Historical Sediments of Competing Gender Models in Indigenous Guatemala

It has become a cliche to see the Maya as residing in closed corporate communities (Wolf 1957). While these highland Mayan communities were never as closed as imagined, they are, without doubt, more open than ever. Development projects, tourism, foreign researchers, and international migration have exposed Mayans to foreign bodies and foreign ways of doing things at an accelerated pace. Given past predictions of Guatemala’s national ethnic homogenization (ladinoization), one might think that such exposure is eliminating local Mayan cultures and identities, but the dynamic is more complicated. On one hand, an ethnically tinged civil war, discrimination, state marginalization, and inadequate subsistence agriculture have weakened semi-subsistent farmers’ sense of ethnic righteousness. On the other, the Maya Movement has provided an avenue for modernization without ladinoization, at least in terms of identity, while foreigners continue to appreciate Mayans for their “Mayaness,” both real and imagined. For young men in particular, who are most likely to migrate to Mexico and the United States, the transition from a semi-subsistence world to a full wage labor among foreigners leads to what Gutmann—using Gramsci—refers to as contradictory consciousness about their roles, responsibilities, expectations, habits, and tastes. Resting on the historical sediments of collective memory, which includes both conscious and subconscious reproduction of routines, spaces, objects, and emotions, is a new topsoil of foreign experience and culture (Laclau 1990; Thompson. American Ethnologist, 30(3), 418–438, 2003). Contacts with foreigners have challenged the righteousness of which food to eat, who prepares it, and when, where, and how to eat it. It has also changed tastes and possibilities about matrimonial and sexual partnerships, all of which stretches if not tears the social fabric of their home communities. Kaqchikels and Ch’orti’s are experiencing and managing these changes somewhat differently. Among the Kaqchikel, the absence of fathers, husbands, and sons challenges established gender roles back home, including pushing women to take on men’s tasks under the traditional surveillance of community gossip, envy, sorcery, and other forms of social control. Thus, while they are becoming attracted to men who travel, they also experience frustration and vulnerability after partnering with them. The migrating men, in the meantime, find themselves shouldering ‘feminine’ tasks like cooking and cleaning and being exposed more to women in power. Still, they still maintain a strong sense of “home” and their social bonds there. In the past 20 years, many Ch’orti’s have gone from seeing Gringos as cannibals and sexually monstrous to the conceivability of marrying them, although they battle incessantly with an inferiority complex in a Ladino region. Due to their extreme poverty and experience of discrimination, those Ch’orti’ young men who manage to make it to the U.S. continue to send money home, but most have no spouses or children and thus may never return “home.” Both Kaqchikel and Ch’orti’ migrants have a newfound preference for English over their native languages, but their maintenance of community contacts, sharing of collective memory, and experience of social exclusion abroad may motivate them to maintain an distinctive identity.