CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 311the embattled Indians. Ceto went on to take a leadership role in the Committee for
Peasant Unity (CUC), a political organization made up mostly of Indian and poor
ladino peasants and workers. At first, CUC’s work was devoted to organizing and ed-
ucating rural workers and peasants in an attempt to improve their general social
conditions, but under relentless attack from the army and death squads, the orga-
nization went underground and merged with the guerrilla movement.
Indian leaders like Ceto came to understand that remnants of the ancient Mayan
culture could serve as powerful symbols for the revolution. One important source of
Mayan symbolism was the Popol Wuh,the so-called “bible” of the K’iche’ Mayas (for
a discussion of this important Mayan document, see Chapters 6, 13, and 14). The
Popol Wuh, for example, tells the story of a greedy and pompous giant macaw bird
claiming to be the sun. The bird is brought down from its high perch by humble or-
phan twins who mortally wound it with pellets from a blowgun. Cast in the emerg-
ing nativist ideology of the revolution, the self-aggrandizing bird metaphorically
could stand for the wealth-seeking military rulers of Guatemala, whereas the orphans
who humbled that arrogant bird could represent the poor Indians fighting against
the military regime. Metaphors of this kind had enormous motivational power among
both the educated and the peasant Mayas of Guatemala.
Perhaps even more important than the educated town Indians for the
Guatemalan revolution were the rural proletarianized Mayas. Jeffrey Paige (1983)
noted that, as in the Vietnam revolution, the insurgents in Guatemala enjoyed their
greatest success in gaining recruits precisely in rural areas where the Mayan Indians
had previously been transformed “from hacienda to migratory labor estate and from
Indian to proletarian.” The evidence available on the revolutionary ideas that moti-
vated these proletarianized Indians came in part from the powerful Mesoamerican
cultural tradition. This effect is made clear from a soliloquy delivered by a K’iche’
Mayan guerrilla leader who appears in the documentary film on the Guatemalan
revolution entitled “When the Mountains Tremble”:
Guatemala is at war. The road that led to that war is over 400 years old. It led us up into
the mountains when the Spaniards invaded and tried to wipe out our Indian culture. Our
ancestors preserved our customs. We grew corn and our numbers increased. We say that
every road has a coming and a going, a leaving and a returning. Now we’re coming down
out of the mountains. We’re going back down to the towns and cities. We are reclaiming
our rights. But we don’t travel this road alone. There can be no returning unless every-
one, Indians and non-Indians go together. All of us together will make a new Guatemala.
All of us together will reclaim our rights. The road is returning. Together we will win.This leader and the people to whom he addressed the speech were representa-
tive of the hundreds of thousands of Mayan peasants who had recently become wage
laborers on the coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations of Guatemala. In his eloquent
phrases we hear echoes of both their recent travails and the memory of ancient
Mesoamerican traditions. In particular, the metaphor of the modern Indian’s his-
tory as a “road” takes us back to the Popol Wuh and to a prayer recited there that
refers to the journey of life as a dangerous “Green road, the Green Path” trod by
both the ancient and the modern Mayas, despite its many pitfalls and snares.