Janferie Stoneas the communities of production necessarily devote energy to other
practices and educational strategies. As clothing carries such signif-
icance within the momentum of contemporary Pan-Maya activism,
it becomes obvious that the appearance of the body simultaneously
constrains and empowers the individual as the body moves through
the spaces of the house, town, and world. The early 1990 s were years
of transition. How might one draw out the relationship of a young
woman, wearing traje and traveling in California, to the stories she
told of transforming beings and the dream narratives that described
correct behavior and ideal female roles and yet empowered her to seek
new paths of interaction with the world? And how did these tales relate
to the time in which they were told, when the civil conflict in Guate-
mala was moving toward the peace accords, a period of détente char-
acterized by deep emotional exhaustion?
Cultural Reproduction in a Time of DeathVera told this tale when Guatemala was emerging from a forty-year-
long civil conflict, peaking in the late seventies and the eighties, when
more than 200 , 000 Maya were killed and 440 villages destroyed in a
massive repression by the Guatemalan Army, authorized by the gov-
ernment (Montejo 1999 , 4 ). The Commission for Historical Clari-
fication (ceh), the un-appointed truth commission, reported on the
extent of the terror and its racist–ethnic basis in 1999.^3 Knowledge
of the genocide is still obscured for many of the Maya people who
did not directly experience the violence, although it happened across
the lake, up in the mountains, or just down the road. In 1992 , when
asked directly, Vera claimed to have no knowledge of violence in her
town. However, when she began to relate one incident, she cut it off,
saying that “after all, not much had happened.” In recent conversa-
tions, Vera admitted that there are things she is willing to talk about
now, across elapsed time and at a distance, when she is in the United
States but not when she is at home, where her words might be over-
heard. As a woman, enclosed by household activities, she is aware of
the small ears, older ears, and male ears that may listen and judge.
Conversation is always in flux, taking all possible audiences into con-
sideration. When Vera and I talked, we were in a small cabin in the