CHAPTER 9 TRANSNATIONALISM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MESOAMERICA 365kets are expanding to two or three days a week. Some towns already hold daily plazas,
and the trend points to many more permanent markets. A good example of this is
the market in San Francisco el Alto in western Guatemala, the largest in the region.
This market used to be held only on Fridays, when over 10,000 people would crowd
the hilly streets of the town early Friday morning. In 1980, vendors would arrive in
San Francisco at 9:00 or 10:00 A.M. on Thursday night and sleep in the plaza to be
guaranteed a space. By 1987, people were arriving early on Thursday, and the plaza
would begin its activity then. In 1990, people predicted that soon Wednesdays would
become an additional day of plaza. The level of commercialization, particularly in tra-
ditional textiles and male garments, is so high that San Francisco may become a per-
manent market center of the Western Highlands region.
Whereas many direct producers (called propiosin Guatemala) bring small
amounts of produce on each market day, a large number of intermediaries (called
regatones) may buy from the local producers at their local market and then take them
to other markets at longer distances. There is some gender differentiation in this di-
vision of labor. Most direct producers who sell at the markets are women, who pre-
fer to sell in markets close to home and thus have to travel shorter distances. They
often travel by bus, although some people in the region still walk several miles be-
tween marketplaces. Most intermediaries are men. They are long-distance merchants;
many of them own trucks and cross regional and national boundaries.
Intermediaries are experimenting with new strategies that represent variations
from their traditional practices. For example, many do not remain loyal to the tra-
ditional products because diversifying the items traded diminishes the risk of busi-
nesses going bad. Vendors may set a goal of reaching a distant market, even crossing
national borders. They then purchase goods that will be sold at different stops
throughout the trip. In turn, they acquire local specialties at each stop, which will be
sold at the final destination. This practice of stepped trading, now conducted with
the aid of trucks or buses, was already practiced in pre-Columbian times on foot, and
during the colonial and neocolonial years with the help of mules.
Marketing Culture
The complex network of interdependent markets graphically depicts a system of so-
cial and political relations among the populations of the different regions. The close-
ness and intensity of the trading interactions suggest the degree of the participants’
immersion in the capitalist system. As these networks expand, so does the universe
of the region’s inhabitants. Spanish is spoken as a trading language in most markets
of Mesoamerica, even where large sectors speak Spanish only as a second language.
This is the case in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and western Guatemala, among other areas.
Markets provide the means for acquiring ethnic knowledge, and as such, they have
been recognized as sites for peaceful interactions, even in times of violence. The prac-
tice of bargaining, widespread in Mesoamerica, goes hand in hand with full accep-
tance of the market as regulator and determinant of prices. Research has shown that
the resulting price of each bargaining interaction usually does not change significantly
from one trading partner to another. What does change is the length and style of the
bargaining itself. The negotiation is longer and more difficult, and it starts at higher