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450 Mission Street, Room 204
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-4364
FIRST PERSON-815 WORDS
GUATEMALA'S PEACETIME CHALLENGE -- MAYA INDIANS REDISCOVER IDENTITY WHILE
LADINOS LOSE THEIRS
EDITOR'S NOTE: The biggest challenge facing Guatemala's traditional
ladino elites in the new post-civil war era is one of identity. As the
traditional Maya Indian majority recover from the war years with a
stronger sense of themselves and their culture, they force the ladino to
redefine who he is in relationship to them. PNS commentator Miguel
Matias, an agronomist and ordained Maya priest, is one of a re-emerging
Maya class of educated, politically aware indigenous men and women
determined to shape Guatemala at peace into a multi-cultural state. This
essay was edited by PNS associate editor Mary Jo McConahay from several
hours of interviews with Matias. It is one of an occasional series of
"voices" by PNS editors drawn from sources whose perspectives might
otherwise not be easily available. For a photograph of Miguel Matias,
please call Pacific News Service.
BY MIGUEL MATIAS, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
CHIMALTENANGO, GUATEMALA -- I am a modern man, a flexible man. I can
sleep on the ground or on a bed, walk in a city, even speak with
diplomats. As much as I move about in the non-Indian world, my behavior
is that of a Maya. I cannot act like a ladino. And that is becoming a
problem for them.
Ladinos, those who rule my country, are descended from a mix of Spanish
and Indian. But they deny the Indian in themselves and seem confused when
they meet educated Maya like me, as if they are experiencing a crisis of
identity. "Who am I, if they are not who I thought they were?" they ask
themselves.
For ladinos, we Maya had always simply been there, uncombed and dark, a
majority of the country meant to work cheap, keep quiet or sound stupid.
But in recent years, where intelligence has become a factor in the game
and Maya can play, the field has been leveled. So insecurity penetrates
the ladino's world. "And on top of everything, one of them wins a Nobel
Prize!" I hear some ladinos complain, referring to Rigoberta Menchu who
won for Peace in 1992. "They know both languages, Spanish and their own
tongue," they seem to be thinking. And if we know English too? Hah!
By the time I was nine, I was traveling every year from our highland
village to work the hot lowland coffee and cotton plantations with my
family -- not because we wanted to, or for extra money, but to buy enough
corn and beans to eat. Our fields at home, rented from big landowners,
were too small and overworked. In the 1960's, when American Maryknoll
priests helped villages like ours form cooperatives to farm virgin
jungle, our family joined. Migration changed our attitudes. When my
uncle, the cooperative president, said I should study, I thought, why not?
At 17 I enrolled in a high school in the provincial capital. The other
students were ladinos and made fun of the way I talked. But after years
of study I passed the test to attend an agronomy school in the national
capital. There were only three of us Maya among 200 young men, most of
them sons of ranch owners. Outside the classroom students hit me on the
face, punched me when they passed me in the halls. Once when I wrote
something for the school paper a professor asked me, "How can an Indian
write something like that?"
At graduation in 1982, everyone else's families and friends came. But my
father had been killed a few months before when he attempted to bury a
neighbor's corpse which had been booby-trapped by the army. As I
graduated, my mother and grandfather were somewhere in the jungle living
on grass and worms, hiding from the army which thought anyone who
belonged to a cooperative was subversive.
The war that is coming to an end after 38 years was terrible but has left
some political space which was not there before. Today I work with my
community to educate adults in literacy so we may elect our own people to
office and bring the benefits of the state we deserve to the villages. I
have also studied with the grandfathers, the ancianos, and become a Maya
priest, to serve better.
At the national level, there are no Maya cabinet ministers, only a tiny
few in Congress, and none in important management posts. But I must act
politically because I have the instinct to do so, and believe such
instincts are part of one's being, part of the charge I was given when
presented at the Maya altar as a newborn.
In the 1960s and 70s, many Maya took on ladino ways, desperately hoping
that if we could become something we were not, it would make our lives
better, safer. But it didn't work; tens of thousands of Maya died in the
violence. Now the reverse is true. People are returning to their names
and Maya ways with a stronger idea of who we are. Dislocation awakened
for some of us the idea that we have an identity.
For ladinos, on the other hand, the identity crisis is beginning. I see
it in a man's eyes when I meet him and he tries to figure out who I am.
"Is this a peasant? Well, no, maybe a village school teacher," he thinks.
"He is not acting like an Indian should act, not averting his eyes -- he
must be a teacher."
In a business office, ladinos will say, "How can an Indian give me orders?"
And they will be confused.
It will be good if the ladino can understand what the ancianos know, that
if there is no suffering there is no change. Maybe the next step will be
to say, "I am the product of a mix of our country's races, so I am Maya
too."
(09271996)**** END ****(c) COPYRIGHT PNS