CHAPTER 1

Greg Grandin

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

Guatemala has more than its share of martyrs but few, if any, national heroes.It is impossible to imagine a child of a Guatemalan president being namedafter an indigenous leader or a peasant revolutionary, as were CuauhtémocCárdenas and Emiliano Zedillo, the sons of Mexican presidents from opposingends of the political spectrum. Of Central America's three major NewLeft insurgencies—the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador,the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, and the GuatemalanNational Revolutionary Unity—only the last didn't take the name ofan idealized leader whose death symbolized frustrated national aspirations.

One reason for this distinction is the persistence of the country's extremeracial divide, which has restricted the kind of multiclass politics that memorializespopular figures like Emiliano Zapata and Augusto Sandino. In Mexicoby the late colonial period, an expanding economy had begun to break downindigenous ethnicity in the central valley into a homogeneous rural identity,which, though still ethnically marked, allowed for the emergence of fluid alliances(Knight 1994: 78). Peasants participated on all sides during Mexico'stumultuous nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet a great many marchedon the winning side of liberal-national history: independence from Spain,anti-imperialist struggles against the United States and France, the rise topower of Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, and, of course, the Mexican Revolution.

Guatemala's backwater colonial economy, in contrast, allowed for theconsolidation and endurance of distinct indigenous identities centered onresidential communities; the nineteenth-century coffee economy created anagrarian proletariat defined along racial lines. Indigenous communities weresingled out as sources of labor; workers were conscripted through a series ofextra-economic "incentives," including forced labor drafts, debt peonage, andvagrancy laws. Whole villages became captives of specific planters, who reliedon them not just for labor but, unable to maintain a full-time labor force, tosubsidize, through ongoing subsistence production, the nutritional needs ofworkers during the off-season. Indigenous peasants, in turn, used the wagesthey did receive to maintain and even revive community traditions and rituals—forexample, cofradías (Catholic saint cults), fiestas (celebrations of specificsaints), and cabildos (indigenous administrative institutions, associatedwith Spanish colonialism)—even as the land base that traditionally underwrotesuch activities was coming under intense pressure.

As a result, the concordance of liberal nationalism with a form of capitalismthat deepened rather than dissipated racial identity generated a stableopposition: on one side stood indigenous communities allied with theCatholic Church, defending communal land and local autonomy; on theother were modernizing liberals pushing to alienate the corporate protectionsof both church and indigenous cabildo. When liberals took control ofthe state and its ideological apparatus in 1871, indigenous mobilization wasuniformly portrayed as an obstacle to achieving their nation. In 1951, in themiddle of Guatemala's "national-popular" decade, the historian Daniel Contreras(1951) did try to claim Totonicapán's Atanasio Tzul, who led a significantuprising in 1820, as a national procer, or statesman, paving the way toindependence from Spain. This one exception aside, nationalist intellectualsnearly unanimously blamed the failures of Guatemalan liberalism—the fallof the first postcolonial liberal regime, the destruction of the highland Estadode los Altos, the collapse of the Central American Federation, the enduranceof Rafael Carrera's conservative regime—on indigenous obstinacy.

The 1910 Mexican Revolution and the myths it generated inspired historiansto search Mexico's agrarian past for the Revolution's origins...