Claiming Collective Memory: Maya Languages and Civil Rights

According to 1992 Nobel Prize Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, about 440 small towns populated by Maya peasants disappeared from Guatemala's map during the first years of the 1980s. In an interview with Mary Jo McConahay (1993), she declared that "about 200 clandestine cemeteries exist throughout the country." In similar terms, Arias (1984: 107) described the human drama of the Maya population as the result of state policy: the government of General Rios Montt's cultural policy was one of deliberate and conscious denial that by sword and fire destroyed the cultural identity of the indigenous people with whom over 60% of all Guatemalans identify. Certainly, centuries of the native culture are being annihilated - language, history, myths, and artistic expression. Menchu and Arias allude to the systematic destruction of Maya culture the Guatemalan military dictatorship initiated at the end of the 1970s, which continued in a methodical and deliberate manner until 1984. Details of this horrendous period are profusely documented in the four-volume report produced, after four years of intensive research, by the Human Rights Office of the Guatemalan Archdiocese (1998). This was not the first attempt to destroy the Maya culture. What happened during the struggle of 1978 to 1984 was a replay of the Spanish Conquest of 1524 when, for the first time, a well-organized attempt was made to physically eliminate the Maya and to stamp out all cultural traces of their heritage among the survivors. Nonetheless, the efforts of the conquistadores, as well as the colonial and postcolonial subjugation of the Maya, have proven to be historical failures. Through the centuries, the Maya population not only regained almost all its pre-Conquest numbers, but also succeeded against all odds in preserving most of their languages and cultural heritage. It was the Maya's own assertiveness, combined with their attempts to modernize and enfranchise themselves politically and fight racism, that led to the second extermination attempt nearly five centuries later. Yet, like the Conquest and the colonial and postcolonial experiences, the destructive mission of this second attempt also failed. The life of the contemporary Maya is indeed a story of a people's will and resilience, a story of their long-overdue claim for space in the cultural and political discourse in a nation that never was. In the last years of the 1980s, and particularly in the 1990s, the gains achieved in revitalizing the Maya languages and culture, the economic progress in some geographical areas, and the political force shown in local and national elections appear promising. These stories are the main concern of this article. Identity as Framework According to the official figures of the National Institute of Statistics, a government institution, the ladinos (all people who claim a non-Maya identity or ancestry, regardless of origin) represent the majority (almost 70%) of Guatemala's population. The Maya people constitute the minority - 30%. Maya commentators, however, believe those numbers reverse the reality. Leopoldo Tzian (1994), a leading Maya demographer, adjusted figures from the last census and revealed that the Maya population amounts to about six million people and the ladino population four million, with a total national population of 10 million. This numerical discrepancy would be irrelevant for that country's leading elites were this not end-of-century Guatemala. The difference today is that contemporary Maya have accumulated a degree of economic power in some regions and count among their ranks a critical mass of thinkers, scholars, and political leaders with sufficient voice to question the official version of Guatemala's population reality. For the first time in over 150 years of postcolonial experience, the norm is being vigorously contested. At the heart of such contestation lies the struggle to define who is and who is not Maya, and the insertion of this defining into the collective imagery of the state and the project of nation. …