Concurrent with these intellectual and political movements, within Guatemala a repositioning also occurred in the wake of the end of 300 years of Spanish colonization. When General Carrera created the Republic of Guatemala in 1847, Juan Gavarrete transcribed Historia de la Provincia de San Vicente y Chiapas y Guatemala, by Ximénez. Son of the wealthy notary Juan Francisco Gavarrete y Narváez, this Creole antiquarian and historian inserted himself into the political aims of modernity. Interested in recovering a past that would serve to justify the present new aim, Gavarrete dedicated himself to compiling unknown colonial texts. His main concern was to save them, then conserve them, and if possible distribute them. This was a fundamental part of the rewriting of the foundational discourse.
In 1872, in the “Foreword” for a general history to be edited under the auspices of the Economic Society of the Republic of Guatemala, Gavarrete makes an exposition about the necessity of writing the first history of the country, just as had been done by “civilized countries” and other republics that had become independent (l). The agenda of the new historical discourse should open with “recollections recorded by natives who learned to write after the conquest,” which is to say, the Popol Wuj (2). The precolonial past is mentioned as the Quiché Kingdom, which qualifies it as a nation. Its “myths and historical memories” are presented as the “NATIONAL BOOK, SACRED BOOK or COMMUNITY BOOK, meaning the POPOL-BUJ” (3). With this approach, the Mayan past receives important recognition, but at the same time it is lumped into the national agenda hegemonized by Creoles. It is not an assimilation that respects the integrity of the values of the native culture, but rather it absorbs them, stripping them of their philosophical and religious cores. This approach assimilates K’iche’-Mayan epistemology within the Christian one, which constitutes a strategy of making the former disappear, given that the validating reference is Western, not native. This recognition is gained only to the degree to which it resembles the paradigm brought by colonizers and perpetuated by the Creole-ladino elite, not by its own distinct values.
In Guatemala, in 1927, J. Antonio Villacorta and Flavio Rodas published Manuscrito de Chichicastenango (Popol-Buj). Villacorta was a historian, anthropologist, linguist, and paleographer, who also had a turn in the administration of the state as Minister of Culture during the government of General Jorge Ubico (1913–44). Flavio Rodas, native of Chichicastenango, was familiar with K’iche’ vocabulary, but in Edmonson’s judgment had serious grammatical limitations (1971: x). This was the second bilingual edition of the Popol Wuj, and in it the authors used a new orthography, rephoneticizing the text to adapt it to modern Castilian prosody. Nevertheless, the element of this version that had the most impact was the theme of the native speaker as competent authority to handle the language of the Ximénez manuscript. From here onward, the legitimate voice is to be that of the native. But it was the open debate over this edition that started the concern over fidelity to the original K’iche’ text.
This bilingual edition marks the start of the indigenist phase of Popol Wuj studies, which coincides with indigenism as a movement that opened the way in the intellectual climate of Central America during the 1920s and 1930s. This movement sought a national inheritance for Guatemala, and the Popol Wuj fit this ambition very well because it recovered a “soul” that had sunk deep into the past. The Prehistoria e historia antigua de Guatemala that Antonio Villacorta published in 1938 is along these lines. But at the same time, this interest in a “glorious” indigenous past became disconnected from the reality of the natives of the twentieth century. For Villacorta, and in general Guatemalan indigenism, the indigenous reality belonged to a pre-Columbian past and did not have any projection into contemporary history. Therefore, the Popol Wuj was read as a “classical text” – that is, something of interest and competence to intellectuals.
Adrián Recinos, another of the founding members of the Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, published for the first time in 1947 what has been the most widely distributed translation within the Spanish language. He had been working on it for many years, obtaining the highest fidelity with the meaning of the manuscript. Recinos, knowing that in 1928 Walther Lehmann had rediscovered the bilingual manuscript of Father Ximénez (Schultze Jena, 1944: iv), visited the Newberry Library. There he worked with the Ximénez original and put aside the Brasseur version, avoiding following in the footsteps of Noah Eliécer Pohorilles (1913), Georges Raynaud (1925), and Villacorta y Rodas (1927).
This translation, indigenist in philosophy and documented academically in his implementation, was very important because it allowed a wide distribution of the text among the intellectual community and middle-class Creoles and ladinos, who in general were strongly racist in Guatemala. The elegant prose of Recinos gave access to the Popol Wuj locally in the same way that the translation into French (Brasseur, 1861; Raynaud, 1925) and German (Pohorilles, 1913; Schultze Jena, 1944) had done in Europe. It must also be noted that the wide impact that this work had both within and outside of Guatemala is due also to the important work of distribution undertaken by the Fondo de Cultura Económica de México. This publisher incorporated the text, which was previously virtually unknown to the entire continent, in a deliberate effort to promote a sense of national, regional, and Latin American cultural identity.
However, even in this era of modernity, marked by scientific discourse and indigenism, many of the contradictions and ambiguities that had arisen during Spanish colonialism persisted.
Globalization versus Mayan Resurgence
“Globalization” spans from the height of the Cold War to the present. Among the K’iche’ this period of history has continued to be very turbulent and tragic time. There was a departure from the historical, sociological, and judicial discussion that characterized the governing periods of Juan José Arévalo (1944–50) and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán (1951–4), who had been active participants in the implementation of fairer policies with the indigenous people, and the region slipped directly into civil war. The dictatorship of Coronel Castillo Armas launched a strategy of isolation and repression of the natives, using as excuses the paradoxical outcome of the indigenist policies of the Arévalo and Arbenez governments and the simplistic arguments of Cold War doctrines imported directly from the army and ultraconservative sectors. Between 1960 and 1980 these elites also developed a policy of appropriating land and exploiting indigenous workers that progressively transformed itself into a campaign of extermination perpetrated by the elite and the army, both predominately ladino.
The failure to recognize native rights generated responses from indigenous communities by diverse political groups, generally leftist, various churches (some postconciliar sectors of the Catholic Church and some liberal Protestant churches), and some activist groups with indigenous roots. From this movement guerrilla groups arose – never very numerous – Grupos de Base (a Catholic-inspired organization, with much influence from liberation theology), social movements and unions (mostly on plantations and farms), and groups for the recovery of language and traditions.
The repression led by the army against this widespread movement was called a “civil war” despite the fact that the vast majority of those killed or missing were unarmed civilians. In fact it was an ethnic war against natives, especially the K’iche’ (83 percent of the victims from 1962–96 were Mayans, and of those almost 50 percent were K’iche’, according to a report from Proyecto Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica). The worst period was under the dictatorship of General Efraín Ríos Montt, from 1982–3, with genocide