Indigenous Apostles: Maya Catholic Catechists Working the Word in Highland Chiapas. (Studies in World Christianity & Interreligious Relations)

Indigenous Apostles

This is No. 46 of Studies in World Christianity and Interreligious Relations. The Studies are a continuation of the Church and Theology in Context series. The Studies are published by the Foundation for Studies in World Christianity and Interreligious Relations in collaboration with the Nijmegen Institute for Mission Studies and the Chair of World Christianity and Interreligious Relations at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The aim of the Studies is to publish scholarly works on Christianity and other religions, from the perspective of interactions within them and between them. The Studies are peer-reviewed. General editor: Frans Wijsen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Editorial board: Michael Amaladoss, Chennai, India. Francis Clooney, Cambridge, United States of America. Diego Irarrazaval, Santiago, Chile. Viggo Mortensen, Aarhus, Denmark. Robert Schreiter, Chicago, United States of America. Abdulkader Tayob, Cape Town, South Africa. Eric Venbrux, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Manuscripts for consideration can be sent to Frans Wijsen, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Indigenous Apostles Maya Catholic Catechists Working the Word in Highland Chiapas

Ruth J. Chojnacki

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2872-2 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2873-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

In grateful memory of my Mother and Father and with admiration and gratitude for all who practice the Word of God in Santa Maria Magdalenas

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Introduction

Introduction

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

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Orthographic Note

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Introduction

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Chapter 1: Contexts and Conversion Origins of an Ecclesial Cargo

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Chapter 2: Constructing Highland Mission Proposals and Problematics

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Chapter 3: Position and Place Church, State, and Mission on the Ground

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Chapter 4: Proclaiming Religion, Reclaiming Land History, Cognition and Religious Change

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Chapter 5: Working the Word Constructing a Tzotzil Maya Theology

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Chapter 6: Decolonizing the Saints From Myth to History

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Chapter 7: Epilogue Doing What the Apostles Did

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Bibliography

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Index of Names

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Introduction

Introduction

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Acknowledgements

This book owes its existence to the generosity of the catechists and Catholic community of Santa Maria Magdalenas. Their engagement of the new age of globalization with the power of Christian faith showed me the face of the world church. Whatever intellectual light this study sheds owes substantially to Jonathan Z. Smith, distinguished scholar of religion at the University of Chicago. Other Chicago scholars – theologians Anne E. Carr and Kathryn E. Tanner and. Mexican historian Claudio Lomnitz – encouraged me by word and scholarly example. Dartmouth Mayanist John Watanabe generously critiqued every page I wrote. The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and the Office for World Mission of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee opened the door to Chiapas for me. Bishop Samuel Ruiz García and the pastoral agents of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas extended extraordinary hospitality in the midst of war and peace negotiations. So many friends supported me in countless ways in Chiapas. At terrible risk of overlooking any in naming some, I am especially grateful for insights and companionship to the late Andrés Aubry, Hrna. Clemen Becerra, George Collier, Dra. Margarita Herrera, Hrna. Luci Jiménez, la familia Ruiz Martinez, Charlene Floyd, Padre Eduardo García, Pati Gómez, the late Angélica Inda, Christine Kovic, Diane, Jan and Jacob Rus, Sr. Giulli Zobelein and colleagues in the Centro de Derechos Humanos, “Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.” Family, friends, and fellow scholars here at home patiently stood by me as I wrote. Abena Apea, Mary Finger and Sheri Lee at DePaul University gave me time and assistance to complete the manuscript. Robert Schreiter and Frans Wijsen generously enabled its publication. Cary Tucker could not have dreamed that marriage entailed proofreading and indexing. I am grateful for his unstinting labor on these pages and for so much else outside of them

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Introduction

Introduction

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Orthographic Note

Spanish language words are italicized in this study except in cases where they have been accepted as loan words into English and included as such in the American Heritage Dictionary. In lieu of a glossary, all words and terms which have specific meaning in Highland Chiapas and/or for its inhabitants are defined within the text; these definitions are amplified in the footnotes. Tzotzil Maya words are accompanied by their Spanish and English equivalents in both text and footnotes. I have generally followed the spelling for these words given by Robert M. Laughlin, The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán. Definitions have been verified with this reference. I have adopted the convention of pluralizing the names of Highland Maya linguistic groups following the English, rather than Spanish, form: thus, Tzotzils, Tzeltals, rather than Tzotzils, Tzeltales, etc. Indian and Ladino are capitalized when used as nouns, but not when uses as adjectives. As is customary in Chiapas, in this study the word “indigenous” is synonomous with both the noun Indian and adjective indian. I relied on transcriptions and translation of tape recordings of Tzotzil homilies into Spanish by native Chamula assistants. The Tzotzil spoken in Magdalenas varies somewhat from their dialect, but not to a degree of mutual incomprehension. In the footnotes, references to field transcripts are denoted FT, to field notes FN. In both of these cases, dates of actual recording follow.

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Introduction

Introduction

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Introduction

This field-driven study tells the story of conversion to Catholicism and birth of new ecclesial community with the arrival of Vatican II mission in Santa Maria Magdalenas, a Tzotzil-speaking village in Mexico’s Maya highlands. In the southeastern frontier state of Chiapas, the nation’s move onto the global economic stage in the last third of the last century drove young Magdaleneros to search for alternatives to peonage. A few eagerly seized upon invitation from the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas to become catechists. Their ensuing critique of the close articulation of traditional Maya ritual practice and the highland’s near-feudal political economy proved definitive in both spheres. Exercising newly-acquired biblical literacy, they upended the tradition of their fathers – costumbre – and claimed expropriated ancestral land as their own. In this dialectical religious passage, they founded a wholly Tzotzil Maya Christian community and constructed a distinctive peasant theology in communion with the world Catholic Church. Within the vast collection of Catholic theological and biblical studies arising from Latin American liberation, inculturation, and ecclesiological thought and practice, works addressing the Mexican church, the second largest in the world, are arguably underrepresented. More to the point, Mexico’s highland Maya remain almost theologically unnoticed as they engage in the most significant transformations of local religious practice since the Spanish Conquest. This case study responds to this lacuna. It also invites scholars of religion and theologians to consider everyday religious practice by countless remote small-scale communities in regions like highland Chiapas as an indispensable datum for understanding the current explosion of Christianity in the South. I first encountered the catechists of Magdalenas during a summer ministry education field placement with the Human Rights Center, “Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas,” then housed in the curia of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. The obvious authority of these young men as they directed openair processions into church at the fiesta of Santa Maria Magdalenas immediately intrigued me, a guest of the parish pastoral team. This was so especially because I also observed elders holding traditional bastones (staffs) of Maya authority passively surveying the scene from the opposite side of the plaza, mere spectators at the annual celebration of the village patroness. My dissertation proposal in religion and culture outlined a plan to investigate this apparent generational divide. But it also asked; Who were these young men? How did they come to lead the Catholic community in this

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Introduction

ancient Tzotzil Maya pueblo? Why did these profoundly impoverished peasants so readily donate time and energy to liturgical celebrations far from corn and coffee fields on which their very survival depends? The Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago approved a doctoral project addressing these questions under the direction of a founding scholar in the academic study of religion. The discipline arose, in part, to obviate theological bias in the study of religion and my project seeks to comply. But, given its questions, the scholarly adequacy of my investigation required critical readings by theologians and anthropologists of Mesoamerica as well. This study, then, is necessarily interdisciplinary, engaging theory in the study of religion, anthropology, and other social sciences as well as aspects of contemporary theology. Despite historic and continuing missionary contributions to (and participation in) anthropology, mistrust of Christian mission within the discipline is the stuff of academic legend. Indeed, I witnessed its unfortunate effects on relationships between pastoral agents and Mayanists during my time in Chiapas. Contributing to mutual exchange among these actors became another goal.

MAP 1: Chiapas encompasses 28,700 square miles on Mexico’s southeastern frontier (the size of The Netherlands and Belgium combined). The borders of the municipios (townships) of Larrainzar and Chenalho’, the subregion of this study, touch the western- and eastern-most edges of the Tzotzil Maya linguistic zone.

Introduction

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Finally, this account shows indigenous Catholic leaders to be powerful agents in their own evangelization and in the unfolding of its inevitable socio-cultural, economic, and political consequences. The transformative power of their faith on the ground constitutes the core of my argument. Overview in Context The 1994 New Year’s Day uprising by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas unleashed a flood of socio-political analysis in Mexico and around the world. The remaking of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the image of the Maya majority under Bishop Samuel Ruiz García figures importantly, though not always accurately, in this literature. Bishop Ruiz would undoubtedly name the nearly 8,000 indigenous catechists trained during his episcopate (1959-1999) as principal agents in this reinvention of both local church and Maya society. At the outset of my field work in 1993, the ecclesial communities they led in the diocese’s Tzotzil pastoral “zone” (one of seven) embraced nearly 70% of 200,000 inhabitants (Informe Ad Limina 1988-93). Under the Spanish crown, tutelage facilitated by “reduction” of secularly dispersed Maya settlements to clerically dominated pueblos shaped mission in Chiapas as in most of Latin America. Missionaries and colonial administrators alike considered its natives legally and theologically minores, lacking reason. Today, new Maya Catholic communities are reconstructing both religious ritual and economic production as they repossess their ancestral territories. World systems, neo-marxist, and post-colonial political-economic and social theorizing offer leads to interpretation of these processes. But by themselves they do not account for strategic, not simply default, decision by substantial communities of highland Maya to confront the inescapable and inevitably divisive assault of a globalizing political-economy on their world by yet another course: self-conscious revitalization of collective quests for autonomy in ancestral places. The rubrics “closed corporate community” and “regions of refuge” framed anthropological discussion of the Mexican highlands into the late 1960s. Given current Maya engagement with the global market, new infrastructure and technology, and, not least, political struggle echoing globally, small-scale peasant community anthropologists once regarded as virtually hermetic are ever more porous. The surprise EZLN revolt made Mexico’s Maya players in the nation’s ambiguous late-twentieth century democratic opening and raised the profile of the hemisphere’s native peoples on the international stage (and the World Wide Web). Tzotzils, Tzeltals and members of Chiapas’ other Maya groups

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Introduction

today participate in local, national and international socio-political networks, pan-indigenous movements, and the global flow of migrant labor. Modern Maya struggle for social-cultural freedom is as old as what Nancy Farriss calls “the collective enterprise of survival” in the wake of the Conquest (1528 in the Maya highlands). Following Mexican independence (1821), Tzotzil Maya maneuvered within colonial confines to maintain relative autonomy through costumbre, a constellation of religious and socialcultural practices imbued with Spanish Catholicism but revered as ordered by the ancestors and enforced by community elders. Costumbre – a type of invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) – accounts in large part for the endurance of highland Maya identity into the twenty-first century. In Chiapas, its ritual ingenuity and cosmological complexity manifest creative intellectual engagement with modern Maya life under intensely caste-conscious domination by mixed race elites (called “mestizos” elsewhere in Mexico, but “ladinos” in Chiapas). In Tzotzil Maya, cargo service to the saints is abtel – work – to please the divinized patron(ess) who upholds their local world but also threatens it with her wrath. Obligatory ritual propitiation according to costumbre decides the difference.

MAP 2: MAGDALENAS /ALDAMA, 2657 hectares of mountainous terrain ranging in altitude from 1500 to 500 meters, lies 37 kms. NW of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Magdaleneros cultivate limited arable land as milpa (corn, beans, and squash) for subsistence, coffee and some bananas, for cash. They harvest forests and scrub for firewood.

Introduction

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But for a cohort of young men in Magdalenas, repeated dislocations owed to abrupt shifts in Mexican and global political economy beginning in the 1970s particularly affecting its agricultural sector sharpened the contradiction between semi-proletarian labor outside the community and obligatory ritual work within it. Leaders of the Catholic community today trace their conversion to “illumination” of a counter-intuitive yet wholly inner-worldly alternative possibility (Lawson). They came to see that communal well-being could be secured by fraternal relationship to saints who, on their reading of the Bible, also “worked.” Their decisive move – re-cognizing the “work” of cargo to be literally burden, as alienating as the bodily labor required to pay for its ritual materials – involved pedagogical disruption of the habitus (Bourdieu). Post-Vatican II renewal of Catholic mission in the highlands made young Mexican highland Maya men the required pedagogues. Textual liberation from the intellectual and social confinement inhering in orality quickened and intensified native reflexivity and critical capacity (Goody and Ong). In short, with biblical literacy Tzotzil peasant catechists acquired what was for them a novel form of work, authorized by – and in their exegesis of – God’s Word. In Magdalenas recently converted Catholics use the word “religion” to distinguish their new ritual practice from costumbre and their rupture with “the way of the ancestors” (Nash 1985). More precisely, for Magdalenero Catholics religion means celebrating La Palabra de Dios, “the Word of God,” signifying for them both Christian scripture and the exegetical community it calls forth. The “work” of La Palabra de Dios, like every form of intellectual labor, is owned in its performance, beginning with translation of Spanish scripture into Tzotzil. The ritual “work” of cargo addresses the realm of patrons, divine and human, who extract indigenous labor through hierarchical and relatively static structures of obligation and domination. La palabra de Dios reverses this regime: “working the Word” through dialogue among themselves embeds scriptural narrative in the world of peasant production. Just so Magdaleneros identify with the saints and place ritual in service of their own productive pursuits. In other words, the catechists replaced propitiation of the saints with biblical exegesis as a means of access to power, sacred and secular. They came to see that ritual service to the saints required peonage and/or proletarianization. In the worst case, it meant forfeiture of land to meet its costs. Their preaching led their peers to the same conclusion. La Palabra de Dios replaced costumbre for a majority of Magaleneros in the mid-1980s as a way to reclaim their land and redirect their labor to it.

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Introduction

Their wholly religious but expressly inner-worldly project replaces the trope defining Maya ritual – cargo “work” – in a double sense. For their new “work” – exegetical articulation of intellectual and agricultural production – is socio-culturally planted by Maya themselves on their once-expropriated but now reclaimed ancestral land. From there, empowered by Christian faith, they strive to assertively engage the world in all its global complexity. In traditional discourse, Tzotzil Maya is “bats’-i k’op – the true word,” the language of the community founded by Mary Magdalen at a site thought fitting to its status as the center of the world. Magdalenero Catholics replaced this local myth with sacred history narrated by the “Word of God,” the scripture of a world religion. Theoretical Engagements For the Tzotzil Maya, Catholic Christianity is an intrinsically local and eminently practical affair that liberates human agency in the current age of globalization as in the historical past. A formulation from an anthropology of colonialism – “dialectics in a double sense” – offered initial interpretative entreé to field findings (J. Comaroff 1985). Contemporary highland Maya Catholicism exemplifies the interplay between structural constraint and human agency on the one hand and between global systems and local processes of dominance and subordination on the other. The argument here points to biblical literacy and its cognitive entailments as powerful motors of individual agency and social change where oral tradition and illiteracy prevail. Together they constitute the switchplate of the turn from costumbre to the social-historical construction of what Magdalenero converts call “religion.” Religion continues to escape consensus definition, and some question whether its definition is a useful project at all (J.Z. Smith 1982, 1998; Mizruchi 2001). This study attempts to show religion as at once second-level reflection and thoroughly social practice in which the symbolic relates dialectically to the material, ritual design to everyday life. Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977, 1990a, 1990b, 1991) joins the work of the Comaroffs on colonialism and religion (1982, 1985, 1992, 1997) as touchstones in this respect. While the question of belief(s) arises, more important to this argument is the salience of cognition in religion (Boyer 1994, Lawson 2000; Lawson and McCauley 1990). The Christian tradition affirms the rationality of faith in innumerable ways, beginning with the New Testament writers (e.g., Romans 12:2, Eph. 4:23, 1 Peter 3:15) and the hermeneutic enterprise demanded by their theologically plural texts. With countless generations of Catholic theologians, Magdalenero Catholic catechists explicitly name and promote

Introduction

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rationality as intrinsic to biblical faith. Their distinctive everyday religious practice applies this relationship to agricultural production as well. Reflexive appropriation and exercise of critical rationality is entailed in the passage from orality to literacy (Goody 1968, 1977, 1986, 2000; Goody and Watt 1963; Ong 1982). In our case, the acquisition of literacy and its intellectual entailments liberates from tradition and warrants religious autonomy. More specifically, for highland Maya catechists and their ecclesial communities, biblical literacy motivates rejection of the obligatory dictates of costumbre and empowers religious construction of a viable local world (J.Z. Smith 1978, 2004; Mack 2000). Put another way, they deploy the Bible as a tool for work, intellectual and agricultural, to negotiate globalization’s socioeconomic disruptions on their own terms. Over the last thirty years, varieties of neo-marxist, post-colonial, and post-structuralist thought arguably worked along with theories of practice (Bourdieu 1977) and practical reason (Sahlins 1976) to dethrone functionalist, structuralist, and every other static and conflict-free notion of culture (Tanner 1997). In this study, culture is construed as a dynamic historical construct, a site of ongoing contest convergent with hegemonic struggle. (Gramsci 1971, Williams 1977). From this perspective, power relations are an inescapable datum of cultural-religious as much as socio-political practice in everyday life (deCerteau 1984, Scott 1985). This is decidedly the case in highland Chiapas. The play of power – experienced in individual agency, at work in interpersonal relationships, and decisive for social formations (Christian mission among them) – is a framing theme for this study. I began field work shortly after completing theological studies infused with concern for justice and hospitable to inculturation and liberation currents. Thus, as I engaged a local church pursuing a pastoral strategy in tune with these theological orientations, the emergence of a missionary-Maya problematic came as an unexpected challenge. To understand apparent contradictions in mission on the ground, historical ambiguities in Mexican church-state relations became relevant, as did Dumont’s theory of hierarchy (1980). Misrecognitions traced to their largely Mexican urban middle class status accounted for missionary missteps I observed in the field (Bourdieu 1990). But pastoral agents also seemed to under-appreciate that difference (Todorov 1984; J.Z. Smith 1992, 1998) and place (LeFebrve 1991) are not simple givens but rather unavoidable negotiables in human affairs. Viewed through this insight, contradictions appear in strains of Catholic inculturation and liberation thought as well as missionary practice. This investigation proves the indispensability of ongoing translation in both practice and study of world Christianity (Amaladoss 2005; Sanneh

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Introduction

1989, 2003; Schreiter 1997). It contributes modestly to a series that takes up this urgent necessity in a substantive and serious way (Wijsen 2007). As world systems theory and other global analytics entered scholarly discourse, one distinguished anthropologist astutely countered that we cannot know “what is happening in the world” except by attending to human beings and their activities at specific times in relatively circumscribed places (Nash 1981). Just so, the argument here is principally determined by what Tzotzil Maya Catholics told and showed me while I enjoyed the great privilege of sharing their daily lives. Their story calls attention to indigenous catechists and other local grassroots church workers as consequential leaders for today’s world church. Sites and Methods During my principal fieldwork in 1993-95, and shorter summer stays in 1997, 1999, and 2001, Santa Maria Magdalenas was an agencia (political subunit) of San Pedro Chenalho’, one of 110 municipios (elemental cells of the Mexican federation) within the state of Chiapas. The Catholic community in Magdalenas belongs ecclesially to the parish of San Andrés Apóstol encompassing the neighboring municipio of Larráinzar and canonically attached to the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Its divided civic and religious location, largely determined by mountain geography, contributes to the pueblo’s separate identity within the wider Tzotzil linguistic zone. Under circumstances of ceasefire and intense intra-community conflict, I was unable to conduct a religious census of the pueblo. The 2000 Mexican census (notorious for undercounts in the Maya highlands) recorded 1883 inhabitants in Magdalenas (Aldama officially) and its dependent parajes (hamlets). In the two principal sites for this study, Magdalenas center (pop. 735) and the paraje (hamlet) Cotsil nam’ (pop. 190), there were eleven and six catechists respectively when I arrived in July, 1993. More than half the population over age fifteen in these settlements was literate. The ten other hamlets the census counts within Magdalenas were majority illiterate, by a ratio of two to one in most cases. These measures suggest correlation between literacy and religious affiliation, a matter of considerable relevance for the argument advanced here. My freedom of movement and investigation – including written and electronic recording of catechist homilies, life histories, and other interviews – owed to my association with the diocesan human rights office, regular participation in liturgies, manifest identification with the catechists, and frequent residence in their homes. Towards the end of 1994, I began to become acquainted with Protestants, many of whom maintained relationships with members of the Catholic community after its initial fracture by break-

Introduction

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away Presbyterians in 1986. But traditional practitioners of costumbre continued to regard me warily, as they did all kaxlanes (Tzotzil for foreigners). Throughout I attended monthly gatherings of all catechists in the parish of San Andrés Larraínzar, whose numbers fluctuated between 130 and 180 during my time in the field. I also observed two of their annual week-long required courses and similar diocesan courses for catechists in other municipios as well. As a result I came to know many catechists and participate in liturgies beyond Magdalenas and the parish of San Andrés. I consulted the archives of both the Diocese of San Cristóbal and the municipio of Chenalho’, as well as official state and national agrarian affairs archives in Tuxtla Gutiérrez (Chiapas state capital) and Mexico City. Unfortunately, the most complete historical collection of catechetical course material was destroyed in 1994 by women religious who feared their seizure following death threats against Bishop Ruiz for allegedly promoting the EZLN. In this study, characterizations of pastoral agents and their views do not pretend to represent all who worked in the diocese. Evidence for most of these characterizations comes from (1) conversations with missionaries who consistently contrasted pastoral strategy in the Diocese of San Cristóbal with pastoral options elsewhere in Mexico; (2) direct statements by pastoral agents that they sought work in the diocese and/or might leave were its strategy to take a conservative turn; (3) common knowledge that an unknown number of pastoral agents left the diocese in disagreement with its pastoral strategy; (4) observation of diocesan assemblies where dissent was virtually nonexistent; and (5) personal witness of diocesan affairs from my position in an office of the curia. It should be noted that the Catholic community’s successful challenge to Tzotzil tradition shattered religious unity in Magdalenas into more than two pieces. “Religion” means precisely something other than given communal tradition, as suggested by the term’s interchangeability with Catholic practice in Magdalenas (and validated by scholarly interest in religion as a discrete phenomenon). In fact, this Tzotzil Catholic community’s break with tradition effectively opened a pandora’s box of “religions,” so that, by the time my first long field stay ended in 1995, five new Protestant communities had arisen in the pueblo, and one of these, the Presbyterians, had already split in two. This exemplary instance of religious fragmentation ensuing from the collapse of tradition is not addressed by this study but obviously deserves further investigation. A final methodological note highlights my focus on Catholic religious practice in the context of war and uncertain ceasefire. In the Tzotzil highlands, Catholics generally endorsed the Zapatista political agenda, and a few catechists told of recruitment by the EZLN. Though some in the parish of San

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Introduction

Andrés, including Magdaleneros, enlisted in the indigenous army and others lent it material support, the stated position of La palabra de Dios was unequivocal: Armed struggle and political activism were (like religion) matters of choice, not obligation. For this reason, in addition to overriding interest in Catholic life and ritual practice, neo-Zapatismo figures contextually, but not thematically, in this work. Desire for peace remained paramount when I last visited in Summer 2008. Structure of the Study The overall design of my argument reflects the dialectical character of conversion to Catholicism and its everyday practice in Magdalenas. To unpack this complex process, the study proceeds along a thematic spiral, taking matters broached in one chapter to greater depth in another. I interpolate theoretical considerations into the overall narrative flow of the argument at several junctures. Chapters One to Three are largely contextual, addressing the sociocultural and political history of church and nation in Mexico, particularly as their ambiguous relations impinged upon the highland Maya and renewal of mission among them. Readers interested in the construction of local Tzotzil Maya theology will find in Chapters Five to Seven a fine-grained account of its unfolding in homiletic dialogues and a related account of catechist decolonization of once-deified Catholic saints. Though the argument forms an integral whole, readers can profitably read individual chapters according to particular interests. The first chapter describes how the originally ethnically protective Maya civil-religious cargo hierarchy evolved historically into a medium of domination in the highlands of Chiapas. It also takes up Mexico’s modernizing policy towards its native peoples and introduces the theme of biblical literacy as requisite of conversion to Vatican II Catholicism in Magdalenas, as elsewhere in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Hegemony and approaches to ethnic-cultural difference emerge as key mission problematics in Chapter 2. It is organized as a kind of thematic palimpsest. A sketch of post-Vatican II renewal of mission in Latin America leads to presentation of Bishop Samuel Ruiz’s published thought on the evangelization of the continent’s indigenous peoples. A brief history of church-state relations in Mexico, politically ambivalent on the one side and historically anti-clerical on the other, follows. These wider discussions frame an account of late twentieth century mission to the nation’s Indians, moving from contradictions in ecclesially-sponsored Indian Theology to critique of pastoral discourse in the Diocese of San Cristóbal.

Introduction

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In Chapter Three, spatial discourse exemplifies frustrated missionaryMaya encounters in the parish of San Andrés Larraínzar. In counterpoint, a portrait of diocesan catechetical courses argues that the acquisition of literacy effectively formed young Tzotzil Maya in liberation praxis, ironically leading to a reversal of pastoral initiative in the local church. Chapter Four, the pivot of the argument, explains how sharp fluctuations in Mexican political economy compelled novice Magdalenero catechists to train newly acquired critical skills on cargo ritual. One catechist’s theological reflection on how he evangelized his peers bridges to an historical narrative of “the year of liberation”(1986) from obligatory ritual cargo in Magdalenas culminating in resettlement of their ancestral territory. In Chapter Five, I employ transcripts of catechist biblical exegesis to unravel the intellectual-agricultural dialectic Magdaleneros call “working the Word.” Through regular homiletic exegesis, they draw scriptural narrative into the world of peasant production and, I argue, self-consciously own their power along with the Word. Chapter Six elaborates this point by sketching the ancient origins of saint cults and then Spanish colonial import of communal patron saints to Latin America. Magdalenero catechists de-colonized both the saints and their relationship to them as they identified with gospel histories in constructing their local theology. To conclude the study, Chapter Seven presents a Magdalenero Catholic reading of Mary of Nazareth and John the Baptist as exemplars of the Christian way of life Tzotzil Maya catechists preach “as the apostles did.”

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Introduction

Contexts and Conversion

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Chapter One

Contexts and Conversion Origins of an Ecclesial Cargo

... In those times, nobody said anything. Nothing. The enganchadores [labor recruiters] even beat us. That’s how it was, so ugly. But poor indigenous, no one knew how to read or write, we didn’t even know how to speak Spanish. So we just stood there, looking at the Ladinos [non-indigenous Mexicans].1 Introduction In the course of a generation, the catechist, a vocation authorized by the Roman Catholic Church and recognized as such throughout highland Chiapas, also became in Santa Maria Magdalenas an authentically Maya construction. Among Magdaleneros the articulation of the Catholic office of catechist and the Tzotzil obligation of community service known as “cargo” transformed the meaning of both structures in church and community alike. Alterations in cargo occurred throughout the highlands in this period, in part in response to shifts in the political economy of Chiapas which, in turn, reflected the Mexican state’s erratic attempts to mold the nation’s productive forces for competition in the global marketplace. In this disruptive context a newly-activist Catholic church animated by Vatican II re-entered remote Maya hamlets to call forth indigenous collaborators. In Magdalenas this appeal resonated particularly with the disenchantment of restive young men for whom long-fixed ideological and geographic boundaries of community and tradition encompassing cargo had become increasingly porous, and hence problematic. The wider contexts for this local phenomenon included Mexican ideology and state policies bent upon integrating indigenous people into the nation – indigenismo – while siphoning the heretofore largely untapped natural resources of Chiapas toward the developing middle and northern third of the country. Both indigenista and national development purposes advanced along the path of corporatist centralism reliant on caciquismo, or political bossism, an intractable feature of Mexican politics at all levels. In highland Chiapas, this mechanism followed the colonial logic of ethnically-coded dominance –––––––––– 1

Quoted by Rus, Rus, and Hernandez 1990: 7.

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and subordination untouched by Mexico’s Independence and Revolution in the last two centuries. Profoundly affected by both events, Mexican Catholic church pastoral strategy had long been driven by concern for survival in the face of anticlerical hostilities which, in Chiapas, led to the flight of more than one bishop and all but precluded assertive evangelization among remote indigenous communities. To cope with and resist conditions of neglect and exploitation by ecclesial and secular powers respectively, highland Maya indigenous continually re-invented ancient social designs. Among the Tzotzil Maya, the civil-religious hierarchy of cargos, successive periods of strictly defined community service, integrated all adults in local political governance and ritual observance by unquestioned obligation. Embedded in costumbre, the legitimating tradition of the ancestors, cargo constituted social identity, granting graded levels of prestige to adult males and their spouses. When in the early 1960s the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas inaugurated courses for indigenous catechists to promote its own reconstitution among the Maya, it unintentionally abetted the realignment of social forces already underway in highland communities suffering the stresses of economic dislocation. Estranged from cargo and costumbre by their participation in the labor of their fathers, ritual and gainful, young Magdaleneros in search of alternative avenues of advancement responded eagerly to the church’s invitation. They thus became not only protagonists in the remaking of local Catholicism but – motivated by new sources of identity, authority, and ultimately power – pivotal agents in the decolonization of their highland Maya world. Context mediated the liberation of these young men from the double confinements of ancestral tradition and ethnic subjugation. Interpreted contextually, their ascent to leadership in the decolonization of their local community and revival of the diocesan church began with and remains a religious passage. Chiapas: Ecclesial Challenge and Episcopal Renewal Inscribed on the episcopal seal at the installation of Samuel Ruiz García as bishop in the cathedral of San Cristóbal de Las Casas is a verse from Jeremiah: “To root up and to tear down, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1, 10b) (Fazio 1994:80). The text aptly describes the cultural-historical drama of his episcopate. But its critical events and effects resulted from his pastoral decision only by way of a multi-leveled dialectic. The bishop himself would be the first to agree that Maya indigenous, whose historic priority and demographic dominance defined his see as mission territory, drove this dialectic. The complicity between missionaries and colonizers, as individual actors often one and the same, has been demonstrated often (for Chiapas, see

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Wasserstrom 1983:12-69). But studies of colonization have often overlooked the subjectivity of indigenous people in the evangelization process, as recent anthropology shows (e.g., Jean and John Comaroff 1985, 1991, 1992). In fact, during Bishop Ruiz’s episcopate evangelization did not so much incite as accelerate movement by an already-mobile Maya population. In the Diocese of San Cristóbal, the coordinates of colonial complicity arguably reversed as missionaries allied with and, in important respects, followed indigenous Catholics in their transformation into self-conscious subjects of decolonization. The catechist cargo emerging from this mutually converting relationship figures socio-cultural metamorphosis of the highland Maya world and radical renewal of a church embedded within it by catechists as leading ecclesial actors. Consecrated bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in 1960 in the old Ciudad Real, the highland’s colonial capital, Samuel Ruiz García confronted a local church at the extremes of the most marginated state in 2 Mexico. Problems of personnel and infrastructure defined the ecclesially precarious situation: the new bishop counted just thirteen priests to attend a geographically isolated, economically underdeveloped, and politically nearfeudal Mexican frontier territory covering some seventy thousand square kilometers with a population of nearly one million. Only the Pan American Highway linked the vast interior of mountains and jungle to the more commercially developed Pacific Coast; and this road, which finally reached the Chiapas highlands in the late 1940s, remained just partly paved when Samuel Ruiz arrived. The ladino (non-indigenous or acculturated Mexican) population concentrated in a half-dozen small cities accounted for far less than half of the new 3 bishop’s flock: the majority were Maya indigenous people who lived dispersed and profoundly impoverished in remote hamlets, or parajes, accessible only by ancient footpaths. Under Lucio Torreblanca, the bishop’s immediate predecessor, each of the few priests in the diocese necessarily assumed pastoral responsibility for vicariates of several municipios (townships); most maintained permanent residences in the larger cities and towns, many not in their parishes. They made their rounds by horse and foot to baptize, hear confessions, and celebrate mass, visiting decrepit colonial-style churches or mud-thatched chapels –––––––––– 2

3

The Diocese of San Cristóbal spans 36, 821 sq. km., about 5000 sq. kms. smaller than The Netherlands (Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas Informe Quinquenal Apostolorum Ad Limina, 1988-1993). The five Maya language groups in the Diocese of San Cristóbal: in order of population: Tzotzil (291,550); Tzeltal (278,574); Ch’ol (140,806); Tojolobal (37,667); and Mam (5450). Institución Nacional de Estadística, Geografía, y Informática (INEGI), 2000.

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scattered in valleys and plateaus amid the mountains at most twice a year, often just once, for patron saints’ fiestas. The obstacles to evangelization posed by meager infrastructure and scarce personnel in the sprawling diocese were aggravated in San Andrés Larráinzar by socio-cultural and ethnic fractures epitomized in the histories of its recent pastors. Officially assigned to the vicariate of Chamula, the most densely populated of all Tzotzil municipios, their territory included two neighboring municipios, Zinacantán and San Andrés. In 1950, eight thousand eight hundred people lived in some forty-five parajes in the parish of San Andrés, including Santa Maria Magdalenas. Depending on weather conditions, often dense fog, up to seven hours were needed to traverse the barely-graded eighteen km. dirt road from San Cristóbal to San Andrés by truck; during the rainy season (May-November), the mountain track often became impassable (Orozco 1968). Simple physical access required great resourcefulness and determination from any visitor to San Andrés. San Andrés was particularly unfortunate in its mid-twentieth century pastors. Appointed in the early 1950s, Padre Fernando was preoccupied with liturgical correctness, rules governing mass stipends, and similar stipulations of the “licit,” a favored term. In one letter to the bishop, impoverished Tzotzil parishioners protested the priest’s celebration of a holy day mass at a ladino hacienda for its stipend, abandoning them to their own liturgical devices. In January 1953 they asked the bishop to remove him, complaining that he attended them only on important fiestas or when it was “convenient;” tried to destroy their ancestral religious icons; talked “nonsense” instead of teaching “doctrine;” and continually “disparaged” them (Archivo del Obispado – Epescopal Archive, Box 4). The family of his successor, Padre Jorge, ranked high among the Ladinos who controlled the lucrative alcohol trade in the highlands. Among the Tzotzil every inter-personal pact, sacred or secular, was sealed by exchange of rum. The ritually-driven rum trade was thus strategically positioned in the highlands at the volatile intersection where culture and commerce met – and where, as argued below, Ladino and Indian re-enacted the paradigmatic colonial transaction of conquest and enslavement. Like his negligent predecessor, Padre Jorge was a diocesan cleric, his prestige wholly dependent upon his relationship with the bishop and his ties to San Cristóbal’s local elite. Their colonial aura inevitably compromised the pastor’s standing among the Tzotzil. Embodied in these pastors, the fragile association between the Diocese of San Cristóbal and its indigenous population was wholly transformed by the remarkable fit between Samuel Ruiz and the agitated historical conjuncture of his arrival in Chiapas (Fazio, passim).

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Born in 1924 in Irapuato, Guanajuato, hotbed of resistance to Mexico’s post-Revolution anti-clericalism, the new bishop came to San Cristóbal from a family steeped in Cristero sentiment.4 His father, whose wife conceived Samuel on one of several sojourns in the United States to augment the family income, led the Knights of Columbus and Catholic Action in Irapuato.5 Prevented by his wife from joining armed Cristero bands, Maclovio Ruiz eventually relinquished Catholic Action leadership to enlist in a local political organization opposed to the socialist orientation of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940).6 The assassination of the family’s parish priest in a crowded church by a hired hand of Masonry remains among the bishop’s most salient childhood memories. In short, the young Samuel Ruiz was nurtured by a politicallyalert family enmeshed in the social and ideological combat which shaped post-revolutionary Mexican Catholicism. Ruiz’s intellectual gifts were honed by study in Rome where he lived and was ordained between 1947-52. Doctoral work in scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute culminated with a summer in Jerusalem, cementing the biblical foundations of his mature pastoral theology. He had taught seven years and was rector at the seminary for the Diocese of León when named to the see of San Cristóbal in 1959; at age 35, he was among the youngest bishops in the world. Studious, energetic, and well-informed, Samuel Ruiz shared the Mexican hierarchy’s fervent anti-communism. His first pastoral letter, issued in October 1961, invoked the legend of David and Goliath to describe the “Catholic’s obligation” to combat Marxist atheism (Ruiz García 1961). For the new bishop, whose study of sociology was limited to functionalist texts, the alternative was communism or religion. He was a staunch institutionalist, solidly aligned with the doctrinal consensus among his episcopal peers (Blancarte 1992:167-201). The bishop’s anti-communism extended to suspicion of the work of the National Indigenous Institute (INI) which arrived in the highlands in 1951 to implement the Cardenista indigenist agenda for Mexico’s native peoples by establishing schools, clinics and other ameliorative programs among the highland Maya. One student of Mexico’s Indians saw in Samuel Ruiz a “fanatic” obsessed with “combat” against communists and Protestants alike. In response to an anthropologist’s charge that the diocese stood in the way of –––––––––– 4 5 6

Crying, “Viva Cristo Rey – Long Live Christ the King,” Cristeros waged a violent crusade against Mexico’s revolutionary anti-clerical government (Meyer 1974-76). On the birth of Catholic Action in Mexico as an alternative to the Cristeros, see Blancarte 1992. “Sinarchism” appealed to Catholics opposed to left-leaning post-Revolution Mexican regimes who eschewed Cristero violence (Meyer: 1977).

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indigenist reforms, the bishop defended pastors who quarreled with INI’s bilingual teachers, asserting that Indians deserved a Catholic education rather than pro-communist “propaganda.” To bolster his argument, the bishop cited Fidel Castro: his ascent to power announced, in the bishop’s militant Catholic view, an era “of conflicts and crisis” (Benítez 1967:151-54l). The bishop’s intellectual confidence, bolstered by biblical faith and inherited social conscience, drove his determination to repair centuries of ecclesial weakness in the highlands. Any reform depended initially on augmenting both the quality and quantity of clergy in Chiapas. In addition to attempts to shore up an antiquated, depopulated local seminary, among the new bishop’s earliest acts was to invite the Dominicans to return to the Diocese of San Cristóbal and join the priests of the Sacred Heart and the Jesuits who had been recruited by his predecessor, the latter reaching Chiapas in 1959, just a few months before the new bishop. The arrival of men from these cosmopolitan religious communities enabled the church to extend its presence physically to the more inaccessible areas of the diocese, some of which had not seen a priest in many years. They also provided the bishop with intellectual companionship as he searched for an evangelization strategy equal to the several challenges – logistic and linguistic, cultural and socio-economic – posed by the indigenous, the majority of his flock, as well as the local ladino elites who despised them. Arguably the most far-reaching of the bishop’s initial decisions implemented a suggestion by the Apostolic Delegate, the Vatican’s representative in Mexico, Luigi Raimondi (Fazio 1994:77-80,102). With the Delegate’s financial contributions backing his moral support, Bishop Ruiz invited Marist brothers and Divine Shepherd sisters to establish schools for catechists in San Cristóbal, as the church had throughout Latin America to form local lay leaders capable of nurturing the faith in the absence of adequate numbers of clergy. This fateful move quickened socio-cultural ferment in remote indigenous hamlets. To understand why this is so requires exposing the backbone of highland Maya social organization as it existed when the bishop began his work – the cargo system, and the inevitable accompaniment to its practice, rum. Dialectics of Subordination Anthropologists are agreed that cargo was structurally essential to indigenous community in the Maya area: [The cargo system] is virtually the entire social structure of the Indian municipio [township]. At the most general level of social integration this structure does [for] Indians what kinship does for African societies, and what the social class system does for ladino societies (M. Nash 1958:65-75).

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But by the mid-1960s cargo was becoming increasingly unserviceable in the Chiapas highlands, though a fully satisfactory explanation for its demise remains elusive (Tax 1937; Cámara 1968; Carrasco 1961; Cancian 1965, 1967, 1992; DeWalt 1975). But it is also significant that studies of cargo fail to address the most salient feature of the system as seen by Maya Catholics who came to reject it – namely, its tie to trago, or ritual alcohol consumption. The view of Magdaleneros from below and inside widens the accepted socioeconomic interpretation of cargo in its late-modern form to include the symbolic dimension that motivated their abandonment of it. Cargo Although vestiges of pre-Hispanic Maya society can be found in the archaeology of post-colonial cargo hierarchies, the structure ordering the social world of Magdalenas for the catechists’ fathers and grandfathers was almost surely of late- nineteenth century origin. Melding elements of Spanish town government and Catholic cofradías (cultic associations to serve communal patron saints imported by Spanish missionaries), the Tzotzil, like other highland Maya linguistic groups, constructed a series of age-graded community duties. These were alternately civil (principally administrative-juridical, attached to the municipal agency office) and religious (principally ceremonial, connected to the church). The principal authority on cargo practice in Chiapas notes that civil-religious hierarchy shares a limited number of characteristics throughout the Maya area. Ascent of what anthropologists metaphorically called the cargo “ladder” established social identity, bestowed prestige, measured rank, conferred authority, and inculcated an ethic of service in all adult males (and their families) in a given community (Cancian 1967:289). But the actual functioning of cargo varied historically among communities, their differences reflecting distinct socio-economic positions within the larger regional world. This world was, of course, ladino-dominated, a fact supporting interpretations of the cargo hierarchy as an indigenous sociocultural defense mechanism. Thus, it has been argued that social control of wealth via obligatory cargos integrated and insulated Maya settlements against foreign intrusion so effectively they exemplify the ideal-type of “closed corporate peasant communities” (Wolf 1957). Whether or not any Maya community in the Chiapas highlands ever maintained total closure and seamless corporate integration, economic developments beginning during the mid-nineteenth century decidedly eroded their community-insulating effect. One important study demonstrates that the cargo ladder, ostensibly a creation of autonomous Maya socio-religious tradition, historically mirrored how differently situated highland communities fared in their relations with the dominant world (Rus and Wasserstrom 1980).

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The Cargo Hierarchy in Magdalenas, c. 1970 Civil ------------------------------- Religious Principal or Pasado |______ \Alférez I Alcalde _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / II Alcalde (gubernador) III Alcalde IV Alcalde_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |Capitán |Cavilto Regidor (9)_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / |Mayor (9)_ _ _ \ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Mayordomo (7) __________________________________________ Principal = elder who has completed all cargos. Attached to municipal agency: alcalde = assistant to municipal agente, salaried civil municipal officer appointed by state; regidor = tax collector, registrar; mayor = police. Attached to the church: alferez = fiesta sponsor; capitán = races horses at fiesta; cavilto = recruits maxpat, other ritual/ fiesta attendants, performs Semana Santa passion ritual; mayordomo = church caretaker. *= number of persons holding the office at any one time

For example, in the municipio of Chamula on the southern border of Magdalenas, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) regime bi-lingual municipal scribes insinuated themselves into community governance by securing cargo appointments for themselves. The first loyalty of these men was not to communal tradition but to the political apparatus to which they owed their entry into Chamula as agents of indigenist reform. These men eventually had themselves named to religious cargos, thus gaining the right reserved to religious leaders to sell the home-brew pox (Tzotzil rum) and ultimately the opportunity to replace communal elders as they died. Development programs initiated by the INI in the early 1950s expanded the power base these erstwhile scribes constructed as they became the first school teachers, health workers, and owners of trucks and cooperatives in Chamula (Rus 1999:293-300). Today, Chamula’s civil-religious hierarchy reflects disposition of political patronage enabled by their monopoly of local power in the name of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to which they owe their positions. According to Tzotzil tradition, a Magdalenero catechist explains, ..to realize a cargo is to please a saint. It’s a response of the people for all that the saints have done for them – giving them food every day, health, life. In return for

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carrying out a cargo the saints assure the cargo-holder a long life on this earth, as well as the things necessary for life – food, money, housing, everything . But cargo also has to do with our fathers and the community. To realize a cargo gives a person prestige in the community, he’s more respected as a person (FN 21.VII.93).

But, as the recent history of Chamula shows, the reciprocity binding individuals to the community through sacred obligation to the saints could alienate as well as integrate, in part because the cargo “ladder” was never simply a structure ordered by fixed rungs (or rules) following ancestral tradition. Instead, cargo practice was inevitably vulnerable to strategic manipulation within a context wider than the local community and subject to extra-communal power. By tradition sacred in origin and in local discourse unalterable – “es costumbre, it’s tradition” – Tzotzil cargo remains an eminently historical artifact whose architecture was always potentially variable, the specific contours of its practice manifesting both the degree of internal cohesion in a given community at a given moment and the specific coordinates of its subordinate position within the larger ladino world in which it is embedded. To gloss cargo in this way – as a socio-historically charged indicator of the dialectics of dominance and subordination in a regional world – draws attention beyond its formal structure to its actual practice. In this realm, 7 cargo’s universal ritual accompaniment – trago, drinking – is the solvent of the system and the critical trope for the way of life it sustains. Trago – Drinking As obligatory offering to the saints, cargo constitutes a type of Mauss’ “total social phenomenon,” ordering all relations in a given Tzotzil community within the framework of the legitimating belief that life itself, biological as well as social, depends upon it (Mauss 1967). Until recent decades, perhaps no other social phenomenon dominated modern Maya discourse as much (Haviland 1977). At all key moments in its bestowal, the “gift” of cargo – the offering of one’s self in one’s service to the saints/community – requires drink, to motivate the partners in the transaction and to validate its authenticity. Obligatory gifts and consumption of trago occur when a man is notified of his cargo appointment and when he accepts it; when he is installed in his cargo and when he relinquishes it; and, most characteristically, during the several ritual performances entailed in fulfillment, in particular, of religious –––––––––– 7

The Tzotzil use trago synonymously with pox = Spanish aguardiente (cane-based, homebrewed spirits) for the drink itself and for the act of drinking it.

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cargos. In fact, trago is the critical feature of cargo in contemporary rationales for its rejection, for catechists signifying a disposition at best wasteful and at worst destructive of both character and community.8 Their decidedly negative pronouncements beg examination of the articulation of cargo and trago with the suspicion that the latter, at least, is something other than the benign instrument of reciprocity undergirding local Tzotzil communities, as argued by some.9 Though the fermented corn brew chicha figured in pre-Hispanic Maya ritual, Spanish colonists introduced rum to Chiapas and with it the deritualization of indigenous alcohol consumption (Crump 1987:239-49; Navarrette Pellicer 1988:83-98; Eber 1995:15-36). Imperial favor of cane commerce in Cuba and Brazil encouraged expanded distilling in the hot Chiapanec lowlands as a productive outlet for mills attached to sugar fincas planted with cane imported originally from the Canary Islands. Despite royal prohibition and ethical protests from churchmen like Bartolomé de Las Casas, clandestine production created a lucrative internal market, particularly among indigenous indentured to sugar mills. This original linkage between forced labor and non-ritual alcohol consumption steadily widened as corrupt civil, military, and (even) religious authorities exploited the indigenous market driven, most powerfully, by landowners who paid (and thus plied) with rum workers drawn from the great labor reserve composed of landless indigenous, particularly after liberal disentailment in the nineteenth century. The expansion of capitalism during the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876-80, 1884-1911) perfected the system of enganche (enganchar = hook). Highland labor contractors for lowland finqueros (plantation owners) “hooked” indigenous workers with offers of money and/or credit, and, always, rum, then transported them to San Cristóbal, where they were further indebted by days of drinking before being delivered by armed escorts in long processions to coastal coffee lands. Recounting a career begun in 1939, a contemporary “hooker” describes how he and his peers “conquered people in the villages”: ....first they gave him [indigenous recruit] his portion of trago, then the worker asked for it himself, since he had in his net bag the money that had been advanced. And so, ‘a mamar trago’ [he got drunk] (Navarrette Pellicer 1988:93).

–––––––––– 8 9

For similar comments on cargo by catechists in Guatemala, see Warren, 1989: 99 and Watanabe 1992: 207. Many anthropologists resist negative interpretation of Maya alcohol consumption to defend traditional ritual. But at least one demonstrates that ritual alcohol use is, in truth, “negatively functional” (Cortés 1988:157-85).

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Twentieth century capitalist development steadily integrated Chiapas into the Mexican national economy, eroding subsistence maize agriculture. Inevitably, it also increased indigenous need for cash. Thus abolition of forced labor and the first stirrings of agrarian reform following the Revolution could not weaken an equation as richly symbolic as it was real: work in exchange for rum. From their earliest acquaintance with it, Maya peoples evinced profound ambivalence towards the alien substance purveyed by colonial sugar millers, protesting its presence in their communities following an ideological equation of their own: rum = Ladinos = devil = death. When the State of Chiapas restricted rum sales to ladino vendors, the most successful of them combined distilling with enganche, insuring that what cash Maya peasants earned bought rum and thus a high level of indebtedness that could only be paid off by labor on coffee fincas (Crump 197: 39-49). As one planter summarized, “Take aguardiente [Spanish, rum] away from the Indian and what will become of coffee? Coffee plantations run on aguardiente as an automobile runs on gasoline” [Cited by Eber 1995: 30). In this pernicious system, the perversity of the Indian’s position vis a vis the Ladino’s is more adequately expressed through the colloquialism “a mamar (to nurse on) trago” – get drunk. The linguistic link between infancy and drunkenness in the Spanish mamar resonates with the well-attested symbolic equivalence of milk and wine, and even more so blood and wine: 10 “all are symbols of life; all are fertility symbols” (Jellinek 1977: 854-55). Taken together, rhetorical clue and symbolic analysis establish trago as a potent carrier of cosmic and social meanings, and their convergence in highland Chiapas. According to one important study, alcoholic beverages came to predominate in ritual practice principally because they – unlike milk, water, or other drinks – physiologically effect the illusion of power: “we feel stronger, more powerful, more self-confident” when we drink .11 The felt meaning so embedded in drinking is further reinforced by the common Maya belief that alcoholic beverages build the blood, i.e., sustain life.12 For indigenous living in the often-frigid highlands, blood heats the body as the sun heats the earth: –––––––––– 10 Jellinek notes the Roman fertility festival at which wine was admitted to the temple only as milk and cites Frazer’s report of a Javanese search for palm wine : “Let him slake his thirst! Mother’s breasts are full to overflowing” (ibid.). 11 Countering the symbolism of drinking as such: “In the last analysis, when a choice [among beverages] can be made [in ritual], it is undoubtedly the pharmacological effect of alcohol which is decisive” (Jellinek 1977: 854). 12 “Reading” the pulse persists among modern Maya healers: “The blood of the curer enters into communication with that of the patient when he holds his own thumb pulse against the patient’s pulse” (J. Nash 1989: 426-27, n.13).

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heat-as-life – ultimately bestowed and maintained by the gods – connotes supernatural power (Watanabe 1992: 88). Thus in the Maya highlands rum is somatically equivalent to blood, while the “tremendous prestige” universally attached to alcohol is divinely legitimated (Jellinek 1977: 857). More than coincidentally, those who hold religious cargo, or serve the saints/community, are said to have “heated their souls” through their association with these deified patrons.13 But, as already shown, cargo service is not altogether innocent, either as an act of religious devotion or as an expression of altruism. Required expenditures on trago always resulted in overwhelming debt which could only be repaid through seasonal labor in ladino enterprises. Viewed in this context, cargo obligation can be interpreted as ritual reconstruction of the original enslaving colonial link between work and drink, established with indigenous indenture to the early sugar mills and perfected through the modern mechanism of enganche. A Tzotzil elder recounts the demonic origins of rum: The Devil thought about how he could transform chicha [fermented corn brew] to conquer Our Father. The Devil got together with his demons and....made an apparatus that is moved by two horses to extract the syrup of the sugar cane and with that he made rum.... But then he went and deceived Our Father Jesus Christ.... “That’s your drink, but it’s no good,” said the devil. “This is mine; it’s better. Mine gets us drunk really well,” he said.... Then Our Father drank it and he got drunk.... In the end the Devil tricked Our Father Jesus Christ. That’s why now rum is the Devil’s, according to ... the ancestors (Eber 1995:15-16).

In biblical discourse, the Devil is, of course, “the father of lies.” In this account, the Devil’s Tzotzil persona pursues a strategy of deception employing tactics (a horse-drawn “apparatus”) and means (rum) for an end (conquest), all facilitating Spanish colonization, a trick victimizing even the gods. Civil-religious hierarchies undoubtedly enabled highland Maya communities to defend indigenous identity against colonial assaults. But Mexican independence and the advance of capitalism on land-, labor-, and resourcerich Chiapas subverted this purpose. Cargo holders ritually enacted complicity in the “trick” of the Devil by drinking to figurative death, somatically in drunkenness and socially in debt. In either case, their bodies were no longer their own (Nash 1989:233 and passim). But “our Father Jesus Christ” had suffered the same deception and so shared their enemy. –––––––––– 13 Gutieras-Holmes documented this traditional Tzotzil view of cargo (1961: 72-73, 306). Tzotzils today prefer Pepsi or Coca Cola – now widely used in traditional ritual as a less costly alternative to pox – depending on which they perceive to “heat” better.

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Open struggle was (literally) unthinkable against so powerful a foe as the Devil (= ladino world = advancing capital). The revered ancestors prescribed ritual exchanges with “our Father” and among peers which called for imbibing the foe in the medium, trago, he gave them. Tradition, and the salience of trago in it, thus bound indigenous communities in misrecognition of its actual effect: delivery of their bodies to the dominant world. Cargo is central to costumbre, and so to the persistence of highland Maya community over five centuries. Neither a matter of idols behind altars nor blind adoption of Christian forms, costumbre resulted from active appropriation of them to preserve a Maya place in a colonially-fractured world (Farriss 1984). But the articulation of cargo and trago undoubtedly facilitated subordination of highland peoples to ladino interest. Of course, hegemonic strategies are plural. Mexico’s modernizing project rivaled the decline of cargo in disturbing highland Maya social equilibrium, and its contradictions were also instrumental in facilitating Maya conversion. Modernization: Indigenismo vs. the Indigenous Change originating in the regional world, always an influence on local Maya social forms, accelerated in the 1950s as economic investments and indigenist policies transformed highlands infrastructure, material and socio-cultural. The arrival of the Pan-American highway in 1948 quickened the pace of expansion in commercial agriculture integrating Chiapas into global market strategies increasingly favored by the Mexican government as commodity prices returned to pre-World War II levels and continued their rise for the next 20 years. Rapid multiplication of new secondary roads brought trucks closer than ever to remote Maya hamlets, enabling ladino middle men to carry both surplus maize and land-poor laborers to and from booming lowland agribusiness venues. Close historical analysis of the last century reveals the essential paradox of state-directed modernization in the Maya highlands: Expansion of infrastructure in central Chiapas—indeed, the entire program of modernization and transculturation which state and federal agencies had put into effect there—had in reality caused living standards to decline (Wasserstrom 1983: 212).

This counterintuitive result had everything to do with ethnic relations, manifest above all in land ownership. The number of acres under cultivation in the state doubled between 1950 and 1970 as Chiapas became the leading producer of coffee in Mexico and the largest supplier of the nation’s dietary staples, corn and beans (Benjamin 1996: 223-24).

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But Maya peasants, whose best lands were seized by Ladinos following disentailment in the mid-nineteenth century, were largely excluded from the benefits of this agribusiness boom. Under Mexico’s revolutionary agrarian reform, presidential decrees might declare marginal ladino estate lands “affected” for distribution. But these declarations went largely unobserved in Chiapas (Esponda y Pólito 1995:112-113) because, as one Maya campesino explained, “the government and the finqueros are the same” (Benjamin 1996:223). Land poverty had crippled Maya for generations (Harvey 1994:6-7); it deepened as an expanding population and the introduction of fertilizers exhausted the land’s productive capacity (Wasserstrom 1982:195). Linked ever more inextricably to global markets, Mexico’s highland Maya thus found themselves struggling with growing desperation to maintain minimal subsistence from the one resource that guaranteed at least the illusion of socio-cultural autonomy, the land. Promoted by progressives to end indigenous margination, in Chiapas the Mexican policy known as indigenismo actually masked the modernizing capitalist erosion of the material basis of highland Maya society. Following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, director of the Ministry of Education, envisioned a “cosmic race” incorporating indigenous peoples into the nation. The ethnically-coded hegemonic project underlying subsequent schemes supplied by Mexico City intellectuals in fact echoed the rhetoric of local notable Manuel Pineda: [Indians] think that only agriculture is capable of fully satisfying human needs. To open to Indians horizons other than work on the land, to which they devote themselves with so much good will, would be an issue, for agriculture needs so many more hands while the ladino masses demonstrate the strongest repulsion towards this activity (quoted by Favre 1971: 311).

Pineda, in fact, expressed the highland elite’s great fear: wholesale “ladinoization” of an indigenous population with capital expansion into their homeland. Without the “Indian,” the “Ladino,” whose ethnic identity was constructed in San Cristóbal on parasitical domination of the surrounding highlands, would cease to exist (ibid.). Government agreement that the Maya needed “regeneration” only Ladinos could bestow showed in the colonial relations that ruled rural schools (Pineda 1993:66ff.). Recalling residence in the school at San Andrés early in the last century, one erstwhile Tzotzil student wrote: I wanted to learn more and more. Nevertheless, we [Maya peasants] didn’t advance because many times indian students were treated by the [ladino] teachers

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like laborers: the biggest collected his firewood, served as errand boys and porters; I, who was smaller, cleaned his house, carried water and sometimes took care of his little children. While we did all this, the Ladinos had classes (Arias 1990: 83).

The Maya memoirist provides an apt trope – indigenous peasants carrying water for ladino government agents – for the caste ideology embedded in indigenismo. President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) is often revered as the redeemer of the Mexican revolution for his far-reaching land and labor reforms. Yet his attitude toward Mexico’s indigenous was similarly colored by caste. Cárdenas, himself of Tarascan Indian heritage, regarded the nation’s indigenous peoples as an ‘ethnic proletariat’ (Becker 1995: 70). Despite a genuine desire to ease the economic misery of Mexico’s indigenous, Cárdenas consistently instrumentalized Indians, as did the zealous rural teachers and political organizers who spread his vision. In 1939 the President was asked to reconsider invitation of Mexican Indians to an international conference on indigenous peoples: ...most of the Indians will be unable to deliberate and figure out ways to help the evolution of the various American Indian races... Instead, send competent, qualified people knowledgeable about the idiosyncrasies and needs of the various Indian races (ibid.: 159).

Wanting nationalist icons, Cárdenas replied: “Your point is right... Even so, invite, along with the qualified people, one or two Indians” (ibid.). Never the exotic innocents envisioned by elites intent on inventing the nation, ambitious highland Maya were thus drawn to the spoils of modernizing reform (ibid. 115). In short, indigenismo perversely produced indigenous caciques who served the nation against their communities: “the Indians were integrated, but as proletarians and peasants, official clients, and (occasionally) official caciques” (Knight 1991: 268). The indigenist legacy of Cardenismo – a surreal modernist mix of nostalgic idealism, righteous reformism, and ambitious statism encompassed by structures of caste and capital – loomed large when in 1948 the Mexican government founded the National Indigenist Institute (INI). Wary of earlier unwanted intrusiveness, INI trained its own bi-lingual indigenous “promoters” to win consent for its projects. Inevitably, INI training pulled all promoters out of their communities in every sense: Naturally ... measures were taken to orient the student [promoter] to forms of life totally distinct from [Maya] tradition...: change of behavior in view of new situa-

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Chapter One tions in dining rooms, in dormitories, in the street, in the classroom, in relation to teachers.....and others [behaviors] that permitted the formation of a new type of citizen, totally distinct from ...what they had had as subjects of exploitation. (Montes S. 1976: 82-83)

The equally “natural” result of this process was “the ladinoization of many promoters” who adopted “a negative attitude toward the indigenous” (Modiano and Pérez Hernández 1976: 67). Inevitably, a majority of them abandoned their home communities entirely (Montes S. 1976:92). Like the socialist zealots of the Cárdenas period, INI agents undertook the re-making of indigenous society, beginning with the collaborators they hoped would provide entrée to it. What Bourdieu calls “the appropriating by the world of a body” (Bourdieu 1977: 89) was enacted, in the first instance, by physically removing promoters from indigenous territory. More irreversibly, INI inculcated modes of appearance and behavior that distanced its indigenous trainees from Maya culture. The indigenists’ world finally inhabited the promoters they recruited in the name of cultural non-intervention. In short, seeking to “protect” the Maya by introducing them to the benefits of modernity, INI could not evade the structure governing the outcome of every preceding indigenist project in Chiapas. Implementation required remaking the Maya in INI’s own image and interest, the better to serve both. The young Maya men who became Catholic catechists in Magdalenas and other highland communities came of age in a late-1960s conjuncture of the contexts described above: new church leadership pressing for strategies (elaborated below) to revive a moribund Catholic presence among the Maya; systems of domination fraying Maya communal organization and religious tradition through misrecognized mechanisms of cooptation, cargo in particular; and state-directed modernization appropriating Indians in order to assist them. The road is a fitting icon for the cultural contiguity of these contexts: the explosion of routes through the mountains and into remote indigenous villages since the Cárdenas regime invited global capital and the Mexican state into the interstices of Maya community life. But cargo continued to impose debt while arable land disappeared, market consumption increased, and migratory labor remained essential to survival. Under these conditions, new roads offered no exit for most young Magdaleneros. Bilingual schools did suggest a means of mobility. But for most students, the classroom actually presented only another humiliating encounter with the dominant world which kept them in their place even as it encroached upon their territory.

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But the highland Maya have persisted since the Conquest by continually opening alternatives paths. In this case, young men seized upon a new religious discourse as a way to re-define power-relations first within and then beyond the community, and thus achieve mobility on their own terms. Conversions and Continuities The varieties of religious conversion may exceed those William James asserted for religious experience (Gallagher 1990; Hefner 1993; Rambo 1993), and it is only recently that anthropology has focused on the introduction of Christianity among indigenous peoples (cf. Horton 1971, 1975; Beidelman 1974, 1982; Jean Comaroff 1985; J. and J. Comaroff 1991, 1992; Burridge 1991; Hefner 1993). In the case of Chiapas, the original conversions to this world religion are now the domain of historians; but their conclusions suggest, at least negatively, the salience of Maya agency in what is often described as unilateral conquest. A landmark study of the Yucatec Maya during the colony distinguishes between the private/polytheistic/local and public/monotheistic/universal levels of indigenous belief, arguing that the adaptability of pre-Conquest Maya cosmology accommodated Christian doctrine coherently, if not always readily, at the latter level (Farriss 1984). This history rejects the ‘idols behind altars’ paradigm of indigenous resistance to Christian mission, portraying, instead, a gradual, discontinuous process of “creative synthesis” that “Mayanize[d] the Christian framework of public worship” in the Yucatan (ibid.: 318-319]. To the same end, indigenous revolts punctuated the early-modern history of the Maya highlands. The most famous of them – the Cancuc Rebellion of 1812 among the Tzeltal and Cuscat’s Rebellion of 1867-71 among the Tzotzil – originated in revitalization movements seeking to end “the Spanish monopoly of the Catholic religion” (Bricker 1981: 69 and passim). This history, like the extraordinary survival of the highland Maya into postmodernity, presumes an alternatively active and dormant but always potentially assertive agency among indigenous for whom cultural survival and religious autonomy are co-dependent values. Just so, the modern historical conjuncture limned above produced religious rupture between costumbre and Catholicism as young men re-activated Maya religious agency in the highlands once again in the late 1960s. The argument that dissolution of traditional religious cosmologies can be accounted for by modernizing forces “in the air,” obviating the need for missionary intervention to cause and/or explain conversions to Christianity during Africa’s colonization, is suggestive (Horton 1971, 1975). Setting argument’s validity aside, neither the broad processes of modernization nor the re-energized preaching of missionaries in by themselves account for the

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rejection of costumbre and rise of the Catholic church there in late twentieth century highland Chiapas. Rather, the Word of God, re-introduced into Maya communities with new vigor following Samuel Ruiz’s arrival in San Cristóbal, became an instrument of liberation in the hands of young men who, in conquering literacy, read God’s salvific message into their historical milieu with transformative effects. In this case, conversion was a turning, in the first instance, from trago to text; and literacy, to paraphrase Bartolomé de Las Casas, became the indispensable way (Las Casas 1993). The ensuing reversal(s) of authority upset tradition in the Tzotzil community of Santa Maria Magdalenas and elsewhere in the highlands and redirected post-Vatican II Catholic evangelization as converts became catechists, reading themselves in the sacred text and claiming it as their own. In so doing, they assumed authorship of world and lives until then heavily inscribed by Ladinos. Fathers and Sons – a Conversion Story Local clergy complaints about the activities of INI’s bi-lingual teachers announced the presence of new players in the highlands. Bishop Ruiz recruited missionaries broadly: among the first foreigners to respond was Padre David, an ex-Jesuit North American who was assigned to the parish of San Andrés Larrainzar in 1962. Inspired by Catholic Action and its ameliorative agenda, he set about organizing an experimental potato farm and support for a health clinic staffed by North American women religious (Archivo Dioce14 sano, Box 10; Orozco mss). But his overriding pastoral concerns were to root out alcohol consumption, in his view the primary vice of his flock, and to develop a cadre of catechists to evangelize the parish’s forty-four parajes: “the first thing a priest looks for is a catechist” (FN 21.VIII.42). Padre David’s initial recruit was a fiscal,15 ritual advisor for the initiating cargo of mayordomo whose assumption was, the pastor observed, the first step to alcoholism (ibid.). Highly respected for his cargo, early in 1963 this fiscal attended the course for catechists given by the Marist fathers at the new school now operating in San Cristóbal under the direction of Bishop Ruiz and the patronage of the nuncio. –––––––––– 14 Letters between the priest and funders of his projects show the concern about Tzotzil diet and lack of commercial markets. The U.S. women religious serving San Andrés had responded to Paul VI’s call for “papal volunteers.” 15 The missionary’s selection was historically astute. During the early colonial era, fiscales served as Catholic agents in outlying hamlets priests rarely visited. Their role included burying the dead and gathering children for catechism (Farriss 1984: 233-239).

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On his return the catechist worked alone under close clerical supervision for several years, translating into Tzotzil rudimentary knowledge acquired from monolingual Marists: prayers, songs, and exhortations to obey God and abandon sinful ways. In 1968, this fiscal-catechist recruited five other indigenous parishioners for the course in San Cristóbal. Meanwhile the pastor of San Andrés, unsatisfied with incremental growth in catechist numbers, resorted to a strategy as old as the first Mexican missionary reductions. With funds from a European relief agency, he established a residential primary school for boys in the cabecera (site of the parish church center and official seat of township government, literally “head town”) near the parish compound where none had existed before. This venture led to a secondary school in San Cristóbal that the missionary hoped would foster vocations to the diocesan seminary whose facilities it shared. Among the first pupils in the mission primary school was the Andresero (resident of San Andrés) Daniel: his story, though in some aspects exceptional, traces the nearly universal pattern of conversion by parish catechists. Daniel’s father held prominent cargos and was an honored curandero (village healer) as well; his prestige gave his son a privileged place at fiesta celebrations. But, Daniel recalls, “it was the hardest thing, to see my father drunk” (FN, 7.21.93). The boy hid or fled the house rather than watch his father beat his mother in drunken rages. The family tilled more fertile land than most and, rare among the Tzotzil, owned three horses and a few cows; Daniel greatly admired his father’s capacity for work. Nonetheless, he remembers shivering through frigid nights and rising in the frost of early morning to walk to school alone in his only set of clothes. The pains that poverty inflicted during these journeys was further aggravated by the shame he experienced in the one-room school where ill-prepared, ladinoized INI teachers using opaque Spanish texts failed utterly to reach him: he quit primary school after two years. To relieve his consequent depression, following a three-day fast his father took him to pray to the Virgin of the Assumption in Ixtapa, five hours’ walk from their homestead, “so that I might learn” (ibid.). Recitation of ritual formulae according to costumbre rescued Daniel from despair following failure in school. But he never returned to the public primary and refused to follow his father in ascent of the cargo ladder, not because he objected to service of the saints but from abhorrence of trago. A transfer of identity resolved the boy’s dilemma while dissolving psychological conflict in social critique. San Andrés’ first fiscal-turned-catechist had created the nucleus of a revitalized Catholic community; its existence addressed several sides of the boy’s dilemma. His brother-in-law’s invitation to join this new community

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assured affiliation with his family, at least laterally. At the same time, he discovered an alternative path to social prestige in a new, but unquestionably sacred cargo: catechist. As important, he satisfied his thwarted desire for learning by mastery of religious doctrine with a convincing rationale for rejection of trago: the drunkenness of any of his children dishonored the one true God, loving father-creator of all. In short, in catechist preaching Daniel discovered a God formed after the image he sought, and could not find, in his own father. He also found a community in which social worth depended on the free gift of God, not obligatory drink. The boy’s conversion entailed both severe costs and substantial rewards. His parents fiercely opposed his attendance at catechist-led meetings, fearing their loss of a laborer for the family milpa (traditional landholding sown with corn, beans, and squash) and their son’s loss of “the things of costumbre” (FN 7.21.93). Despite being denied meals and occasionally suffering captivity at home, Daniel defied his father to pursue an affiliation in which he experienced acceptance. Moreover, his vow never to succumb to his father’s drunken ways became transcendentally secured. He received his first holy communion without parents or padrinos (godparents), feigning their indisposition. Then, at age fourteen, five years after defying his father to hear the Word of God, Daniel left his parents’ home, despite their threats, to attend the month-long Marist course for catechists in San Cristóbal with some twenty-five other Andreseros (residents of San Andrés), conscious that this act constituted a decisive break with his father and ancestral tradition. Shame and domestic rebellion had pushed the boy to seize a socioreligious alternative to costumbre. But cargo per se was not what he renounced: he prized both its accepted purpose – service to the community, and its social reward – the value placed on the word of those who reached the cargo ladder’s highest rung. Nor, at least in its origins, was his conversion triggered by religious doubt. To the contrary, he admired his parents’ “great faith – they prayed with candles, regularly, every fifteen-twenty days, not out of obligation but in total security that the Apostle (San Andrés) would give them all they needed and asked for” (FN 7.21.93) and honors memories of tradition’s healing pilgrimage after he abandoned school. Rather as he pondered his painful circumstance – he had one change of clothes, slept on the ground covered by torn blankets, went barefoot until age 13 – “I felt these questions inside, in my very body, I don’t know why I had these questions, I never told anybody about them” (FN 7.21.93). At first provoked by poverty and familial anguish, then reinforced by classroom alienation, questions felt “in my very body” disposed him to find

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answers in an alternative community offering not just psychic relief but a new world of meaning. The Lure of Literacy The essential medium of the world in which Daniel found both refuge and a future was the written (Spanish) word. He cites “illumination” to account for his ready understanding of Catholic prayer and precept initially absorbed by memorization. The mature catechist also recounts a vision during an open-air course conducted by an early catechist: It was a kind of apparition. There was a huge cross with the colors of the rainbow. A piece of paper fell down from it, looking like a beautiful rooster or chicken, and landed on my folded arms. I put it in my pocket without looking at it or telling anyone about it and ran home so my [brother-in-law] could read it. There were lines of colored writing on this tiny piece of paper. It said I would get 500 pesos [US$165.00]. It wasn’t signed (FN 7:31.93).

Daniel’s vision attests to the enormous attraction and promise of the written word in a largely oral culture on the margins of an ethnically-divided world in which literacy functioned as an instrument of domination (Cornelius 1991; Genovese 1974: 561-566; Goody 1968; Sanneh 1989, 1993). The images embedded in it gloss the divide while showing the Word of God to effect Christian conversion not only as message of salvation but as medium of social power. Listening to a lesson he was as yet unable to read, Daniel perceived the quintessential Christian symbol conflated with the Maya sun-god in rainbowcolored hues hovering over the field, confirming the divine source of his good fortune. Its announcement came in the form of a dietary luxury (chicken) reserved in most Tzotzil households for those rare occasions when they consumed animal protein. To secret an unearned treasure defends against envy, characteristic vice of peasant communities whose social organization assures shared poverty through devices such as cargo. The family member responsible for his entry into the Catholic community and, not incidentally, his first literacy instructor, became the obvious choice to decode this prophesy of economic windfall for the impoverished fledgling reader. The words had dropped from heaven whose authority they surely bore in the absence of a human signature. The paper was tiny, its recipient emphasizes, a sign of the precariousness of its promise. But it could not have been grander: wealth, and hence well-being, betokened by brightly colored words. The vision’s interpretation depends on contextual clues. Its symbolism describes realistic ambition rather than fantastic wish, linking, as it does, well-being (chicken, rainbow colors, money) and written text, just as wealth

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had historically been limited to literate Ladinos (and their indigenous clients) in highland Chiapas. Far from confinement within the boundaries of one man’s idiosyncratic psychic experience, in various guises these associations are echoed repeatedly in conversion stories told by the catechists of Magdalenas. All were exposed to literacy but finally denied it in public bi-lingual schools staffed by ladinoized indigenous teachers, when not Ladinos themselves. As Rudolfo, another catechist who now tutors less-literate peers in the Bible, explains, “I went to school for eight years and graduated from primary. But nothing entered my head there” (FN 10.7.93). Aware of the power of literacy by humiliating encounters with Spanish-speaking vendors, employers, and government agents – including teachers – (“indito” – little Indian,” they called me, Rudolfo recalls), reading and writing became highly desir16 able, even revered and mystified, capacities. While indigenous scribes had been present in highland communities since early colonization, they were essentially agents of ladino government over and against Maya community. It had been decades since an indigenous agent of the church had appeared in any highland hamlet. But when a new generation of Maya catechists appeared in the parish of San Andrés in the mid-1960s, they modeled in their persons and created with the text an extraordinarily congenial context for the acquisition of literacy. Here was not merely an immensely desirable skill but an alternative future for young men disenchanted with cargo but unwilling and/or uninvited to pursue social options entailing ladinoization. This world of words was explicitly indigenous and implicitly tied to the Spanish language, heretofore an exclusively ladino medium. By his very translation in a Tzotzil field of a religious lesson originally learned in Spanish, the fiscal-catechist straddled boundaries that could not be bridged in state-sponsored INI school rooms ruled by ladinoized bi-lingual teachers. Not every catechetical lesson took place in the essential locus of Tzotzil life – “el campo – the countryside.” But the religious discourse of the first Andresero catechists was, by missionary necessity, linguistically and socioculturally situated wholly in indigenous territory. Presumably every person in attendance understood that the instructor came in the name of the priest; but this non-indigenous presence was remote, indeed practically invisible. The convening agent of this Tzotzil gathering shared the assembly’s ethnic, as well as linguistic, identity. His authority, however, rested not only in the hearing accorded him by his fellow Tzotzils but on his access to the dominant –––––––––– 16 In one of many demonstrations of the esteem with which Tzotzils regard literacy, usually undemonstrative women quite openly expressed astonishment when a teenage girl read to them about weaving from an illustrated primer.

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world. This access, historically forbidden to Indians, was conferred in the first instance by bi-lingualism, articulating a moral agenda. The central axis around which this agenda turned was trago, the neuralgic point of rift between fathers and sons threatening the reproduction of Tzotzil tradition in the parish of San Andrés, including the village of Santa Maria Magdalenas. Challenging the socio-religious practice fathers saw as lifegiving and sons as death-bearing, the catechist preached the Word of God which epitomized as text both lucidity and mobility, and explicitly condemned drunkenness. Elias, among the first catechists in Magdalenas, guards a picture of himself at seventeen standing with head bowed behind his parents under the shelter of the ceremonial tent marking the high-status cargo of alférez, or fiesta-sponsor, reached by only the few men of sufficient means. But Elias now agrees with another catechist’s sardonic assessment: “His [Elias’] father can’t get ahead at all. He’s a terrible worker. The only thing he knows how to do is eat and drink” (FN 5.13.94). It took the Magdalenero Bartolomé a long time after he had left his father’s household and established his own to become a catechist. His conversion story explicitly ties drink to immobility: My wife and I heard the Word of God. When they asked me to serve in the [township] agency, I knew I couldn’t make good decisions if I was drunk. We went to church every day for a week to ask God to help me quit drinking. And when I did, I joined the Catholic community and worked for the people in the agency, too. I never drank again (FN 11.2.93).

Translated from Spanish to Tzotzil, the medium enforced the message: God was reached not by offerings of rum under obligation enforced by the elders, but rather by observing God’s Word in free association with peers. For the more ambitious, knowledge of the Word meant learning to read the Spanish Bible and thus mastering the idiom of social mobility, not under the tutelage of government teachers but of Tzotzil campesinos fulfilling a novel, but transparently authentic, cargo. In short, the catechist cargo relied on text instead of trago as medium of intercourse with God and literacy as cargo service to Maya community. Early anthropology of literacy (e.g., Goody and Watt 1963; Street 1984) acknowledges religion as a foundational locus for literacy practice; indeed, Goody argues that religion, commerce, and state bureaucracy were the motivating vehicles for the written word (Goody 1986). Goody further claims for literate religions extraordinary privileges and tacit ideological power, asserting that the fixity and transportability of the text enables theological

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(monotheistic) and ethical universalism to replace the contextually-specific gods and norms of local, oral religions. How this might be so rests in a paradox: religions bound by a book readily cross boundaries, the universality of their exclusive claims attested by the mobility of their sacred texts (cf. Sanneh 1989, 2003). Hence the claim: You cannot practice Asante religion unless you are an Asante.... Literate religions ... at least alphabetically literate ones, are generally religions of conversion, not simply religions of birth. You can spread them like jam.... In fact, the written word, the use of a new method of communication, may sometimes provide its own incentive for conversion, irrespective of the content of the Book; for those religions are not only seen as ‘higher’ because their priests are literate and can read as well as hear God’s word, but they may provide their congregation with the possibility of becoming literate themselves. What I am claiming here.. . is that only literate religions can be religions of conversion in the strict sense.... (Goody 1986: 5)

Setting aside the final assertion, read in the highland Maya context, “the possibility of becoming literate” emerges as something more than the universal human cognitive capacity, and presumably socio-cultural ambition, to acquire a “technology of the intellect,” Goody’s shorthand for the formal cognitive import of literacy (1977:16). Goody adduces the “evident performative force” of the text in an exemplary Ghanian courtroom: court-room oaths sworn on Bible or Qur’an unequivocally won over witnesses in whose eyes those attested by appeal to a local shrine (i.e., the purely oral and/or visual) appeared inferior in contrast (ibid.: 5-6). The “force” of the texts in the Ghanian case derived, by implication, from three “critical” attributes: the “status” of those who possessed, i.e., could read, them; their “outside,” foreign origins; and, most powerfully, “the gap between code and actuality” they represented (ibid.:6, 12, 25). Viewed from the standpoint of the youth transfixed by a vision in a highland field, the power of these attributes resides in the dialectical relationship among them. The paper that fell from the sky and the bilingual catechist whose translation of the Word occasioned the daydream both constituted texts. That is, they crossed boundaries and transcended locations – geographic, socio-cultural, and linguistic. Further, the Word evinced the gap between word and world while the catechist’s preaching embodied its liberating potential. Ultimately, the apparent fixity of the text challenged the presumptive fixity of Tzotzil tradition. Here was a reality “above” costumbre in every sense. It promised not only delivery from immediate cultic debt – the practice

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of the Word of God “costs nothing,” one catechist declared (FN 10-X-93). Even more compelling, it opened a way up from under dominating authorities, indigenous and ladino, and their world(s) of obligation within and subordination without. Appropriating the Word of God and “managing” it (manejar, meaning ‘to use or operate with,’ is the term favored by catechists for deciphering the Bible), Magdalenero youth saw the possibilities of effective defense against co-optation, resistance to domination, and ultimately subversion of ladino hegemony. For, Even in ordinary times the normative implications of the text often provide a yardstick for the difference between reality and potentiality, between what is and what should be, between existence and Utopia. In this way it supplies a measure of our discontent. (ibid.: 20).

The catechist Rudolfo explained how it was that Catholics of Magdalenas instituted a “semicollective” to increase, and equalize, agricultural production by pooling and working their tiny and parcels together: In Genesis it says God intended the land for everyone, not just some few people. ... In Acts 4 we heard how the apostles worked. When Jesus died they made an agreement. They decided to have all their goods in common. (FN 8. 12.95).

For these Magdaleneros, scripture’s communistic message was not restricted to economics. The “we” appropriating its utopian announcements resulted from the social production of a “textual community” (Stock 1983:90) empowered in its very gathering to reform traditional modes of production and thus attenuate the effects of ancestral poverty by reading a text that in principal is – just as the land in Genesis – “intended for everyone.” Eliding the logic of dominance and subordination that had ruled the Maya highlands since the Conquest, the text figured the autonomy it promoted. In other words, for Magdalenero catechists, the Bible legitimated free rationality, rather than obligatory intoxication, as privileged means of access to the divine and just so liberation from secular oppression. Young men of Magdalenas were humiliated by encounters with this regime in painful migratory treks to the fincas and INI-sponsored schools. They were thus the first in their community to grasp the liberating possibilities of the new arrival of the Word of God into the world of their fathers. Their “conversion” meant, in the first instance, freedom from the obligations of cargo and trago. Secondarily, it led to the Christianization of their understanding of Maya cargo and, at the same time, the Mayanization of Christian ministry. Ultimately, it raised hope for a new assertion of Maya identity as

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the communities they formed decoded secular domination in and through their shared deciphering of scriptural text. As a new basis of reciprocity within the community and as a “technology of the intellect” transcending confinement from without, the Bible carried by Maya catechists reached highland communities undoubtedly as una buena palabra – a good word, as they like to say. How they advanced in its possession and assumed its power is the story of their passage from objects to subjects in the missionization project whose schools for doctrinal formation became venues for liberation.

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Chapter Two

Constructing Highland Mission Proposals and Problematics

Introduction There exists today a substantial anthropology of mission theorizing its disruptive processes and finding them charged with power-laden dialectics. Jean and John Comaroff’s exemplary work on colonial and post-colonial South Africa demonstrates how these dialectics implicate even the most trivial features of human society and culture. Bridging history and ethnography, the Comaroffs’ work uncovers the multitude of contests set in motion in every domain at all times and places of missionary venture (1985, 1991, 1992, 1997). Using their anthropological analytic “challenge and riposte,” this chapter and the next begin to reframe an enterprise celebrated for its decolonizing intentions: renewed Catholic evangelization of Mexico’s Indians during the second half of the last century. As it came to know the Maya in Chiapas, the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas became a laboratory for new approaches to evangelization imbued with Catholic theologies of inculturation and liberation. But these theologies were not entirely free of “the essence of colonization,” as the Comaroffs define it: “seizing and transforming ‘others’ by the very act of conceptualizing ... them in terms not of their choosing ... assuming the capacity to ‘represent’ them....” (Comaroff 1991:15). In the Maya highlands, the peculiar history of Mexican church-state relations and the literally “habit forming” (ibid.:23) Mexican hegemonic consensus inevitably compromised wellintentioned pastoral proposals. Challenge and riposte between missionary and Maya appear insinuated in the laminated layers of these proposals when they are peeled apart historically from the top. Vatican II Mission: Inculturation Theology and its Limits When in the late 1960s Magdaleneros arrived in San Cristóbal to attend diocesan courses designed to create an indigenous catechetical cohort in the highlands, they entered an ecclesial world in flux, globally and locally. Responding to the “signs of the times,” its signature theme, Vatican Council II (1962-65) reoriented the self-understanding of the Catholic church through related moves toward aggiornamiento – updating, the goal of Pope John

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XXIII’s surprising call for an ecumenical council at the outset of his pontificate. The Council ratified modernity by admitting the findings of critical biblical studies and, in a more limited way, the ascendant social sciences into ecclesial discourse. In doing so, Catholic bishops placed the church in service to a world they explicitly acknowledged to be autonomous relative to its own mission. Moreover, while European and American prelates and scholars set the terms of discussion at the Council, attendance of unprecedented numbers of bishops from Africa, Asia, and Latin America signaled the entry of Christianity into what Karl Rahner called a “third age” auguring abandonment of its 1 centuries-old Eurocentric posture to stand as an authentic “world church.” The Council’s pastoral-intellectual departures had their greatest immediate impact in Latin America. Its episcopal delegates, already regionally selfidentified through formation of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) in 1955, left Rome decided to take stock of their local church under the Council’s renewing impulse.2 The resulting August, 1968, CELAM consultation at Medellín, Colombia, under the programmatic title “The Church in the Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council,” became historic through its articulation of a developing liberation theology. CELAM’s explicit condemnation of “structural violence” inflicted on the impoverished majority by global capitalism and its endorsement of the “preferential option for the poor” as a theological principle were subsequently adopted by the Vatican itself (Galilea 1987: 61ff). The critical opening in Catholic thought affirmed by Vatican II and instantiated in the teachings of Medellín reverberated throughout the church, including those areas designated “mission territory,” areas and populations ecclesially neglected, alienated, or simply untouched. Though he played no visible role at Vatican Council II, Samuel Ruiz, an unusually young delegate, was impressed by the African bishops’ discourses on the dilemmas intrinsic to evangelization of non-Western cultures. He also made contacts with Europeans eager to collaborate in confronting them. One of these, Pierre Boulard, supported by sociologist-consultors to a new association of Mexican bishops serving marginated populations (Union for –––––––––– 1

2

Of some 2642 prelates present at the Council, there were 849 Europeans, 932 Latin Americans, 256 from Asia, 250 from Africa, 239 from North America, 70 from the Pacific Islands; Alberigo and Komonchak 1995: 2; Rahner 1979: 716-27. Gustavo Gutierrez notes that while Latin American participation at Vatican II was “limited,” Chilean Bishop Manuel Larraín conceived of a CELAM meeting “to take stock of our situation in the light of Vatican II” during the Council (in Alberigo, Jossua, and Komonchak 1987: 182-83).

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Episcopal Mutual Support – UMAE), initiated a series of meetings in Chiapas. As a result, in 1967 Bishop Ruiz and his pastoral agents divided the highland diocese into six geo-linguistic “zones” serving distinct Maya language groups to encourage attention to the particularities of micro-missionary fields. This structural acknowledgement of linguistic difference within the diocese provided the experiential reference for a shift in pastoral strategy for Bishop Ruiz who, until then, had pursued the familiar Catholic Action assistencialist model, i.e., education and health initiatives supported by international aid to ameliorate Maya margination. At the urging of Jesuits in his diocese, in April, 1968, Bishop Ruiz attended the first continent-wide meeting on mission in Latin America held in Melgar, Columbia, one of several gatherings preparatory to Medellín. In retrospective evaluation some thirty years later, Bishop Ruiz depicts himself as driven to anguished self-examination by anthropological critique of Christian mission: I felt full of desperation... Then, ‘what was it to evangelize? ....Should I just sit and contemplate cultures or try to revive them in their pre-Columbian splendor? Why did God permit the existence of so many cultures? ... He himself was born into and embraced a certain culture, even spoke the dialect of the Nazarenes on the road to Galilee (Fazio 1994: 87).

In this context, a presentation to the assembled churchmen by the Columbian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was, to the young bishop, “a revelation” (ibid). He concluded that accepted modes of evangelization on the continent – including those he had undertaken in Chiapas – were counterevangelical, exuding paternalism, if not outright domination. At this same meeting, the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the seminal figure in liberation theology, formulated Vatican II missiology to offer a theological way out. His presentation recuperated the patristic doctrine of Justin Martyr, logos spermatiko – seeds of the Word: We are taught that Christ is the First-born of God...that he is the Word in whom all mankind have a share.... Thus whatever has been spoken aright by any man belongs to us Christians; for we worship and love, next to God, the Logos which is from the unbegotten and ineffable God; since it was on our behalf that he was made man... ...[ancient Greek] writers were able, through the seed of the Logos implanted in them, to see reality darkly (in Shorter 1988: 76-77).

Divine revelation, on this account, is inevitably mediated by cultural particularities. So-called logos Christology prescribes the discovery of the (univer-

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sal) Christ-event within (particular) cultures rather than its imposition upon them. Nominated to direct CELAM’s Department of Missions and from a similar position with the Mexican Episcopal Commission for the Indigenous, Bishop Ruiz embraced this ancient formulation of what contemporary theology calls ‘inculturation.’3 From national and international missiological platforms, he publicly rejected the implicit paternalism in Catholic Action’s program of moral and social uplift masterminded by missionaries. Within his own diocese he urged an “incarnational,” “inculturating,” insertion into local indigenous reality directed toward “integral liberation.” This theological current rethinks what Ignacio Ellacuria calls the “historical transcendence” of biblical events, discovering in them “history as corroboration and demonstration of God” in order to argue “a single praxis of salvation,” at once historical and transcendent, i.e., eschatological (Ellacuria and Sobrino 1993: 251-89). But theological warrants by themselves could not remap mission. Indeed, read closely, the document produced by the Melgar meeting actually constrained the renewal in mission it hoped to instigate. It proposed: varied “circumstances” would produce different realizations of a “unique and identical” missionary task; “autochthonous” churches could emerge within a universal ecclesial paradigm; paternalism and alliances with power elites should be rejected in favor of advocacy for structural change; the church, nonetheless, should assume responsibility “to prepare” marginated populations for the inevitable arrival of technology and secularization; and mission should work to reverse indigenous alienation from national culture(s) (Departamento de Misiones – CELAM 1989: #13-15; 19; 21-26). In short, Melgar missiologists acknowledged the fundamental problematic of mission: How can the liberating message of Christian doctrinal universals be mediated within particular, highly varied cultures? But they also continued to postulate higher orders and/or centers – universal church, modernization, the nation state – from which “the unique and identical” mission would approach what ipso facto became lower orders and/or encompassed peripheries, e.g., authochthonous churches or vulnerable and isolated indigenous populations. Thus while drawing on liberation theology’s critique of predatory capitalism, inculturationist proposals failed to fully examine, and/or unintentionally –––––––––– 3

Pope Paul VI summarized the idea of inculturation: “what matters is to evangelize man’s [sic] culture and cultures (not in a purely decorative way, as it were, by applying a thin veneer, but in a vital way, in depth and right to their very roots...” Evangelii Nuntiandi 1975: #20. Important full-scale studies addressing inculturation include Amaladoss 2005; Arrupe 1981; Bamat and Wiest 1999; Roest Croellius 1981- ; Irarrázaval 2000; Schineller 1990; Schreiter 1985, 1997; Shorter 1988.

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reiterated, premises and structures of mediation that suggested domination in a less dehumanizing but arguably still problematic register. A hierarchical church remains not least among these mediating realities. In an address to a 1973 international mission forum, Ruiz rejected what he called “sandwich religion,” a composite of Christian concepts grafted onto traditional cosmologies as mere additives, formulaic veneers, or selective substitutions (Ruiz García 1973: 21-30). Correctly understood, Christian truth is not a doctrine but “an event ... saving history,” in principle translatable in the terms of any culture. The task of mission is not to create one great universal monoculture; rather it is... to make the Word flesh ... according to the particular characteristics of the culture ... [and] lead to both the development of its individual characteristics and unity with other cultures ... to give light to people in their movement.... (ibid.: 25-26).

Despite its historicizing tone, the bishop’s argument for what he called the “incarnational principle,” like the Melgar document, evaded significant impediments to the ecclesial embrace of cultural pluralism. In his formulation, mission’s challenge – to preach the Christian gospel as a source of “light to people,” that is, a universally translatable value – operates as principle rather than problematic. By focusing on mission’s theological dimension, the bishop pushed its mediating agents to the periphery of concern. This discursive strategy assumes the compatibility of hierarchy – “the incarnation of the Church has been entrusted to the totality of its members according to the place which each one occupies in this mystic Body” (ibid.) – with autochthonous churches envisioned as the end of inculturation. But authochthony implies “place” as a locus of meaning and value, begging questions about who maps and assigns locations. Similarly, though Ruiz acknowledged the missionary’s “disturbing influence,” he assumed she will be “free from any negative testimony of oppression and injustice” simply by ecclesial association (ibid.). With faith in the power of God and trust in missionary beneficence, he offered this innocent prognosis: God will then continue doing his own work; men will hear his voice and, without pressure, in a sublime act of acceptance of the ‘unknown God,’ will orient their lives toward Him.... Then will spring forth a Church which is truly incarnate, a Church which can be said to be autochthonous (ibid.: 28).

The bishop’s elevated vision evades the critical questions: whether and how autochthony can result from mission under the auspices of “the Universal Church in its hierarchical aspect” (ibid.) even (and particularly) when informed by a theology of inculturation. These questions were implicitly

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addressed at both Melgar and Medellín by appeals for decentralization of the church. But Catholicism’s fundamental institutional constraint – hierarchy – remains an unexamined given in CELAM documents, as in other postconciliar mission proposals. The compatibility of religious hierarchy – arguably best understood as encompassment (Dumont 1970: 65-78) – and autochthony, and other, similarly vexing theoretical issues are most amenable to analysis viewed from within the circumstance(s) they seek to address. But in this connection, too, normative ecclesial discourse truncates the analytic enterprise. In official church pronouncements, “circumstance” generally denotes a theological locus and culture is construed as a repository of meanings and values without reference to the social determinants of its creation and trans4 mission. These latter include power relations tied to Marxist prescriptions for class struggle in the minds of Latin American prelates schooled to battle atheism and exposed to social thought generally in its functionalist varieties.5 Thus in church documents circumstance is fused with culture construed principally, if not exclusively, as an idealized sphere of symbols, detached from social origin or effect (Suess 1994: 12). In short, what an Asian theologian criticizes as “inculturation fever” (Pieris: 1994: 32) reduces (or elevates) ritual and symbol to aesthetics (Angrosino 1994: 824-32). This theologically-refracted view of culture is of an ecclesiological piece with limited scrutiny of the church’s practice of power in Latin America, the world’s most Catholic region. Bishop Ruiz and his episcopal allies at Medellín and since have often publicly recognized and rejected church alliances with governing elites who ignore structural poverty and human rights. The more progressive among them acknowledge that the church is embedded in social processes and thus only relatively autonomous. They also accept the inevitability of conflict with the dominating regimes they criticize. Yet it is difficult to discover in the writings of these bishops evidence of critical reflection either on the everyday practice of power required for the church’s institutional survival, or on the social origins and location of church agents as bearers of power in pastoral action. Instead, the pronouncements of –––––––––– 4

5

CELAM’s 1992 Santo Domingo document proposes: ‘promoting an inculturation of the liturgy...maintaining the value of universal symbols in harmony with the general discipline of the church;’... ‘promoting indigenous...autochthonous cultural values by means of an inculturation of the church.” CELAM, 1992: #248. A Chilean comment on CELAM’s reference to “Christian culture,” “everything is reduced to the sphere of values... From this viewpoint, inculturation is reduced to an undertaking to moralize culture in accordance with Christian morality.” (Castillo 1994: 76). Bishop Ruiz describes Latin American bishops’ training: “Little was said of Marx. ... We studied Spencer and [functionalist] other sociologists.... Society was thought to be stable ... Change was an aggression against the established order. ...at Medellín... structural analysis began ...” (Fazio 1989: 66).

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Latin American bishops’ display their often innocent, nearly unswerving, and perhaps inevitable belief in the institution whose hierarchs they are. In effect, their status obviated critical insight into everyday ecclesial entanglements in webs of power. Dumont’s argument that religious hierarchy “cannot give a place to power as such, without contradicting its own principle” – i.e., the religious as such, for Dumont the realm of purity or “the whole”– explains why the church’s institutional self-understanding was skewed in this way (Dumont 1973:77). Statements by Samuel Ruiz himself express the inevitable (according to Dumont) contradiction between suspicion of counter-evangelical political alliances and innocence regarding the church’s own practice of power. In a 1993 address to the World Parliament of Religions, the Bishop insisted that conflict is intrinsic to the human condition and condemned the Conquest’s immoral “imposition of religion and culture.” He echoed CELAM’s call for correction of the first evangelization by ecclesial conversion to the poor and rejection of secular power (Ruiz García 1993: 22-29; cf. Puebla 1975: # 1157-58). But in reference to intra-ecclesial conflicts, the Bishop also proposed: ...if according to its constitution it [the church] maintains its hierarchical nature, it is to assure ... service to the ecclesial and human community as free as possible from political eventualities and situations. It [the church] is a hierarchy instituted to promote democracy. This is a conflict [between hierarchy and democracy] that is somewhat artificial since every institution (and all religion) has transcendent points that are never negotiable.... (ibid.: 25).

Precisely as Dumont’s theory predicts, the bishops asserts that hierarchy necessitates a church free from – ‘pure’ of – politics because its “hierarchical nature” demands it be so: power is “not allowed for by the theoretical hierarchy of pure and impure” (Dumont 1973: 77). Just as the Brahmanic priesthood stands for (religious) purity from (organic) pollution, so the church, in Ruiz’s argument, embodies freedom (purity) from politics and promotion of democracy as requisite to the absolute (religious) dignity of human being. Yet the very existence of non-negotiables compels the exercise of power. Indeed, hierarchy’s ‘freedom’ depends upon enforcement of order against chaos (for Ruiz, the inherently conflictive human condition). Thus assertion of ‘non-negotiable transcendent points’ begets contradiction as transcendence begets hierarchy. Or, put another way, hierarchy (emblem of the divine whole) necessarily subjects power (the political order) to itself while requiring power – its own as well as that of secular allies – to do so. But power in this double sense must be hidden from hierarchy for hierarchy to be itself: “[hierarchy] must give a place to power without saying

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so, and it is obliged to close its eyes to this point on pain of destroying itself” (ibid.). Intended to reinvent Christian mission, accepted inculturation theology fails to address this fundamental problematic. Catholic mission constructed on such theological elision generally moves from the universal to the local without noting the passage through power this traversal necessarily entails. In the case of Mexico, a leap from the universal to the local without passing through the nation could only be an illusion for historical reasons directly impinging on renewal of mission to the Maya. From Equivocal Accomplice to Ambivalent Critic: Post-Revolution Mexican Church The peculiar history and position of the church in relation to state and society in Mexico – overwhelmingly Catholic culturally as well as statistically – accounts for the contradictions in Catholic mission in highland Chiapas 6 (Camp 1997: 4-5). Indeed, the sinuous post-Revolution struggle of the Mexican church to survive hostile governments lies scarcely hidden beneath the recent renown of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Alternately celebrated and criticized for its pastoral innovations, the controversial diocese is more adequately portrayed by palimpsest than polemic. Hierarchs and statesmen brought an end to the Cristero revolt, the bloody Catholic traditionalist struggle against the Mexican Revolution’s anti-clerical secularization of society, through the construction of a modus vivendi which ceded the church moral and doctrinal influence (particularly through its schools) in exchange for its acceptance of state dominance of the nation’s 7 political economy (Blancarte 1992: 32). The more or less “hidden” collaboration of bishops and bureaucrats in the interest of social control failed to prevent occasional church-state skirmishes (Reich 1995). Official hostility to the church was actually enshrined in the Constitution of 1917 which denied juridical identity to the church while the state set the number of priests allowed in Mexico (in 1931, one cleric per 50,000 Mexicans) and blocked the entry of foreign priests altogether.8 As a result the –––––––––– 6

7 8

According to Camp, despite persistent official anti-clericalism, the percentage of the Mexican population that called itself Catholic dropped just 9% from 1900 to 1990 when it stood at 90.28% of 63,285.027 Mexicans. Carlos Fuentes epitomizes the cultural force of Mexican Catholicism thus: “I am a nonbeliever, but I am a Catholic in the sense that I belong to a Catholic culture. I can’t get away from it. It impregnates everything – my world view, my view of politics, my view of women, of education, of literature” (Camp 1997: 5). “In the Mexican context, the church disputes the masses with the state” (Blancarte 1996: 32). The 1917 Constitution’s “anticlerical virulence” aimed at “preventing the Church from ever recovering its social strength” (Loaeza-Lajous 1990: 279). Under it church ministers had no

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church’s voice was diminished and its power severely attenuated in the public sphere. Nonetheless, Catholicism remained the dominant domestic socializing influence on policymakers as well as priests (Camp 1997: 11). Mutual tolerance between these similarly socialized elites defined Mexican Catholicism’s institutional peculiarities (Camp 1997:11). Lay activists, women religious, and priests were drawn largely from the middle class to pursue a moralizing devotionalism that left socio-economic matters, including organization of peasants and workers, to the state. Before Vatican II, Mexican seminaries were characteristically Tridentine in teaching and discipline, their residents monastically segregated not only from secular society but from any intellectual influences that challenged traditional dogma and devotion (Camp 1997:162; Pomerleau 1985: 252-54). In so far as the church extended its moral vision beyond care for individuals, it did so through hierarchically directed and often secret gestures to ameliorate injustice via ecclesially chartered lay organizations such as Catholic Action; and this group operated almost exclusively within circumscribed parochial spheres (García Gonzalez 1984: 363ff). In short, the church acceded to privatization of religion while advancing social values – “unity, order, social peace and conformism” (Loaeza-Lajous 1985: 48) – which legitimated the state’s authoritarian regime and its cooptation of labor and other social groups. This tacit division of ideological labor played out in the surreal socioreligious atmosphere created by church’s “irregular” legal situation: ... the Catholic Church, violates if not the letter, decidedly the spirit of ALL [sic] constitutional precepts, and this in a systematic and permanent way. What is more, this irregular situation is known and accepted, or at least tolerated, by the state. Thus...in a country whose population is predominantly Catholic...the Church is outside the law (de la Rosa 1985: 2).

The Mexican church’s outlaw status explains its “equivocal complicity” vis a vis the state up through its early reception of Vatican II (Loaeza-Lajous 1985: 44). Always alert to its precarious legal position, the church pursued a strategy of survival conveniently congruent with anticommunist tercerismo9 thencurrent in Latin America (Sigmund 1973: 61-76). Accordingly, Mexico’s bishops carefully refrained from political pronouncements except those asserting the right, and duty, of Catholics to vote

9

political rights; “lay education” became the norm in all schools; and the church could own no property. Tercerismo rejected both communism and unregulated capitalism, a position echoed in official church social eaching, e.g., John Paul II, Centissimus Annos (1991).

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(and thus the church’s capacity to convoke). The bishops’ rigid survivalist political posture also determined its foreign policy. It concurred with the secular elite’s antipathy towards Mexico’s Protestant northern neighbor and maintained a sense of exceptionalism relative to Latin America, ultimately founded on Mexico’s invented national(ist) tradition: What Loaeza calls an “autochtonous system of symbols” created during the movement for independence – “an idiosyncratic blend of Marian devotion, anti-españolismo and Neo-aztecism” (Loaeza-Lajous 1979: 275) – fit the elite imaginary making 10 Mexicans revolutionary heirs of a “cosmic race.” Whether labeled complicity or collaboration, the church’s stance toward the state undoubtedly enhanced its social position. One measure is the remarkable mid-century increase in Mexican Catholic religious personnel staffing a growing number of church-sponsored institutions.11 But this institutional strength only accentuates the church’s political timidity, especially its failure to address the deepening poverty of Mexico’s majority and suppression of voices that called attention to it.12 Intra-ecclesial tension arguably reflected the divided consciousness of the nation’s governing elite. In brief, Mexican modernization was directed by a corporatist state that fetishized traditional authority, i.e., the caudillo (political boss) and the patron. The nation’s political economy was advanced by a similarly schizophrenic nationalist ideology which sacralized the heroic mestizo campesino while seeking to “improve the race” through industrialization underwritten with foreign investment. National myth notwithstanding, in the last century Mexico’s largely-urban middle class expanded rapidly from 17% of total population in 1960, 25-30% by mid-1980s (P. Smith 1991). This sector produced the church’s personnel and drove its discursive support for the elite’s hegemonic project. In October, 1968, the Mexican government massacred some 500 student protestors who effectively exposed this project at Tlaltelolco, an historic –––––––––– 10 This phrase comes from José Vasconcelos, Mexican Minister of Education during the 1920s. Loaeza-Lajous summarizes: “To rally Creoles, castas and Indians against Spain, [independence movement leaders] proclaimed what was essentially a fiction, the myth of a Mexican nation which was the linear heir of the Aztecs. In practice, however, the insurgents fought behind the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe” (in Brading 1985: 55). 11 Between 1940 and 1960, the number of priests in Mexico grew from 4220 to 6466; the number of women religious more than doubled, rising from 8123 to 19,400 (de la Rosa, 1985, p. 281). 12 For example, the Society for Mexican Theology (STM), Young Catholic Workers (JOC), the para-ecclesial National Center for Social Communication (CENCOS), the Union for Episcopal Mutual Support (UMAE), and the Mexican Social Secretariat (SSM) – the last three established by the bishops themselves – were either brought under official church control or formally separated from it and ceased to function by the mid-1970s (García Gonzalez; 1987: 363-97; 442-446; also Muro González 1994: 94-101).

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plaza in the heart of the nation’s capital.13 The failure of Mexico’s bishops to endorse the students’ cause and condemn the state’s violent response despite broad moral revulsion across the nation revealed the depth of its investment in social stability. Earlier that year the hierarchy attempted criticism of the regime’s economic development strategy in a “Pastoral Letter of the Mexican Bishops on Development and Integration of the Country” (García 1984: 381-83; Blancarte 1992: 32-36). Noting the failure of state-directed projects, the document called for free unions and the assumption of social responsibility by all – “todos somos responsables.” But the bishops refused to fault the regime directly for growing social inequalities. To the contrary, it recognized the state “as administrator of the common good” and tacitly endorsed the hegemonic consensus: “...no one should project his orthodoxy to condemn others, neither is it licit for a Christian to try to impose his criterion....” (quoted by Blancarte 1992: 236). An increasingly vocal minority of clergy and laity chafed at the institution’s failure to assimilate Vatican II’s call for renewal or assume the prophetic stance of Medillín. But, as one Mexican historian observes, “The Council had reached the country at an inopportune moment” (Muro Gonzalez 1994: 104). In fact, Vatican II and Medillín took place at the height of the socalled “milagro mexicano – the Mexican miracle,” a period of steady economic expansion and singular political stability (P. Smith 1991: 321-62). In this circumstance, the center of gravity of the Mexican church on the ground – the burgeoning middle class and the clergy and women religious that emerged from it – weighed against change. The bishop of Tuxtla Gutierrez, capital of Chiapas, voiced the consensus in an Independence Day invocation: Our current President and President-elect have repeatedly committed themselves to a nationalist policy; to not impose imported foreign schemes and to seek a more just order on the path of liberty. This is an attitude that we Mexicans ought to back and demand at all times. Because no Mexican wants the hammer and sickle to substitute for our national flag ... we want no other stars shining in the Mexican skies than those on the mantle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, creator of our unity (Blancarte 1992: 411-412).

But uneasiness with such ecclesial appeals existed at the church’s episcopal center, as well as among progressive pastors. At the conclusion of his first term (1980-82) as president of the Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM), –––––––––– 13 See first-hand accounts of this still-resonant event in Poniatowska 1975; investigations and publications continue in Mexico.

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just three months after the Bishop of Tuxtla’s nationalist paean, Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada borrowed from a homily by the then-Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Woytyla, in blunt ecclesial self-criticism: We’ve not known how to extricate outselves from the narrow juridical corner in which we’re enclosed because we’ve said: We’re not going to lose what we have... the State has been tolerant,...etc., etc. ...the Church in Mexico leads a shameful life... we’ve invented formulaic pretexts to avoid more vital and demanding, more daring and evangelical, undertakings (Blancarte 1992: 409).14

Juridically “cornered”, the Mexican church shared the state’s notorious centralization and obsession with control, a fact surely contributing to its inability to respond to clerics urging change on behalf of those pushed further to the margins of society by Mexico’s political economic advance. The alarming 1982 devaluation of the peso following the collapse of oil prices exposed serious weaknesses in Mexico’s “miraculous” modernizing project (P. Smith 1991: 377-383). It also further emboldened Mexican pastoral agents critical of the church’s political passivity. Denied an institutional voice, they sought alternative routes to effect the Latin American bishops’ 1979 Puebla pronouncement of a “preferential option for the poor.” Some clerics seized on development of ecclesial base communities among the urban poor to advance social justice ‘from below.’ Others maneuvered against statist and ecclesial authoritarianism in the clergy-poor dioceses encompassing the most marginated Mexicans, its Indians. Bishops in the southeastern states of Oaxaca, Tehuantepec, and Chiapas, in particular, initiated the “more daring and more evangelical undertakings” to which Corripio called the church. Here the “world church” presaged by Vatican II came to Mexico in the form of other worlds within it. From the Center to the Periphery: Indian Theology in “a country without Indians” The Mexican church was geographically centralized to an extraordinary 15 degree. The shape of the church’s discourse inevitably bore the marks of this geography, its social-political authority both deriving and flowing from the country’s urbanizing center whose weight only grew as Mexico’s socioeconomic middle expanded and gravitated there as well. –––––––––– 14 “Corripio ... made his own a homily of Karol Woytyla [and] completely assimilated the Polish example to the Mexican” (Blancarte 1992: 409). 15 In 1957, there were thirty-five dioceses and five mission regions within five ecclesiastical provinces, all in the center of the country: Mexico City, León, Puebla, Morelia and Guadalajara. (García Gonzalez 1984: 367-368.)

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But decentralizing moves by Luigi Raimondi, apostolic delegate to Mexico from 1957-67, disrupted this structural status quo. Among twentyfour new dioceses created under his direction,16 two were carved within the centuries-old episcopal territory of Chiapas in Tapachula (1958) and Tuxtla Gutierrez (1964), leaving the Diocese of San Cristóbal with a majorityindigenous population. Thus just as Vatican II turned the universal church toward the modern world, spatial reconfiguration of the Mexican church directed its focus towards the indigenous world within it. At the instigation of Bishop Lucio Torreblanca (1894-1961), the immediate predecessor of Samuel Ruiz in the see of San Cristóbal, CEM established the Episcopal Commission for Indigenous (CEI) which organized a National Indigenist Congress in 1960. In response to Congress deliberations, CEM formed the National Center for Assistance to Indigenous Missions (CENAMI) the next year. Clodomiro Siller, director of CENAMI during much of its history, attributes the church’s long neglect of the nation’s Indians to Tridentine dogmatism and political insecurity. In fact, Mexico’s bishops, until well into this century largely Spanish-born or creole, saw no reason to alter a colonial approach to the nation’s native peoples. They opposed clergy who mobilized the nation’s Indians during the War of Independence (1810-1821) and never evinced solidarity with those dispossessed by mid-nineteenth century liberal disentailment (Siller in Ortoll et al 1985: 213-239). Following the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), Siller argues, the best tradition of the Church [identified with Bartolomé de Las Casas]... forgot that there were indigenous...[and] became nationalized within the Mexican modernizing project ... officially and ecclesially, Mexico had come to be a country without Indians (ibid.: 232).

Incorporated as a civil association with government tax exemptions and import licenses, CENAMI followed an integrationist program ideologically in line with indigenista proposals for resolution of Mexico’s “indigenous problem” (see Ch. 1 above). In short, in its initial phase the church’s rediscovery of the indigenous accommodated its survivalist political posture. Dioceses in the Pacific Southeast assumed a more experimental stance and promoted indigenous socio-economic development with CENAMI resources. A few sympathized with Samuel Ruiz’s move toward liberation praxis, to “accompany” alongside, rather than assist from above, indigenous collaborators theologically envisioned as subjects, not objects, of evangelization. The bishop’s appeals to European and North American foundations –––––––––– 16 CEM expanded from 60 bishops to 80 during of Vatican II (ibid.).

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brought funding for health and education projects directed by clergy and women religious whom he personally recruited from Mexico’s clergy-rich urban centers, as well as from Europe and North America.17 Maya margination remained the paramount focus of missionary concern, leavened in the diocese by Latin American liberationist ideas. But the design of missionary action bore the imprint of interests as well. In the Diocese of San Cristóbal, progressive clergy released radical visions supressed at Mexico’s ecclesial center or in home churches elsewhere. Many members of religious congregations embraced missionary outreach as a means to the renewal of their own communities in accordance with Vatican II.18 Those clergy eager to challenge Mexican capitalist corporatism and align the Mexican church with CELAM’s “option for the poor” readily perceived the power vacuum created by government neglect of the Maya. Their attempts to fill it reflected eagerness to free the Maya from servitude to highland elites but also the church from alliance with the Mexican state. Indeed, not a few missionaries came to Chiapas by a kind of selfselection, seeing in Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist orientation support for progressive projects shunned in other dioceses.19 In addition to health and social services expected of Christian mission, they worked against landlessness and other structural problems, many focusing on cooperatives as alternatives to state entities such as the National Peasant Confederation (CNC). Missionaries less inclined to challenge either the state or traditional missionary methods nonetheless hoped their service to Mexico’s marginated would rebound to expand the vision of their sending religious communities. In effect, missionaries moved from paternalism to liberation strategy all the while remaining embedded within their habitus (Bourdieu 1975). Put another way, Mexican pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal regarded the Maya homeland as an essentially “foreign” missionary field. While this approach entailed a willingness to learn rather than impose, it also meant that when Mexican missionaries entered Maya territory they confronted the “other” within. In other words, they bore the peculiar ambivalence of Mexican caste consciousness resonating in Mexico’s nationalistindigenist discourse. –––––––––– 17 Ivan Illich charged that Paul VI’s “papal volunteers” were motivated by the left’s political failures in the U.S. (Costello 1979). Many Mexican clergy were eager to challenge the state and align the nation’s church with CELAM. One priest said he would leave Chiapas rather than serve under a bishop who forbade pursuit of his own progressive political agenda (personal communication, July, 1991). 18 For example, Dominicans working with native peoples in Latin America proposed that evangelization “represents the historic opportunity to recuperate the spirituality of our mission and rediscover new incarnational possibilities for our charism” (Salado 1991: 94). 19 This was the view of a priest with over twenty years experience in Chiapas at the time (personal communication, Spring 1994).

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Animating romantic evocations of mestizaje and apotheosis of “the cosmic race,” the Indian figured within the invented Mexico as both emblem and problem. The cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, heart of the national narrative and devotional core of Mexican Catholicism, enshrined the Nahua catechist Juan Diego as privileged recipient of divine favor. As one historian argues, guadalupanismo made the Indian the talisman of Mexican national identity: “Apparition of the Virgin Mary at Tepeyac, so precisely dated in the year 1532, must surely be interpreted as a foundation myth” (Brading 1984: 30). And Mexican independence from Spanish domination through divine intervention stipulated that it be precisely Juan Diego, an Indian untainted by Peninsular connections, who received her.20 The legend of Guadalupe legitimating the nation’s independence was actually invented by the eighteenth century Creole preacher and theologian, Miguel Sánchez, who assimilated Juan Diego’s Virgin-visitor to the Woman of the Apocalypse (Revelations 12). Indeed, prior to Sánchez “no one had explicitly referred to an ‘apparition’ of the image at Tepeyac....” (Lafaye 1976: 243; see also Brading 2001: 1) By raising the competition to the supernatural level, Miguel Sánchez made it possible for his compatriots to triumph ‘magically’ over the gachupines [peninsular Spaniards].... Guadalupe would be forever and ever, saecula saeculorum, the ‘letters patent’ which ennobled the Mexican people (ibid.: 252).

When Guadalupe is seen this way, Juan Diego is transmuted from agent to instrument through a theological maneuver readily put to distinctly powerpolitical ends. Ipso facto, the Indian’s autonomy is negated in his assimilation to a whole in which, and from which, he remains necessarily always only (a)part. Teología India – Indian Theology The service of Guadalupe to Mexican nationalism evinces the fundamental problematic confounding renewal of mission to the nation’s natives. CENAMI’s initial development projects implicitly endorsed official indigenist definitions of the Indian “problem.” But deepening contact with indigenous people increased the appeal of inculturationist strands of post-Conciliar theology. –––––––––– 20 “This autochthonous aspect of the cult of purely American images of the Virgin was of capital importance; it was one of the ways in which the sentiment of American patriotism could find more or less conscious expression at a time of pervasive distrust of the Spanish monarchy and fear of its capacity for repression” (Lafaye 1976: 229).

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As Bishop Ruiz pronounced, “Christopher Columbus did not carry God in his three caravelles, but rather God was already present in indigenous communities” (Kan et al 1998: 35). This critical theological insight recommended Maya religiosity to missionary attention, eventuating in an attempt to identify “teología india – indian theology” at church-sponsored encuentros (encounters) among them in Mexico and Guatemala.21 But the record of the first of these shows how the project failed its purpose from the indigenous point of view. Maya and others chosen from native communities to attend this meeting hosted by CENAMI in Mexico City, in September, 1990, participated actively in plenary sessions and workshops. A Kuna (Panamanian) priest voiced their theme: “God is not the property of any people” (CENAMI 1992: 301). Yet bishops and CENAMI theologians and staff, not invited indigenous representatives, set the meeting’s agenda and gave its principal addresses. Indian participation was generally limited to those invited bilingual representatives willing and able to travel to the capital. Misalignments between these ecclesial and indigenous elites, and between them and their respective constituencies, evince the conceptual and operational contradictions embedded in teología india. A preface to the 1990 meeting written by a Zapotec (Mexican) Indian and CENAMI staff member revealed the project’s misrecognized concern: Indian theology is necessary to safeguard the grandeur of the human spirit and preserve the evangelizing mission of the churches which is called into question each time the utopian hopes of any of earth’s peoples are beaten or pulled down like useless trees (CENAMI 1992: 10).

Teología india presumes that Indians have, like peoples everywhere, always produced theology. But, as described programmatically here, the project remained an ecclesial enterprise responding to an ecclesial predicament, locating native peoples in reference to it. Thus, the preface dissociates indigenous history from theology, postulating instead “a vision of transcendent reality” uniting all the native peoples in the Americas, the history of wars among them having “an explanation totally at the margin of these theological desires that animated them” (ibid.: 12). More to the point, according to the author these “transcendent” desires so converge with Christ’s that they uniquely mediate redemption, “better conserved in our peoples, because of the cleanness of heart of the poor, than in many contaminated receptacles of the Church” (ibid.: 14). The author adds: –––––––––– 21 Envisioned as a pan-American movement, the bishops’ interests and limited resources determined the location of these meetings.

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In this sense we believe that theological dialogue will be not only beneficial for the Indian people, but enriching for the church which will rediscover itself with the purest of the Christian tradition (ibid.: 33).

At a teologia india gathering two years later, the bishops of Mexico’s Southeast lamented that at its 1992 meeting in Santo Domingo, CELAM continued to view the church, rather than native peoples, as principal protagonists of inculturation. These bishops also warned against ecclesial efforts to strengthen indian identity that might “instrumentalize or fossilize the indigenous” (ABYA-YALA 1993: 333). The Mexican bishops’ critique further credited their own move from pastoral indigenista to pastoral indígena – replacing an integrationist agenda with respect for indigenous difference – as an advance beyond Santo Domingo. Yet, in this same message, Mexico’s most vigorous proponents of indigenous agency echoed teología india’s exoticizing presumption: “they [indigenous peoples] constitute a reserve of humanity where other human beings and the church itself can wash themselves” (ibid.: 323). In short, removing the indigenous from history’s ‘contaminations’ and portraying them as carriers of purity and transcendence effected the very instrumentalizing move teología india was ostensibly conceived to counter. Critical theory locates this “interesting and ... difficult” contradiction in “the hegemonic in ... its transformational processes” (Williams 1997: 111). Viewed with this insight, teologia india evinces the misrecognitions entailed in the social position of leading actors in Mexican mission renewal. From its vision of the indigenous as a purifying “reserve” follows the project’s attempt to recuperate the myths, rites, and symbols preserved by “los sabios y ancianos” – wise men and elders – repeatedly and reverentially invoked during its meetings. But few of these were actually in attendance, and neither they, nor the younger generation who composed the majority of teología india’s indigenous participants, directed its agenda and process. These were set by CENAMI’s clerical organizers and their indigenous protegés, the former in particular, as Williams puts it, “within or against” and therefore complicit in Mexico’s hegemonic consensus (ibid.: 111-114). In other words, though “against” statist and ecclesial domination of indigenous peoples, CENAMI activists were caught “within” hegemony’s embrace by social location. Theologians and bishops as institutional elites and their indian acolytes as community elites were equally removed from everyday indigenous social-religious practice precisely by their representation of it. In fact, its principal promoter argues that “renewal” of indian religion depends upon theological “confrontation;” put another way, teología india

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requires a reflexive move. CENAMI’s director himself expresses the conceptual confusions implied by this requirement. He locates Indian theology “above all in historical resistance” (ibid.: 60). Yet his method demands rising above everyday “indian social experiences” to distill from them the transcendent tied specifically to an originary horizon of pre-Columbian purity: “Indian Theology ... must be, within this arc from the past for the present and of the future of the Indians of this America called before Tahuantinsuyo, AbyaYala, Anáhuac...” (61). He finds the pre-Columbian in rites, songs, sayings, etc. whose relationship to historic resistance remains unexplained. Curiously, in the same volume, Bishop Ruiz (accurately) observed: The communities of the diocese [of San Cristóbal de Las Casas ...were, it seems, small maya [sic] groups dominated by the Maya. Therefore, with the Spanish Conquest, they passed from one domination to another. ...there is a rupture in their historic consciousness. They don’t celebrate memorable dates in their own history ... they don’t regard the monuments, the pyramids, the ancient ruins in their own territory as the heritage of their own past; rather they speak of it as something ‘the ancients’ did (Ruiz Garcia 1991:160 [emphasis in original] ).

The bishop adds, “the Indians have not reflected on the Christian faith with their own instruments of reflection, such as their myths” (ibid.). In short, with proponents of teología india, he privileges mythological reflection and confines the transcendent in indian culture to it. The incoherence of teología india – alternately elevating and questioning Maya history and consistently privileging myth and analogous discursive forms – evinces the conceptual inadequacies and conjunctural concerns debilitating the project as such. Samuel Ruíz addressed the suggestion that indian theology represents a regression unfavorable to political liberation thus: Actually, we have a walled-up [Indian] religion. There was no dialogue [during the first evangelization]. Christianity imposed itself on the Indian, and the current culture is doing the same thing (CENAMI 1993: 85).

Separating himself from “current culture” (presumably Mexico’s modernizing variety), Ruíz proceeds to specify indian religion: “There is no reason that the Church should continue to fear talk about indigenous rites or myths. The practice of Indian Theology involves the rites of the people” (ibid.). These rites and myths, according to the critique of Santo Domingo he coauthored with the bishops of Southeastern Mexico,

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ought to be presented to all the members of the church and the Mexican people: Let us not forget that each people has a historic vocation to fulfill ... [and] in these indigenous cultures we find ... a rich vein of life ... in the search for alternative models of a just, fraternal, solidary society. Let us drink from these ancestral veins (ibid.: 334).

In short, episcopal sponsors of teología india found an ecclesial alternative in the indian ancestral. But this essentialist appeal effectively reinforced the ‘wall’ surrounding indian religion while pretending to breach it. Bishop Ruiz concluded that repair of the rupture in Maya historical consciousness required recuperation of the past encased in rites and myths. Privileging these media for their perceived theological resonance amounted to a further critical mistake. In fact, “rupture” is precisely not destruction, no more than does the failure of Indians to own “the pyramids on their own territory” as their heritage mean they are a people without history. Critical theory observes that hegemony, as “a saturation of the whole process of living... limits ... what ultimately can be seen....” (Williams 1997:110). The bishops of Mexico’s southeast envisioned indigenous communities as “models of a just, fraternal, solidary societ[ies].” With Cardinal Corripio, they also perceived a conjunctural need for redemption at various sites: mission from its historic injury to the indigenous, the church from its complicity with the state, society from neo-liberal capitalism. Redemption demanded a cleansing medium pure enough to dissolve these “contamination(s).” For Mexicans nurtured in Guadalupanismo, this medium resided in the “ancestral veins” of indigenous peoples presumed to be ‘unstained’ by history because placed at its margins. But teología india’s apotheosis of indigenous rites and myths as reservoirs of redemptive purity unintentionally inverted the project’s original intention. Preserved in historical stasis, the project of Indian theology constrains indian thinking in the here and now. Indigenous participants in the project’s gatherings, uninvested in ecclesial purification, readily perceived this constraint. Their evaluation of the project’s 1992 meeting in Guatemala concluded: First - Confronted with the information [by the meetings] we realize that we have lost much of our culture, but we are motivated to remake our theology. Second - The difficulty of elaborating this theology is noted.... Third - There wasn’t space to say what we carried inside.... Fourth - The speeches were very academic, pronounced by specialists.... [who] limited our participation, since it was a gathering of Indians and, as it turned out, there was a certain lack of respect.

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A Guatemalan priest validated this complaint: ...for the majority of the participants, the level is very elevated.... Our people have their own identity, their own face, their experience of life. Surely it’s not our job to design their life and their face. (ibid.: 189)

Another intervention identified the critical point: The process of bringing Indian theology to light is vulnerable to the danger of professionalization... of being reduced to a way of life for some. It has to be asked [whether] Indian theology is being used to enrich Christian theology in its new evangelization project. When one speaks of an autochthonous church it’s necessary to define what one understands by autochthony (ibid.:192 [emphasis added).

The Greek khthon – earth – fixes the root definition: autoch-thonous = “one sprung from the land itself,” (American Heritage Dictionary 1996). The indigenous complaint registers this meaning precisely: “the Indians would have liked to speak about the theological experience of their communities.” In short, given space they would have spoken from their place – not a pure ‘originary’ past of mythical construction but a ‘contaminated’ historical site of ongoing cultural production.22 Designed by ordained theologians, and thus ipso facto distanced from indigenous space and place, teología india necessarily reduces to “information collected in books” rather than the “theological experience” of living Maya communities. “Confronted” and, in some measure, affronted (“there was a certain lack of respect”) by “information” about their own past, the indigenous critic concluded: “this seems ... like a course of formation....” (CENAMI 1993: 192). In short, the indigenous commentator warned of (re)conquest in a different key.

–––––––––– 22 Humanistic geography has been usefully adapted for the study of religion (J.Z. Smith 1987: 26-46).

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The re-presentation of the autochthonous other is inherently problematic, as an ample literature shows.23 Moreover, the authochthonous cannot be adequately represented by putatively purified extracts (rites and myths) because it is situated by definition. In short, evasion of situation led teología india into re-colonizing paradox. Seeking redemption from the historical complicities that had assured its socio-political position, the Mexican church elevated the Indian. But in doing so, it unintentionally replicated, rather than escaped, the logic of hegemony rooted in conquest and colonization. Some Critical Theory for Theology Vatican II propelled the Mexican church to the periphery and its ecclesiallyneglected indigenous peoples; yet its missionary project(s) remained tacitly tied to the center. Mission’s principal theoretical resource for renewal – the theology of inculturation issuing from Vatican II – drew on retrieval of the formulation logos spermatikos, seeds of the Word of God in the world. But this retrieval restricted this presence to a discursive frame – the symbolic, mythic, ritual – excluding critical social dimensions of cultural production in historical practice. Moreover, the theological foundation of inculturation thinking – the incarnation of God in history – postulated an intervention from without. Its missionary corollary apparently entailed, at least for early missiological revisionists, theological excision of traces of the transcendent in circumstances historically and socio-culturally distant from this event, and from themselves. Whatever value these traces might hold were thus implicitly ascribed not to their authochthonous origins but to their centripetal reso24 nance. For teología india discernment of an authentic manifestation of God in culture seems to be the exclusive faculty of those able to identify and interpret it as such; in short ‘specialists’ who privilege theologically resonant discursive forms and, ipso facto, themselves as interpreters of them. Such interpretation implies that the universal meaning of God’s incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth is uniquely established by agents of the church. The question thus arises: Is there a necessary homology between message and messenger in Christian doctrine, such that the incarnation as the center of history in principle requires a hierarchical church to map its meaning? Here

–––––––––– 23 Representation of the other, a foundational theme for subaltern and post-colonial studies, is thematized in a variety of disciplines: e.g., for anthropology, Clifford 1988; philosophy, Levinas 1998; the study of religion, J.Z. Smith, 2004; ritual theory, C. Bell 1992. 24 J.Z. Smith argues the availability of the idea logos spermatikos to just such a colonizing maneuver. (1987: 101-02).

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we have an ecclesiological variant of the question of the center early notions of inculturation beg but do not resolve.25 The idea of the center implies a periphery just as the universal points to the particular. Conceptually center and periphery are relationally fixed to each other as spatial referents; the relation itself is not readily amenable to reconstruction. But the conjunction universal-particular can be, and has been historically, variously construed. For the ancient classics, the divide between them permits no mediation without contradiction, i.e., the universal either dissolving or being corrupted by the particular; in classical Christianity, the divide requires mediation by divine intervention (the Incarnation) whose universality is henceforth embodied in a particular, exclusive group (the church); and for moderns, the divide is abolished by transparency of the real to reason and Christianity’s incarnational principle cancelled through embodiment of the universal in European culture (Laclau 1996: 46-49). The identification of church with European culture gave rise to Christendom and the colonial result inculturationist mission hopes to undo. But it cannot do so while tied to an incarnational logic which subdues or destroys difference by universalizing one particular. But suppose difference is a condition of universality. Conceived as “missing fullness” and/or “receding horizon,” “the universal is incommensurate with the particular but cannot exist without it” (ibid.: 52,57). This idea is congruent with strains in Christian eschatology. For example, proclamation of the resurrection is a signal of “divine dispersal,” implicit in the absence of the risen Christ who has gone ahead (Mt. 28, 7) and a Kingdom already arrived but yet to come (Duquoc 1980: 63, 67). Dispersal points to the periphery and the possibility that “universality happens on the fringes” (ibid.: 69). In other words, something new – unanticipated and uncontained by the center – might emerge at the periphery. Bishop Ruiz and his fellow bishops’ desire to promote indigenous subjecivity proceeded tacitly from a variant of Christian eschatology, as attested by their repeated affirmation of indigenous peoples as ‘subjects of their own history.’ But their theological construals of culture melded with their hierarchical positions to constrain disclosure at the periphery. An instance of this effect, Mexican mission’s struggle to undo its colonial past through rites of purification like teología india unintentionally distanced difference, thus sustaining the status of the nation’s indigenous as the other within. –––––––––– 25 Robert Schreiter, for example, acknowledges that the normative status of tradition within Christian theology is the unresolved agendum of inculturation and that ecclesiology is “one of the major issues in the developing of local theologies....” (1985: 38). Baum holds that Roman Catholicism itself is an inculturation of the Gospel and, as such, impossible to inculturate (1994: 101-103).

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The historical conjuncture had more than a little to do with this result, related to disruption of the hegemonic consensus whose hidden architecture privileged hierarchical forms derived from Roman Catholicism. Historically, the principle of hierarchy governing the universal church became embedded in the logic ordering the Mexican nation according to an “hierarchical and organic image... made up of complementary, unequal and interdependent masses” (Lomnitz-Adler 1999: 289). Caste consciousness originated as a shaping force in Mexican national culture through Thomistic legitimation of Spain’s encompassment of colonized nations “in a chain of subordination and complementarity...[with] the 26 king and the pope at its apex” (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 262). The notion of “purity of blood” allowed the Hispanicization of the church through the subordination of new-world converts to Spaniards, just as Moslems and Jews were subordinated to Old World Christians in Spain: the required vigilance of Spaniards over Indians in matters of faith legitimated the domination of the one over the other in political economy (ibid.: 263-64). Liberalism promoted universal citizenship which advanced class over caste as a principle of social order. It did not eliminate the valorization of (European) whiteness founding colonialism’s highly elaborated ordering of castes (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 271-72). The Mexican Revolution promoted the mestizo as hero in the nation’s cultural self-understanding. But revolutionary indigenismo postulated the Indian as guarantor of the nation’s soul, while aspiring to modernization and the benefits of capitalism, associated with North America and Europe and thus whiteness. Thus the Indian remained the ideal(ized) subordinate in the construction of the Mexican national community “which had an Indian soul, a mestizo body, and a civilized future” (ibid.: 280). Bishop Ruiz insists that pastoral strategy in the Diocese of San Cristóbal proceeded not from theology but from experience. He clarified his understanding of liberation theology’s origins thus: For me as a Christian, commitment is first: I have to intervene. ...This is what is happening in Latin American theology, it [theology] isn’t the first action of the Christian but the last. The first is committed encounter with the poor, with the marginated, the option, we said (quoted in Marcos 1998: 44). 27

–––––––––– 26 Another historian shows that Thomism legitimated Spanish colonialism as an enterprise of conversion: Seed 1993: 635-40. 27 The Bishop again: “The process of making this option was simple: the poor were there and we were working with them... The new theological explanation simply affirmed an option that was obvious for us.....” (Ruiz quoted by Andraos 1999: 14-15).

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Unquestionably, near permanent socio-political crisis in Chiapas shaped Bishop Ruiz’s episcopate as the state’s feudal social order was yoked to economic strategies of Mexico’s one-party government.28 Equally unquestionable is the fact that the diocese’s denunciation of neo-liberalism as a threat to indigenous survival met with hostile resistance that piously defendly Mexican Catholicism against ‘imported,’ read marxizing, theologies of liberation.29 In the circumstance, the bishop’s disassociation from theology (mis)construed by opponents as both unorthodox and unpatriotic can be understood as episcopal prudence. Nonetheless, though the dynamism and novelty of pastoral action in the Diocese of San Cristóbal among the Maya may not have been scripted by theologians, invocations of inculturation and, more emphatically, liberation dominated its discourse. This discourse constituted the not-so-hidden transcript of the ongoing negotiation of hegemony in Mexico which erupted in the 1968 violence at Tlaltelolco. The church, historical patron of consensus, subsequently became an active party in a now-open, now-hidden but continually deepening struggle for power to reconstrue the nation in the persons of ecclesial agents who sought room for personal and/or political maneuver at the margins of the nation. To repeat an important theoretical observation: “The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis ... seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative, but also its transformational processes” (Williams 1997: 111). In post-Tlaltelolco Mexico, surely a transformational moment, theological constructions such as teología india inverted the terms of colonization without reversing the relations embedded in ecclesiastical hegemonic consent. Liberation proposals contested consent. But a species of political myopia in them ascribed critical values in the hegemonic equation, including 30 popular religion and ethnicity, to false consciousness. The Diocese of San Cristóbal: Liberation and Difference On the ground in Chiapas, liberation practice said less about this argument than about the effects of social positions and dispositions in the missionary encounter. More precisely, in the case of highland Maya mission, the social –––––––––– 28 Neo-liberalism’s negative effects in Chiapas contributed to the 1994 Zapatista revolt (Harvey 1998; Rus and Collier 2003). 29 Apart from well-known Vatican critiques, in their 1975 “Andes Document,” Latin American bishops themselves called liberation theology “a fundamental danger to the faith of the people of God,” adding: “In the portrait of the ‘popular church’ presented by these theologies, we are unable to recognize the face of the true church of Christ” (cited by Allen, Jr. 2000: 16). 30 Exemplary is the Sandinista government’s (1979-89) fractious relationship with Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians. Many fault liberation theology’s initial neglect of cultural considerations. In anthropology, among the more influential is Burdick 1992.

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location of missionaries arguably mattered as much or even more in the hegemonic contest than their theology, particularly given the stakes – powerrelations in the Mexican nation-state, and the principal arena in this contest – (socio-cultural) difference. Preaching an autochthonous church of socio-politically liberated Maya, the Diocese of San Cristóbal inevitably met with resistance and, with time, increasingly aggressive assaults from highland Ladinos who correctly perceived the church’s preferential option for the indigenous as a threat to their power. Among pastoral agents who regarded political self-definition as an unavoidable consequence of liberating mission, these attacks only confirmed their prophetic identity. Yet actual evidence of missionary-Maya encounter suggests that preoccupation with opponents without inhibited examination of obstacles within mission’s decolonizing intentions. In short, what Bourdieu calls “marks of social position and hence social distance... between social persons conjunc31 turally brought together” rendered liberation constructions inadequate to the essential missionary task in the Maya highlands, the negotiation of difference. Hegemony’s hold on ecclesial actors is particularly evident in the history of diocesan attempts to revamp church structures. Bishop Ruiz introduced new forms of shared authority in diocesan governance in keeping with Vatican II notions of collegiality (Komonchak: 77-90, Vischer: 233-48 in Alberigo et al 1987). The most novel of these were diocesan assemblies featuring sometimes spirited debates over mission strategy. These debates intensified as organized political movements sought to co-opt ecclesiallyactivated indigenous people, and/or pastoral agents themselves, to advance a 32 radical anti-government agenda. Following the meeting of Latin American bishops at Medillín, the diocese moved from a reformist posture of “incarnation” (its 1968 formulation) to a more radical option in 1975 for “work with –––––––––– 31 “[I]t is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the forms of dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions, that is between social persons conjuncturally brought together (in physical space ...) ... in short ‘knowing one’s place’ and staying there” (Bourdieu 1977: 82). 32 The Socialist Worker’s Party (PST) and the Mexican Worker’s Party (PMT) appeared in the diocese’s Tzeltal Zone beginning in the mid-1970s (Iribarrán Pascal 1997: 93-120). In this same period, the Popular Politics (PPs) presented an “offer” to pastoral agents there: “You take charge of pastoral matters and we handle political organization. You have the communities in your hands; in this way we can complete our work” (cited by Collier 1994: 74). Many implicated diocesan priests and catechists in the 1994 Zapatista uprising. Unreliable research and tendentious logic disqualify most of these claims. In fact, catechists diverged widely in their political options (Leyva Solano: 1995: 375-405).

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the poor and for the poor...to bring about an autochthonous church” (Irribaren Pascal 1985: 7). This same diocesan assembly confessed church complicity in oppression before declaring that those who could not opt “towards the oppressed, the poor, the addressee of the Gospel” had no place in the Diocese of San Cristóbal (ibid.: 8). A year later, progressive elements in the diocese pressed their critique of the church’s “social relations with power...” at a meeting that became known as the “Assembly of the ‘option for popular power’”(ibid.: 12). The chronic inability of the Diocese of San Cristóbal to arrive at a stable organizational structure reflected internal conflicts provoked by this diocesan 33 “line.” Some pastoral agents challenged hierarchical ecclesial authority with both Vatican II’s gesture to collegiality and the discourse of popular struggle. Others effectively enacted personal-political agendas motivating their move to Chiapas.34 But there were still others who questioned and/or openly resisted this move towards ecclesial political activism, citing church doctrine absorbed in Mexico’s unreformed seminaries. In sum, fissures within the missionary cohort in the Diocese of San Cristóbal mirrored fractures in the Mexican national consensus. 35 Contests over proposals for a viable structure of shared authority and a consensus option for the poor mired the diocese in indecision.36 Insistence on governance by consensus to resolve an essentially evolving and therefore contested pastoral agenda; proposals for political action by a constitutionally disenfranchised and emergent local church; and, in particular, espousal of popular power in Chiapas among clerics educated and ordained in elite circumstances elsewhere – these and other contradictions inevitably divided missionaries in the Diocese of San Cristóbal. But their debates would undoubtedly not have reached such fevered intensity except for the historic 1974 Maya assembly in San Cristóbal known as the Indigenous Congress. –––––––––– 33 A Mexican woman religious recorded this view in her personal diary (FN 15.X.94). Though the notion carries marxist connotations, a pastoral “line” in Mexico may mean more than the presence or absence of a stated political project. 34 One priest arrived in San Cristóbal as a “refugee” from the 1973 collapse of Allende’s marxist regime in Chile; other priests were inspired by Nicaraguan church workers who participated in the Sandinista revolution (1976-1990). 35 An extreme example was the pastor in San Andrés Larrainzar “They’ve [diocesan pastoral agents] forgotten to try to save souls, to teach people to avoid sin and practice virtues.... We try to save souls, they teach people to struggle” (FN, 21.VIII.93; see Ch. 3). A significant fraction of Mexican clergy close to local Ladinos shared this view. 36 For example, in 1977 the Priest’s Council proposed a Diocesan Coordinating Council to oversee four regions, each with a regional council and an episcopal vicar. Instead, the diocesan assembly convened that year established a larger assembly of all pastoral agents. But this structure dissolved a year later over the decision to reject the proposal for formal alliance with the PPs (Irribaren Pascal 1997: 12; see n. 33 above).

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This event as much as any other prior to the 1994 Zapatista uprising specifies why the “search to reposition” pastoral work became, for many, a kind of ‘torture.’37 In an admission that the church occupied a vacuum created by a government interested in the Maya only for their ballots (Sonnleitner 1999: 46), the State of Chiapas asked the Diocese of San Cristóbal to assume organizational responsibility for a gathering of indigenous to honor Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas on the 500th anniversary of his birth. Preliminary planning for the Congress had been directed by an agency implementing the Echeverria government (1970-76) policy of “shared development” (P. Smith 1991: 365375). But this PRI-dominated agency disqualified itself by collaborating in nullification of the early-1974 election of the first-ever opposition government in the municipio of Chamula, the largest in the diocese (García de Leon 1995: 130). The church stepped into the breach, offering its infrastructure for a series of preparatory consultations. Local assemblies involving some 400,000 indigenous people designated 1230 delegates who gathered in a San Cristóbal auditorium from 12-15 October 1974 (ibid.: 120). The event was the first public Pan-Maya native-language discussion of conditions of indigenous life ever held in Mexico. With indigenous themselves facilitating translation among the various linguistic groups, the Congress reviewed a history of oppression and formulated consensus demands for redress of ancestral grievances with an assertiveness not seen among the Maya since the armed 38 revolts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the immediate post-Congress period, the Maya of Chiapas could neither implement nor sustain the unity of political interest manifest in this unprecedented event. The state government rejected its demands and launched a campaign of repression targeting any organizational evidence of an independent indigenous political voice. Thus, the Indigenous Congress dissolved into discrete local initiatives. Pastoral agents joined with the political activists to promote indigenous consumer and production cooperatives; some secretly allied themselves to militant revolutionary organizations (Proceso núm. 880: 1993). –––––––––– 37

“If we want to move toward structures of greater service divested of power, we submit to a tortured search to resituate our work. If we want to live authority as service ... and so modify diocesan structures, we have to respond to constant appeals from without that demand...decisions taken vertically, without time for solidary shared decision making”( García González: 1979: 23-24). 38 The most famous of these are the 1712 Tzeltal revolt and the 1867 Tzotzil uprising. This last revolt began in Chamula following government attempts to suppress a cult constructed by a self-ordained indigenous priest, Pedro Cuscat (Bricker 1981).

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This brief event-history reveals the core problematic of Maya–missionary encounter in highland Chiapas: misrecognitions entailed in Mexican missionary renewal running up against indigenous revitalization. In short, preoccupation with the architecture of power within diocesan structures in fact masked concern for the architecture of power without. Missionaries attributed the frustration of their desire for solidary decisionmaking to activists appeals for political alliance which forced a reversion to ‘vertical’ procedures within the diocese. The re-entry of the church as an active player in Chiapas and the subsequent arrival of activists with a revolutionary national agenda disrupted the local correlation of political forces. The history of Mexican church-state relations echoed in this conjuncture. The indigenous majority, as both symbolic guarantor of national cultural identity and real repository of social-political power in the highlands, functioned as both motivation and object of hegemonic contestation. Within this sociopolitical dynamic, the church engaged not only the state (federal, state and local in monopolistic PRI-party fusion). It also contended with newly-arrived 39 political activists, with their own inner divisions, and, by implication of all the foregoing, with the indigenous it had come to serve. Arguably, questions about who decided and how in the diocese – through horizontal/solidary or vertical processes, and/or representative or direct mechanisms – arose but remained unresolved because the voice ultimately at stake was indigenous. Given their historically contested and constitutionally restricted legal status, Mexican pastoral agents understandably wavered on the theological warrants, as well as legal consequences, of overt political protagonism. But preoccupation with local ecclesial structure and anxiety about proposals for political activism reached ‘torturous’ levels finally because the church remained uncertainly situated in relation to the Maya. A liberationist reading of the Indigenous Congress in a diocesan journal makes the point: It [the Indigenous Congress] was a revelation of their [indigenous] critical consciousness, their latent potential.... First - It was a popular voice. They assumed more solidarity as an ethnic group, as poor, as oppressed, in search of solidarity with all those who seek their liberation. Second - It was an analytic voice, in possession of data, facts, people, dates, and places. Third - It was a denunciatory voice.

–––––––––– 39 Division and debate tore leftists in Chiapas in ways analogous to contests within the church (Harvey 1994: 138-151).

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Fourth - They showed themselves such as they are: poor, indigenous campesinos. In their language with its dynamics, with their high regard for consensus and communitarian sensibility, and their own temporal rhythm (El Caminante, April 1978: 11-12).

Intended to praise indigenous initiative, the tropes above – beginning with the announcement that an indigenous “popular voice” appeared as a “revelation” – actually disclose a compromised liberation agenda. As Bourdieu argues, “the ‘people’ or the ‘popular’... is first of all one of the things at stake in the struggle between intellectuals” – in this case, between progressive activists and missionaries forced into uneasy dialogue in Chiapas (1990: 150). The struggles within each sector as well as those between them were both persistent and acute precisely because they addressed not just the question of immediate distribution of regional political power but the national hegemonic consensus. Missionaries experienced the indigenous voice as a “revelation” because it was silenced through objectification of “the other” that justified original conquest of the Indians and their subsequent symbolic elevation by church and state alike. Mission betrayed its ambivalent placement in this colonial dynamic, contesting hegemony while adopting its objectifying discourse. It recognized the ‘popular voice’ in the language of distance, and deployed liberation tropes – critical, analytic, denunciatory – in a way that accented labels of difference – ‘poor, indigenous campesinos,’ with ‘their language, dynamics, values, communitarian sense, temporal rhythm.’ Among the most politically alert priests – those most likely to find indigenous “critical conscience” a surprising “revelation” and most eager to direct their “latent potential” to radical ends – entrapment within their own socio-cultural world or habitus) obviated any view of Maya reality except from without. Freire’s Misrecognitions and Liberation Thought Liberation tropes – critical, analytic, denunciatory – genealogically trace to Paolo Freire’s program for Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1996 ed.), the prototype of liberation praxis for Gustavo Gutierrez (1973: 233-235). Gutierrez quotes Freire to thematize the prophetic vocation, “annunciation and denunciation,” the same words pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal used to describe their own missionary vocation (ibid.: 233, 248 n.109). Reading Freire himself elucidates the contradiction embedded within this vocational self-understanding. Freire counters what he calls “banking education” (domination “deposits” knowledge through its schools) with dialogic “conscientization” through teacher-student partnership to critique the latter’s historical circumstance or,

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in Freire’s word, “reality.” This scheme assumes the pre-critical “submersion” of the oppressed in this reality and “housing” of the oppressor within their consciousness (Friere 1996: 27-33 and passim). For example, Freire characterizes peasants thus: “The latter [peasants], usually submerged in a colonial context, are almost umbilically linked to the world of nature, in relation to which they feel themselves component parts rather than shapers” (75 n.9; cf. 43). For Freire, pegagogic “humanization” occurs as “the people’s empirical knowledge of reality, nourished by the leaders’ critical knowledge, gradually becomes transformed into knowledge of the causes of reality [sic]” (115). This happens as investigators “decode” the reality of the oppressed which these “leaders” correctly understand to be an historical construction, not a God-given or otherwise preordained natural datum, as, Freire implies, peasants – “whose gestures to some extent simulate those of the animals...and 40 [who] often consider themselves equal to the latter” (155) – regard it. In other words, in Freire’s thought “conscientization” presumes unconsciousness, just as the pedagogue’s decoding assumes peasant ‘latency.’ Freire’s breathtaking caricature of Latin American peasants dismisses their contributions to the making of their nations;41 it also betrays a fundamental contradiction in now-classic liberation thought. In it, distance between theory and practice in the construction of a theory of practice reflects a real social distance, usefully interpreted through the idea of place and placements (Bourdieu 1977: 104; de Certeau 1984: 51-52). This becomes clear with close reading of Freire’s discussion. Warned against the imposition of their values, Freire’s pedagogues nonetheless hope “the people” will come to share at least one of these, i.e., “a correct [critical] method of approaching reality” (Freire 1996: 92). But thus described, criticism is neither purely methodological nor lacking imposable values. Freire’s prescription for the pedagogical practice of criticism makes this abundantly clear. Investigators “decode” what they, approaching from outside, see as a “totality,” attempting to “split it by analyzing the particular dimensions which impress them” (ibid. – emphasis added). Those living in the “area” under investigation participate in this process. –––––––––– 40 Significantly, Freire distinguishes European from the Latin American peasants on this point: “Proposing as a problem, to a European peasant, the fact that he or she is a person might strike them as strange. This is not true of the Latin American peasants...whose gestures to some extend simulate those of the the animals and the trees....” (ibid.). Freire himself was of urban middle class origin. 41 Peasant revolts in Latin America have been amply documented (Mallon 1995; for Chiapas, García de León 1985).

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But its aim is to enable the investigator to “penetrate the totality itself” in order to surface “generative themes” or “[re]codifications” from the contradictions in the totality which they are uniquely positioned to perceive (ibid.). These are, in turn, to be re-presented to the inhabitants in a “thematic fan...[to] objectively [re]constitute a totality” (ibid.). As they in turn decode it, these same inhabitants come to see themselves immersed in this totality and, in so doing, emerge to critical consciousness.42 Focusing on reality to mediate mutual dialogue, ‘inhabitants’ are to work with ‘investigators.’ Yet Freire allows the latter to unilaterally introduce what he calls “hinged themes” (101-102). Fundamental among these is a culture concept setting forth “the role of people in the world and with the world as transforming rather than adaptive beings;” in other words, an explication of the relation between the “contradictions” decoded by investigators and “the view of the world held by the people” (ibid.) As with Freire’s view of peasants, the peoples’ “view of the world” is actually a matter of “feeling their needs” (98). The pedagogically-foundational “hinged theme,” in fact, implies separate worlds necessitating a hinge the investigator is uniquely privileged to provide. Etymological assistance comes from noting that investigare = to track, from vestigium = footprint. Freire’s pedagogical investigator imposes on the world of the inhabitant as he “decodes” what can only be his own footprints – what impresses him, since the “submerged” inhabitants are only capable of “feeling their way.” But, as Freire’s appeal for dialogue itself argues, human “inhabitants” are never completely “submerged,” wholly adapted, animallike, to their “habitats.” In other words, what to Freire’s investigators from elsewhere is an “area” awaiting their “decoding” to its inhabitants is a place, a locus of meaning and value where they feel not merely their needs but their home (J.Z. Smith 1987: 26-29). Objectified in the theoretical distance of the investigator’s constructive (colonizing) procedure – his ‘penetration of the totality,’ “the people” encountered in an anonymous “area” might be mistaken for simple components of nature “umbilically” sutured to it. But in everyday practice “peasants” have already named a “place” through their occupation of and with it, that is, their transformational labor, according to Freire’s own anthropology, unless pedagogical “humanization” proceeds, as his naturalistic metaphors unfortunately imply, ex nihilo. The contradiction, unwanted yet logically begged, arises from social distance frustrating the dialogue Freire’s pedagogy prescribes, as his theory constrains the practice it proposes. –––––––––– 42 Freire quotes Malraux’s citation of Mao: “we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly” (1996: 74, n. 7).

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Reprise: Liberation Discourse in the Diocese of San Cristóbal Freire’s proposals echoed in the liberation discourse of the Diocese of San Cristóbal. There mission’s commitment to “popular power” in the aftermath of the Indigenous Congress entailed the populist paradox. As pastoral agents separated themselves from the state on one side and progressive political competitors for indigenous favor on the other, missionaries hid from themselves, as Bourdieu predicts, “the break with the ‘people’ by gaining access to the role of spokesperson” (1990: 152). For despite the diocese’s desire for an authochthonous church, the Maya were conspicuously absent from its assemblies. Pastoral teams eagerly recruited indigenous collaborators in mission at the base, and convened them for the Indigenous Congress where they developed their own political agenda. But the Diocese of San Cristóbal did not admit them into the assemblies where its pastoral agendas were set. No stated policy restricted indigenous participation at these meetings, but neither were they invited to them. When pastoral agents called attention to “the grand absence in the Diocesan Assemblies ... the people,” they received the following response: The voice of the people actually reaches the assembly by mean of the pastoral agents. The people cannot be brought into interminable meetings with language, dynamics, and forms foreign to their cultural ways. The people do not assume the political use of analysis as an instrument of social transformation in an orthodox way. Popular mechanisms of appropriating reality are not generally analytical since these correspond to the culture of industrial society and our people are involved and live in an agrarian culture. The people have real participation in diocesan co-responsibility by means of their community assemblies and catechetical structure which is directly related with [geo-linguistic] zonal [pastoral] teams (Irribaren Pascal, 1997: 45-46).

“Diocesan corresponsibility” confirms missionary aspiration to an authentically autochthonous local church. Indeed, recruitment of Maya collaborators at the parish level accomplished these ends de facto to a significant degree, validating the good faith in diocesan discourse. But the rationale for indigenous absence from diocesan deliberations neatly evinces the contradiction in the diocese’s liberation strategy. The missionary argument above ratifies the break with “the people” effected by those who speak for them; indeed, it actually announces multiple ‘breaks.’ Fundamental is the designation of pastoral agents as spokespeople, ipso facto objectifying the living “voice of the people” as something to be read and rendered, in short, re-presented by them. But such textualization means

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“rescuing the said from its saying”. It stipulates an interpreter who, on assuming the power to articulate a foreign world, exercises power over it (Geertz 1983: 32). These moves – like Freire’s described above – disjoin worlds while ordering them hierarchically, description of one world by another becoming a kind of prescription. Thus, we have the industrial world of “analysis” and the agrarian world of “ways” (proxies for Freire’s “critical” and “empirical” spheres), the ostensibly benign relativism in this division actually effecting what one anthropologist calls “cognitive apartheid” (Sperber 1985: 62). The implicit equation of “analysis” with “orthodoxy,” juxtaposed to presumably unorthodox “popular mechanisms of appropriating reality,” decisively privileges the pastoral agent-analyst, “rescuer of the said,” over the indigenoussayer, immersed in theoretically mystified cultural “ways.” This reversion to Western evolutionary thought – industrial analytic orthodoxy ascendant over agrarian cultural ways – unintentionally opens “the despicable hierarchical gap” of conquest and colony (ibid.). In this scheme, participation by indigenous in direction of the diocese is “real” via the social fiction to which pastoral agents subscribe by ascribing to themselves power to transmit ‘the voice of the people’ (Bourdieu 1990: 138139). As Bourdieu argues, the “world-making,” classificatory power consisting in decomposition and analysis through the use of labels –in this case, ‘industrial,’ ‘agrarian,’ ‘the people’ – constitutes symbolic power, propagating “a vision...of social divisions” through cognition and recognition (ibid.: 137-38). In highland Chiapas, mission’s classifications replicated the constructions of Mexican hegemony: Liberationist thinking ironically placed the church in what might be called optical collusion with the state, envisioning orthodoxy as a mode of cognition that required the opacity of indigenous “cultural ways” (de Certeau 1984: 50-60, 65-70). Demonstrations of colonialism’s reliance on similar divisions have multiplied in recent years, the categorization of South- and Meso-American peoples as “Indian” an egregious example (Silverblatt 1994: 279-98; Said 1978). Less examined is the analogous categorization embedded within variants of putatively post-colonial liberationist thought. In the argument offered above, social transformation depends upon techniques of political analysis which, like their industrial-technological analogue, select manipulable dimensions of a larger human performance, marginalizing the remain43 der to the sphere of what are called, in our example, “cultural ways.” –––––––––– 43 Michel de Certeau’s calls attention to the relegation of practical “know-how” to the folkloric sphere: “Thus know-how takes on the appearance of an ‘intuitive’ or ‘reflex’ ability, which is almost invisible and whose status remains unrecognized. The technical optimization of the

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Veritable dogma in the liberationist thinking espoused by progressive pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal, “analysis” dissected power relations at stake in the hegemonic struggle at the level of the nation-state to which these middle-class clerics, products of the modernizing urban socialization they share with Mexico’s political elites, were largely oriented. In short, shaped by their habitus, the protagonists of liberation, like sponsors of teología india, carried the center to the periphery. Thus they consigned its peasants to the margins of cognition where, viewed from without, analysis floats like a foreign body on a sea of archaic “language, dynamics, and forms” (i.e., symbols and myths). By the mid-1990s, the question of the “relocation” of pastoral work in the Diocese of San Cristóbal had been answered. A self-denominated “núcleo” of non-elected advisors to the bishop came to dominate diocesan assemblies. The núcleo enforced an increasingly politicized pastoral “line” as nowmobilized indigenous confronted an intransigent state government. The key point of contention between the Maya and the state was control of land and other resources whose value rose exponentially with Mexico’s neo-liberal turn in the 1980s. Núcleo intelligentsia, alumni of elite ecclesial academic institutions and government bureaucracies in the capital and abroad, formulated conjunctural “analyses” directed to political-diplomatic, church-state preoccupations. Defense of the diocese against attack by a growing list of political enemies – from local highland elites to the federal government, and a papal nuncio intent on protecting the 1992 constitutional reform recognizing the church – 44 clearly motivated these preoccupations. In the nucleo’s political taxonomy, the highland Maya were classified with politically active social movements or organizations but otherwise had no place. J.Z. Smith (1992) calls attention to metonymic and spatial representation of the “other,” exemplified by domination through naming and exclusion distinguishing between center and periphery, within and without. He points, further, to the ambivalence inhering in each of these constructions. For example, naming the indigenous agrarians or campesinos implies we are not but could be ‘them,’ possibly for better (because uncontaminated by modernity), possibly for worse (because ‘poor’ and ‘oppressed’). Excluding them from diocesan assemblies implied their incapacities but also spared the nineteenth century ... left to everyday practices only a space without means or products of its own ... an overly silent land, still without a verbal discourses....” (1984: 69). 44 In Fall 1993, a diocesan assembly convened to consider the threat of Bishop Ruiz’s removal from his See at the instigation of the papal nuncio Girónimo Prigione, who had engineered constitutional recognition of the Mexican church in 1992. The scheme of analysis offered by the núcleo at this gathering: I Map of Elements II. Possible scenarios. III. Consequences. IV. What to do? V. Dynamic of the bishops ( FN 29.X.93.)

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indigenous the ‘interminable’ debates which ‘torture’ us. Thus society – in this case the church – questions itself as it constructs the other. Named and/or excluded, the other remains a shadow presence within. But there is no such ambiguity in a third, unequivocal representation of the other as unintelligible, requiring ‘us’ to speak for ‘them.’ In Smith’s felicitous summation: “The focus on the other as unintelligible has led, necessarily, to ‘their’ silence and ‘our’ speech” (ibid.: 10). Highland missionaries re-presented the “voice of the people” confirming, as Bourdieu argues, “the break with the ‘people’ that is implied by gaining access to the role of spokesperson” (Bourdieu 1990: 162). Indeed, they confined indigenous “real participation” in church renewal to the Maya’s own community assemblies and/or catechetical gatherings. Their embrace of the “political use of analysis as an instrument of social transformation” – in diocesan discourse the “orthodox” core of liberationist “language, dynamics and forms” – mystified the “cultural ways” of “the people.” Ironically, if not tragically, this move entrenched pastoral agents on the other side of the cultural divide they hoped to bridge by commitment to inculturation. In short, diocesan mission thought constructed two worlds, urban industrial and rural peasant, by “analysis.” The response of highland Maya catechists to mission’s proposals asserted, instead, the reconstruction of their own place(s) in practice.

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Position and Place Church, State, and Mission on the Ground

Introduction Bishop Ruiz’s evolving vision of an “autochthonous church” –Tzeltal for the Tzeltales, Tzotzil for the Tzotzils1 – entailed the devolution of pastoral initiative to indigenous catechists. Eager campesinos descended from remote mountain dwellings to convent classrooms in the highland metropolis at the church’s invitation, but the initiative in their transformation from peasants to preachers never rested wholly in the hands of missionary mentors. Many Maya indigenous viewed mission’s reappearance in their territory as an offer of relief from government neglect and commercial exploitation. Those who left their communities to become catechists transformed the church’s pastoral innovations into implements for reconstruction of indigenous territory on their own terms. First hesitant and tacit, then insistent and overt moves by these young men confirmed the dialectical nature of the missionary encounter. Mission and the Contest for Hegemonic Consensus A byproduct of anthropological interest in colonialism, recent applications of social theory construe missionaries as disjunctive figures who embody and elicit alternatives. Kenelm Burridge sees missionaries as “inherently provocative,” setting off individuating processes among traditional peoples (1991: 92 and passim). T.O. Beidelman argues that in mission practice and preaching –––––––––– 1

Bishop Ruiz’s favored phrase echoes Pope Paul VI’s exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi. John Paul II developed these ideas, particularly in Africa: “[The Gospel message] does not spring spontaneously from any cultural soil; it has always been transmitted by means of apostolic dialogue ... a certain dialogue of cultures” (Catechesis Tradendi 1979: #53). To Kenya’s bishops, “There is no question of adulterating the Word of God, or of emptying the cross of Christ of its power, but rather of bringing Christ into the very centre of African life and of lifting up all African life to Christ. Thus, not only is Christianity relevant to Africa, but Christ, in the members of his Body, is himself African” (in Shorter 1988: 227, emphasis added). Yet, though he affirmed use of the vernacular by Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs, John Paul never used Justin’s formula “seeds of the Word” and variously signaled his nostalgia for what Shorter calls “a vanished Christian monoculturalism” (233), even the restoration of “Christendom.” Of course, inculturation strategies have been implemented throughout the world with varying outcomes.

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ethnic and class biases become unconsciously confused with religious universals to socio-cultural effects that missionaries scarcely comprehend (1974, 1982). Following Beidelman’s lead, the Comaroffs show how British missionaries responded to discomfiting socio-cultural transformations in modern England by ‘colonizing native consciousness’ in South Africa according to the pattern of their own pre-industrial past (1991, 1997). In the dialectical process that ensued, natives emerged as critical protagonists in the remaking of their own homelands (ibid.; also J. Comaroff 1985). This theoretical focus on disjuncture as cause and effect in mission, and misrecognition as the preferred category for interpreting missionary methods and motives, invites attention to social fact as well as pastoral proposals. The most obvious is, of course, that by definition missionaries are sent from one place to another. As already described, a new influx of missionaries in Chiapas occurred just as Mexico entered a prolonged phase of social-political crisis, exposing points of vulnerability in the post-Revolution hegemonic consensus. Whether explained by the advance of neo-liberalism and/or rising pressure for democratization, the crisis unsettled the aspiring middle classes and the institutional church which drew its leadership from them. Divided in its reception of the more progressive strains of Vatican II, the Mexican church hierarchy nonetheless began to assert its voice in public affairs, hesitantly but at a higher volume than at any time since the Revolution. In other words, the decision to revive the church at the periphery, and particularly among the indigenous, reflected a renewal in institutional self-confidence as well as evangelical spirit. In this socio-cultural climate, a number of priests and sisters perceived in the periphery an arena open to their vision of an ecclesial alternative to the moral bankruptcy in the nation’s political regime. The church represented a singular vocational choice in Mexico where the government controlled, directly or indirectly, most avenues of social advancement. Whether ideologically repelled or socio-economically frustrated by the regime’s nearmonopoly on opinion and opportunity, many pastoral agents chose mission at 2 this juncture in a spirit of dissent. –––––––––– 2

“Rank-and-file clergy...identify essential differences between themselves and government officials.... they believe that politicians understand very little about the church and about what clergy do. They argue that numerous politicians ... tied to the Masons retain interpretath tions of the Church that border on 19 century myths” (Camp 1987: 299-300). Anti-clerical (if not Masonic) sentiment remains alive among Mexican politicians as attested by “tremendous opposition” to Carlos Salinas’ unprecedented decision to invite church hierarch’s to his 1988 presidential inauguration (ibid.: 31-32) Vicente Fox met with similar disapproval for religious gestures at his 2000 inauguration (La Jornada 12.02.00).

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The more politically-oriented among them regarded themselves as competitors in a contest for the soul of society. In their view, the distinctiveness of their vocation lay precisely in sounding the call to social responsibility their peers in other sector – governmental, academic, journalistic – failed to voice.3 Priests in Mexico (as elsewhere) have always exercised authority simply by dint of education in a relatively unschooled society. For the majority of the 200 clerical and lay pastoral agents in highland Chiapas, the margination of the Maya resonated with their sense, heightened after 1968, of the margination of the church from its rightful place place as moral arbiter of the Mexican nation.4 Many of these missionaries had responded to personal invitations from Bishop Ruiz, attracted by his determination to implement the teachings of CELAM. They discovered in the social-political vacuum created by longstanding ecclesial and government neglect in the Maya highlands both need and opportunity to exercise their vocation as conscience to society, often fraught with difficulty in the urban areas from which they generally came.5 Within the expanded space for maneuver at the periphery, these missionaries dissented from the Mexican national consensus through double, contradictory moves. They opted for the poor by promoting indigenous human rights within a social-political order that tacitly denied or overtly violated them. When conflicts with the state inevitably followed, they re-asserted the role of the church and its agents as conscience of society. Indeed, many elements in the Diocese of San Cristóbal presumptively conflated popular struggle by Maya indigenous in Chiapas with reclamation of a place for the church in a public sphere imbued with revolutionary anti-clericalism. But the highland Maya had played only an ancillary role in the Mexican Revolution (García de León 1985) and could not share the investment of middle class clerics in reasserting the Catholic church vis a vis the Mexican state. Historically, church-state relations remained within the ambit of contest for Mexico’s hegemonic consensus in which its indigenous peoples figured as objectified ingredient of national myth. The pastoral initiatives of Bishop Ruiz in service to them incurred the wrath of successive governors in the state of Chiapas. In the most notorious –––––––––– 3

4

5

“Perhaps the single value most likely to promote disagreement among clergy and politicians is the issue of social responsibility. ...[T]he clergy has placed this issue at the forefront of Catholicism’s tasks in Mexico ...” (Camp 1987: 30) A CEM-commissioned study affirms that activism by agents of the Diocese of San Cristóbal under Bishop Ruiz responded to a political vacuum in Chiapas. According to the ex-Jesuit historian Jan de Vos: “The Catholic Church, together with the protestant [sic] churches, will continue occupying these spaces until government and society become sufficiently mature to take charge of their civil oblications” (quoted in Meyer 2000:187). Personal communications. See above, Sites and Methods section of the Introduction to this study.

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instance, in the fall of 1991 the state imprisoned a priest four days after the bishop held a press conference to denounce the deteriorating human rights situation in the highlands. Father Joel Padrón was held from September 19 – November 5, 1991, accused of abetting a Tzotzil peasant land invasion. A tense public stand-off between the bishop and Governor Patrocinio González Garrido culminated in a march by 11,000 indigenous to the state capital demanding the priest’s release. Padrón was freed on judicial orders won by the arguments of diocesan lawyers. (Gómez Cruz and Kovic 1994: 165-67). In Mexico, conflicts between a governor named by the president and a bishop appointed by the pope became, as a matter of course, subject to discussion in the nation’s capital. In this instance, church and state shared mutual interest in normalization of relations via constitutional reform, the church to enhance its status in the public sphere and the government to 6 dismantle obstacles to its neo-liberal global ambitions. These goals intensified the concern President Carlos Salinas shared with the papal nuncio, Archbishop Girolamo Prigione, about a public collision between governor and bishop in Chiapas. Thus, turbulence at the periphery required corrective action from the center. A pastoral letter indicting the government’s neo-liberal policies which Bishop Ruiz presented to John Paul II on his August, 1993, visit to the Yucatan confirmed for the nuncio complaints he had gathered from Chiapaneco elites. When Archbishop Prigione summoned Bishop Ruiz to his office in October, 1993, Gonzalez Garrido, now Mexico’s secretary of government, approved. At their meeting in Mexico City, the nuncio informed Ruiz of a letter from the Vatican announcing its investigation of his work and teachings. He further solicited the bishop’s resignation.7 Reaction to this incident illuminates how highland mission was implicated in national church-state politics. Pastoral agents mobilized a public campaign accusing the nuncio and the government of collusion to suppress

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7

A student of church-state relations at Colegio de Mexico and the London School of Economics, observes that church, as much as state, had political motives for seeking its legalization – namely, constitutional right to its increasingly assertive occupation of space in the public sphere (Loaeza Lajous 1990: 152). There is no official account of this conversation. The newsweekly Proceso quoted the Vatican letter as charging the bishop with “a marxist analysis of society,” “errors in governance,” “incorrect theological reflection,” and an “exclusionary” pastoral practice favoring the indigenous (8.XI.93):18). A prominent journalist reported: “The Mexican government has imposed, and the rulers of the church have accepted, [Bishop Ruiz’s] removal ....The decision obeys governmental necessities, not requirements of ecclesiastical government” (El Financiero 24.X.93).

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the diocese’s defense of the indigenous.8 Progressive Catholic lay leaders in Mexico City, reading the move against Bishop Ruiz as an assault on their own democratizing agenda, responded by invigorating a campaign to nominate the bishop for the Nobel Peace Prize. Counting on Bishop Ruiz’s wide connections with progressive prelates in Europe and Latin America, they worked in tandem with an office the bishop had established in Mexico City. The CEM was already resentful of the nuncio’s usurpation of their authority in negotiations with the Mexican government culminating in the 1992 constitutional reforms legalizing the church; they tacitly endorsed Bishop Ruiz’s pastoral approach. Bishop Ramón Godinez Flores, secretary general of CEM, affirmed the canonical fact that a nuncio has no power over bishops; significantly, he added that as a foreigner this nuncio had no legal standing to act for the church in Mexico.9 Antonio Roqueñí Ornelas, legal advisor to Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, CEM president and primate of Mexico, pronounced that “any action against Samuel Ruiz could provoke problems of division within the Catholic hierarchy itself” (Proceso 8XI.93: 25). Support from Corripio reflects Bishop Ruiz’s emergence as a leader of CEM’s moderate majority through his association with the Group of Bishop Friends (GOA), formed to secure support from CEM centrists for its progressive agenda (Fazio 1994: 263-66). Thus at a critical moment, the bishop was rewarded for his adhesion to church institutions and to peers who were undivided in their defense of ecclesial autonomy against foreign intrusion by an interventionist Italian nuncio they perceived to be allied with a secularist state. Following the January, 2004, Zapatista uprising, the bishop travelled to Rome intending to clarify his role as mediator between the government and the insurgents as well as to circumvent the nuncio in the ecclesiastical campaign against him. Recognition by eight curial officials there effectively ended the immediate threat of the bishop’s removal (Meyer 1996:103; Fazio 1994: 322-23). –––––––––– 8

9

A delegation of diocesan pastoral agents had preceded Bishop Ruiz in meeting with Prigione to protest reports of his impending removal. These had circulated throughout the previous summer following a visit to Chiapas by the Nuncio during which, pastoral agents suspected, he had met with the Bishop’s opponents. The delegation’s defense of the Bishop and pledge of obedience to him provoked the Nuncio to angry denunciation of Ruiz’s “grave errors.” Proceso, 8.XI.93, 19-20. Prigione disregarded the CEM in his proposal that the church register as a ‘civil association’ under the title “Roman Catholic Apostolic Church of Mexico.” The bishops responded that no such entity existed and reminded the nuncio that each bishop is an autonomous successor to the apostles. The government settled the dispute, recognizing a single Mexican Church but requiring that the archbishop of Mexico City and the president of CEM – not the nuncio – sign the request for legalization (Camp 1997:38).

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Thus a battle in defense of the periphery was fought largely at the centers, national and international, to which the originating “cause” for this war of position – the Maya indigenous – had no access. The pastoral strategy which so aroused the nuncio and his government allies was unambiguously directed towards justice for the indigenous. Achievement of this objective demanded a decided shift in the balance of power in Chiapas, a resource-rich border state of considerable strategic importance to the nation. But in this instance, locating Chiapas simply according to its economic and geopolitical coordinates, and/or limiting the measure of the contest over its bishop to powerpolitical equations, forecloses interpretation. State interests would inevitably fall into this error. But that leading agents of the church would do so bears directly on mis-takes in mission to the Maya. In the event, the social location of pastoral agents motivated their preoccupation with the position (in Gramsci’s sense) of the church relative to the state in the national hegemonic contest. The institutional church remained a unique source of authority for members of the urban middle class aspiring to a voice in direction of a nation whose one-party regime owed its extraordinary endurance to mastery of the art of cooptation. Historically having met with uneven success in struggle against this statist strategy, the Mexican church could rely on its hierarchical nature to evade total absorption by it. Yet, as already noted, hierarchy’s characteristic claim to moral purity and political disinterest requires hiding from itself interests whose misrecognition makes them all the more absorbing. The plausibility of this explanation for the maneuvering of pastoral agents in their contest with the Mexican state rests on the substance of the stakes involved. Stated most broadly, the militant majority of diocesan pastoral agents sought an end to corporatist one-party government and the democratization of Mexican politics at all levels. More immediately, they opposed the neoliberal policies of a disintegrating regime which threatened the survival of the indigenous poor with whom pastoral agents fused their own aspirations. From this perspective, church-state politics remained within the ideological ambit of the Revolution understood as a “bourgeois civil war” for control over the modernization of Mexico and defense of the nation against foreign intrusion (Womack 1991: 128). Progressives in the church condemned the nuncio’s role in legalization of the church and the pretended removal of Bishop Ruiz in precisely these terms, while the Bishop himself resorted to Rome for rescue of Mexican national ecclesial autonomy from an engulfing 10 state. –––––––––– 10 Bishop Ruiz read formal Vatican acknowledgement.of his pastoral letter En esta hora de graciaI (1993) as agreement with its the critique of neo-liberalism. Following John Paul II’s

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The Bishop’s move involved a double paradox: an embattled church appealed for the periphery to the nation through a universalizing center, while, with this approach, liberation practice sought support from Vatican authorities notoriously suspicious of its implicit critique of hierarchy. For reasons of its own, Rome preserved the Bishop from his enemies. But reading the route to this outcome locates points of missionary detour missing the Maya. In brief, though intending to reach the periphery, mission’s ecclesial roots at and social-political orientation to the center(s), ecclesial and national, cast the struggle for highland indigenous dignity in power political terms which countered the hegemonic while remaining positioned within it. Indeed, ‘position’ becomes an essential trope for understanding missionaries as ecclesial and national actors as well as the critical disjunction in their relation to the Maya following from these roles. As already noted, Mexican missionaries were generally formed in the socio-geographic center(s) of a rapidly urbanizing nation and its rising middle-class. Their mobility in this double sense aggravated the uncertainty these missionaries, like the uprooted in all times and places, experienced on strange territory. By dint of office in a church reemerging in both the nation’s public sphere and in the Maya highlands, their uncertainty inevitably segued into preoccupation with position on the shifting terrain of Mexican national consensus. This preoccupation was a legacy of historical church-state struggle extending back to the epoch of colonization and could be expected among contemporary clerical traditionalists. But concern for position compromised the progressive impulse among liberationists as well. Indeed, liberation thinking failed to destabilize the hegemonic platform to which, in the end, its proponents remained tethered by their own construction: an ideology tied to the hegemonic discourse of capitalist modernization, privileging its analytic 11 methods and categories to advocate structural socio-economic change. In short, sent to the periphery, not a few missionaries to the highland Maya remained of the center by ideological preference and vocational choice, weighted with history and habitus. To be missioned is to be sent and thus put ‘in the way’ of others, as Burridge asserts. The irony of mission in highland Chiapas is that in seeking to reverse colonial relations with Mexico’s indige-

1993 visit to Izamal, Mexico, where the bishop delivered his letter, Ruiz announced papal endorsemenf of a Maya autochthonous church. 11 Wherever adopted liberation ideology employed marxist categorites for critique of capitalism. Arguably, capitalist modernization advanced in Mexico more rapidly than elsewhere in Latin America due to post-Revolution national consolidation as well as proximity to the United States.

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nous peoples pastoral agents at the nation’s periphery became consumed by the hegemonic contest at its center. For highland indigenous position in this game could not matter. For them the periphery was always already a center, neither a vocational choice nor a hegemonic position, but a place secured by everyday historical practice. Put another way, socio-geographic location remains, for the majority of Mexico’s highland Maya, not a matter of maneuver but of being-in-the-world: peasant mapping of ancestral territory with their bodies through labor on the land. The state, historically predatory toward labor and heedless of indigenous interest, could only be an intruder here. Ordained to mobility by vocation and impelled to maneuver by national conjuncture, the church, for its part, reentered the highlands unable to fully appreciate the how profoundly place mattered to the Maya. An effect of the displaced status of missionaries as such, this matter of in-disposition mirrored the center-periphery dialectics of modernity and colonization which liberation thought, despite decolonizing 12 intentions, extended through its fundamentally utopian structural discourse. Already so inclined by middle class mobility and hierarchical privilege, pastoral agents who embraced liberationist ideas to defend the indigenous poor against the depradations of capitalism with the best of evangelical intentions slighted the significance of place as a matter of course. Missionaries on the Ground Missionaries in the parish of San Andrés failed to grasp this source of meaning in different and conflicting ways. The most pronounced difference lay between the traditionalist pastor who inaugurated the church’s reappearance there after years of neglect and the liberationist pastoral agents who succeeded him. Tensions between them arguably accelerated indigenous moves to make themselves missionaries on their own terms for their own place. North Americans were the first to respond to Bishop Ruiz’s appeal for pastoral presence in San Andrés. They were impelled by the meld of spiritual zeal, entrepreneurial individualism, ascetic adventurousness, and ecclesial 13 responsibility typical of the missionary vocation. Characteristically optimistic and pragmatic, they embraced the call for development articulated in Pope –––––––––– 12 The absence of place as a significant consideration in social science generally has been noted (Agnew 1989: 9-29). For a postcolonial critique, see Gupta and Ferguson 1995: 6-23. 13 Bishop Ruiz himself noted that pastoral workers in his diocese found work among the indigenous “attractive” not only because of their poverty but because they “were more exotic [in]... their languages and mysterious world” (Andraos 1999: 14). Beidelman (1984: 243) calls missionaries “repressed adventurers,” a label he attaches to colonial administrators as well. Undoubtedly, many missionaries are motivated to a degree by ego ideals embracing intrepid exploits in strange lands. Of course, it does not follow that such “adventurers” are repressed.

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Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio – On the Development of Peoples (1967), the seminal ecclesial condemnation of a global political-economy shaped by colonial and neo-colonial structures. The encyclical called for “bold transformations in which the present order of things will be entirely renewed and rebuilt” (#32) to end “the international imperialism of money”(#36). The pope promoted the poor’s self-direction in their own development. But while the encyclical cast basic education and literacy as “privileged means of economic progress and development”(#35), its rhetorical design in fact privileged appeals for increased foreign aid, establishment of an international development plan, and a world political authority. Reliance on institutional instrumentalities rather than popular initiatives as motors of development was of a piece with papal rejection of violent social change (though 14 Paul VI cautiously allowed the possibility of just revolt in extremis). This institutional orientation sheltered highland missionaries of all nationalities, including those who espoused liberationist challenges to it. Indeed, accounts of missionary – Maya encounter on the ground show pastoral agents intent on challenging the social order but unable to relinquish their position within it. This missionary predicament demonstrates the invulnerability of hegemony to simple ideological challenge. It also reveals place to be an indispensable ingredient of gospel proclamation. Unreconstructed Mission Padre David Anthony arrived in San Andrés Larráinzar as its first resident priest in over fifty years by a circuitous but ambitious route fitting his entrepreneurial approach to mission. This U.S. Marine veteran was dismissed by the Society of Jesus when he rebelled against its refusal to offer him a missionary assignment. He was subsequently admitted to the inter-diocesan Catholic seminary founded by Mexico’s bishops in Montezuma, New Mexico, to free students from anti-clerical pressures and revive Tridentine train15 ing. After his ordination in 1962, he accepted Bishop Ruiz’s invitation to the priest-scarce Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. In San Andrés, Padre David bent Mexican Catholic Action strategy to his business-like style.16 Soon after his arrival he recruited a leading fiscal (traditional Maya ritual specialist) as his first catechist, sending him first to the Marist school for –––––––––– 14 One commentary on Populorum Progressio addresses influences on Paul VI’s nuanced formulations, including the statement on revolutionary violence (Dorr 1983: 31, 139-156, 303 n. 78). 15 Camp notes the “integrating” function of Mexico’s first national seminary: “Alumni agree that because they were Mexicans living in a foreign culture, it brought them closer together” (1997: 168). P. David presumably absorbed the clerical integralism fostered at Montezuma. 16 On Catholic Action, see Poggi 1967; on Catholic Action in Mexico, Aspe Armella 2008.

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catechists in San Cristóbal and then into remote parajes (hamlets) to seek other converts, among whom were the first catechists in Magdalenas (see Ch. 4). A year later he established a parish dispensary and welcomed two North American women religious to staff it. They had responded to Paul VI’s call for “papal volunteers” to promote development in Latin America (Orozco n.d.). Drawing on U.S. and other foreign funding, in the early 1970s the priest launched a residential boys’ primary school in San Andrés. Later, with the support of the bishop, he established a secondary school in San Cristóbal, 17 recruiting indigenous youth with assurances of material support. By the mid-1970s, the missionary had allied with Mexican state bureaucracies and an international agronomy program to develop an experimental ranch for the cultivation of potatoes to diversify both the diet and the commercial activities of his indigenous parishioners (Anthony 25.III.1974). In short, the pastor established a version of the classic mission station in San Andrés. P. David appears to have been supremely confident in the efficacy of his various projects. But mutual suspicions quickly arose between the foreign priest and San Andrés’ traditional civil-religious hierarchy as they competed for the community’s religious allegiance. The latter’s mistrust only deepened when the priest purchased scarce arable land for his ranch. His friendliness towards resident Ladinos, natural allies to the expatriate priest, further alienated local indigenous. Then, in 1974, simmering resentment of perennial socio-economic abuses by merchants and ranchers of San Andrés Larráinzar erupted in their violent expulsion from the municipio by a roving band of indigenous armed with machetes and led by local Tzotzil authorities. P. David found himself among those accused of illicit landholding. He became further isolated from both sides in the conflict when indigenous displaced Ladinos as majority residents of the cabecera (township center) (Anthony n.d.). Catechists and students in his schools were initially grateful and devoted to the missionary for the material opportunities his projects offered. But they, too, gradually grew disenchanted with them. For example, the priest sent the Magdalenero Elias to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state’s political and commercial capital, to peddle potatoes harvested on his experimental ranch. Now a highly-respected Catholic deacon in the parish, Elias remembers what seemed incomprehensible Ladino behavior. The most salient souvenir of his urban experience is an image of one Tuxtla resident’s casual disposal of unwanted, but still-wearable, clothes in a local garbage dump. –––––––––– 17 See Anthony-Ruiz correspondence, 18.VIII.1972, 6.VI.1974, 25.IX.1975, Archivo Diocesano, San Andrés Larráinzar, 1950-1990, caja #4, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. [Subsequent references to this source generally name correspondent(s) and date(s) only.]

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Alienated by this and similar perceived Ladino excesses, Elias reached two conclusions: He preferred working his own land on his own terms to selling for the pastor a crop which he knew, as a veteran agriculturalist, would not prosper on Magdalenas’s terrain. And he rejected the offer of secondary schooling in the state capital from a Ladina patron, choosing to continue catechetical training that had already made him a community leader. Elias abandoned the urban market just as the dispute between P. David and pastoral agents opposed to his pastoral approach reached the point of rupture. A 1980 memo detailed the points of conflict between forces for renewal and those resisting it within the Tzotzil pastoral “team.” Addressed to curial officials in San Cristóbal, the document “Catechist Movement in Larráinzar” notes the “double, contradictory presence” at monthly parish catechist meetings of David and Madre Lourdes, a Mexican religious whose pastoral approach openly challenged the U.S. missionary’s pre-Conciliar ecclesiology. The document argued that the priest’s paternalistic style produced catechists who were “legalists, casuists and dependent” while Madre Lourdes unintentionally encouraged their tutelage through an intensely personal approach. The collective author of the memo espoused “a new style of accompanying them [catechists] ... [with] neither recipes nor dogmatic solutions but hope for their thoughts, as well as that of the [parish] team that 18 accompanies them.” The debate deepened when Mexican Dominicans replaced Madre Lourdes in the early 1980,19 each side entrenched behind opposed pastoral-political “lines.” David appealed to theological tradition, citing “the mind of the church” and the will of the pope as warrant for his conviction that the first duty of the missionary is to “save souls,” not, as he characterized the bishop’s “badly mistaken” strategy, to foment social struggle (personal communication, FN 21.VIII.93). Tainted in the eyes of the priest by their association with the diocese and frustrated as a team by his exercise of hierarchical privilege, the women religious grew closer to diocesan proponents of liberation thought. In good measure an exhibit of gender politics, the power struggle among the missionaries became unnegotiable. Though they understood its ideological terms, catechists witnessing this drama perceived it quite differently. For them the paramount issue was –––––––––– 18 “Movimiento catequistico en Larráinzar,” Archivo del Obispado, San Andrés Larrainzar, caja #4., undated. Padre David restricted contact with his flock to required liturgical and sacramental functions. Elias offered this point of contrast: “Madre Lourdes spent time with us, here in our homes. Padre David celebrated mass and then left as fast as he could.” (FN 12.XI .94) 19 When one of the U.S. women religious left Larráinzar to marry, Dominicans sisters came from Mexico City to take her place.

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neither theological nor political “correctness” but local advantage, or, put another way, everyday practice and its production of place. Their discourse about the missionaries is locative, embedded in spatial semantics rather than theological claims, much less structural analysis. Catechists had asked Bishop Ruiz to remove the priest from the parish as early as 1980. The bishop responded by encouraging new forms of ministry, including ordained indigenous deacons who would, he hoped, eventually serve their people alongside Maya Catholic priests. The reorganization of pastoral workers into teams reinforced the bishop’s move which, not incidentally, coincided with the diocese’s option for “popular power.” The women religious in the parish of San Andrés eagerly embraced consensus pastoral decision-making to curb the pastor’s authority and enhance their own. They inevitably regarded the catechists as allies whose communitarian tradition favored the new pastoral model. These developments abetted the deterioration in catechist relations with P. David and were brought to a climax with their request for his removal in early 1990. This time they stated the terms of their revolt against him in two 20 letters to the bishop (Catechists 6.I.1990; 26.III.1990). Introducing their initial complaint, the catechists’ noted that P. David had taken steps to establish a convent of conservative women religious in the parish, a potential counter-influence to the Dominican sisters (Catechists 6.I.1990). Then they voiced the true reason for their concern: the pastor had promoted division in the parish by seeking endorsement for this project among parish indigenous without consulting them. In short, the pastor’s move was just the most recent instance of unilateralism figured in various forms of invasion and exclusion on his part. The letter alleged that P. David had long factionalized communities by forming rump groups loyal to him rather than the diocese in villages far distant from the parish church in the cabecera. (township center). It also charged that he illicitly possessed indigenous land and diverted funds solicited from foreign sources to buy hotels and other property in San Cristóbal rather than for 21 parish purposes. The letter then expanded the list of pastoral affronts: P. David refused to admit catechists to the elaborate compound he had built apart from parish property, designating the threshold to his office a boundary he forbade them to cross; limited his participation in catechist meetings to brief appearances; –––––––––– 20 The second of these letters appeared over 1900 indigenous signatures, most actually thumbprints. 21 I could not verify this last claim. Direct observation and reports from credible sources corroborate the remaining charges.

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and restricted their participation in the liturgy, curtailing catechist translations of his sermons and presiding with his back to the people (6.I.1990). The catechists began their second letter to the bishop: “the priest never takes an interest in the problems and the necessities of the people,” citing his refusal to follow the diocesan “line” which enjoined them to “speak about our situation of hunger and misery from the light of the word of God” (26.III, 90). Then they explicitly enlisted liberation ideology in their appeal for the priest’s removal, noting their need to “speak of oppression and capitalist exploitation” and David’s anticommunist warnings against Nicaragua and Cuba while “he never says anything against Yankee imperialism...” (ibid.). The translation of missionary dispute into marxist terms begs the suspicion that pastoral agents sympathetic to so-called ‘popular organizations’ 22 guided the letter’s composition. In any case, what Freire calls ‘conscientization’ echoes in the self-proclaimed awakening of these peasants: “If years ago we were manipulated as much by municipal authorities as by the priest, now we are different but the priest believes we remain asleep” (6.I.1990). But liberation discourse by itself hardly explains how the catechists in fact awakened. Indeed, their ideological argument appears as a coda to over nine pages of handwritten complaints against the priest whose unifying theme comes not from liberation thought but indigenous practice: The priest doesn’t “try to understand and respect our way of working,” “take into account the opinion of his catechists ... [or] enter into agreements [acuerdos] with the catechists,” “live with the people ... [or] stay with us in our meetings and courses...” (26.III.1990). In actual fact, the priest maneuvered within boundaries, secular and sacred, that marked his place above and apart from the indigenous and their “way of working.” As the catechists charged, he had abandoned quarters on church grounds local Catholics of the diocese shared with traditionalists in an 23 uneasy modus vivendi. Instead, he directed his various projects from his own walled quarters, leaving them only to visit his other properties, or to meet sacramental needs in the parajes where the majority of his flock lived. These visits are best remembered by the catechists for the priest’s refusal of indigenous hospitality, including meals specially prepared for him. He was –––––––––– 22 Among these was the catechist-turned-pastoral agent Daniel. One of very few catechists in the entire diocese to have received a high school diploma (bachillerato), Daniel’s brief career as a public school teacher took him to areas bordering the Lacandon Jungle where the EZLN began and still maintains its principal base. Daniel himself left the pastoral team in 1993 to eventually become a Zapatista negotiator in peace talks with the government (FN 20.IX.92; end) 1993, and direct witness, March, 1994). 23 This colonial edifice was under the bishop’s authority and included pastor’s quarters. Like all church property in Mexico, it was legally state-owned and accommodated traditional Maya as well as Catholic ritual.

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obviously eager, as Elias perceived, “to leave as fast as he could” (FN 11.XII.94). Mounted on horseback, he raced across Tzotzil territory, above and past indigenous peasants who, when fortunate enough to own them, relied on their horses exclusively to carry agricultural burdens; they themselves always traveled on foot. 24 In short, the priest moved across the surface of indigenous lands and lives in pursuit of projects irrelevant and/or dismissive of their everyday production. Whether real or imagined, then, his real estate investments in the highland metropolis epitomized the catechists’ view of their pastor’s remove from their lives. This is a matter, above all, of sharing lots in a double sense. The catechists’ letters link in immediate succession charges that the priest illicitly occupied land claimed by landless Andreseros and refused to enter into agreements with them. Significantly, these charges are semantically joined in both letters, a complaint about the priest’s failure to consult followed by an accusation concerning his landholdings. Pairing the spatial and the procedural, the catechists’ rhetorical strategy asserts productive principle. For the Maya, occupation of ancestral land is legitimated by common agreement; occupation with this land affirms its status as communal place, never wholly private property. In other words, socio-economic production makes the place, and the place both figures and enables a “way of working.” The illegitimacy of the priest’s landholdings, following this scheme, was manifold. According to the catechists, in the early 1980s several landless Andreseros had petitioned under Mexico’s agrarian reform law for title to thirty-two hectares of land the priest occupied, a move to which he responded by gathering signatures among his followers to validate the legality of his possession. This (apparently successful) appeal to the state in defense of property rights clearly violated communal norms. But implicit alliance with the state, placing property over community and against the landless, was far from the priest’s only, or even most grievous, transgression. Equally, if not more, offensive, his solicitation of support provoked political division among indigenous whose survival depended on communal consensus. The priest’s choice of potatoes rather than corn on what he called “experimental farm ‘San Amadeo’” substituted imported experiments in development for indigenous agricultural wisdom. He promoted potatoes for their commercial as well as nutritional value, envisioning, at his most expansive, indigenous modernization – schools, roads, and other infrastructure – via this –––––––––– 24 Jan and Diane Rus, anthropologists who arrived in neighboring Chamula in the 1970s,told of being left in the dust as P. David galloped past them on horseback (personal communication, Summer 1994).

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single crop.25 But, just as Tzotzil campesinos had predicted, the potato neither did nor could prosper in Larráinzar’s climate and terrain. Catechists, unconvinced of its viability from the start, remained affected by the message of this agricultural scheme long after its material collapse. Years later Elias recounted a conversation in which the priest criticized the catechists’ failure to raise cattle. Elias remembers, “I asked him, ‘What land would we use to graze them?’ He didn’t even understand that you need land to feed cows, and we hardly have enough land for our milpas!” (FN 12.XI.1994). Equal parts exasperation and disdain colored the campesino’s memory of the missionary’s facile disposition toward the ground (literal and figurative) of indigenous existence. In short, where indigenous planted, the missionary supplanted. To the foreigner a mere site for experiment, “land for our milpa” had for centuries assured Tzotzil social-cultural survival. The priest’s allies – from state agrarian agencies to international development bureaucracies and funding sources – were as alien to the Maya as the potato. The crop – like his refusal of their hospitality and his horseback trips over their land – unmistakably signified his dis-placement. Given his posture in Tzotzil social space, P. David unsurprisingly rejected Vatican II recognition of the laity, and thus catechists, within the church itself. Virtually boycotting their meetings, just as he did diocesan assemblies and team dialogue, the priest carefully protected priestly liturgical prerogatives. He dismissed the need for sacramental preparation, a responsibility specific to the catechetical office, frequently baptizing and presiding at marriage without it despite catechist protestations. In another letter to the bishop, they complained that David had told them “that sacramental prepara26 tion is our thing,” and, as merely such, dispensable (3.III.1978). Indeed, the priest’s resistance to renewal consistently undermined catechist authority. He regularly suspended their translations into Tzotzil of his Spanish homilies, ostensibly to shorten them. Perpetuating the linguistic distance separating missionary and Maya, this act effectively denied indigenous full access to the Word of God, the very basis of their renewed Catholic community. Catechists remember with particular bitterness P. David’s mode of presiding at liturgy. Eschewing the reforms of Vatican II, he stood alone at –––––––––– 25 Correspondence related to the project includes a 1974 report in English projecting this vision to U.S. donors (30.V.1974) 26 This letter complains that though David told the pastoral team he accepted the need for preparation before baptism, he informed “the people that preparation is our thing. Every day the problem intensifies, above all among the elders and those who do not accept preparation.” Apparently, in his concern to “save souls,” the pastor regarded catechesis as secondary to sacramental performance.

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the recessed altar of the parish church, his back towards kneeling indigenous worshippers below. This ritual gesture aptly figured the missionary’s regard for hierarchical privilege as a sacred duty intrinsic to the priestly vocation, granted by ordination from above and, for him, essentially indivisible. But his vertical theology paradoxically led to self-defeating contradiction of hierarchical principle. Catholic priestly ordination bestows not ministerial autonomy but a share in episcopal office. P. David’s resistance to Vatican II’s extension of this theological understanding to affirm the priestly vocation of the laity led to direct conflict with Bishop Ruiz. In brief, the pastor was insubordinate to the hierarchy he pretended to uphold, as the bishop insisted on the laity’s place within it. Respect for episcopal authority, as well as the integrity of diocesan pastoral strategy, demanded that the catechists’ petition be granted. Bishop Ruiz decided that P. David could remain in San Andrés “to attend urgent 27 cases” while the diocese sought a new pastor and the Dominican sisters assumed responsibility for general pastoral care in the parish (28.IV.1990). Mission Misplaced The letter communicating to parish catechists the bishop’s decision to dismiss P. David as their pastor closed with the following exhortation: You are the ones who must continue the work in your communities, without becoming discouraged and never losing sight of our task: the construction of the reign of God in our land... (ibid.).

P. David had accepted neither the ecclesial devolution nor the definition of the missionary task these words asserted. For Maya catechists, alliance with the diocese arguably turned on their construal of a critical phrase, “the construction of the reign of God in our land [emphasis added].” Theologically, the arrival of God’s rule in time and space defines “integral liberation,” the rejection of every form of dualism to find “identification without total identity” between eternal salvation and the achievement of justice in the world (F. Schüssler Fiorenza 1991: 848). “World” here denotes the sphere of actual human existence. It is this soteriological geography that the Diocese of San Cristóbal recommends to the catechists (as refusal of it warranted P. David’s dismissal). In other words, conversion from costumbre to the Word of God promised alternatives to impoverished peasant lives in the here-and-now of –––––––––– 27 Under the terms of his dismissal, P. David was allowed to hear confessions, baptize, and celebrate mass in Larráinzar only in emergency.

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their ancestral territory. This understanding of salvation also served as the basis for catechist collaboration with pastoral agents in mapping mission. Nonetheless, liberation thought failed to take into account the crucial matters of social location and habitus, in this instance strikingly expressed in divergent valorizations of place. In everyday practice, missionaries misread catechist spatial gestures and thus missed altogether Maya desire for mutuality in mission. In San Andrés, the catechists made this desire visible in actual parish architecture, seeking to anchor the church in their place as they claimed their place in the church. When Bishop Ruiz asserted his episcopal authority by withdrawing P. David’s priestly faculties in the parish, the missionary appealed his case to Rome. But Maya catechists validated their victory in the dispute by proposing renovation of the local parish compound to create suitable quarters for the dismissed pastor’s replacement and meeting rooms for themselves there as well. Situating their meeting rooms within the walled 28 parish convent would legitimate catechist agency in mission, just as the priest’s residence there would incorporate the church into the local community. In effect, for the catechists the ecclesial field was analogous to the agricultural, a place to be occupied by common agreement for community production. Thus the arrival of God’s reign in indigenous territory required their occupation of sacred space alongside the priest to create the local church together as full partners. With encouragement from Bishop Ruiz, Sergio Hernández, the new pastor in San Andrés, had fled a Central American seminary opposed to liberation thought.29 Wholeheartedly committed to the bishop’s project, he dramatically signaled a new ecclesial regime in San Andrés by inviting indigenous eucharistic ministers and deacon-candidates to stand with him at the altar facing the assembly during Sunday liturgies. On Saturday evenings he met with catechists who would read Sunday’s scripture readings and/or translate his homily for vocabulary lessons and exegetical discussions. The new pastor also encouraged parish-wide catechist organization, including formation of a mesa directiva30 – a board of directors – to convene and preside over their monthly meetings, coordinate rotating liturgical assignments, and arrange pastoral visits to local communities. Padre Sergio also entrusted the mesa directiva with the keys to the parish convent for their use in his absence, a powerful endorsement of catechist leadership in the parish. –––––––––– 28 “Convent” refers to often enclosed grounds adjacent to the church proper. 29 Sergio attended the seminary in Puebla, site of the 1978 meeting of CELAM. 30 This group consisted of five men chosen by fellow catechists at annual elections to serve one year terms on a rotating basis.

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The young pastor nonetheless failed to take up full-time residence in the quarters they had remodeled for him at their own expense.31 Instead, he maintained rooms at the cathedral rectory in San Cristóbal, commuting to San Andrés on Saturday evening and leaving after the late-morning liturgy for Sunday dinner with the cathedral pastoral team or Ladino friends. P. Sergio faithfully celebrated mass, baptisms, and confessions during patronal fiestas and annual pastoral visits to some 50 local parish communities that could last up to three days.32 But priestly duty rather than personal interest seemed to motivate these visits, marked as they were by friendly but limited interchange with local villagers whose language the pastor, a fairly introverted and passive man in any case, made no effort to learn. During longer stays in indigenous hamlets for fiestas or catechetical courses, the priest passed the time between liturgical duties tuned to the outside, reading church journals or listening to a portable radio. On Saturday evenings in San Andrés, he took meals with a local indigenous family but also went out of his way to cultivate relationships with one of the few local ladino families remaining in Larráinzar.33 P. Sergio’s immigration status was precarious. Mexican authorities required that he renew his visa annually in the federal capital and indefinitely delayed approval of his application for the religious residence status allowed by the 1992 constitutional reforms that legalized the church. The ex-patriate pastor remained acutely aware of his vulnerability to arbitrary state action against foreigners.34 His tenuous immigration status notwithstanding, P. Sergio’s bonds with Mexicans in San Cristóbal and Larráinzar argue that legal concerns do not explain his decision to leave the rooms the catechists had prepared for him vacant and reside at the cathedral in San Cristóbal instead. Apparently feeling less foreign to Ladinos than Maya, Sergio located himself among the former, at a distance from the indigenous and unbridgeable by his liberationist commitment. –––––––––– 31 The simple facilities included a ten by twelve bedroom-office with new cement floors, painted plaster walls, and a bathroom with a flush toilet and shower supplied by a hot water heater – all features absent in Maya adobe and/or wood dwellings. 32 Seventy-three villages stood within parish boundaries, but not all of these had chapels and some villagers traveled to other communities for pastoral visits. At yearly visits for the local fiesta the priest would say mass and lead rosaries over several days. 33 The head of this family was a notorioius coyote or middle-man who bought coffee at exhorbitatn prices from local Maya peasants with no other means to market their harvest. 34 In 1987 Mexican immigration authorities expelled a Belgian priest, presumably to signal government disapproval of diocesan pastoral work. Following the 1994 Zapatista uprising, at least five more priests in the diocese – Spanish, French, Argentinian, Canadian and United States citizens – were expelled from or denied re-entry to Mexico.

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The Dominican sisters who served with him, Mexican nationals sent from their motherhouse in the federal district, had sleeping quarters in a hamlet an hour’s walk from the cabecera. But they rarely used this outpost, preferring their spare but comfortable convent in San Cristóbal where they assisted Dominican missionaries. Their alliance with these leading advocates of liberation praxis in the diocese, two of them members of the núcleo, paradoxically reinforced their social distance from the Maya whom they sought as collaborators in mission. A Dominican sister from the U.S. who worked with the Larráinzar team from the mid-1980s to early 1990s provided the exception proving the rule that apparently governed the Mexican sisters’ relations with the catechists. Only at her insistence did they undertake extended visits to Maya hamlets. The sisters’ evident insecurity among the Tzotzil increased as the diocese intensified its defense of indigenous rights. Indeed, one can detect an inverse ratio between the ever-increasing number of diocesan denunciations of human rights violations against the Maya, a strategy pushed by the núcleo, and the frequency of the sisters’ visits to their communities in Larráinzar. The departure of the U.S. sister who drove the community truck provided a logistical excuse. But a reluctance to leave San Cristóbal that approached paralysis following the Zapatista uprising begs further explanation. Three summers after the twelve-day indigenous uprising, as a series of Zapatista-initiated referenda promoted the insurgents’ agenda while a partial accord with the government sat in congressional limbo, Elias reported asking one of the Dominican sisters after Sunday mass why she no longer came to his, and other, parish villages. She whispered her reply: “Because you are Zapatistas.” Elias urged her to visit and “see for yourself.” But the nun could not be persuaded. The deacon interpreted her response with equal parts chagrin and bewilderment: “Tiene miedo – she’s afraid” (FN 25.VII.97). At that moment Mexican army troops were deployed throughout Chiapas; outposts on either side of San Andrés controlled access to Maya hamlets. In at least one notorious instance two years later, they also protected unpredictable right-wing paramilitary forces resentful of the Zapatistas’ appeal, and in 35 some cases outright control, in highland communities. But the danger of violence in Chiapas was restrained by broad national sentiment against armed solutions by either government or insurgents. Moreover, the nun’s fear had neither obviated the deacon’s asking nor her entertaining his question: a –––––––––– 35 It is widely agreed that the December, 1997 murder by paramilitaries of 45 Maya indigenous in their chapel at Acteal, Chenalho’ could not have occurred without the acquiescence of Mexican soldiers stationed within earshot of the atrocity. See 1998 reports by Centro de Derechos Humanos, “Fray Bartolomé de las Casas” (www.frayba.org.mx).

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shared ecclesial agenda of liberation had accustomed catechists and missionaries to a certain discursive association. But they remained practically dis-sociated, missionaries to Larráinzar regarding indigenous from without and, against their own intentions, above. On the one hand, the fear Elias glimpsed in the nun’s response reflected the sense of exposure readily befalling a non-Maya visitor to highland communities even in normal (i.e., peaceful) circumstances, missionaries unexcepted. The segue from an outsider’s feelings of vulnerability to disabling fear in this circumstance certainly owed to the unique role of the church in Chiapas, molded by the longue durée, national and regional, and acutely tension-laden in the immediate conjuncture. Having moved into a political vacuum to assert its moral authority, the Diocese of San Cristóbal became the preferred because historically acceptable target of local and national resentment of indigenous collective assertion. Modern Mexico’s anti-clerical tradition was refracted in Chiapas through the local elite’s feudal sense of privilege, and the Zapatista uprising provoked its most venomous expression. To employ the historic vocabulary of Mexican national culture still used in the highlands, los indios, according to these selfstyled gente de razón, were incapable of initiating any project of conse36 quence. This ethnicizing logic attributed Zapatista success in rousing national and international attention to mentors in the Diocese of San Cristóbal who promoted its preferential option for impoverished highland indigenous. Ironically, pastoral agents such as Elias’s interlocutor belied this inaccurate conclusion while unintentionally inverting its logic. The missionary’s reply “you are Zapatista” articulated intractable contradictions in mission. In brief, it acknowledged indigenous agency but refused its effects. Affixing a label to her collaborator, the pastoral agent marked the chasm between mission and Maya widened by pastoral agents carrying sociohistorical weights they misrecognized in their desire to disown the church’s colonial past. Their eagerness to assert the church’s (political) autonomy complicated the project of the Diocese of San Cristóbal as it challenged the state’s oppressive stance towards the indigenous by defending their human rights, and then embraced the role of mediator between the government and politicized Maya indigenous the Zapatista uprising thrust upon it.

–––––––––– 36 The racial ideology behind these labels, indios (Indians) at one pole and gente de razón (“reasonable people”) the other, originated with Spanish colonizers. They constructed an “erudite classification of castas,” multiple groups classified under distinctive mixed-race labels, e.g., Spanish and Indian = mestizo; Mestizo and Spanish = castizo, etc. (LomnitzAdler 1992: 261-281.

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This activist posture inevitably wrapped the diocese’s claim to autonomy in ambiguity and exposed it to attack by opponents. Indeed, the president of Mexico himself discredited the church as proponent of a “theology of violence,”37 thereby publicly unmasking a not-so-hidden (and ultimately successful) strategy to frustrate ecclesial mediation.38 Though antithetically situated and motivated as rhetorical gestures, the president’s bombast nonetheless echoes the subtext of the missionary’s whisper: indigenous people on the move unsettled the status of the principals joined in hegemonic struggle. In other words, church and state regarded the indigenous from opposed points of view, except in this one respect: both stood within an historically established and now wobbling frame of asymmetrical power relations that excluded and/or objectified Mexico’s Indians. Elias’s bewilderment in the face of the missionary’s response glosses the point. For him, whether or not he, or anyone in his community, could be called Zapatista simply did not count so far as his relation with the church was concerned. He respectfully accepted but did not fully understand the missionary’s fear because he neither did nor could participate in the struggle for position it expressed. The deacon approached the missionary assuming that their collaboration eclipsed her concern about what, to him, remained a matter of (mere) political adhesion incidental to a more fundamental affiliation. His invitation signaled that occasional meetings in the cabecera – even when the occasion was, as in this instance, sacred liturgy – could not substitute for encounter with Maya life at its intimate source, the local community created through everyday life and labor. Urging the missionary past her objections, Elias pushed liberation towards an interpretation she, preoccupied with (political) position, could not comprehend. For Elias and his fellow catechists, possession of a place to stand is paramount, liberation practice seized as a means to this end and any other offer regarded in relation to it. Thus the deacon had earlier refused a Zapatista recruiter: “My community needs me,” he reasoned; “advances” in its socio-economic well-being life nurtured by catechist-led “religion” would be imperiled in the absence of his leadership (FN 9.I.95). 39 –––––––––– 37 Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo employed this phrase during a visit to the state capital, ostensibly to advance peace in Chiapas. La Jornada 1.VI. 98. 38 The bishop dissolved the National Commission on Intermediation (CONAI), shortly after President Zedillo’s rhetorical assault amid mounting political evidence that the government was uninterested in a political settlement with the EZLN, much less one brokered by the church (Proceso, June 1998). Miguel Álvarez, secretary to Bishop Ruiz, confirmed this interpretation (personal communication May, 2000). 39 The Zapatista militant made more than one visit to the community in search of Elias before the January 1, 1994, uprising in Chiapas. Elias explained why he failed to enlist: “Why would I want to risk death, leaving all the [natural] marvels of this world?” (FN 17.VII.97). As the standoff between the EZLN and government troops segued into political stalemate,

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For the Tzotzils of Magdalenas, being-in-the-world is being-together-inplace, with place the essential vantage point for religious and political views. Elias’s invitation to the missionary echoed the Tzotzil disposition in the standard interchange with visitors to Magdalenas: “¿Cómo estas? Aquí estamos, como siempre. – How are things? Here we are, as always.”40 In other words, to be Tzotzil is to be emplaced within Tzotzil territory, a product of everyday life and labor. For the deacon, liberation practice oriented this occupation and deepened its value: for him, catechist and pastoral agents, both heralds of liberation, belonged on the same ground. Elias’s invitation, like the living quarters catechists constructed for their pastor, manifests Maya indigenous engagement with the historical conjuncture, including the church’s reentry into the highlands. Missionary misrecognition of Maya accommodations to their presence in San Andrés, on the other hand, demonstrates the paradoxical persistence of primordialist ethnocen41 trism even among missionaries committed to reading the “signs of the times” (Mt. 16:3, Gaudium et Spes 1965: #4). In brief, liberation offered no deliverance from the trap of ethnicizing logic. Its utopianism favored a time- and space-less view of the indigenous that privileged structural policies made at the center(s) (local and national) and thus unintentionally reinforced a (colonial) hierarchy of places. This is not to say that missionaries confused contemporary Maya with the ancestral architects of Mesoamerican pyramids, nor that the church denied the agency of those whom, after all, it named catechists (and among whom it came to detect Zapatistas). Rather, it is to argue that missionary reluctance to reside in Maya (geographic) space maintained missionary and Maya each in their (social) place, the former apart from and, inevitably, above, the latter. Liberation thought regarded the Maya as subjects of their own history. But viewed at the distance measured by missionary ties to global, national, and regional power centers, in pastoral practice they remained objects of pastoral reflection and political label. In sum, in a different place, Maya indigenous embodied, for missionaries, the other. The other in its several forms is, of course, a historical construction, resulting from encounters with difference transmuted by an alchemy of

the deacon and the Catholics he led became more committed to the Zapatista cause. Years after the uprising Elias expressed admiration for the “courage” of one EZLN recruit he knew personally; but never took up arms himself. 40 This ritualistic interchange is an instance of locative usage characteristic of everyday Tzotzil discourse. E.g., “Tec oyan – you remain here” is the universal saying on leaving a house; the typical greeting on the road is “te chivat – you’re going [away from here].” 41 For critiques of primordialist notions of ethnicity, see Wilmsen and McAllister (eds.) 1996.

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obduracy and desire into relations of power.42 Spanish colonial ‘discovery’ of ways and worlds heretofore unknown to the European is the paradigmatic case. Perceived through Christian certainty and technological superiority, native peoples appeared not interestingly different but intolerably other.43 For the colonizers, alterity seemed not an invitation to inquiry but a motive for assimilation or annihilation (Todorov 1984). In encounters with difference, dialogical interest requires acquiescence to the exercise of power by others on their own terms. It means, further, recognizing that, though not identical, such terms are, in principle, mutually translatable because of the same (human) order. Missionary determination to undo the dehumanizing effects of conquest and colony in the Chiapas highlands undoubtedly promoted the exercise of Maya power. But liberation analysis as much as Mexican national culture presumed its relative inefficacy, unintentionally undervaluing the essential task of translation. This contradiction was not a simple result of theological naiveté on the liberation side, but a complex product of social formation, the habitus, of the late-twentieth century Mexican middle class.44 In their encounters, missionary contradiction rebounded against Maya clarity as indigenous themselves shaped the task of translation to leverage power already in their possession. In practice, then, liberation arrived in highland Chiapas not with missionary analysis but with the contradictions embedded in it – and, inevitably, on Maya terms, in Maya place. Courses – Rites of Literacy, Performance of Liberation The Diocese of San Cristóbal conferred catechist status on Maya peasants depending on their attendance of annual catechetical courses. The evolution of these exercises distinguished teachers from students socio-culturally as well as pedagogically. It also traces the reversal in missionary initiative limned above. Initiated by church hierarchs in an attempt to bridge the cultural-religious gap between Vatican II Catholicism and Maya tradition, these courses be–––––––––– 42 Post-colonial studies is the obvious source for the articulation of prejudice and power. The locus classicus is, of course, Said 1979. Other scholars cogently argue that cultural difference is a historical process of differentiation “produced and maintained in a field of power relations,” and call for “interrogating the ‘otherness’ of the other’” with a “willingness to interrogate, politically and historically, the apparent ‘given’ of a world in the first place divided into ‘ourselves’ and ‘others’” (Gupta and Ferguson 1995: 16-17). On colonialism and desire, Stoler 1995. 43 J. Z. Smith distinguishes between otherness and difference (1992) and offers a critical genealogy of race (2001: 3-21). 44 In the case of Larráinzar, mission strategy was constrained by diocesan policies largely devised by priests from Mexico’s urban centers and sustained for over thirty years by women religious from the same Mexican community headquartered Mexico City.

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came rites of passage from which peasant catechists emerged, in ecclesial eyes, as trustworthy collaborators. Religious novices in their own eyes, the catechists, in turn, increasingly assumed authority for the design of their religious formation and, consequently, the religious architecture of their communities. In short, though indispensable as conveners, pastoral agents figured more often as witnesses than mentors of Maya who authorized their own learning and religious formation. Beginning in 1962, catechist courses were offered in the new schools for catechists established in San Cristóbal at the urging of the papal nuncio (Iribarrán Pascal 1988). Elias recalls his month-long 1971 sojourn at the Divine Shepherd convent there: I went because I wanted to see what it was like. We learned prayers and how to sing songs, and very little of the Word of God. It was nothing like what we do now in our courses. At the end of the course, Don [Bishop] Samuel [Ruiz] came and gave us a card that said we were catechists. We took home la doctrina [Catholic manual of hymns and devotional prayers].45

The catechist Daniel remembers learning about the sacraments and “a bit of the gospel” at a course of that early period held in the diocesan seminary under harsh conditions: “there wasn’t enough food and we lost weight.”46 Jorge, who was fluent in Spanish when he responded to an appeal for help from other catechists, recalls early experiences in San Cristóbal as do most Magdalenero catechists: “muy duro – very difficult” (FN 12.VIII.95). The “difficult” in these experiences was manifold. Many young men embarked for courses in San Cristóbal over the understandable objections of their parents. The absence of any family member, and certainly an older son, seriously reduced a peasant household’s productive capacity. The diocese itself had limited resources for maintaining indigenous men who arrived in its classrooms with little more than the clothes they wore. Petates (straw mats) were the only beds available in rudimentary dormitories, and meals rarely deviated from the traditional indigenous diet of rice and beans. Presented by men and women religious residing in the highland metropolis to Maya peasants who as late as the mid-1960s were prohibited use of its sidewalks, the early catechist curriculum was utterly opaque linguistically and socio-culturally. Catechists themselves served as ad hoc translators for instructors who made little attempt to learn the various Maya dialects in the –––––––––– 45 Field transcript 22.VII.1995. [Transcriptions of tape recorded conversations and homilies are denoted FT in subsequent references.] 46 Typescript of autobiographical notes Daniel entrusted to me in October, 1993.

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diocese47 and confined their lessons to elementary moral precepts and prayer – the Sign of the Cross, the Our Father and Hail Mary. Yet Daniel notes that only one of the thirty young men from San Andrés with whom he attended his first course failed to finish (FN 24.VII.1993). Daniel himself had little difficulty assimilating the doctrine he heard in San Cristóbal, largely because it responded to the restlessness that led to his enrollment as a catechist. He cites his first course as pivotal to his subsequent life trajectory which, though exceptional in achievement (teacher certification), typified both motive and direction of a common catechetical itinerary (autobiographical notes 1993). The most salient marker of their religious conversion, proscription of drink, resonated with all the would-be catechists. Repudiation of ritual alcohol consumption signaled liberation from the rule of fathers they had literally left behind ritually as well as geographically to embark on catechetical training. In doing so, the majority crossed the threshold of literacy previously barred to them either by economics and/or, if they had attended school, by teacher absenteeism in putatively bilingual highland government 48 schools. Thus, Jorge, a popular municipal agent in Magdalenas, had learned the rudiments of reading as a boy while working as a clerk on coffee fincas. But his chronically-indebted father, fearing loss of his labor in the family milpa, forbade his acceptance of a teacher’s invitation to attend secondary school in the late 1970s. In 1985, a catechist invited him to take the course in San Cristóbal. By this time, the curriculum was guided by liberationist scriptural hermeneutics rather than church doctrine. Jorge’s frustrated educational ambition found satisfaction in the acquisition of biblical literacy: “God has written in the Bible what He wants. The Word of God itself teaches what He says and where He says it, in which verses” (FN 8.VIII.1995). Jorge offers more than a proof-text to legitimate what amounted to a world-altering critical move. Encouraged by the preaching of catechists to reject ritual drink and cargo service, Jorge explains how catechetical training enabled him to rationally appropriate this life-turn: “There [reading scripture –––––––––– 47 Although Bishop Ruiz encouraged pastoral agents to deepen their understanding of the Maya through anthropology and language studies, by the mid-1990s only a handful of missionaries had mastered more than minimal conversational Tzeltal or Tzotzil, and fewer Ch’ol or Mam, the minority dialects in the diocese. Significantly, foreigners – a German who compiled a Mam Maya dictionary and a Canadian priest fluent in Tzotzil – were among these few. 48 Mexican law required bilingual instruction. In highland Chiapas, teachers were either Ladinos barely familiar with any Maya language, or Maya natives from different communities unfamiliar with the local dialect. Teachers were frequently absent, and Spanish-Tzotzil primary textbooks arrived only after the 1994 Zapatista uprising.

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in San Cristóbal] I could think, because there I knew the Word of God” (ibid.) Daniel seconds Jorge’s assessment. An early primary school drop-out, this eager student consciously linked and equally valued Spanish and biblical literacy. Their acquisition in tandem propelled him far beyond his father’s world, to preparatory school and a teaching certificate as well as religious leadership in his home community. His account of this remarkable advance states the crucial point: “This first [catechetical] course was very important; it gave me power” (ibid.). Spanish and the Bible functioned as ethnic diacritics in Chiapas as elsewhere in Latin America. These young Maya indigenous had known nothing beyond village milpas except the confinement of finca labor before trekking to convents in the highland metropolis. Thus, their initial courses became authentic rites of social-cultural passage. One leading pastoral agent recounts indigenous dramatization of highland Maya history for the visiting papal nuncio. He had intended the exercise to enable the nuncio and others in the audience of pastoral agents “to understand the people as they saw themselves.” To the amazement of all present, the indigenous narrator began: “My excellency, I’m going to tell you how our life is. Look: the life of the Indian is really tough. The life of our children is screwed” (Fazio 1995: 69-80). This spontaneous diagnosis of contemporary Maya life astutely epitomized highland history. It also displayed the reflexive impact of catechetical training, uniquely enabling indigenous to (re-)see themselves in a different image, refracted through texts, teachers, and each other within convent classrooms. In effect, exchange of agricultural for academic tasks and entry into a space designed expressly to advance conversion re-situated Maya indigenous in a ritually transformative way. Spatial-temporal suspension of everyday life – the sina qua non of ritual – heightened the critique of indigenous reality instigated by the socialeconomic displacements which initially motivated the positive response of young Maya males to ecclesial recruitment. The leisure of time away from milpa and machete, wielding the intellectual tools and experiencing the material privileges marking Ladino space – pens and notebooks, texts and 49 clocks, regular (if simple) meals and, not least, the hygienic advantages of floored and cemented housing with indoor plumbing – provoked fascination and incited critical thought.50 During courses, peasant catechists paused from –––––––––– 49 It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which catechists focused on meals, clearly a highly valued secondary gain of catechetical training. 50 Peasant fascination with plumbing fixtures they naturally associated with Ladino society resonates, albeit in the wholly different material register, with Ricoeur’s seminal notion: “the symbol gives rise to thought” (1967: 347).

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their normally unceasing material labor on a symbolically-constructed platform from which they could re-imagine themselves. In other words, they repossessed their power in the world ipso facto made available to their (re-)design. As pastoral strategy in the Diocese of San Cristóbal evolved to fit sociolinguistic circumstance, pastoral agents entrusted the Bible – until then exclusively possessed by literate Ladinos – into Maya hands. Missionaries recommended (Spanish) chapter and verse for discussion sessions among catechists from which these teachers had barred themselves by failing to study Maya languages. Instead, they commissioned the few minimally literate Maya among the catechetical trainees as teaching assistants. These men, in turn, expanded their primary school learning by leading their illiterate, largely monolingual peers through Spanish texts. The eventual addition of Maya language scriptures to the curriculum furthered the critical effect.51 Juxtaposition of Spanish and Tzotzil Bible texts for the sake of translation represented graphically the boundaries the catechists crossed in what amounted to a pedagogical exodus. In this way, the discovery of the Bible became for novice catechists an empowering re-discovery of each other as Maya, i.e., positively differentiated within the Ladino space in which they gathered. Through labored conquest of textual meanings, they discovered and appropriated their own intellectual resources, acquiring the power of bilingualism – invaluable in the highlands – in the process. They did so in encounters whose pivotal transaction – the handing over of texts for translation and exegesis – ritually focused culturallinguistic distinctions between (ladino) pastoral agents and their (Maya) protégés. In other words, novice Maya catechists practiced liberation as they acquired literacy. Inevitably, they discerned themselves in Israel’s oppressed and then liberated peasant tribes. The scriptural narrative at one and the same time mirrored and elevated Maya lives in their own eyes as catechists came, in their words, to “manejarlo – handle it.” The connotations of this usage are exponentially amplified by the catechists’ word for linguistic mastery: “dominación – domination.”52 Thus catechists became a ‘people of the book,’ claiming the Bible as their own by making it a tool for their own culturalreligious reproduction. –––––––––– 51 The US-based and Protestant-dominated Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) entered the highlands in the late 1930s (Rus and Wasserstrom 1981). But The Diocese of San Cristóbal rejected its translations as theologically tainted. A Tzotzil Bible ecumenically produced under diocesan sponsorship became available in 1997. 52 Catechists distinguish between those able or not to “dominar” Spanish. Interestingly, “Spaniards then [during conquest of the Philippines] as now, always referred to learning a foreign language as a matter of ‘dominating’ it” (Rafael 1988: 26, n.9).

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Original colonial mission obviated such an outcome, indoctrinating from above and requiring the ‘reduction’ of indigenous to spaces controlled exclusively by the masters of doctrinal manuals. In the decolonizing circumstances of late-twentieth century highland Chiapas, however, the mission encounter proceeded from different premises. Catechetical training endowed Maya already mobilized by structural change with new resources for maneuver in their homelands and movement beyond them. Biblical literacy as such, as argued above and further developed ahead, became the most important of these. The social re-positioning figured in transmittal of the text also inevitably laid the foundation for change in the calculus of power entailed in mission as, Bible in hand, the catechists began to place themselves on new footing with pastoral agents. Indigenous autonomy, regulating ideal for inculturation and liberation theologies, advanced through dimensions of everyday practice overlooked by missiological proposals oriented to the symbolic sphere and, in the Diocese of San Cristóbal, overlaid with political concern. Thus, missionaries who were surprised by a Maya performance in a metropolitan convent could not have foreseen their erstwhile students’ reversal of colonial reduction. Indeed, as catechists returned from church classrooms in the highland metropolis, they confidently seized ecclesial initiative and remade the local church in Tzotzil territory.

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Chapter Four

Proclaiming Religion, Reclaiming Land History, Cognition and Religious Change

Introduction In October, 1985, catechists led a caravan of Catholics to the cabecera of San Pedro Chenalho’ and secured abolition of the obligation attached to certain ritually-significant cargos in Magdalenas through the mediation of municipal government officers. The struggle with local traditional authorities to eliminate what was, in the catechists’ estimation, the most onerous feature of costumbre marked definitive establishment of a renewed Catholic community in Magdalenas. What one catechist called the “year of liberation” in fact punctuated historical developments in the highlands of Chiapas extending backward to nineteenth century ladino usurpation of Maya lands following Mexican independence and forward to the Zapatista campaign for indigenous autonomy. Reversal in the correlation of ladino and indigenous forces sought by Zapatista supporters began, from the point of view of its Maya protagonists in Magdalenas, with a religious revolution whose pivotal events were quite circumscribed in time and space. Structure and Religious Agency: A Local History The crisis in land and labor in Chiapas during the 1970s and 1980s and the resulting structural shift in highland Maya political-economy, most explosively announced by the 1994 Zapatista uprising, has been amply documented (Cancian 1992; Collier 1990, 1994a, 1994b; Harvey 1994, 1998; Rus 1976, 1995, 1999; Rus and Collier 2003; Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace 2003; Viquiera and Ruz 1995; Wasserstrom 1975). What has not been widely recognized is that for catechists and other Catholics from whom this crisis elicited a radical response, land and labor became religious data in the post-Independence highlands through their modern articulation with cargo practices. Never barely material phenomena for the Tzotzil Maya, land and labor’s religious import in Magdalenas is

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substantially informed by the evolution in their distinctive socio-economic structural relationship in Chiapas.1 At its root lay the passage of highland Maya lands into ladino hands facilitated by state legislation following liberal disentailment in the midnineteenth century. Eviction from their lands drastically reduced the capacity of indigenous campesinos to sustain their traditional milpa mode of production (Wasserstrom 1975). Joined to the struggle for political integration, modernization through capital expansion became Mexico’s national project under the government of Porfirio Díaz (1876-80, 1884-1911). His policies lured foreign investors to Chiapas where Germans, in particular, created coffee fincas in the lowlands and highland locations in tierra caliente (hot country) requiring large pools of reliable labor during the harvest. To meet this need, head taxes and other forms of extortion added debt to hunger in the highlands, forcing virtual armies of Tzotzil and Tzeltal into annual migrations of 3-4 months for meager finca wages to fend off creditors and to buy subsistence corn which their equally meager land parcels could 2 not produce. Demography adds a critical aggravating ingredient to this scene: population rose steadily in the highlands throughout the twentieth century, reaching the point of explosion between 1970 and 1990 when the overall state population grew by 104% (Rus 1995:81-82). As catechists remember their childhoods in the 1960s, conditions in Magdalenas mirrored the political-economic pattern found in most Maya indigenous municipios (Rus and Collier 2003). Large swaths of their com3 munal lands had fallen into ladino hands. By the middle of this century, ladinos had established twenty-eight separate ranches within the boundaries of the traditional pueblo, monopolizing the resource base of indigenous thereby forced into peonage. Thus it is that, with rare exceptions, contemporary catechist life histories begin with stories of their coming of age on coffee fincas. Etched in Maya memories, finca names themselves – e.g., Germania, Hanover – communicate the essential foreignness of the experience of debt peonage, as well as its –––––––––– 1 2

3

Weber is of course the locus classicus for this line of approach. Jean Comaroff directed my attention to the symbolic valence of peasant production. Of a total of 125,000 to 150,000 working age Maya in Chiapas, 60,000 to 75,000 were engaged in migratory agricultural labor at mid-twentieth century (Rus 1995: 81-82). Wages were as low as 2 pesos a day [MX Peso = U.S.$0.10 in 1951, $0.03 at 1982 devaluation] (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática 1985: 811). “Aldama,” as Santa María Magdalena is officially known, encompasses 2684 hectares. No official data fixes relative percentages of pueblo land held by indigenous Magdaleneros and ladino ranchers in this period though informants insist that Ladinos had annexed the largest and best plots.

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structural origins.4 Larger families with several work-age sons who pooled their earnings eventually were sometimes able to rent milpa land in the Central Valley. The explanation for this economic migration offered by the head of one such Tzotzil family who spent six years in a lowland town 80 kilometers to the southwest of Magdalenas, epitomizes highland politicaleconomy from the indigenous standpoint: “We didn’t have enough land here” (FN 25.X.94). Local politics deepened the socio-cultural rupture entailed in alienation of highland Maya land and labor. In the most pernicious of political maneuvers, powerful highland ladino landowners subverted indigenous agency and the ethnically-protective design of indigenous civic-religious hierarchy by coopting community elites who assigned cargos (Rus 1999). A leading Magdalenero catechist offers a striking account of how this distinctive armature of highland Maya communal cohesion was turned into an instrument of their disenfranchisement. He recalls that during his childhood the local cacique effectively abdicated his authority over communal land to “Don Rey” (literally, “sir king”) as the natives referred to the dominant landowner known to fellow ranchers as the apoderado, the empowered [person] who served as rancher fiduciary with Maya peasants and the state (FN 5.I.02). This lamented cacique-apoderado axis enabled Ladinos to trade trago (rum) and cash for the land of Magdaleneros desperate to acquire these essentials of fiesta sponsorship and other ritual obligations. As available communal land to work and thus trade was annexed by ladino ranchers in this way, land-hungry Magdaleneros were forced to the fincas to finance cargo ritual. Thus they assured their social status within the community, the only place highland Maya knew any standing at all, at the expense of their land. In short, finca labor essentially subsidized traditional Tzotzil Maya communities while leaving them dependent on land far from home they could never hope to own (Rus 1995). But in Magdalenas, the manipulation of cargo robbed this “subsidy” of its putative salutary effects as ladino subornation of communal authorities subverted costumbre. In effect, this ultimate ground of indigenous communal identity became a ladino mechanism for Maya displacement not only from but also within their ancestral territory. Highland political economy shifted dramatically with the turn in modernization strategy under the government of Luis Echeverría (1970-76). Determined to re-establish the state’s legitimacy following the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco, the Mexican president launched a populist program of –––––––––– 4

Maps of Chiapas dated 1971 and drawn by Karl Helbig were given me by collector in San Cristóbal; one is entitled, “Chiapas: Schema der Landaufteilung, hier in einem Teil des Sosconusco.”

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“shared development” that de-emphasized commercial agriculture in favor of peasant corn-producers (P. Smith 1991). The new administration co-opted young university-trained activists to drive this strategy on the ground. They formed a technocratic cadre that effectively bypassed local community caciques to stimulate advances in production with federally financed technical advice, credit, and other inputs (Schmidt 1991: 87-88). One of these technocrats, a government-appointed agrarian reform engineer, arrived in Magdalenas in late 1971 to implement the survey of communal lands authorized by the Law of Agrarian Reform passed that year (FN 12.VIII.99). This law established procedures for titling communal lands promised by the victors of the Mexican Revolution (Mendieta y Nuñez 1982: 490-92). Catechists and their elders alike readily recall the “gran peregrinación – great pilgrimage” undertaken by the entire community in response to the engineer’s initiative. Fathers and sons assembled to trace the path of the ancient mojones (traditional boundary markers) defining the ancestral lands of Magdalenas (12.VIII.99.) Chosen by indigenous and ladino informants alike to describe this event, the word “pilgrimage” precisely fits its ensuing ritual effects. An immediate motive for this dramatic public procession was a longstanding dispute with the neighboring pueblo of Santa Marta over a shared border close to a river subject to periodic flooding. Worked by Marteños when high river levels blocked the passage of Magdaleneros, land traditionally claimed by the latter was eventually ceded to their neighbors (ibid.). The resolution of the inter-community contest following nature’s dictates remains relatively forgotten today. But the communal “pilgrimage” it occasioned decisively altered the self-understanding of ladino witnesses as well as indigenous participants. The (ladino) grandson of Don Rey recalls, “The ranchers were terrified” as they watched Magdaleneros process over their lands (FN 24.VIII.99). The ritual power of the community’s action, as well as the rationality of ladino anxiety, showed in its effects on indigenous participants. Magdaleneros today assert that public reclamation of their land required submission to their authority within it, implying imposition on ladino residents of cargo service and cooperación, as they refer to fiesta and other local taxes (FN 15.VIII.99). Though lacking effective means to enforce these obligations on the ranchers at the time, indigenous proclamation of legitimate authority over Ladinos decisively altered power relations in the community. Within months of inscribing the boundaries of their territory with their feet, Magdaleneros took steps to secure the plan definitivo (definitive map) of the pueblo, financing the first in a long series of delegations to the nation’s

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capital to secure presidential recognition of their land claims.5 The leader of the initial two-man delegation is now a catechist, converted to Catholicism through the joint persuasion of his son and son-in-law, the deacon Elías.6 This attempt to legitimate Magdalenero claims on ancestral land shared the fate of hundreds of similar appeals from Chiapas. Mexico’s Secretariat for Agrarian Reform delayed action nearly a quarter of a century on the petition it first received, according to its own records, from “a group of peasants from the center of the settlement called ‘Aldama’ previously ‘Santa María Magdalena’” on January 24, 1972.7 In Magdalenas, ongoing preoccupation with the plan definitivo8 framed what became a more urgent struggle over everyday disposition of communal land. In the event, juridical and inter-ethnic concerns over its possession devolved into fierce inter-generational religious contention among Magdaleneros themselves. The breach between fathers and sons who had begun taking catechist courses in San Cristóbal became unbridgeable when yet another shift in Mexico’s political-economy prompted revaluation of local land as young men began to focus on its actual use. This revaluation was indirectly prompted by discovery of oil reserves that transformed Mexico into a player in the world system. Relying on the promise of oil, the federal government abandoned what remained of its determined economic nationalism in favor of neo-liberal emphasis on export agriculture. Hundreds of indigenous sharecroppers and debt laborers alike became unemployed as thousands of hectares of corn fields were converted to pasture in Chiapas. Meanwhile, the longstanding dominance of highland Maya in low-paid finca labor was challenged by experienced Guatemalan coffee workers who accepted even lower wages as they flooded into Chiapas to escape their country’s brutal civil war (Rus and Collier 2003). Coffee itself increasingly shaped Mexican agricultural policy following the 1973 restructure of the Mexican Coffee Institute (INMECAFE). This policy move promoted com–––––––––– 5

6 7

8

Mexico’s 1971 Agrarian Reform Law required that an “agrarian delegation” initiate the petition for recognition and titling of common lands. (Nuñez y Mendieta 1982: 40). Neoliberal reforms advance by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) abolished communal land rights and, not incidentally, contributed to the Zapatista uprising. This man remembers wearing his traje and sandals to the Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization to enter the petition. Diario Oficial de la Federación 26 de septiembre de 1976:72. This entry names the catechist noted above as one of the original petitioners. The State of Chiapas isued the map authorized by this 1976 on February 14, 1997, i.e., more than twenty-five years after the January, 1972 petition. At a July, 1993 community assembly I witnessed, some 150 Magdaleneros deliberated for six-hours to reach consensus on matters including phone calls to Mexico City and travels to the state capital seeking action on the plan definitivo (FV 10.IX.93).

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mercialization through price regulation and government assistance to growers at all levels, including small producers (Martinez Quezada 1994: 42-43). In the ensuing twenty years, the number of Mexican coffee producers grew from 97,000 to 193,000; coffee moved from a quarter to a third in share of the nation’s total agricultural exports; and Mexico became the world’s fourth largest coffee producer (ibid.: 41). Like many Tzotzils replaced by Guatemalans on lowland fincas, some catechists had found jobs in the vast public works projects financed by government borrowing against oil. Construction of refineries in neighboring Tabasco, dams on Chiapas’ Grijalva River, and roads and bridges throughout Mexico’s depressed southeast lured landless indigenous laborers. They also found work in the coastal resort areas of the Yucatán peninsula as the government promoted tourism with hotel and infrastructure projects. An instance of the socially explosive ironies of globalization, these government initiatives propelled Mexico’s rise in the global economy but eventually turned Magdaleneros back to their highland homes. There the dialectics of religious awakening among Catholic converts definitively upended the community’s modern social-cultural order. For the young men of Magdalenas, the economic attraction of public works outweighed their heavy social cost only for a time. Subjected to harsh proletarian conditions, they suffered lasting moral as well as physical injuries during long hours of heavy labor under abusive ladino foremen. Thus, when construction jobs evaporated following the 1982 collapse of Mexico’s oildriven economic boom, Magdaleneros returned home as much drawn by desire as forced by necessity. The deacon Elias remembers working in the oil fields, ...in the sweat of the sun; we slept naked on [concrete] slabs, 120 in one big room; we got up at 3 a.m. and they [foremen] decided everything, how we should work, where we should be all day and night (FN 20.XII.94).

“They looked down on us, always made themselves superior,” one Catholic chorus member recalls of hotel construction in the resort city of Cancún where he suffered his first painful hernia. “María [his new wife] sat solita (all alone) – all she had was the radio” (FN 17.X.93). One catechist points to shoulders scarred from bearing loads of cement (FN 18.VIII.95). Another sums up the motives of his peers as he explains his decision to abandon a sixyear, on-and-off construction career in Villahermosa: They mistreated us, ordered us around, we didn’t speak Spanish well: I thought, it’s better to work in my milpa, sow beans (FN 17.IX.93).

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Far from a retreat into nostalgia, this young man’ evocation of milpa explains the de-proletarianization of his peers. They returned to their place of origin in urgent search of a project for its future. In effect, rejection of ladino dominance over their bodies in oil fields and construction sites resonated with discovery that the ways of their fathers could be questioned. To elucidate this resonance is to chart the course and fix the terms of religion’s critique, and eventual displacement, of costumbre in Magdalenas. Religion, Re-cognition, and the Dialectics of Conversion Several young Magdaleneros had already embarked on catechist courses against their fathers’ wills, before being forced to look for new work abroad. Now steady advances in literacy together with possession of the Bible amounted to a critical platform from which they re-surveyed their home territory. From this altogether novel (for them) critical perspective, social scars on the land inflicted by tradition were as transparent as bodily injuries suffered in peonage. The deacon Elias describes his “illumination” following absences from Magdalenas for catechectical courses and peonage: [I saw] women and men lying drunk on the side of the roads to San Andrés. Even the old catechist drank after baptisms. Vacant lands [were] grown over with weeds (FN 12.I.02).

More realistic than Daniel’s visionary “illumination” during a catechist course – a colored text dropped from the sky promising a windfall of cash (see Ch. One) – the source of Elias’ religious revelation was nearly the same. Both catechists “saw” and deconstructed their poverty through removal from it, textual and geographical. They disproved divine ordinance of their material circumstance by reading the Word, the method as effectively as the message opening access to a discursive domain unsuspected by their fathers and denied them by ladino overseers. In Goody’s evocative portrayal of literacy as a reflexive exercise, “bouncing thoughts between oneself and a piece of paper” potentiates intellect as well as social standing (Goody 2000: 148). Thus, as catechists accrued the social “prestige of writing” (ibid.: 118) – historically restricted in the highlands to ecclesial, governmental, and commercial actors – they also felt inwardly empowered. The consequent alteration in their relationship to themselves entailed a parallel revision of their relationship to the world, raising questions they had not considered before they encountered the text. Most significantly, in the context of re-entry to Magdalenas, their appropriation of the Bible prompted the question, how could they effectively

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repossess the land they had recently confirmed to be their own? Necessity motivated the query. The material-symbolic dialectics of peasant practice that embodied Magdalenero conversion delivered its response. During the preceding decade, many highland Maya had unintentionally forged a potent weapon against peonage as they transplanted coffee seedlings in their domestic gardens. In these experiments, they complemented native agricultural skills with knowledge accrued on the fincas (Martinez Quezada 1994: 65-66). When INMECAFE began dispensing credit and other inputs to promote coffee production among Mexico’s small growers, Maya indigenous joined Ladinos in petitioning for government aid (ibid.: 66ff). The value added to their land by prospects for this cash crop compelled new scrutiny of its traditional disposition, in the case of the catechists with a new religious refraction. According to their exegesis of Genesis and Exodus, the universal destiny of created goods legitimated Magdalenero claims on ancestral land while Hebrew liberation from slavery anticipated their own emancipation from peonage. As significant, the intellectual passage that validated this hermeneutic – the acquisition of literacy and the cognitive transformation(s) it entailed – led to a religiously decisive re-cognition: Ladino monopoly of their land was sustained, as the catechists now saw it, by what amounted to Maya selfeviction. This re-cognition, specifically focused on tradition and land, constituted the “illumination” cited by leading catechists. Its personally arresting, consciousness-altering power derived from both counter-intuitive force and contextual fit. The social enslavements shaping their early biographies – childhood submission to domestic drunkenness, adolescent exile to the miseries of the fincas, adult subservience to ladino economic orders – were disrupted by the biblical text, the process of its appropriation validating its message. The synergistic effect revealed the oppressive underside of costumbre. Put another way, literacy bestowed the power of a textual alternative to tradition in a double sense. The Bible was transformed from inaccessible object to prized possession through inquiry, verbal and conceptual, inevitably transferred to the given order of the world. In other words, reflexive interaction between self and world facilitated the separation between self and world (Goody 2000:48). Just so, the lapidary interrogative punctuating gospel proclamation by the deacon Elías – “¿Cómo es possible? – How is it possi-

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ble?” – evinces the break with Tzotzil tradition’s intuitive social ontology through which the catechists entered “religion” (Boyer 1994: 34ff).9 “How is it possible,” Elias wonders with his newly-literate brother catechists even now, that Magdaleneros had abandoned both themselves and their land to cargo and trago, i.e., ritual drinking. “How is it possible” that so much of what land they did possess was haphazardly tended and/or given to sugar cane supplying trapiches (domestic distilleries) rather than corn? And, especially after the arrival of coffee “en grande – big time” via INMECAFE inputs, “How is it possible” that so much of those communal resources remaining in Magdalenero hands stood as tierra vacante – empty, unoccupied land? The new salience of “empty” land owed substantially to the altered context of agricultural production in Chiapas. Whereas sugar cane cultivated for personal consumption linked to cargo guaranteed debt, coffee for commerce promised cash – and, even more important to young Magdaleneros, a communal future. Access to the means of coffee cultivation “illuminated” a way ahead on the land to which they had returned, prepared by their wider regional experience for new terms of exchange both within and beyond the community. Disposition of the critical matters – cane, coffee, and above all, land for subsistence milpa as well as cash cropping – had thus become, for the catechists, a question of alternatives with starkly different social and economic valences. Decisions related to them became, in turn, the stuff of religious conversion understood dialectically, that is, structural constraints and/or stimuli impinging, indeterminately and variously, on symbolic practice and 10 vice versa. In sum, following from the fit between desire and opportunity, for the catechists of Magdalenas “illumination” was effected as they envisioned coffee cultivation as a way to (re)possess the land and their own labor.11 The capacity to formulate and pose the critical question “how is it possible” for things to be as they are depends, of course, on a sense of what they might otherwise be. The apparent triviality of this observation should not –––––––––– 9

A leading advocate of the application of cognitive theory to the study of religion, Boyer argues that counter-intuitiveness is characteristic, even defining, of religious representations as such. 10 Though Elias took his first catechist course in 1973, he sets the date of his own “illumination” precisely in 1979, coinciding with establishment of PIDER-Mecafé – Program of Investment for Rural Development (“improvement of coffee plantations – in the highlands”). 11 Burton Mack points to “the dimension of change or production” and defines religion as “a practice that produces myths and rituals of ideational consequence for the structure of a society as a whole” (2000: 283-296). Among “the forces and features of social existence” with which religion is concerned, Mack notably includes “a group’s attitude toward the land” (293).

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obscure the compelling power of the phenomena it describes. In the case of the catechists of Magdalenas, desolate fields and drunken fathers came to be re-cognized as a product of self-eviction in so far as the acquisition of literacy deepened reflexivity and context urged evaluation of their standing on the land. Put another way, the sense of self-possession engendered through the critical-intellectual exercise(s) of catechetical training propelled desire to (re)possess ancestral land. This desire was, in turn, legitimated by both Mexican law and God’s Word. It was rendered both urgent and hopeful by the constraints and opportunities of the political-economic conjuncture. The religiousness of these moves, evinced by their counter-intuitive and reflexive character, is further confirmed by the pivot around which they turned: cargo ritual and the unmasking of its subversive effects on Maya community. In short, in the eyes of the catechists, the transforming power in re-cognition of a mis-recognition confirmed the ritual domain to be a matter of life and death. Excursus: Fragment of a Theological Brief for Ritual Reform When asked how the Word of God arrive in Magdalenas, the deacon Elias took up pen and paper. His ready resort to the instruments of literacy figures his profound engagement with the cognitive effects attending this “technology of the intellect” (Goody 1986, 2000). The ability to suspend the social ties that restrain questioning in oral culture and to interact systematically with oneself, the features of literacy which promote reflexivity and, with it, criticism of the world beyond the text, enabled the catechists of Magdalenas to break with the order of the ancestors, as suggested above. Goody argues further that literacy advances logical abstraction by both making the implicit explicit and rendering words them12 selves objects of reflection (Goody 2000: 140-48). Further, he points to the advance of second order intellectual production with literacy, proposing theology as an example of “thoughts about thoughts” (Goody 1986: 37-38). But Elias demonstrates how the acquisition of literacy so understood makes theology something other than “thoughts about thoughts.” In his case, the obscurity imposed by tradition on local reality dissolved to reveal the (relatively) transparent realm of human. Thus, his theological reflection, with commentary:

–––––––––– 12 Goody argues that the “gap” between oral and literate societies postulated by evolutionists lies not in so-called “mentalities” but in “outcomes” of the application of identical (human) capacities using different “tools of the intellect” (2000:150).

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FOUNDATION AND ORIGIN OF THE WORD OF GOD13 From the beginning we teach Christian doctrine. We ask: Where is God? Who is God? What is God? And so we talked, with a firm will, to men and women, where we found patience, [with] friends and relatives...

While not exhausted by this purpose, the dialogue the deacon initiated with these questions demonstrates, even long after its inciting events, how reform of cargo drove evangelization in Magdalenas. Prompted to respond to his own questions, Elias offered the relevant corollaries: Where is God? God is in the love of each person. God wants us to share love. We need to act like brothers to all. If you do this, you are going to have more friends, now all in right mind, not through drinking. It’s better for everybody. Now it’s another way, not drinking. Carrying on with work and good counsels and examples [emphasis added].

In the deacon’s hermeneutic, the foundational Christian affirmation – “God is love” (1 John 4,8) – and its moral correlatives at once condemn one “way” of human association and envision another, the drunken camaraderie of cargo to be replaced by the rational community of work. As in catechetical courses, God is located in “right mind,” that is, rational enterprise opening on emancipatory possibilities: it is “better for everybody.” Word (“counsels”) and work (“examples”) replace drinking as orienting religious categories for “another way” of constructing Maya community. Who is God? He is a God who always has his way of acting in a people or a family.... A people’s way of acting requires good conditions. To burn candles, incense, drink – without thinking, how is God – though one loves God, it’s in vain. God wants the truth; they [traditionalists] act without thinking, through costumbre. God is in all places, permanent. If God is permanent, people need to move ahead in life [emphasis added].

Its logical leaps included, this gloss makes striking theologicalanthropological claims about God’s relation to, and human action in, the world. God’s “way” is disclosed in human ways, but only in so far as both are rationally considered. This restriction derives from God’s unrestricted presence, “in all places.” If God is omnipresent, then God can (even must) be –––––––––– 13 FN 13.VIII.95.

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sought, and thought, free of the constraints of costumbre. Its obligatory ritual gestures, bound to specified objects and places, are “vain” precisely because they are performed “without thinking” about God and about (the) human condition(s). God’s truth is revealed in human action, but only in “conditions” rendered “good” by human thought. The warrant for such thoughtful action is the very “permanence” of God, endowing value on human endeavor – that is, conscious, purposeful effort – as such. An omnipresent God’s way is revealed, in short, as a human way “ahead in life.” Then, What is God? He is not a God who hides, he is a God who comes near. He is with you during all your work. If you don’t know what God is, don’t have a line – do whatever you feel like doing – if you don’t think carefully about what you’re doing, what good is it? [emphasis added].

The deacon’s response immediately turns the question of divine being against any form of essentialism. Instead, God is described relationally, his presence and approach to human being particularly manifest in work. God invites, even more, is a “line,” a rational direction, for work. This truth is transparent (God does not “hide,” but rather “comes near”) and warranted by the “good” it yields. So the deacon’s catechism concludes: If you grasp these three questions, now you no longer have difficulty, now no one can dominate you because you understand [emphasis added].

The “good” lies, first of all, in the questioning itself, more exactly in the critical spirit precisely as counter to domination, the supreme “difficulty.” Implicit in Elias’ text as a whole, “domination” includes all the enslaving dimensions of costumbre from the catechist point of view – obligation, addiction, peonage, and the social and material alienation(s) resulting from them. Religion, the deacon implies, liberates by “understanding” these enslavements. Its alternative “thinking” about God criticizes costumbre as “vain,” i.e., fruitless and unproductive, precisely because unthinking. The God who “wants truth” wants “thinking” and all that follows from it, according to the deacon. Above all God wants “good conditions” and “a move ahead,” in other words, production and the future it makes possible. For the deacon, locating God “in the way of acting of a people” amounts to assimilating thought to work and so offering a future on the land worked as one’s own. Not least important, on this liberating understanding domination is neither an abstract force nor an anonymous structure. As the deacon implies, the “difficulty” of domination begins as difficulty with an implied someone,

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in the case of the catechists, their elders and, by extension, the Ladinos whose peons they had become. According to Elias, the “Word of God” (i.e., the Catholic community) took root in Magdalenas with the critique of costumbre. This critique – like the theology it engenders – was originally enacted and elaborated in a bitter, nearly violent struggle of sons to undo the binding of their fathers to Ladinos via cargo practice. The “Year of Liberation”: Cargo Struggle in Magdalenas In December, 1984, Rudolfo, who began attending celebrations of the Word of God soon after his father planted his first mariposas de café (coffee 14 seedlings), in the late 1970s, refused the nightly dance during the Christmas novena required of cavilto, the cargo he served that year. It was not, he explained, just that dancing was a waste of time. Worse was the customary ritual drinking while they danced that cost caviltos money, lucidity and, consequently, productive labor. But cavilto entailed another, even more repugnant obligation during celebration of the Lord’s Passion. Caviltos were required to recruit two maxpat to trace Christ’s way of the cross through the village on Good Friday while swinging a glass-studded ball of wax against their backs to emulate “the scourging” described in gospel passion narrative (Mark 15,16ff.). Painful in itself, the procession’s mutation into public spectacle compounded its humiliations. Scores of Ladinos traveled annually to Magdalenas to watch the two maxpat anesthesized by trago make their bloody way to eventual collapse at the end of the appointed route. Abetted by brother catechists, Rudolfo’s refusal of cavilto duties enraged the elders of Magdalenas. The traditional Christmas novena thus marked the opening act in the community-rending drama whose prologue had unfolded during the previous spring’s Holy Week when another catechist declined to serve as maxpat. Named in the gospels, the authority behind the ritual suffering of maxpat was endowed with anonymity by cargo, the social structural core of Tzotzil costumbre. Anonymity – es costumbre – endowed cargo with obligatory force. But it also facilitated cargo’s subversion. The presence of Ladinos spectators begs the critical connection. Don Rey and the ranchers who depended on him routinely beat Magdaleneros with a whip as he rode through the pueblo to oversee their properties (FN 5.I.02). As in the case of all cargo, Magdaleneros could only be persuaded to undertake maxpat by gifts of trago from caviltos, the same cargo holders who supplied trago for obligatory consumption during the nine-day Christmas novena. “Se –––––––––– 14 Coffee seedlings look like butterflies (mariposas) to the Tzotzil.

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gastó mucho, los caviltos – caviltos spent a lot” (ibid.) and fell deeply into debt to Ladinos when they recruited maxpat. Far more than innocent spectators of the ritual, then, Ladinos were implicated in maxpat flagellation by indigenous debt paid off through forced labor that was not infrequently disciplined with a whip. Yet, Ladinos effectively underwrote the maxpat rite and all its humiliations with indigenous consent. As if to ratify their agreement, prescribed selfflagellation during the bloody rite of Holy Week invariably incapacitated 15 cargo-holders for days after the event. In short, the cargo (en)acted the complicity of indigenous actors in the infliction of obligatory, trago-fueled, and anti-productive – i.e., mindless – cargo suffering as such. Thus, the catechists’ 1984-1985 revolt against the cavilto-maxpat complex unmasked and subsequently reversed the domination it enforced, reclaiming Magdalenas in the process. In the immediate aftermath of the Christmas revolt, traditional authorities armed with machetes and rifles paid threatening night visits to the catechists and their supporters. Except for the authorities and certain cargo holders required to reside in the center during their year(s) of service, most Magdaleneros lived in domestic units near ancestral parcels scattered widely within communal territory. Now, encouraged by a newly-converted local municipal agent, as well as arrival of a road from San Andrés and the prospect of 16 electricity engineered by the government, leading catechists and other newly-converted Catholic families moved their homes to the community’s traditionally empty center in self-defense (FN 4.I.02). Gathering for worship daily in the templo on the pueblo’s plaza and across from the municipal agency where traditional authorities ruled, the nascent Catholic community that called itself the Word of God thus staked its claim to authority in Santa María Magdalenas. Remaking Magdalenas On New Year’s Day 1985, the traditional date for inauguration of new authorities and cargo holders among the Tzotzil, municipal officers from San Pedro Chenalho’, the township center, arrived in Magdalenas. The elders had appealed to these government officers to enforce their ancestral authority to impose cargo obligations. But the visit failed to quash the catechists’ rebellion. –––––––––– 15 The parenthesis here is meant to signal agreement that ritual meaning lies in neither prior script nor subsequent interpretation but in ritual performance itself (C. Bell 1992). 16 One Mayanist attributes the “florescence of hamlets” in the municipio of Zinacantán to improved infrastructure. He explains the growing number of chapels by linking new economic opportunities and the erosion of cargo, but acknowledges the Catholic church and its catechists only in passing (Cancian 1992).

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By this time five other catechists worked alongside Elias and Nicolás, the first Magdaleneros trained in Bishop Ruiz’s new schools for catechists, to lead a Catholic community that had grown from fewer than fifteen households in the mid-1970s to nearly forty of a total of two hundred families in Magdalenero territory. Most of these had entered the Word of God when it was time to marry or have their children baptized. Fueled by determination to defend themselves against the elders following the New Year’s Day visitation, the catechists accelerated their efforts to proselytize their peers, initiating pláticas (conversations) according to the formula sketched by Elias for evangelizing “friends and relatives.” Having defied parents who locked him out of the house on Sundays in disapproval, Nicholás now offers a succinct, straightforward account of the catechists’ shared convictions: The Word of God is good [favorable], it changes our behavior, it’s good news for us, changing our life: it improves the family, our [socio-economic] situation because we don’t drink or rob or abuse others.... I like the singing we do [at liturgical gatherings]. And we don’t go to the finca any more (FN 5.I.02].

Abandonment of finca labor meant ritual reconstitution of community just as liturgical reclamation of the templo at the center of Magdalenas signified an end to this disaggregating effect of cargo.17 Permanent domestic settlement at the pueblo’s center at once facilitated daily gatherings in church and encouraged the reconstruction of relations of production already underway throughout communal territory. Small groups of families persuaded by catechetical pláticas began abandoning scattered and isolated dwellings from which they were easily recruited for the finca to form the nuclei of permanent hamlets outside the center. Where they considered tilling first “empty” (uncultivated) communal 18 land and then ladino ranches. These prospects emerged with the profitability of coffee cultivation, but became plausible through the dialectically-formed Maya re-cognitions described above. –––––––––– 17 The catechists’ critique of cargo argues that the anthropological trope “the empty center” figures not an innocent oscillation between productive dispersion and ritual gathering but the evacuation of ethnic power among the highland Maya with nineteenth century development of agribusiness. 18 Magdaleneros agree that the deacon Elias was responsible for the “foundation” of Catholic communities in the hamlets of Xuxchen, Saclum, Yabchivit, and Cotsil’nam. A school was located at this last site in the 1950s, but none had permanent residents until the 1980s catechist campaign Though they evoke the “textual communities” summoned by late medieval religious reformers (Stock 1983), these Tzotzil communities came together not only for textual conquest but also for the productive possibilities it entailed.

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On the one hand, the death of Don Rey in 1976 followed by the collapse of corn prices in Mexico weakened ladino rancher resistance to Magdalenero assertion of ancestral territorial rights, progressing from the 1971 boundary procession, through the pueblo’s ongoing campaign for its plan definitivo, to catechist plans for purchase of ladino-held land. On the other, these developments at once motivated and embodied religious conversion among Magdaleneros. As early as 1979, thirty families had begun working six hectares of vacant communal land in Pucujvits at the northwest corner of Magdalenas. By 1983, two groups from Magdalenas center and two more from Elias’ paraje, Cotsil’nam, had also put vacant land into production (FN 12.I.02). Up until then most families who had any land at all reserved a portion of their plots for sugar and clandestine production of pox (rum) for ritual consumption. Now bananas, corn, and coffee seedlings filled this land and other “vacant” territory re-claimed for cultivation. Animated by catechetical “conversations,” the groups dedicated to this mode of diversified, cooperative production formed precursors to the socios, or partnerships that evolved hand in hand with new religious affiliation. These partnerships strategized outright purchase of ladino ranches to effectively reconfigure Magdalenas as Maya territory (FN 10.I.02). The fury the elders directed at the catechists, then, responded to the radical reach of displacement (and replacement) propelled by the young men’s revolt. Residence at the center had traditionally signified civicreligious authority, governing distribution of communal land as well as political and ritual order. The convergence of new Catholics there abetted cultivation of vacant communal land, the latter ratifying the former in de facto defiance of the rule of the elders. Liturgical gatherings in the church anchoring the pueblo’s public plaza tacitly celebrated the devolution of authority, attracting Magdaleneros with the appeal of a fiesta every day, unencumbered by the prescriptions of costumbre and the yearly round of fiestas it governed. Echoing Nicolás, Rudolfo, whose refusal of the requisites of cavilto during the Christmas novena instigated the cargo revolt, traced the beginning of his conversion to the sounds of liturgy reaching across the plaza as he returned from his distant milpa each afternoon. He approached the catechists to ask how he could join newly gathered community, simply “to sing with them” (FN 25.VII.93). Thus, amid acute communal tension verging on violence, by October, 1986, the catechists had succeeded in enlisting a majority of Magdaleneros to their side in the cargo contest, some one hundred of two hundred families. A simple desire for congregation as much as the catechists’ critique of cargo presumably drew many Magdaleneros to Catholic liturgical celebration. But, at its climactic moment, critique of cargo proved decisive.

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Usually the product of consensus during community assembly, the relatively close margin between those who supported the elders and those led by the catechists made it impossible to reach community agreement on the catechists’ demand for relief from ritual cargo obligation. The disputing parties thus traveled to the seat of municipal government intent on a legal settlement of their dispute, the traditionals on foot, the catechists by truck, as Rudolfo gleefully emphasized.19 Their mode of transport metonymously confirmed the catechists’ critical advantage, just as appeal to “los licenciados” (university-educated government authorities) in the cabecera to adjudicate their contest measured the cognitive distance between youth and elders. Literacy liberated the catechists from costumbre’s obligatory order. The reflexivity it engendered at once enhanced catechist agency and loosened tradition’s stranglehold. In the end, the catechists won a written document legitimating abolition of obligatory 20 cargo their elders had long enforced by oral tradition. The catechists had made the authority of “los licenciados” an instrument of their own emergent power. In doing so, they ironically inverted the perverse alliance through which Ladinos had suborned indigenous authorities to dominate the land and so highland political economy generally. They carried back to Magdalenas a settlement establishing the voluntary status of three ritually significant cargos – cavilto, capitán,21 and alférez, this last the enormously costly and indebting obligation of fiesta sponsorship.22 “We Own the Pueblo Now.” It seems probable that in this instance official support of Magdalenero Catholics reflects the state’s desire to defuse conflict in an area of the highlands relatively unaffected by militant peasant organizing roiling other areas of the state (Harvey 1998: 147-64). For this study, far more significant than the state’s motives was the catechists’ effective cooptation of its agents to ad–––––––––– 19 Nicolás, however, recalls that Catholics walked to the township center, San Pedro Chenalho’. It is quite possible that the catechists could not secure truck transport for so large a number. Rudolfo’s recall of a journey by truck may be true for catechists and some supporters, with the actual number of vehicles exaggerated by memory to emphasize the elders’ travel on foot. 20 Literacy means “the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures... [and moves towards] greater interiorization and openness” Ong 1982: 179-80. Catechist rejection of cargo as obligatory communal structure was a conscious decision mediated through the critical distance from taken-for-granted social order acquired with literacy. 21 The obligation distinguishing capitán, horse racing through the center at certain fiestas, threatened injury and loss of production. 22 One older man who had “passed” all cargos before becoming a catechist estimates that his turn as alférez in 1984 cost him NP$300,000, or U.S. $2000(FN 22.VII.94). In the mid1990s, the annual income of a typical catechist was U.S. $600-800.

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vance what they came to call their “liberation.” In effect, their defeat of obligatory cargo inaugurated the era of “religion” and a new structure of production, and so of power relations, in Magdalenas. As the deacon Rudolfo reports, “The catechists said, ‘We own the pueblo now’”(FN 30.VII.97).23 Their use of the word “liberation” in this connection was (and is) not ideological. Rather, it denotes the concrete religious motive and mechanism for the catechists’ revolt against tradition, made explicit in the agenda they carried to the cabecera. Their objective was neither the overthrow of the cargo system as such, nor the ouster of the authorities who enforced it. Those cargos deemed necessary to the civil order necessary for production – e.g., mayor (police officer), regidor (town clerk), and alcalde (mayor-judge consultant to the agente (municipal agent) remained unobjectionable to the catechists. Most catechists periodically assume these civil offices even today. And they continue to duly honor los principales, elders who have “passed” through all cargos. Indeed, Nicolás cites backing from a few principales as a contributing factor to the power of the catechists’ position as the cargo struggle wore on (FN 5.I.02). This struggle pivoted, around the obligation to undertake those traditional ritual cargos which compromised – through drunkenness, debt, and bodily endangerment – their autonomous pursuit of production on land they hoped to make their own through their revolt. In catechist conversion narratives, obligation contradicts autonomy discovered and seized through re-cognition of an alternative way of being in the world. Put another way, “liberation” came through “illumination,” the word the catechists favor to denote the cognitively- arresting irruption of possibility within the given ontology of costumbre. 24 Possession of the Bible denied the unquestionable (i.e., sacred ) status of tradition as (ontological) source of truth and (cognitive) guide to knowing. Its revelation of God’s presence in human endeavor challenged costumbre’s restrictive sitings of the sacred. The catechists’ passage to criticism through literacy effected the human empowerment this revelation warranted. –––––––––– 23 It is worth noting here that in the mid-1980s, when Magdaleneros celebrated liberation from cargo and reclaimed their land, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation enjoyed only embryonic status in jungle lowlands of Chiapas. The rebel leader Subcomandante. Marcos dates the official formation of the EZLN November 17, 1983. Only in 1988-89 did Zapatista membership expand to significant numbers, growing from 80 to 1300 (Harvey 1998: 16467). 24 This definition of the “sacred” comes from Roy Rappaport. He attributes it to “Ultimate Sacred Postulates” that are “counterintuitive” and “consequential” and “can be falsified neither logically nor empirically .... [and] ...verified neither objectively nor logically.... And yet they are taken to be unquestionable” (1999: 280-281, emphasis in original).

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These young men initially addressed their critical freedom to the ritual sphere but did so to expand their sphere of action as such. Thus they reiterated their claim to space for autonomous Maya production on more than one plane of signification. Repudiation of maxpat entailed refusal of the ritual’s route encompassing the center. The prescribed ritual map itself arguably signified ladino constraint on indigenous peasant production, constraint sustained by the misrecognition(s) embedded in cargo. As catechists encouraged Magdaleneros to settle the center and found new hamlets, they destabilized the dual hierarchies complicit in their oppression. In effect, youth displaced their ladino overseers along with their elders as they established a new spatial design for production. Daily communal liturgical gatherings – an utterly novel ritual practice for the Tzotzil – ratified this transformative process. By its dialectical logic, release from the costumbre meant definitive emancipation from centuries-old colonial domination. Put another way, Magdaleneros use the word “religion” in the first instance to signify liberation from tradition’s ritual obligations. But they realized religion by reclaiming their ancestral place on the land. 25

“The Whole World has Changed.” While nearly all studies of recent highland history acknowledge its worldchanging effects on the Maya, they generally assign events to separable symbolic and material planes and attribute far more explanatory weight to the latter.26 Doing so inhibits historical interpretation of one of the more remarkable features of contemporary highland life: material and symbolic dialectics on the ground bringing about the (re)production of new Maya social space, in our case relocating Magdaleneros according to the contours of their conversion to post-Vatican II Catholicism.27 Stated more exactly, the founding of new hamlets in Magdalenas at the instigation of the catechists, each with its own chapel for liturgical gatherings, reconfigured the pueblo’s territory to conform with catechist ascen–––––––––– 25 I borrow this phrase from Rus: 1994. 26 Cancian, Collier, Harvey, and Rus all acknowledge the presence of new religious actors on the scene. But the theoretical approaches these scholars employ fail to address how religious change figured in the transformation of the highlands during the last half of the last century. 27 Important exceptions are Cancian 1990, 1992 and Burguete Cal y Mayor 2000: 259-73. Indirectly confirming the present study, Burguete describes “the structural dimension of autonomy” in six spheres in the “reindianisation” of Mexico’s highland Maya: 1. demographic – Ladinos today live in only two of fifteen highland municipios; 2. the passage of land into indigenous hands; 3. political – Maya political officers, even in San Cristóbal de Las Casas; 4. agricultural – renewed peasant production on ancestral now with marketable crops; 5. economic – indigenous control over previously ladino-dominated market sectors....summed up in 6. reconquest – “Tsotsil and Tseltal [sic] immigrants have taken over entirely, reshaping urban space” [in San Cristobal de Las Casas] (269).

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dance at its center. The world changed in Magdalenas, then, as indigenous changed their socio-geographic position in it, immediately motivated and empowered by what the catechists call “religion.”

MAP 3 TRANSFER OF LAND IN MAGDALENAS following the 1984-85 cargo struggle began with purchase of ladino ranches by catechist-led socios.Of 28 ladino ranches within the pueblo into the 1980s, in the mid-1990s all but two had been purchased by indigenous Magdaleneros organized into socios largely according to religious affiliation.

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MAP 4 MAGDALENAS RESETTLED with the founding of new parajes by catechists, each with its own chapel housing the santissima (Eucharistic host) where the Word of God gathers for deailing rosary and weeklycommunion liturgies. [Note: the pueblo’s other parajes not shown here.]

Henri Lefebvre theorizes: ... produced space can be decoded, can be read. Such a space implies a process of signification ... interested ‘subjects,’ as members of a particular society, would have acceded by this means at once to their space and to their status as ‘subjects’ acting within that space and (in the broadest sense of the word) comprehending it (1991: 17).

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Lefebvre’s critical marxist project grants logical priority to action over language, specifically to “activities which mark the earth, leaving traces and organizing gestures and work performed in common” (ibid.: 16-17). His quasi-evolutionary hypothesis – that language originated in spatial ordering of perceptual chaos – invites alternative frames for the spatial articulation of the material and the symbolic, the religious particularly salient among the possibilities. That textual and territorial concerns both matter to religion in multiple times and places is a truism. 28 Contemporary highland Maya conversion to Christianity argues at minimum that context is more substantial than accidental consideration for religious and theological studies. Newly-converted Magdalenero Catholics acceded “at once to their own space and their status as ‘subjects’ acting within that space” through the several “comprehensions” sketched above. Sharp turns in Mexican development strategy both instigated the re-mapping of Magdalenas and altered the conditions of highland political economy. These new circumstances urged a rising generation of Maya to reorient their standing on ancestral land. A significant segment among them found their bearings through the acquisition of literacy, more precisely, of heightened reflexivity entailed in their engagement with the biblical text. In Lefebvre’s terms, the articulation of space and language arose in this case with indigenous empowerment precisely through biblical literacy. In other words, Magdalenero conversion to Christianity was realized, in the strict sense, in the liberating practice of literacy as it dialectically engendered a new mode of work and thus the (re)configuration of ancestral territory. Again, Lefebvre’s theory supports a correlative line of argument: “a new space will [also] restore unity to what abstract space breaks up” (ibid.: 52). His reference for abstract space is the technologically homogenized and hence (for him) socially alienating urban megalopolis. Colonial ladino domination arguably achieved an analogous effect in the highlands of Chiapas, abstracting and thus alienating the land from Maya community (Mack 2000). The origins of the “empty center” in traditional patterns of pre-conquest Maya agricultural settlement does not rule out its evolution into a means of Maya socio-political dispersal, as subversion of its ceremonial purpose effected ladino suppression of Maya autonomy (Rus 1999: 33ff.). Catechist re-cognition of this situation, exhibited in their selective refusal of ritual cargo, enabled its deconstruction, a cognitive process religiously realized as practically consequential social subjectivity. Put another way, for the cate–––––––––– 28 Paradigmatic instances are ancient Israel’s identification with “the promised land;” the political dictum cujus region, ejus religio in early modern Europe; and, most relevant to this study, the reduction of native peoples to colonial mission compounds in Latin America.

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chists reflexive comprehension of their situation amounted to taking hold of themselves. The demonstrably religious sense of self-possession among these Maya peasant-converts culminated in re-possession of their land. “Everything Through the Word of God” When young Magdaleneros began taking catechist courses in the mid- 1970s, the agriculturally choicest flat lands of their ancestral territory was divided among twenty-eight ladino-owned ranches. Over the course of nearly a decade beginning in 1986, the year ritual cargo obligation ceased, twenty-six passed into the hands of the Tzotzil of Magdalenas. Of these ranches, twenty were purchased by those practicing “religion,” the large majority organized into socios composed of catechist-led Catholics. Nicholas, who traveled to San Cristóbal for his first course in 1973 explains this remarkable land transfer from the indigenous point of view: The ranchers sold because they saw that we were organized .... The indigenous grabbed everything through the Word of God, giving up drinking, and working FN 5.I.02).

The catechist’s rhetorical scheme itself interprets the events he describes. “Organize” entered highland Tzotzil vocabulary with liberation discourse. But the instrumental efficacy it implied signified strategic disposition rather than ideology in Magdalenero usage. Emphasizing the pivotal role of cognition in religious belief, Lawson reminds us that agency is always at play in “human cognitive traffic with the world. Human beings consistently adopt the intentional stance in their dealings with each other” (2000: 83, 108). In this instance, “organization” serves as a trope for indigenous initiative(s) which, as Nicolás suggests, reversed the historic direction of ladino-indigenous “cognitive traffic,” compelling ranchers to see intentions otherwise invisible to the dominant. In Maya peasant hands, the Word of God functioned as switchplate in this reversal, the recognitions it stimulated among Magdalenero youth articulating with structural economic shifts to alter altogether the defining terms of Ladino-indigenous exchange. As the catechist’s rough logic suggests, release from cargo debt and drink led to accumulation of economic capital and its pooling by socios, transforming indigenous debtors into buyers and Ladinos into sellers. In short, their erstwhile peons compelled ranchers to negotiate what hitherto they had effectively seized at will (Wasserstrom 1975: 108-141). Ranchers had been awakened to indigenous intentions by the 1972 procession marking ancestral boundaries. A generation later they confronted

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reconfiguration of Magdalenero territory as new indigenous hamlets arose on previously abandoned communal land. The case of Cotsil’nam is exemplary. The site of a government school since mid-century, this land stood midway between the center of Magdalenas and the pueblo’s most extensive northern stretch of tierra caliente (hot land) suited to coffee cultivation. But it remained unoccupied until early 1986 when, in the simmering aftermath of the cargo struggle, the deacon Elias led a group of twenty-six families who left their scattered dwellings to construct neighboring residences on an overgrown plain below the school. As predicted by Elias’ choice of “friends and relatives” as initial candidates for conversion, other close kin and/or kin groupings joined a core group of in-laws, most related by blood and/or marriage to one or another of seven catechists, in building the new commu29 nity. Construction in Cotsil’nam began shortly after New Year’s Day, 1986, when a Catholic was installed in the pueblo’s center as the local municipal agente, ratifying catechist ascendance in Magdalenas, including all its subordinate parajes. Elections for new representatives to the comisariado, the official entity with jurisdiction over vacant communal land throughout the pueblo, were scheduled for the following May. The elders and other traditionalists, embittered by the October, 1985, cargo settlement, continued to challenge the catechists. In February, 1986, municipal authorities in San Pedro Chenalho’ granted “representatives of the traditionalists in the Agencia Magdalenas” the keys to the church cabinet housing the statue of Mary Magdalene while exhorting them “to maintain peace and tranquility in the settlement and with all the inhabitants who profess the Catechist religion [sic]” (Ruiz Arias-Sántis Vázquez et al, 13 30 II.86). Power over the icon of the community’s patron signaled traditionalist pretensions to control of the resources she guarded. Viewed against this lingering opposition, the founding of Cotsil nam amounted to a preemptive move towards tierra caliente and collective coffee cultivation, effectively repudiationg costumbre's confinement of the patroness to myth. When Catholics won the comisariado in May elections, Elias, Nicolás, Rudolfo – all catechists – and three other Catholics were physically –––––––––– 29 “Kinship and friendship networks are fundamental to most conversions ...” But how relationships figure in conversions begs explanation: as Rambo writes, “relationship dynamics need to be more systematically examined.” (1993: 108ff.). The introspective and/or affective language of “religious experience” is almost non-existent in Magdalenero conversion accounts. Though personally felt and motivating, the “illumination” some cite remains primarily a cognitive phenomenon, fitting theories of conversion that view religion as world building rather than (solely) self-transforming. 30 Documents cited in this section were found in the Municipal Archives, San Pedro Chenalho’, Chiapas.

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assaulted by politically-weakened traditionalists, according to a complaint addressed to municipal authorities the same day (Vázquez Jiménez-Ruiz Arias 16.V.1986). The response from the cabecera affirmed the Catholics’ hold on the comisariado – “the decision of the majority realized in a democratic election” (Acta de Acuerdo [agreement] 16.V.1986). More significantly, it confirmed their command over political discourse in Magdalenas, as well as disposition of its land.31 Indeed, invocation of democratic principle in the political sphere paralleled the catechists’ move in the ritual sphere: release from unquestionable (i.e., sacred) tradition through and for critical practice. In Magdalenas, religion arrived with the latter, originating in acquisition of literacy along with the Word of God, the text testing context.32 That is, whereas orally transmitted tradition arises from, accommodates, and ultimately enforces the given social order, with literacy and the Word of God came the relative autonomy of religion through the text’s incitement to interpret, contest, and overthrow tradition and, finally, remake context. In Magdalenas, religion was born from the (social) body gathered through and for this constructive process, and realized (in the strict sense) in production of place. To return to our example, the aggregation of Catholics in Cotsil’ nam positioned them to alter the disposition of the land through a double effect. Proximity facilitated an acuerdo (agreement) among them to form a socio (partnership) for purchase of land which became available when ladino ranchers “read” the new hamlet as reason to accede to a proposal made financially viable, in turn, by the overthrow of cargo obligation. 33 The history of the ensuing transaction can be traced back to youth’s return to Magdalenas from fincas and other venues abroad and, among –––––––––– 31 “Discourse” here includes those power-laden practices which construct society and, in the Gramscian sense, present a functional, more enduring alternative to force. “Every social practice is ... articulatory [or discursive]. it always consists in the construction of new differences” (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moufee, cited by Murphy in Braun and McCutcheon 2000: 401). Murphy continues: “This strange object we call ‘society’ (and the same can be said about ‘culture,’ ‘religion,’ etc.) is nothing more than an ensemble of discourses, or discursive articulations. ‘Society,’ in other words, is not a substance ...; it is simply the ongoing practice of its various and multiple articulations” (ibid.). 32 Goody notes “the profoundly conserving force” inhering in the written word yet argues the key point: “a written religion... is never a purely conservative (as distinct from conserving) element in society.... Even in ordinary times the normative implications of the text often provide a yardstick for the difference between reality and potentiality, between what is and what should be, between existence and Utopia. In this way, it supplies a measure of our discontent” (1986: 20). 33 The deacon Elias, his brother- and father-in-law and nine other close kin and fellow Catholics bought fourteen hectares from three adjoining ranches over the course of three years.

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Catholic converts, rejection of tradition’s obligations as vehicle of their displacement. These moves located them as their new theology located God, in “right mind” and “work.” It also enabled them to fill the “empty” center and till the “empty” land throughout their ancestral territory as the pattern of new settlement – work on uncultivated common land, formation of socios, and purchase of ladino ranches – repeated itself at various sites throughout the pueblo.34 The “world” of the Tzotzils of Magdalenas had, indeed, changed as their position in it changed, Catholics rejecting obligatory cargo to thus repossess and reposition their bodies, individual and collective, in space. Magdalenas, as the archaeological data show, existed in some form as a Tzotzil Maya place before Spanish Dominican missionary “reduction” five centuries ago.35 Remarkably, this original foreign intrusion failed to definitively destroy autonomous Tzotzil discourse and production, though the subsequent advance of ladino commerce and capital in the highlands profoundly compromised both. But the erosion of Maya society by colonization was not simply a matter of eviction, dispersal, and geographic reduction as such. Rather, these material mechanics articulated with symbolic process, epitomized by ritual cargo, to insinuate the alien into body and consciousness, individual and social, eviscerating Maya autonomy from within. As the involutions of maxpat and other rituals show, the alien was actually infused through obligation metonymously figured in compulsory consumption of trago which, like colonial reduction, indentured Maya bodies to others’ projects. The consequent deformation in social relations alienated their ancestral land as it was given over to ladino domination and/or trago-induced indigenous neglect. The most conspicuous marker of conversion to Catholicism in Magdalenas as throughout the highlands – fierce repugnance towards trago – does not, in the first instance, signify a personal turn from vice to virtue, as in the discourse of modern evangelical conversion. Rather, rejection of trago means reclaiming autonomy materially realized, for Tzotzil peasants, in the individual body fit for work and, in turn, restoration of the social body to its place on the land. On the road near Larrainzar one day, Elias pointed to the drunken demand of one Tzotzil on another to drink with him. With a shot glass in one hand and a flagon of pox in the other, the swaying beseecher pushed against the other’s arm, the gesture meant to force compliance with his demand. A –––––––––– 34 Not all socios were composed solely of catechists-led Catholics, but catechists led the transfer of land from Ladinos to Magdaleneros in this period. (See maps above showing location of ranches and new hamlets with chapels in Magdalenas before and after the cargo struggle.) 35 Magdalenas Probanza 1570 [personal photocopy courtesy of Jan Rus]; Calnek 1961.

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common sight where costumbre endures in highlands Chiapas, the scene spoke for itself. Elias offered this gloss: You can never know where you stand in relations cemented in this way, compelled and cognitively impaired as they were by trago (FN 7.IX.94). Associations founded on such exchanges, Elias implied, are inevitably unreliable because unfree. Bourdieu argues that “the implicit pedagogy” of the “social field ... shapes” those in it through operations such as this ritual to obtain from them that undisputed, pre-reflexive, naïve and native compliance with the fundamental presuppositions of the field .... The countless acts of recognition which are the small change of the compliance inseparable from belonging to the field, and in which collective misrecognition is ceaselessly generated are both the precondition and the product of the functioning of the field (Bourdieu 1990: 68).

Such misrecognition upholds practical belief (“undisputed, pre-reflexive, naïve and native compliance”) inscribed in the body so that “bodily hexis” (the organization of the body and its deployment in the world) is, political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, walking and thereby feeling and thinking (ibid.: 69-70).

Bourdieu cites Plato’s polemic against mimesis 36 to allow for the dis-ruption, of the “diffuse pedagogic action” by which “the body is thus constantly mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces.” The appearance of “specialized agents or specific occasions” of pedagogy can, like writing, objectify knowledge, freeing it with respect to the body (Bourdieu 1990:73). In re-cognition of the ritual on the road, as in the catechist calling as such, Elias performed as one of Bourdieu’s “specialized agents,” in this case disrupting an everyday instance of costumbre’s “diffuse pedagogy.” The –––––––––– 36 Bourdieu actually cites Havelock (1963). Not entirely by coincidence, Goody (1977) also acknowledges his considerable debt to Havelock who writes: “One is entitled to ask ...given the immemorial grip of the oral method of preserving group tradition, how a selfconsciousness could have ever been created. If the educational system which transmitted Hellenic mores had indeed relied on the perpetual stimulation of the young in a kind of hypnotic trance, to use Plato’s language [on mimesis], how did the Greeks ever wake up? “The fundamental answer must lie in the changing technology of communication. Refreshment of memory through written signs enabled a reader to dispense with most of the emotional identification by which alone the acoustic record was sure of recall .... You could as it were take a second look at [what had been written down]. And this separation of yourself from the remembered word may in turn lie behind the growing use in the fifth century of ... the method of dialectic ...” (1963: 208).

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social significance of informal forced exchanges of pox in inter-personal meetings such as this one is intensified when seen to mimic pedagogically the formal obligatory exchanges embedded in communal rituals of costumbre. Among the Tzotzil Maya, the maxpat rite is exemplary in this respect, not least because beating made bearable by trago embodies “obligation” itself as “political mythology.” That is, the incapacitated body, anesthesized by trago and given over to beating while circumscribing the center on a prescribed path overseen by ladino spectators, is ritually the obliged body of peonage. But just as trago submerges consciousness in the body, the text and, by identification, those who possess it, interpolate between the body and con37 sciousness, giving rise to reflexive inquiry. Within the critical space thus opened, the autonomous human agent arises and the world becomes available to critical scrutiny. Put another way, whereas traditional obligation entailed involution and loss of control, the catechist’s criticism, directed at ritual coercion, manifests freedom for autonomous, deliberated action in, and more, on the world. The catechists of Magdalenas asserted agency in this sense by refusing those ritual performances – maxpat and cavilto – which delivered the body to actions involving diminished consciousness, in these cases flagellation and dance in trago-induced stupor. Their continuing and remarkably insistent rejections of trago amount to declarations of consciousness rather than (simply) conscience (though both are present in the unspoken fear of relapse implied by their vehemence on the subject). The interpretative symmetry that results begs notice. Reversing the spatial techniques of colonialism, missionary reduction and then commercial dispersal, the catechists moved out from the center and gathered in new hamlets to break through the constraints of costumbre on Maya action in the world. They deliberately transferred their bodies to reclaim their (ancestral) land, realizing consciousness – “to know where you stand,” as Elias puts it – in their place in the world.

–––––––––– 37 This is the point of Bourdieu’s borrowing from Havelock: The text -- like dialectical query – separated the knower from the known to yield thought and, with it, the autonomous self, these two inseparably paired in Plato. The crucial “discovery” of Plato’s Greece: “...selfconsciousness emancipated from the condition of an oral culture. The psyche which slowly asserts itself in independence from the poetic tradition...had to be the reflective, thoughtful, critical psyche, or it could be nothing. Along with the discovery of the soul, Greece in Plato’s day and just before Plato had to discover something else – the activity of sheer thinking” (Havelock 1963: 198-200).

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Coda: The Body of Christ According to the deacon, as he signaled the ritual on the road, costumbre – diminishing consciousness and dispersing bodies – displaced the Maya. The practice of religion, on the other hand, conscienticized and convoked, their revived consciousness taking the form of what the catechists call firmeza. Ascribed to the individual body as it manifests tenacity and force of conviction, through these embodiments firmeza engenders the social body. In Tzotzil, Elías explains, firmeza is the same as slequil co’ontontik – “the goodness/generosity of our hearts.” The expression is never invoked without 38 the plural possessive suffix -tik (FN 8.V.98; 25.VII.99; 5.I.02). So Elías attributes the founding of Cotsil’nam to firmedad del cuerpo – bodily strength and determination (FN 1.VIII.99), that is, bodily hexis signifying consciousness in and of the individual body from and for the social body.39 As the first houses in the hamlet neared completion, in April, 1986, a letter from “Ermita de Cotsinam [sic] Magdalenas” begged the Bishop of San Cristóbal to allow the santissima, the most holy, as the catechists call the consecrated eucharistic bread, to reside among them, since our community finds itself in an anomalous state, and in this condition we have considered that the santissima would accompany us [as we] move toward the goal of the commitment God has given us ... (Catechists to Bishop Ruiz, 26.IV.1986)

Here the immediate referent for the community’s “anomalous state” is distance from the santissima, until then reserved uniquely in the parish church at San Andrés where the priest presided over liturgy each Sunday. Six months later, catechists from “Centro de Magdalena, Municipio de Chenhalho’” sent an identical letter to the bishop (2X1986). Implicit in these requests is an altogether novel metric among Magdaleneros. Religion, not geography, measured the newly-recognized distance cited by Catholic inhabitants of the once-empty, now-filled Maya places petition–––––––––– 38 I am grateful to Antonio Gómez Gómez who explained the suffix –tik; to Jan Rus who noted the crucial Tzotzil equation of goodness and generosity; and to Tzotzil linguist Robert Laughlin who confirmed these observations. 39 Bourdieu on the notion of bodily hexis: “each technique of the body [is]a sort of pars totalis, predisposed to ... evoke the whole system of which it is a part ....” Bourdieu also famously asserts, “the principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness and hence cannot be touched by voluntary deliberate transformation ... nothing seems more ineffable... than the values made body by the transubstantiation ... of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology ...through injunctions as insignificant as ‘stand up straight ....” (1977: 94) . This argument leaves little room for human agency except in so far as it draws on the counter argument which (ironically) gives force to it, i.e., Havelock’s gloss on the opposition in Plato between mimesis and dialectic.

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ing the presence of the “most holy.” Their attribution of anomaly to this distance signals their communal re-incorporation, still a work in progress. The santissima – the Body of Christ now celebrated regularly by Magdalenero Catholics – cultivated consciousness as those who petitioned its presence cultivated the land. It also warranted autonomy won through religious reconquest, the call for its closeness testifying to Maya persistence in Maya place.

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Working the Word Constructing a Tzotzil Maya Theology

Introduction Among Catholic Magdaleneros la palabra de Dios – the Word of God – signifies both scriptural text and ritual community, while the one as much as the other also means (calls for) work. Maya Catholics are “el pueblo creyente – believing people” in the ecclesial discourse of the Diocese of San Cristóbal, 1 and frequently referred to simply as “los católicos.” by those, ladino as well as indigenous, who practice another or no religion. But with other highland Tzotzil Maya Catholics, those in Magdalenas call themselves la palabra de Dios to distinguish their religious practice from costumbre and from other, mostly Protestant, religious groups. “Work,” Tzotzil abtel/Spanish trabajo, in its multiple grammatical and semantic variants2 focuses the ritual discourse of this practice, as well as everyday conversation among Magdaleneros who embrace it. The latter is hardly unexpected in the case of peasant agriculturalists whose modern history, moveover, begins with their enslavement. But the word “work” renders discursive service through more than bare contextual connection, even while context remains analytically as relevant as it is obvious to understanding contemporary Maya religious practice. In fact, “work” and its semantic relatives are ubiquitous in the homilies at bi-weekly Catholic communion celebrations, becoming nearly normative in Magdalenero interpretation of the Catholic lectionary that assigns scriptural texts for each Sunday and holy day. These exegetical exercises led by catechists – a principal preacher usually followed by a second to “correct” and “complete” – always aim to elicit communal dialogue. The catechists regularly invite the assembly to respond to their preaching as they usually do, sometimes in the form of paraphrases, sometimes with questions, and always, at minimum, with “lech oy” (okay, fine) to express –––––––––– 1

2

“Los católicos” might also refer to those who continue to attend mass celebrated by the pastor removed from San Andrés at the catechists’ request. “La palabra de Dios” refers exclusively to those who accept the leadership of catechists for the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. The most common are the infinitive abtej and the plural abtele; also yabtel-e /-ale – the/your work and kabteltik – our [collective] work; and abtelanel – to work it.

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understanding and/or agreement to a conclusion. These dialogic exercises usually last over an hour, well beyond the time required to recite the Tzotzil canon for communion services.3 Each homiletic exchange follows reading of the biblical text in Spanish and its spontaneous translation into Tzotzil for the monolingual majority.4 The rotation of preachers and translators is decided at a “preparación” on the evening before celebrations held on Sundays in mid-afternoon and on weekdays when all have returned from their milpas or cafetales (coffee fields). In other words, the homilies communicate “work” through the simplest requirements of their form. But the salience of the dialectic of word and work (discursive topos as well as contextual imperative) emerges particularly at these ritual gatherings through recurrent thematic invocations. “Effort,” “force,” “power,” “attention, and the triad “listen-obey-carry out” are among the most frequent. In practice, the gatherings as such respond to them and so enact the double meaning Magdaleneros give the “word of God.” In short, naming their ritual community for the text, they identify themselves through and in its celebration. Thus Jaime exhorts the assembly: Now we must not return to doing everything we did before, now none of this .... We see that everything is difficult. It’s difficult to stop doing things that aren’t so good. But for this we ask God’s help. Let’s not stop half-way [por el medio camino]. Let’s reflect ... about the things that aren’t good. This is what it [the Word] says. This is our work, this is what the Virgin Mary did. This is gathering, unity.... (FT 12 XII.93).5

The catechist specifies “everything we did before” quite precisely: “las viejas costumbres – the old customs,” glossed in this case as “devoting our Sundays to drunkenness, drinking pox and chicha (corn-based beer)” (ibid). The new community of converts knows itself in “our work” in the primary sense of gathering to “reflect” on the word of God: to gather is, first of all, to make an “effort” to come together after long days of field labor; and then “work” to –––––––––– 3 4

5

The Diocese of San Cristóbal has translated this prayer into all five Maya languages within it – Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolobal, C’hol, and Mam. The Diocese of San Cristóbal distributes the Spanish lectionary each year in Advent. A diocesan Tzotzil translation of the Bible is available but catechists prefer to translate from the Spanish Biblia lationoamericana to accommodate limited Tzotzil reading skills and dialectical differences among communities. The text for the day was Luke 1, 39-48, recounting Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth. [FT = field transcript, referring to transcribed tape recordings translated from Tzotzil to Spanish by Antonio Gómez Gómez, Center for Humanistic Research, on Mesoamerica and the State of Chiapas (CHIMECH) and Xalik Guzmán, Institute for Anthropological Consultation for the Maya Region (INAREMAC) in San Cristóbal.

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understand what the word says, literally the immediate labor of SpanishTzotzil translation and then broader hermeneutic exertion. In short, Magdaleneros “work” to become the religious-intellectual/ exegetical community that calls itself “the word of God.” So Rudolfo exhorts the assembly: ...we must not stop gathering, we must listen to the word of God.... When we gather together ... it means we are unifying our thoughts, we are working with it [the word], it’s necessary to gather, men and women, to fulfill our duty, let’s not take our books in vain, with the excuse that it’s very difficult, it’s a suffering, it’s very profound, very hard (FT 14.XI.98).

Notwithstanding this litany of trials, the community heartily assents to the deacon’s summation: “we must work the word of God...[for] the word of God is for working it” (ibid.). Magdaleneros perceive the word as task not only because newly-literate peasants find the semantics of Hebrew and Christian scriptures “difficult” to decipher linguistically, though linguistic ability remains an ever-present preoccupation for them. As shown above, religion arrived in Magdalenas with reappraisal of ritual, reversing the relationship between ritual and work to place the former at the service of the latter. This reversal had material causes and consequences. But more than simple cost-benefit analysis determined its logic. Primary exhibit for this argument, their celebrations of the text exalt their labor on the land as the newly-converted Catholics transfer critical-cognitive entailments from the one sphere to the other. Tracing this transfer on the ground unpacks the phrase that epitomizes, for Magdaleneros themselves, their new religious practice: “working the Word.” Initiation: “A Gift from God for Work” The “work” of the catechists includes, among its polyvalent references, presiding over the various sacramental and other rituals that initiate and preserve Catholics in what Magdalneros call “religion.” While in basic pattern these rites resemble Catholic liturgical celebrations everywhere, they are not simple reiterations of canonical form. To critically adapt the vocabulary of contemporary ritual theory, in this case the self-referential (highland Maya) articulates with the canonical (Roman Catholic) so as to render the ritual a substantiated indigenous form 6 (Rappaport 1999). As inflected and interpreted by Magdaleneros, Catholic –––––––––– 6

Other sources on ritual theory for this study are C. Bell 1992, 1997; Bloch 1977; and J.Z. Smith 1978, 1987; Tambiah 1966, 1968.

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rituals incorporate la palabra de Dios as an historical project whose gravity derives from religion’s contested origins and concrete consequences. The performance of baptism in Magdalenas, for example, accords with normative Catholic rubrics. But, in keeping with Latin American appropriation of the Roman rite, highland Maya indigenous have also adopted the custom of compadrazgo, usually choosing close relatives or friends to be sponsors – compadres – to whom the baptized (and his/her parents) turn when in need of advice or material assistance (Nutini and Bell 1980). Through compadrazgo baptism ritually reinforces established kinship and other social bonds, or occasionally creates new ones. Within the community that calls itself la palabra de Dios, catechists have become preferred compadres. Since family and friends compose the first audience for their preaching, catechists share bonds of kinship and friendship with many in the la palabra de Dios. Nonetheless, the extraordinary number of ahijados (godchildren) some catechists have – the deacon Rudolfo claims nearly thirty – and, further, the frequency of compadrazgo between non-kin catechists suggests that Magdaleneros regard membership in la palabra de Dios as a type of kinship. The catechist Tacho’s understanding of the new status conferred on his daughter by baptism shows that for Magdalenero Catholics, the sacrament itself impresses a far deeper mark. It, too, reiterates the context of Tzotzil conversion, now articulated theologically in terms absorbed through catechist courses. After the ceremony at which his brother-in-law, the deacon Elias, presided, Tacho explained that “before” the infant had been simply a “child of humanity” who came into the world with “original sin, the sins of her parents.” But now she had been baptized in “the three names,” each responsible for one of three creations: the Father “the original, first creation;” the Son “who shed his blood on the earth;” and the Holy Spirit “who came to the apostles.” “Everything changes with baptism,” Tacho asserted: the baby, Luz Patricia, now belongs to, is known by, “the three names;” and, he quickly 7 added, she has received her “don – gift” (FN 9.X.94). The Tzotzil Maya tradition of three creations is well-documented (Guiteras Holmes 1961: 153-157 and passim; Holland 1997: 71-73). One authority notices a “resemblance” between the way the ancient Maya “mystically regarded [multiple gods] as a single being” and Christian Trinitarian doctrine (Thompson 1970: 346-47 and passim). Tacho’s reference to the “three names” articulates this “resemblance” between ancient Maya and Christian theology, but in an altogether new key. –––––––––– 7

Succeeding quotations of catechists on baptism are from this date.

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His focus remains on the “don – gift” to his newly-baptized daughter through which she is personally known and owned by the divine, a theological idea altogether foreign to the ancient Maya. As he explained it, the “gift” given at baptism is only revealed as the child matures. It determines what kind of worker she will be and/or what kind of work she will do – a teacher, a nurse, or a doctor, Tacho speculated.8 Presented with his brother-in-law’s theology of baptism, Elias agreed: “Before,” the baby is “puro carne – just flesh;” in baptism, “she has been handed over to God.” And, he added the critical gloss: “She received her gift [don]. We don’t know what the gift is until she grows up. Everyone has a gift from God, for work” (FN 9.X.94, emphasis added). Elias helpfully elaborated on the theme. A “gift,” as such, cannot be taught; if a person does not have a “gift” for carpentry, no amount of teaching can make him a carpenter. The deacon then embarked on what seemed a conversational tangent, recalling his compadre Salvador to explain what happens to the soul after death. Though “his bones are in the cemetery,” Salvador remains alive to the community through the memory of “his words and actions” which were, in his case, immensely successful: “He worked all the time, he harvested coffee during the day and shelled it at night.... He was a great worker, he had the gift of [or for] work” (ibid). Marvelling at the sounds of mechanized coffee shelling echoing at night from his neighbor’s land in the valley below, Elias says he learned how to work from Salvador. They had met soon after Elias entered la palabra de Dios, and Salvador had entered the Catholic community through his neighbor’s preaching. When one of his own children was baptized, Salvador asked the deacon to be his compadre. Salvador lives on as Elias recalls and emulates his “words and actions” while going about his own work. This, for the deacon, is his compadre’s “soul,” alive in his remembered “don de trabajar – gift for work.” And so, Elias concludes, “Baptism is muy fuerte –very strong, intense, powerful).” For the catechists of Magdalenas, then, the force of baptism owes significantly to its endowment of the gift “for work.” This theme threads through the deacon’s discourse from baptism to life after death and back to baptism. There is, of course, the ambiguity that his compadre, presumably baptized as a child, exhibited the “gift” for work before his conversion to la palabra de Dios. But for Elias, the salient point is that Salvador’s “soul” lives in his “gift for work” in so far as others, like Elias, emulate him. In this respect, in particular, the “gift” is distinct from, though it inevitably recalls, Weber’s notion of “vocation” (1991/1993: passim). Apart from an –––––––––– 8

Highland Maya women only rarely become teachers, fewer are nurses, and none physicians. Tacho’s speculations reflected post-baptism exuberance and/or the widening social horizons.

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apparent similarity in their articulation of religion and work, the two cases diverge on most significant counts, beginning most obviously with context. Emerging from and analyzed within an ascendant urban bourgeoisie, Weber’s Protestant “man of vocation” intent on “proving” and/or “certifying” his salvation through “inner-worldly asceticism” resembles the Maya Catholic peasant convert only in the sobriety they share. Further, in Weber “an organic ethic of vocation” is articulated with the notion of power-political hierarchy following from caste-like “natural differences among men” (ibid. 232-33). But for Catholic Maya like Tacho and Elias, whose peasant life relativizes any but “inner-worldly” concerns and renders “ascetic” orientations unimaginable, the “gift” conferred in baptism in effect ‘certifies’ the character of their community and the recipient’s belonging in it, rather than her individual rank and/or “other-worldly” salvation. Overlaying, if not replacing, the normative Christian understanding of baptism as purification from sin, the catechists’ interpretation makes the “gift, for work” as such intrinsic, if not equivalent, to salvation itself. In other words, Catholic Magdaleneros regard themselves as “known by God” in knowing their own capacity for work, reclaimed in and through their conversion, that is, their replacement of costumbre with la palabra de Dios. To cement and, equally important, maintain the community so constructed, catechists would inevitably be preferred compadres, and serve as compadres to each other as well. For example, the catechist Lucas traveled from the paraje Xuxchen to Cotsil nam’ so that Elias could be compadre for the baptism of his twelfth child, while another catechist, Miguel, came from the paraje Saclum to preside at the ceremony. Lucas was among the first to buy land from Ladinos following the cargo struggle in Magdalenas, leading to the reconstitution of Xuxchen with the foundation of an ermita (chapel) by the new Catholic community that re9 named the settlement Tepeyac.” In the mid-1990s, he and his community held more coffee land in Magdalenas than any other single person or group. During the same period, the catechists had reconstructed the chapel in Saclum after traditionals destroyed it in a rage against their new religious practice. In this case, then, the preference of catechists as compadres clarified Elias’ epitome of baptism. It is fuerte (strong), that is, profoundly consequential for the new way of being in the world inaugurated with the contemporary arrival of religion in Magdalenas. In other words, for Magdalenero Catholics, –––––––––– 9

Tepeyac is the site in Mexico City where Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared. Magdaleneros show no particular devotion to Guadalupe, but the village name “Tepeyac” suggests awareness of her stature as Mexico’s patroness.

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baptism reconstitutes indigenous community through, and for, a new regime of work. Homiletic Labor: Constructing a Local Theology In contemporary Catholic theology, eucharistic liturgies celebrate the repeatable sacrament of initiation. Though unacquainted with this thinking, Tzotzil catechists insist on the importance of bi-weekly communion celebrations. Indeed, their confidence in the “gift, for work” bestowed in baptism is warranted by coming together to work the Word. To repeat, for Magalenero Catholics exegetical labor is a communal enterprise, beginning with the catechists’ evening “preparation” of the scripture to be read at the next day’s eucharistic celebration. Occasionally with the assistance of a pastoral agent, but generally on their own, they read the liturgically-prescribed text in Spanish and struggle to understand it, first in purely linguistic terms and then with hermeneutic concern for the community constructed in and through this labor. In these sessions, as during the homilies that follow, the catechists frequently disparage their own skill while expressing constant preoccupation “que lo entienden la gente – that the people understand” and, as important, that they actually “listen” to and stay awake during their preaching after a day’s labor. The “beatitudes” (Mt. 5:3-12) proved to be a particularly challenging text in these respects. The unfolding of its exegesis exemplifies the intellectual exertion displayed at each celebration of the word of God in Magdalenas (FT 10 19.VI.94). The first verse caused considerable consternation: We’re going to read what the book of St. Matthew says ....Blessed those who find happiness ... and so our God speaks, my children, this is the word of God. Well, these are two or three words that our Lord Jesus Christ mentioned, I don’t know if you understand since I don’t very well. Our Lord Jesus said: that they are blessed, those who are completely happy, those who find themselves happy, the Lord speaks to them, since they are [his] children, it says. Sometimes we don’t understand ... I haven’t managed to understand what this means either.

The catechist tried various approaches to his hermeneutic dilemma. He suggested, first,

–––––––––– 10 Following quotations are from this field transcript unless otherwise noted.

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when there is no happiness among us, the Lord doesn’t know us, doesn’t know if we are really his children because we don’t want to understand, we don’t want to put in our hearts that happiness is achievable (ibid.).

In this account, “happiness,” and thus “blessedness” (or, salvation itself), is being known by the Lord precisely in understanding God’s word about happiness: in other words, engaging the word of God. But the catechist was not yet entirely convinced: ... it’s not pointless to think ... there could be peace the way we’ve discussed it, as our Lord Jesus Christ says, for when there is peace and happiness then he will know that they [sic] are his children, when they are gathered in happiness in a unified way.

This last move, asserting that happiness is specifically dependent upon, if not synonymous with, the community’s “gathering,” offered the catechist new exegetical leverage. Unhappiness results from the “hunger and thirst” that prevails in the community, leading to quarrels and mutual offense “inside and outside our houses.” We say, he continued, this is because we are lazy, sleep late, in short, because “we are not working.” But Jesus was delivered into the hands of enemies because his children were poor and his father in heaven wants everyone to be equal. What we want is that happiness would be for everyone, not for a certain group of people ... and this is all I wanted to comment on these few words ... perhaps I don’t understand everything that they mean, you [the assembly] can expand upon it with ... what you understand.

The ensuing responses affirmed the liberationist understanding pastoral agents and catechists alike projected onto the Zapatista uprising earlier that year. But the semantics of class struggle – between those “eating water mixed with chiles and see fleas swimming [in it]” and “those unjust men who have too much to eat” – remained embedded within the discourse emerging from the rise of la palabra de Dios in Magdalenas. Thus, the first voice from the assembly declared the catechist “really right”: ...in those times I was not happy because I fought with my wife ... sometimes I even beat [her] and this was because I didn’t know where the Lord was who gives happiness and that [sic] gives the beatitudes ... there was no equality, only anger, and so I didn’t know the Lord.

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In other words, conversion enabled cognitive distinction between the present and “those times” when “we lived in company with the devil.” When the first catechist wavered in response, a second stepped in with obvious confidence in his exegetical skill: ... this [reading] can be understood clearly; for example there is one [verse] that says: happy those who work for peace because they will be recognized as sons of God; from the beginning in [verse] six, it says: happy those who hunger and thirst for justice because they will be satisfied, just as there are other verses that are very clear, that those who look for happiness and liberty, those who work for it will always reach happiness, and so it says happy those who work for peace....

Thematizing the notion “work for peace,” this catechist at once authorized indigenous exegesis and articulated homiletic with everyday labor. He admitted, “occasionally we don’t understand ... and comment [during homilies] that we won’t reach [happiness]....” Following a litany of “sufferings” attending la palabra de Dios – hunger, exhaustion, persecutions – he nonetheless asserted, ...we are not mistaken in the way ... we must understand well what the reading says ... we must not confuse ourselves ... what we are doing is correct and it’s incorrect when we don’t understand clearly what is said to us [by the reading] ... the fruit is peace in our community.

An intervention arose from the assembly: I agree but I don’t understand in what way to understand or apply the word ‘fruit,’ I don’t know what it means, but what I can understand is that we have to reach the happiness and well-being of all.

The catechist’s initial response evoked the Zapatista uprising six months earlier and employed its liberationist rhetoric: “The peace we’re seeking is that we don’t want to be oppressed or relegated ... we want to be taken into account.” Yet, again, political discourse stands within what remains, for Magdalenero Catholics, the primary discursive frame: ... we’ll see the fruit of our work, we will see achievements when we put up with shame, criticism, prison, kidnapping,11 of all this we’ll see the fruit, just as when

–––––––––– 11

Such human rights violations plagued the highlands well before the 1994 uprising rising; see documents at www.frayba.org.mx.

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we go with our hoe to work in the field to sow something, after a good time we’ll harvest the fruit of our work, so the word of God ... so we must be conscious of the work that we are doing, we must not leave the things of God and if someone asks us we must tell them that those who work for peace will bear fruit.

Analogy between the agricultural and the evangelical recalls, though not in a directly derivative sense, the synoptic gospel parables,e.g., sower and the seed; and the appeal of biblical literature generally among Maya peasants certainly owes to similarities, material and figurative, between its context(s) and their own.12 But the very request for explication of the word “fruit” demonstrates that exegetical labor here draws on more than analogical thinking and, further, that indigenous interlocutors recognize this to be the case. Striving for happiness and equality seem transparently worthy ends to the questioner: the puzzle remains “how to apply ... know what [the word fruit] means,” or how, in practical terms, to arrive at these ends. The catechist proposes, in response, “be conscious of the work,” implying the alternative possibility; and he adds the correlative requirement for Magdalenero Catholics, “not leave the things of God,” again suggesting the possibility of choice. The difference between alternatives relies on the identity in practice between ‘being conscious of the work’ and ‘the things of God’ in Magdalenas. The one as much as the other describes the fundamental option entailed in conversion from costumbre to la palabra de Dios in so far as the latter warrants and intends productive labor. Conversion so described arises in and then promotes the dialectic (and not simple analogy) between exegetical and agricultural work that distinguishes la palabra de Dios as a matter of autonomous indigenous religious production in both spheres. As if to further the point, still another catechist introduced a text Magdaleneros privilege above all, the Letter of James.13 After reading the full pericope (Jas. 3:13-18) in Spanish, this catechist glosses the final verses with a Tzotzil paraphrase: –––––––––– 12 From myriad examples: Responding to the visitation narrative (Luke 1, 39-56 NRSV), some wanted to know the exact kinship between Mary and Elizabeth and the precise distance between their respective villages. Magdaleneros walk long distances to their fields and often several days to visit relatives. At the instruction to forgive “seven times seventy” (or “seventy-seven times” – Mt. 18:22 NRSV) the assembly wanted a calculation and then loudly responded that forgiving four hundred and ninety times was out of the question. One listener asked “Does this mean I have to forgive someone whose horse trampled my milpa? It’s impossible! – !no se puede!” 13 Catechists readily cite, “... faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:15-17 NRSV). The letter’s diatribe against the rich and the “double-minded” also resonates. Most compelling for them is, “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers....” (1:22).

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... the glory of God that comes from above brings rectitude, it is happiness, it gives the grace of the sense of God and we understand the meaning if we pay attention to all the things being said to us [in the reading], and the work will be honest (recto) not only in thought but good things to do will come out of it, here is where happiness is sown and it will give fruit, just like the artisan who has freedom, as it says in our language [emphasis added].

Here “happiness” is identified with “rectitude,” and the very “sense of God” depends upon this virtue: God is “sensed” through acquisition of a disposition with the cognitive turn epitomizing Tzotzil conversion to Christianity, “paying attention to all the things being said to us.” Rectitude so understood is both engendered by and manifest in “honest” work in the dialectical sense bestowed, according to the catechist, by “our language,” signifying linguistically Tzotzil and discursively the distinctive semantics of Catholic Magdalenas. Communal religious history warrants the pivot on which this discourse turns: work “in thought” yields “good things to do,” not least in milpa and cafetales. In short, for la palabra de Dios, cognitive work yields “fruit” as productive practice. The catechist concluded his exegesis with metaphoric meta-commentary on the Catholic community’s originating discovery in both domains. The biblical text concludes: “Justice is sown in peace, and gives its fruit to the artisans of peace (Jas. 3:18). Showing striking exegetical liberty, the catechist’s textual labor devolved into a form of play, freely rendering the final phrase, “just like the artisan who has his freedom.” Theoretical Excursus This turn of the text – “just like the artisan...” – typifies the productive power of the Magdalenero hermeneutic, as a reading of M.M. Bakhtin ironically suggests. From his own peripheral view (relative to the West), Bakhtin argued “language is heteroglot from top to bottom,” proposing the [Russian] “illiterate peasant” as an example (1981:273). Always immersed in “several language systems” – ecclesial, festive, domestic, bureaucratic – Bakhtin’s exemplary peasant experiences “a critical interanimation of languages” as soon as he becomes conscious of their differences (ibid.: 295-96). But, despite his own social and scholarly eccentricity, Bakhtin was apparently unable to allow “peasants” one of the “socially significant world views” in heteroglossic dialogue. Instead, he imagined them passing from “moribund equilibrium” to “critical inter-animation” of languages (only) with migration from the “unmoving” rural world to the city (ibid.). But our case demonstrates a resolutely rural religious community in highland Chiapas to be not unlike Bakhtin’s “socially significant” urban

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“circles, journals ... artistic works and individual persons....” Their dialogic homilies show Magdaleneros to be fully capable of attracting [a language’s] words and forms into their orbit by means of their own characteristic intentions and accents... [as a] socially significant performance...to infect [sic] with its own intention certain aspects of language that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones.... (ibid.: 290).

Though sharing none of Bakhtin’s literary preoccupations, Magdalaneros readily assented to the catechist’s textual play – “just like the artisan who has his freedom” – and thus imposed on a favored piece of biblical literature the “specific semantic nuances and axiological overtones” fitting the “characteristic intentions and accents” of la palabra de Dios. Its religious ritual (rather than literary aesthetic) “verbal performance” (Bakhtin) freely imports biblical language into indigenous discourse (while questioning the divide between language and action sometimes vexing critical theory). Moreover, as they work with the text their ability to direct their peasant labor is affirmed and enabled. In short, in homiletic dialogue they claim and assert freedom from ritual obligation and economic indenture, owning their labor by making the Bible their own. It remains to demonstrate not only that they do so but to what extent they have succeeded – in other words, to show how the Catholic community of Magdalenas, “like the artisan who has his freedom,” finds “fruit” or, “good things to do” in la palabra de Dios. 14

“What We Say is What We Know How to Do.” A diocesan worksheet asked catechists to reflect on their contribution to society. Their reply was unhesitating: There’s nothing else we can say; really, what we say is what we know how to do, what we know how to work [abtej/trabajar], clearing away the scrub brush, working in our milpa, because here’s how we get our food. Besides we know all kinds of work, we know how to use what you [earlier speaker] mentioned, the machete, hoe, we know how to work with all our energy [kipaltik/nuestra fuerza], our eager desire [jtzatzaltik/afán]. The work that we carry out now is through our strength

–––––––––– 14 This Magdalenero Catholic assertion echoes French post-structuralists: “For him [Marcel Détienne], these tales, stories, poems, and treatises are already practices. They say exactly what they do. They constitute and are what they intend to mean” (de Certeau 1984: 80, emphasis added). [Note: In what follows, quotations from Tzotzil transcriptions with Spanish translation of key words appear within brackets.]

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[kipaltik/nuestra fuerza]. But if only we had organized work, we would have better support, if we really did our work well (FT 13.XI.93).

The transparency of this discourse is particularly compelling. Unfailingly, Catholics of Magdalenas hold to their peasant position as they work the word of God, tying their survival to their bodily exertions on the land: In San Cristóbal, in Mexico [D.F.], those who work in the office, they only know how to work with pencils, they don’t know how to use the machete, the hoe, they don’t know how to plow the earth, they don’t know how to sow corn. Their strength [yipal/fuerza] is in their fingers, that’s how they get their food. But if it wasn’t for the corn, they couldn’t survive. Sure, they have their money, but they don’t eat money. But we who are in the countryside, in the mountain scrublands, we know everything ... (ibid.)

The catechists confer preeminent social value on strength, energy, determination, and desire. Their caricature of Mexican urbanites – knowing only one tool, the pencil, and channeling all strength into “their fingers” – affirms indigenous social worth and the primacy of agricultural over other forms of labor. But “strength” in this account is more than simply brute bodily force, and “knowing how” to deploy it an urgent preoccupation. The catechist’s paean to peasants who “know everything” (metonymically attested by the many tools they “know how to use,”) is critically tempered: “If only we had organized work ... if we really did our work well.” The word of God provokes and propels the catechists and Catholic Magdalenas as a community to the possibility in this “if.” Just so, learning to “manejarlo bien – handle it [scripture]” well is high praise in a community that employs the Bible as a tool for organizing and doing work “well.” In this sense, homiletic transcripts can be seen as the field of play for the tropes (in Fernandez, ed. 1986, esp. Turner: 121-58) with which the community reflects upon the “gift of God” and thus its own social formation, above all, “word” 15 and “work.” These tropes and their cognates thread through homiletic discourse from one celebration to the next, if not seamlessly at least with remarkable constancy. Picked up on any one occasion, they reverberate in almost any other, whatever the scriptural text in hand. –––––––––– 15 One scholar proposes that religion is “a mode of thinking about social constructs,” and that its rituals “creat[e] a space for play, experimentation, thoughtful meditation” on aspects of social life including “the sense of belonging to a people,” “a group’s attitude toward the land,” “experiencing the constraints of another’s view,” “marking...genealogical loyalties,” “finding reasons for ... assignments of tasks,” and “the workings of gifts and obligations” (Mack 2000: 287-91). Most all of these features of “social formation” are addressed in one way or another in Magdalenero homiletic reflections. See J.Z. Smith 1982, 1987, 2004.

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“The Word of God is for Working It.”16 A homily on the Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30) proves an exemplary exegetical platform from which to follow these tropic threads. According to one catechist’s translation, a man distributes his “money” (tak’ine/dinero) to each of three “workers” (abtele/trabjadores) in varying amounts. On his return after a long absence, he finds two of them knew how to “work it” (ta yabtelenel/trabajarlo), but the third buried his for fear of the master. The master rewards the first two, welcoming them into “glory” and “light.” He gives the third’s share to the first, and then casts the now-dispossessed worker into “obscurity.” The translator replaced the Spanish “talents” with the Tzotzil “money.” But with deepening homiletic reflection, rhythmically marked by four repetitions of the parable itself, this literal economic rendering dissolved into others. 17 The translator himself offered something close to an accepted reading. “The meaning is equal to the kingdom of God, the meaning is clear, we must announce all that is heard to all [our] neighbors, just like working money.” But, when the deacon Rudolfo becomes principal homilist, the meaning is not, in a direct metaphorical sense, “just like working money.” Rather, exegetical alteration of the terms of exchange rule out anything like straightforward economic accumulation: Everything is a gift (matanal/regalo) from God that he gives through the sacrament, a gift that he gives to you, because God sends his light over you to give you strength (yipal/fuerza) and courage.

And, “the gift that is given to us, all these things have a meaning it is necessary to decipher....” Again, The gifts of God are not a simple present, so we shouldn’t spend it [sic] in vain ... we must guard this commandment (matanal/mandamiento) with great care, we must work the word of God (xkabtelantik ti sk’op Diose/debemos trabajar al palabra de Dios), we must have a return on all that has been commended to us.

To trace the course of this exegetical sequence – from “talent” to “money” to “everything;” then, more precisely, to “a gift from God” given in the sacrament (baptism), which becomes “strength and courage;” and finally “the –––––––––– 16 FT 14.VI.93: All quotations in this subsection come from this transcript unless noted otherwise. 17 E.G. “The time before the return of Jesus...must be used responsibly. ...Matthew warns against those attitudes which will bring about exclusion from God’s kingdom” (Donahue 1988: 109).

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word of God” – is, first of all, to revisit the double meaning of la palabra de Dios in Magdalenas. That is, the “gift” that is “everything” amounts to the (total) way of being in the world entailed in practicing – and more specifically, ‘deciphering’ and/or ‘working’ – the word of God. In this exegetical account, recursive in both form and content, the word as “gift” is “light,” “strength” and “courage,” enabling and, more, urging “work.” In this and subsequent homiletic passages, the alternate rendering of the Tzotzil matanal – now “gift,” in another place “commandment” – carries on the lexical level the message embedded in the discourse as whole: the word of God, “not a simple present,” intends a “return” in the form of a disposition, personal and communal. For Rudolfo, the “return” reflects “the gift” according to the axiological discourse of Magdalenero conversion: “When we realize [the needs/suffering of the people], then we will be working, we will have opened our eyes, but this is a gift of God.”18 Here the pivotal referent is the catechist’s own converting “illumination.” Thus, his next exegetical move: Everything depends on one’s intelligence (sp’ijil/inteligencia), since each one [of us] has a different capacity (jp’ijiltike/capacidad), but whatever it is, it’s necessary to use it. ... When we are gathering, men and women, it means we are unifying our thoughts, we are working with it (syak chij-abtejotike/estamos trabajando con ello), it’s necessary to gather.... Though we don’t have much intelligence (jp’ijiltike/inteligencia), well this means we have very little money to work, some more, others a lot, others little, this is the capacity of our intelligence (tolol ti jbilitike/capacidad de nuestra inteligencia)19 ...

Typical of all the other catechists,20 the modesty in this appraisal of intellectual “capacity” belies its enormous significance. In Mexico generally and the Maya highlands in particular, the ladino-indigenous ethnic divide traces to the seminal colonial-missionary question: ‘are the Indians not men?’; significantly rephrased at the Imperial Court by the Dominican Fray Montesinos: ‘do they not have rational souls?’ (Seed 1992: 629-52). Though the Court –––––––––– 18 Six months later, Rudolfo voiced a similar concern at his nephew’s baptism: “it will be too sad if the community sleeps, it will suffer if it doesn’t hear the word of God” (FT 9.XII.93). 19 Tzotzil tolol = head, cranium, so the phrase might be translated literally “all [the intelligence] that fits in our head.” 20 “We aren’t very efficient, really; before you and before our Lord Jesus Christ, we don’t know how to speak, we don’t know how to make good commentaries” (FT, 24.IV.94); or, “excuse my [catechist’s] errors, perhaps there were some correct things [in my homily] and others maybe weren’t [correct], you [community] be the judge” (FT, 12.XII.93); and, “Pardon me, don’t get angry, don’t get upset because I don’t know how to explain it [Parable of the Talents]” (FT. 14.VI..93). Elected by their peers, catechists rarely impose themselves; they also readily acknowledge their lack of education.

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decided in the affirmative, through the late-colonial period “in ecclesiastical censuses and countless political documents” Spaniards in the Americas described themselves as “gente de razón – people of reason” following a socio-religious taxonomy constructed on denial of this ascription to indigenous peoples (ibid.: 649). In Mexico, the “image of a dual society” – Indian/white, with mestizos as an intermediary category – persisted even as “the national culture” navigated the nineteenth century passage from caste to class (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 276 and passim). The late modern dual classification depended on the early modern assumption about native “capacity,” for modernity in the former case, for Christianity in the latter (ibid.). A note on translation ironically reinforces the point. The primary translator for this study initially rendered the Tzotzil “sb’ijil” and “jb’ijiltike” alternately “intelligence” and “capacity,” the same substitution that occurred in early modern debate on the human status of Indians. In late-twentieth century Magdalenas, catechists insist “jchu’nej mantalotic k’oplal”, literally, 21 “we obey the plan of the commandments.” Again echoing the early-colonial contest that set Mexico’s ethnic fault line, our translator gives for this same phrase “somos gente de razón, we are people of reason.” But the point extends beyond these evocative lexical coincidences. During the Conquest era, “capacity” for understanding Christian doctrine became the test of human rationality among indigenous peoples in the Americas, judgment, like the test itself, belonging to missionaries (Seed 1992). On the eve of a new millenium, Tzotzil Maya appropriated their intelligence for themselves (in both senses), Magdalenero Catholics an exemplary instance. For them, obedience to the commandments (jchu’nej mantalotic) is precisely not submission to external judgment. Rather, it is understanding, even more participating, in the (rational) “plan” (sk’oplal) informing these commandments. In short, as our translator understood, for Catholics in Magdalenas conversion itself warrants the claim, somos gente de razón. The claim entailed working the Word of God, as the catechists explain, “yu’un abtenalal sk’an ti sk’op Diose – because the Word of God is for working it.” In other words, Magdalenero perception of the Bible determined their reception of it (and vice versa). Unlike the formulae of colonial catechetical manuals, scripture as such is not, nor could it be, simply matter for rote repetition or even memorization (though, to be sure, much of it is memo–––––––––– 21 Ch’un = obey, believe, is from a semantic family including the Tzotzil adjective ch’ul = sacred, divine, holy. It figures in nearly all words linked to this root idea: e.g., ch’ul-totik = God the father; ch’ul = saint; ch’ul-el = soul; ch’ul-na = house of prayer, church; ch’ul- totil = godfather; ch’u-onil = godson

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rable). Rather, as the catechists say, it demands “deciphering.” They find in scripture not a “test” of their intelligence but testimony to it, and just so divine gift. The circularity entailed in any gift (bestowal completed by reception and ratified with eventual return) in this case at once validates and describes the gift itself: “Working” the word of God – to read/translate and engage in its exegesis – demonstrates “capacity” for it. For Magdalenero Catholics, the gift in this sense – intelligence – is realized in everyday practice. Finding themselves by disposition unable to “say” anything but “what we do” and by conversion uniquely identified with the word of God, these Tzotzil peasants “decipher” the biblical text through a distinctive religious joining of semantics and pragmatics. As the core instance of this amalgamation, “deciphering” through ritual dialogue makes the text a tool for “unifying our thoughts,”a ritual objective repeatedly voiced in Magdalenero homilies. Thus Rudolfo’s exegetical summary of the Parable of the Talents: We have to work this gift.... the power to work the word of God, [to] listen and say what the pueblo has, the reality of the pueblo, what it is living now ... this is the form of augmenting the work, to feel that the word of God grows... Jesus is speaking of unity, of agreement [acuerdo], one has to read and say it to the community.

“Reading,” “listening,” and “saying,” la palabra de Dios comes to know itself in religious construction of its world and so realizes its “gift,” its intelligence, communally. To achieve “good interest” amounts to agreement or acuerdo, the preeminent Tzotzil socio-political value, that the Catholic community in fact “knows” in a triple sense: it knows its lived (social and political-economic) reality; it knows that it knows this reality; and this selfconscious knowing is a form of feeling (“to feel that the Word of God grows”), what might be called “cultural intimacy ... the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that provide...assurance of common sociality.” (Herzfeld 1997: 3). One catechist affirmed the community’s identification with the Bible thus: “Everything we need to know is in the book” (FT 12.XII.93). But trust in the book extends beyond knowledge of its contents to an integral sense of well-being in its use. As manifest in exegetical practice, the converted peasant community recognizes itself in “handling the book,” as catechists describe biblical literacy, by “working” it and just so becoming a distinctive social body. Viewed as a metonym, the locution “handling the book” assimilates (and ultimately revalues) mastered agricultural skills – e.g. use of the machete and

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the hoe – to (and with) religiously (re)discovered intellectual dexterity, and the other way around. In Magdalenas, the Bible is the indispensable emblem of catechetical office, virtual appendage(s) of its occupiers. Only in the rarest circumstance does any Magdalenero stand before Catholics assembled in the templo without the Bible, and catechetical visits to counsel the sick, grieving or troubled always include prayer and/or reading from it. More to the point, like the ever-present machete slung over peasant shoulders, and decidedly unlike the stationary patronal icons ensconced behind locked cabinet doors in the church, for Magdalenernos, the Bible is functional possession, never object of worship or display. On the way to celebrations or home visits, the Bible rests in the same (kind of) red or handwoven net bag these agriculturalists stock with tortillas and matz’/pozole (corn-based beverage) to nourish a day’s labor in milpa or cafetal. Only those whose literacy enables them to “handle” a Bible own one. And only the simplest protections – a homemade wood chest or plastic cover – distinguish the status of this possession from the machetes, hoes, sledge hammers, ropes and other rudimentary agricultural implements scattered 22 casually about rough adobe dwellings. In short, unthinkable (and largely impossible) as it is for these peasants to acquire any but those tools essential to their labor, the Bible has become one of them for Magdalenero catechists. Mastery of the machete marks a pivotal moment in a highland Maya youth’s coming of age as potential padre de familia: he is said to ‘manejarlo bien – handle it well.’ Once removed from the household, the Catholic community values the Bible analogously: the leaders among them, the deacons, are distinguished by their ability to “animate” the community with it. His father-in-law explained Elias’ selection for ordination without hesitation: “porque él sabe – because he knows,” holding up his hands as if reading and pointing to a word. The gesture indexes the implied gloss: ‘lo maneja bien – he handles it [the Bible/Spanish] well,’ a skill exhibited at every liturgical celebration over which the deacon presides. Illiterate Magdaleneros, the majority in the pueblo, confront in the Bible (for them) mute materiality, as resistant to human effort as any uncultivated scrubland. But taken up as a tool, it gives life and nourishes in the communal sphere as the machete does in the domestic. Catholics of Magdalenas bestow authority on those whose biblical literacy motivates gathering and self–––––––––– 22 “Cultural categories and economic goods are here defined in terms of one another: ...the collection of different objects in the one space represents a commonality of cultural virtue.... It is a process of mutual valuation. What it implies is that economic value is Saussurean, it is the differential standing of a given object in a system of meaningful relations. (Sahlins 1976:36)

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recognition in “deciphering” the text. Bodily enacted and exhibited, the “animating”23 effect is confirmed as socially-constitutive, and for Magdaleneros expressly “religious,” yield. The community “feel[s] that the Word of God grows,” and knows the “glory” and “light” reserved for those who invest their intelligence with la palabra de Dios. “They Thought it Very Strange: What Power Human Beings Possess!”24 Returning to the idiom of our exemplary parable, the re-cognition with which Catholic Magdaleneros thus reflexively identify, and so distinguish themselves as a religious community, counts as the first return on working the word (and not burying it). Their work with another biblical text, John 3:14-15, further glosses this gain: We have passed from death to life. We know because we love our brothers. He who does not love his brother is already dead, he who hates his brother is an assassin, and we, and you, know no assassin can have eternal life in his heart, brothers and sisters. This is the word of God [emphasis added].

Though seemingly minor and quite apt to the text’s near-gnostic theology, a slip in the catechist’s translation is telling: the biblical author assures his audience “you know,” while the catechist assimilates the Magdalenero assembly to this early Christian community with the addition “we.” The ensuing dialogue amply warrants the translator’s textual amendment. The homilist assures the assembly, “the written word is very good,” but several confess to difficulty with it. From one, “I don’t understand well,” to another, “I can’t comment well, I can’t remember it,” and yet another, “I understand that the word is very important, but it seems we can’t understand it very well,” comes the conclusion: “We don’t know how to think-reflect.” Expressing the religious assembly’s preoccupation, these admissions underwrite its identifying conviction: They [the biblical writers] saw that the written word was very good.... It reaches all power, the word of God that they said. It’s not like [just] any power. Perhaps you don’t understand, you find another who doesn’t understand. But as they said the word of God here, it is true, it is the true word, the word of God here [in the Bible]. They saw that it is the true word when the people were gathered. They

–––––––––– 23 The Magdalenero Catholic usage animar=animate recalls Weber on charisma: “The charismatic hero derives his authority not from any established order ... He gains and retains it solely by proving his powers in practice. ... his divine mission must prove itself by bringing well-being to his faithful followers (1968: 1114-1115). 24 FT 4.XII.93. Quotations in this section are from this transcript unless otherwise noted.

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thought it very strange, what power man had.... You must see the scripture very well, and this is why it is written in the book.

Evidence for the ‘goodness’ of the written word – as of its truth and, ultimately, its power – comes “when the people were [are] gathered.” Read recursively, this statement aptly describes the “very strange” power – attraction to and convocation by the word – the homilist (and, he presumes, the scripture writer) finds in human being. In the ensuing dialogue, lamenting “disorganizing” forces on the one hand and extolling unity on the other, the “very strange” appears rhetorically ritualized as socially formative for Catholic Magdalenas. The homilist initially proposed a distancing move: “In [biblical] times past ... people weren’t united yet. No. Only a few heard the word of God....” Some “spoke evil” against them, and those who commit calumny of this sort are murderers, “not because they cut off heads” but because they “kill its [the group’s] power ... disorganize the group.” In this way, the catechist imagined the original scriptural community (and read the text) by retrojecting an ever-present threat to his own. Again fusing a possible present with textual past, he echoed what he knew his hearers say to themselves, perhaps even at that moment: I don’t understand the word very well, better I just sit, or better I leave the word of God, perhaps he would say to the people.... But as he left it, he disorganized the group. So, he’s a murderer.

Then came diagnosis of a lethal ‘disorganizing’ menace lurking within the community as the homilist projected another imaginary interior monologue onto those assembled before him: I haven’t found anything good in the word of God, I have many needs, better I look for work, better I go to the finca to look for work. It’s better still that I rest, don’t take advantage or see....’

Here the written word proves its goodness and power in the rhetorical strategy it provoked. Dramatization of a resonance between an imagined, authoritative past and known, ambiguous present shows the word to “work” as most public ritual does, enabling the community to consider and renew its identity, in this case in the face of disaggregating dangers. The homilist plainly sought this ritual effect. The familiar tone of interior monologues played back to hearers whose doubts he surely shares strikes against the ominous epithet “murderer” in the text. With force gathered over

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this rhetorical divide, the collision communicates the momentous stake in the alternatives: “leave the word of God” or “take advantage and see.” The homilist also manifestly intended a deliberative, rather than emotive, response. The medium altogether suited the message framed by the familiar contest between finca labor and la palabra de Dios and further thematized with repeated versions of the religiously critical question for Magdaleneros: “What is our work?”25 For the homilist, peasant values both perennial (utility or “advantage”) and newly re-cognized (lucidity, to “see,”) dictate the converted Catholic’s response: “we must think well.” For Catholics in Magdalenas, the word of God possesses “strange power” through the common work it demands and promotes, not least collaboration between literate and illiterate. Mutual dependence is of course necessary in this case, but insufficient for community cohesion. But a discursive shift turned the community in a theological direction: “If we would think alike, we would work alike: we would be united, we would be together,” the catechist proposed. In the next instant, he abruptly affirmed “nos salvó por su muerte por nuestra salvación – he [Jesus] saved us by his death for our salvation,” and then posed the crucial question: “What sign do you see now that we are saved...?” A response arose from the assembly: In those times, as there was no single unity, really a part or a half ... they died of hunger, they had no bread, there was no food, they had nothing to eat, they had nothing to savor, they didn’t have clothes. Though there isn’t much more [of these things] now, still there is unity, assembly, meeting. In common we will help each other, in common we will look for our food, together we will look for what we need.

“Those times” when “there was no single unity” describes the rejected regime of finca labor and the empty center. Poverty endures in Magdalenas but with what its inhabitants regard as a saving difference: “...the people are united. If it is united it is because it wants to save itself, rapidly they [sic] gain power. The homilist assimilated one social diagnostic to the other in soteriological summation:

–––––––––– 25 In other places in this transcript we find, for example, “If we work badly, we will find suffering...;” and “this [scripture] told us how we must work;” and again “this [calumny] isn’t our work now.”

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It is the word of God that we share together among us. We share and we demonstrate the true word of God when we are well unified, gathered together in the word of God. This is what we can share among us, the word of God, we can only gift each other with the word of God equally shared. We demonstrate with our attitude the good way of our all-powerful Lord. It’s what we can share, the word of God. On the contrary, clothes to dress with ... corn, beans, we can’t share.

Theologically, then, being in the word of God signifies a salvific state of being in the world warranted by the egalitarian social unity it engenders. In other words, for Magdaleneros the word of God is a medium of exchange inaugurating novel – and for them, saving – power relations in the community. Neither susceptible to simple accumulation nor suited to exclusive possession, scriptural texts can in principle (if not in historical fact) be “equally shared.” Distinctly manifesting this attribute, the Bible’s “strange power” to convoke ramifies from templo and ermita to milpa and cafetal as a uniquely fungible phenomenon Magdaleneros “demonstrate with [their] 26 attitude.” The word of God is good to work and good for work as collective intellectual enterprise: being “in the Word of God” is gathering together to “think well,” that is, to perform (ritual-intellectual) work which informs (agricultural) work. Put another way, the “strange power” of the unified community to “save itself” in the word of God arises from social aggregation as entailment of intellectual application – and the other way round. Alternative translations make the point: “We demonstrate with our attitude the good 27 work (lekil xanbal) of the all-powerful God.” In short, salvation for Magdaleneros amounts to realizing, in both senses, the “good way of the allpowerful God” in shared work with God’s word. Thus oriented, everyday labor, as God’s gift, saves. “We Must Think Well....This Is How It Is, the Word of God.”28 The catechist epitomized the message of Luke 6, 43-49 his homily: We must think very well ... we need to know very well what the reading says in order to comment.... we must listen why and how so that we can do [the word of God]. ... Then this is how it is, the word of God.

–––––––––– 26 Tzotzil. ilel, rendered by Spanish actitud, can also be Sp. ver = to see. 27 The Tzotzil lekil xanbal = “good work” can also “good way;” also, xanbal = to walk, essential to peasant labor in the highlands. 28 FT 8.IX.94. All citations in this section are from this transcript unless noted otherwise.

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For Magdalenero Catholics as for the homilist, the word of God is something done: “deciphered” in one domain, it is “carried out,” as they like to say, in another.29 More specifically, in each case the “work” depends on an “attitude,” as our translator puts it, the meaning so named unpacked by reference to its English semantic cousin, “dispose,” to arrange or put in order, one’s self and/or one’s world. Dispositions refer to both states of mind and states of things, but notions of habit and constraint associated with the static nominative do not cancel deliberation entailed by the predicative, as Magdaleneros themselves tacitly affirm: The message we hear is very pretty, and though it is beautiful we must understand it in two forms and interpret all that we need to realize so that we would go on learning and can work in the surroundings in the coming days, we must think each day as it is said, not each year (FT 8.IX.94; emphasis added).

Here “two forms” restates Luke: “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:43). The homiletic exegete further appropriates the juxtaposition in the text to advance re-appropriation of context. Magdaleneros are to dispose themselves (“interpret ... realize ... and go on learning”) toward (re)ordering their world (“work in their surroundings”).30 The seemingly odd temporal addition – “in the coming days ... each day ... not each year” – urges the community to continually decide for conversion and hence reflexively deepen the disposition it entails. Just so, to periodic interruptions of production to honor tradition’s yearly fiesta round, la palabra de Dios adds daily gatherings closing one day’s labor and announcing the next. In this way, la palabra de Dios synchronizes ritual to agricultural rhythm, and the other way round, disposing peasant and land alike to recognize(d) production: Everyone here, yes we listen to the commandment, that’s fine. But it’s better that we believe and obey ... in the material ... not to lose heart, for everyone has to think in what form he has to make an effort ... in working all that can grow in cultivated fields [vosilalike/los terrenos].

With this injunction, the catechist tacitly reminds that in the current socioeconomic conjuncture land traditionally ordered to the demands of subsis–––––––––– 29 The Spanish cumplir = carry out, fufill relative to a promise. For Magdaleneros, to call someone “muy cumplido” is high praise. 30 The distinction between “forms” or categories of the “strange power” in the Word notably arised in reference to gender differences: “Women also have power from God, but in the form of thinking, of listening....” (FT 12.XII.93).

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tence and costumbre, that is, cultivated exclusively for milpa and sugar cane, calls for calculation – “each one has to think” – suiting coffee and other cash crops.31 Indeed, the globalizing turn “in the material” of highland Tzotzil life rewards the kind of intellectual acuity, considered judgment, and personal vigilance stimulated and nurtured by the structured dialogues of frequent liturgical celebration. Their regularity effectively ties ritual work to everyday production through yet another striking result of Catholic ritual innovation as communal dialogue shaping celebration in templo and ermita inevitably continues afterward. Sometimes around the altar itself but always spilling out of the worship space, following nearly every liturgy la palabra de Dios shifts in focus (scriptural to agricultural), tone (hesitant to eager), number and gender (exclusively male), but not in the participants’ alert and searching disposition. Temporally enforced by daily ritual gatherings, the logic of this disposition is spatially manifest, in the first instance, by the altogether public character of these post-ritual conversations. Costumbre’s public gatherings in church and/or plaza are limited to obligatory ritual events or community-wide assemblies. But every day in the post-ritual twilight, Catholic peasants in Magdalenas bodily carve informal mini-plazas from the otherwise unoccupied environs of the church. There they trade agricultural concerns – emphatically legitimated by la palabra de Dios – along with stories, jokes, and gossip. Catholics emerge from their common prayer eager to discuss markets and middle-men; fertilizers, prices and transport. Most importantly, they seize the opportunity to solicit and/or offer help with field labor and, in the case of cooperative holdings, jointly plan the next day’s work. In short, these consultations perform the exhortation “think well.” Put another way, more than inviting cognitive operations as such, “think well” invokes the disposition inculcated by both exegetic ritual and post-ritual verbal exchange interstitially located between church and field, domestic and civic space, one day’s labor just ended and the next’s anticipated. Indexing disposition, this homology between body, space-time, and discourse realizes (in the strict sense) the new religious community’s reconstructed local theology. Both ritual and agricultural work by Catholic Magdaleneros elude the governance of tradition’s civic-religious authorities; neither one nor the other renders obligatory and, for these converts, alienating service to the saint(s). –––––––––– 31 Small producers of coffee must reckon with the three-year interval between planting and commercially viable crop; consider costs and benefits of investment in coffee’s techniques and technology; and negotiate a boom-and-bust global market through brokers known and unknown. Those cultivating beans certified organic for the global market face further startup costs.

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In fact, the exercise of agency in conversion to what they call “religion” effectively transformed mythical mediating patrons into historical companion exemplars. Ipso facto, their socio-political liberation from obligatory cargo frees Catholics from costumbre’s formulaic relations with the divine. In keeping with the saints’ demotion from divine to human status, postritual Catholic socio-cultural geometry entails the worldliness and historicity in the catechists’ incantation: “hay un solo Dios – there’s only one God.” To paraphrase the deacon Elias, if God is one and everywhere the same, and if work is God’s gift, then “everything matters.” The always-unfinished tasks and uncertain outcomes of everyday life and production, no longer subject to the fickle favor of the saints, demand the reverse of God’s gift, that is, deliberate reflection. Catholic celebration of la palabra de Dios performs this theology, not least by continually urging Magdalenero attention (“interpret ... realize ... go on learning”) and critical (re)construction of their world in all its pressing immediacy (“in the surroundings in the coming days”). With a correlative moral move, the catechists liberate the sacred from its confinement by costumbre to prescribed times and places, rhetorical forms and ritual substances by assimilating themselves to the apostles (and other biblical persons) and la palabra de Dios to the early Christian communities. Catechist retrojective identification ascribes to their “first fathers and moth32 ers” in “religion” (FT 4.IV.94, 8.IV.94) virtues and values perennially advantageous to peasants and so theologically re-invent them. Exalted in this way, peasant labor mediates the power of God.

–––––––––– 32 The ancestors in Magdalenero Tzotzil are ba’yi jtotik, jmetik = literally, “our first fathers mothers.”

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Chapter Six

Decolonizing the Saints From Myth to History

Introduction Post-ritual Catholic socio-cultural geometry entails the worldliness and historicity in the Tzotzil catechists’ declaration: “hay un solo Dios – there’s only one God.” Their frequent repetition of this fundamental article of faith epitomizes the dethronement of costumbre and its deified patron saints with the coming of the Word of God to Magdalenas. Saint cults originated among Mexico’s highland Maya, as they did throughout Latin America, with the Conquest. Christian saints themselves were imported and imposed by Spanish clerics who also organized the cofradías, indigenous brotherhoods, to serve the saints and, not incidentally, provide maintenance for the priests who presided over fiesta masses and 1 other rites in their honor. In Magdalenas, as elsewhere, cofradías became entire villages which understood their well-being to depend on the favor of what they regarded (and divinized) as patron saints (Farriss 1984: 266). Interpretation of traditional Maya relationship to patron saints benefits from Peter Brown’s brilliant attribution of the rise of saints’ cults in early Christianity to a shift in religious imagination “congruent to” changes in social relations in late-antiquity (Brown 1981: 21). For the ancients, the protection afforded by gods, personal daimons, geniuses, and guardian angels – “invisible companions” descending from God to man along neoPlatonism’s intimately-linked chain of being – lay in “the shimmering presence of their bodiless power.” As fixed and dependable as the stars, they served as emblems of “the tranquil structure of the universe” (ibid.: 51-57). Christian baptism erased this influence on ancient personality by offering, instead, human protectors sanctified by martyrdom. Each of these saints presented a bridge with a visage over the “cliff face” of heavenly beings that separated human and divine in the ancient world (61). For Brown, this new link bestowed the sense of intimacy with divine protectors anxious ancients –––––––––– 1

The extent of missionary extraction of Indian resources via the cofradías is variously interpreted. Farriss argues, “we should not exaggerate” the income clergy acquired through essentially Maya institutions” (1984: 326). But Wasserstrom nearly reduces cofradías to instruments of clerical greed (1975: 27-28,71-74).

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craved. The Christian saints enjoyed the immense advantage of being “eminently intelligible ... in terms of those human relationships which late-Roman society had been most skilled at articulating,” namely, patron-client relationships (62). The salient point: For patronage and friendship derived their appeal from a proven ability to render malleable seemingly inexorable processes and to bridge with the warm breath of friendship the great distances of the late-Roman social world.... (65)

Thus, Brown suggests that the cult of the saints coheres with distant colonists’ reliance on personal patrons in Rome. For early Christians, sites associated with saints’ relics and tombs came to be holy places. In this way, the protection of individual interests in the Empire via particular Roman patrons was transferred for Christians from the (merely) private sphere to shared, public spaces (Brown 1981: passim). In early modern Spain, the birthplace of the adventurers who conquered the Maya, the transference of saint patronage from individual to corporate entities anchored the florescence of popular religiosity in peasant localities burdened with the demands of Spanish imperial pursuits. According to the principal study of this phenomenon (Christian 1981), in the later middle ages lay devotion escaped ecclesiastical control as it was redirected from relics guarded by bishops, abbots, and pastors in cathedrals, monasteries and parish churches to mobile saint images (ibid.: 20-21). The resulting sacralization of peripheral places inevitably challenged hierarchical control in the religious sphere as it bolstered socio-political localism. Ironically, Spanish priests who barely tolerated local saint cults in the parishes to which they were assigned remained profoundly attached to the saints beloved in their home villages (ibid). Thus they carried saint patrons with them as missionaries to Mexico’s Maya highland pueblos. Colonial constructions The ancient Maya, too, counted on intermediary divine beings for protection. They are the lesser gods of costumbre today and, according to Vogt, visualized as ancestors (Vogt 1976: 16). These “protecting gods – totilme7iletik, mothers and fathers – became assimilated to the Catholic saints in the highlands (Holland 1963: 110). Their traditional powers and purpose can be 2 discerned in indigenous understanding of cargo as “service to the saints.” –––––––––– 2

At the first cargo level, the mayordomo’s responsibility for clothing the village patron is, in this respect, as important as the alferez’s duty to sponsor the fiesta honoring her; both required ritual offerings – candles, pox or soft drinks, and incense.

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The ambiguities inhering in colonial “assimilation” of Christian saints to Maya gods and costumbre’s “service” to them invite interpretation that shows why and how contemporary catechists’ reject both. Missionaries accompanying conquistadores in the Maya highlands “reduced” its indigenous inhabitants to colonial settlements which they, in turn, sacralized by assigning them to saint patrons. Holding Farriss’ position that Maya understandings dominated in the ensuing “two-way exchange” with missionaries that produced costumbre, John Watanabe places saints within a trio of “historically relativized images” (as opposed to primordial essences) linking Maya to their land and to each others – saints, ancestors, 3 and earth lords (Farriss 1984: 297; Watanabe 1990: 143). Thus, the Maya collectively feast with the saints whom their forebears “encapsulated” in local churches (Watanabe 1990: 136-38),4 transforming imported images into symbols of village sociality. Further, compliance with the ways of the ancestors, especially at the village saint’s fiesta, reaffirmed the continuity of history, while appeasement of the earth lords with which they were implicitly conflated secured the stability of the cosmos. Within this interpretative frame, “cults of community” focused on the saints affirm evolving local moral norms and political sovereignty along with territorial boundaries. Reverence for the ancestors who mastered the saints by housing them perpetuates costumbre as present historical “recapitulation” of the past. Respect for the earth lords, likened both to Ladinos and the devil himself, acknowledges the enduring resistance of the world to human will. In the “ongoing reassortment” of these three symbols, the historically-alert observer can read the continuous permutations of local concern (ibid.: 144). This masterful portrayal of post-conquest traditional highland religion demonstrates Maya agency in a dialectical struggle to achieve and maintain control over a meaningful local social order. Yet local meaning and stability are profoundly constrained by the (colonial) hegemony in which they are embedded. Exemplary in this respect are the earth lords who “personify inescapable encompassment by natural as well as human realities” (ibid.). Their lingering colonial force appears in this portrait of the powerful Earth Lord Yahval Balamil in Zinacantán, Chiapas:

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4

Farriss argues that saints replaced ancient Maya tutelary gods in “a two-way exchange in which the Maya system seems to have been dominant” during the early colonial period (1984: 294-300). The notion of “encapsulation” appears in both Christian’s account of “encapsulated devotional charters” for Castilian saint cults (1981: 75) and in Vogt’s application of it to describe the ability of the Zinacanteco social system to “maintain its cultural patterns” against Aztec, Spanish, and Mexican states (1969: 582).

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He is pictured as a large, fat Ladino who possesses piles of money, herds of horses, mules, and cows, and flocks of chickens. He also controls all of the waterholes... the clouds... and all the products of the earth that Zinacantecos use.... Hence a Zinacanteco cannot use land or any of its products for any purpose, whether to grow maize in a milpa or to construct a new house, without compensating the Earth Lord with appropriate ceremonies and offerings (Vogt 1969: 383).

A portrait of earth lords called witz in Chimbal, Guatemala5 is remarkably similar: ...witz brood inside solitary mountaintops, intervening in local life only when they, not Chimaltecos, please, impervious to the moral suasion of reciprocity. Consequently, witz become Ladinos not necessarily because Ladinos are naturally evil, but because, like Ladino strangers, witz dwell outside the community, indifferent – if not actually inimical – to the local sociality of Chimalteco life (Watanabe 1998a: 142).

Equally notable, the affiliations of the earth lords in both places extend in the opposite direction as ancestors, original claimants of communal lands, are variously associated with them. Chimalteco ancestors share with witz regenerative natural power (ibid.), while the typical Zincanteco ancestor, like the Yahval Balamil, lives in the mountains in a well-supplied “house like a Ladino house” (Vogt 1974: 384). Precisely these ancestors, ambiguously situated in equally intractable natural and ethnic spheres, created costumbre by “capturing” resistant saints in the wild in Guatemala (Watanabe 1998a: 137-38). Yet, the saints themselves remain “willful,” “egoistic,” and “notably lacking in Christian virtues,” eluding definitive Maya socialization (ibid.: 138; Farriss 1984: 324). At each annual patron fiesta in highland Maya communities, mayordomos fulfill their cargo by placing a new layer of the local woven traje (village dress) on the plaster image of the saint. But the problematic result of their original “capture” is visibly manifest in the failure of ritual re-clothing to disguise their pale and finely chiseled European visages. What is more, their unreliability as protectors imposes a regime of propitiation for their favor, the numerous obligations of fiesta sponsorship the most onerous among them. Every cargo on their behalf is, literally, “burden” (Farriss 1984: 348), including, of course, the need to bear the saints on their excursions out of the church at fiesta – just as, in the Chiapas highlands, Maya cargo-bearers from –––––––––– 5

Chiapas was part of Guatemala until its legislature voted to join Mexico in 1824, soon after Independence.

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the earliest colonial days bore every form of ladino load, including ladino notables themselves.6 A linguistic note precisely situates the patron saints of costumbre within the nexus of colonial power relations. In San Andrés, the patron saint “owns” the church (Holland 1997: 83) by conceptual analogy with Kajvaltik/Nuestro Dueno, “Our Owner,” a cosmological composite of Nuestro Santo Padre (the sun/masculine) and Nuestro Santo Madre (the moon/feminine), the creator and conserver of life (Ochai 1985: 50; Gossen 1974:30-31; 322-333). In the neighboring settlements of San Andrés, Santa Maria Magdalenas, and Santa Marta, nearly identical myths explain the origin of each community’s respective location through a common pattern that legitimates, for costumbre, the communal patron’s claim to the title, Nuestro Dueno. Thus, as Magdaleneros tell the tale, their virgin patron set out in search of a place to live and, after finding several sites wanting – too windy, rainy, rocky, small, insect-ridden, etc. – settled on an ideal spot. Then, at her behest, logs moved like snakes and stones traveled like sheep to be cemented with whites from gigantic eggs by the prodigiously-skilled ancestors who constructed the templo at the center of the community. In short, the saint became the village founder by selecting its territory as her preferred homestead, and then domesticating nature and securing indigenous labor to construct the dwelling it thus 7 “owns” (FN 13.XI.93) The saint herself founds Magdalenas, while Chimaltecos entice, or better force, their saint’s collaboration in establishing their village. Maya initiative in the second case nonetheless proves to be as profoundly attenuated as it is in the first. Indeed, the saint’s “captivity” implies its potential “escape,”8 just as the permanent possibility of its vengeance requires preventive propitiation.9 In Chiapas, the ritual form of this regime of obligation became dialectically transmuted into the material fact of tacit indenture, as Maya labor in ladino enterprises financed the expenses of fiesta and other cargo costs. Thus, the saint’s “ownership” of Maya community as its patron in the cosmic sphere mirrors ladino “ownership” of Maya labor in the economic sphere.

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7 8

9

Stunning images of Indians bearing Ladinos on their backs populate Mexican iconography. Maya cargo-bearing, among the earliest forms of indigenous labor for the Spanish, “boomed” with foreign investment the 1880s and 1890s (Rus 2003: 260). An identical pattern shapes the foundation narratives for San Andrés (Ochai 1985: 53-58). Santiago twice escaped “capture” and required great Chimalteco exertions to bear weight the resisting saint deliberately added before finally housed in Chimbal (Watanabe 1998a:13538). “[E]goistic saints” require constant feeding and “ongoing obeisance” to forestall their wrath against transgression – “usually some real or supposed ritual neglect” (ibid.: 137).

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Ritual “service to the saints – beginning with church construction under order of Spanish friars – inexorably demanded agricultural service to ladino fincas. ‘Inexorability,’ as Brown argues, was a defining characteristic of social experience in late antiquity, the rise of the patronus explained by the urgent need “to render inexorable processes more malleable” (Brown 1981: 65). Whether a peasant in an actual colony or simply one of the mass in the growing cities of the late Empire, the average Roman confronted vast socioeconomic and geographic distances. Their vastness figured “inexorability” 10 materialized by taxation that was impossible to negotiate except through the favor of a patron (ibid.). Whereas Brown links patronage to friendship, arguing that patron and client might possibly share residence in the same locality, the undisguisable “foreignness” of the saints obviated such friendship between patron saint and community in the modern Maya highlands. In historical fact, Dominican missionaries imported Mary Magdalen into pre-conquest Tanjoveltik when they reduced surrounding Tzotzil settlements to this site. The colonial style of her current “home” attests to their oversight on construction of the original 11 church there (Calnek 1961: 25). She remains one of many “decidedly local Maya personages” that is, (merely) figuratively, rather than actually, Maya persons (Watanabe 1998a:137, emphasis added).12 Thus she is unable to elicit any but “standardized” (J. Nash 1970: 207) devotion, according to “the law of costumbre” whose observation is “utterly impersonal” (Reina 1966: 163). In this respect the exactions of costumbre mirror the extractions of colonialism, the one as much as the other “inexorable processes” ultimately directed by foreigners. In socio-political order as in ritual practice, the obligation characterizing costumbre mystifies its articulation with ladino domination, just as the imported image constrains indigenous cognition. Indeed, the icon’s foreign origins – figured by undiguisably European features – obscures its intelligibility. In short, the communal patron finally remains an implacable divinity imposing a propitiatory regime profoundly alienating in both cognitive and social effect. Local saint cults in Spain, as Christian explains, emerged with a shift in religious “technology,” so to speak, that allowed their transfer to Spanish –––––––––– 10 “[The land tax] was inflexible and thoroughly ill-distributed. Nothing shows more clearly the ineluctable victory of the twin unseen enemies of the Roman Empire – time and distance” (Brown 1971: 36). th 11 A diocesan archivist thinks the convent shows remants of 16 century construction; Magdath leneros believe the bell tower was re-constructed sometime in the late 19 century (FN 10.X.94). 12 In Chimbal, ritual celebration “presents Santiago as an active participant in... these devotions,” and “Santiago has thus come to ... belong in the community like any Chimalteco,” according to Watanabe (ibid.). But Chimalteco presentation of Santiago obviates the saint’s true belonging

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colonies. The replacement of stationary relics by portable images as devotional media altered the geography of the sacred in Spain as in its conquered lands, but according to reversed socio-political coordinates. Whereas in Spain saint images propelled popular religiosity beyond hierarchical socio-religious control, in the Maya highlands they subjected indigenous devotion to costumbre’s colonial inversions. In Spain peripheral communities proclaimed local autonomy under the aegis of saints whose images they possessed. Maya communities, on the other hand, served patron saints who “owned” their church and thus, by dint of ritual obligation, possessed them: “...the Virgin and the patron saint were viewed as proprietors of a manor, whose manor house was the church ( Farriss 1984: 311). As Brown shows, for antique Christians sainted martyrs worked to ameliorate inexorability in the cosmos just as Roman patrons did in politicaleconomy. But, in the Maya highlands, saint images came with missionary reduction, the spatial expression of colonial encompassment that also forced native cultural-religious in(tro)version. Reduction, of course, restricted Maya mobility. But religious legitimation of mission’s geographic boundaries further entailed disabling linguistic limits. Farriss describes how the Yucatec Maya Christian saints (“carved and painted in the pure European style”) were simply “deposited in the village churches,” stripped, so to speak, of life histories, personalities or other 13 hagiographic detail. Utterly objectified in the strict sense, saints could be no more than idols, unintelligible forms without substance. In effect, missionary “deposit” of statues and other images in local colonial churches was strategically coherent, as well as contemporaneous, with near-total destruction of Maya codices and the gradual disappearance of their literate priest interpreters at temple sites (Farriss 1984: 310-313).14 In this way, colonial mission deliberately disjoined the Maya from their history while inviting them into Christian history via indecipherable alien images. Its perverse accomplishment was a general decline in indigenous literacy, and thus the loss of a crucial resource of Maya social-cultural, as well as political, power (Farriss 1984: 313).

–––––––––– 13 “Although through the centuries silver halos, silk robes and canopies, and other local adornments were added...none of the later embellishments reveals any influence of local styles or visual symbolism” (Farriss 1984: 310). 14 Spanish missionaries disallowed Maya literacy in multiple ways. Moreover, the introduction of saints as much as the destruction of codices dismissed native intelligence as well as history.

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Catechist Decolonication of Costumbre’s Patron Saints Traced backward in this way to costumbre’s colonial origins and to cargo’s modern link to ladino economy, catechist critique of costumbre becomes more than simple rejection of Maya tradition. In actual effect, it mobilized Maya agency. An historian celebrates Maya “innovation” in the oral tradition that replaced written texts as carriers of sacred lore in the colonial period, resulting in a “creative synthesis” of Maya and Christian religious form (Farriss 1984: 313-318). An anthropologist insists that costumbre does not deserve dismissal as mere false consciousness (Watanabe 1998a:131). Yet, admission of the saints’ persistent rebelliousness15 is altogether congruent with the religious motive ascribed to three major historicallydocumented Maya uprisings, in 1610, 1712, and 1868, “to assert control over the new cult rather than reject it” (Farriss 1984: 318). Alliance between ecclesial and political highland elites consigned these attempts to the long list of indigenous utopian adventures suppressed by military force.16 Precisely the “utopian” failure of these revolts begs the questions: how was it that Maya indigenous sought “control” over a “creative synthesis” that was a product of their own “innovation”? Could indigenous “control” in the religious sphere be achieved by replacement of ladino by indigenous priests as guardians of a “cult” whose underlying premise, patronage, legitimated the various forms of alienation imposition of the saints entailed? Contemporary Maya Catholic catechists in Magdalenas, and elsewhere in the Diocese of San Cristóbal, respond in the negative by re-placing the cult itself in more than one sense. Initiates in biblical and actual Christian history, catechists recognize the saints as human beings inhabiting the intelligible past rather than quasi-divine “others” fixed in opaque mystifications. They know patron saint icons in village churches to be human representations, not divine presences. In other words, catechists have historically deconstructed the saints with the instruments of literacy and their own mobility. They have (re)placed them in the past as companions and followers of Jesus of Nazareth. In short, Catholic Magdalenros have come to know the saints as historical models inviting emulation rather than mythic intercessors demanding service. –––––––––– 15 “[V]illagers punishing the saint to make it ‘behave’ properly” and distinguishes the Maya’s “more willful and worldly saints” from their Castilian versions (Watanabe 1998a: 138). 16 In 1610, two Maya in the Yucatec Tipu region proclaimed themselves pope and bishop and ordained their own clergy. (Farris: 318). During the 1712 Tzeltal Revolt, Maya indigenous similarly assumed the rights of clergy. The 1868-70 “Caste War” is also sometimes called “Cuscat’s Rebellion” after the self-proclaimed priest, Pedro Díaz Cuscat, who led it (Bricker 1983, Rus 1983, Garcia de León 1984).

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Catechist displacement of local myths with biblical history is of a piece with recognition of their fathers’ misrecognition in the matter of cargo. Indeed, by constructing their ecclesial cargo to serve a new religious community, catechists engage an historical social reality made intelligible by their new mode of insertion in it. For Magalenero catechists, patrons are unnecessary to enter and make “malleable” the world of power relations no longer distant, or “filled with inexorable processes.” Rather, to these newly-literate and increasinglymobile men, this world appears negotiable and near. For them the world, like themselves and their community. is amenable to transformation through the Word of God. Gathered in the church convent a month after Mary Magdalen’s fiesta, the catechists “prepared” the Word of God they would “celebrate” at the next day’s communion celebration. They moved together between Spanish and Tzotzil, laboring over the scripture texts, wresting meanings from sometimesunfamiliar words, devising strategies to “explain” them to Magdaleneros who would gather in the templo after returning from their milpa and cafetales in the late afternoon. When asked about their task as catechists, they responded: “We are responsible for encouraging and explaining to the people, like the apostles; encourage them so they don’t quit, but move ahead” (FN 26.VIII.93 emphasis added). So they marvel at Mary Magdalene who, they know from reading the gospels, accompanied Jesus in his ministry and announced his resurrection to the other apostles: ella se cumplió, they say – she carried out the word given to her. Today, the catechists leave others to carry the icon of the virgin during fiesta processions, charging themselves instead “to carry out” the word as Mary Magdalene did, to be apostles (and saints) themselves. The antique Christian saint’s bodily relic conferred sacrality on its resident place. These Tzotzil Maya catechists and the socio-religious body they sacralize themselves by laboring for their (reclaimed) territory. For the ritual repetitions mimicking the (relative) social homeostasis maintained by the 17 (oral) cult of colonial saints, they substitute dialogical exegesis of the Word of God to “animar la gente para que ... se avanza – to encourage the people so they move ahead.” –––––––––– 17

“[L]anguage is developed in intimate association with the experience of the community, and it is learned by the individual in face-to-face contact with other members. What continues to be of social relevance is stored in the memory ...language – primarily vocabulary – is the effective medium of this crucial process of social digestion and elimination ... analogous to the homeostatic organization of the human body” (Goody and Watt 1963: 30-31). Of course, homeostasis requires change: “the ‘choice’ in traditional societies is not between verbatim reproduction and distortion, but between constant re-arrangement and oblivion” (Boyer 1987: 60-62).

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Thus cult yields to homily as privileged religious practice in so far as the intrinsically mobile and intellectually-digestible word, as opposed to the stationary relic or the transportable image, animates the social body to produce, and precisely thus sacralize, its place. Scrupulous care for the image of the patron Mary Magdalene – washing, clothing, censing, carrying, and in general guarding her icon against any form of violation – figures the anxiety of costumbre’s cargo holders’ about ancestral place not finally theirs. Just so, the catechists’ disinterest in these rites signals insistence on making this place wholly their own. For them, the saint is no longer the inanimate “owner” to be served but the living apostle anyone can become by carrying out (cumplir) the Word and producing on their land, that is, “moving ahead” (avanzar). Fiesta, then, becomes a matter of celebrating the Word, working it through, with, and thus into the social body that, not incidentally, calls itself “la palabra de Dios – the Word of God.” In short, they have traded the periodic fiesta processions of the saint around the village for their own bi-weekly celebrations, imitating rather than indulging the apostles Jesus chose, the original Christian saints.

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Chapter Seven

Epilogue Doing What the Apostles Did

Mary of Nazareth is for Catholics the virgin mother of God. Magdalenero Catholics recognize and revere Mary as such, explicitly acknowledging the role of the Holy Spirit in her conception of the child Jesus. Yet their account of Mary’s “visitation” to her cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-48) attends to this doctrinal point only in passing. Instead, it embellishes what they regard as her apostolic initiative, or “work.” Thus, with typical exegetical freedom, a catechist began by motivating Mary’s visit to Elizabeth: It wasn’t just that they loved each other. No, they weren’t just wasting time in vain, no. Their work/yabtelik received power/yipal from God. So it was that the child grew with the help of the Holy Spirit. They [Mary and Elizabeth] raised and cared for the little child .... women who came together. ... But she [Mary] became the mother of the savior... They carried out the Word of our Lord Jesus Christ. They carried out the Word of our Father God (FT 12.XII.93).

Here kinship’s affective tie matters most for its (re)productive potential. That the two cousins jointly raised “the little child” adds a novelty to the narrative unwarranted by the text but resonant with household alliances among the Tzotzil, most common among kin though rarely extending to shared childrearing except in the case of orphans. Insistence that “they carried out the word” together, the more telling point, celebrates the practice of collective labor revitalized by the catechists. This exegetical move affirms work by women just as it promotes sisterly solidarity, in keeping with the catechist conviction that liberation means gender equality and, in traditionally patriarchal Maya society, raising the status of women.1

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Catechist promotion of Maya Catholic women owes much to the women religious and lay pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas (Kovic 2003).

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Venturing further beyond normative Catholic exegesis of the text,2 the catechist theologically joined and elevated words frequently associated in Magdalenero Catholic discourse – abtel = work and ju’el = power. ‘Work’ acquires soteriological significance with his assertion that Mary unreservedly “carried out” (xchu’unbeik/spas/ta pasel = cumplir)3 God’s word – she did her “work” – and just so “became the mother of the savior.” Catholic teaching, of course, regards conception of Jesus as God’s, not Mary’s, “work.” The catechist, inattentive to this doctrinal distinction, contradicted Catholic dogma concerning Mary’s own sinless or “immaculate” conception as well. He asserts, instead, “when she [Mary] conceived the child...she quit doing bad things...all kinds of sin.” In one case as much as the other, concern for orthopraxis eclipses attention to orthodoxy. Thus, the homilist pursued a dialectic of material context and divine design that pivots on “effort,” a notion the catechists privilege: She did everything with greatness of effort .... She obeyed with great effort in [her] work, our mother Mary.... But for us now, for all men and women, for all youth, this is our work (kabteltik) ... such as we learn from her we must it carry out. We are like her.

In this way, Magdalenero local theology shifts Marian devotion from its traditional Roman Catholic focus – Mary’s unique ontological status as sinlessly-conceived mother of God – to her richly imagined moral life. While clearly asserting “she is the mother of the redeemer,” the catechist expands Mary’s exemplary history, only barely sketched by the gospel writers, to include among her “great works” scripturally unattested conversion (“she quit doing bad things”); care for neighbors as well as kin (“she supported her companions/xchi’iltak”); and, not least, apostolic preaching: ...she also exhorted all men and women. She exhorted women of that time to take good models. She explained everything that is right before God. This is what our mother Mary did.

The logic of identification driving these textual interpolations makes Mary the preeminent model Catholic Magdaleneros. Because “we are like her/

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Elizabeth’s address to Mary as “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43) evinces “Mary’s divine motherhood” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #495. Tzotzil ch’unbeik = obey, pas = do, make, pasele = create; Spanish cumplir = carry out, fulfill for the translator of this study.

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no’ox jechotik je’uk,” we can live “just as” she lived. 4 Mary became the mother of God through her “immense obedience,” manifest in her “grand work(s) – muk’tik abtel;” and so, “we must make the effort to increase our faith like Mary, to believe in the way Mary did.” This imperative, warranted by narrative imagination rather than categorical thought, gives rise to contextually apt moral directives: We must quit everything bad, even in the small things here on earth ... drinking alcohol, scolding each other, mistreatment between men and women ... jealousy and hatred ... slander.

Power to overcome these vices is accessible by persistent appeal to Mary herself: ... at dawn, at noon, in the evening, let us ask our holy mother Mary to give us more of her power (s’juel) to be able to do good works just as she did when she was in the world.

Identification with Mary and appeal to her arise alike from highly realistic reading of la palabra de Dios. The “plain sense” of Christian scripture privileged in Magdalenero exegetical practice invites free back-and-forth movement between the biblical world and their own.5 Just so, the catechist’s disclaimer – “we can’t know how great Mary is ... we can’t compare it to what we are doing now, it’s not the same” – signals precisely the opposite in practice. Magdaleneros navigate the hermeneutic passage on a raft of imaginative realism to place themselves alongside Mary: “she did everything that was important... she obeyed with all her power in work.... But for us now, for all women and men, this is our work...” –––––––––– 4

5

In other iterations, “we are like the virgin -- jo’otik xk’exolotik ti jme’tike;” and “all women are like our mother Mary -- antzetik xkaltike xk’exol jemetic Maria.” The homily is replete with moral injunctions to act “just as” Mary did. Hans Frei calls attention to “the wide, though ... not unanimous, traditional consensus among Christians in the West on the primacy of the literal reading of the Bible” (Frei 1986: 36): Privileging the “plain sense” of scripture, Frei argued “...the most fateful issue for Christian self-description is ...regaining its autonomous vocation as a religion, after its defeat in its secondary vocation of providing ideological coherence ... to Western culture” (ibid.: 74). Also, “[I] dentifying the plain sense of scripture with a narrative leaves open – better forces open – the material specifications of a distinctively Christian way of life.... [it] involves the constructive process of continually reinitiating a Christian self-understanding by imaginatively repositioning the particulars of one’s own life within a story” (Tanner 1987: 74-75; and Tracy 1990: 35-68).

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Ultimately, Magdalenero “exegetical ingenuity” (Tanner 1987:74) confers divine power on “Mary’s work” and, by identification, their own. The exegetical premise – Mary “carried out” God’s word, she did her “work,” and just so “became the mother of the savior” – leads to the essential postulate: “...[God] takes into account all the efforts of human beings.... We must work with all our effort, as much as we can do.” The subsistence agriculturalists’ inescapable earthly imperative – “we have to ... work while we live ... there is no rest in all of life” – finally has heavenly consequences. Mary, bearer of the 6 Word to Elizabeth and thus first apostle, “is at the side [of], near to God now” because she “carried out the Word of God” and did her “work.” Catechist insistence on Mary’s present proximity to God reveals their acquaintance with the Catholic doctrine of her bodily assumption to God’s “side.” But theological formulation of Mary’s departure from this historical world does not signal, for Magdaleneros, removal from their worldly circumstance. Rather, the imaginative realism that elicits identification with her makes the “assumed” Mary all the more accessible to them. When the first homilist ceded to a “complementing” second to preach on Luke’s visitation text, he responded first to requests for clarification of narrative detail. Mary went “to her aunt’s house” when Elizabeth was in her “sixth month” of pregnancy. John the Baptist, “born three months later,” did not die of illness but was “assassinated ... a soldier carried his head on a 7 plate.” Joseph, “a carpenter who worked with a saw,” lived in “Bethlehem,” where Jesus “was born” and Mary “nursed him.” The child grew up in “Nazareth.” In the midst of this graphic embellishment of gospel details, the catechist, unable to say exactly how long Mary lived after Jesus, nonetheless positively affirmed, Our mother Mary didn’t die in this world ... living she went [to heaven]... Now we have said many times about Mary that she is in heaven. This means that there is a woman alive there in heaven... She was carried [to heaven] by our great God.

This assertion went unquestioned by interlocutors eager for historical particulars yet oddly incurious about an apparently supernatural intervention. But –––––––––– 6 7

The Acts of the Apostles puts Mary among them at Pentecost (Acts 1:14) and artistic portraits of Pentecost do the same. This striking portion of homiletic dialogue unmistakably recalls everyday life in Magdalenas: Homilist: – “His [the Baptist’s] head was on a plate. Assembly: – Ohhhh. H.: – So John the Baptist died, he wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t under the blankets when they killed him, it wasn’t because of fever or cough, it wasn’t because of vomiting or diarrhea, no brothers and sisters” (cf. Mark 6-27-28). Also, in Luke, Elizabeth is simply Mary’s “kinswoman” or relative.

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this oddity fits the reorientation of Magdalenero “theological imagination” from the fickle power of local saint-deities demanding propitiation towards the ever-present power of the one universal God discernible in human work. This local theological frame, cemented in conversion’s conjuncture, accounts for the way Magdaleneros, homilist(s) and assembly alike, embed the supernatural in the historical. Indeed, the thesis guiding this homily in its entirety arises from it. As Catholic Magdalenas understands it, Mary’s present bodily existence in heaven – “there is a woman alive there in heaven” – confirms the essential truth of her bodily life on earth: “[her] work received power from God.” Magdaleneros bury their dead and understand Mary to be an exception to the rule of human mortality. To emphasize the privilege of her assumption in this instance, the catechist noted that Elizabeth and Joseph are “souls,” not living bodies, in heaven. The one “woman living there in heaven” is Mary, premier apostle, who “did everything under the power of God, she carried out her work with all her effort.” The actual conditions of Mary’s life “in heaven” remain undescribed, nor do Magdaleneros express any interest in them. Neither do they picnic at gravesites or set food out in their homes for returning souls, rites widely practiced in other parts of Mexico on the Day(s) of the Dead (Carmichael and Sayer 1991). The catechists explain that the dead have no reason to return: God gives them rest and satisfaction in heaven, so they aren’t hungry, and if they’re in hell, they can’t get out. We know this from the Bible. We saw that food rotted, flies swarmed all over it when we left it out for two days [for the Days of the Dead] – so we decided we should just eat our food (FN 14.X.93). 8

In keeping with this highly pragmatic deconstruction, though Mary, unlike other souls, has a body, she has no bodily needs as she enjoys the “rest and satisfaction” of heavenly existence. In other words, the biological implications of Mary’s bodily life in heaven is of less interest to Magdaleneros than its biographical iconicity. For these converted peasants, the body in heavenly existence figures the salvific in human effort here on earth. Mary’s body “living there in heaven” at once facilitates and motivates identification with her – “we are like her” – precisely in terms of work. “She carried out her work with all her effort ... this is our work.”

–––––––––– 8

I learned this while questioning catechist as the Catholic community butchered two bulls for the feast in October, 1993. Using a scale and a calculator, community leaders allotted each family a measure of meat according to its size.

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So, the homilist suggests, We have the liberty to choose ... to put ourselves to think about all our works and deeds ... So we can take into account how the virgin Mary is in the glory of God ... together with the son of the father in heaven who also gives his blessing to us ... he sends us his spirit, he is in us every day, every night.

Belief in the one God’s enduring availability – “in us every day, every night” – directed Magdalenero Catholics’ to include recourse to Mary in their revision of ritual practice: “At dawn, at noon, in the evening, let us ask our holy mother Mary to give us more of her power (sjuel) ....,” above all to do good work(s). Here rhythmic cues – day and night; morning, noon and evening – rhetorically signal the critical religious point. For the catechists, Mary’s (scripturally unmentioned) turn from vice to virtue, like their own, is something other than simple exhibit of “works righteousness,” narrowly conceived. Rather, the power they seek from her – sjuel – is a “kind of political power or 9 authority, to be able to do things,” on their own initiative as authoritative agents of their everyday lives. Particularly manifest in the initiative Mary displays in their homiletic portrait, this same power – sjuel – made her mother of God, according to the catechist. Magdalenero reading of Mary’s visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth, culminates with the exhortation to “take into account how the virgin Mary is in the glory of God.” Working through the gospel narrative, la palabra de Dios identifies with Mary’s life as labor, and so authorize their own.10 Put another way, the Catholic community’s identification with the woman “living there in heaven” denies costumbre’s divinization of her icon, residing in the pueblo’s templo and requiring its worship. Instead, catechists divinize her apostolic effort and assimilate their everyday peasant labor to it, glorifying its satisfactions and its exertions alike. As one of them explained, visits to San Cristóbal de Las Casas leave him irritated: he takes greatest pleasure in a strenuous day’s work with machete and hoe, sweating in the strong highland sun (FN 20.VI.97). Through their exegetical labor the catechists make such “good work” resemble Mary’s, and so make themselves “like the apostles” (26.VIII.93). With this ascription, they at once authorize their new place on ancestral land and render their cultivation of it salvific. –––––––––– 9

According to linguist John Beard Haviland on the Tzotzil root form ju (personal communication). 10 The Tzotzil sjuel warrants this emphasis on authorization, as opposed to legitimation.

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Conclusion: “We are Doing What the Apostles Did.” Present but invisible in the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, their expected sons, Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist, figure together in another text taken up by Magdalenero homilists. In this story the imprisoned Baptist sends disciples to ask whether Jesus “is the one to come.” Jesus replies with a litany of his miracles and then extols John to his own “twelve disciples” (Mt. 11:215). One verse particularly captured the catechists’ exegetical attention: Truly, I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. (Mt.11:11).

For the homilist in this case, John’s greatness owed first to his practice of baptizing, a (cargo) service shared by catechists. Then he noted, “Nobody has received more strength for work than John had.” Though implicit in the story, Jesus does not mention John’s baptizing. Nor does his “strength for work” appear in Matthew’s narrative. The only Hebrew prophet it names, Elijah, became for the homilist a point of comparison. No one, neither Elijah nor Moses nor any other prophet, is greater than John, he emphasized, expanding on Jesus’ esteem for the Baptist. The catechist continued: ... he who wants to believe, to learn what God in heaven wants ... can be very great. He who confronts suffering, is hungry, is thirsty, is cold ... finds the glory of God. Nobody looks well on him. But this person will possibly find salvation.

Matthew’s verse – “yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he [John]” (Mt. 11:11a) – thus prompted a portrait of highland peasant life. The homilist found the “possibility” of salvation within it through the next, more controverted saying: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force” (11:12) (FN 8.IX.93).11 As they prepared to preach this text, the catechists, like other modern translators, struggled over the meaning of “violence” and “force” (FT9.IX.93).12 The homilist concluded to an assenting assembly: –––––––––– 11 All quotations in this section are from this source unless otherwise noted. 12 “The meaning of this difficult saying is probably that the opponents of Jesus are trying to prevent people from accepting the kingdom and to snatch it away from those who have received it” (New American Bible). The Oxford Annotated NRSV has: “The violent [sic] are the eager, ardent multitudes.” Luis Alonso Schökel offers a third alternative, “Some discuss a violent proletariat among the followers of Jesus” (Biblia del peregrino: 199?).

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The reign of God, how to find it, he/it [Jesus/text] said, is making an effort.... It is the very strength of human beings. Strength, but only when I make an effort. Only so can I enter the reign of God. He came to open the way to those who make an effort....

A second, “complementing” catechist specified the desired effort with a commentary on Jesus’ conclusion: “Let anyone with ears listen!”(Mt. 11:15): We know that we have ears to hear. We have noses, we have mouths. It’s necessary that we understand the commandment because the Lord gave us our head, our ears so that we understand well the commandment of God, dear brothers. Christians, true Christians, prophets of Jesus, we must make an effort to do the good. We must be strong like John the Baptist who was concerned about changing the world. ... If we go to the cantina [to drink], it’s horrible. We must open our understanding, just as our Lord said.

As in the case of Mary and all others Magdalenero Catholics recognize as apostles, identification with John the Baptist invokes “effort” in the distinctly fungible mode that encapsulates Christian orthopraxis for them. On the one hand, la palabra de Dios – community and text – strives to “open our understanding,” a laborious undertaking for newly literate catechists, more so for the illiterate who strain to grasp their preaching.13 Such exertion is uniquely resonant within a perennially marginated peasant existence: ...we have suffered so much poverty, cold, hunger, thirst; we don’t have clothes, food, energy [yip] we live who knows how, we seem ... like a sheep without good pasture.

Surviving extreme deprivation demands “effort” of a magnitude intuitively recognizable in the Maya highlands. But with the arrival of la palabra de Dios, Magdaleneros also adopt the Baptist’s concern – “changing the world.” And, for these peasants, it is precisely la palabra de Dios itself – again, community and text – that effectively transmutes this apparently utopian desire into a realistic pursuit. As the catechist asserted, “We Christians suffer a lot, it’s necessary that we understand. We must discover what we are working for.”14 For Magdalen–––––––––– 13 On this point, an elderly woman worried that she might not go to heaven: “It’s just so hard to understand what they say in la hermita,” her daughter translated. 14 The interrogative – k’usi kabteltik – was translated in Spanish para que servimos = what good are we. The question joins the notion of purpose and “our work – ablteltik”, as in, “what are we here for, what are we working for?” In other words, what is the point of human existence?

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eros, the very formulation of this question attests to its ongoing accomplishment: la palabra de Dios amounts to prophecy and fulfillment at one and the same time in so far as the text engages peasant intellectual effort in the form of translation, reading, listening, and, implicit in all these, imaginative interpretation. In this instance, they ascribed greatness to John based on “his effort to believe in God – ti yipal ta xch’unel ti Diose,” and so exalted their own exegetical exertions to the same end. Even more, they identify this process as the singular way to the reign of God already come on earth to be fulfilled in heaven, in the Christian self-understanding Magdaleneros adopt as their own. The catechist’s theological conclusion – salvation as “strength, but only in so far as I make an effort” – is ultimately attested in Jesus: Our Lord Jesus Christ ... goes before us. So we shouldn’t think we are alone. ... Even though we don’t see him physically, he is here, men and women. If it weren’t so we wouldn’t understand anything, maybe we would throw ourselves into some abyss.

This apparently tautological affirmation of salvation epitomizes what Magdalenero Catholics call “religion.” They trust the biblical narrative of Jesus’ resurrection and promise to be “with you always” (Matt. 28:20) precisely because they “understand” it. It is not just that literacy’s intrinsic empowerment validates the biblical message of divine power. Still more, for Magdaleneros dialectical reading makes the biblical text a tool for reconstruction of their context. More precisely, in learning to “handle” the Bible, they come to re-cognize and purposefully re-position themselves in a conjuncture of socio-economic rupture. Elsewhere described as “illumination,” in this instance the catechist attributed this new situation, and their new self-consciousness in it, to the living Spirit of Jesus. Jesus, as Magdaleneros heard in his response to John’s disciples (Matt. 11:5), showed “power – sju’el – in his miracles: healing the sick, raising the paralytics, curing the mute and the blind. So, the catechist concluded, he has 15 “power – ipal” – in heaven and on earth.” From a strictly linguistic standpoint, in Tzotzil the “authority, capacity” to do things (root ju = power) is not the same as the “force, energy” required to do them (root ip = strength). Yet, in Magdalenero homiletic discourse, the terms are nearly, if not entirely, interchangeable. More to the point, they apply each of them alternately to gospel characters and to themselves. Identifying with the apostles in –––––––––– 15 Haviland explains that the root ju denotes power in a “more abstract” sense than does the root ip (see above, n. 10).

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this way, they locate and divinize “the very strength of human beings,” that is the reflexive capacity to direct and so own their own labor. In other words, as they imaginatively engage scriptural narrative, Magdalenero Catholics at once recover authority to initiate change, and strength to effect it in local political-economy. This result describes, as it derives from, the ongoing double dialectic that turns on “effort” and propels what the catechists call “working the Word.” In this religious practice, the effort of cognition demanded by la palabra de Dios, text and community, both mimics and informs the exertion intrinsic to everyday peasant labor. By ritual form and rhythm, through exegesis and identification, Magdaleneros at once construct and sacralize a new way of working the land of their ancestors in a new age of globalization. As the catechists explained: We were preaching how the apostles worked, lived. One by one people started asking how to do what the apostles did in the Acts of the Apostles 2: 43-45. ... We analyzed well how we could love one another: we have an agreement [acuerdo]. We saw people without clothes, shoes, nothing – we saw land as a way to help....(26.VIII.93)

Thus, Magdalenero catechists and the community formed with their new mode of Maya cargo rewrote the terms of exchange with both socioeconomic and sacred powers. They become indigenous apostles, religiously empowered and self-consciously determined to change the world on their own terms, in keeping with the Word of God.

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203

Index of Names

Agnew, J., 94 Alberigo, G., 52, 75 Allende, S., 76 Amaladoss, M., 19, 54 Andraos, M., 73, 94 Angrosino, M., 56 Arias, J., 39, 138, 139 Arrupe, P., 54 Aubry, A., 9 Bakhtin, M., 155, 156 Bamat, T., 54 Baum, G., 72 Becker, M., 39 Beidelman, T., 41, 87, 88, 94 Bell, B., 148 Bell, C., 71, 128, 147 Benítez, F., 30 Benjamin, T., 37, 38 Blancarte, R., 29, 58, 61, 62 Bloch, M., 147 Boulard, P., 52 Bourdieu, P., 17, 18, 19, 40, 64, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 141, 142, 143 Boyer, P., 18, 123, 179 Brading, D., 60, 65 Braun, W., 139 Bricker, V., 41, 77, 178 Brown, P., 171, 172, 176, 177 Burdick, J., 74 Burguete, A., 133 Burridge, K., 41, 87, 93 Calnek, E., 140, 176 Cámara, F., 31 Camp, R., 58, 59, 88, 89, 91, 95 Cancian, F., 31, 115, 128, 133 Cárdenas, L., 29, 32, 39, 40 Carmichael, E., 185 Carrasco, P., 31 Castillo, F., 56, 115 Castro, F., 30

Christian, Jr., W., 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 23, 37, 41, 45, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 87, 109, 125, 147, 148, 150, 160, 163, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183, 188, 189 Clifford, J., 71 Collier, G., 9, 74, 75, 115, 116, 119, 133 Comaroff, J., 18, 27, 41, 51, 88, 116 Comaroff, J.L., 18, 27, 41, 51, 88, 116 Cornelius, J., 45 Corripio Ahumada, E., 62, 91 Cortés, B., 34 Costello, G., 64 Crump, T., 34, 35 Cuscat, P., 41, 77, 178 DeWalt, B., 31 Díaz, P., 34, 116, 178 Donahue, J.R. 158 Dorr, D., 95 Dumont, L., 19, 56, 57 Duquoc, C., 72 Eber, C., 34, 35, 36 Echeverria, L., 77 Ellacuria, I., 54 Esponda, M., 38 Farriss, N., 16, 37, 41, 42, 171, 173, 174, 177, 178 Favre, H., 38 Fazio, C., 26, 28, 30, 53, 56, 91, 112 Ferguson, J., 94, 109 Fernandez, J., 157 Fiorenza, F., 102 Floyd, C., 9 Fox, V., 88 Frazer, J., 35 Frei, H., 183 Freire, P., 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 99 Fuentes, C., 58 Galilea, S., 52

204

Index of Names

Gallagher, E., 41 García de León, A., 80, 89 García Gonzalez, J., 59, 60, 62 Geertz, C., 83 Genovese, E., 45 Gómez Cruz, P., 90 Gómez Gómez, A., 143, 146 González Garrido, P., 90 Gossen, G., 175 Gramsci, A., 19, 92 Guiteras Holmes, C., 148 Gupta, A., 94, 109 Gutiérrez, G., 21, 53 Guzmán, X., 146 Harvey, N., 38, 74, 78, 115, 131, 132, 133 Havelock, E., 141, 142, 143 Haviland, J., 33, 186, 189 Hefner, R., 41 Helbig, K., 117 Hernández, J., 40, 103 Herzfeld, M., 161 Hobsbawm, E., 16 Holland, W., 148, 172, 175 Horton, R., 41 Illich, I., 64 Irarrázaval, D., 54 Irribaren Pascal, P., 76, 82 James, W., 41, 154 Jellinek, E., 35, 36 John XXIII, 52 Justin Martyr, 53 Kan, E., 66 Knight, A., 39 Komonchak, J., 52, 75 Kovic, C., 9, 90, 181 Laclau, E., 72, 139 Lafaye, J., 65 Larraín, M., 52 Las Casas, B., 9, 13, 15, 16, 20, 22, 26, 27, 34, 42, 51, 58, 63, 68, 77, 95, 96, 133, 145, 181, 186 Laughlin, R., 11, 143 Lawson, E., 17, 18, 137 Lefebvre, H., 135, 136 Levinas, E., 71

Leyva Solano, X., 75 Loaeza-Lajous, S., 58, 59, 60 Mack, B., 19, 123, 136, 157 Mallon, F., 80 Marcos, S., 73, 132 Mattiace, S., 115 Mauss, M., 33 McAllister, P., 108 McCauley, R., 18 McCutcheon, R., 139 Mendieta y Nuñez, L., 118 Meyer, J., 29, 89, 91 Mizruchi, S., 18 Modiano, N., 40 Montes, S.F., 40 Montesinos, A., 159 Moufee, C., 139 Muro González, V., 60 Murphy, T., 139 Nash, J., 17, 20, 35, 36, 176 Nash, M., 30 Nutini, H., 148 Ochai, 175 Ong, W., 17, 19, 131 Orozco, A., 28, 42, 96 Paul VI, 42, 54, 64, 87, 95, 96 Pieris, A., 56 Pineda, M., 38 Plato, 141, 142, 143 Poggi, G., 95 Pomerleau, C., 59 Prigione, G., 84, 90, 91 Rafael, V., 113 Rahner, K., 52 Rambo, L., 41, 138 Ranger, T., 16 Rappaport, R., 132, 147 Reich, P., 58 Reichel-Dolmatoff, G., 53 Reina, R., 176 Ruiz García, 9, 15, 26, 27, 29, 55, 57 Rus, D., 117 Rus, D., 9, 25, 31, 32, 74, 100, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 133, 136, 140, 143, 175, 178 Ruz, M., 115

Index of Names Sahlins, M., 19, 162 Salado, D., 64 Salinas de Gortari, C., 119 Sánchez, M., 65 Sanneh, L., 19, 45, 48 Sayer, C., 185 Schineller, P., 54 Schmidt, S., 118 Schökel, L., 187 Schreiter, R., 9, 20, 54, 72 Scott, J., 19 Seed, P., 73, 159, 160 Shorter, A., 53, 54, 87 Sigmund, P., 59 Siller, C., 63 Smith, J.Z., 9, 18, 19, 81, 84, 85, Smith, P., 60, 61, 62, 77, 118 Sobrino, J., 54 Sonnleitner, W., 77 Sperber, D., 83 Stock, B., 49, 129 Stoler, L., 109 Street, B., 47 Suess, P., 56

205

Tanner, K., 9, 19, 183, 184 Tax, S., 31 Thompson, J., 148 Todorov, T., 19, 109 Torreblanca, L., 27, 63 Tracy, D., 183 Turner, T., 157 Vasconcelos, J., 38, 60 Viquiera, J., 115 Vischer, L., 75 Vogt, E., 172, 173, 174 Warren, K., 34 Wasserstrom, R., 27, 31, 37, 38, 113, 115, 116, 137, 171 Watanabe, J., 9, 34, 36, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178 Watt, I., 19, 47, 179 Wijsen, F., 9, 20 Williams, R., 19, 67, 69, 74 Wilmsen, E., 108 Wolf, E., 31 Womack, J., 92 Woytyla, K., 62 Zedillo, E., 107