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Many Guatemalans speak of Mayan indigenous organizing as "a finger in the wound." Diane Nelson explores the implications of this painfully graphic metaphor in her far-reaching study of the civil war and its aftermath. Why use a body metaphor? What body is wounded, and how does it react to apparent further torture? If this is the condition of the body politic, how do human bodies relate to it--those literally wounded in thirty-five years of war and those locked in the equivocal embrace of sexual conquest, domestic labor, mestizaje, and social change movements?
Supported by three and a half years of fieldwork since 1985, Nelson addresses these questions--along with the jokes, ambivalences, and structures of desire that surround them--in both concrete and theoretical terms. She explores the relations among Mayan cultural rights activists, ladino (nonindigenous) Guatemalans, the state as a site of struggle, and transnational forces including Nobel Peace Prizes, UN Conventions, neo-liberal economics, global TV, and gringo anthropologists. Along with indigenous claims and their effect on current attempts at reconstituting civilian authority after decades of military rule, Nelson investigates the notion of Quincentennial Guatemala, which has given focus to the overarching question of Mayan--and Guatemalan--identity. Her work draws from political economy, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, and has special relevance to ongoing discussions of power, hegemony, and the production of subject positions, as well as gender issues and histories of violence as they relate to postcolonial nation-state formation.

Finger in the Wound

Body Politics in Quincentennial Guat

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By Diane M. Nelson

University of California Press

Copyright © 1999 Diane M. Nelson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520212855

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One
Introduction:
Body Politics and Quincentennial Guatemala

In interviews Guatemalans speak of their nation as a wounded body.1 When asked about Mayan cultural rights activism, both nonindigenous Guatemalans (ladinos) and Maya say that it is a "finger in the wound" (un dedo en la llaga ), suggesting that attempts to address ethnic difference are painful proddings, irritating interventions. The metaphor was frequently deployed in conversations and in the press in the years surrounding 1992, the Columbus Quincentennial, a watershed for indigenous organizing. An editorialist in the newspaper La Hora warned against "enthusiasm for indigenous languages . . . because this is a dangerous political game against national unity. . . . It is a finger in the wound" (11 August 1990).2 The Mayan activist Pop Caal makes a similar point: "The ladino [nonindigenous] tries to erase and put a veil over the problem, not because he is convinced that discrimination does not exist, but because he is afraid that putting a finger in the national wound will stir up conflicts between both groups" (Bastos and Camus 1993, 27).

This metaphor suggests that the wound afflicts a body politic, a nation that exists but is not whole or complete.3 Is the wound ethnic difference

I have identified some people by their generic position rather than their name, usually at their request. Whenever I quote someone without a citation, this was a personal communication in an interview or informal conversation. I rarely taped formal interviews, instead taking handwritten notes, which were later transcribed and fleshed out. For less formal talks, I typed up notes from memory. All of the interviews with Guatemalans were conducted in Spanish, and all translations of spoken and written words are mine unless otherwise noted, with copious translation assistance from Josi Fernando Lara, especially with the jokes.

Enrique Sam Colop (1991) has analyzed this editorial, as has Kay Warren (n.d.).

It is a nation which is not onea term I borrow from Luce Irigaray (1985b) to mean it is not one in the sense of singular and undivided, nor is it necessarily a nation at all. The met-aphor of the wounded body is also deployed by Chicana(o) theorists to discuss the nation which is not one (neither singular nor technically a nation) of border cultures. Gloria Anzaldza says, "1,950 mile-long open wound dividing a pueblo , a culture, running down the length of my body. . . . The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again" (1987, 23). Similarly, Guillermo Gsmez-Peqa, writing on border culture and deterritorialization, signs off "from the infected wound" (1987). The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (1996) also evokes the metaphor of the wounded body to describe his postcolonial nation.

draining the body politic of its vitality, and is Mayan organizing a finger in the wound because it reminds that body of its racism? Or is racism itself the finger in an always existing wound caused by stress fractures along gender, class, geographic, and cultural lines (lines, I argue, that are necessary for the body's very intelligibility)? Because there is a body in the metaphor, but a body that is deeply contradictoryscarred and wounded by violenceI think the metaphor is useful for describing the body politic of the Guatemalan nation. Guatemala is emerging from a civil war that displaced one-eighth of the population and left some one hundred and twenty thousand people dead or disappeared: the wounded body is thus also terribly material.

Now, the transnational system that undergirds current processes of globalization is grounded in the building blocks of whole, homogeneous, and functioning "modern nations," and Guatemala cannot be understood outside this framework. Where such a body politic is lacking (as in ethnically diverse postcolonial countries), this lack is blamed on "primordial" identifications that hark back to the premodern era. Tradition and ethnicity are found guilty of holding nations back, denying them the benefits of civilization and modernization. Or worse, these timeless and apparently irrational identifications rip the nation apart through the actual wounding of bodies in civil war and counterinsurgency.4

This book critically examines such notions of the nation and of ethnic identification. I argue that ethnicity and tradition are not always already there, nor are they naturally opposed to the modern nation relying on the homogenizing state to repress these differences. Instead, in the wounded body politic of Guatemala, modernity and tradition, nation and ethnicity are interpenetrated on every sideand the state, rather than trying to erase multiple identifications, is a productive site for their articulation.

This term articulation condenses many of the concerns of the book. I use it to mean a relation, a joining that creates new identifications and social formations (as in the relational identifications of Maya and ladinoa.k.a.

Guatemala, Peru, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka form a short list of world "hot spots" where, despite nods to histories of colonization and class-based antagonisms, popular (and too often social-scientific) understandings rely on the notion of primordial hatreds.

non-Maya).5 Articulation is recombinant. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue, it changes as it joins, creating "a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice" (1985, 105). What I am naming Quincentennial Guatemala might also be termed "postcolonial" in the sense that after five hundred years we have no access to a moment before the articulations among Europe, the Americas, Africa, capitalist modes of production, milpa (corn) culture, Christian god, Mayan gods, Spanish and the array of indigenous languages, and so on: in another word, all of the relations joined into Columbus's mistaken coining of Indian . There are no identifications in Guatemala that were not formed in relation . In chapter 2, I suggest that an analytics I call "fluidarity" may be appropriate for dealing with such identifications in flux.

To articulate also means to join words together to make sense (common and otherwise), a meaning that foregrounds the struggles over representation that so engage Maya and ladino in Guatemala. In turn, to be articulate means to speak well, to express oneself clearly, a characteristic that many ladinos find quite uncanny when wielded by the traditionally disempowered: for example, Mayan women represented by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchz.6 Articulation also carries the sense of "coupling": with all the pleasures and dangers of such an intimate activityas well as the generational hopes and fears of miscegenation or "race improvement" that link the coupling of individual bodies with the reproduction of the body politic. In Quincentennial Guatemala, the state is increasingly engaged in articulating these various processes.

This book is an ethnography of that state as it emerges from thirty years

Stuart Hall says,

By the term "articulation," I mean a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not "eternal" but has constantly to be renewed, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connectionsre-articulationsbeing forged. It is also important that an articulation between different practices does not mean that they become identical or that the one is dissolved into the other. Each retains its distinct determinations and conditions of existence. However, once an articulation is made, the two practices can function together, not as an "immediate identity" . . . but as "distinctions within a unity." (1985, 113114)

See also Gramsci 1989; Hall 1986; Morley and Chen 1996; Slack 1996; Althusser 1971; and Laclau and Mouffe 1985.

Ms. Menchz received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, an honor announced just a few days after October 12, 1992hour zero of the Columbus Quincentennial. She is well known for her testimonial, I, Rigoberta Menchz , written in collaboration with Elizabeth Burgos-Debray (1984), and for her tireless efforts for human and indigenous peoples' rights (discussed in chapters 2 and 5).

Image not available.

Figure 1.
"Encuentro de Dos Mundos, 14921992 " (Clash of two worlds, 14921992).
Postcard. Copyright Daniel Hernandez Salazar. Published with kind permission.

of civil war and military dictatorship, and as it relates toand thus helps to constitutean emerging ethnic identity: the Maya. But the book is also about the emerging ladino identity. Traditionally defined only negativelyas not-Indianand assumed to control the state and the economy, this identity cannot help but change as the Maya transform what it means to be Indian and as the state increasingly becomes a site and stake of struggle.

So what I am calling Quincentennial Guatemala is the sickening fear, the fierce exhilaration, and the doggedly persistent hope of these intricately articulated emergings. Quincentennial Guatemala , a term that refers to the five-hundred-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage, encompasses these anxieties and aspirations in the context of the country's recent history while emphasizing the still painful wounds of the Conquest. Quincentennial Guatemala is a condensed way of talking about complex processes like the election of a civilian government in 1985, the decade-long peace process that culminated in December 1996 with signed peace accords, struggles on the terrain of the state over what postwar Guatemala will look and feel like for non-Maya and Maya alike, and the explosion in organizing around Mayan identitygalvanized in part by global reactions to 1992, which produced a flurry of hemispheric meetings, Rigoberta Menchz's Nobel Peace Prize, and the United Nations declaring first a Year and then the Decade of Indigenous People.

Twenty years ago, the only Maya in Guatemala were on thousand-year-old glyphs and in tourism literature. Until about the mid 1980s, the word Maya was primarily used in archaeological discourses to refer to the builders of Tikal (the "Classic" Maya city, probably abandoned by the ninth century A.D.), in linguistics (referring to Maya trunk languages), and in government tourism campaigns designed to lure foreigners carrying hard currency with the promise of an exotic ancient past. Maya was not used popularly, or by those self-identifying, to refer to existing indigenous people. But in Quincentennial Guatemala, indigenous activists are redeploying the term Maya to refer to members of Guatemala's twenty-one distinct ethnic-linguistic communities, who have traditionally identified primarily with their communities of origin, secondarily with their ethnolinguistic group, and only distantly if at all as indigenous. The term has been appropriated to claim everyone related to the linguistic trunk that unites such disparately identified groups as the pre-Conquest K'iche's, Kaqchikeles, and Tz'utujiles, whether or not these groups descended directly from the builders of Tikal. Mayan organizers refer to the work of creating activists and of salvaging their culture from five hundred years of destruction as to formar (to create). The new and increasingly hegemonic use of the term Maya is part of this practice of formando , making or forming this new, pan-indigenous identification.

However, I quite emphatically want to differentiate the sense of makingencapsulated in the words formar and articulate from a facile view of identity as easily taken on or willfully discarded. Though I argue that identification is produced rather than primordial, this production occurs through the slow accumulation of the minute effects of orthopedic change. I use the term orthopedic in Foucault's (1979) sense, from the Greek ortho (straight) and paideia (the training of children), to suggest the ways that powerful practices such as the law, schooling, and the use of language work with individual bodies to produce the body politic rather than simply repress an already-existing self. Thus identification is produced through constant repetition in sites of power that themselves are historically overdetermined, as well as through unconscious investments and resistances. The current success of the Mayan movement is not the result of a few people waking up one morning and deciding to become Maya. It grows out of half a century of organizing around linguistic rights (impossible to foretell back in the 1940s, when the indigenous activist Don Adrian Inis Chavez began his work); out of the crucible of five hundred years of Conquest and the last thirty years of catastrophecivil war, earthquakes, and grinding poverty; out of political struggles, reversals, and shifting strategies; out of unexpectedly passionate attachments; and out of changes in the global information economy that produce employment for Mayan intellectuals and technological innovations now turned to Mayan ends (like high-speed networking

with transnational solidarity). In turn, there is no guarantee of the effects of these articulations.

Nor is my emphasis on the production of identifications (and I mean all identificationsMaya, ladino, Guatemalan, gringa [North American], and so on) meant to support the frequent and insidious suggestion that the Maya are duped or easily manipulated. Ladino discourse (of the left and right) is full of images of Indians as empty-headed, asleep or just waking up, or a sack of potatoes waiting to be hauled around. In the model villages (army-run resettlement areas), military intelligence officers told me that their job was to "change the cassettes" in indigenous peoples' heads through hours of reeducation. Such discourses obviously seek to delegitimate Mayan demands by suggesting their inauthenticity and their external sources, and they also set up the ladinos who articulate them as saving the gullible Maya from those who would lead them astray. These discourses in turn mesh contradictorily with similarly popular images of primordial indigenous identity: the inherent Mayan backwardness that limits the nation's modernization. As I explore throughout the book, such apparent contradictions often work simultaneously, in this case, perhaps, to assuage ladino anxieties about Mayan empowerment.

The pan-Mayan cultural rights movement is one of the most vibrant sectors of the Guatemalan body politic, able to cajole and pressure the government to sign accords guaranteeing them rights to cultural difference. Their organizing acknowledges that the violence and erasures of the catastrophic colonial past make it impossible to trace a clean line to any primordial identity. Instead, I examine how the colonial process itself, even as it yearned for assimilation, has created Mayan activists, and how the state, as it responds to the Mayaand itself attempts to deploy culture to formar the nationis itself changed in the process. Quincentennial Guatemala offers a case study of how national, ethnic, and gender identifications are constantly transformed through processes of articulation, and I suggest that the instability of these identificationsrather than their "primordial" natureincites ambivalence and attempts to "fix" them (in both the sense of to stabilize and to repair). I am especially interested in those sites and processes of fixinglike the school, the law, the household, and the production of sexual desirethat link or articulate individual bodies with the body politic. For example, competing efforts to form a "whole" national body politic often lean on material bodies for their proofon what those bodies wear, on their cultural practice, on their "racial" and "sexual" markings, and in the case of continuing counterinsurgency, on materially wounding those bodies.

However, unlike in many parts of the world, Guatemala's war is ending, Mayan demands are being recognized, and ladinos and indigenous peoples are finding wayscomplex, fear-filled, and often violentto live together.

This book examines the roles in forming Quincentennial Guatemala played by transnational organizations, gringa anthropologists, Mayan activists becoming state officials, and ladino government functionaries studying to become Mayan shamans, and by events like the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, the founding of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, the legalization of the Guatemalan Mayan Language Academy (ALMG), and the ratification process of the International Labor Organization's Convention 169.7 Drawing from these examples, I suggest that ethnic, gender, and nation-state identities are mutually constitutive, meaning that they do not exist outside their relation to each other, and that at this historic moment the Guatemalan state is an important matrix through which these relations occur.

An Introduction to Quincentennial Guatemala

History As Catastrophe

The largest and most industrialized country in Central America, Guatemala has been at war for over thirty years. The country's indigenous population (estimated to be from 45 percent to over 70 percent of a population of around eleven million), itself divided among some twenty-three ethnolinguistic groups (twenty-one Maya and two others), has historically been disempowered on the national political and economic scene.8 Non-Indians, commonly called "ladinos" (although this is not a homogenous category either), tend to hold the institutionalized positions of power in the country.9

Like its present, Guatemala's past can be described as a traumatic wound,

"Convention 169" is the abbreviation for United Nations International Labor Organization's Convention 169 on the Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries.

Guatemala is ethnically more diverse than is suggested by the categories of "Indian" and "non-Indian" (ladino). The Guatemalan Mayan Language Academy (ALMG) counts twenty-one Mayan linguistic groups in addition to non-Mayan indigenous peoples like the Xinka. In addition to the ladinos, there are the African-Caribbean Garmfuna as well as vibrant Chinese and German communities.

Ladino is a complex term in Guatemala (see chapter 6) and has been employed for centuries of ambivalent border crossings. In the Roman Empire, it was applied to conquered peoples who learned Latin and began "passing" into roles of translators, as middle men and women. The term also applies to the Sephardic Jewish language of the Diaspora, a mixture of Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and other influences added in exile. Victor Perera, a Guatemalan novelist and journalist, brings together this strand with the common usage in Guatemala (ladino as "non-Indian") in his book The Cross and the Pear Tree (1994b). In Colonial Guatemala, ladino first meant those indigenous people who learned Spanish and left the community to live in the borderlands between Criollo colonizer and indigenous colonized. John Watanabe puts it quite concisely: "While the subtleties and ambiguities of actual relations between Maya and Ladinos belie such stark oppositions, these racist stereotypes pervadeand shapeGuatemalan life" (1995, 30).

an unsutured opening on the body politic. Since the pre-Colombian period, a series of catastrophes has time and again erased the material documentation of the pastthe stories as well as the storytellers. The openness and allure of this unfinished history is materialized in the great ruins of Tikal, Quirigua, Kaminaljuyu, and others, which the "mysterious fall" of the Classic Maya civilization left with their memories erased. Few can resist the magic pull and melancholic thrill of loss evoked by an encounter with the ancient past at these ruinsa feeling I call "ethnostalgia."10 This ruptured history has engendered passionate debates over the meaning of the archaeological recorddebates with charged political effects.11

Likewise open and fiercely debated are understandings of the lifeways of post-Classic but pre-Colombian inhabitants of Mesoamerica. The heroics and tragedies of internal wars among the pre-Conquest K'iche's, Kaqchikeles, and Tz'utujiles were just barely preserved in post-Conquest chronicles like the Popul Wuj . The Spanish Conquest brought blood and dislocation and the burning of the Mayan books, a deeply traumatic memory (see Hill 1992; Carmack 1983; Clendinnen 1987) frequently invoked by Mayan cultural rights activists.

Not only the indigenous past has been buried in ruins. In addition to the unnatural disaster of colonization, earthquakes destroyed the colonial and postindependence (1821) capital cities time and time again, so that today the catastrophe of the colonial past is evinced in the ruins of the abandoned capital of Antigua, and there are few buildings in Guatemala City that pre-

I borrow the term ethnostalgia from Mario Loarca, to mean the sense many ladino state officials expressed in interviews when they enthused about their Mayan rootsfelt most keenly when they go to Tikal. One government tourism brochure, in English and distributed at the airport to all entering foreigners, reads,

Visitors nowadays feel a strange thrill when they stand in front of the impressive legacy of Mayan science, art, and magic hidden in the depths of the jungle and protected by thousands of species of plants and animals. The Maya's magnificent cities, their structures, sculptures, bas-reliefs, friezes and paintings stand proudly . . . waiting to be discovered again and again. . . . History and nature come together in Guatemala in a way that simply marvels its visitors. (INGUAT n.d., 5)

George Lucas even used the legendary Tikal as a set in Star Wars (see chapter 7).

For some of these representations, see Coe 1993; Carmack 1981; Stuart and Stuart 1977; Schele and Miller 1986; and Freidel, Schele, and Parker 1993. For the effects of these debates on the "modern-day Maya," see Sam Colop 1991; Pop Caal 1992; Taller J'a C'amabal I'b 1989a and 1989b; Fischer and Brown 1996; and Cojtm 1995. This is a fascinating polemic, which unfortunately cannot be addressed adequately here. Actors in the transnational grid of foreign "scientists," besieged ladino bureaucrats, Mayan intellectuals, army officers, and gringas in fluidarity seize hold of different stories about this open past in complex ways that I will trace fleetingly throughout the book. Please see Quetzil Castaqeda's lovely history of the production of this "museum of Mayan culture" (1996) in Chichen Itza, Yucatan Mexico, and the way it variously works for local residents, state officials, and gringos.

date the 1920s.12 Politically, over a century of postindependence dictatorships gave way to a progressive government in 1944 that enacted land reform and laws that protected labor. But 1954 brought the CIA-backed coup that overthrew the elected government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz and tried to erase the memory of reform by murder, exile, and censorshipsetting up the military governments that would rule until 1985.13

These in turn midwived the most recent catastrophe, which overdetermines my entire discussion here: the ferocious counterinsurgency war of the early 1980s, with its scorched-earth attacks on highland villages, mass murder, and disappearance of tens of thousands of people. Between 1978 and 1984, an estimated seventy thousand (primarily indigenous) people were killed, forty thousand disappeared, and over one million displaced out of a population of eight million. Most of these acts were perpetrated by the Guatemalan army. The beginnings of Guatemala's civil war, called part of the country's "national folklore" by one state official (Walsh 1996, 1), are usually traced to 1963 when army officers rebelled against the U.S.-supported regime (in place since the 1954 coup). They formed the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR) and, inspired by the Cuban revolution and drawing on the cadres and experience of the Communist Party (PGT), organized primarily ladinos in the capital city and eastern Guatemala. A brutal counterinsurgency campaign disarticulated the movement by the early 1970s (Jonas and Tobis 1974; Melville and Melville 1971), but by the mid-1970s the FAR and PGT were regrouping, and indigenous peoples were being organized by two new guerrilla forces: the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and the Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA). In the early 1980s the violent government responses to these challengesincluding the consolidation of the armed struggle under the aegis of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG)resulted in some four hundred highland villages being completely destroyed (wiped off the face of the earth and of official maps); a Guatemalan diaspora with over a million people displaced within the country (Fabri 1994; AVANCSO 1992), and tens of thousands of refugees crossing the border into Mexico; bloody crackdowns on all sectors, ranging from labor to the church to academics to journalists to prominent government officials; and the destruction of almost every organization working for social change, from the indigenous political party National Indigenous Front (FIN) to credit cooperatives and church study groups (Simon 1987; Manz 1988a; M. McClintock 1985; Falla

I am indebted to Mark Driscoll's work on the similar loss and nostalgia incited by the frequent destruction of Tokyo, especially "Apoco-Elliptic Japan" (1994).

Many fruitful histories of this event detail the interests of U.S. companies and political figures in getting rid of Arbenz and his land and labor-law reforms (Kinzer and Schlesinger 1983; Gleijeses 1991; Handy 1984).

1984, 1988, 1992). Guatemalans live among the eloquent ruins left by the war: model villages built on the charred remains of burned houses, clandestine cemeteries (EAFG 1995), holding cells for the disappeared built into houses, and military and civil patrol installations throughout the cities and countryside.14

By 1984 the revolutionary guerrilla army of the URNG, which in 1981 seemed poised to follow in the footsteps of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and take power, was brutally smashed, withdrawing to isolated strongholds in the mountains and lowland jungles. Though seldom mentioned in the national press, or even among friends as a result of the silencing accomplished by terror, the URNG maintained guerrilla columns in many parts of the country and until the cease-fire of 1996 engaged the army in skirmishes, undertaking daring acts of sabotage. Only with the peace process heating up in 1995 did the URNG become a fixture in the news, a major change in status forcefully marked by a guerrilla captain inviting a television news team to cover the peaceful occupation of a town in June 1996. This was a truly historic shift from 1993, when people still used elaborate code to keep from even mentioning the guerrillas during informal discussions in their own homes. Although the URNG carried enough international prestige for the United Nations and U.S. government to back the peace talks, for the past decade there has been little hope that they will take power, and their negotiating position has been correspondingly weak.15 Despite internal and external critiques of their strategies, the loss of what the revolutionaries represented in terms of hope for a radical change in Guatemala's political and economic structure is to many a catastrophic and traumatic loss. New Year's Eve 1996 saw the official return to Guatemalan territory of the URNG commanders, with full demobilization beginning soon afterwards.

The way indigenous peoples in particular were affected by the killing, uprooting, and subsequent resettlement policies of the civil war led many anthropologists to fear that the country's distinctive indigenous culture would disappear (Carmack 1988; Jonas, McCaughan, and Martmnez 1984; Fried et al. 1983). And yet the past ten years have witnessed the emergence of a vibrant indigenous rights movement expressed in a wide array of organi-

The Central Square in Guatemala City is bounded by the cathedral, palace, and the Bank of the Army. Just behind the palace, and covering several square blocks, is a major army installation. Even the "Zona Viva" in Zone Ten, with five-star hotels, nightclubs, and fancy restaurants, is right next to the old Politicnica, still a major army base. This was the site, ironically enough, of one of Jennifer Harbury's hunger strikes as she pressured the government for information on her missing husband, the guerrilla leader Eframn Bamaca Velasquez (see chapter 2).

The Group of Friend Countries, an international coalition composed of Colombia, Spain, Norway, Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States, politically and financially supported the peace process (INFORPRESS 1996).

zations, ranging from human rights activism to rural development agencies, and from associations of Mayan writers and painters to the recently state-recognized and state-funded ALMG (Bastos and Camus 1993, 1995; C. Smith 1990b; Fischer and Brown 1996; Tedlock 1992; Warren 1992, 1996; Wilson 1995). This movement, in turn, has been energized by the hemispheric organizing around the Columbus Quincentennial and the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, as well as struggles for representation in the peace process.

This book looks at both Mayan organizing and state-sector responses to it, as well as ladino and Maya struggles to form state policy. I also explore the imagi-nations that surround and inform these struggles over state power at the national level: the complex histories, erotic investments, and deep-seated fears articulated through colonially inflected fantasmatics of race, sex, and gender. The intensity of the counterinsurgency warwith massacres and scorched-earth campaigns radically out of proportion to the threat of the guerrilla army of the URNGsuggests that political-economic analyses of the violence must take into account the overdetermination of fantasy and paranoia. All of the efforts of the Mayan cultural rights activists as well as state officials and ladino organizers occur under the threat of bodily harm. Their efforts are imbricated with race, class, and gender as expressed in jokes, stereotypes, representations on the national and international scenes, and in the imaginary communities that activists, government officials, and transnational actors are trying to make real.

I focus here on the Quincentennial because it served as a node for articulating these imagi-nations, for making sense of thirty years of bloodshed in a larger historical context. All the epistemic murk and pain and rage and desire for change coalesced around it like cotton candy condenses around a cone of paper. For example, a poster distributed by the organization Majawil Q'ij during October 1992 shows the Maya-K'iche' hero Teczn Uman fighting a Spanish conquistador, only the fearsome figure on the rearing horse is a twentieth-century soldier armed with an M-16an economical representation of five hundred years of power-drenched relations. To briefly introduce the Quincentennial setting of this book and the myriad relations I hope to evoke through the term, I describe similar condensations circulating in the press and in conversations during that historic October.

The Quincentennial resonates powerfully for both Mayas and ladinos because strategies for the post-Peace Accords future rely heavily on what Max Weber called the "authority of the 'eternal yesterday'" (Gerth and Mills 1958, 78). Struggles over the meanings of these yesterdays are often over bloodboth its mixing and its sheddingand thus who has contributed most to the future. Official discourse complacently remembers a "meeting of two worlds," with Spain contributing the cultural treasures of civilization

and white "blood" to the (now shared) traditions and folklore of the "brown" Indians, creating the new "mestizo" (mixed) nation. Drawing on eugenics discourses, these mestizos claim to have improved the race with their blood and to have sacrificed that blood in struggles against external enemiesfirst in winning independence from Spain and then saving the nation from either communism or yanqui imperialism (depending upon their politics). The Maya contest this version of yesterday, emphasizing the violence of that "meeting," the rapes that produced the racial mixing of mestizaje , the appropriation of their culture (Classic Mayan ruins, indigenous ritual life, and traditional clothing) to identify Guatemala, and they question the entire logic of blanquemiento (whitening).16 They also claim to have shed more blood for the nation, in constant uprisings against the Spanish, and as the foot soldiers and primary casualties in warespecially the most recent catastrophe, which many Maya call genocidal. Focusing on the intensity of their suffering in Quincentennial Guatemala is not, as many ladinos denounce, an indication of Maya desires to live in the past (in "Mayassic Park" as one pundit put it), but a powerful strategy of seizing "hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger" as Walter Benjamin says (1969, 255), a way of laying claim to the future.

The Quincentennial As a Moment of Danger

The Quincentennial, which foregrounds issues of culture and identity, ethnicity and the nation's history, was experienced as a moment of danger and a promise for projects attempting to make sense of Guatemala's past as catastrophesome striving to close over those wounds and others insisting that only by opening them up would the body politic heal, be "fixed." Mayas and ladinos in the civilian government, army, and guerrilla organizations seized on the Quincentennial in attempts to "fix" (both to hold still and to repair) Guatemalan-ness, culture, and the role of indigenous people in the nation's future.

The Government and Press

In the summer of 1992, Spain sponsored an exposition on the five hundred years, attended by Guatemala's President Jorge Serrano Elmas, who spoke with pride of Guatemala as an "Indian nation." Guatemala's pavilion at the exposition excited controversy in Guatemala, however, because it was considered "too Indian," with its diorama of a highland market day and figures of indigenous women with baskets of

Carol Hendrickson addresses the practice of ladinos who "wrap themselves in traje and embrace or 'become' the Indian as an expression of what it is to be Guatemalan" (1995, 80) (more ethnostalgia). In chapter 5, I address the role of traje in marking national identity.

corn and squash for sale. So it was changed to a display of Guatemala's "national products" (exports): coffee, rum, bananas, and so on.17

The official responses to October 12, 1992, usually celebrated in Guatemala as the "Day of the Raza " (race) were ambivalent and subdued. Plans for a major celebration were scaled back as local and international critiques of the Conquest heated up. In general, however, government pronouncements echoed the many ladino newspaper editorialists who lauded the creation of a new world and a new people (raza ) in the joining of Europe and the Americas. The editor of the daily Prensa Libre (Guatemala's highest circulation newspaper) said, "It was the most amazing human adventure of our time. It was both glorious and painful, but it began a new race, our race. . . . We must celebrate and commemorate the fusion of Spanish, Indian and Negro that created us all" (12 October 1992). The secretary of public relations for the president of the republic took out full-page ads in the major newspapers that read simply, "Un Solo Pueblo [one single people]: October 12." Surrounding the phrase are photos of indigenous cofradma members in traditional garb, an indigenous campesino wielding a hoe, and ladinos wielding high technologyworking at telephones and computers, thereby reiterating the "natural" relation of ladinos with modernity and Maya with tradition.18

In other official pronouncements, however, Guatemala became isomorphic with the indigenous past in a nationalist contrast to an imperial Europe. The Archbishop Prospero Penados de Barrios chastised the Spanish ambassador for plans to celebrate October 12 rather than mourn the effects of the Conquest and said, "You are Pedro Alvarado and I am Teczn Uman." Teczn Uman, the mythic K'iche' warlord who fought the Spanish invaders to the death, figured prominently in discussions of the Quincentennial, and his story condenses stereotypes and ambivalence over Guatemalan national identity. Legend has it that he mistook the Conquistador Alvarado's horse for part of the man, attacking the animal and leaving himself open to the lance. It is said that when he died the brilliant green quetzal bird rested on his chest and to this day carries his blood in the flash of red on its breast.

Like other memories, that of Teczn Uman can be seized in various ways. Enrique Sam Colop discusses the racism of the story of his death and how it misreads the chronicles (Sam Colop 1991). Kay Warren says, "Stories of

In the various reactions to Rigoberta Menchz winning the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1992 (see chapter 5), many ladinos expressed pride that Guatemala had another Nobel winner (Miguel Angel Asturias had won for Literature in 1967), but also concern about being represented to the world as "a country of Indians."

The cofradma is a brotherhood charged with caring for a particular saint (Rojas Lima 1988; Vogt 1990; Cancian 1965; Warren 1989; Wilson 1995).

Image not available.

Figure 2.
"One Single People, October 12." Presidential Office of Public Relations.
Paid newspaper advertising, La Hora , 12 October 1992.

Image not available.

Figure 3.
Mural La Conquista  (The conquest) by Galvez Suarez, National Palace.
Postcard Collection "Welcome to Guatemala" by Diego Molina.
Pedro Alvarado kills Teczn Uman as the quetzal bird flies overhead.

Pedro de Alvarado's defeat of the Mayan leader Teczn Uman have been given legendary status in national schools and state-sponsored histories. . . . Maya simply do not believe this story, which they feel has been created to assert Maya stupidity and ignorance" (1996, 9697). Teczn Uman's memory also rises up in moments of hybrid ritual. Many indigenous communities perform "The Dance of the Conquest," which was imposed by or borrowed from Spain, where it is still performed (Tedlock 1992, Hendrickson 1995). Its original form retells the story of the Reconquest against the Moors, and in Guatemala the blackfaced masked figures are still called "moros ," whereas the blond white-skinned masks adorn Spanish "Cristianos " (Christians). In the Guatemalan highlands, however, the leader of the Moors has been rechristened Teczn Uman and wears a stuffed quetzal in his elaborate headdress, whereas the leader of the Christians is Pedro Alvarado. I first saw the dance performed in Nebaj in 1985, when only a few of the burned-out villages had been rebuilt, refugees were still being brought down against their will from the mountains into militarized "model villages," and the earth was still fresh in the clandestine cemeteries. The dance is performed over a week, enacting skirmishes between the two armies as Teczn Uman's lieutenant and diviner spies on Alvarado with the help of his

son, foretells the future, and humiliates the Spaniards in a variety of ways. After the final catastrophic battle, however, Teczn Uman is killed and placed in a coffin with glass panels so he can be seen when he is paraded through town. At the moment of his death, and throughout the day as the coffin moved through the streets of Nebaj, a torrent of grief accompanied it. People fell upon the coffin shrieking and crying, some cursed the army and called out the names of dead friends and relatives, and family members carried away those overcome with mourning.

In other more official identifications with the legend, the quetzal mythically marked with Teczn Uman's blood is both the nation's currency and Guatemala's national bird, which reportedly cannot live in captivity. A large mural in the National Palace commemorates the moment of Teczn Uman's death, his statue adorns many town squares, and he is commemorated every February 20. The army's spokesman, Yon Rivera, described the conquest as a result of the Spaniards'

evident technological superiority over the National Army, represented at that time by Indians who valiantly defended their country.19  . . . We should not talk of celebrating, but instead of commemorating. That defeat changed world history. What must be celebrated is the National Army, headed by Captain Teczn Uman, who offered his life fighting for his nation. Today's National Army has many Indians among its troops who have decided to continue to defend their national territory. If the National Army back then had had similar advanced technology, Guatemala would never have been conquered. (La Hora , 12 October 1992)20

A third reading, which seems, in contrast, to set up the indigenous population as clearly other to the "nation," informed the cover of the weekly

In 1978, as the counterinsurgency war was heating up and indigenous issues were making news with the formation of an indigenous partythe National Indigenous (or Integration) Front (FIN)Belize was negotiating for its independence from Great Britain. In response, on Teczn Uman Day, the defense ministry made a similar speech celebrating Teczn as a defender of the nation against a foreign invaderhere to be understood as England (Falla 1978, 456).

Just as in the United States, the military offers a job and possible route to advancement for poor and indigenous youths. Some families decide to "sacrifice" one son to military service in return for the portion of his wages sent directly "to the mother." However, the majority of indigenous soldiers are forcibly recruited, grabbed off buses, taken from school dances, or picked up walking down the street. As one ladino state worker said, "If it weren't for the Indians, there would be no army. No city ladino would allow their child to be grabbed, and no ladino schoolboy from the capital could survive the training." The National Coordinating Committee of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA), a primarily indigenous organization headed by Rosalina Tuyuc, has worked for several years to end forced recruitment, appearing at army bases to retrieve youths, agitating for the army to observe its own age limits, and trying to get legislation through the Congress to make forced recruitment illegal.

Image not available.

Figure 4.
Teczn Uman enters his coffin. Dance of the Conquest, Nebaj, August 1985.
Photo by author.

newsmagazine Crsnica . In capital letters, next to an extreme close-up of Rigoberta Menchz's face, it reads, "INDIGENOUS POWER: What Are Its Goals? Integration or Division? Revenge or Justice? Peace or Conflict?" (1622 October 1992). The lead story quotes state officials, congressmen, and army staff, warning that indigenous demands could lead to a race war

and the balkanization of the country. This is a common refrain.21 Expressing this fear, and intimacy, the ladino Congressman Francisco Reyes complained to me, "The Indians are a scorpion in our shirt!" In a similar but slightly more sensationalist vein, the front-page headline in the second largest daily newspaper, El Grafico (which is not a tabloid), screamed, "They are selling human heads!" over a photo and text coverage of the indigenous demonstrations around the Quincentennial. The story inside, which has nothing to do with the Quincentennial, claims that graves were being robbed in the highlands and suggests that this barbarous enterprise was an instance of Indian witchcraft (14 October 1992).22

The URNG

In a paid advertisement on October 12, the General Command of the URNG declared:

Indigenous Peoples and the popular sectors have maintained a powerful and invincible resistance in defense of their rights, their identity, their history, and their cosmology. The might of other civilizations is not sufficient to bend, assimilate, or uproot this powerful identity. . . . Indians are victims, along with campesinos and the poor, of atrocities, the loss of their land, and displacement, but they are waking up and are part of a new future for Guatemala. . . . Our peace proposal demands full recognition of the identity and rights of the indigenous population, their culture, language, free association, their customs and forms of worship, which converge with other values of universal civilization and make our nation a harmonious and rich mosaic. We share this struggle, we identify with it as brothers against oppression, discrimination, and exploitation. This is a struggle that forms part of the great national undertaking of the Guatemalan people to end the disgraceful and bloody crisis that has kept us in great misery and underdevelopment, but whose solution we can now see forming in our future. (Prensa Libre 12 October 1992)23

Warring attempts to "seize hold" of the Maya (in this case to best represent or speak for them) were on view when two days later the government

Accusations of indigenous divisionism were especially fierce surrounding the ratification of ILO Convention 169, as I explore in chapter 8.

Another ambivalent attitude toward the memories rising up in 1992 positions the ladino as simultaneously guilt-ridden oppressor of the Indian, victim of transnational exploitation, and innocent betrayed by the Indian to international interests. One ladino editorialist wrote: "Celebrate? No! It is best not even to remember. Such shame, disgrace, it is better to forget, to seek amnesia. In these five hundred 'tears,' the Indian has barely changed his status or his disastrous lifestyle. Liberty raises her torch in New York, but in her backyardor better said, her Hispano-American toiletthe Indian, on his knees, kisses the boots of Saint Wall Street. Yesterday it was Spain and the criollos, today the corrupt, the exploiters, and the gringos" (Crsnica , 1622 October 1992).

Note that despite claiming that indigenous people are part of the URNG, the distinction between "us" and "them" is grammatically retained. This may be a sign of respect but also marks a salient division, an issue I address in chapter 2.

of the republic used their "right of reply" in a full-page ad saying that the URNG's "supposed struggle for the full recognition of the identity and rights of indigenous peoples is a lie and clear evidence of the political and ideological manipulation of the indigenous issue for hidden aims." It claimed that whereas the government builds clinics and schools and provides essential services to all the population, the URNG only destroys, and that there is nothing in the URNG proposal that is not already included in the Constitution.

Indigenous Organizations

The Popular and Cultural Rights Divide

Although such boundaries are constantly blurred, indigenous activism tends to divide between cultural rights groupswhich focus on rights to difference based on an identity position of "Maya" (Bastos and Camus 1993, 1995)and what is called the "popular" sectorhuman rights groups, many with a more Marxist analysis of the situation and a more openly antagonistic relation with the government. The dividing line between these is a fraught and emotion-laden place, and because most of these groups are quite newmany formed in the late 1980s and early 1990stheir positions should not be reified.

Participants in the popular movement, both ladinos and indigenous people, have found class to be their most salient identity category, a position seen to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics of colonial racioeconomic organization. In Patria del Criollo , the Guatemalan historian Severo Martmnez Pelaez argues that the category of Indian was created during the colonial era to designate those most exploited by the hacienda system (1990). The book is required reading at the National University (Universidad de San Carlos, or USAC), where many of those who now work in the state, in the research community, and in Mayan organizations studied. As such, this book colors many peoples' understandings of nation and ethnicity. As I discuss later, Martmnez Pelaez argues that there is no such thing as authentic indigenous identitywhat is now called "indio " is a product of the Colony, a racialized legitimation of class exploitation, and ethnic markers like the cofradma (saint society) and traditional clothing (traje ) were imposed as Spanish counterinsurgency. It is hard to capture how many times Patria del Criollo was cited directly and indirectly in interviews and in the press. Though hegemony construction is a project fraught with multiple valences, I would call this a hegemonic book. Rereading it after conducting field interviews, I was constantly struck by how often informants expressed views from the book as their own. The result of this class identification has been a tendency to downplay issues of racism, presupposing that once the class structure was overturned such discrimination would melt away.

Many of today's popular groups have roots in historical processes like

Catholic Action (beginning in the 1950s) and the labor movement, or in the Campesino Unity Committee (CUC, founded in the late 1970s), but most are "Sectors Arising from Repression and Impunity"organized in the 1980s to respond to the counterinsurgency war. They include organizations of widows and orphans (National Coordinating Committee of Guatemalan Widows [CONAVIGUA] and the Mutual Support Group for Families of the Disappeared [GAM]), refugees (the Permanent Commissions [CCPP]), internally displaced (Guatemalan Council for the Displaced [CONDEG] and the Communities of the Population in Resistance [CPR]), and human rights organizations (Council of Ethnic Communities "Everyone United" [CERJ], which resists forced recruitment into the army-run civil patrol system). The CUC, to which Rigoberta Menchz belongs, is part of this sector and was formed in the 1970s to struggle for land and labor rights. CUC was decimated by the counterinsurgency war and only began to reconstitute in the late 1980s. Even as the civil war has wound down, these groups have faced continuing army repression, with leaders killed and disappeared, surveillance and intimidation of members, and bombings of their offices. These popular indigenous organizations have been closely linked to the student and union movements through different umbrella groups like the Unity for Labor and Popular Action (UASP) and they have a major presence in national life, often heading demonstrations in traditional indigenous clothing (traje ), taking over the Congress, making statements to the press, and demanding demilitarization, land reform, and restitution for their losses during the war. Although the majority are indigenous, issues of ethnic identity or cultural rights have in general been secondary to demands based in their positions as poor people and as victims of state violence.

The cultural rights groups, which are the focus of this book, have taken the name Maya for themselves and have concentrated their efforts around linguistics, education, and development issues. Mayan groups include the Guatemalan Mayan Language Academy (ALMG), the Guatemalan Mayan Writers Academy (AEMG), the Mayan Center for Research and Documentation (CEDIM), the Mayan Cultural and Educational Center Cholsamaj, and the Center for the Study of Mayan Culture (CECMA). Some of these Mayan activists were involved in religious, popular, and even revolutionary movements but say they often encountered racism within the very groups claiming to represent them. Many concluded that struggles for economic justice did not adequately address their multiply oppressed positions. Instead, they say, it was necessary to develop Mayan-led organizations to struggle for political, economic, and cultural rights. The ALMG first served as an umbrella group for these organizations and later joined with fourteen others to form the Guatemalan Council of Mayan Organizations (COMG),

which in turn has joined a larger federation, the Mayan Unity and Consensus Group (IUCM).

Although the Mayan groups have been accused of being elites, intellectuals unconnected with their bases, and not representative (claims I address subsequently), their discourseincluding the use of the word Maya to name themselveshas been growing in appeal. This trend is quite clear in the names of the "popular" Mayan Coordinator Majawil Q'ij, which was formed in the early 1990s, and the Coordination of Organizations of the Pueblo Maya of Guatemala (COPMAGUA), created to implement the peace accord on indigenous identity. Member organizations send delegates to Majawil and COPMAGUA and several of these representativeswho had previously identified only as popularsaid that interacting with international indigenous organizations and with the cultural rights leaders had made them aware for the first time of the specificity of their indigenous identity. The very use of the term Maya in their titles shows that this process was already underway. Though by the end of 1998 many groups were employing the term Maya , in the early 1990s it was still used almost exclusively by groups with a specifically culturalist agenda.

Indigenous Responses to the Quincentennial

Struggles over the meaning of the Quincentennial and how best to deal with its scars were fierce at the Second Intercontinental Congress held in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, in 1991 to plan indigenous and popular responses to 1992. Delegates from twenty-seven countries throughout the Americas attended, and issues of identity and representation became central to their discussions. I did not attend the meetings, and those who did still disagree about what occurred and why. My understanding is that similar issues to those that divide the Mayan cultural and the popular movements within Guatemala were involved. Many indigenous delegates felt they were not adequately represented either in numbers or in their views being taken into account, and they finally walked out. Nonindigenous activists claimed there was no racism intended, but that many ladinos at the conference had years of organizing experience that made it easier for them to dominate the proceedings.

In part because of these disagreements, the indigenous response in Guatemala to 1992 was also relatively subdued. There was a small march in Guatemala City that stopped at the Congress and National Palace and demanded approval of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169. The biggest demonstration was held outside the capital, in Solola, where Rigoberta Menchz, generating enormous enthusiasm as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, was greeted by some ten thousand people.

However, indigenous peoples are seizing hold of memory around the

Quincentennial in ways that destabilize any reified division between the "popular" and the "Maya." A foreign researcher who had expressed strong reservations about the Mayan movement in 1990 (mainly because she felt it vindicated an identity that did not exist, something the Maya were "making up") was forced to change her mind. She told me in October 1992 that she couldn't believe how all her friends in CUC and CONAVIGUA were "going over to the Mayan thing. There seems to be something there that really affects these people, that is meaningful for them."

Although on the ground (and in some recent scholarship on the ethnic rights movement) divisions still exist between the more class-based groups and the Mayan cultural rights organizations, there are also convergences.24 The International Indigenous Summits sponsored by Rigoberta Menchz and the peace talks, especially the round addressing "Identity and Indigenous Rights," have mobilized articulations across this divide. I think it is worth quoting at length from the Majawil Q'ij reaction to the Quincentennial, in part to show the way new identifications are articulated, the Majawil Q'ij view of the state, and the growing convergences among the discourses of popular indigenous groups and those of the Mayan culturalist organizations.

"Life, Resistance, and the Future: After Five Hundred Years a New Dawn for our People,"
Maya Coordinator Majawil Q'ij

For us, October 12, 1492, means the violent destruction of our history. The invaders and their descendants sought only gold, riches, land, and slaves. We know very little of this history, only what our elders have told us and what researchers have revealed. Our Mayan grandfathers knew the stars, developed the calendar we still use today, and worked the land together. Their spiritual and material wealth was destroyed by the invaders. They burned our codices and built churches over the temples of our ancestors. The Calvary of the indigenous peoples of America began in 1492.

The invaders massacred entire villages, stole our mother earth, and distributed her and our peoples as forced labor. With Independence in 1821, the tribute and fruits of indigenous labor went to the criollos rather than to Spain. In 1871, they undertook the liberal reforms. Indigenous peoples lost their communal lands so the powerful could plant coffee. Some people were

Cross-communication between the "popular" and Mayan groups was mobilized by the Serrano "auto-coup" of May 1993 and the subsequent organizing around the return to constitutionality (creating the National Consensus Group [INC]), the purge of state institutions, and the creation of the Association of Civil Sectors (ASC). This cooperation between popular and culturalist groups has extended to shared participation in the ASC, which was the official representation before the government-guerrilla peace talks.

Image not available.

Figure 5.
"After 500 Years We Are Here! Sing, Rise Up, America!" Banner carried in
Quincentennial procession, Guatemala City, October 12, 1992. Photo by author.

forced by law to become ladinos. In 1944 the democratic revolution began. It ended the dictatorships, built schools, and distributed some land, but the rights of the indigenous peoples were not taken into account. In 1954 the direct persecution began of indigenous campesinos and poor ladinos who had received land. In the seventies there were massacres in Sansirisay and Panzss. The 1980s began with the massacre in the Spanish Embassy, and in the next years there continued the transformation of 440 indigenous villages into ashes by the military. Today, poverty forces our peoples to spend up to six months working on the plantations for starvation wages.

They clearly want to destroy our culture. Through the schools they try to make us change our traje and forget our languages. They propose laws to "protect" us, while the civil patrols and the military control in our communities destory trust, unity, and community life. We have suffered massacres just as our ancestors suffered the destruction of the cities of Gumarkaaj and Iximche in 1524. This is a policy to finish off the Indians with the same cruelty and savagery of the Spaniards during the invasion, only now this is carried out by the new lords of Xibalba.25

The "lords of Xibalba" refers to the underworld of the Popul Wuj .

It has taken five hundred years for them to recognize our values. How much longer will it take before they recognize us as human beings and as peoples?

As indigenous peoples, we have always resisted, and now we are struggling within the framework of dialogue and negotiation. The state must recognize our human rights and our specific rights as indigenous populations, because we are the majority. These include the right to our archaeological heritage, the right to own communal land, and the rights to resources and to recuperate our culture. We reject the use of Mayan names for repressive groups like the Army Battalion Caibil Balam and the folkloric use of our culture while we die of malnutrition. We have the right to elect our own authorities, and the state must recognize our laws and include them in the laws of the country. Perhaps our struggle is more clearly recognized internationally, with the candidacy of our sister Rigoberta Menchz for the Nobel Peace Prize and initiatives like the ILO Convention 169. These will help us end the racism and discrimination that still weigh so heavily in our own country.

After five hundred years, Guatemalans seek to change the terrible situation affecting our country. Though Indians have suffered this Calvary of discrimination most, now Indians, ladinos, Garmfunas , campesinos, workers, students, professionals, and so on are all suffering from hunger and the lack of land, work, fair wages, education, and health services.26

Though the government says it respects the law, it does not respect our rights to our culture, or the rights of our youth not to be forcibly recruited into the army, or the rights of refugees to return to their lands. On top of this, we suffer the impunity, corruption, and drug trafficking of the powerful. The state must recognize our human rights and our specific rights as indigenous populations. We must all look to the future to create a Guatemala without ethnocide, without colonialism, without oppression and death. (condensed from La Hora Supplement , 12 October 1992)

Echoing the sense of hope and "new times" expressed here, a Mayan friend said she had a pre-Quincentennial child and a post-Quincentennial baby. She had been very involved with Catholic Action and the CUC, and her first child was named in good Catholic fashion for his saint's day. Her post-Quincentennial baby, however, is named Bailam, from the Popul Wuj .

The Garmfuna are the peoples of African descent living primarily on the Miskito or Atlantic Coasts of Central America (N. Gonzalez 1989). They are the black people or "Negroes" extolled in some accounts of the new Guatemalan "raza ." Garmfuna representatives participated in the 1991 Quetzaltenango meetings, raising awareness of their situation and leading the organizing group to change its name to the National Maya, Black, and Popular Resistance Movement. One way that many ladinos I interviewed attempted to discredit the Mayan cultural rights movement was to claim that they in turn were racist and exclusionary because they acted like they were the only ethnic group in Guatemala. These ladinos would thus set themselves up as the defenders of black people (in other words, as light-brown people saving black people from brown people).

"My mother is horrified," she said. "She thinks I've become a pagan! But this is an historic change for us, a new dawn after so many years of war."

Ladino Reactions

Much of this book is devoted to ladino reactions to Mayan cultural rights organizing and the Quincentennial. Like whiteness in North American discussions of race, ladino identity has often been invisible in Guatemalan struggles over ethnicity and nation. As Renato Rosaldo (1988) suggests, the powerful tend to feel they have no culture, save for the universal culture of civilization. But this comfortable position is disrupted by Mayan organizing, which forces ladinos to think critically about their own identifications, a process that makes many people quite cranky. For example, Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, an exile visiting Guatemala in October 1992 to check out the possibility of returning, said,

The worst part of all this Five Hundred Years stuff is the Maya saying that the ladinos have no culture. How ignorant! I am ladino, petit bourgeois, and they tell me I have no culture! We have our literary tradition and a history of resistance! Without us there would have been no 1944, or the resistance of the 1960s. We have a valiant history. We have our own Nobel Prize winner in Miguel Angel Asturias!

The unsteady mixture of class, practice, and "high" culture through which he and many others define ladino ethnic identification may lead to the many attempts to "fix" or hold the Maya stillas a "self constituting other": as traditional to the ladino's modernity, as domestic labor to support that petit bourgeois home, and as folkloric in contrast to ladino literary pretensions.

The Quincentennial's unprecedented challenges to ladino identifications produced a range of uncertainties and irritations. The Guatemalan anthropologist Celso Lara decried the cynicism and melancholia pervading the ladino character. "We have no happy cultural expressions. Look at Guatemala's Semana Santa [Holy Week]. It has no Easter, no resurrection. We put all our energy and passion into Good Friday, celebrating death, not rebirth." Similarly Diego Molina, a well-known photographer, described his fellow ladinos as "liars, traitors, charlatans, thieves, hypocrites, cowards, murderers, machos, drunkards, co-opted, negative, petty politicians, sold out, and always taken advantage of."

Attempts to fix things were often expressed through metaphors of the family and the conviviality of home (often as a counter to Mayan emphasis on historic antagonism). For example, Mr. Molina prides himself on creating positive images of the country, which he displays in postcards, magazines, books, and large-scale exhibitions lavishly funded by both the state and private interests; he calls these images "a beautiful family album." Responding to Mayan organizing by saying "we all have to live in one house," as Alvaro Colsn of the government agency FONAPAZ (National Peace

Fund) did, or describing ladinos and Mayas as a heterosexual couple, are metaphors that concisely evoke their terrible intimacy, as well as the power asymmetries embedded in the patriarchal nuclear family. As I explore throughout the book, the Indian is often coded as female. Discussing the emergence(y) of Mayan organizing and possible autonomy, many ladinos echoed the state official who complained, "But this is like a wife leaving her husband. She already has a home, a family, a legal bond, she can't just up and leave!" At other times, the Indian is coded as a problem child. As Congressman Jorge Skinner-Klee wrote in an editorial, "The Indian is like a family member we want to hide" (Siglo XXI , 3 August 1992). Couching ethnic relations in this metaphor of the family seems to be a way of dealing with the weirdness of the Quincentennial, the way modes of ladino identificationbeing that which everyone else aspired to because of its attachments to whiteness, the modern, and the futureare suddenly under question and rendered uncanny. From the German unheimlich (un-homelike), uncanny suggests the feeling of being cut off from something that was once intimately part of the self, a sense of eerie alienation.27

So Quincentennial Guatemala is an uncanny site for ladino identification, where the ladino body politic is acknowledged to be wounded, just as the national family is dysfunctional. A popular joke during the Quincentennial went, "They say that Fidel Castro invited President Serrano to Cuba. While Serrano was there he attended an enormous rally in Havana. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans were there, and Castro led them in a cheer: 'Who is the mother of the Nation?' he called, and the crowd roared, 'Cuba! Cuba!' 'Who is the father of the Nation?' he asked, and they said, 'Castro! Castro!' 'And what do you want to be?' 'Communists! Communists!' they replied. Well, Serrano was very impressed and decided that he had something to prove about Guatemala and capitalism, so he invited Castro to come to Guatemala. When Castro arrived, Serrano had them truck in thousands of

The Quincentennial also evoked many wildly clever and quite sincere attempts to deal with its uncanny demands. One of the most popular plays in Guatemalan history was Epopeya de las Indias (Epic of the Indies), which was performed for several years in the National Theater and reversed the story of discovery while constantly adding references to current events in the Quincentennial years. The play is a wonderful mix of high and low culture. The main character is a Maya named Cristsbal Culsna name that plays on the Spanish for Columbus (Colsn) and ass who goes off to "discover" Spain. There he and his mates are horrified to find the living standards far lower than home, the Spaniards believing in only one god, and Isabel and Ferdinand speaking the stereotypical Indianized Spanish, the ungrammatical forms of which are ripe for obscene word play. This ladino mimicry of how Indians supposedly speak (in other words, badlythey are inarticulate) is a major form of comic diversion and essential for the sense of many of the jokes about Rigoberta Menchz analyzed in chapter 5. The play ends with a call on the audience to acknowledge the violence of the Conquest and to attempt to imagine a different past that might lead to a more peaceful future.

Civil Patrollers for a rally in front of the National Palace.28 He also went out and asked, 'Who is the mother of the Nation?' And they rather halfheartedly replied, 'Guatemala, Guatemala.' 'Who is the father of the Nation?' Serrano asked. 'Serrano, Serrano,' they said. 'What do you want to be?' And the great shout went up, 'Orphans! Orphans!'"

Theorizing Double Bind(ings)

Ladinos seem caught between the cozy image of the nuclear family (with the Maya as wife and mother in a presumably petit bourgeois home) and the uncanniness of national domesticity that makes them long to escape family ties altogether, as orphans. Guatemalans in general seem similarly ambivalent about the state. As Serrano's Presidential Advisor Juan Daniel Aleman put it, "The state is a piqata. Everyone hits us and everyone expects us to give them sweets." Too, when I asked Guatemalans about a national project, many said that the country is "schizophrenic," based in a fundamental split between Indian and ladino, between poor and rich, and whose plans for the future are constitutively contradictory. Dr. Demetrio Cojtm, a prominent Mayan intellectual, describes the ambivalence of the ladino toward the Indian: "They hate them and they love them simultaneously. They admire them for their glorious past, but they treat those of the present with disdain and violence. . . . They consider the Indian a treasury of 'national authenticity,' but they either treat them as slaves or try to force them to assimilate" (Cojtm, 1990, 9). Richard Adams describes the relation as "a fear-laden embrace" (1990, 159). This emotional double bind informs the complex work of the Maya and the complex reactions of the state and ladinos, and also suggests the way they are "doubly bound" to each other in the contradictory process of nation building.

In attempting to understand Quincentennial Guatemala, I have been strongly influenced by the work of Carol Smith and the contributors to her collection Guatemalan Indians and the State, 15401988 (1990b), and by Brackette Williams (1989) and others who insist that ethnicity and nation cannot be understood without also investigating the state. Of course, when one goes looking for the state it tends to become rather elusiveits aims contradictory, its long arms hard to trace back to a point where someone shoulders the blame. Guatemalan state policy seems to be both to wipe out

The Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC) were instituted by the army throughout the highlands as part of the counterinsurgency war. Local men were forced to patrol and surveil their villages, often in twenty-four-hour shifts. At the height of their deployment, over half a million men were recruited. One of their duties has been to show up for government rallies. For accounts of abuses of the patrol system and the disruption it has created in community life, see Manz 1988a; Simon 1987; Paul and Demarest 1988; and Nelson 1990.

the Maya through assimilation or even genocidal counterinsurgency and to maintain them as workers and tourist attractions, even responding at times to their demands for representation. I have borrowed the theoretical tools developed by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, and Michel Foucault to analyze these contradictory effects of state power. I use Foucault's notion of the "governmental state" as shorthand for the ways many theorists have articulated these ideas and to mean the state as productive of subject-effects rather than repressing already existing identities.29

The state, represented by "ideological apparatuses" and orthopedic practices such as the school, legal kinship, hygienic infrastructure, and economic regulation, is not a clear-cut set of interests that gets what it wants through repressive apparatuses. In Guatemala it has been and still is extraordinarily repressivethat is why there is so much attention to wounded bodies in this book. But it is also, and simultaneously, a set of relations: a structure of domination, yes, but one which in turn forms the conditions of possibility for all political work.

Rather than repressing or homogenizing, this state "fixes" in both the sense of holding steady and the sense of repair. In Foucault's theory of governmentality, disciplinary and regulatory powers fixin other words, hold people in the gaze of power and in their designated placebut the liberal state is also legitimated by fixing in the sense of mending and invigorating. Wendy Brown says:

As the social body is stressed and torn by the secularizing and atomizing effects of capitalism and its attendant political culture of individuating rights and liberties, economic, administrative, and legislative forms of repair are required. Through a variety of agencies and regulations, the liberal state provides webbing for the social body dismembered by liberal individualism and also administers the increasing number of subjects disenfranchised and deracinated by capital's destruction of social and geographic bonds. (1995, 17)

This sense of fixing, of ameliorating and improving, may be one of the sweets that keep people coming back for the "piqata effect" of the state, de-

For example, it may not be useful to think of the state and public life as opposite and inimical to the privacy of the home. Instead, theories of governmentality help us see that the distinction between public and private is a boundary internal to capitalist production and bourgeois legality: in other words, rather than the state encroaching on the already existing (primordial) home, domestic experiences of intimacy and comfort in contrast to the alienation and competition of the outside world are effects of and produced by a larger formation. As Jane Collier suggests, citizenship requirements and bourgeois law require people to obey an inner voice: "[T]he ideal of a 'free' market for jobs and commoditieswhich accompanied, and was made possible by, the spread of bourgeois legal concepts and institutionsrequired competitors for employment and sales to have inner capacities and desires that distinguished them from rivals" (1997, 207).

scribed by Presidential Secretary Aleman. The wounded body politic of Quincentennial Guatemala may need all the fixing it can get.

But how are individual bodies linked to this body politic that is fixed, regulated, and produced by the governmental state? How do bodies come to matter, as Judith Butler asks, with some mattering more than others? These questions are fundamentally about identification, about fantasy and desire, and they have drawn me to use the theoretical tools of feminism and psychoanalysis.30 These tools help elucidate the role of gender in producing the bodies of men and women and of ladino and Maya, as well as the imagi-nations of larger bodies politic, and I deploy them here in hopes of understanding the fear-laden embrace, the simultaneous love and hate that Dr. Cojtm sees in ladino relations to the Maya. How else to explain the explosion of jokes told about Rigoberta Menchz when she won the Nobel Prize, or the primal contradiction that Indians are seen by ladinos as both "the same," in that they are Guatemalans and mestizos, differentiated only by such folkloric effluvia as handmade clothing, and as primordially "different," racially distinct, a frightening mass of ignorant savages always ready to revolt? Diana Fuss suggests that "identification is the detour through the other that defines the self. This detour through the other follows no predetermined developmental path, nor does it travel outside history and culture. Identification names the entry of History and culture into the subject" (1995, 3).

I have also found the concept of the "body image" very useful in tracing the strange journeys of identifications through history and culture. I borrow the notion from neurophysiology and psychoanalysis via the work of Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies , who suggests that the body image is the way in which a person's corporeal exterior is psychically represented and lived, an imaginary anatomyit is what gives a subject her sense of place in the world and her connection to others (Grosz 1994, xii). The body image is necessary for posture, movement, and tactility and is linked to the model that the subject has of other bodies and that other bodies have of the subject's body (1994, 68). For example, the experience that an amputee has of a "phantom limb" is caused by the body image. Psychically the wounded body does not give up the limbalthough often, over time, the imaged

As Ann Stoler says,
Saying "yes" to Foucault has not always meant saying "no" to Freud. . . . Despite Foucault's rejection of the repressive hypothesis, there are surprising ways in which their projects can and do converge. . . . Both were concerned with boundary formation, with the "internal enemy" within. . . . If Foucault has led us to the power of discourse, it is Freud that has, albeit indirectly, turned us toward the power of fantasy, to imagined terror, to perceived assaults on the European self that made up the anxious and ambivalent world in which European colonials lived. (1995, 168169)

limb changes shape. In the case of an arm, after several years the psychical body image of the hand may nestle close to the physical stump. Doctors treating amputees have found that some control of the phantom limb is possible, and people can learn to extend the limb into the prosthesis to facilitate maneuverability.31 In fact, according to Grosz, the body image is necessary for the manipulation of any prosthetic. The image extends to include external objects and implements like cars and surgeon's scalpels and, perhaps, allows wounded bodies politic to function by enfolding (in fear-laden embraces) other bodies.

Embraces can also be pleasurable, and despite the emphasis here on war, wounding, and power-saturated relationalities, this book is also concerned with pleasurewith how necessary it is to identification and to the functioning of the state, and with laughter as a (sometimes nervous) symptom of body politics. That is in part why the book is so fascinated with popular culture, including jokes, movies, fashion, and science fiction. It is also why I have used as illustrations the postcards that circulate among Guatemalans and between Guatemala and the rest of the world, creating and maintaining relations. These are all ways that we make sense of the world.

To conclude this brief overview of the book's theoretical framework, I note that any understanding of wounded bodies politic and of subject constitution as fluid must take into account the way identifications are overdetermined by transnational political economy. Without denying the powerfulness of certain blocs in the world economy (Guatemala is far from God and close to the United States), I try to follow Regulation School theorists (Boyer 1990; Lipietz 1987) who not only take seriously world systems theory (Wallerstein 1974, 1983) and Gunder Frank's notion of the development of underdevelopment (in Rhodes 1970) but also question their fatalismwhat Lipietz calls "pessimistic functionalism." The identifications I am exploring in Guatemala are formed in relation to multiple transnational flowsranging from anthropologists, tourists, and indigenous representatives moving around the world to the imposition of structural adjustment economic policies and to the effects of consumer preferences in the United States and Taiwan on the lives of Mayan farmers. But if subjects (Maya, ladino, state officials, and, I argue, economic actors) are understood to be produced through interactions, articulations, resistances, and countermaneuvers, then, as with the governmental state, perhaps even United Nations mandates and World Bank neoliberalism are not imposed unilaterally and homogeneously by western powers. Instead, these are the effects of constant

According to Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1995b), the body image is quite malleable. Paraplegics working with neurophysiologists have managed to transport certain portions of their body image so that they rub together where there is feeling on the physical body, allowing them pleasurable sensations otherwise denied.

hegemony work (including, of course, capitulations), they are unevenly applied, and they are in complex relation with other interlocutors (for example, Guatemala is involved in trading blocs with other Latin American countries, has special relations with Mexico, Spain, Israel, and Taiwan, and receives increasing direct foreign investment from South Korea and Japan).

Methods

It is a well-known joke that the longer a foreigner stays in Guatemala the harder it is to write about it. Whole books can come out of a three-week sojourn, whereas those who have lived there several years are gradually overcome by such a sense of complexity and contradiction that it becomes increasingly difficult to write (Francisco Goldman captures this perfectly in his novel The Long Night of White Chickens [1992]). After my first fieldwork in Guatemala in 1985, in which I spent six months traveling through the highlands, southern coast, the cities of Guatemala, and the refugee camps in Chiapas, Mexico, my knowledge was so superficial that I was able to sit down and write hundreds of pages of description and analysis.

Thirty-five months spent in Guatemala over the past fourteen years have humbled me. Guatemala is extremely complex, a space of terror as well as laughter, of horrific violence as well as bravery. So much of the information available there has been multiply encoded and recoded, filtered through rumor and personal histories, and encased in a hard veneer derived from political antagonisms, that it is a truly perilous claim I make in trying to represent it at all. Though never with the intensity the Guatemalans suffer, I have experienced the "epistemic murk" that Michael Taussig discerns in the "space of death," of "the great steaming morass of chaos that lies on the underside of order and without which order could not exist" (Taussig 1987, 4). In Guatemala, there are constant border crossings between order and chaos, and I have tried to acknowledge this experience by focusing throughout on contradiction and ambivalence.

My tactic in writing about years of conversations, events, written and spoken polemics, and observed and experienced emotions is to acknowledge that the interrelations of ethnic, gender, and national identities in Guatemala are quite fluid and always in recombinant articulation with me, the gringa anthropologist. As I explore in more detail in chapter 2, these not very solid identifications may call for a methodology of fluidarity: a practice and analytics that combine solidaritybeing partial to, as in on the side of, the people I work withwith an acknowledgment of how partial, how incomplete, my knowledge and politics have to be.

I have been involved as a gringa researcher, journalist, and solidarity activist with Guatemala since the mid-1980s. I was very fortunate in my first sojourn there in 1985 to work with several gringas who had long histories

of commitment to the Guatemalan cause. Their willingness to vouch for me, despite my inexperience and naoveti, allowed me to meet and form relationships with a wide range of Guatemalans, including many living in exile in Mexico City and in refugee camps in southern Mexico, as well as those working in Guatemala City and the highlands in research, human rights, church-based organizing, and development efforts. These contacts, and the trust they in turn graciously and courageously placed in me, allowed me and the gringas I was working with to interview Guatemalans from many different backgroundsfrom those involved in clandestine work to powerful elites.

This first field trip was followed by a research project on the army-run resettlement areas known as Development Poles or model villages (see chapter 3 and Nelson 1987, 1990), with field research lasting from July 1996 to January 1997. I later worked with Guatemalan exiles in Mexico on development projects in Chiapas and made three return trips to Guatemala before the year-long stay (October 1992 to October 1993) in Guatemala City that forms the basis of this book. While there I was invited to work as a translator at the three International Indigenous Summits called by Rigoberta Menchz as part of the United Nations Year of Indigenous People, which gave me a glimpse of the enormous energy and commitment of the transnational indigenous rights movements. Finally, I returned for two months in the summer of 1996 for follow-up fieldwork. Limited as it is, this background, the contacts, and the basic knowledge it has afforded me (like knowing jokes about all the presidents since Lucas Garcma), and the modest reputation afforded by the research projects I've worked on, have made me part of the communities I "partially" limned in the acknowledgments. I have kept in touch with many of these people: witnessing their responses to historic changes in the past twelve years; rejoicing and commiserating with many, met in exile, who have now returned home (some taking on major responsibilities in the civilian governments); talking over ways that senses of self change with people who were peasants when I met them and now newly identify as Maya; mourning the death of friends like Myrna Mack and working to support the struggle for justice of her colleagues (I was based at AVANCSO, the research institute that Mack founded). Although twelve years is a short time to understand the complexities of Guatemala, I have had the honor and privilege of forming deep and lasting friendships with people who have been generous in helping to explain those complexities.

All this by way of explaining how I "got" the information herein, some of which is quite intimate ("How in the world did you get people to tell you their sexual fantasies?" I've been asked), and why I'm willing to try to explore the Guatemalan imagination. These explorations are always "partial," of courseboth incomplete and interestedand there's "not a very gen-

eralizable recipe" for an appropriate methodology (Geertz 1973, 416), but I have tried to interview a wide range of participants and to observe a number of the interactions I elaborate on here.

I was based in the capital, Guatemala City, interviewing city-based Mayan intellectuals and as many state officials as would see me (including members of the government ministries, the Congress, judges, and the executive branch). I called on friends and acquaintances for contacts in the state and among ladino elites, researchers, and Mayan activists, and asked for feedback and clarification from people I've known for a long time in these circles. Where possible I held multiple conversations with people. Interviews were conducted in offices; in waiting rooms (where I spent an inordinate amount of time); in walks through Zone One; in restaurants and cafis (I had an unofficial office in a downtown hotel's restaurant); in cars and buses; in people's homes and in my home; in the aisles of movie theaters and marketplaces, and in the lobbies of government buildings, of hotels where conferences were going on, of the National Theater, and of the martial arts gymnasium where I worked out; and in bars and nightclubs (although these were kept to a minimum as they tended to get a bit sticky). Fieldwork was greatly complicated by the failed "auto-coup" of May 1993, when then-president Jorge Serrano Elmas tried to institute martial law. He was deposed and went into exile, and many of my contacts in the state went underground, while entirely new faces inhabited the palace and ministries as part of the congressionally selected government of Ramiro de Lesn Carpio.

The book is principally concerned with the Mayan cultural rights organizations and in no way claims to represent the popular movement nor the range of indigenous strategizing (urban and rural) vis-`-vis the state (or vice versa). This is not a book about all indigenous organizing, but a book that focuses primarily on Mayan professionalsin general, people with a sixth-grade education and higher, who hold nonmanual-labor jobs (teachers, secretaries, translators, development specialists, and so on) and who work in urban areas, primarily Guatemala City. Although there are many Mayanidentified organizations that want nothing to do with the Guatemalan state, here I am primarily interested in those who have decided, for historic and strategic reasons, to struggle for representation in that state. But this is not an in-depth study of "The Maya" or so-called Mayan Nationalism as an isolated phenomenon. Rather it is an attempt to understand Mayan cultural rights activism in relation to the Guatemalan state and ladino sectors, investigating the ways these interactions articulate, or fix, identifications in the short term.

I should also make clear that a structuring but absent presence of the book is the role of the Guatemalan army. I did not focus on the military in

my fieldwork, in part because it is difficult and in part because it would limit my contacts with other sectors. I believe, based on my own experiences and those of my friends and informants, that there has been a qualitative change in the way power works in Guatemala, given the change to civilian government in 1985 and the recent Peace Accords. However, the army remains an extremely significant force in the city as well as the countryside. I explore this issue in chapter 3, but emphasize here that, although things are different than when I began fieldwork in 1985, fear of the arbitrary power over life and death held by the army overshadows all the work done by Guatemalan state officials, Mayan activists, and gringa anthropologists. Without giving the army total powerwhich it never had, even at the height of counterinsurgency in the early 1980sit should not be forgotten that despite many important and structural changes, Guatemalan society remains heavily militarized.

Although I briefly discuss the recombinant relations between the Maya and the URNG, I cannot explore the revolutionary movement in depth in this book. This is because during all of my fieldwork it was almost impossible for me to talk to or about members of the movement. Their recent emergence into public life, the discussions mobilized by the findings of the Truth Commission, and the URNG's transformation into an aboveground political movement will make for exciting work in that field in the years ahead. Some of the harshest critiques of the revolutionaries, however, have come from Maya who question the clear-cut binary between how the army and the guerrilla treated indigenous people. Some claim that both sides in the war used them as cannon fodder.

In Quincentennial Guatemala, many previously clear-cut boundaries are becoming crosscut, interpenetrated. For example, the limited (but expanding) openness of the current moment has created vicious struggles over what counts as political. Charges of being "co-opted," "manipulated," "sold out," "a demagogue," "inauthentic," or of not representing those you claim as followers are frequently lobbed at every target imaginable, including Mayan rights activists, the guerrillas, popular leaders, human rights groups, nongovernmental organizations, researchers, and the government. During my fieldwork I had to constantly remind myself that the boundaries of the political are flexible and that it was dangerous to assume that I always already knew what constituted a progressive, feminist, or antiracist project. Obviously, although I frequently forgot it, this means refusing to romanticize or to demonize either ladinos or Mayas. It means giving up both heroes and villains (see chapter 2). For those, indigenous and ladino, who have sacrificed family, friends, and home and risked their lives in the struggle for a more equitable future (and even for those who risked little, working in solidarity), Mayan critiques of racism in the guerrilla and popular movement are hard to hear and too easily evoke a violent disavowal. Total im-

mersion in the world of the Maya, however, can blind one to the important history of the ladino (anthropologists and tourists tend to have little interest in nonindigenous Guatemala). Casual references to a "ladino state" ignore the enormous costs borne by the majority of ladinos who are not represented there. In turn, overemphasis on the struggles over culturesuch things of beauty as traje , mountain shrines, and incense-laden ritualcan cover over the ugliness of desperate poverty and internal divisions among the Maya.

Toward the end of a year in the field, in 1993, one of my ladino friends (who went on to play a major role in the peace process) said, "I have met with you many times and we have talked about many things. In return, I want you to promise me one thing about your research. Please, please do not be tempted by caricatures." I think that keeping open these tensions and contradictions, refusing to assume that any one position is unproblematically liberatory or unremittingly pernicious, is one way I can respond to his concern. As Charles Hale suggests, we need to devote attention to the different sides of a conflict so we can portray each side as fully constituted, complex, knowledgeable actors, while simultaneously stepping back and viewing them from a distance in order to highlight the structural determinations of their consciousness (1994, 216).

Throughout this book I try to make this double move and to retain the power differentials and the fear and uncertainty that undergird life in Guatemala, without forgetting that people lead "normal" lives. Despite the fact that many Guatemalans live in extreme poverty (Jonas 1991), most people do go to work and school and church, formulate plans and see them through, march in protest and go shopping, hang out in parks, consume greasy Pollo Campero (fried chicken), and tell jokes, play games, listen to Madonna, dance the son , and watch B movies.

I did all those things, too (although my son dancing is barely serviceable), and I try to keep myself present in the following chapters, along with the other transnational power vectors that frame these debates within Guatemala. I work against my own erasure both by analyzing my problematic position as gringa, Lizard Queen, translator, and possible baby snatcher, and by deploying overt and possibly inappropriate tropes. My textual strategies of using the metaphors of Maya-hacker, Rigoberta Menchz as transvestite, and bodies that splatter are meant to remind you of the representational labor occurring, while they problematize categories like "Maya," "Guatemala," "identity," and "authenticity."

Finally, as my acknowledgments make clear, this book is a relational project and deeply partial, both in the sense of incomplete and extremely subjective. I have tried to be as respectful as possible of all of those who were so generous with their time and analyses, and I take full responsibility for all the errors and limitations here contained. Although anything I can give will

be hopelessly small in comparison to all I have received, I hope this book contributes to an always emerging project of waging peace in this constitutively wounded land.

A Map to Precede the Territory

The book folds around the themes of bodies and bodies politic, beginning with the vulnerable body of a North American woman hurt in a highland village and ending with the laboring body of the Mayan woman prosthetically supporting Guatemala's insertion into the global economy. I open with the transnational bodies politic expressed in relations of solidarity and counterinsurgency between the United States and Guatemala, and in succeeding chapters slowly head toward the individual body itselfa body stripped down, desiring, and marked by race, class, and gender. We get there by moving through discussions of body politics in the state and Mayan organizing to the hieroglyphic veil of clothing and the attempts of smutty jokes and the discourses of eugenics and mestizaje to penetrate it, to reach the body. Then we move back out to bodies politic through Mayan organizing and its relation with modernity and the cyberspatialized nation-state to the effects of transnational forces like UN Conventions and neoliberal economic packages.

In the second chapter I concentrate on the almost fatal beating of a North American tourist because of rumors that she had snatched a baby in order to sell its organs. I take this incident as a starting point to investigate my own position in the transnational flows that affect identifications in Quincentennial Guatemala and in the United States, exploring the relational term gringa , which means being somehow involved with Latin America. Guatemala's geographic and political positionas a site for human rights and solidarity activism, international sanctions, maquila (foreign-owned assembly plants) production, UN peacekeepers, and increasingly as a tourist destinationdeeply affected my fieldwork, and Guatemala's history of civil war has also politicized anthropological work there in ways different from more settled fieldsites, linking analysis to solidarity. In chapter 2, I interrogate these aspects of the field and the contradictions of trying to produce a critical and politically aware ethnography of the Guatemalan state when that state is in flux and when many Guatemalans identify gringas as baby-snatchers.

The organ-harvesting rumors and the various attempts to explain them condense issues central to this book: the production of meanings in a space overdetermined by violence and uncertainty, and the ubiquity of transcultural and transnational interactions for this account of identifications. Through critically investigating my own relation to the solidarity movement that first motivated my academic work, I develop the concept of fluidarity

as a way of thinking about Quincentennial Guatemalawhere "the pueblo " is heterogeneous and identities are not solid. Fluidarity is a practice and theory of identity-in-formation, aware of its own investments, the pleasures of intervention, and the erotics of relational subject-making. It is historically specific and knows that it is very hard to give up solid bodies, clear-cut enemies and friends, but that this may be the most responsible way to approach the current conjuncture in Guatemala.

Chapter 3 provides a brief history, focusing on both the state's institutional attempts to deal with the indigenous population and with the "piqata effect"how, despite the delegitimation of the war and rampant corruption, people turn to the state for sweets and as a site of struggle. I discuss the Ministry of Culture and Sports, founded with the civilian government in 1985, its role in the context of the Quincentennial, and the way officials there deploy the concept of "culture" as a commodifiable product, something to be seized hold of. For example, culture was described as a solution to Guatemala's disadvantageous economic positioning in the world system and as a central component in constructing a new, legitimate nation-state. In opposition to the traditionally held belief that the indigenous population was a hindrance to economic development that must be eradicated, I explore this emerging vision of the state vis-`-vis Mayan culture, which is now seen as a renewable, clean, "national" resource to be sold as tourist imagery and as material goods like "traditional" weavings. I suggest that this vision marks a shift toward the more governmental state that can support the ratification of ILO Convention 169 and the Accord on Indigenous Rights.

The historic shifts that the Culture Ministry tries to address have also opened a space for indigenous participation in the state, the subject of chapter 4, which explores the struggles to consolidate the Guatemalan Mayan Language Academy (ALMG) as a state-funded agency. The ALMG's mandate is to standardize the alphabets of the twenty-one Mayan languages, create materials for bilingual education, and promote the revitalization of traditional Mayan lifeways. I suggest that the ALMG activists are seizing hold of memories of community and "culture" as part of the process of being "community-bound," of heading toward a community based in new identifications and commitments. I am especially interested in the historical production of these activists as Mayan "middle men and middle women," people trained as teachers and catechists who have become leaders in the struggle for cultural rights. I focus on an historic moment when colonially inflected markings of subordination (hostile markings such as the Mayan languages, clothing, and religion) are being taken for empowering use in producing identifications.

Two days after Rigoberta Menchz won the Nobel Peace Prize, a friend asked if I'd heard the latest joke. "Why," she asked, "did Rigoberta really win the Nobel Prize? Because she's an indita desenvuelta! " (she's an articulate

little Indian, or a naked little Indian). Desenvuelta means both "articulate" and "well-spoken," and also "unwrapped"referring to taking off an indigenous woman's traditional skirt: in other words, Rigoberta had slept her way to the prize. Within a week I had heard this joke (and many others) several times from a wide range of people, ladino and Maya. Within a month I knew I had to write about it, because the joke condenses so many issues around identification, gender, language, and national identity in a transnational framework. Chapter 5 analyzes the responses to Rigoberta Menchz's Nobel Peace Prize through the prism of jokes, which foreground gender and sexuality as sites of ambivalence in identity formation and emphasize the uncanny effects of multiple boundary crossings. Mayan women's traje figures prominently in the jokes and marks a place of particular challenge to notions of ethnic-national identity. The highly polemical responses to the Peace Prize (the "positively hostile and cruel" content of these jokes) suggest that because representations of both Mayan-ness and Guatemalanness depend heavily on images of indigenous women in traje , and because Rigoberta Menchz who uses traje challenges many of the stereotypes of indigenous women, her image also challenges the naturalness of these identities. In exploring the mutual constitution of ethnicity and nationalism, I address the ways gender is mobilized to structure and give force to these emerging and multiply contested identities. The fascination with clothing leads me to read the jokes as situating Ms. Menchz as a sort of transvestite in Marjorie Garber's (1992) sense, as a marker of more general cultural anxieties. Ms. Menchz is not what she seems (a powerless Maya woman) and therefore rips at the seams that are meant to bind identities such as powerful, ladino, and masculine.

Chapter 6 further explores the social regulation of race, gender, and sexuality in Guatemalan ladino discourse about indigenous bodiesa sort of "biopolitical economy" that draws on a complex set of stereotypes, fantasies, ideals, notions of home, and eroticized imaginaries. Examining the book Guatemala: Linaje y Racismo (Lineage and Racism) by the Guatemalan anthropologist Marta Casaus Arzz in relation to my own interviews, I explore how gender and sexuality are constitutive of ladino discourses on "Indians." I pay special attention to two apparently contradictory notions of race and ethnicity. One is mestizaje (racial mixing), which proposes that differences between Indian and ladino are cultural, not genetic; ethnic, not racial. The other views difference as racial, leaning on notions of blood purity and "objective" phenotypic marks of difference. I suggest that these apparently opposed discourses are similar in that they both carry eugenic promises of progress through the social regulation of desire, both call on the body as proof, and both, by "racing" the body in different ways, simultaneously erase the constitutive gendering and sexualizing of those bodies.

In Quincentennial Guatemala, forms of information manipulation like those found in science fiction are changing the role of the Maya in relation to discourses of modernity, technology, and the imaginary bodies politic of cyberspace and the national community. In chapter 7 I explore how Mayan activists appropriate "modernity" in order to prove their appropriateness for the nation, and how state sectors respond to this strategy. I build on the way Mayan activists rename identity-positions as "Maya-K'iche'," "Maya-Kaqchikel," and so on, to develop the metaphor of the "Maya-hacker." This term, mixing the ethnic and the high-tech, attempts to capture the uncanny effects of Mayan efforts to undermine the colonial binary of identity that consigns the Indians to the premodern and defines ladinos as those with access to the modern in terms of language, technology, and knowledge. Historically, any indigenous person who spoke Spanish or held a desk job was redefined as ladino. But, by appropriating "modern" technology and knowledge while refusing to be appropriated to this redefinition, the Maya-hacker is, in Trinh Minh-ha's words, the "inappropriate (d) other" (Trinh 1986). I argue that this "inappropriate" presence on the national scene and in the state is creating ambivalent realignments of various identities and forcing a rethinking of the nation's future. But in chapter 7 I also explore how gender, often read as "tradition," prosthetically supports this political strategy.

Chapter 8 moves back out from the nation-state as the site of these struggles to the transnational terrain of international law as the site of complex interactions among the United Nations, the Guatemalan state, and local, national, and international indigenous organizations over the ILO's Convention 169. The Conventionwhich was ratified by the Guatemalan Congress in March 1995contains potentially radical provisions concerning self-determination, limited legal autonomy, and territorial rights for indigenous peoples. It stipulates indigenous participation in the development and implementation of national laws that affect them and requires national respect for derecho consuetudinario (customary law). The Convention also calls for recognition of the special importance and spiritual relationship that indigenous peoples have to the landhere understood as territorywhich will include lands they occupy or use in other ways.

The struggles surrounding ratification of Convention 169, including disseminating and discussing these provisions, are part of the processes of Quincentennial Guatemala that constitute identifications. These struggles in turn reveal deep fissures in the state itself, as some see the Convention threatening state sovereignty and the very existence of the Guatemalan nation, whereas othersincluding three Guatemalan presidentshave actively supported ratification. I will focus on the apparent contradictions of a racist state apparatus ratifying a juridical instrument that could potentially

redefine its entire relation to the governed. This is linked in turn to the question of why the ILO, member agency of the United Nations, an international organization deeply invested in territorially defined nation-states, is pushing a convention that contemplates nations without states and states without territorial boundaries.

The conclusion contextualizes struggles over Convention 169 and the contours of the more governmental state in a period that has been labeled "post-Fordist." Here I return to the role of the body in Guatemala's late capitalist body politics, suggesting that transnational power relationsfrom the ILO to World Bank structural adjustment to gringa anthropology to maquila productionare laying the groundwork for a new flexibility in national and ethnic incorporations. Not only may Mayan articulations of cultural identity be in the interests of national and multinational capital, but, simultaneously, these national and multinational regimes may form some of the conditions of possibility for Mayan identity formation and (in) corporation. This brings me back to the larger arguments in the book; that neither the state nor transnational capital is a monolithic power that always gets what it wants; that power works in multiply territorialized interstitial places, often through bleeding boundaries; and that ethnic, gender, and national identifications are produced through mutually constitutive and always contingent relationships.

"A finger in the wound" refers to these messy boundaries, their interpenetrations, and the lack of a coherent, seamless national or ethnic identity in Quincentennial Guatemala. Attempts to fix such identifications lean on the body and function as a sort of orthopedics, a way of articulating selves. But these attempts also fail, as constant appropriations unsettle these struggles to stabilize ethnic and national identities. Mayan, ladino, Guatemalan, gender, and other identifications are "community bound": they are headed toward a future and never fully finished community, and also bound together, constantly rearticulating those identifications.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Finger in the Wound by Diane M. Nelson Copyright © 1999 by Diane M. Nelson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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