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Greg Grandin
Department of History, Duke University

View the images for Dr. Grandin's paper

Abstract

This paper revisits an argument I make in my book, The Blood of Guatemala, regarding the relationship between the new art form of photography and the maintenance and transformation of K'iche'- Mayan identity in the highland city of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. In my book, I suggested that as Guatemala's export coffee economy expanded at the end of the nineteenth century, wage labor supplanted relations of mutual obligation between indigenous K'iche' Mayan elites and commoners. This development undermined Mayan identity which had traditionally been based on these norms of reciprocity. In response, indigenous elites came to rely on the outward forms of ethnicity, particularly female dress, as a means of shoring up an endangered Mayan identity. Identity, in other words, became increasingly symbolic and distant from the customs and institutions of local communities. I also argued that one of the aspects of Guatemalan nationalism was to equate indigenous identity with rural poverty and to cast both as emblems of the past that Guatemala would have to discard in order to modernize. In response to this assumption, urban Quetzalteco K'iche' elites used studio portraits to distance themselves from indigenous peasants. In the process, I argued, these K'iche' elites created a decidedly urban indigenous aesthetic which challenged Ladino - non-indigenous Guatemalan - notions that progress depended upon the loss of indigenous cultural identity. In this essay, I challenge my previous argument - or at a minimum, complicate it. While I will show that my thesis holds true for urban indigenous elites - that is, that these images do reveal efforts by K'iche' male elites to cast themselves as the bearers of progress and modernity - its corollaries regarding the role of women and peasants are, if not wrong, overstated. In these photos, indigenous women and peasants did not simply stand in for tradition. Like urban elites, they presented themselves as fully engaged with the changes of the modern world. In their choice of clothing, fashion accessories, pose and expression, women and peasants in these photos do not stand as relics of the past, but as active participants in their present.