Social Science Research Council

TRANSNATIONALISM AND MAYA DRESS
By Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj

In this article I approach the study of culture as inseparable from the context of structures of economic, social and political power in which culture is embedded. Similarly, some of the forces of transnationalism are cultural and symbolic, but these are analyzed in the broader context of power structured by the transnationalization of capital, especially in the tourism industry. This article will discuss how the forces of transnationalism have aggravated both the folklorization and exploitation of Mayan people, especially Mayan women, and the racism and sexism we suffer in Guatemala. Ironically, at the same time, these forces have unintentionally opened up spaces of resistance for Indigenous cultures. Focusing on the experiences of Mayan women I discuss how economic and political elites commodify and trivialize into folklore Mayan cultures and the images of Mayan women, while these elites discriminate against Mayan women on a daily basis. Mayan cultures and Mayan women are "valued" to the extent that they can be used for the accumulation of capital for the domestic and international tourism industry, while at the same time they are severely discriminated against and denied their basic human rights. Hand-crafted Mayan textiles, produced principally by Mayan women, and visual images of Mayan women in our regional clothing are important commodities in the tourism industry and the marketing of such tourism, yet the social stigma and discrimination suffered by Maya women who use regional clothing goes largely unnoticed. However, the transnationalization of different cultures, ideas and information has also brought new spaces of resistance, new discourses of human rights and international solidarity that many Mayan women are taking advantage of to denounce discrimination, racism and exploitation.

Racial Discrimination Against Mayan Women: An Ethnographic Case

June 5, 2002 promised to be like any other normal day, consisting of another round of work and meetings. At five in the morning I left home in Quetzaltenango for the capital with several Ladino and Maya friends to attend a meeting of the Agrarian Platform, which brings together farming and civil organizations and university institutions in support of farm-workers' demands. Their aims include the drawing up of a State agricultural policy, something totally lacking in this essentially agricultural country. I had been working with them since returning to Guatemala in December 2001.

The meeting, held in the Episcopal Hall, was intended to inform the international community about the Coffee-growing Reform put forward by Agrarian Platform as an alternative to the severe economic crisis facing some half a million farm workers and small farmers - mostly Maya - who plant and harvest coffee in Guatemala (1).

After this presentation a group of us decided to go to a restaurant to talk over the day's work. We were from different academic disciplines and different parts of the country. With the idea of having a beer together, we chose the popular "El Tarro Dorado" (The Golden Mug) tavern chain. We went to this tavern in the affluent neighbourhood known as Zone 13. When I reached the door with four other women, a security guard in civilian clothes said politely to the other women: "This way, please." To me he said loudly: "But not you: women in traje típico (folkloric dress) aren't allowed in."(2) As the only Maya woman there, I couldn't believe my ears. I asked the guard to repeat what he had said, and again looking straight at me he said: "The management refuses entry to women wearing traje típico, so I can't let you in." At this repetition of the racial discrimination (3) directed at me for wearing K'iche' dress, a shiver ran through me from head to toe.(4) I remember taking hold of my perraje (shawl) and wrapping it round my bosom, as if looking for strength to resist such racial discrimination in the 21st century.(5) My eyes filled with tears; a wave of indignation but also anger and courage swept through me.

My four companions (two of them were lawyers) intervened, explaining that to refuse me entry because of my regional dress would be a violation of my human rights under domestic legislation and under international conventions ratified by Guatemala. These legal arguments aroused the attention of the second security guard, this one in uniform and carrying a heavy calibre automatic firearm. Both guards listened to the statement of the constitutional and international violations that were being committed. Both replied that the others, who were not wearing regional traje and therefore were not indigenous, could go in, but that management policy did not allow me in the restaurant [since wearing K'iche' traje identified me publicly as a Maya woman in a high-class district of the capital].

I interpreted this act of racial aggression as a violation of my human rights committed firstly by the restaurant owners, who form part of the small oligarchy that has controlled our country economically, politically and culturally for centuries. The racist and classist rules enforced by low-level employees like those security guards come from a pyramidal power structure at whose base are such employees, who simply obey orders from above.

And secondly, my rights were violated by the State of Guatemala itself for letting the Government Ministry allow the running of restaurants and shops where racial discrimination is part of a management policy implemented on a daily basis in leisure spaces of that kind.

The Wearing of Regional Dress As a Political Act: Part I

The particular act of racism that I had personally experienced made me reflect on what it means culturally, racially, socially and politically for the Maya women of Guatemala to wear our regional traje on a daily basis in the different parts of the country. Starting from this particular case - which reflects the everyday experience of racial discrimination that most Maya women in Guatemala face whenever we risk leaving our homes and towns to work, study or carry on any other activity - my own experience has enabled me to grasp the political dimensions of wearing different dress in a country that was founded on the basis of social exclusion enforced by racist structures. Whenever we are seen in regional traje, the ruling classes are reminded of the failure of their efforts to make us disappear, which have ranged from genocide to ideological coercion. Five centuries of humiliation have not succeeded in bringing the Maya people to their knees.

For the Maya, leaving our own communities means losing the cultural shield that protects us when we live and work in the towns or villages where we are usually in the majority and where we understand the logic of how life operates. But when owing to economic necessity or for some other reason we decide to leave our communities, we come up against the other Guatemala, 'imaginary Guatemala,' Urban and Capital-City Guatemala, where we are rejected by almost all the Ladinos who wield political and economic power.(6)

The everyday racism faced by Maya women - those that refuse to give up regional dress - has invaded every area of our lives, we live it and feel it through discriminatory words and acts on city and rural buses, in public and private offices, in the streets, in restaurants, on university campuses, in public and private schools and colleges, in leisure areas and even in places of worship. So common are these human rights violations that many Maya women act as if they barely notice them: they take them as a normal part of the burden of contempt that goes with being an indigenous woman, and so they do not challenge them.

So I must stress that wearing our trajes - whether they be K'iche', Mam, Kaqchiquel, Tzutuhil, Pocomchí, Jakalteca or others - is not simply a matter of standing up for our cultural rights. For post-war Guatemala it has become a political challenge: that of breaking the various ideological, legal, colonial and contemporary racist structures that exist in all spheres of the Guatemalan State. Though they have evolved somewhat since 1997, these structures have not disappeared. Furthermore, the transnationalization of capital has in many respects strengthened these structures. They still reign supreme in the exclusive circles of the Guatemalan oligarchy, and are present in all sections of the Ladino (non-Maya) and mestizo ('mixed-race') population, both middle-class and poor. It is they who maintain and often reinforce the various racial stereotypes, including the racist and sexist jokes about what Maya women have under their corte (skirt) or huipil (blouse), with reference to their sexual organs and the presence or absence of underwear.(7) The investment of transnational capital in the tourism industry has led to a more extensive folklorization of Mayan cultures and images of Mayan women and here too the Guatemalan State has played a key role in accommodating the needs of the tourism industry.

This particular violation made me think about the various forms of historical resistance that our ancestors, our grandmothers and mothers, have been putting up since 1524 A.D. in the face of racial discrimination by refusing to give up those elements of their identity (of which clothing is only one) that differ from the Western pattern, the official pattern laid down by the government's assimilation policies.(8) In this historical resistance, women's traje has played a leading role: the other elements of identity have been little documented and need bringing to light. Hopefully such investigations will be carried out by Maya women, and from a critical perspective.(9)

Associated with this historical resistance is the everyday resistance that we contemporary Maya women carry on in different forms and with a variety of instruments to challenge and face up to the constant acts of racial discrimination that we refuse to accept in spite of the constant but subtle pressures of "modernity" to give up our regional dress. Individual and collective acts of everyday resistance, such as legal battles in national and international courts, public denunciations made through the mass media, the formation of political organizations of Mayan women are some examples of how we challenge the system in which we live.

Transnational Capital and Folklorization Versus Social Reality of Mayan People

The racial exclusion faced by Maya women who wear regional traje bears no relation to the 'folkloric' use made of our diverse regional dresses and fabrics by the government and the Ladino elite to promote the tourism industry of our country abroad. Guatemalan embassies and consulates all over the world commonly display photographs, posters or paintings of indigenous girls and women in regional dress, all smiles and perfect silhouettes: native people are presented as Guatemala's biggest tourist attraction, belonging to the past yet living in the so-called modern world.

People from "Western" countries are supposed to be fascinated by places where "natives," "exotic savages" or "Indians" of past centuries can still be seen today. The policy is to show visitors a static and unchanging native culture, as if the indigenous peoples of Guatemala and elsewhere did not have an evolving culture that is constantly being renewed.

While the government collects taxes and the tourism industry profits from the display and sale of garments - such as the huipil, corte, perraje and the hair ribbon called cinta - woven by Mayan men and women from different regions of Guatemala, Mayan people never get any credit for their art and still less the fair price for creative work that artists obtain in "core" countries. Many Guatemalan restaurants and hotels of the exclusive districts of Guatemala City that serve visiting tourists and businessmen commonly have a display of textiles and also photos, posters, etc., that combine Maya faces (mostly female), regional costumes and landscapes with ancient pyramids. These images are important marketing tools for the tourism industry. While Mayan culture is commodified in these images, they bear no relation whatsoever to the Maya men, women, children and elders who eke out a living in these exclusive districts, working as labourers or servants, selling woven fabrics, furniture or sweetmeats, or even begging. (Lately a sizeable number of indigenous people have taken up begging because Guatemala's complex realities forced them to leave their villages and go to the capital, where life operates differently and there is no place for them.)

In other words, Maya textiles are "folklorized," meaning that they are presented as something totally separate from the social, political and economic context in which they were made. As if economic pressure had no impact on the making of regional dress. As if the political effects or pressures on the regions concerned were not reflected in these garments. As if the Civil War endured by the Maya people for 36 years did not modify, alter and even eliminate some elements of weaving in Maya communities, especially in areas where the war raged most fiercely.(10) This folkloristic separation between the Maya weaver's art and the social context of the people who design and make the textiles has always been part of the policies of both the government and the dominant economic and political elite. However, new political economic pressures linked to neo-liberal changes in the world economic system (11) have aggravated this problem by making Guatemala more dependent on the investment of transnational capital in the tourism industry. Thus official state and economic elite policy at home and abroad has been to exploit Maya people through the "unequal exchange" of textiles, that are bought cheap from local Mayan producers and sold at high prices to tourists, and to folklorize Mayan cultures through cultural representations of Mayan cultures that ignore the complex economic, social and racial realities endured daily by some eight million Maya men and women that live in this small Central American country.

Beauty Pageants and the Folklorization and Exploitation of Mayan Women: An Ethnographic Case

Beauty pageants of Maya women in Guatemala have led to the objectification of the "authentic" Maya woman. I will provide only one example of this although it is a humiliating and painful example. Each year the Folk Festival in Cobán, Baja Verapaz, in the north of the country, elects a Rabin Ajau or Daughter of the King. The organizers are Ladino families plus, sadly, a few Maya. They invite young Maya women from all over the country to compete in what is considered their oldest and most 'authentic' regional traje they can find in their community. In fact, one of the jury's most important evaluation criteria is the "authenticity" of regional dress.(12) This event has been held in Cobán for the past 32 years, and on average it attracts 100 Maya girls. One of their first duties on arrival is to put on their best ceremonial traje and go to a studio set up within the festival by major Guatemalan and transnational photographic and other companies that sponsor the event. Each 'Miss' is photographed several times, with special emphasis on showing off the regional traje.

Later, without any authorization from the Maya participants, the sponsoring companies hold an exhibition open to the public, at which the photos are sold for 20 dollars apiece, especially to tourists. Not one cent of the proceeds goes to the participating girls or to their communities. The profits made from the sale of such photographs are controlled exclusively by the photographic companies. In this sense, the young Maya women that participate in the pageant are being exploited. According to the few Maya participants that have dared complain, the organizing committee of the pageant describes the weave, material, design and history of each traje but generally ignores the Maya women wearing the clothing, ignores them as human beings, as Maya women and as rural people.(13) They show no interest in their problems whether inside or outside their home communities. Again we see the folklorization of Mayan culture that separates cultural artefacts, in this case regional dress, from the social context and Mayan people that produce the clothing. The meaning of such clothing from the perspective of Maya people is ignored. This exploitation and folklorization is carried out and sponsored by local Ladinos, a few Maya, and Guatemalan and transnational photographic and other companies. The problems facing young Maya people as Third World women, their objectification through folklorization, the racist manner in which they are treated throughout the event, and the economic exploitation made of them by national and international companies, are aspects ignored by the Rabin Ajau Pageant.

The Wearing of Regional Dress As a Political Act: Part II

Also ignored is the struggle of an ever-increasing number of Maya women from different parts of Guatemala who have emigrated to the capital for various reasons and who in spite of all the racial pressures survive without giving up their regional traje. On the contrary, in the context of the Beauty Pageant Maya women are simply seen to be proudly wearing a huipil from their own community (or some other region). Many Maya women emigrated to the capital in the 1980s as the only way to escape the atrocities of the Guatemalan Army. Thousands had even been kidnapped by the Army to be used as sexual slaves or forced to prepare meals, wash clothes and perform other tasks (see González).(14) In this way, thousands of Maya women once again became displaced persons within their own country, often when still young girls. These Maya women and their families took refuge in poor, working-class areas of the capital, but typically did not give up regional dress, though their traje underwent considerable changes because the women could no longer weave as they had done in their own community.

Another reason for this migration was the extreme poverty of their communities, which forced them to emigrate in search of jobs. Most were employed as domestics in the houses of Ladino or mestizo city-dwellers and many found work in assembly plants (maquilas) built at the end of the 1980s. Today, hundreds of the workers in these assembly plants are Maya women who come to work in regional traje, though a significant proportion have been forced to adopt Western clothing.(15)

Final remarks

Maya textiles and regional dress carry many meanings: cultural symbolism, centuries of history, a changing and sometimes contradictory indigenous culture, respect for nature, and so on. But it is time to start recognizing that these same textiles also carry a history of racial, cultural, social and economic exclusion that we Maya of Guatemala have endured but have resisted for over 479 years. The textiles and regional dress are also a sign of the historical and day-to-day resistance that Maya women have put up to maintain and pass on their culture.

The Maya textiles of Guatemala cannot be understood if we do not realize that for Maya women, whether they are professionals or factory workers, wearing a traje in contemporary Guatemala means to challenge the 'imaginary Guatemala' that has been socially constructed by a small economic elite with power and control over the State. Within this imaginary nation the only space for Maya people, textiles and dress is as a folkloric cultural representation, a marketing tool and a source of profit for local and transnational capital. Here Maya cultures are reduced to a decoration in public or private areas or as museum pieces, where they have some ambiguous historical value but are ultimately presented as static objects, their main contribution to the country being to enrich the tourist industry. Today more than ever, many Maya women are aware that wearing regional traje in our country is not just a cultural right but also a bold political act that asserts the right of the Maya to self-determination.

Investment in the tourist industry can be practiced in ways that may benefit Indigenous communities of Guatemala or other peripheral countries. For example, small-scale foreign or local investment in the tourism industry can be regulated by Indigenous communities so that the profits made from tourism can benefit the communities where such tourism is located and in ways where the tourism industry does not harm the dignity of the Maya people or harm or privatize the bio-sphere. So far I have discussed how the Indigenous communities of Guatemala have been negatively affected by the tourism industry, especially that controlled by national and transnational capital. However, many Indigenous communities do not oppose the tourism industry entirely and some have in fact been able to secure a modest living as small business owners that cater to foreign tourists. Thus, the role of national and transnational capital in the tourist industry is complex and may have both negative and positive consequences. Oftentimes, however, the negative consequences are ignored. Furthermore, there are substantial differences between small and large-scale investment in the tourism industry and community or capitalist control of this industry.

The transnationalization of culture and capital is complex. On the one hand, it permits indigenous people to work in solidarity with other people and cultures around the world against racism, discrimination and exploitation. On the other hand, the transnationalization of culture and capital permits the folklorization of, and hence racial discrimination against, indigenous people. The forms that the political resistance of indigenous people assumes are also very complex and constantly changing. Mayan people resist the folklorization of our culture at the same time that we assert our right to cultural difference.

The fight to be recognized as Maya people with full historical, cultural, political, legal, economic and social rights within our own country and abroad continues to be one of the principal challenges. Our fight as Maya women to bring down and transform the racist structures that prevent us from being accepted with our regional dress in various places continues to be a daily struggle. We need to resist the forces of the transnationalization of culture and capital at the same time that we need to take advantage of the new spaces of resistance that these forces create.

Just as I finished this article, I saw that on December 15, 2002 a Mam woman, Olimpia López, was refused entry by a discotheque in the city of Quetzaltenango because she was wearing the red huipil and black corte that identifies her as a Mam woman from San Marcos department. This is another violation of human rights and an insult to the dignity of Maya women and to the entire Maya people of Guatemala. It shows we still have a long way to go in achieving racial equality for our mothers, for ourselves and for our daughters. Let us hope for solidarity from other indigenous and non-indigenous women in the world who understand our complex reality and give real support to our fight for equality in the areas of race, class and gender inequalities.

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Notes:

1. The document's full title is: "Facing the economic crisis, poverty and hunger in the field of Coffee-growing Reform" (Plataforma Agraria, CONIC-PTI-AVANCSO-CALDH, 2002).

2. The expression "traje típico" as applied to the regional traje (pronounce 'tra-hay') that we Maya women wear in Guatemala is a racist way of referring to our clothing and of 'folklorizing' our culture. The Maya people do not accept or employ this terminology.

3. For the Maya, racism is a system historically formed by social structures, institutions and processes that render subordinate any persons or groups considered racially and culturally inferior. At the same time it grants privileges, unasked for, to the group not considered racially and culturally inferior.

4. The K'iche' are one of the 21 groups that make up the Maya people of Guatemala. The Accord on the Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, signed in 1995 by the Government and the Guatemalan guerrillas, recognizes three indigenous peoples in Guatemala: the Maya, the Xinca and the Garífuna.

5. This act of racial discrimination towards me for wearing my K'iche' traje was taken up by the national press and by radio and television programmes, magazines and regional newspapers. See La Hora, Prensa Libre, El Periódico and Siglo XXI from 15 June 2001. The violation was reported to the Ministry of Public Affairs, the Office of the Prosecutor for Human Rights, the Office for the Defence of Indigenous Women, the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA) and the Office of Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic.

6. By analogy with the concept of 'imaginary Mexico,' in the minds of the westernized elite, and 'deep Mexico,' the rural indigenous world is denied, concealed and discriminated against. See Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).

7. In Chapter 5 of A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999), Diane Nelson analyses and deconstructs the jokes made in conservative Ladino circles about Rigoberta Menchú, who in 1992 was the first indigenous woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

8. 1524 is the year in which the Spanish army, on Pedro de Alvarado's orders, began the colonization of Guatemala, for which they employed violence but also ideology.

9. Irma Otzoy's Identidad y Vestuario Maya (1996) is one of the few works about the historical, aesthetic and political implications of wearing Maya dress to be written by a (Kaqchiquel) Maya woman.

10. The international organizations, the Government and the civil sectors of society agreed that Guatemala's Civil War began in 1960 and ended in December 1996, upon the signing of the Firm and Lasting Peace Accord between representatives of the Government and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), the umbrella organization of the Guatemalan guerrillas. During this time 440 indigenous towns disappeared as part of government policy. Also 83% of the victims during the war were indigenous. See Guatemala Nunca Más (1998) and "Conclusions and Recommedations of the Commission for Historical Clarification" (1999).

11. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

12. See Carlota McAllister's "Authenticity and Guatemala's Maya Queen" in Cohen et al. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1996). This is one of the few texts to make a critical analysis of the racial implications of the Rabin Ajau contest held each year in the city of Cobán, department of Baja Verapaz.

13. See the daily newspapers La Hora and Prensa Libre for July 2002, when several Maya participants issued public complaints about the racial and discriminatory humiliation that they had been subjected to by the members of the organizing committee and by the representatives of the national and international companies that had sponsored the festival.

14. Matilde González, Se Cambió El Tiempo. Conflicto y Poder en Territorio K'iche' 1880-1996 (2002), especially chapter XI. See also "Conclusions and Recommendations of the Commission for Historical Clarification" (1999).

15. As in other peripheral countries, the neoliberal ideology that advocates the spread of maquilas has been incapable of reducing in any significant way the high levels of poverty in Guatemala and has served largely to transfer wealth and services away from the poor and the working class and towards transnational capitalists On the other hand, on a smaller scale, it has also been noted that the women who have worked extensively in maquilas have been able aquire new means with which to challenge patriarchal authority as their earnings increase and their relocation to the maquila areas give them new freedoms of gender and sexual expression. All of this occurs within new structures of patriarchal control, sexual harrassment and frequent sexual abuse on the factory floor. See Norma Iglesias, Beautiful flowers of the maquiladora: life histories of women workers in Tijuana (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997).

Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj is a K'ichee' Maya anthropologist and journalist. As a recipient of the 2002 GSC Dissertation Fellowship, she currently conducts fieldwork for her project "Indigenous Identity, Gender Relations and Agrarian Politics in Guatemala" in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.