Ch’orti’-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala: Indigeneity in Transition

Abstract

In recent years, several scholars have discussed issues of Guatemalan history and anthropology, and these studies have, with a few exceptions, only marginally approached the borders of the Ch’orti’-speaking areas of eastern Guatemala. Unfortunately, serious historical and anthropological scholarship on the colonial and modern culture and society of the Ch’orti’ has remained painfully sparse. According to Metz, “Today, no more than twenty thousand people speak Ch’orti’ ” (p. 219). This statement describes the ongoing drama of an increasing Ch’orti’ population, superimposed upon a simultaneously dwindling Ch’orti’ culture in Guatemala’s Oriente. In 1983, Murdo MacLeod asked what happened to colonial Ch’orti’ society and called for a monographic study on the region. A decade later, in the Historia general de Guatemala (1994), Margarita Ramírez Vargas lamented the fact that there was still no exhaustive monographic study on the Ch’orti’. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a handful of doctoral dissertations (including Metz’s and my own) had taken up various topics related to the Ch’orti’. As a result, the historical, ethnographical, and ethnological Ch’orti’ have recently been the topic of increasing academic scholarship and debate.In Ch’orti’-Maya Survival in Eastern Guatemala, Brent E. Metz searches for indigeneity in eastern Guatemala. His quest (reminiscent of Robert Carmack’s seminal work among the Quiche Maya of the highlands) is fraught with disappointment and misapprehension, because the Ch’orti’ culture Metz searches for — which was described in detail by Charles Wisdom and Rafael Girard over a half century ago — has been systematically undermined by internal and external forces, to the point that the Ch’orti’ they described in the 1940s scarcely exist any longer. Nevertheless, as a result of years of participant observation, Metz provides lucid and critical insights into modern Ch’orti’ cultural and social longevity, all in the face of enormous pressures and conflicts that have threatened the Ch’orti’ with cultural extinction. Metz argues that identifying what is “Maya” is a relatively difficult task, because the definitions continue to evolve through phases of both self-definition and redefinition.The author provides a somewhat terse overview of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala and the remainder of the colonial period in the corregimiento of Chiquimula de la Sierra. He categorizes the hardships the Ch’orti’ overcame, including cultural and linguistic invasions, epidemic and pandemic disease, encomienda and repartimiento grants, and the effects of African slavery. Metz’s narrative is a bit sparse for the period between 1890 and 1930 and also with respect to the political and economic catastrophe contiguous to the transfer of power from Jorge Ubico to Juan José Arévalo, and from Jacobo Arbenz to Carlos Castillo Armas at midcentury.In classic ethnographic style, Metz describes his introduction to the Ch’orti’ villages near Jocotán that would become his summer home for over a decade. He elucidates on a broad range of topics, including subsistence, relationships, morality, linguistics, sexuality, politics, gender, humor, polygyny, reciprocity, and religious syncretism, all within the Ch’orti’ cultural framework. Metz articulately describes Ch’orti’ stoicism in the face of increasing ladinoization, economic marginalization, ethnic abandonment, paternalism, and violence.Metz pays particular attention to the horrors and brutality that afflicted the Ch’orti’ during the 36-year-long civil war that occupied much of the last half of the twentieth century. The Ch’orti’ found themselves caught between the ultra-right-wing conservatism of the military and the oligarchs on one side and the left-wing liberals and radical insurgency movements on the other. While the Ch’orti’ did not overwhelmingly support either side during “Las Ruinas,” Metz argues that neither faction treated them well, and both abused them for their own ideological motives and interests — “the Left seeking a more revolutionary Indian and the Right seeking a more consumeristic Indian” (p. 228). But Metz’s discussion of the more recent Maya Movement offers the hope that the Ch’orti’ will continue to find their place in the broader context of Maya-speaking peoples throughout Guatemala, which will bring them closer to their own Maya heritage and background.Metz makes use of many essential secondary sources in his ethnographic research, but more impressive is his use of archival documents from the AGCA and from municipal repositories in eastern Guatemala. Metz’s command of the Ch’orti’ language is notable, enabling him to conduct interviews with Ch’orti’ informants in Ch’orti’-speaking communities such as Pelillo Negro. These Ch’orti’ Maya provide invaluable insight into their own world, their economics, politics, and apprehensions for future generations of Ch’orti’ speakers. Metz has written an enormously important and essential book on a dwindling Maya culture; this book will be indispensable for years to come. Metz’s book will be of primary significance to upper-level graduate students, graduate students, historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists who are interested in Guatemalan history and politics, the Maya Movement in general, and the Ch’orti’ Indians in particular.

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