532 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
persisted throughout the colonial and early modern periods (perhaps even today)
as underground books of prophecy.
All of this could be dismissed as a mere curiosity were it not for the fact that lit-
eracy and the written word, as symbols of political and religious power and ethnic con-
sciousness, matter a great deal in the ideological warfare that pervades Mesoamerica
in our time. All of the major purveyors of new ideology—Protestants, Marxist revo-
lutionaries, Roman Catholic reform-oriented missionaries affiliated with the Theol-
ogy of Liberation, and advocates of national integration and development—promise
some form of political entitlement through literacy. This is old soil, well trodden for
2,000 years. However, two new issues are apparent. First, in all cases, the focus is upon
shared entitlement; literacy is not destined to empower only the elite. The second
issue is, of course, whether the written word will empower in Spanish or in native
languages. Interested parties disagree here. However, there is at least good reason to
speculate that victory in the new spiritual warfare of Mesoamerica will go to those who
offer literacy (and something to read) in native languages. This eventuality may partly
account for the extraordinary recent success of Protestantism in many of the pre-
dominantly Indian areas of Guatemala and Mexico.
We have concluded this chapter by sketching six core features of spirituality that
span the linguistic diversity and the ethnic, political, and ecological boundaries of
Mesoamerica across several millennia. Because these traits are so widespread and
apparently so durable, it is not unreasonable to assert that religion, cosmology, and
related symbolic constructions may be among the more important features that unify
the native peoples of the region as a distinctive cultural space (“civilization”) in both
past and present. Although this may be true, we have noted earlier that there are
now tens of millions of Mexicans and Central Americans for whom the core features
we have described as characterizing Indian-derived spiritual components of the re-
gion certainly do not apply, at least insofar as people would consciously identify them-
selves. However, although cultural space and individual identity are not necessarily
related, it is nevertheless the case that the Indian past and present color the quality
of life throughout the region.
From minishrines that adorn the front of buses and taxis, to the coins in their
pockets, to the murals painted on public buildings, Mexicans daily encounter sacred
symbols from their Indian past. Guatemala’s greatest literary classics—the sixteenth-
century K’iche’ Mayan Popol Wuhand Miguel Angel Asturias’s twentieth-century epic
novel Men of Maize,for which he received the Nobel Prize in literature, are nothing
more and nothing less than root and branch of Maya spiritual ideas (for citations from
these sources, see Chapter 13). Thus, the realm of spiritual and religious traditions
does not lie far removed from the lives of all contemporary peoples residing in the
bounds of the ancient Mesoamerican lands.