332 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
The incipient class of merchants and commercial farmers in Chamula early on
was made up of Indians who were able to take advantage of the developmental pro-
grams and later expanded capitalism in Chiapas. The commercial farmers obtained
credits, fertilizers, seeds, and irrigation technology from INI and other development
agencies. The merchants were early collaborators with the revolutionary government
and used political position to obtain the credits needed to purchase trucks and li-
censes to establish retail businesses in the community. Some of the commercialized
Indians in Chamula, especially the merchants, became an elite group of “progressive”
caciques. They gained control over key political and religious institutions, and were
able to manipulate community life in such a way that it favored their own interests.
It is not surprising that relations between the members of this elite group of Chamu-
las have been highly competitive, and this state of affairs has led to fierce factional
struggles within the community.
The most serious factional conflict centered on large numbers of Chamulas who
had converted to evangelical religions. The evangelicals were largely made up of dis-
affected wage laborers, and they resented the persisting economic and cultural lim-
itations of the community. Because they represented a threat to the local commercial
elite and the latter’s guardianship of the community’s Tzotzil Mayan identity and
culture, they were persecuted. Those who would not renounce their evangelical be-
liefs were either killed or driven out of the community. Some of them formed inde-
pendent agricultural communities in adjacent areas, and thousands of them settled
in the marginal zones of nearby San Cristóbal and the state capital of Tuxtla Gutiér-
rez (for an account of the murder of a Chamulan protestant leader by the caciques
of Chamula, see Gossen 1999:211ff).
The anthropologist Gary Gossen (1970; 1999) points out that Chamula culture
is not an “authentic” Mesoamerican culture but a complex blending of Spanish colo-
nial, Catholic, Mexican revolutionary, and modern developmental ideas melded with
basic ideas, symbols, and practices that ultimately derive from the aboriginal
Mesoamerican world. Such cultural complexity is to be expected and apparently is
similar to the identifying cultures of all “Indian” communities in Mexico (and Cen-
tral America). In the case of Chamula, the unique amalgam of beliefs and practices
in the late modern era would appear to be the result of a synthesis worked out be-
tween the ruling Indian caciques and the more traditional rural farming sector of the
community. What is extraordinary about the synthesis, however, is the extent to which
it has retained profoundly Mesoamerican (Tzotzil Mayan) cultural features, despite
the many cultural elements from Spanish and Mexican sources that have been in-
corporated into its present form.
The local Chamula cosmology, for example, retains the Mesoamerican idea of
cyclic creations, in which each creation is defined by a contest between good and
bad forces. The world, which centers on Chamula itself, extends upward in the form
of celestial layers, each the habitat of sacred powers (for example, “Our Father” the
Sun is in the third “sky,” “Our Mother” the moon is in the second). The cosmos ex-
tends downward into the underworld, also layered and the habitat of the dead (such
as St. Michael, the earthbearer). And the four cardinal directions provide an even
more fundamental spatial division of the Chamulan world, whereby territorial sec-