orita Coba n (Miss Coba n) who will later in the night compete with representatives of other Alta Verapaz townships for the title Sen orita Monja Blanca (Miss White Nun16). Although the racially mixed Ladino population only form small minorities in these townships, all the candidates for the 1999 regional Monja Blanca title evidenced a Caucasian physiognomy and, indeed, they were mostly of a fairer complexion than the average Ladina. The candidates made two appearances before the audience and panel of jurors: first dressed in bathing suits and then in evening gowns. Three finalists had to respond to questions about social and political topics of current interest: about the Peace Agreement, the need for protecting the environment, etc. Their responses to these questions tended to be far less politically contentious than those of the Indian candidates in the folkloristic contests. Unlike the Indian/folkloristic pageants, which had a mixed audience of Indians and Ladinos, the audience at the Ladina pageant that I attended appeared to be almost exclusively Ladino. Just as the Indian winners of the local folkloristic contests advance to compete for a title on the national level (Rabin

13 In some other parts of Guatemala, Spanish surnames are common also among Indians. 14 Although I have only attended one Ladina beauty pageant, I have seen the portraits and names of the candidates of many others on placards posted around town. 15 This figure stems from the National Population Census of 1981 (Wilson, 1995: 21). 16 Monja Blanca (white nun) is the name of an orchid symbolic of Guatemala and particularly of the Alta Verapaz region.
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Ajaw), winners of local Ladina contests may advance to compete for the Miss Guatemala title. When I asked Indian women why they are never seen participating in this or other common beauty contests, they found the idea rather surprising. One woman told me that it would never occur to an Indian woman to parade before a panel of jurors in a bathing suit. Indeed, Indian women dressed in bathing suits is not a common sight anywhere, not even at the public bathing places of the Coba n area. Bathing suits are considered indecent, it seems, because they expose the full form of the female body, including the hips and legs that are otherwise always covered by the Indian long skirt (corte). The fact that Ladinas never wear the corte indicates that rather different standards of femininity apply to the two groups. While Ladina girls do not ruin their reputation by parading in bathing suits in connection with beauty pageants, it seems that an imagined Indian candidate would do so. The strict code of Indian modesty relates to the lower part of a womans body and only less so to the upper part. In some rural regions of Alta Verapaz, it is still quite normal for Indian women to go about their daily tasks bare-breasted. That, of course, would be unthinkable for Ladinas in any public context. The beauty pageant context, however, also makes the exposure of breasts for Indian candidates quite controversial, notwithstanding the authenticity that in some cases is claimed for such a custom. In Alta Verapaz, the official (authentic) costumes of two townships lack a huipil or blouse, properly covering the upper part of a womans body: that Lanquin and Cahabon are located at lower altitudes than the other original towns of Alta Verapaz may explain this standard.17 Because of the hotter climate, it is still quite common in the hamlets of this area for women to go about their daily tasks barebreasted. At an earlier date, women dressed in this way, only wearing a head covering on ceremonial occasions, may have been a common sight in the two towns as well; at least it was recorded as the authentic local attire by the mid-twentieth century folklorists (for the case of Cahabon, see Pettersen, 1986: 258). Nevertheless, local people now question this standard, particularly if daughters participating in the folkloristic beauty contests are expected to parade bare-breasted in front of the jurors and the audience.18 The stage-show context, then, makes the messages of authenticity and tradition blur dangerously with the sexual meaning exposed female breasts usually have in the modern Western context, indeed, quite the opposite of the chaste image which otherwise pertains to Indian femininity and which makes bathing suits virtually unthinkable. Different from the Indian winner of the Rabin Ajaw title, the Ladina winner of the Miss Guatemala title will later be a candidate in international beauty contests. As the standards of beauty applied by the jurors at the common (Ladina) beauty pageants in Guatemala can appear to disfavour Ladinas with a notable Amerindian physiognomy, girls representing Guatemala in international pageants tend to be of a relatively fair

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By the original towns of Alta Verapaz is meant those that were established in colonial times. Several new townships have been established in the lowlands during the twentieth century. The problem is usually solved by permitting the candidates to drape their (large) headscarf across their upper body and in this way cover their breasts.
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complexion. Ironically, the participants in such international contests are sometimes required to make appearances in folkloristic-looking national costumes, which in the case of Guatemala can only be chosen among its many traditional Indian costumes that are never worn by Ladinas inside the country. According to Hendrickson (1997: 22) when, in 1975, Miss Guatemala won the national costume division of the Miss Universe contest and was heralded internationally as having the most beautiful outfit in the world, the very white-skinned Ladina candidate was actually wearing the traditional traje t pico of Nebaj, an Ixil town in the northern part of the Quiche province. Thus, what within Guatemala serves as expressions of indigenous local cultures often understood as yet inadequately incorporated into the nation is in the international context adopted as symbolic of the nation. This exemplifies how, in the tradition of Latin American indigenism, Indian symbols are appropriated for nation-building purposes, although without necessarily incorporating the Indians themselves in this project. In terms of Guatemalas paternalistic indigenist tradition, Indian symbols are by definition national symbols (when the nation decides to make such use of them), just as the Indians themselves may be spoken of as our Indians by (well-meaning) Ladinos.

The Election of Rabin Ajaw

Participants in the Rabin Ajaw beauty pageant must be Indian, single and in the age range 1522. The ethnic requirement was earlier expressed in terms of purity of race (pureza de raza). In acknowledgement that such criteria are dated and purity of race in any case hard to prove, this formulation has now been dropped. However, both parents of a would-be candidate must be Indian in the ethnic sense, and the girl must speak the native language of her township as well as Spanish. She is required to wear the authentic costume of her township, she must know how to dance the son and should reveal convincing Indian manners in her overall comportment.19 As the candidates are assessed less on the basis (of the jurors ideas) of female beauty than on the overall impression of authenticity that they are able to convey, girls of a relatively fair complexion (who might otherwise have been considered the more beautiful by some jurors) are less privileged; rather, the girl should look Indian. Furthermore, the girls are expected to be conscious about and proud of their Indian identity. They are required to present themselves by means of short speeches and the finalists must respond to questions about their culture. They should therefore know something about the customs and traditions of their cultural group and township and should also profess an awareness of what it means to them to be Indian or Maya. Evidently, the jurors selection of the finalists depends more on the addresses given by the candidates than anything else. This means that candidates must be literate, fluent Spanish speakers and at least moderately informed on cultural and topical issues. In practice, most of them have far more education than the average Indian girl of their age. Many are presented as high school or university students and quite a few are
19 The son is considered an Indian dance. It is usually danced to marimba music.
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teachers. Thus, most participants are likely to have parents who encourage education and take pride in their daughters achievements. Somewhat paradoxically this means that most candidates are rather untypical representatives of their culture, gender and age group: few are authentic in the sense of being peasant girls from the rural zones of their townships. Village girls rarely complete primary school and will as a rule marry at an early age. If not necessarily illiterate, they will tend to speak poor Spanish and are seldom recruited for beauty contests. Those who are recruited for the local beauty contests of their townships mostly represent different sectors of the urban environment: different quarters of the town (barrios), suburban settlements (colonias) or the trades or occupations of their parents. At the 2001 contest for Coba ns local title, only one of twelve candidates came from the rural zone of the township. The one candidate representing a rural village (aldea) was clearly a favourite of the audience (and perhaps of the jurors panel) but lost her chance when it became evident that she did not know sufficient Spanish to understand the questions that she was asked. Apparently, the Spanish version of her presentation address had been learned by rote. Most of the candidates in the Rabin Ajaw beauty contest are in this way the winners of local (folkloristic) beauty contests in their native townships. Normally, each township can only be represented by one candidate. The opportunity to travel and meet other contestants from other regions of the country is a major motivation for many of the girls who decide to run. The winner of the Rabin Ajaw title is awarded a modest sum of money and may get to travel even more. During the winners term as national Indian queen, she is a celebrity who is called upon for various tasks of representation that may also include visits abroad. On the first day of the Rabin Ajaw pageant, each candidate is required to give a short speech, first in the Indian language of the group she belongs to and then in Spanish.20 As each candidate is called upon, she will start to walk slowly down the gangway with a burning candle in her hand, making gestures of greeting as she advances towards the stage. After having mounted the stage, she will deliver her speech, first in her native language and then in Spanish. Then she will walk down the gangway again passing the next candidate walking towards the stage. Despite this set procedure and the limited time at the disposal of each candidate, there is considerable variation concerning what they manage to make of it. A few of the candidates are accompanied by a child or male consort who like themselves are dressed in the correct traditional costume of the represented township. Some include a display of fireworks in their presentation and, in 1998, one candidate brought with her a basket with sweets that she tossed to the audience. In the 2000 contest, one candidate started her speech

20

As the number of participating candidates has grown steadily over the years, reaching 92 in year 2001, it became impossible several years ago to get through the whole show in the course of just one night. Thus, to avoid having the show drag on until the next morning, the first part of the contest is no longer part of the show to which tickets are sold and which is broadcast by television. It takes place in a lesser assembly hall on the day before the main show. Although admission to this first part of the contest is free, the audience here is not so large.
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while still walking down the gangway, thereby gaining time to say more than the other candidates. On the basis of how the candidates present themselves and deliver their speeches, the jurors decide on about ten finalists whose identities are kept secret until the main show the next night. During the first part of the main show, all the candidates are first ceremoniously presented to the audience. One after another, they parade across the stage while their names, names of their parents, township presented, occupation and other information about each are announced. Now, however, competition is restricted to the finalists. After their identities have been announced, each in turn has to pick a question to which she has to respond. The winner is selected on the basis of these responses. The show ends with the winner being crowned by the holder of the title from the previous year. The winner will keep the silver crown, adorned with quetzal feathers, until she passes it on the following year. Practically all the speeches given by the candidates revolve around the themes of cultural and ethnic pride. The importance of maintaining Indian or Maya customs and traditions, including of course the use of native languages and traje, are emphasised by nearly all of them. Some praise the achievements of the Ancient Maya, quote passages from the Popol Vuh and make references to Maya cosmological exegesis (such as the significance of the four directions, the symbolic power of colours and the ideal complementary roles of the sexes, etc.). Many denounce the repression and discrimination that Indians (and Indian women in particular) have been subjected to since the Conquest, including the atrocities and massacres committed by the army and the guerrillas during the Civil War. Some go on to denounce the current ills of the society: Ladino racism, common sexism, exploitation of Indians by the rich, government corruption and foreign imperialism. When I first witnessed this event in 1998, I was struck by the radical political content of the speeches of many candidates.21 Although many also included patriotic statements of a more general nationalistic kind in their speeches, one could certainly think that many of the attitudes and opinions expressed would give rise to worry in some circles. Their clear statements about their shared Maya identity also seemed to contrast with the contemporary attitude of many Indians in Coba n, the very town where the Folklore Festival has been held for more than 30 years. Although many Cobaneros have during the last ten years or so become familiar with the idea that most Guatemalan Indians share a common Maya identity, this idea has so far not won general acceptance. Some look to the emphasis that is now put on such a pan-Mayan identity as emanating from government policies relating to the Peace Process rather than from popular sources (Schackt, 2000: 20). Another foreign spectator at the 1998 pageant, who was also surprised by the political tendency of many statements, suggested to me that the candidates addresses should be looked to as a genre and that clear and conscious expressions about their Maya heritage and identity would probably be rewarded by the jurors. He believed that the candidates had been well instructed about what they should say by their local mentors. However, later interviews (like the one referred to below) revealed that many

21 Their radical statements also struck Carlota McAllister (1996: 105) ten years earlier.
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candidates are not simply reiterating learned formulas but relate in a sincere way to the opinions they express. The jurors clearly do not reward statements that sound rotelearned or formulaic and may disfavour others that are overtly antagonistic. During the 1998 show, I took special notice of a candidate who was presented as a student of medicine. She was a very good-looking candidate and delivered an address that was notable in combining ethnopolitical militancy with remarkable eloquence. Nevertheless, she did not finish up among the finalists who, on the other hand, included Coba ns own candidate as well as the one representing the neighbouring town, San Pedro Carcha . As the latter girl had won the regional title, Princesa Tezulutla n, one month earlier, it seemed that cheering supporters in the audience expected her to win the Rabin Ajaw title as well. However, picking a question about culture and the media, she stumbled on her words and asked to have the question repeated. Perhaps, in an effort to correct this slip, she overly accentuated the patriotic tone of her response, condemning all foreign music broadcast on the radio, and saying things to the effect that our marimba music is the only music worth listening to. The candidate representing Coba n won the title. The jurors may have found the response of the San Pedro Carcha candidate too harsh or chauvinistic or, perhaps, she lost her chance when she asked to have the question repeated. The girls are of course expected to say nice things about their cultures and traditions. Pushing the response towards the political may also pay as long as it primarily proves the candidate to be well informed, but there is probably a point where it no longer pays off. According to McAllister (1996: 118), at the beginning of the 1990s, the candidates were warned about being too political in their addresses. Since then, the Peace Agreement (1996) has probably eased the fear about political outspokenness somewhat. Nevertheless, the political character of the candidates addresses appear to be not so much encouraged by the managers, as a genre developed by the girls, partly in opposition to the Folklore Committee and managers of the pageant. The radicalism of many candidates appeared also to have been fuelled by discontents with the general conditions offered to them. This has ranged from dissatisfaction with food and accommodation arrangements to suspicions about put-up deals. In a sense, the discontents culminated in the scandalous 2001 pageant, after which the organising committee resigned. The holder of the Rabin Ajaw title from the year before, Mercedes Adelina Garc a Marroquin, had during her reign become particularly known for her critical attitude and outspokenness. She did not disappoint the journalists on her final day either. In her address, she launched a heavy critique of the Folklore Committee and accused it among other things of discrimination. After her confrontational speech, an unfortunate error made by the announcer meant that the show was broken off before a new queen was crowned. The girl that was announced as the winner turned out not to be the one chosen by the jurors. While she was about to be crowned, a member of the panel intervened to stop the ceremony and announced the name of the right winner. However, following this interruption, both candidates declined to accept the nomination. A third candidate was then pronounced as the winner, but, by this time, the audience had become so agitated that the managers and members of the committee found it safest to leave the premises. Thus, the rest of the ceremony was called off and no new queen was crowned there

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and then. As the whole show ended in chaos, the outgoing queen later deposited her regalia at the police station.22 In the aftermath of this scandal, the Folklore Committee resigned and the continuance of the festival seemed for some time to be in peril. The wholly new committee that was finally formed for the arrangement of next years festival responded to the critique made against the festival by first calling an assembly of former queens and other interested partners to discuss how the pageant should be continued. As a result, the 2002 pageant was made more Maya in form. Its name was changed from Rabin Ajau to Rabin Ajaw, a spelling in accordance with the standard recommended by the Academy of Mayan Languages in Guatemala.23 Indians now dominated the jurors panel as well as the entertainment that was presented in the break. Up to the 2001 pageant, this entertainment had been provided by the professional (and mostly Ladino) dance troupe of INGUAT (the Institute of Tourism). Whatever could be said about their artsy ballets and choreographed dances, they could hardly be considered authentic, either in an Indian or in a Maya sense. The INGUAT troupe had been replaced by an Indian childrens dance group performing a traditional Maya dance.

Authenticity: Culture Versus Folklore

Opinions about the National Folklore Festival and the Rabin Ajaw beauty pageant commonly relate to the notion of authenticity: does the festival convey a correct, desirable or authentic image of Indian or Maya culture? What in any case is desirable or authentic? The idea of cultural authenticity is commonly referred to in public discourses, although many scholars relate to it with suspicion, as a notion rather devoid of clear and objective contents. Because cultures have always been changing and adapting, reshaping their forms of expression in this process, any custom, tradition or other cultural item, might be deconstructed as inauthentic in the sense that it was once created or invented (Linnekin, 1991). Richard Handler (1986) argues that the notion of authenticity is a cultural construction of the West. In his opinion, it is part of a Western ontology and does not really exist outside of this ontology, as also an innate part of the other cultures it usually characterises. Thus, when members of these cultures themselves become concerned about cultural authenticity, it means that they have become westernised and are to that extent less authentically themselves. Different from this, Jonathan Friedman (1994) uses the concept cross-culturally for contrasting an attitude characterised by sincerity or engagement in peoples production of symbols with the inauthenticity implied by the commodification of the same symbols:
22 I was not present at the 2001 pageant. This synopsis of events builds on eyewitness and newspaper reports (Tax and Chun, 2001). 23 The Academy for Maya Languages of Guatemala (ALMG) was formed in 1984. In 1987, it achieved official recognition as a government-sponsored autonomous institution. One of its main achievements has been the standardisation of the alphabet used to transcribe the Mayan languages (England, 1996).
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The act of identification, the engagement of the person in a higher project, is in one sense an act of pure existential authenticity, but, to the degree that it implies a consumption of self-defining symbols that are not self-produced but obtained in the marketplace, the authenticity is undermined by objectification and potential decontextualization (Friedman, 1994: 104). In the light of this reasoning, folklorisation could seem to imply at least some objectification and decontextualisation of cultural forms, if not necessarily subjugating them to pure market relations. On the other hand, the symbolic communication of heart-felt identities could be considered authentic in terms of serving the manifest and emerging social and communal bonds. Identities, perhaps, are more commonly redrawn than reconstructed from the bottom up. In Guatemala, Indians (or natives, Ind genas) and Mayas are different labels for the same people but they bring up different associations and symbols. In this way, established images of what constitutes authentic Indianhood in Guatemala only partly overlap with emerging images of Mayahood. The term Maya is well established as a label for related pre-Columbian civilisations in southern Mesoamerica, but it is a relatively new phenomenon that contemporary indigenous groups develop a shared cultural identity on the basis of this heritage (Gabbert, 2001; Schackt, 2001). Thus, the ideas of people more or less influenced by the heterogeneous Maya Movement depart from those of the original initiators and benefactors of the festival: mostly Ladinos more or less inspired by the indigenist idea of salvaging a rich cultural heritage for the sake of the whole nation. Mayanists, on the other hand, see culture more as a lived practice than as a collection of forms in need of salvation. Common types of critique aimed at the festival have been that it is mainly a tourist spectacle, that it does not express or convey a true respect for Indian culture and that it lacks (in the Maya sense) a spiritual component.24 This type of critique is also raised by the candidates. Mercedes Adelina Garc a Marroquin, the winner of the Rabin Ajaw title in the year 2000, told Prensa Libre: To make myself clear I know that the truth is painful for people but this activity (the election of Rab n Ajau) that takes place in Coba n, Alta Verapaz, consists in the exploration of Mayan values for the sake of exploiting them later. For among those who are managing this activity, I have not seen a single Maya leader, far less any (Maya) spiritual guide who would have been the only kind of person with sufficient credence or authority to lead and carry through an election of this order (Montenegro, 2000a: 41, my translation). Asked why holding such opinions she even participated in the contest, she answered that she had no idea that she would end up among the finalists or win; she had only
24 See, for example, commentaries by different people interviewed by Prensa Libre (Montenegro, 2000b: 4).
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gone to Coba n with the intention of making her comrades (the other candidates) more conscious about their Maya identity. In the interview I later did with her myself, she was no less conscious about her Maya identity and culture. She contrasted folklore with true cultural values and criticised the festival for confusing culture with folklore. While she considered folklore a form of exploitation, culture, she said, is a way of life. In her address given at the contest, she had called on people to respect and value Maya culture. Marco Aurelio Alonzo, the founder of the National Folklore Festival and at that time the President of the Folklore Committee, acknowledged in the interview I did with him that Mayanists had often criticised the folklore concept and advised that the festival should be given another name and another focus. He found it, however, difficult to break with an established tradition and claimed that the festival could in fact be given some credit for having contributed to the diffusion of Maya identity and consciousness among people in Guatemala. He claimed that the candidates in the Rabin Ajaw contest had always used the Maya term and had been among the first in Guatemala to emphasise their Maya identity. Even in the time of the Civil War (when the Folklore Committee itself was dominated by military people), he claimed, the pageant had been a platform for explicit messages about the situation of the people. He had found it astounding what many of the girls had then had the guts to say with the President (of Guatemala) and other political dignitaries present. They had never flinched from speaking the truths. The truths currently spoken by some of the candidates are, as we have seen, not always favourable to certain aspects of the Folklore Festival: its associations with Ladino paternalism, its links to commercial interests and tourism and its framing of Maya culture in terms of a paradigm (folklore) that relates to it primarily as spectacle or show. While the folklore paradigm is felt to locate the authenticity of Maya culture in ideal moments of the past: the time when all men and women wore the correct costumes of their particular townships; the heyday of the colonial Indian republics; the pre-Columbian cultural order and events relating to the Conquest, Mayanists are likely to emphasise contemporary culture as vital and dynamic and, at least as far as its spirituality is concerned, having a continuity dating back to the Classic era of the ancient Maya high civilisation (AD 300AD 900) or earlier. However, the revaluation of Indian culture occasioned by the spread of Mayanism has not been without repercussions among the folklore-interested Ladino or Ladinoised elite. On the occasion of the 2000 Rabin Ajaw pageant, the President of the Folklore Committee declared himself to be overwhelmingly Maya by descent, and only a small percentage mestizo. Beauty pageants and young girls speaking truths are not very ancient aspects of Maya culture whether as described by anthropologists or as conceived of by Mayanists. Currently, however, they are important arenas for the diffusion of Maya consciousness and identity. I have already pointed to how Indian/folkloristic beauty contests on local and regional levels have spread throughout Guatemala, multiplying these platforms for speaking truths in the name of the Maya. Elected local, regional and national queens serve as models for girls who know that they must get some education and knowledge of the Maya if they can ever dream of becoming elected Maya queens themselves. And whatever they know about the Ancient Maya and the significance of their own Maya
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heritage when they, by winning a local contest, start their beauty queen careers, they will pick up the essentials of this genre, from their comrades and others, as they advance through the system. Adopting Friedmans (1994) existentialist perspective on the notion of cultural authenticity, I conclude that the folkloristic pageants have become an arena for authenticating modern Mayas.

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