Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Subverting Authenticity: Reinas Indígenas and the Guatemalan State, 1978

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2008-044

1527-1900

Betsy Konefal,

Latin American and Latino Studies

A photo of 22 young Mayas covered the front page of Guatemala’s daily El Gráfico on July 30, 1978, accompanied by an unexpected headline: “Reinas Indígenas [Indigenous Pageant Queens] Condemn This Year’s Folklore Festival.” As the pageant queens and supporters announced a boycott of the state-sponsored festival, they protested intensifying army violence against indigenous communities, referring explicitly to a recent army massacre of Q’eqchi’ Maya campesinos in the community of Panzós, Alta Verapaz. While the blood of “genuine Guatemalan indios,” as the protestors pointedly termed the Panzós victims, still soaked the ground, “all the . . . festivals . . . in supposed homage to the indio of Guatemala are unjustified . . . because in daily reality the right to life is not respected, [nor] the right to our ancestral lands, [nor the right] to our cultural practices without paternalism.”1The protestors’ confrontational declaration would have been intriguing under any circumstances, but considering the context of mounting government repression in 1978, its appearance in the press is stunning. Amid growing state violence against oppositional organizing, what was the significance of such a protest? Who were these young people, and how had they — coming from disparate communities and linguistic groups — become connected to one another?2 Why queens and pageants to protest state killings?3The Panzós massacre, a deadly marker in the chronology of state violence in Guatemala, represented a turning point in the country’s bloody civil war that began in the 1960s. Death squads had been targeting activist leaders well before the 1978 killings, but the massacre in Panzós ratcheted up tensions and gave state violence a decidedly ethnic cast.4 On May 29, 1978, hundreds of Q’eqchi’ campesinos had entered the Panzós town square to present a document to the mayor regarding land claims. In one of the first large-scale counterinsurgency assaults against Mayas, army soldiers fired into the crowd of men, women, and children, killing at least 35 and wounding dozens more. Within three years of the Panzós killings, racialized counterinsurgency practices that equated “Maya” and “subversive” would reach a level that the UN Truth Commission determined to be genocide.5Yet at the same time and in the same department of Alta Verapaz, the Guatemalan government maintained its indigenista tradition of folkloric homage to the nation’s Maya “soul,” most visibly in the national Folklore Festival held each July in the departmental seat of Cobán. The festival aimed to showcase the nation’s Mayan heritage, one folklorist explained, and to “keep watch over [velar] its authenticity.”6 As symbols of authentic Mayan identity (as judged by non-Mayan folklorists), indigenous women — and especially reinas indí-genas — played a central role in state indigenismo and in the annual festival. Since 1971, festival organizers had summoned local indigenous queens from across Guatemala to compete in the Folklore Festival’s centerpiece, a national competition for the title of Rabín Ahau.7 Through dress, language, and dance, contestants were called on to embody Mayanness for the nation. Government officials including the president typically attended the pageant. The Rabín Ahau was held up as the national representative of the indigenous “race,” embraced by the president himself.8In Guatemala, indigenismo had long involved a supposed valorization of the country’s pre-Columbian heritage, primarily through folklore and homages to long-dead Mayas, but the same sentiments did not necessarily extend to living Mayas themselves. Guatemalan officials were not alone in this — such incongruities underlay indigenismo everywhere — but in the late 1970s, discrepancies in attitudes toward past and present Mayas in Guatemala were extreme. Similar to other instances when repressive governments have professed to celebrate elements of the nation while in fact assaulting them, the very contradictions inher ent in state actions created a means of resistance. As Jennifer Schirmer writes of “motherist” movements in Latin America, the states’ “contradictory doctrine of at once valorizing and destroying the family . . . made [mothers’] resistance possible.”9 In Guatemala after the 1978 massacre of Q’eqchi’s, the state’s own celebration of Mayan folklore provided protestors with compelling language and imagery with which to denounce the crass inconsistencies in government actions. It was no accident that the protestors, too, positioned the gendered symbol of indigenous identity — Maya women in community-specific dress — as the focal point of their protest. The group set out their demands in the name of the indigenous communities the women as queens represented. Drawing on but contesting the state’s ideas of Mayan authenticity, they argued that the dead in Panzós were “genuine” Mayas and their “brothers.” They displayed Mayan identity through dress, yet protested against the state as they did so: several of the reinas wore Mayan clothing symbolic of mourning; one young man in traditional dress raised his clenched fist in the air.In the eyes of the military, the dead in Panzós had nothing to do with “genuine” Mayan heritage. Politicized campesinos in Panzós were not Mayas to be celebrated; officials charged instead that they were engañados [duped], the tools of leftist insurgents. The protest offers a snapshot, then, of contestation between a repressive state and Maya activists over issues of identity and injustice, both cultural and political. By staging their protest within the government-sanctioned space of Maya women’s pageantry, could these young people get away with confronting an abusive state? Could “authentic” activists, ironically, manage to subvert the state’s definition of lo auténtico?After learning of the protest in the pages of El Gráfico, I traveled through the Guatemalan highlands seeking out the queens and fellow protestors who had posed for the camera a quarter-century before. The newspaper article provided no names, but I began with the communities listed in the photo’s caption, eventually knocking on doors in 20 pueblos in the western highlands and the Verapaces to the northeast. With the help of people in each community, I identified 18 of the 22 protestors.10 I talked with 16 of those photographed and with dozens of others who had been involved about their decisions to protest and the historical moment captured in the image.The protestors were a diverse lot, not only geographically but politically. In 1978, these women and men had been teachers and students, Catholic Action catechists, literacy workers and radio broadcasters, campesino leaders, and young people who would become revolutionary combatants and supporters. Such an array of organizing experiences makes the group difficult to place within scholarly understandings of the civil war period. In particular, the group’s union of economic and political demands with cultural rights claims stands out and belies a tidy differentiation between them.11 The protest is important, I find, not because it succeeded in its aims (it did not), but because it reveals a moment when pan-Maya organizing in Guatemala was relatively new and qualitatively different from what reemerged in the aftermath of genocide. During the 1990s peace process, culturally focused demands by Mayas became abstracted from broader social justice claims. Many Mayas distanced themselves from social struggles, even their own, and a history of political activism became taboo. We learn from the queens’ protest that in the 1970s things had been quite different. Before the terrible effects of violence reshaped relations among Mayas, culture was not apolitical. “Indigenous activism” was not always or only about culture.The young people involved in the 1978 protest were not representative of most Mayas in Guatemala. Spanish-speaking and literate, many of them a step away from subsistence agriculture, and engaged in at least this instance of pan-community activism, they had access to schools and time to dedicate to political struggles. Although a minority, their numbers grew steadily in the 1970s, and much of the responsibility for this lay with the Catholic Church. During the previous two decades, parish priests had set up schools for Mayas in towns all over the highlands.12 They directed promising students, often with scholarships, to regional seminaries and secondary schools. Among the most important of these were two schools exclusively for indigenous students: the Instituto Indígena Santiago for boys and its sister school for girls, the Instituto Indígena Nuestra Señora del Socorro. Both of these schools, attended by young Mayas from across Guatemala, generated among students new ideas about indigenous identity, rights, and justice.Parish priests, many of them inspired by liberation theology, simultaneously offered leadership training in indigenous communities. They established Mayan-language radio schools with literacy programs run by young Maya catechists. Priests helped set up agricultural cooperatives and credit unions even in small communities, again staffed by young Mayas.13 Indigenous campesinos, catechists, and students from different areas became linked to each other through church-sponsored organizing, agrarian movements, and secondary schools. Growing numbers of activists came to see themselves as not only rooted in their communities but part of a larger pan-Maya community, a pueblo indígena in Guatemala.14Such politicization took shape while a leftist guerrilla movement developed in the highlands. In this context, two tendencies among activist Mayas emerged: those known as culturalistas emphasized questions of indigenous identity and “race,” focusing on the needs and demands of “la raza maya.” Clasistas tended toward class-based organizing with ladinos (non-Mayas). Yet close attention to activists’ ideas and efforts shows that such distinctions obscure the nature of organizing in the 1970s. In practice, culturalista demands were seldom divorced from issues of social and political justice, and some culturalistas called for revolutionary change. Mayas involved with class-based organizing (through the Comité de Unidad Campesina or CUC, trade unions, or guerrilla organizations) did not see these efforts as wholly abstracted from ethnicity. Many, like clasistas in the 1978 protest under discussion here, took part in efforts to revitalize Mayan culture.15 As I will show, in reina indígena pageants, which were embraced by culturalistas and clasistas alike, the queen contestants’ very words wedded concerns about ethnic identity, land, and violence. Activists of different types disagreed about strategy and priorities in the 1970s; some felt strongly that Mayas could not achieve justice within Marxist movements that subordinated ethnicity to class struggle. Yet such differences did not preclude discussions among activist Mayas of different persuasions or informal alliances in what many saw as collective defense of the pueblo indígena. In July 1978, differences of opinion about ethnicity and class did not preclude queens and campesino leaders, culturalistas, and revolutionaries from standing before the same camera, together opposing a manipulative and violent state.16Over the course of the 1970s, reina indígena pageants and the women who competed in them became part of broader processes of highland politicization and a means by which activists, mostly young men, could publicly convey new ideas about Mayan identity and rights. Maya women had long served as visual markers of indigenous identity in Guatemala, weaving and wearing huipiles (blouses), skirts, and elaborate hair wraps whose designs and colors signify culture, place, and, in the eyes of the world, nation. Within Guatemala, each weaving pattern is recognized as specific to a given locale, and a woman wearing traditional clothing (traje) is identifiable not only as indigenous but as a member of a certain community. Since most men no longer wear traditional dress, men and indigenous communities as a whole depend on Maya women to produce and display the symbols that mark them all as indigenous.17 The indigenous queen’s symbolic role was even more explicit: as a chosen representative of her community, she embodied local identity. What that meant — what she stood for — was undergoing important change in the 1970s.There are two distinct kinds of reina indígena contests in Guatemala: local pageants, some of which began in the 1930s, and the national Rabín Ahau pageant, established in 1971. Despite similarities between local and national contest formats, community reina indígena pageants were independent affairs, usually held during annual festivals in honor of a local patron saint. Before the establishment of reina indígena contests, even towns with indigenous majority populations typically had ladina beauty queens presiding over local fairs. To counter exclusion from such festivals in the 1930s, Mayas fought for the establishment of their own queen pageants in towns such as Cobán and Quetzaltenango, though ladino mayors and judges typically officiated, and indigenous reinas in these years adopted some of the European-style adornments of ladina queens.18 Mayas did not, to my knowledge, push for inclusion in ladina contests, but instead advocated parallel, racially separate indigenous pageants, which exist to this day. These gave an indigenous representative a spot beside the ladina queen (or behind her, in a community parade). Soon common even in small highland municipalities, the pageants staged a community’s indigenous identity as separate and distinct from ladino identity.19Community reina indígena pageants varied somewhat from place to place, but most shared a basic structure. Unmarried Maya women could take part, sponsored by a community group or institution. Contests were held in a town’s central plaza or theater, which was set up with a stage, microphone, and marimba and decorated with symbolic renderings of the Mayan past. The contests drew large crowds and garnered press coverage. People speak nostalgically of plazas overflowing with spectators and recall the festive feel of the nights.20The pageants would begin with each contestant making her way through the crowd amid clouds of incense. Wearing ceremonial dress, each young woman would move forward slowly to the sound of marimba, carrying a basket loaded with goods symbolic of her pueblo and the fecundity of the land, or with her head bent and arms clasped behind her, dancing a traditional dance called the son. The final component of the pageant, and the one that changed most significantly in the 1970s, involved a speech by each candidate given first in her maternal language and then in Spanish. It was a unique and likely often daunting opportunity for women to speak before an entire community. Spectators cheered on their favorites and hissed at the less articulate or those unable to speak Spanish well. Successful speeches have been described as highly poetic, full of symbolism, and delivered with passion.At issue even in local reina indígena pageants was whether a contestant represented the community and la raza — “the race” as locally understood — with authenticity. Not surprisingly, in the politicized 1970s this could be a contentious subject. Activist Mayas, culturalistas and clasistas alike, made local reina indígena pageants a focal point of their cultural revitalization efforts, a means to introduce new ideas and foster pride in la raza. Activists demanded and won changes in the events. Struggling with ladino officials, they first pressed for equality with ladina queens in terms of prize money and titles.21 Soon they focused on questions of symbolism and the meaning of “authenticity.” What would be represented in the contests? Would Mayas or ladino “experts” plan and judge the events? In community after community in the late 1970s, activists gained control of the pageants and designed contests that they considered to be more culturally appropriate.At the same time, themes of rights and justice made their way into some queens’ speeches alongside frequent references to a broad pan-Maya identity. As Greg Grandin notes, the tomb of Thelma Beatriz Quixtán Argueta, the 1970 reina indígena of Quetzaltenango who died shortly after being named queen, is inscribed with the epitaph, “We have been beaten and humiliated, but the race was never defeated.”22 Perhaps not coincidentally, Quixtán, the 36th indigenous queen of Quetzaltenango, was shown in a commemorative history of the contests not in a formal portrait, but speaking into a radio station’s microphone, addressing the pageant’s audience in the theatre and beyond its walls.23 In a similar image of the 1978 Quetzaltenango reina (figure 2), the photographer and his newspaper readers again seem to have been interested in the queen as speechmaker. The image also reflects changing ideas about authenticity: in 1978 the queen cast aside the elaborate crowns, collars, and flowing capes that had adorned “Europeanized” indigenous queens of earlier decades.24 By 1979, the indigenous representative was no longer called “reina” but was renamed U-mial Tinimit, “Daughter of the Pueblo” in K’iche’.25In a surprising number of communities, activists went beyond symbolic changes and managed to appropriate reina indígena contests for political ends, as stages for the expression of oppositional discourses. Leftist community groups growing at the time sponsored queen candidates and shaped pageant speeches. Not all contestants’ speeches in the 1970s, or even a majority, could be construed as voicing resistance. But opposition groups could and did put forward contestants who protested racial discrimination, poverty, and exploitation, and, increasingly, state violence. A new type of discourse took its place alongside traditional speeches. The words of activist-sponsored contestants were poetic, as tradition dictated, but politically charged as well.One young K’iche’ Maya woman, a student at the Instituto Indígena Nuestra Señora del Socorro and reina indígena of Quetzaltenango in 1973, provides an example. In her farewell speech in 1974, the reina indígena intertwined references to Maya blood lineage with explicit calls for economic justice. In a reference to class conflict in and beyond indigenous communities, she called for an end to economic exploitation of campesino “brothers,” whether by “foreigners” (meaning non-Mayas) or fellow members of la raza:Another K’iche’ reina from San Sebastián, Retalhuleu, who later participated in the 1978 protest, demanded in a 1977 speech that Mayas recognize their own worth.27 She called for pan-Maya unity in Guatemala and for indigenous people to rise up together in common political cause: “Our pueblo suffers so much exploitation, . . . so much violence,” she told a reporter. “My pueblo will only move forward by unifying, because in unity is strength.” Like many other reinas of the 1970s would do, the San Sebastián queen drew on the sacred K’iche’ account of origin and conquest, the Popul Vuh: “I exhort . . . the pueblo indígena . . . of Guatemala,” she said, “to take up the counsel of our ancestors, ‘may not one nor two be left behind, may all rise up together.’”28The idea of pan-indigenous unity in Guatemala developed as activists from different areas were in fact coming together. By 1974, a newly formed Coordinadora Indígena Nacional brought together activists — culturalistas and clasistas — for meetings and workshops. A devastating earthquake in 1976 connected activists to each other as young people from distant communities worked together in relief efforts. In 1977, indigenous students founded the periodical Ixim: Notas Indígenas as a means of pan-community activism and communication. That same year, a strike by miners from Ixtahuacán, mostly Mayas, drew the attention of local organizers all along Guatemala’s Pan-American Highway. Soon the nationwide campesino organization Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC) was founded, linking local agrarian activists, both Mayas and ladinos, to each other and to national opposition movements.In these same years, reinas indígenas became involved in pan-community organizing. Beyond sponsoring their own candidates, local Maya organizers invited reinas and their supporters from other municipalities to their pageants. Sometimes visiting reinas spoke on stage about experiences in their own communities. Queens and their sponsoring groups met in regional meetings planned by indigenous students and funded by the Catholic Church, and organizers offered workshops for the women and supporters, inviting teachers and other professionals to take part. Adrián Inés Chávez, an indigenous linguist and translator of the Popul Vuh, was an influential figure in these efforts. He traveled to communities far and wide to introduce young people to the text, which helps explain its quotation in many speeches.As connections among pan-community activists grew, reina indígena pageants became a convenient place for people from different areas to get together. And with the growth of highland mobilization in its many forms came increasing state repression. By the late 1970s, few places remained for students or campesino organizers to meet. Fairs and pageants, held throughout the year on local community patron saints’ days, could provide cover. At the same time, pageants were cultural and gendered events (and therefore deemed nonpolitical) so they represented a relatively safe means by which activists could speak out. As one organizer explained, “the reina indígena [pageants] were a space we appropriated for political action. We were using the girls [señoritas], we have to admit that. But there were no alternatives left.”29 When the military labeled most other forms of activism “subversive,” indigenous queen contestants like those in the 1978 protest became activists’ symbolic spokeswomen.Consequently, queens like those quoted above delivered speeches that advocated mobilization. A few urged their listeners not only to rise up, but to join a class struggle that united them in common effort with poor ladinos. A contestant in the 1978 Quetzaltenango pageant, sponsored by the activist group Acción Juveníl, embraced class struggle and condemned the racial politics that divided indigenous and ladino campesinos.30 With a leftist insurgency growing in strength, her speech was practically a call to arms.Certainly not all pageant spectators would have agreed with the sentiment she and others like her voiced. Regarding the contestant from Acción Juveníl (who did not win the contest), one Maya observer commented that she seemed “to forget that she was participating in an indigenous event, . . . [speaking] with resentment against her Indian brothers.”31 Similarly, members of other communities, Mayas among them, sometimes reacted negatively when queens advanced an unwelcome political opinion or overstepped the bounds of appropriate speech. Critics charged that by such displays reinas rendered themselves not representative, but inauthentic. These moments of local contestation over authenticity offer an important message: radicalized speeches represented only one facet of a complex story, as intensifying violence deepened divisions within indigenous communities.32Politicized pageants raise an obvious question: Were the young women who gave voice to oppositional politics being used by activists, as the organizer suggests above? (In interviews, he referred to reinas not only as señoritas but also patojas, “little girls.”) Queens could be as young as 15, but most were a few years older, sometimes even 20 or 21. Many outspoken queens had experience in community groups and in contemporary newspaper interviews seemed quite savvy. Yet women’s roles as activists were and are less visible than men’s. As Grandin observes of activism by Q’eqchi’ women in Alta Verapaz, “Women’s actions tended to be more covert, as planters, military commissioners, and the like were less likely to recognize them as agitators than they were men.”33 One woman active in the 1970s noted an invisibility that made her organizing possible: “As an indigenous woman, I lived a clandestine life.”34Gender ideologies that allowed women’s activism to go unseen acted in concert with both local cultural practices and indigenista zeal for folklore to further render queens apolitical. Of course, the protestors (like the Q’eqchi’ woman above) leaned on those very understandings to create a space for political activism. The protest participants I spoke with, women and men, were aware that queens’ symbolism gave all of them room to speak out. Interviews suggest, moreover, that the women knowingly and willingly lent their “authenticity” to the group.35 Consider the composition of their photo, taken by one of the organizers. Nearly all of the reinas, framed by their male supporters, wore solemn and composed expressions. The men’s mannerisms were strikingly different: two smiled as they exchanged glances in the back row, another grinned with his fist clenched. The single woman without a serious expression (in the center) had long been challenging gendered norms as a land activist in her community. Yet the more composed women, their expressions dutiful markers of indigeneity, seem to authenticate both her and the male activists.Given these gendered stereotypes, politicized speeches by queens sometimes aroused suspicion and accusations that their words were not their own. It is true that the women typically prepared speeches in consultation with their sponsors, and their speeches generally reflected sponsors’ aims. There is also remarkable similarity in the themes voiced by reinas, which suggests that pan-community and church-based organizing efforts had significant effects. Yet it is not safe to assume that the messages delivered by reinas were simply memorized, or that the women did not take ownership of them. A majority of the reinas I spoke with insisted that they were the ones to give voice to the words on paper.What the women as reinas actually did was not wholly determined by their assigned role, their sponsors, or any given script. Those I interviewed accepted rather than challenged their position as symbolic queens, but several of them used that position in surprising ways. While some of the women limited their participation (or it was limited for them by family or local authorities) to speaking with relative caution on the pageant stage, others went beyond what might have been scripted to graphically protest racism and terror. One reina in the 1978 protest, for example, stood before a plaza filled with spectators shortly after the Panzós massacre. With an intensity that was remembered by another participant 25 years later, she paid tribute to the dead by internalizing and giving voice to their suffering: “Hermanos de Panzós,” she said, “su sangre la tenemos en la garganta [Brothers of Panzós, your blood is in our throats].”36 Young women like her pushed the boundaries of what the reina indígena stood for and conveyed to the community and the state.As local contests became more politicized, folklorists and successive Guatemalan military governments adopted the local pageant format as their own, staging a reina indígena pageant at the national level for the first time in 1971. The Rabín Ahau contest grew out of an indigenista folklore movement in Cobán. The National Folklore Festival of which it became a part had been created two years earlier by Cóban resident Marco Aurelio Alonzo, a ladino teacher and folklore promoter. Alonzo organized the festival to celebrate Guatemala’s Mayan heritage, he explains, and save it from “inevitable” decline and corruption.37 Soon other folklorists took control of the festival, including the wife of soon-to-be-president General Kjell Laugerud García. Along with the change in organizers came the new highlight of the festival, the contest for Rabín Ahau.The National Folklore Festival, while a Cobán-area inspiration, fit perfectly into the government’s symbolic efforts to forge a nation of the fragments within Guatemala’s borders, a modern nation of guatemaltecos, but one with a glorious Mayan heritage. State indigenismo celebrated a “Day of the Indian” and paid homage to the conquest-era K’iche’ leader Tecún Umán.38 The selection of a national indigenous queen was a natural addition, an opportunity to personify, for Guatemalans and tourists, the “indigenous spirit” of Guatemala.39State officials became enthusiastic patrons of the Rabín Ahau contest. Local reinas indígenas were called to the national competition from towns all over the highlands, sometimes forced to attend by local ladino mayors. The army press office printed pageant brochures. Presidents gave speeches and posed for the camera with queens. During his presidency (1978 – 82), General Romeo Lucas García, a Cobánarea landowner, attended and reportedly even paid for the festival himself.40 Appearing in the 1981 official Folklore Festival program, a captioned photo shows a smiling Lucas García, president during some of the deadliest years of counterinsurgency in the indigenous highlands, “contentedly” embracing a Rabín Ahau contestant.41Like the local reina indígena pageants, the Rabín Ahau contest has since its beginning been racially segregated from the national, exclusively ladina Miss Guatemala pageant.42 Like her local counterparts, the national Rabín Ahau was understood as a symbol not of beauty but of Mayanness. A Folklore Festival organizer explained that the Rabín Ahau was not just another beauty pageant, “not the same as the election of a ladina queen, chosen for her physical beauty. The Rabín Ahau,” he insisted, “is chosen for the way she expresses her identity, manifested by . . . her maternal language, . . . the purity of her traje . . ., and her . . .