CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 339(see the discussion of these reforms in the preceding section on development in
Guatemala). Guatemala’s post–1954 indigenist programs failed to promote respect for
the Indians or to successfully integrate them into national life. And with the onset of
the civil war in the l970s and 1980s, the development programs were totally scrapped
as the government engaged in a genocidal attack on the Indians and their cultures (on
the civil war in Guatemala and its impact on the Indians there, see the earlier section
on the Guatemalan revolution).
Despite the denials of significant Mesoamerican influence on Guatemalan na-
tional culture, that influence has been substantial. This could not be otherwise, given
the fact that a far larger proportion of Guatemala’s people is made up of Mesoamer-
ican Indians than in Mexico or the rest of Central America. The author of this chap-
ter long ago called attention to influential Mesoamerican elements that found their
way into Guatemala’s budding national culture. For example, the country’s revered
name, like Mexico’s, appears to have been adopted directly in memory of a power-
ful pre-hispanic Mayan kingdom of the area. Another of the country’s most power-
ful symbols of national pride and identity is based on the great Mayan epic, the Popol
Wuh,read by all the schoolchildren of Guatemala and endlessly studied and inter-
preted by Guatemalan scholars and writers.
Another of Guatemala’s deepest and most complex national symbols derived
from Mesoamerican sources is the persona of the Mayan historical hero Tekum, who
led the K’iche’ Mayan forces against the Spanish conquistadors in 1524. According
to historical documents, Tekum was killed by Pedro de Alvarado, the Spanish captain
(see the account of this historical episode in Chapter 4), and today Tekum’s burial
place is claimed by numerous Indian communities of the western highlands, and
statues of him have been erected throughout the country. The Tekum persona can
be seen as the Guatemalan equivalent of Mexico’s Cuauhtemoc persona: the un-
bowed, valiant Indian warrior. Similarly, Alvarado is the equivalent persona to Cortés,
the Spanish conquistador and violator of Indian women and political sovereignty.
This Guatemalan secular pantheon is less developed and certainly more narrowly
shared than Mexico’s, but it does exist in diverse forms for most Guatemalans. As in
Mexico it expresses profound but “hidden” native elements in Guatemala’s national
cultural identity.
The parallels between Guatemalan and Mexican national symbolism include
similar ideas about the ladinos (“mestizos”) and their origins in both countries. As
Paz does for Mexico, Luís Cardoza y Aragón, one of Guatemala’s main critics of in-
digenismo, alludes to a hidden “collective conscience” in Guatemala concerning
the ladinos, which according to the anthropologist Richard Adams is so sensitive
and deeply entrenched that until recently, it was almost never openly discussed.
Even more so than in Mexico, the Guatemalan ladinos are defined in racial and
ethnic terms, as if to provide a symbolic bridge across the historically created chasm
of inequality, insecurity, and hatred between the Spaniards and Indians. Cardoza y
Aragón described this aspect of the national “conscience” as follows (Adams
1991:147):