"A Dark Obverse": Maya Survival in Guatemala,: 1520-1994

Abstract

We know of scarcely any record of destructive exploitation in all the span of human history until we enter the period of modern history, when transatlantic expansion of European commerce, peoples, and governments takes place. Then begins what may well be the tragic rather than the great age of man. We have glorified this period in terms of a romantic view of colonization and of the frontier. There is a to the picture, which we have regarded scarcely at all. - Carl Sauer, Theme of Plant and Animal Destruction in History. 1938 Carl Ortwin Sauer (1889-1975) was a complex, multitalented individual whose research interests covered a range of diverse topics (Kenzer 1987). Contrary to the construction of him in recent years as a figure of conventional, conservative bent (Jackson 1989; McDowell 1994), Sauer's geography abounds in examples of radical, innovative thinking. The latter trait is readily apparent in the inaugural volume of Ibero-Americana, which Sauer coauthored with Donald Brand in 1932. Ibero-Americana for decades served as the showcase for pioneering research on Latin America conducted by scholars associated with the University of California, Berkeley, a forum to which Sauer made several provocative, influential contributions. In their study of Aztatlan, for example, perusal of documentary sources in conjunction with field observation led Sauer and Brand (1932) to conclude that, at the time of Spanish intrusion, the area of Mexico under scrutiny supported a population roughly the same size as the one occupying the land in the early twentieth century, which in 1920 was 225,000. Sauer made the same case for all of Northwest Mexico in another Ibero-Americana volume published three years later. In asserting that aboriginal rural populations and present ones are much the same, Sauer (1935, 32) believed he had reached not a sensational conclusion, but a quite natural one. Between the late pre-Columbian past and the early twentieth century, however, lay a population history ofdisastrous decline and slow recuperation. Sauer's ruminations about the longue duree in Mexico, we shall see, apply also to Guatemala (Sauer 1935, 32). A foray into the field of population history cannot be considered one of Sauer's primary intellectual pursuits, though he did keep sight all along of the catastrophic impact that Spanish colonialism had on Native American welfare, nowhere more tragically rendered than in The Early Spanish Main (1966). The dark obverse of which Sauer wrote in 1938 has been illuminated bit by bit by a number of scholars, for whom issues of Native American population history have become a central concern (Lovell and Lutz 1995). In the discussion below we review diverse sets of data relating to Maya survival in Guatemala. We chart, from the eve of conquest to the present, the collapse and eventual recovery of one of Latin America's most fascinating Indian cultures. The population statistics at our disposal should in no way be considered definitive, for all of them indicate an Indian presence without ever being clear and consistent as to whom, precisely, the definition applies. These statistics are displayed in Table I. Any statistic we contemplate must also be appreciated in relation to the sources and methodology of its calculation, as well as the ideological context of which it forms a part. Discussion of these issues, however, we keep to a minimum. Our aim is to summarize the salient features of a complex demographic situation in the hope of shedding light on an enduring Maya presence, one that increasingly challenges traditional notions of what a Guatemalan nation-state should be and on what terms Maya peoples contained within it (or, in some cases, now living beyond it) should live (Smith 1990, 1991; Cojti Cuxil 1991, 1995; Warren 1994; Wilson 1995; Fischer and Brown 1996). DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS, 1520-1770 At the time of the Spanish conquest, some 2 million Mayas inhabited the area of present-day Guatemala south of the Peten rain forest (Lovell and Swezey 1982). …

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