Manufacturing Identities

Race and Ethnicity in Highland Guatemala

Who is Ladino and who is indigenous in Guatemala and what qualifies one for either designation are often difficult to determine, especially because most Maya are not easily distinguished from non-Maya on the basis of phenotype alone (Smith, 1995: 723). The line between these groups is often porous, externally determined, and flexible. Intense and divisive notions of ethnic difference persist despite the national policy of indigenous assimilation (As Smith [1995: 735] points out, the Guatemalan state confers full political rights on indigenous people only if they are fully assimilated and have severed all ties with their native communities.) The definitions of “Ladino” and “indigenous” are always made in contrast to the other; they are mutually constitutive (Nelson, 1999: 7; Little-Siebold, 2001: 177).

“Ladino” is an exceptionally thorny term, not usually expressing a meaning that anyone is willing to admit. As a cultural or ethnic label, it assumes various meanings that may shift over time or across space, often depending on the particular situation and those involved. It is, however, always inextricably tied up with notions of race, class, skin color, and education and linked to social practices (Smith, 1995: 724). Regardless of how one defines “Ladino,” most scholars and indigenous Guatemalans agree that the designation greatly affects one’s status, relationships, income, and upward mobility (Hendrickson, 1995: 33). Ladinos, however categorized, have economic and social advantages over the indigenous.

At the same time, many non-Maya recognize the tenuousness of the supposed differences between themselves and indigenous people. According to Charles Hale (2006: 4), people identified as Ladino “generally have absorbed an ideology of racial superiority in relation to Indians: viewing themselves as closer to an ideal of progress, decency, and all things modern, in contrast to Indians, who are regrettably and almost irredeemably backward.” Today most Ladinos acknowledge and accept that racism is wrong and they should not tolerate it but still want to benefit from being socially and culturally superior. At the same time they criticize the Maya for not adapting and blending into society at large (Hale, 2006: 11). This recent discourse articulates the dialectic that still exists in Guatemala regarding race and undergirds a racial discourse predicated on the notion of assimilation.

Despite the current national discussion regarding ethnic equality, the Ladinos invented the costume dance as a way of underscoring social distinctions (Zamora Mejía, 2003). The dance costumes, through their emphasis on contemporary characters and original concepts of design, help perpetuate the myth that the Ladinos are contributing to national progress while the Maya are obsolete, committed to tradition and incapable of combining their outdated customs with new technology (Nelson, 1999: 298). Moreover, the Ladino performers portray the Maya, both in the dances and in real life, as continuing to develop in opposition to the dominant ideological direction of the nation (Arias, 1990: 230). The dances are fraught with the politics of difference. They subordinate Maya forms of knowledge and cultural practice to North American forms and their Ladino versions. This is an example of what Enrique Dussel (1992) calls as the “covering of the Other.” The costume dance provides Ladinos an avenue for distinguishing themselves through their consumption practices, both individually and as a group.

Persistent ideas of racial difference and indigenous racial inferiority have been implicated in the state-sponsored terrorism against Maya people of the past half-century. “The Maya” (a term used only by tour guides, archaeologists, and employees of language schools) refers to a large, abstract group and is not used in daily conversation to refer to indigenous people (Hendrickson, 1995: 31). Under the policy of indigenismo, which blamed the country’s inability to develop on its large indigenous population, the Guatemalan government waged a 30-year-long war on its own citizens. The United Nations–supported Historical Clarification Commission, which collected and published accounts of massacres, found that the majority of the victims of the documented 42,000 abuses of human rights were indigenous and concluded that the military’s actions amounted to genocide (Fisher, 2004: 81).

In spite of this and, to some extent, in reaction to it, the Maya today are revitalizing cultural forms, promoting ethnic pride, and asserting themselves in the national space (Fisher, 2004: 83). In the face of the government’s efforts to synthesize cultural diversity and eradicate indigenous contributions to society, Guatemala ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169, which requires that indigenous groups be given sovereignty over their own economic development and greater self-determination in national affairs. In 1996 the Guatemalan government and the Unidad Revolutionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (National Revolutionary Unit of Guatemala—URNG) signed an accord ending the civil war, and it included a special “Accord on the Identity and Rights of the Maya People.”

During the harshest years of the civil war, in the 1970s and 1980s, approximately 350,000 indigenous Guatemalans fled the country seeking political asylum (Warren, 1998: 52). Finding their way to the United States, Mexico, or even Europe, these refugees were some of the first transnational indigenous populations from Central America to forge new international relations. The conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize on a K’iche’ Maya woman, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, in 1992 for her work in bringing about awareness of the violence and human rights abuses against Maya people reflected international concern for indigenous rights and sparked worldwide interest in Maya society in Guatemala.

The K’iche’ Maya have proven resilient in sustaining their culture in the face of adversity and have demonstrated an ability to adapt to and accommodate new religions, political systems, forms of subsistence, and technology, even creating and maintaining successful businesses. An emerging indigenous bourgeoisie is challenging the economic dominance of Ladinos (Carmack, 1995: 265). Many Maya see the consumption of U.S. exports as a way to demonstrate their affiliation with a strong foreign power while bypassing Ladino control. In the Guatemalan highlands today there are wealthy indigenous rural merchants who differ from Ladinos mainly in that they either have difficulty converting wealth into a contemporary standard of living or simply choose not to (Carmack, 1995: 270). The costume dance gives K’iche’ an opportunity to demonstrate their capacity to participate in the modern nation-state as drivers and consumers of contemporary culture.

Costume Making in Guatemala

Shops that rent masks and costumes to performers of traditional dances, morerias, date to the end of the sixteenth century and appear in Spanish documents through the colonial era (García Escobar, 1987; Hill, 1998). The owners of morerías construct costumes and rent and sell them from their storefront shops, usually attached to an extended family compound or home. Family and household are central to their business plans (Krystal, 2001: 49). Although they are considered master craftsmen, their mask and costume designs must follow established protocols so that they are recognizable, with facial characteristics and dress patterns that previous generations have used. Therefore the emphasis is on continuity of design. Some of the K’iche’ Maya consider the moreros (shopkeepers) custodians of tradition, memory, and folklore (Luján Muñoz, 1985), stewards who transmit local knowledge from one generation of dancers to the next. Moreros often participate in the dances, either as masters or teachers or as choreographers (Miguel Angel Ignacio, proprietor of Morería San Tomás, Chichicastenango, interview, July 25, 2005). Today, moreros from different highland communities are related by marriage and share ideas and techniques while maintaining a certain competitiveness.

Separate from the morerías but similar in structure are four costume shops, two of which are located in the western highlands. These shops are multigenerational family businesses, run by brothers and cousins. Drawing on images from North American popular culture, they manufacture costumes and fiberglass masks by hand for sale and rental. The homologous relation (Barthes, 1975: 240) that exists between the morería and these new shops clarifies the various elements that go to make up the two systems of organization and provides and allows highland Guatemalans to “make sense” of foreign elements and incorporate them into the local social scene. Although the work of the costume shops emphasizes inventiveness, imagination, and creativity in design, they are nonetheless modeled on the morería and acquire significance from that similarity.

Rather than using imagery and characters from folklore as the moreros do, the costume shops take their inspiration from film, television, music, and the Internet (Juan Carlos Zacarias, K’iche’ costume designer, interview, Santa Cruz del Quiché, February 1, 2008). They borrow images from media that individuals often enjoy anonymously in darkened movie theaters, in private, or in small-group settings such as a family living room and open them up for the entire village to appreciate. In this regard, they follow the example of the moreros by creating a sense of community and stronger social bonds through shared experience (Chambers, 1990: 2). As Bakhtin (1984) points out, in Carnival the repression of everyday life can be broken when society admits the pleasures it normally denies. The shopkeepers create an opportunity to celebrate imagery and characters from the foreign mass media, allowing Maya to become familiar with them and articulating the multitude of ways in which North American cultural and technological developments insinuate themselves into Guatemalan life.

As the source of inspiration, growth, and elaboration for the costumes, the shopkeepers expand the semantic network of dance to include new connotations and new social discourses. As opposed to the moreros, who trade in long-standing ritual and tradition, the new costume shops invoke youth, wealth, leisure, entertainment, diversion, new technology, urban living, fashion, sports, and popular music, among other things, almost all of them from the United States. The shopkeepers have turned the idea of the traditional dance, which functions as a link to the past and an investment in one’s spiritual future, into something associated with leisure and relaxation. In the past, Ladinos openly considered a K’iche’ Maya with spare time as unemployed, indolent, and guilty of shirking his responsibilities. This bias linked the indigenous to confinement and subordination. The costume dances now provide an avenue for emphasizing identity value through leisure. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1984: 2, 6), consumption is ultimately a material and symbolic act of communication, referring to social position, financial resources, and cultural capital. The display of dance costumes provides a very public site of discourse regarding leisure, entertainment, and liberating pleasures, separating those who participate in a commodified society from those who do not.

Whereas the traditional dances mean inclusion and community bonding, the costume dances mean social difference, and they serve this function only through their homology to the former. As Barth (1969: 10) notes, groups create ethnic (in this case social) difference through the representation of marked juxtapositions in daily interaction. For an object of social differentiation to exist, there must be something against which it is compared. New technologies provide this distinction and rely on their contrast with traditional objects. Phones, radios, cameras, video recorders, televisions, iPods, compact disks, DVDs, personal computers, photocopiers, fax machines, cell phones, and Internet cafes provide new sources of significance and value for those who have access to them.

The costume dances receive significance from their forging a link between the old and the new. Many of the new costumes, although inspired by the contemporary mass media, bear a resemblance to the traditional ones. The attire of the dancers who participate in the Conquest Dance, Mexicans, or the festivities during Holy Week provide examples of what Victoria Bricker (1973:130–133) calls “cultural pastiche,” the jumbling of elements as a comic device. They freely mix components from different times and places including pre-Hispanic Guatemala, colonial Spain, eighteenth-century France, and recent K’iche’ society. In addition, they combine garish colors with elaborate decoration making use of feathers, sequins, studs, velvet, and fringe. The various costumes often cross time, space, and genre; the performances are jocular, irreverent, and bawdy and at the same time pious.

Walter Benjamin (1968) has explored the relationship of art and technological expansion under capitalism, and although he deals particularly with film his ideas apply to many of the issues apparent in the costume dances. He says that mass communication was made possible by the introduction of technologies that made images accessible to a wider audience. He argues that mechanical reproduction destroys the “aura” of a work of art—the specific qualities that render it unique and authentic. For Benjamin, the loss of aura is unavoidable and in some ways even a positive thing, as it allows art to be torn from the “fabric of tradition” (1968: 211). Additionally, he says, “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (224). He envisions a situation in which authenticity is no longer applicable as a standard for evaluating artistic production.

Benjamin (1968: 224) argues that the loss of aura allowed art to “begin to be based on another practice—politics.” He anticipates art’s merging with the mass media while rejecting its traditional cult value in favor of a straightforward relation to contemporary political struggles that has a more direct function in society. Applying Benjamin’s line of reasoning to the dances of the Guatemalan highlands, one finds that both the structure and the content of the performances inevitably change. If the traditional dances constitute the authentic theatrical art, the “fabric of tradition,” then the costume dances emerge out of mechanical reproduction to correspond to and symbolize a significant political struggle. With the shift from the traditional to the costume dance the aura of the unique original is lost and the reproduced images—drawn from the Internet—provide the basis for a more direct and purposeful form of public interaction. The costume dance provides a contemporary platform for K’iche’ to rework their identity and claim their place in Guatemalan national society.

For Benjamin, the mode of artistic production and communication is determined in large part by the level of technological development. In the Guatemalan highlands, the past 15 years have witnessed an influx of globalized mass communication that has produced a rapid shift in expressive culture. The resourceful and imaginative production of the dance costumes is significant for its ability to connect with a larger political purpose.

The Marxist theorist Jean Baudrillard (2001: 45, 90) argues that meaning resides not in the object but in the way the object is used. If he is correct, then the highland Guatemalan shop owners who create outfits for public performances are responsible for producing much of the social meaning of these performances. They attach the attire to the lifestyles with which different Guatemalans identify (Bourdieu, 1984). The costumes are part of a material culture that has an identity value, one that may or may not serve the interest of consumerism. In one sense, the costume makers are working outside of the system, “putting one over” on the multinational corporation. They are Michel de Certeau’s (1984: 26) “tricksters.” They and the dancers and spectators consume the images but not the commodities themselves, detaching them from the economic system that produced them. As de Certeau (18) notes, there are “innumerable ways of playing and foiling the other’s game . . . that characterize the subtle and stubborn resistant activity of groups which, since they lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and representations. People have to make do with what they have.”

In constructing their own costumes, the vendors create an alternative economic system that defies the originally produced commodified imagery. As de Certeau (1984: 39–40) suggests, it is an example of the weak’s refusing to behave according to the rules of the strong. By making do with images and characters already in circulation, the costume designers create an identification between the costumes and the audience, inscribing the dance outfits with multiple, layered meanings. It is only through the dance that these foreign images acquire local-social meaning. The costume makers mobilize these foreign elements as signification of Guatemalans’ ability to interact with consumer networks while at the same time staying close to an existing cultural practice, making costumes for traditional dances.

The costume shops manufacture much of the significance with which they hope the viewers will identify. By appropriating and modifying Maya cultural performance, the costume designers are attempting to make the costume dances conform to a middle-class ethos. At the same time, they are taking the traditional dance, which centered on religious penitence and release, and adapting it to purposes of recreation. Public performance is no longer part of a liminal ritual outside of and completely separate from daily life but reflects a controlled emphasis on leisure. In addition, the designers encode some of the costumes with particular meanings by focusing on the massive expansion in the range of costumes. The costume designers have augmented previously known types of traditional and Ladino dance costumes and added to the range of costumes in recent years. The direction this reaction takes and the types of costumes that the designers choose to create fall along the fault lines of ethnicity in the western highlands.

Costumes and Identity

The ladino shop: to to masks and costume rental

Pedro Roberto Rodas is the proprietor of the mask and costume shop located in San Miguel Totonicapán, the capital of the Department of Totonicapán. The town of Totonicapán or “Toto,” as the locals call it, lies in a rough and varying landscape, with chains of hills and mountains and a dense municipal core. Before the conquest it was the second-most-important city of the K’iche’ Empire and the seat of the culture hero Tecún Umán, who died at the hands of the Spanish general Pedro de Alvarado, ending the War of Conquest. Indigenous people make up 98.9 percent of its population (Censo, 2002). As in many cities in Guatemala, Ladinos own the majority of the businesses and control the town government. Their ability to maintain their identity and status in a predominantly native community attests to the significance of this ethnic split in the western highlands (Carmack, 1995: 300). Cultural difference is emphasized despite what Carmack (301) calls “extensive interchange.”

Throughout the colonial era, the western highlands were the stronghold of indigenous populations; territories were constructed across racial lines by the Spanish viceroy. However, in the nineteenth century, as part of the government’s desire to promote an export economy in the region, nonindigenous people were settled in the area to function as a “structurally privileged class of labor recruiters” and as state officials (Warren, 1998: 11; see also Smith, 1990: 84–87). They were typically people of mixed blood who identified with Spanish language, dress, and customs and considered themselves above the indigenous populations in the social-racial hierarchy. The forced interaction between newcomers and natives helped shape the new category of person in Guatemala, the Ladino, who functioned as an intermediary between the natives and the ruling oligarchic elite; thus, the current formation contrasting Ladino urban elite with rural native labor developed. More recently, many K’iche’-speaking Maya have settled in the urban core to pursue employment opportunities, creating an environment of cultural interaction and mixing. As is typical of colonial and postcolonial societies, all of this social interaction takes place in the language of the dominant culture, Spanish (Colby and van den Berghe, 1969: 92–93).

Similar to other cities and regions of the western highlands, Totonicapán has a rich variety of traditional dances, boasting a Centro de Estudios Folklóricos that preserves folkloric performances and their accoutrements as part of the process of folklorización—an effort of metropolitan politicians and other elites to revalue the cultural performances of subaltern groups by refashioning them as regional or even national folklore (Borland, 2006: 10; Mendoza, 2000). (Another aspect of this process is the attempt to minimize the indigenous meaning of Tecún Umán as a symbol of resistance to the dominant culture and national hegemony by treating him as a national hero.) The costume dances are excluded from the municipally run dance costume cooperative Casa de Cultura and the Centro de Estudios Folklóricos. Although intended to reflect indigenous forms of public festival and dance (Pedro Rodas, interview, Totonicapán, August 8, 2006), the costume dances exist outside of the folkloric tradition, representing a new, modern public institution (Zamora Mejía, 2003). This suggests that Ladino locals view Maya ritual activities as part of a crumbling cultural pursuit on the verge of dissolution and worthy of preservation and protection. As Katherine Borland (2006: 11) suggests, conserving these performances in this way tends to sanitize and domesticate them. Meanwhile, Ladinos see their own performances as contemporary and not in need of any special safeguards, although they have not yet been codified as part of the national heritage. This regionally sponsored separation and protection of the Maya traditional culture industry sustains its “folklore” status and helps perpetuate the bias against the idea of indigenous progress.

Pedro Roberto Rodas, the proprietor of Toto Masks and Costume Rental (Figure 1), takes an active role in shaping these cultural artifacts and giving them meaning (Figure 2). Rodas has more than one business; in addition to manufacturing, renting, and selling costumes from his shop, his family runs a storefront bakery and makes children’s birthday piñatas to order. Among Ladinos, the greatest difference in terms of class usually has to do with access to higher levels of education and luxury goods such as technology. As Carmack (1995: 261) notes, the capacity to master an industry in Guatemala has a profound impact on one’s position in the class structure. Rodas’s combination of artistry and business acumen has opened doors to a more comfortable lifestyle, a higher social status, and a variety of household consumer goods (including several color televisions, a VCR, a digital video camera, a couple of automobiles, and a van).

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Figure 1.

Toto Masks and Costume Rental.

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Figure 2.

Pedro Roberto Rodas, costume maker.

Rodas has maintained control over his designs and their dissemination. He claims total ownership of his work, regardless of the fact that it recreates characters invented by others—figures that typically appear in other media from another part of the continent. He emphasizes the artistry of his work and the creativity that goes into modeling the costumes. He specializes in furry or plush cartoon characters and corporate mascots (e.g., Ronald McDonald or Tony the Tiger), tailoring his designs to children (Barreno, 2008: 32) (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Furry costumes in Totonicapán.

He bypasses North American notions of copyright by insisting that his costumes are original, but they very closely approximate the original creatures. He uses these resources provided by the social order, detaching them from the system that produced them, to claim personal and exclusive possession and some degree of market control.

Because the costumes are enormously popular with children, Rodas quickly saw an opportunity to make some extra money on the side and now rents them out for birthday parties. This has resulted in confrontations with Ladino dancers who feel that the use of the costumes in other venues diminishes their prestige. Rodas responds that he makes the garments and will rent them whenever and to whomever he pleases. He repeatedly emphasized that the costumes are an art form and what he does is an artistic activity, part of the culture of Guatemala and similar to the original act of creation (interview, August 8, 2006). He does not appear to find irony in his claims of exclusive rights to someone else’s original artistic conceptions. ¹

Rodas’s costume business has allowed him to display his modernity while maintaining his self-definition or ethnic affiliation (Zamora Mejía, 2003). He plays an active role in the process of cultural production in an attempt to legitimize and corroborate his social standing, which is not fixed but hotly contested. This is what Escobar (2008: 15) calls a “place-based yet transnationalized strategy”—the creation of social norms and meanings with signs and symbols from beyond the immediate community in an effort to delineate one’s position in society. His approach reconciles the contradictions and inconsistencies of ethno-racial exclusion, preparing the representations and signifying practices used by the dominant culture to validate its advantaged position.

The Maya Shop: The Predator Costumes

Located about 50 miles northwest of Guatemala City, the capital of the Department of Quiché, Santa Cruz del Quiché, is located along a highway that traverses striking highland terrain, including the dramatic canyons and pine forests of the Chaucús Mountains, before reaching a densely packed urban area that forms the city center. The population of the municipality is more than 62,000, and approximately one-third of it lives in the urban center (Censo, 2002). Travelers make their way past Laguna Lemoa, which local legend says was created from the tears shed by the widows of K’iche’ kings. The Spanish founded the city about two miles to the east immediately following the fall of the capital of the Late Postclassic K’iche’ Empire, Q’umarq aj (Tedlock, 1996: 213). Santa Cruz del Quiché received its official blessing in 1539 from the first archbishop of Guatemala, Don Francisco Marroquín (Ximénez, cited in Recinos, 1950: 217). Spaniards subsequently began to occupy the town and built the Roman Catholic cathedral and other public buildings from the stones of the ruined K’iche’ temples and palaces. Santa Cruz del Quiché is also known as the site where during the sixteenth century several surviving members of the K’iche’ nobility composed, in K’iche’ using the Spanish alphabet, the spiritually significant Popol Vuh (Council Book). Many scholars refer to the Popol Vuh as the Mayan “Bible” (Tedlock, 1996), a sacred text derived from pre-Hispanic religious beliefs and customs and most likely transcribed directly from Mayan hieroglyphs.

As the capital of its department, Santa Cruz del Quiché is the regional hub of commerce, transportation, education, and the seat of the local and regional government. It is predominantly a K’iche’ city; the indigenous make up almost 80 percent of the population, and many of them live in the urban core (Lewis, 2001: 124). It is, nonetheless, a city of contradictions. Despite its indigenous components and recent history as one of the hardest-hit departments during the government-sponsored counterinsurgency campaign, 8 of the 14 current municipal officials belong to the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (Guatemalan Republican Front—FRG), the political party of the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.

Certainly one of the most unexpected aspects of the city for me was the existence of The Predator Costumes (Figure 4), owned and managed by three brothers, Juan Carlos, Francisco, and Manuel Zacarias (Figure 5). Located only a few blocks off of the main street, the shop caters to participants in costume dances. Two of the brothers, along with a variety of other family members, live in the same building, in which they invent, design, and manufacture the myriad characters available for rental or for purchase. In this way, they are responsible for producing and circulating the content and meanings associated with the costumes. They create and respond to the language of the dance while expressing their relationship to larger institutions, including the state, and the values, behaviors, and beliefs of the different K’iche’ communities. This system of representation allows them to burlesque aspects of life through the lens of foreign elements while making sense of things beyond the village or town level. Through the cultural practice of dance, the brothers construct meanings, drawing on cartoon characters, recent news events, and other things reported in the mass media, and bring them into the social orbit of the community.

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Figure 4.

The Predator Costume Shop, Santa Cruz del Quiché.

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Figure 5.

Juan Carlos and Manuel Zacarias, owners of The Predator Costume Shop.

This process, however, is selective; the Zacarias family creatively incorporates North American novelties into the preexisting cultural system, sometimes rejecting images from powerful global networks such as the Internet and the movies (Borland, 2006; Guss, 2000; Harris, 2000). Juan Carlos Zacarias (interview, February 1, 2008) describes his role in this manner: “We visualize them [the costumes] from movies and take the designs from the Internet, others we think up.” Because the costumes are a Ladino invention modeled on those for indigenous dances, the Zacarias brothers’ work is a transcultural borrowing, appropriating imagery to be incorporated into a reappropriated form of the dance. In addition, they also infuse their costumes with shared meanings and values. As Manuel Zacarias (interview, February 1, 2008) says, “Maybe a movie comes with a certain figure, but we give it more meaning, more color for the costume. We watch a movie attentively, just a guy with a shirt and pants, and we add a lot more meaning to the costume.” The brothers map local meaning onto the language of the mass media, which engages with preexisting forms of dance to reflect social relations.

Meaning is produced in the community by similarity to and differences from both traditional and Ladino dance costumes, all of which telescope time and mingle various genres. While the Zacarias brothers’ costumes may include some of the images that Rodas borrows from the North American media, which appeal primarily to children (e.g., Chewbacca, Santa Claus, Ronald McDonald), their designs expand on the original images to please and attract a wider audience of all ages. In contrast to Rodas’s inventions, the Zacarias brothers connect to K’iche’ social identity through the addition of key themes that accentuate indigenous forms of subsistence and lifestyle. They make use of the same raw materials as Rodas’s, such as fake fur, sequins, and feathers, but with a very different result. For example, the overwhelming majority of the outfits relate to nature, animals, and hunting, employing whole stuffed animals, furry fabrics with animal markings, animal headdresses, or animal insignia emblazoned across the chest (Figure 6). While they may appeal to children because they are fluffy and soft, they also suggest the mythical importance and continuation of hunting as a means of survival in the highlands. Similar imagery is found in such traditional dances as the Deer Dance, which features deer, lions, dogs, and hunters, and the Monkeys, in which high-wire monkey dancers perform with lions and tigers that are not part of Ladino folklore.

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Figure 6.

Examples of animal designs in dance costumes, Momostenango.

In addition, the costumes play an important role in fixing the meanings of a number of local characters that appear in indigenous dances. Homeless, hungry children and filthy shoeshine boys, drunken and irresponsible mothers, and corrupt and ineffective police officers and soldiers, all realities in highland society, frequently appear in costumes (Figure 7). Their prevalence has increased since the civil war, which saw a military set on destroying the fabric of the native community through the death or disappearance of the male population—creating over 100,000 widows and innumerable orphans—and the destruction of entire communities (Proyecto Interdiocesano, 1999). Yet their use in the fiestas is not meant to be cheerless and distressing; rather, they not only provide an opportunity for indigenous comment on proper forms of behavior and on social ills but also function as ritual clowns, bringing humor and release to an unfortunate situation (Bricker, 1973; Taube, 1989; Taube and Taube, 2009). Not surprisingly, these characters are absent from Ladino costumes. That Maya society is able to make use of performative metaphors as a means of looking inward and producing characters that are at once comic and tragic parallels the folkloric performances of the Conquest Dance, which has been recreating the Maya’s defeat at the hands of Europeans for centuries.

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Figure 7.

Street urchin/shoeshine boy, Momostenango, 2008.

Additional extremely popular costumes that the Zacarias brothers create are indigenous figures, albeit as seen through the lens of the North American media. Ladino costumes often feature the sad, drunk old man in native costume as a reminder of the backwardness and unsophisticated character of the indigenous communities with a view to limiting their participation in civil society (Zamora Mejía, 2003). Eric Lott (1993: 112–115) discusses the rise of blackface minstrelsy among white working-class society as a means of counterfeiting, deriding, and controlling antebellum-era black communities in the United States. By generating their own version of black culture, he argues, whites were able to “master” black culture in order to keep it “safely under wraps.” Ladino costumes that caricature indigenous society perform a parallel function of calling up and burlesquing another culture to restrain it. Virginia Garrard-Burnett (2000: 342) observes that the public language of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century linked drunkenness and “Indian” in the national Ladino discourse of indigenismo. The portrayal of Mayas as inherently inferior and in need of acculturation for the good of society highlighted a trope of “nativeness” that had to be suppressed, making it essentially racialized and political. This created and perpetuated another ethnic cleavage and suggested that “authentic” native culture was low-status.

In response, the K’iche’ have a variety of positive and strong pre-Columbian costumes that feature kings and deities, such as the Inka ruler Manco Capac, the Aztec maize gods, and a host of ancient Maya figures, to affirm their connection to pre-Hispanic traditions (Figure 8). These depictions of confident historic native personages are, however, mediated by the North American media; the Maya rulers are fashioned directly after the costumes in the film Apocalypto (Juan Carlos Zacarias, interview, February 1, 2008), and a much-admired picture in a magazine inspired the costume of Manco Capac (Domingo Tzoc Poroj, president of the dance group Revolución 2008, interview, January 31, 2008). The Zacarias brothers actively contest the Ladinos’ view of indigenous culture as a substandard, primitive expression without access to technology.

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Figure 8.

Apocalypto costumes, Santa Cruz del Quiché.

These costumes create a site of production and contestation of public “Indianness” (Lott, 1993: 38–39). Performers turn ethnic encounters into entertainments that mirror the romanticized North American vision of the pre-Hispanic Other rather than celebrating contemporary native achievements. These dances highlight the social-ethnic relations of “racial” production—the tension in Guatemalan society that has created a self-commodification of “Indianness” that is celebrated by the indigenous themselves. The cultural capital that these images represent derives from their reference to Hollywood films and National Geographic. These are the representations of Maya society available to non-Maya, and they lend credibility to nonindigenous imitations of native culture. More than simply a means of getting along in a constricted world, they are the result of cultural exchange between Ladinos and K’iche’ that plays into the national rhetoric that contrasts the ancient wise native with the contemporary wizened and outdated indigenous culture of today. The costumes provide the materials for an exchange of cultural signifiers that locates the authentic indigenous heritage in the past. They also allow K’iche’ performers to burlesque their own cultural heritage and themselves at the same time as they seek cultural belonging and legitimacy (Mendoza, 2000: 165).

The commodification of these characters corresponds to a fundamental contradiction in K’iche’ society between maintaining local identity and being part of the new, global postwar Guatemala. The nature of the costumes allows the designers to include any aspect of contemporary society they choose to define and redefine native identity. They emphasize, discard, and replace components while contesting the negative ethnic stereotypes that appear in Ladino dances. Their choice of pre-Hispanic characters recognizes the local need to seek prestige in indigenous identity, albeit mediated by mass communication. The search for old ethnic certainties provides a platform for forging new cultural identities; the dancers performing in pre-Columbian costumes are in the act of becoming “Maya” (Hall, 1990; Nelson, 1999: 5, 11). These costumes articulate what Frantz Fanon (quoted in Hall, 1990: 223) described as “directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others.” In addition, incorporating these characters into the costume dances creates a sense of transformation and social renewal.

Other figures and costumes are abstract creations found only in the brothers’ imagination (Juan Carlos Zacarias, interview, February 1, 2008). These costumes represent various gods, kings, old protagonists, and folk heroes from other towns, as well as completely fabricated creatures (Juan Tzoc Lajpop, interview, July 31, 2006). Many combine the features of historical warriors and enemies—spies, gladiators, musketeers, crusaders, and samurai (Figures 9 and 10). Rather than adhering to a strict concept of type, they defy precise classification and mix and match elements for visual effect. Fantasy creatures, they may even combine human and beast (e.g., half human and half ape, half human and half jaguar).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 9.

Warrior/gladiator combination costume, Momostenango, 2006.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 10.

Warrior/samurai combination costume, Momostenango, 2006.

Conclusions

Issues of race, ethnicity, and social opportunity and class in the Guatemalan highlands are a dance between Ladinos (bearers of the dominant culture) and K’iche’ Maya. As unwilling partners, both groups adapt the costume dance to their own interests, and the tension between them is evident in the different types of costumes they rent and purchase for dances. The costume shop proprietors function as cultural intermediaries, producing both the context and the meaning of the dances. Through their ability to design and manufacture specific types of costumes for their clients, they allow performers and spectators alike to construct different identities through these dances.

A central motif of both types of costumes is Guatemala’s relationship with the United States and its products and lifestyles. For the Ladino community this is a statement of leisure and wealth—of access to a variety of new technological products and the lifestyle they promise. Many figures are meant primarily to appeal to children. While the Ladino costumes are a statement of consumerism, the Maya versions emphasize communitas. This is not to suggest that all K’iche’ approve of and interpret the dances in the same manner (Guss, 2000); rather, it means that the dances do not necessarily serve the interests of the dominant culture but highlight fundamental K’iche’ ideas regarding appropriate ritual practices. In other words, while they appear to emphasize consumption, they function according to a cultural logic that stresses shared knowledge and resources. Today the K’iche’ use the costume dances as a means of breaking with the colonial past and negotiating their encounter with global projects. The K’iche’ costume shop has expanded the types of costumes produced and used and their meanings. Guatemala’s true transnationals as a result of the events of the civil war, the Maya appropriate North American forms, rework them to fit their own needs, and restructure them in their own image as a device for national ascendancy.