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Surviving Conquest: The Maya of Guatemala in Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

W. George Lovell
W. George Lovell*
Affiliation:
Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
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Little by little heavy shadows and black night enveloped our fathers and grandfathers and us also, oh, my sons …!

All of us were thus. We were born to die!

The Annals of the Cakchiquels (ca. 1550–1600)

The Maya of Guatemala are today, as they have been in the past, a dominated and beleaguered group. Few have expressed this enduring reality more poignantly than the late Oliver La Farge. Commenting forty years ago on why Kanjobal Indians take to drink, La Farge observed that “while these people undoubtedly suffer from drunkenness, one would hesitate to remove the bottle from them until the entire pattern of their lives is changed. They are an introverted people, consumed by internal fires which they cannot or dare not express, eternally chafing under the yoke of conquest, and never for a moment forgetting that they are a conquered people.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , 1988 , pp. 25 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Latin American Research Review

Footnotes

*

The research for this article was made possible by grants and fellowships awarded over the past several years by the Killam Program of the Canada Council, the Plumsock Fund for Mesoamerican Studies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Queen's University Advisory Research Committee. For their words of encouragement, and caution, in the course of earlier drafts, I thank Jeffrey Bellinger, Wayne Bernhardson, Woodrow Borah, Robert M. Carmack, Jeffrey A. Cole, Sasha and David Cook, Shelton H. Davis, Susan E. Davis, James Dunkerley, Steve Elliott, Mireya Folch, Piero Gleijeses, Paul Goodwin, Linda Green, Ruth Gruhn, Jim Handy, Sally and Christopher Lutz, Elizabeth Mahan, Laura Massolo, Kent Mathewson, Rosemarie McNairn, Victor Perera, John H. Rowe, Jane and William Swezey, John M. Watanabe, and Ralph Lee Woodward. The response of Carol A. Smith was especially helpful, as were the comments and suggestions of Bernard Q. Nietschmann and James J. Parsons. The Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a visiting scholar in the fall of 1985, provided a stimulating environment in which to reformulate my ideas about how this article should be written.

References

Notes

1. Oliver La Farge, Santa Eulalia: The Religion of a Cuchumatán Indian Town (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 100.

2. Heritage of Conquest: The Ethnology of Middle America, edited by Sol Tax (New York: Macmillan, 1952). For an assessment of how well the analysis of Mesoamerican life developed by Tax and his collaborators has withstood the test of time, see Heritage of Conquest: Thirty Years Later, edited by Carl Kendall, John Hawkins, and Laurel Bossen (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983).

3. For a romantic view of the Indian as “vestige,” as a timeless throwback to a golden age, see Louis de la Haba and Joseph J. Scherschel, “Guatemala, Maya and Modern,” National Geographic 146, no. 5 (Nov. 1974):661-89. For a crude view of the Indian as “victim,” as a powerless being forged and preserved by colonial exploitation, see Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo: ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria, 1975). In a recent study of Guatemalan ethnicity, John Hawkins characterizes the Indian as “opposite,” maintaining that Spanish colonialism created a Mayan culture of symbolic inversions and oppositions that was structurally one with the culture of the conquerors. See Hawkins, Inverse Images: The Meaning of Culture, Ethnicity, and Family in Postcolonial Guatemala (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984). The ways in which, throughout history, Europeans and Europeanized Americans have portrayed the Indian as a collective and general category-of-one is scrutinized at length in Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978). A provocative discussion of the Indian as “other” is the focus of Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).

4. Nancy M. Farriss, “Indians in Colonial Yucatán: Three Perspectives,” in Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica: Essays on the History of Ethnic Relations, edited by Murdo J. MacLeod and Robert Wasserstrom (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 2 and 19.

5. Ibid., 34.

6. Numerous contributions are evaluated and placed in historiographical context in Benjamin Keen, “Recent Writing on the Spanish Conquest,” LARR 20, no. 2 (1985):161–71; and W. George Lovell, “Rethinking Conquest: The Colonial Experience in Latin America,” Journal of Historical Geography 12, no. 3 (1986):310-17. For Mexico, Nancy M. Farriss joins Charles Gibson in establishing standards of scholarly excellence to which all future research on the colonial period should aspire. See Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). Three works that reappraise the colonial experience in Peru are Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes, 1530-1570 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977); Steve J. Stern, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); and Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). See also Luis Millones, “Ethnohistorians and Andean Ethnohistory,” LARR 17, no. 1 (1982):200-216; and Leon Campbell, “The Historical Reconquest of ‘Peruvian Space,'” LARR 21, no. 3 (1986): 192–205. For Guatemala, recent contributions include Robert M. Carmack, The Quiche Mayas of Utatlán: The Evolution of a Highland Guatemalan Kingdom (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981); Robert M. Hill and John Monaghan, Continuities in Highland Maya Social Organization: Ethnohistory in Sacapulas, Guatemala (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); Christopher H. Lutz, Historia sociodetnográfica de Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773 (Antigua Guatemala: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, 1983); Sandra L. Orellana, The Tzutujil Mayas: Continuity and Change, 1250-1630 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); W. George Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500-1821 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985); and Elias Zamora, Los mayas de las tierras altas en el siglo XVI: tradición y cambio en Guatemala (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1985). See also Grant D. Jones, “Recent Ethnohistorical Works on Southeastern Mesoamerica,” LARR 22, no. 1 (1987):214-24. An excellent example of the approach Farriss espouses is John M. Watanabe, “'We Who Are Here': The Cultural Conventions of Ethnic Identity in a Guatemalan Indian Village, 1937–1980,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1984.

7. See, among many examples, George Black, Garrison Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1984); and John Weeks, “An Interpretation of the Central American Crisis,” LARR 21, no. 3 (1986):31-53. A refreshing change, in emphasis if not in actual execution, is Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala (Boston: South End Press, 1984). The tendency to slight the colonial period is to be found among writers of every ideological hue, Marxists included. They are admonished for the practice, by one of their kind, in Steve J. Stern, “Latin America's Colonial History: Invitation to an Agenda,” Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (1985):3-16. The historiography of the Central American crisis, especially the flood of print released over the past several years, is dealt with most cogently by Carol A. Smith and Jeff Boyer, “Central America since 1979,” Annual Review of Anthropology 16 (1987): 197–221; and by James Dunkerley, “Central American Impasse,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 5 (1986):105-19.

8. This choice is not meant to suggest that theory has been deliberately eschewed. Nor should it be taken to mean that theory has no place in understanding the dynamics of Maya cultural survival. Historical geography of the type attempted here lends itself to many different approaches. The subject under discussion is simply considered best rendered as historical narrative. For those who wish to make some theoretical assessment of the reality here reconstructed, the case specifics may be borne in mind during a perusal of Edward H. Spicer, “The Process of Cultural Enclavement in Middle America,” Actas y Memorias del XXXVI Congreso Internacional de Americanistas 3 (1966):267-79; and “Persistent Cultural Systems: A Comparative Study of Identity Systems That Can Adapt to Contrasting Environments,” Science 174 (19 Nov. 1971):795-800. See also George P. Castile, “Issues in the Analysis of Enduring Cultural Systems,” in Persistent Peoples: Cultural Enclaves in Perspective, edited by George P. Castile and Gilbert Kushner (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981), xv–xxii.

9. Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962).

10. Hubert H. Bancroft, History of Central America, 3 vols. (San Francisco: The History Company, 1882-1887), 1:617-704 and 2:74-121; An Account of the Conquest of Guatemala in 1524 by Pedro de Alvarado, edited by Sedley J. Mackie (New York: Cortés Society, 1924); and Arden R. King, Cobán and the Verapaz: History and Cultural Process in Northern Guatemala, Middle American Research Institute Publication no. 37 (New Orleans: Tulane University Press, 1974), 15–26.

11. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 41–43; and William L. Sherman, “Some Aspects of Change in Guatemalan Society: 1470–1620,” in MacLeod and Wasserstrom, Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica, 170–75.

12. W. George Lovell and William R. Swezey, “The Population of Southern Guatemala at Spanish Contact,” Canadian Journal of Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1982):71-84. See also The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, edited by William M. Denevan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Henry F. Dobyns, Native American Historical Demography: A Critical Bibliography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); and D. Joralemon, “New World Depopulation and the Case of Disease,” Journal of Anthropological Research 38, no. 1 (1982):108-27.

13. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 40–41.

14. The debate is nicely summarized in Murdo J. MacLeod, “Modern Research on the Demography of Colonial Central America: A Bibliographical Essay,” Latin American Population History Newsletter 3, nos. 3–4 (1983):25-28. See also Francisco de Solano, Los mayas del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1974), 62–96; Denevan, Native Population, 291; William T. Sanders and Carson Murdy, “Population and Agricultural Adaptation in Highland Guatemala,” in The Historical Demography of Highland Guatemala, edited by Robert M. Carmack, John D. Early, and Christopher H. Lutz (Albany, N.Y.: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, State University of New York, Albany, 1982), 32; Elías Zamora, “Conquista y crisis demográfica: la población indígena del occidente de Guatemala en el siglo XVI,” Mesoamérica 6 (1983):291-328; and W. George Lovell, Christopher H. Lutz, and William R. Swezey, “The Indian Population of Southern Guatemala, 1549–1551: An Analysis of López de Cerrato's Tasaciones de Tributos,” The Americas 40, no. 4 (1984):459-77.

15. Murdo J. MacLeod, “An Outline of Central American Colonial Demographics: Sources, Yields, and Possibilities,” in Carmack, Early, and Lutz, Historical Demography of Highland Guatemala, 13.

16. Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, “Conquest and Population: A Demographic Approach to Mexican History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 113, no. 2 (1969):177-83; and N. David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

17. Nathan Wachtel, “The Indian and the Spanish Conquest,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America: Colonial Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1:207-30. See also S. Ryan Johansson, “The Demographic History of the Native Peoples of North America: A Selective Bibliography,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 25 (1982): 139–42; and Robert H. Jackson, “Demographic Change in Northwestern New Spain,” The Americas 41, no. 4 (1985):465-67.

18. Linda A. Newson, “Indian Population Patterns in Colonial Spanish America,” LARR 20, no. 3 (1985):65-66.

19. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 40–41.

20. Ibid., 120–23; Stefan H. Borhegyi, “Archaeological Synthesis of the Guatemalan Highlands,” Handbook of Middle American Indians (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 2:3-58; and W. George Lovell, “Settlement Change in Spanish America: The Dynamics of Congregación in the Cuchumatán Highlands of Guatemala, 1541–1821,” Canadian Geographer 27, no. 2 (1983): 163–74.

21. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, as quoted in J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1976), 65.

22. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 374.

23. Salvador Rodríguez Becerra, Encomienda y conquista: los inicios de la colonización en Guatemala (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1977); William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); and W. George Lovell, “To Submit and to Serve: Forced Native Labour in the Cuchumatán Highlands of Guatemala,” Journal of Historical Geography 9, no. 2 (1983):127-44. Encomienda entailed the unremunerated provision, by Indians to Spaniards, of certain commodities and initially also of labor. Repartimiento involved the furnishing to Spaniards of Indian labor that theoretically should have been paid for.

24. John H. Rowe, “The Incas under Spanish Colonial Institutions,” Hispanic American Historical Review 37, no. 2 (1957):181; Gibson, Aztecs under Spanish Rule, 285; and MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 221–24.

25. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 381–85; and W. George Lovell, “Landholding in Spanish Central America: Patterns of Ownership and Activity in the Cuchumatán Highlands of Guatemala, 1563–1821,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s. 8, no. 3 (1983):214-30.

26. MacLeod, “Demography of Colonial Central America,” 25–28. For regional studies of Indian depopulation in Guatemala, see Michel Bertrand, “Estudio demográfico de la región de Rabinal y del Chixoy en Guatemala,” Mesoamérica 1 (1980):232-49; W. George Lovell, “Collapse and Recovery: A Demographic Profile of the Cuchumatán Highlands of Guatemala, 1520–1821,” in Carmack, Early, and Lutz, Historical Demography of Highland Guatemala, 103–22; and Thomas T. Veblen, “Native Population Decline in Totonicapán, Guatemala,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67, no. 4 (1977):484-99.

27. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 228–31; and Robert M. Carmack, “Spanish-Indian Relations in Highland Guatemala,” in MacLeod and Wasserstrom, Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica, 218.

28. Murdo J. MacLeod, “Ethnic Relations and Indian Society in the Province of Guatemala, ca. 1620-ca. 1800,” in MacLeod and Wasserstrom, Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica, 194.

29. Ibid., 197.

30. As paraphrased by Joan Vincent in her review of The Prospects for Plural Societies, edited by S. Plattner and D. Maybury-Lewis (Washington, D.C.: American Ethnological Society, 1984) in Science 226 (9 Nov. 1984):683. A discussion with Bernard Q. Nietschmann caused him to question the validity of Depres's argument on the grounds that theft by decree, in Nietschmann's eyes, does not constitute competition.

31. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 228–30; and “Outline of Central American Colonial Demographics,” 11. In contrast to MacLeod's predominantly economic and demographic reasoning, Adriaan C. van Oss explains the emergence of “Indian” and “ladino” Guatemala in terms of ecclesiastical geography, distinguishing between a “west” overseen by regular clergy and an “east” overseen by secular clergy. See van Oss, Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524-1821 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 14–49. See also Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala, 173–76.

32. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 97, 375, 385.

33. Ibid., pp. xiv-xv. The quotation comes from Pierre and Hugette Chaunu, Séville et l'Atlantique (Paris: Colin, 1955-1959), 8:848.

34. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 326–27. Native rebellion in colonial Guatemala has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. An important beginning is the work of Severo Martínez Peláez, Motines de indios: la violencia colonial en Centroamérica y Chiapas (Puebla: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas y Sociales, 1985). For a discussion of the issue elsewhere, see Leon Campbell, “Recent Research on Andean Peasant Revolts, 1750–1820,” LARR 14, no. 1 (1979):3-50; William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979); and Anthony McFarlane, “Riot and Rebellion in Colonial Spanish America,” LARR 17, no. 2 (1982):212-21. Brief accounts of violent confrontation may be found in Victoria R. Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King (Austin: University of Texas, 1981), 77–84; Daniel Contreras, Una rebelión indígena en el partido de Totonicapán en 1820: el indio y la independencia (Guatemala City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1951); and Handy, Gift of the Devil, 31–33.

35. Oliver La Farge, “Maya Ethnology: The Sequence of Cultures,” in Clarence L. Hay et al., The Maya and Their Neighbors (New York: D. Appleton Century, 1940), 282–91; and MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 328.

36. Eric Wolf, “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13, no. 1 (1957): 1–18

37. Ibid., 6.

38. Ibid., 8.

39. Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 214–15.

40. Ibid., 215.

41. From Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias, as rendered in William B. Taylor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 67.

42. Lovell, “Settlement Change in Spanish America,” 169–72; and Karl Sapper, The Verapaz in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Contribution to the Historical Geography and Ethnography of Northeastern Guatemala, Institute of Archaeology Occasional Paper no. 13 (Los Angeles: University of California, 1985), 19–20.

43. Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Florida (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1972), 15.

44. Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia de Guatemala, legajo 168, Tomás de Cárdenas and Juan de Torres to King Charles V, 6 Dec. 1555.

45. Ibid. To this day, such shrines may be found throughout highland Guatemala.

46. Ibid. This same conclusion has since been reached by many other observers. Maya notions of what connects people and place truly enter the realm of the mystic. The relationship between man, land, and the supernatural is richly explored by Miguel Angel Asturias in his novel Hombres de maíz (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1972). How the Maya deal with time is discussed in Nancy M. Farriss, “Remembering the Future, Anticipating the Past: History, Time, and Cosmology among the Maya of Yucatán,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 3 (1987):566-93; Barbara Tedlock, Time and the Highland Maya (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); and John M. Watanabe, “In the World of the Sun: A Cognitive Model of Maya Cosmology,” Man, n.s. 18, no. 4 (1983):710-28.

47. Ray Elliott and Helen Elliott, “Ixil,” in The Languages of Guatemala, edited by M. Mayers (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 126. The Elliotts cite as their source papers found inside the baptismal registry for the town of Chajul for the years 1678 to 1778.

48. Fuentes y Guzmán, Recordación Florida, 26.

49. Ibid., 40.

50. La Farge, Santa Eulalia, x.

51. Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala, 82–89. For a discussion of similar patterns elsewhere in the Maya realm, see Nancy M. Farriss, “Nucleation versus Dispersal: The Dynamics of Population Movement in Colonial Yucatán,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58, no. 2 (1978): 187–216; David J. Robinson, “Indian Migration in Eighteenth-Century Yucatán: The Open Nature of the Closed Corporate Community,” in Studies in Spanish American Population History, edited by David J. Robinson (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1981), 149–73; and Rodney C. Watson, “La dinámica espacial de los cambios de población en un pueblo colonial mexicano: Tila, Chiapas, 1595–1794,” Mesoamérica 5 (1983):87-108.

52. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 122; Carmack, The Quiché Mayas of Utatlán, 306 and 320–27; and Watanabe, “We Who Are Here,” 53–55. For a useful general discussion, with a case study of social differentiation in colonial Peru, see Steve J. Stern, “The Struggle for Solidarity: Class, Culture, and Community in Highland Indian America,” Radical History Review 27 (1983):21-45.

53. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, 29; Hill and Monaghan, Sacapulas; and Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala, 78–82.

54. Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth, 220.

55. Martín Alfonso Tovilla, Relación histórica-descriptiva de las provincias de la Verapaz y de la del Manche (Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1960), 218.

56. Archivo General de Centroamérica (hereafter AGCA), A1, legajo 6037, expediente 53258.

57. AGCA, A3.16, legajo 1601, expediente 26391.

58. AGCA, Al, legajo 6037, expediente 53258; and Al, legajo 6040, expediente 53305.

59. See, among many examples, the records forming part of Contaduría 973 and 815 in the Archivo General de Indias.

60. Lovell, “Landholding in Spanish Central America,” 226; and Hill and Monaghan, Sacapulas, 90–114.

61. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 19.

62. Ibid., 390.

63. Ann Collins, “Colonial Jacaltenango, Guatemala: The Formation of a Corporate Community,” Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1980.

64. Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putomayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3 (1984):468. Taussig elaborates on this theme in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

65. Taussig, “Culture of Terror,” 468. See also Martínez Peláez, Patria del criollo, 535.

66. See especially E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 96–106; Hazel Ingersoll, “The War of the Mountain: A Study of Reactionary Peasant Insurgency in Guatemala, 1837–1873,” Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1972; Keith L. Miceli, “Rafael Carrera: Defender and Promoter of Peasant Interests in Guatemala, 1837–1848,” The Americas 31, no. 1 (1974):72-95; Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., “Social Revolution in Guatemala: The Carrera Revolt,” in Applied Enlightenment: Nineteenth-Century Liberalism (New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 1971); and Woodward, “The Economic Development of Guatemala in the Nineteenth Century,” paper presented to the Social Science History Association, Toronto, 28 Oct. 1984.

67. La Farge, “Maya Ethnology: The Sequence of Cultures,” 291.

68. Robert M. Carmack, Quichean Civilization: The Ethnohistoric, Ethnographic, and Archaeological Sources (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 220.

69. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Central America: A Nation Divided, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 92–119.

70. Ibid.; and Burns, Poverty of Progress, 96–106.

71. Carol A. Smith, “Local History in Global Context: Social and Economic Transitions in Western Guatemala,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 2 (1984):202.

72. Ibid., 203.

73. Ibid.; and Carol A. Smith, “Beyond Dependency Theory: National and Regional Patterns of Underdevelopment in Guatemala,” American Ethnologist 5, no. 3 (1978):610-11.

74. David J. McCreery, Desarrollo económico y política nacional: el Ministerio de Fomento de Guatemala, 1871-1885 (Antigua Guatemala: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, 1981); and McCreery, Development and the State in Reforma Guatemala, 1871-1885 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1983).

75. Charles Wagley, “Economics of a Guatemalan Village,” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 58 (1941):59–61; and Robert A. Naylor, “Guatemala: Indian Attitudes toward Land Tenure,” journal of Inter-American Studies 9, no. 4 (1967):627-30.

76. Naylor, “Indian Attitudes toward Land Tenure,” 629; and Smith, “Local History in Global Context,” 204.

77. King, Cobán and the Verapaz, 28–34 and 91–104. German entrepreneurs played a particularly active role in establishing an export economy based on coffee production. Smith records coffee as comprising “50 percent of foreign exchange earnings by 1871, 92 percent by 1880, 77 percent in 1929, 78 percent in 1950 and 32 percent in 1970.” See Smith, “Beyond Dependency Theory,” 589. For a vivid depiction of how the coffee economy was forged and what the “coffee republic” looked like as it came into being, see E. Bradford Burns, Eadweard Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875: The Photographer as Social Recorder (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), especially 91–129.

78. Nathan Whetten, Guatemala: The Land and the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 121; and David J. McCreery, “Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876–1936,” Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 4 (1983):735-59; and McCreery, “An Odious Feudalism: Mandamiento Labor and Commercial Agriculture in Guatemala, 1858–1920,” Latin American Perspectives 13, no. 1 (1986):99-117.

79. McCreery, “Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala,” 758.

80. Ibid., 759.

81. Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatán (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964); and Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule, 355–88. For an assessment of the literature on the Caste War, see Gilbert M. Joseph, “From Caste War to Class War: The Historiography of Modern Yucatán (ca. 1750-1940),” Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 1 (1985):111-34.

82. Carmack, “Spanish-Indian Relations in Highland Guatemala,” 220–33; and Smith, “Local History in Global Context,” 205. King records three native revolts among the Kekchí Maya between 1864 and 1906. See King, Cobán and the Verapaz, 29 and 34. Future research may reveal resistance to have been far greater than is presently thought.

83. David J. McCreery, “Coffee and Class: The Structure of Development in Liberal Guatemala,” Hispanic American Historical Review 56, no. 3 (1976):450.

84. Shelton H. Davis, “Land of Our Ancestors: A Study of Land Tenure and Inheritance in the Highlands of Guatemala,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1970, 54–55. A caballería is a unit of land measuring approximately 105 acres.

85. Ibid., 64–65. McCreery writes that “on the night of July 17, 1898, the inhabitants of San Juan Ixcoy murdered the local habilitador … and then, in an effort to hide their crime, slaughtered all but one of the remaining thirty Ladinos in town.” See McCreery, “Debt Peonage,” 756. Irregularities in labor recruitment procedures and native resentment of outside control of municipal land apparently triggered the bloodbath. The Indian uprising met with a swift and brutal response. Raymond Stadelman reports that “the retaliation of the Government was prompt, and it has been estimated that perhaps ten Indian lives were exacted for each slain Ladino.” See Stadelman, “Maize Cultivation in Northwestern Guatemala,” Contributions to American Anthropology and History 33 (1940):96-97. A brief account of the incident may be found in Adrián Recinos, Monografía del Departamento de Huehuetenango (Guatemala City: Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1954), 363–64. Mention of the affair is also made by La Farge, who adds that “in the present century the Indians of San Mateo all but perfected a similar uprising.” See La Farge, Santa Eulalia, pp. xi–xii. Watanabe discusses the Liberal Reforms in relation to Santiago Chimaltenango, which lies about forty kilometers to the southwest of Santa Eulalia. He establishes that this community lost possession of about half its baldío or “uncleared land,” 24.4 square kilometers in all, under the terms of a municipal land title issued on 10 Sept. 1891. The land was lost not because of ladino encroachment, however, but because of successful lobbying on the part of neighboring Indian townships, particularly San Juan Atitán and San Pedro Necta. Land disputes between native communities in the Cuchumatanes date back to the seventeenth century. See, for example, AGCA: Sección de Tierras, Huehuetenango, paquete 1, expediente 1, which records that Santiago Chimaltenango was involved in litigation against Todos Santos Cuchumatán in 1668. But Watanabe suggests that “in this region of little commercial value, population growth motivated this escalating competition for land.” His research serves to underscore the need, when assessing the impact of the Liberal Reforms, for scholars to be ever-mindful of the geographical specificity of their findings. See Watanabe, “We Who Are Here,” 165–70.

86. Carmack, “Spanish-Indian Relations in Highland Guatemala,” 242.

87. Ibid., 242–43. For the time period that Carmack is dealing with (that is, before the advent of chemical fertilizers), E. C. Higbee reckons that “about three arable hectares” would have been “the minimum necessary for independent family existence on average tierra fría land.” See Higbee, “The Agricultural Regions of Guatemala,” Geographical Review 37, no. 2 (1947):180. The growth of the Guatemalan population in the course of the nineteenth century is crisply summarized in Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., “Population and Development in Guatemala, 1840–1879,” Journal of the Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies 14 (1983):5-18.

88. Carmack, “Spanish-Indian Relations in Highland Guatemala,” 242.

89. Ibid., 243.

90. Ibid.

91. Ibid., 244.

92. Ibid., 243. Carmack presents a fuller reconstruction of what happened to the community of Momostenango under Barrios and subsequent liberal administrations, including the regimes of Manuel Estrada Cabrera and Jorge Ubico, in Historia social de los Quiches (Guatemala City: Seminario de Integración Social, 1979), 245–351.

93. Julio Castellanos Cambranes, a Guatemalan historian, is currently engaged in a pioneering three-volume project that will furnish important new information on the impact of the Liberal Reforms. His first volume reveals widespread resistance to land seizure and to labor demands. See Castellanos, Coffee and Peasants: The Origins of the Modern Plantation Economy in Guatemala, 1853-1897 (Stockholm: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1985). While rich in empirical detail gleaned from years of archival foraging, Castellanos's work is marred by poor organization and a rather clinical style of writing that creates an uncomfortable distance between the author and his subject. For a fuller critique, see W. George Lovell, “Voices from the Dark: Recent Writing on Guatemala,” Queen's Quarterly 94, no. 1 (1987):34-42, especially 37–38.

94. Carl O. Sauer, “The Education of a Geographer,” in Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, edited by J. Leighly (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 403.

95. Robert Burkitt, “Explorations in the Highlands of Western Guatemala,” The Museum Journal of the University of Pennsylvania 21, no. 1 (1930):58.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid.

98. McCreery, “Debt Servitude in Guatemala,” 744.

99. Ibid., 744–45.

100. Alain Dessaint, “Effects of the Hacienda and Plantation Systems on Guatemala's Indians,” América Indígena 22 (1962):340-41.

101. Maud Oakes, The Two Crosses of Todos Santos: Survivals of a Mayan Religious Ritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 241. For a more recent account of life on a finca as a migrant Maya worker, see Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London: Verso Press, 1984), 21–27 and 33–42.

102. See, for example, John M. Watanabe, “Cambios económicos en Santiago Chimaltenango, Guatemala,” Mesoamérica 2 (1981):31. Watanabe records that many plantations simply announce on the radio the labor they need, the rates they pay, and the facilities they provide. These broadcasts penetrate even the most isolated Maya communities, where potential workers are listening. Upon hearing the specific details about what work is available, workers drift down from the highlands to the Pacific slope to bring in the harvest. Most of the Mam Indians of Santiago Chimaltenango now migrate as seasonal laborers without having contracts arranged in advance.

103. Shelton Davis and Julie Hodson, Witnesses to Political Violence in Guatemala: The Suppression of a Rural Development Movement (Boston: Oxfam America, 1982), 45.

104. Whetten, Guatemala: The Land and the People, 92–106; and Lehman B. Fletcher, Eric Graber, William C. Merrill, and Erik Thorbecke, Guatemala's Economic Development: The Role of Agriculture (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1970).

105. For comparative purposes, see Sven Linqvist, Land and Power in South America (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1979). E. Torres-Rivas writes that the agricultural census undertaken in 1979 “was never published by the Guatemalan government. The results confirm what everyone knows to be true: the poverty/riches ratio gets worse every day, and the government has done nothing to alleviate it.” See Torres-Rivas, “Presentation by the Prosecutor,” in Guatemala: Tyranny on Trial, edited by S. Jonas, E. McCaughan, and E. Sutherland Martínez (San Francisco: Synthesis, 1984), 18.

106. For example, four out of five children in rural Guatemala have nutritionally inadequate diets, while the lands of their forefathers produce coffee, cotton, and sugar cane for export abroad. For a statistical profile of inequality in Guatemala, see Davis and Hodson, Witnesses to Political Violence, 45–46.

107. See, among other works, Richard I. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); and Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Garden City: Doubleday, 1982). The work of Piero Gleijeses will advance considerably our knowledge of the Arbenz period. See Gleijeses, The United States and the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944-54 (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming).

108. Robert Wasserstrom, “Revolution in Guatemala: Peasants and Politics under the Arbenz Government,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 4 (1975):478. Wasserstrom's argument and his interpretation of the Arbenz period in general do not sit well with either Jim Handy or Piero Gleijeses. Handy contends that “a serious cause of unrest was the continued corporate nature of Guatemalan communities, a strong attachment to the community and the institutions of the community.” See Handy, Class and Community in Rural Guatemala: Village Reaction to the Agrarian Reform Law, 1952-1954 (Florida International University: Occasional Papers Series, Dialogue no. 59, 1985), 50–51. He elaborates on this and related issues in “Revolution and Reaction: National Policy and Rural Politics in Guatemala, 1944–1954,” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1985. Like Handy, Gleijeses considers the agrarian reform of Arbenz to have been more radical and successful than Wasserstrom acknowledges. Both Handy and Gleijeses work with an array of unpublished primary sources and criticize Wasserstrom for having relied exclusively for his thesis on six community studies written by anthropologists who conducted field research in Guatemala during the Arbenz period.

109. Wasserstrom, “Revolution in Guatemala,” 478.

110. Ibid.

111. Ibid. See also Smith, “Local History in Global Context”; and McCreery, “An Odious Feudalism.”

112. Norman B. Schwartz, “Ethnicity, Politics, and Cultural Survival,” in Cultural Survival Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1983):20.

113. Davis and Hodson, Witnesses to Political Violence, 14.

114. As cited in Wasserstrom, “Revolution in Guatemala,” 474.

115. Davis and Hodson, Witnesses to Political Violence, 14.

116. Ibid. For a detailed analysis of changes in the Catholic Church during this time, see Richard N. Adams, Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan National Social Structure, 1944-1966 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 278–317.

117. Davis and Hodson, Witnesses to Political Violence, 14.

118. Ibid.

119. Ibid.

120. Ibid., 46. For a more detailed exploration, see Robert G. Williams, Export Agriculture and the Crisis in Central America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

121. Carol A. Smith, “Labor and International Capital in the Making of a Peripheral Social Formation: Economic Transformations in Guatemala, 1850–1980,” in Labor in the Capitalist World Economy, edited by Charles Bergquist (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1984), 148–49. See also Watanabe, “Cambios económicos en Santiago Chimaltenango,” 20–41; and Watanabe, “We Who Are Here,” especially 40, 43, and 152. Watanabe makes the valid point that the growing cycles of corn and coffee are complementary, not conflictive. He contends that “this seems to contribute to an Indian (Chimalteco at least) sense of migrant labour as an extension of, rather than an intrusion into, their local economic activities.” Personal letter from John M. Watanabe to W. George Lovell, 30 Jan. 1985, emphasis in original.

122. Jude J. Pansini, “Indian Seasonal Plantation Work in Guatemala,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1983): 17. Although Pansini has independent evidence that documents a “drying up” of Indian plantation labor, the argument is most convincingly made by Carol Smith, especially for what she considers to be “core” communities, in “Local History in Global Context,” 219; in “Economic Transformations in Guatemala,” 148–49; and in “Does a Commodity Economy Enrich the Few While Ruining the Masses?,” journal of Peasant Studies 11, no. 3 (1984):60-95. Smith openly admits that her thesis “about labour scarcity since 1976 is not a widely accepted one. It is based on my own rural surveys of 1970 and 1976 (of 131 hamlets) which asked about labour migration over the past 25 years. Most people think Indian labour was redundant in the 1970's.” Personal letter from Carol A. Smith to W. George Lovell, 28 Dec. 1984. While Smith's argument may be controversial, it fits my own impression of increasingly innovative self-reliance on the part of native communities lessening their dependence on plantation labor. During a tour of several cooperative projects in the Department of Chimaltenango prior to the escalation of violence, I was everywhere struck by the resourcefulness with which Indians were tackling their problems, even though well-founded apprehension charged their collective endeavors.

123. Shelton H. Davis, “State Violence and Agrarian Crisis in Guatemala,” paper presented at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 5 Mar. 1982.

124. Smith, “Economic Transformations in Guatemala”; and Smith, “Local History in Global Context,” 219, 221.

125. Davis and Hodson, Witnesses to Political Violence, 48.

126. Ibid., 15, 47.

127. Cultural Survival and Anthropology Resource Center, Voices of the Survivors: The Massacre at Finca San Francisco, Guatemala (Peterborough, N.H.: Transcript Printing, 1983), 36–37. The events at Finca San Francisco and other atrocities are analyzed in Ricardo Falla, “The Massacre at the Rural Estate of San Francisco, July 1982,” in Cultural Survival Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1983):43-44; and Falla, “We Charge Genocide,” in Jonas, McCaughan, and Sutherland Martínez, Guatemala: Tyranny on Trial, 112–19. Few have written firsthand about counterinsurgency with greater effect than Victor Montejo, an Indian schoolmaster from Jacaltenango currently engaged in graduate study at SUNY-Albany. His Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village is a moving account of how counterinsurgency affected his life, and those of many others, in the small Cuchumatán community where he once taught school. See Montejo, Testimony (Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1987).

128. Why the call for Indians to rise to rebellion in Guatemala failed catastrophically will consume the energies of the left for many years to come. For a reflective discussion of the matter, see Carol A. Smith, “Culture and Community: The Language of Class in Guatemala,” in The Year Left, edited by M. Davis, M. Marable, F. Pfeil, and M. Sprinkler (London: Verso, 1987), 2:197-217 and 2:267-71.

129. George Black, “Under the Gun,” NACLA Report on the Americas 19 (Nov.-Dec. 1985):10-25.

130. W. George Lovell, “From Conquest to Counter-Insurgency,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1985):46-49. The film El Norte, released by director Gregory Nava in 1983, is as comprehensive an account of this tragic era as may ever be produced.