Jakaltek American

Jakaltek American

 

 Jacaltenango is a remote, unkemptlooking town at the western edge of the Cuchumatanes Mountains close to the Guatemalan border with Mexico. It is known to the scholarly world as a stop on the route taken in 1925 by Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge, who afterward produced a two-volume record, Tribes and Temples (1926, 1927), about their reconnaissance. La Farge returned to Jacaltenango two years later with fellow researcher Douglas Byers, with whom he penned The Year Bearer’s People (1931), another classic contribution in the field of Mesoamerican anthropology. Both works, especially the latter, document an intriguing array of Maya survivals. One of the most remarkable was the persistence in Jacaltenango of a method of observing the passage of time according to a pre-Columbian calendar, complete with rites and ceremonies that date back centuries, if not millennia. In his introductory remarks to The Year Bearer’s People, Blom aptly likened the intent of La Farge and Byers “to that of a man trying to become familiar with the ritual of a Masonic Lodge without becoming a Mason himself.” All three men spent long and distinguished careers studying indigenous cultures in Guatemala and other parts of the Americas. As part of the decolonization of academic life in Guatemala, Jacaltenango is now being written about not by visiting anthropologists but by one of its native sons. Before he himself trained and became accredited in the discipline while studying in the United States, Victor Montejo engaged local lore and storytelling in two books, El Kanil: Man of Lightning (1984) and The Bird Who Cleans the World (1991). The first book presents an elaborate legend that La Farge and Byers recorded only fragments of; the second is a collection of fables that resonate with the moral authority of Aesop, Jakaltek folk tales that Montejo heard as a boy from his mother and community elders. In Testimony (1987), however, social not magical realism prevails as he grapples with Jacaltenango’s grim lot during counterinsurgency operations in 1982.

 On the morning of September 9 that year, a Friday, Montejo woke in a small village some distance from Jacaltenango. His job then was to teach village children as resident schoolmaster. Friday, he writes, “has always been a happy day for me, full of anticipation,” for after class he would set off to return home to Jacaltenango to spend the weekend with his wife and children. An elementary school teacher, Montejo had worked for ten years as a government employee in the Department of Education, preferring to take a humble post within reasonable reach of his home rather than seek employment in a more illustrious setting farther away. Montejo was satisfied with his decision to go back to his roots after graduating from teacher’s college. That Friday class unfolded as usual until one of the villagers burst into the schoolhouse and screamed, “The guerrillas are approaching. . . . Everyone get ready!” The peal of the church bell confirmed the danger. Montejo recalls: I consulted my watch and saw it was eleven in the morning. At almost the same instant I heard the first shot fired. Behind it came a volley of machine gun fire. The peaceful community broke into confusion. The women wept and prayed to God to protect their husbands and older sons who had been forced to join the civil [defense] patrol. I ordered the students to stretch out on the floor and barred the door and windows with old broomsticks. The invaders had encircled the village and the hills echoed the furious explosions of grenades and the sputter of bullets that whistled past the corrugated tin roof of the schoolhouse. “Don’t make a sound,” I ordered my children. Some began to weep and others trembled with fear. Their fathers were in the midst of that gunfire, armed with sticks, stones, and slingshots and the children were fully aware of the danger they were in. It turned out to be a tragic case of mistaken identity. The local civil defense patrol had seen an armed group of men moving through village territory and assumed that they were guerrillas. The patrol opened fire, wounding one of the intruders, but then noticed that the guns the intruders replied with emitted the distinctive “coughing noise of Galil rifles,” the standard Israeli-made issue of the Guatemalan army. Realizing their error, the members of the civil patrol fled to escape retaliation. Chaos erupted as the army attacked the village. After a while the shooting died down, and Montejo deemed it safe enough to dismiss his students, who “fled like deer out the door” and raced off to find their parents. He then joined other villagers ordered by the army to assemble in the school patio. There and in the space adjoining the village church the army was getting ready for a public execution, rounding up local militiamen who had been captured and accused of being guerrillas. They tied five men to a row of pillars. Montejo attempted to intervene and explain to the enraged officer in charge just what had happened: “Good afternoon, my lieutenant,” I said respectfully. . . . “What do you want, you—” he snapped. “I am the schoolmaster in this village and have come to let you know that the people you’re holding captive are members of the civil patrol. By accident they mistook you for guerrillas.” “Don’t come to me with those stories. These sons of bitches are guerrillas. That’s why they attacked us, and I am going to execute every damn one of them.” I went on, unperturbed. “Up there by the chapel the rest of the men are waiting to clear up the situation for you.” “With me you have nothing to clear up. Everything is already clear. They’ve wounded one of my soldiers, and all of you will have to pay for it. What more do you want to know?” “I beseech my lieutenant to forgive these people. All the men are members of the patrol and guard the village day and night, as you have verified for yourself. What a pity they mistook you, because of your olive green uniforms.” The commander made no reply, but went on inspecting [some] boxes and chests. . . . “This radio interests me. Take it along,” he called out. Montejo’s intervention proved futile. The lean majesty of his prose, translated beautifully from Spanish into English by Victor Perera, only heightens the horror of what took place next, when the firing squad set about its work: The five condemned men turned to one another, uncomprehending. They set their eyes above the heads of the kaibiles [soldiers] who were lining up to discharge their weapons into their hearts. No one spoke. The hapless captives gazed toward the horizon, as though to bid farewell to the hills that had nurtured them. . . . As the commander prepared to give the fatal order, the condemned turned instinctively for a last look at their loved ones. Their hands were tied behind their back so they could give vent to their feelings only with strained smiles and bitter tears. “FIRE . . . !” The cavernous voice of the commander rang out, and the Galils exploded with thunderous fury The women raised a deafening howl. Dazed with grief, they tried to fling themselves on the bullet-ridden bodies of their beloved ones, but once again the kaibiles forced them to draw back by threatening them point blank. The victims slumped and hung from the pillars as the warm, copious blood drenched their shirts. After the execution Montejo’s personal situation quickly deteriorated. Under torture a villager demented by pain gave Montejo’s name as a guerrilla sympathizer, and so the schoolmaster was sought out, bound, beaten, and led “like a thief or a murderer” back to army headquarters in Jacaltenango, where he was interrogated and beaten again. Death, he believed, seemed inevitable: I was bothered by the knotted rope around my neck and stuck my fingers repeatedly under the noose to prevent it from choking me. My dignity as a schoolmaster, I said to myself. These bastards are making a display of me, as if I were an assassin, a thief or a common criminal. I spat my darkest unspoken thoughts on the ground. . . . In all my thirty years I had not known darker days than the present ones. Fortune, however, favored him. Insisting always on his innocence, Montejo was eventually released from captivity, but only on the condition that he visit army headquarters and report on “every person” he thought might be “involved with the guerrillas.” Repugnant though this condition was to him, he accepted it to protect himself and his family. Once home, living by his wits for weeks on end, he resisted being forced to inform on others until he was finally able to flee into exile and arrange for his wife and children to follow. The family lived for many years in California, eventually becoming American citizens. After Montejo departed Guatemala, suspicion fell on his parents, forcing them also to flee Jacaltenango. They lived for a while in Canada. In recording his ordeal, Montejo is careful not to lapse into indiscriminate hatred. During his captivity, one soldier offered Montejo food and a blanket, causing him to reflect: “I thanked God that not every soldier was malevolent and devoid of human feelings. His gesture made me understand that in their own way—although they dare not say so—they too are victims of a violence that has become institutionalized.” Judging by the way they spoke, Montejo was able to identify the soldiers involved in the operation as natives of Sololá or Totonicapán, Mayas like himself. Heavy of heart, Montejo observes how terror sows division and distrust among Maya communities, how it corrodes group solidarity. The scorn with which the soldiers rebuked his pleas of reason—“you don’t fool any of us with your high-sounding jabber”—illustrates how risky it is to value education in a country where knowledge or the gift of self-expression can be construed as an act of subversion. Education was the bedrock upon which Montejo reinvented himself in the United States. With customary Maya resourcefulness, he learned English and enrolled in university, earning a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany and, in 1993, a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Afterward, he took a faculty position at the University of California, where for eight years he served as Chair of Native American Studies. He reworked his Ph.D. dissertation into a substantive monograph, Voices from Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History (1999). To his already impressive literary output has been added a collection of poems, Sculpted Stones (1995), and an illustrated retelling, for children, of the Popol Vuh (1999), a sacred Maya text. When I met up with Montejo and other Mayas in Chicago in 1991—we were attending the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association—I was able to arrange a visit to the Newberry Library, where we inspected a copy of the Popol Vuh made in the late seventeenth century by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez. The original is either lost or in safe keeping beyond our ken. It was a very emotional day. During a ceremony of symbolic repatriation, the Q’eqchi’ spiritual leader and native rights activist Antonio Pop Caal was reduced to tears as he held the Maya bible and chanted a prayer. Don Antonio, who studied philosophy and theology at the University of Salamanca in Spain before returning to work in his Verapaz homeland, is now in the arms of his Maya makers: on December 17, 2002, having been abducted two months before, his decapitated body was found in a well. For his part, Montejo has become a critic not only of American anthropology and Guatemalan politics but also of the indigenous movement to which he belongs, subjecting it to scrutiny in a trenchant book of essays, Maya Intellectual Renaissance (2005). As an assimilated American academic with a Fulbright scholarship among his many awards and distinctions, Montejo has faced the challenge of returning to Guatemala and getting involved in political life there. In elections held on December 28, 2003, he won a congressional seat and was later named by presidential winner Oscar Berger to serve in 2004 and 2005 as the newly created Minister of Peace. The corruption so endemic to holding any political post in Guatemala was one Montejo and his team managed to keep at bay, a trait recognized by the National Award for Transparency in Office. In 2006 he was elected president of the Congressional Commission for Indigenous Issues. “We have to emerge from this chaos,” he once told Mary Jo McConahay in an interview with Pacific News Service. “We need people in this country who can create [a] strong relationship with the United States. The indigenous, for instance, will not simply tell Washington what it wants to hear.” A Jakaltek American has spoken.