CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 333tions, calendrical periods, day and night, seasons, rituals, and practically everything
else that is significant in the community, are situated according to the particular car-
dinal direction with which they are associated (for more on these beliefs in Chamula,
see Chapters 13 and 14).
The Chamulas have struggled fiercely to preserve a Mesoamerican identity and
cultural orientation against all outside attempts to replace them with modern ideas.
For example, in the late 1980s when the Roman Catholic Church attempted to in-
troduce more socially oriented religious practices in the community, “in the best in-
terests of local religious belief and practice” (Gossen 1999:5), the Chamulas withdrew
from the Roman Church and sought affiliation with the Orthodox Catholic Church!
Obviously, for the majority of the Chamulas their identity as (Mesoamerican) Indi-
ans was far stronger than their identity as Christians. More recently, in 1994, the rad-
ical Zapatista movement burst onto the Chiapas scene and attracted to its side many
Indian communities in Chiapas. The Chamulan community, however, chose not to
support the Zapatistas’ nationalist agenda. Apparently, local Indian identity in
Chamula counted more than the kind of “pan-Indian” identity being sponsored by
the Zapatistas (for more on the Zapatista movement, see the section that follows on
“Ethnic Nationalism,” and especially Chapter 10).
Native Mesoamerican Communities in Central America. In Central America, only
the country of Guatemala has large numbers of local communities that are similar
to those of southern Mexico in which local Mesoamerican cultures continue to
provide the primary source of identity (see Box 8.5 for an account of the general
nature of local identities in the Mayan communities of Guatemala).
Southeast of Guatemala—in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—
only a scattering of communities have retained strong native Mesoamerican identi-
fication. Among these would be Izalco and a few other Pipil communities in western
El Salvador; some 100 scattered Lencan communities in southwestern Honduras;
and Monimbó and a sprinkling of other Chorotegan communities in Pacific Coastal
Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The nature of native Mesoamerican local cultures in the
southeastern Central American countries can be illustrated by the Monimbó com-
munity, an Indian “barrio” located in the city of Masaya, Nicaragua (see the discus-
sion of Monimbó in connection with the Nicaraguan revolution presented in the
preceding section on Central American revolutions).
The majority of Monimbó residents, more than 20,000 in number, continue to
identify as Indians, even though their native Chorotegan language has been lost.
Furthermore, they no longer differ significantly from other lower-class residents of
Masaya in terms of occupation, marriage patterns, religion, or education. Increasingly,
it would seem, Monimbó has taken on the characteristics of lower-class structure, its
past communal unity being gradually replaced by a fragmented, class-stratified
suburb.
The anthropologist Les Field (l998), who recently studied local identities in Mon-
imbó, argues that their Indian identity is in flux. For some of Monimbó’s leaders,
Chorotegan Indian identity is based on an untenable “essentialist” view of history
(that is, they argue that their Mesoamerican cultural features have persisted relatively