Maya Resurgence In Guatemala

Download or read book Maya Resurgence in Guatemala written by Richard Wilson and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1999-09-01 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval--religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q’eqchi’-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing--abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations--have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q’eqchi’ ethnic identity.

Download or read book The Maya Diaspora written by James Loucky and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2000-10 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Maya refugees found new lives in strange lands.

Download or read book The Blood of Guatemala written by Greg Grandin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-15 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. In the wake of this violence, a vibrant pan-Mayan movement has emerged, one that is challenging Ladino (non-indigenous) notions of citizenship and national identity. In The Blood of Guatemala Greg Grandin locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades. Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala’s transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants. This “history of power” reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.

Download or read book Maya Intellectual Renaissance written by Victor D. Montejo and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Mayan leaders protested the celebration of the Quincentenary of the "discovery" of America and joined with other indigenous groups in the Americas to proclaim an alternate celebration of 500 years of resistance, they rose to national prominence in Guatemala. This was possible in part because of the cultural, political, economic, and religious revitalization that occurred in Mayan communities in the later half of the twentieth century. Another result of the revitalization was Mayan students' enrollment in graduate programs in order to reclaim the intellectual history of the brilliant Mayan past. Victor Montejo was one of those students. This is the first book to be published outside of Guatemala where a Mayan writer other than Rigoberta Menchu discusses the history and problems of the country. It collects essays Montejo has written over the past ten years that address three critical issues facing Mayan peoples today: identity, representation, and Mayan leadership. Montejo is deeply invested in furthering the discussion of the effectiveness of Mayan leadership because he believes that self-evaluation is necessary for the movement to advance. He also criticizes the racist treatment that Mayans experience, and advocates for the construction of a more pluralistic Guatemala that recognizes cultural diversity and abandons assimilation. This volume maps a new political alternative for the future of the movement that promotes inter-ethnic collaboration alongside a reverence for Mayan culture.

Download or read book Our Time is Now written by Julie Gibbings and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustration of how indigenous and non-indigenous actors deployed concepts of time in their conflicts over race and modernity in postcolonial Guatemala.

Download or read book Maya Identities and the Violence of Place written by Charles D. Thompson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2001. Exploring issues of diversity and cross-cultural interaction and understanding, Maya Identities and the Violence of Place offers new perspectives on borderlands and identities, providing an important case study of people from Latin America on the move. Examining issues of indigeneity, diaspora, flights from physical violence and economic repression, and efforts to remain indigenous among a proud but beleaguered people, this book is replete with stories of movement and change that operate as means to maintain identity. Thompson examines how the Jacalteco Maya of Latin America form their identities as indigenous people, despite a long tradition of movement across the rigid constraints of borders of geography, history, race and ethnicity. Religion, language, fiestas, and stories of leaving and return, all serve to bond people to their particularity. Examining the indigenous identity formations and religious convictions among the Maya in places where brutality has dominated the landscape and where violence is commonplace, this book avoids dwelling on centers of culture and explains instead how Maya concepts of identity arise from travel, contact with others, and change. Thompson reveals the ironies of classifying as natives', aboriginal or indigenous the many individuals and families who have become refugees, and explores how Maya have transcended the erroneous image of Guatemalan Indians ensconced within borders of particular land, and how they have overstepped popular portrayals of native peoples clinging tenaciously to their sacred soil as their sole means of surviving culturally and spiritually. Showing bleeding borders to be more than a recent occurrence, Thompson argues that there has never been a time when Maya did not have to travel in order to remain who they are. Exploring ideas of human to land connections and how religion among the indigenous makes change and movement possible, this book offers invaluable insight

Download or read book The Ancient Maya Marketplace written by Eleanor M. King and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trading was the favorite occupation of the Maya, according to early Spanish observers such as Fray Diego de Landa (1566). Yet scholars of the Maya have long dismissed trade—specifically, market exchange—as unimportant. They argue that the Maya subsisted primarily on agriculture, with long-distance trade playing a minor role in a largely non-commercialized economy. The Ancient Maya Marketplace reviews the debate on Maya markets and offers compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces in the Maya Lowlands. Its authors rethink the prevailing views about Maya economic organization and offer new perspectives. They attribute the dearth of Maya market research to two factors: persistent assumptions that Maya society and its rainforest environment lacked complexity, and an absence of physical evidence for marketplaces—a problem that plagues market research around the world. Many Mayanists now agree that no site was self-sufficient, and that from the earliest times robust local and regional exchange existed alongside long-distance trade. Contributors to this volume suggest that marketplaces, the physical spaces signifying the presence of a market economy, did not exist for purely economic reasons but served to exchange information and create social ties as well. The Ancient Maya Marketplace offers concrete links between Maya archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary cultures. Its in-depth review of current research will help future investigators to recognize and document marketplaces as a long-standing Maya cultural practice. The volume also provides detailed comparative data for premodern societies elsewhere in the world.