1

“Progress and Primitivism on Display at the Central American Exposition of 1897”

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Central American Exposition flung open its gates to international audiences on

March 15, 1897 in the capital city of Guatemala to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the

nation’s independence. At the appointed hour, President Reina Barrios pressed a button that sent

a telegraph over newly installed electrical wires with news of the exposition to distant regions of

the globe. Parades and military bands played the new national anthem and accompanied the

president, the exposition’s central committee, and other important guests to the fairgrounds.

According to the official bulletin of the central committee, more than 40,000 people attended the

exposition on the opening day.1

Swept up in the global mania for world’s fairs, Guatemalan leaders and their fellow

Central American counterparts seized on the idea of hosting an international exposition to refute

their former colonial status, dispel prevailing stereotypes of their backwardness and barbarity

and, in conscious imitation of the United States and Europe, promote their economic potential

and draw foreign investment. World’s fairs allowed for the articulation of national ideals of

progress, modernity, and visually illustrated a nation’s collective identity in an international

context. Most expositions of the late nineteenth century attempted to promote a sense of national

identity and pride by uniting citizens through exhibits that emphasized shared cultural values and

important national symbols.2

1
Boletín de la Exposición Centro Americana. March 20, 1897. The number of visitors on opening day
reported varies widely: the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala reported a mere 7,000.
2
Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions,
1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1-8. Rydell argues that fairs represented “symbolic
universes” that articulated national ideas about progress, modernity, and empire that fostered a sense of collective,
national identity and common cultural values. Additionally, fairs aided in the creation of national identities much in
the way that Benedict Anderson argued that print capitalism creates “imagined communities.” See Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York:
 2

In contrast, the Central American Exposition consciously sought to highlight the

distinctions between Mayan Indians, Ladinos, and white coffee plantation owners. These racial

divisions helped to construct new social hierarchies that reflected the changing economic needs

of coffee growers and potential foreign investors. The fair’s central organizing committee,

charged with the monumental task of creating an acceptable national and regional history and

public image, faced difficult choices when deciding how to represent Central American Indians

to an international audience. Their arrangement of the displays and exhibitions visually

structured knowledge of Indian people for visitors and articulated assumptions about the Indian

past and present that allowed the nation to appear modern by comparison. The juxtaposition of

collections of export products and machinery alongside Indian archeological artifacts and

contemporary ethnographic items, allowed visitors to understand easily the subtle messages

about civilization, primitivism, evolution, and modernity embedded within the displays.

This thesis examines the ways Guatemalan fair organizers conceptualized and

represented Indian people through the careful display and arrangement material culture in order

to present a modern image of the nation to an international audience. Anxious to present itself as

a nation with tremendous potential opportunities for investment as well as the ideal site for

foreign immigration, the Guatemalan political and business interests that organized the fair

promoted Indians as a capable, modern workforce ready to assist European plantation owners

with their coffee harvests. In order to create this impression, the organizers used the exposition

as a visual, public venue where it could carefully manage its international image and influence

assumptions about the nature of Indians through the strategic display of material culture. The

Verso, 1991).
 3

exhibition emphasized the industrious nature of Indians, but the display of archaeological

remains created an artificial barrier between the indigenous past and present that allowed fair

organizers to redefine Indians as the ideal modern workforce and legitimized rapidly increasing

government appropriation of both Indian land and labor for coffee production.

This study builds on original archival research conducted at the Archivo General de

Centro America (AGCA), as well as sources gathered from a variety of libraries and universities.

A number of primary sources related to the exposition also exist at the Latin American Library of

the Howard Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University. Finally, a large number of sources

remain scattered across both national and international libraries. I primarily rely on official fair

records, which include speeches, inventories of the items exhibited in the displays, and

contemporary newspaper articles from Guatemala and the United States. The general narrative

history that I present here remains incomplete, due to the nature of the sources as well as the lack

of any monograph that narrates the fair in detail. In addition to official records and documents

directly related to the fair, I examine ethnographies of Mayan people produced by foreign

anthropologists in Guatemala. I focus on the work of Dr. Karl Sapper, a prominent German

geographer and anthropologist, created detailed ethnographies of Mayan people during the late

nineteenth century. I use his observations to attempt to show that despite the nation’s insistence

that contemporary indigenous people had no relationship to their ancient past, Indians continued

their cultural traditions and practices, such as retention of Mayan languages, dress, and religion

that provided them with a sense of history and identity apart from their roles as workers on

coffee plantations.

Two different approaches could be used to examine this exposition and would necessarily

produce slightly different conclusions. The first concerns the way the Central American
 4

Exposition functioned as a proxy for the rapidly growing national economy that centered on

coffee cultivation. The second approach emphasizes the ways that this exposition fit into the

larger global constellation of expositions and world’s fairs at the end of the nineteenth century.

Although I find advantages to both approaches, I focus my analysis here on the ways that the

fair’s structure and execution ultimately served the small but influential group of Guatemalan

coffee finqueros. I elected to make coffee the focal point, rather than the expositions in general,

as coffee represents a lens specific to Guatemala and Central America that highlights the region’s

unique historical experiences. Additionally, the role of labor and local economies on

international expositions remains a vastly understudied area that demands greater investigation. I

provide a general overview of expositions and their multivocal meanings here to situate the

exposition within the larger context of fairs. As this project progresses towards a dissertation, I

plan to expand my analysis to include a more detailed examination of how the meaning and

significance of this fair compares to expositions the U.S., Europe, and other former colonial

nations.

World’s fairs and international expositions captured the imagination of both the public

and world leaders during the nineteenth century. After the Crystal Palace exposition in London

in 1851, expositions became widely regarded as the ultimate marker of modernity and progress.

At their zenith, expositions took place several times a year in different locations around the

world. Nations across the globe scrambled to host their own expositions or at the very least,

participate in an important exposition in another country. The United States and Europe

remained the leaders in the mania for world’s fairs and hosted and participated in a large number

of expositions.
 5

The exhibition of material culture that represents people and concepts structures

knowledge for viewers and provides a way to understand the world. Displays of collections of

objects assumed an even higher profile in the late nineteenth century after the Industrial

Revolution and the emergence of an economic system that relied on the production of massive

amounts of consumer goods that came to adorn public venues for visual consumption. Visual

representations also took on increased significance as private, closed of displays of collections of

art, scientific specimens, and archaeological artifacts became more accessible through the

gradual opening of a culture of display that encouraged the public to understand the world

through exhibition. The shift towards expositions formed part of a larger “exhibitionary

culture” that developed during the late nineteenth century.3 Public access to world’s fairs,

museums, and department stores allowed new cultural attitudes towards visual culture to flourish

that made exhibitions an authoritative medium for the transmission of knowledge. The strategic

display of material culture in these public venues provided a tangible way for powerful

institutions, such as local and national governments and elite economic interests to broadcast

their worldviews to a large audience.4 The increasing visibility of displays of science, art, and

consumer goods promoted visual representations as the primary means of learning about the

world as well as providing explanations about its order and purpose. The culture of display

helped to structure the relationships between visitors and the exhibited object that served to

mirror the proper relationship between the public and state institutions and reinforce social order.

Furthermore, these institutions served didactic purposes in that fair organizers designed exhibits

3
Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex.” In The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics
(London; New York: Routledge, 1995), 59-88.
4
Ibid., 59.
 6

with the express purpose of subtly educating and schooling the public in acceptable social roles

and cultural values.5

The subtle ideas and discourses generated at expositions remained lodged in the public

consciousness long after the destruction of the temporary buildings. Expositions played a major

role in the creation of national museums in the United States, Europe, and Latin America as

items left over from expositions, such as art and ethnographic items, moved into specific

physical spaces and found new meaning as museum pieces. The arrangement of these objects

created narratives that constructed and reproduced an official state vision about the world that

explained national histories that ultimately served political purposes. More importantly,

ephemeral ideas and discourses from expositions moved to museums where they became

institutionalized as a permanent part of national consciousness. The underlying assumptions

embedded in expositions, such as the definition of relationships between social classes, the

nature of political power, and the role of the state, took on increased prestige and legitimacy

when exposition displays gained a new sense of authority from their roles as official museum

exhibitions at the national level. The museum building itself, as the repository of collections,

framed the physical display of the knowledge that the objects generated and provided visitors

with the appropriate environment in which to marvel at the exhibits well as a symbolic space for

the enactment of rituals of civilization.6

5
Tony Bennett, “Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility, and the Social Order,” in The Politics of
Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), 32.
6
Sophie Forgan, “Building the Museum: Knowledge, Conflict, and the Power of Place,” Isis 96, no. 4
(December 2005): 572-585. Forgan offers a number of useful ways to think about museums and argues that the
physical structure of the museum remains as important in the construction and archiving of scientific knowledge as
the collections housed within. Additionally, she suggests that scholars think critically about the historical and
culture context of the museum structure, particular physical locations of museums, and the ways that museum
architecture shapes the viewers experience.
 7

Among the items displayed at expositions, the display of human beings constituted a

crucial part of the visual messages that viewers received. Fairs offered viewers a glimpse of

strange and exotic beings through both living ethnographic exhibits and static dioramas that

commonly featured indigenous people from both overseas and internal colonial possessions. In

particular, colonized peoples at fairs served as national trophies as well as souvenirs from exotic

locales for imperial nations and their citizens. Even in stationary dioramas, exhibits that

displayed archaeological and ethnographic materials represented the symbolic presence of

foreign peoples and structured the colonial relationship between the viewers and the exhibit. The

display of people served as a bridge between popular entertainment and anthropological

conceptions of race and evolution based on Social Darwinism. These exhibits conveyed a

number of ideas, such as the power of empire as well as popularized pseudo- scientific ideas

about the nature of indigenous people. By the end of the nineteenth century, representations and

imperialism had become standard fare at expositions.7 Fair organizers, often in the guise of

anthropologists, attempted to present indigenous people in supposedly authentic settings,

creating the impression of savagery, barbarity, and exoticism that titillated fairgoers.8 The

juxtaposition of well-heeled visitors and savage Indians emphasized the dichotomy between

civilization and barbarity as well as progress and primitivism.

Despite their inclusion in expositions as oddities or primitive savages, Indian people

themselves paid little attention to the way expositions manipulated representations of their

cultures to suit specific purposes. At some expositions, evidence points to the active indigenous

7
Raymond Corbey, “Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930,” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 3 (August 1993):
338-369.
8
Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 21.
 8

manipulation of both fair organizers and visitors for either amusement or monetary gain.9 The

noticeable absence of Indian responses to their representation at Central American Exposition or

as fairgoers reflects a lack of fair documents that includes any information about Indian people

except in terms of their representations that suggested their capacity of labor. The exposition’s

single minded focus on presenting Indians in terms of progress led to their exclusion from

official records and hinders our present understandings of the Indian viewpoint. The

reconstruction of the Indian experience in relation to the exposition may remain the ultimate

unknown variable here. The struggle to maintain cultural and political autonomy could be

characterized as “resisting” the stereotypes that the fair created for them, but Indians found

themselves preoccupied in battles against the state appropriation of their land and labor. Shifting

the spotlight from the exposition to the struggles of actual indigenous people and the ways that

the production of coffee changed Indian communities provides a counterweight to official fair

narratives that only emphasize ideas about their suitability for the hard work of coffee

cultivation. Both ethnographies and labor legislation that attempted to regulate Indian workers

demonstrate the ways in which Indians engaged the increasing power of the state and its proxies

and challenged the ideas that the exposition created about them.

Expositions visually articulated national values, ideas, and visions of the future to both

international and domestic audiences and the multivocal nature of these mega-events allows for

an analysis of competing discourses from a variety of angles. An analysis of world’s fairs allows

for further examination and understanding about nineteenth century ideas about such diverse

themes as nationalism, class, racial, and gender hierarchies, scientific solutions to pressing

social problems, empire, and conceptions of modernity and progress. The rapidly expanding

literature on world’s fairs and international expositions has touched on many of these themes, but
9
Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 59-88.
 9

historians have invested relatively little time in the exploration of fairs hosted by nations outside

of Europe and the U.S. The substantial gaps in the historiography of world’s fairs appear due to

a nearly exclusive focus on the social meanings of expositions in Europe and the United States

and the vast majority of secondary literature and historical studies about fairs examines the

cultural significance of fairs from the perspective of industrialized, colonizing nations

determined to provide visual confirmation of their status as modern nations engaged in global

imperial processes. An exploration of these fairs held in peripheral and former colonial

possessions constitutes an important field of investigation, as fairs staged in these relatively

young nations held distinctly different meanings than those held in either the United States or

Europe. The list of former colonies that hosted expositions includes Australia, Brazil, Indonesia,

Jamaica, New Zealand, South Africa, and Guatemala.10

Historian Robert Rydell has made a number of significant contributions to the rapidly

expanding field of world’s fair literature. In his first study, All the World’s a Fair, published in

1984, he identified a number of specific characteristics defined world’s fairs in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides obvious economic motivations behind the

fairs, he argued that world’s fairs remained intertwined with larger discourses of nationalism,

imperialism, and progress. World’s fairs appropriated these themes and structured them within

exhibitions that created meaning and explanation of the human experience within these symbolic

universes.11 Not only did expositions visually explain concepts about the world, but the ideas on

10
Alexander C.T. Geppert, Jean Coffey, and Tammy Lau, “International Expositions, Exposicions
Universelles, and World's Fairs, 1851-2005: A Bibliography,”
http://www.csufresno.edu/library/subjectresources/specialcollections/worldfairs/ExpoBibliography3e d.pdf This
bibliography, while extensive, remains incomplete. For example, Guatemala does not appear as a country that
hosted an exposition, although my research conclusively demonstrates that the Central American Exposition
attracted a considerable amount of attention and that numerous countries participated.
11
Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 2.
 10

display reflected the worldview of elite political, business, and scientific interests. Rydell

conceptualized the elite interests that sponsored and organized fairs as the hegemonic dominant

class and fairgoers as the subordinate class willing to be coerced into a vision of society that

clearly did not serve their interests.12

Of the two studies published that explicitly address Latin American participation in

world’s fairs, both focus 1889 Paris Exposicion Universelle and they examine the national

pavilions of Mexico and Argentina. Ingrid Fey’s study of the Argentine experience in Paris

explored the development of the idea of “two Argentinas” and the manipulation of the national

image as two opposing metaphorical and literal spaces. The pavilion simultaneously represented

the nation as modern, industrialized, and cosmopolitan as well as underdeveloped and in need of

the guiding hand of European immigrants. The chic culture of Buenos Aires refuted any

suspicions of backwardness, while the emphasis on open, uncultivated tracts of land suggested

untapped natural resources and economic potential. Native Argentines did not receive any

mention in the display, which symbolically removed their presence to refute preconceived

notions of the nation as backward, Indian, or uncivilized.13 The design of the pavilion and the

arrangement of the displays inside gave physical form to these discourses about the desirability

of progress and the perception that Indian people jeopardized the possibilities for future

development and modernization.

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo’s examination of the Mexican pavilion in Paris largely focused

on the behind-the-scenes work of the elite coterie of politicians in the Porfirio Díaz regime

responsible for the production of Mexico’s international image. Political instability and chaos

12
Ibid, 2.
13
Ingrid Fey, “Peddling the Pampas: Argentina at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889,” in Latin
American Popular Culture: An Introduction (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2000), 63.
 11

marked the first fifty years of independence; the fair provided an opportunity for Mexico to

improve its national image and dispel the notions of its barbarism and backwardness. Tenorio

Trillo argues that Porfirian elites crafted their exhibitions at the fair to showcase the nation’s

status as a modern and industrialized to attract both foreign investment and European

immigration. Using France as a model, the elite created the impression of a modern, progressive

nation, capable of attracting a substantial number of European immigrants to continue progress

towards Porfiran goals. The exhibition team designed the pavilion to highlight the glorious Aztec

past while cleverly concealing harsh realities that plagued the nation. Tremendous social and

economic inequalities existed between socioeconomic classes, but faith in science, progress, and

education absolved the elite of the responsibility to resolve these problems. As a consequence of

the inequalities between social classes, the construction of the national identity and the

emergence of a nationalism only shared by the elite failed to create a broad sense of social

cohesion or identity. The fragile façade of the modern nation ultimately proved unable to bridge

the yawning divide between the Porfirians and the rest of the nation, culminating in the Mexican

Revolution.14

As far as a theoretical framework, social scientists have conceptualized of fairs in both

Gramscian and Foucaltian terms. Tony Bennett, whose influential work focuses on the

relationship between museum displays and the creation of knowledge and power, argues that the

shift to exhibitionary culture can be understood as a reverse of the developments that Foucault

outlined in Discipline and Punishment. The prison and conceptions of punishment inexorably

moved from grandiose public spectacles to an increasingly closed form of justice that focused on

punishing the internal life of the prisoner. Bennett conceptualizes of expositions as the opposite

14
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), 1-12.
 12

of this process, as the display of objects in private settings for a limited audience gave way to

public expositions and museums aimed to attract the general public. Once inside the

exhibitionary space, visitors visually understood their relationship with the state through the

design of building and the display of objects, which suggested that the visitor approach the

exhibits with deference, respect, and awe. The museum served as a proxy for the state provided

a public venue for the viewer to symbolically interact with state power in an appropriate way that

clearly reinforced official ideas about social order and control.15

Rather than use the Foucaultian theoretical framework to structure my analysis of the fair,

this study will take up the subject in Gramscian terms in the examination of official fair records.

Although this fair could be analyzed in terms of the ways of exhibitionary culture functioned as a

means of social control and as a means to define power relationships, my interest centers more

on the ways that an elite group of fair organizers attempted to organize and explain the world

through their dominant, hegemonic paradigm. Nevertheless, this perspective fails to adequately

represent individuals and groups that fell outside this worldview. In particular, the fair as

conceptualized in a Gramscian framework presents only a limited idea of Indian people who paid

little attention to official discourses. I aim to provide a more balanced view of late nineteenth

century Guatemala that represents the relationship between dominant and subordinate groups as

reciprocal and flexible, much in the way that James C. Scott proposes reading documents to

uncover what he terms “hidden transcripts.”16

Methodologically, it remains difficult to reconstruct the ways that Guatemalan Indians of

the late nineteenth century conceived of the official attempts to portray them as the ideal labor

15
Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 59-88.

16
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), 4.
 13

force for coffee plantations as few, if any, written documents represent the Indian viewpoint.

Nevertheless, Indians certainly felt the sudden increase in the appropriation of their land and

labor as well as the relative autonomy that their communities had enjoyed during from the 1830s

to the 1860s. Their individual and collective responses appear in newspaper records that

recorded litigation related to state seizure of Indian lands as well as the reluctance of Indian

communities to enter the coffee economy. The persistent Indian refusal to provide labor for

coffee production necessitated increasingly coercive labor laws, which elicited resistance from

Indian communities, which in turn spurred on further legislation. Labor legislation, and its effect

on indigenous communities and regions, provides evidence of Indian agency if the historian

approaches these records with caution and recognizes the inherent bias in such sources as well as

the limitations of the evidence and treats these sources accordingly.

In addition to labor legislation, ethnographies produced by anthropologists or other social

researchers interested provide an alternative line of evidence that can be used to supplement an

examination of official fair records and help to answer questions about how Indians responded to

the new coffee economy and demands on their labor. The use of ethnography in historical

studies helps to counteract the bias and misrepresentation present in official colonial or state

produced sources. Nevertheless, even ethnography must be approached with care.

Anthropologists employ their own biases and preconceived ideas into their studies. Additionally,

ethnography can be just as oppressive to indigenous people as other sources. As Kent Lightfoot

argues, anthropology can create descriptions of the “ideal” Indian, furthering stereotypes that

define Indian culture for indigenous people rather than allowing them to define for themselves

what constitutes “authentic” Indian traits and cultural practices.17 Furthermore, despite their

17
Kent Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: the Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the
California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 238.
 14

admirable intentions, anthropologists, ethnographers and other social scientists must remain

sensitive to the ways in which their ways “Orientalize” their research subjects and present

cultures as little more than a collection of preconceived, Western ideas that do little to further our

understanding of the realities experienced by researched people.18

The following chapter focuses on explaining the political and economic factors that

shaped late nineteenth century Guatemala. The shift to an export economy based on coffee after

the Liberal Revolution of 1871 greatly affected the relationship between Indians and the state.

As coffee assumed an ever greater importance as a profitable export product, coffee growers

demanded Indian land for coffee cultivation and Indian labor to harvest the beans. The need for

a large exploitable workforce compelled the government to reimagine Indians as modern workers

rather than primitive savages. Nevertheless, Indians refused to acquiesce to their new roles as

peons, which led not only to increasingly coercive labor legislation, but also to the use of visual

mediums such as the exposition to redefine Indians as workers. The explicit redefinition of

Indians as workers allowed the creation of a new social hierarchy that reflected the needs of a

rapidly changing economy.

Chapter 3 provides a basic narrative of the fair as well as an analysis of Karl Sapper’s

visit to the exposition. Drawing on a variety of sources, I outline basic information about the

exposition and explain how the fair’s organizers attempted to represent Indians visually through

the display of material culture. The exhibition of ethnographic object and archaeological

artifacts not only allowed the nation to define itself as modern by comparison, but also created a

division between contemporary Indians and the ancient Maya that disconnected Indians from

their long history. The “new” Indians without history then stood ready for their redefinition as

18
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
 15

modern workers rather than unassimilated, culturally distinct people unwilling to participate in

either the national culture or the cash economy. The analysis of Karl Sapper’s visit highlights

these distinctions, as his written description provides the reader with a rhetorical narrative of his

perspectives and observations about the Indian exhibits at the fair. Additionally, his comments

help to illuminate the experience of a visitor and explain the interactions between fairgoers and

the actual exhibits.

Chapter 4 shifts the reader’s attention away from the exposition and centers on the

experiences of Indians around the time of the exposition. If Indian had no input as to their

representation at the fair and remained unconcerned about the display of their material culture,

then an examination of the ways in which Indians acted and reacted to the emerging coffee

economy is in order. Indians suddenly found themselves in high demand as laborers as well as in

danger of losing their community lands to coffee plantation owners looking for new areas for

coffee cultivation. Nevertheless, Indians responded to these changing economic conditions

through quiet refusals to submit their new status as debt laborers until the constant barrage of

coercive labor legislation made refusal impossible. Additionally, I also analyze Karl Sapper’s

ethnographic studies in order to provide the reader with a sense of the conditions of Indian life

and the importance of cultural traditions that allowed Indians an alternative vision of identity that

remained distinct from the unified Guatemalan national identity envisioned by fair organizers.

The conclusion to this study outlines some of the outcomes of the fair and summarizes

my major arguments about it, as well as explains what I have learned from my investigations into

this topic. Although my research has answered some questions about the Central American

Exposition, it has also opened many new avenues for further investigation. As topic of this

magnitude and that contains such diverse meanings and interpretations cannot be satisfactorily
 16

addressed within a master’s thesis, I identify some major themes that demand attention as this

study advances towards a dissertation.

Overall, the Central American Exposition conformed to many of the features that

characterized fairs in the late nineteenth century, but Guatemala’s approach to the fair reflected

its unique historical, economic, and racial circumstances. The nation’s largely unassimilated,

autonomous Indian communities presented a conundrum to fair organizers determined to echo

predominant discourses about modernity, progress, industrialization, evolution, and Social

Darwinism. At the same time, the rapidly changing nature of the nation’s economy towards a

monoculture system focused on coffee and the persistent belief that foreign immigration

represented the solution to chronic underdevelopment resulted in a fair with a distinct meaning

specific to the realities of the region.

 17

Chapter 2: Guatemala and the Coffee Economy

The promotion of coffee exportation and cultivation provided the economic motivation

behind the Central American Exposition of 1897. It visually articulated the Liberal belief in the

power of the rising market for coffee to bring about economic development and profits and in the

ability of exhibitionary culture to transform Indians into laborers in the minds of both popular

and dominant classes, as well as international audiences. The Liberal return to power in 1871

after the long reign of Conservative president Rafael Carrera signaled rapid changes in the

relationship between Indian communities and the state as coffee continued to increase in

importance and achieved status as the nation’s premier export crop. This created an urgent need

for a cheap, easily exploitable labor force to work on coffee plantations. Nevertheless, the

nation’s transformation into a modern nation with an important export economy remained

incomplete as long as Indians continued to trigger images of primitive barbarians in both national

and international imaginations. The exposition served as an important medium to construct as

well as explain the new relationships between social classes as well as the changing relationship

between Indians and the state. The government’s unprecedented intrusions into Indian life and its

insistence that Indians participate in the coffee economy required a highly public, visual

reassertion of state authority to reassure foreign investors as well as domestic audiences that

Indian communities fully submitted to the power of the government and will of coffee plantation

owners.

Official efforts to encourage the public to reconceptualize Indians as modern workers

relied heavily on the visual representations of Indians at the exposition and the public

consumption of specific exhibits designed to foster new ideas about indigenous people. The

exposition masked the fierce labor struggles that characterized Guatemala’s entrance into the
 18

global coffee market as well as Indian resistance to state sponsored schemes to obtain cheap

labor. Beneath the exposition’s shiny veneer and impressive displays lay the ugly reality of the

brutal system of debt servitude that dramatically altered daily realities for Indian communities.

Indians themselves ignored efforts to transform them into the quintessential workforce, as they

tried to retain the degree of cultural autonomy they had experienced prior to the Liberal

Revolution. Nevertheless, they could not avoid the increasing state presence in the lives of

individual Indians and their communities as the government steadily applied increasingly

coercive measures and effectively sanctioned debt servitude in an effort to obtain Indian land and

labor. Despite increasing demands for workers and labor legislation intended to coerce Indians

into the cash economy on the behalf on coffee finqueros, Indians often resisted the mounting

pressure by refusing to provide the workforce necessary to drive the coffee economy. Indian

labor constituted a vital element in the successful production of coffee and the finqueros’

reliance on Indian labor and the new social and economic conditions caused by the shift to coffee

made the reduction of Indian community autonomy a state priority.

The shift to an economy centered on coffee exportation accelerated dramatically after the

Liberal revolution of 1871 that brought coffee plantation owners to political power. Chronic

political struggles between Liberals and Conservatives characterized much of the nineteenth

century and largely stemmed from their fundamentally opposite visions of nationhood.

Conservatives sought to preserve the political and social structures from the colonial period and

advocated the maintenance of rigid colonial social hierarchies, the power of the Church, and

corporate privileges for clergy as well as Indian communities. In contrast, Liberals promoted

ideas of national economic development, but believed that substantial, national cultural changes

constituted a precondition to economic progress. The Liberal vision of economic development

 19

favored the importation of foreign cultural and aesthetic values, resulting in blatant imitation of

European cultural niceties, such as the ballet, opera, and presumably, international expositions.19

Additionally, Liberals proposed to reduce the power of the Church, dismantle communal Indian

properties, and promoted a vision of nationhood that emphasized the sanctity of private property

and exalted individual enterprise. These measures aimed to modernize Guatemala’s stagnant

economy and bring about industrialization and cultural modernity. Liberals and Conservatives

also conceptualized Indians in radically different ways. Since the colonial period, Indians had

been considered wards of the state and found themselves near the bottom of the social hierarchy,

but also received corporate lands and a limited number of privileges, known as fueros.

Conservatives largely sought to continue these policies. Liberals, although convinced of the

racial and cultural inferiority of Indians, conceived of them as potentially useful members of

society if they could learn the values of civilized society, such as hard work and the value of

private property.20

The historiography of nineteenth century Guatemala has largely focused on two main

issues. The first concerns the assumed importance of the Liberal Revolution of 1871 and its

relationship to the increased power of the state. The large number of Indian revolts in rural areas

during the 1830s and 1840s and the relative lack of these rebellions after 1870 remains one of the

perplexing paradoxes of the nineteenth century, since the increasing number of state incursions

into Indian communities and lives during the Liberal period presumably caused mounting Indian

frustrations. Instead, despite the dramatic increase in the appropriation of Indian land and labor,

the late nineteenth century remained free of the violent revolts that characterized the mid-

19
David J. McCreery, “Coffee and Class: The Structure of Development in Liberal Guatemala,” The
Hispanic American Historical Review 56, no. 3 (August 1976): 449.
20
Ralph Lee. Woodward, “Chapter 6: Coffee Republics,” in Central America: A Nation Divided (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 156.
 20

century. The second historiographic issue focuses on the origins of the Indian/Ladino racial

dichotomy that reduced the complex colonial social and racial hierarchy to the binary categories

of Indian and non-Indian (Ladino). Colonial authority had rested largely on the maintenance of

strict class, race, and gender hierarchies that classified and separated the constantly shifting

ethnic makeup of colonial subjects in New Spain. The crown recognized a complex hierarchy of

natives, free and enslaved blacks, castas, criollos and peninsular Spaniards and sought to

maintain these divisions through colonial institutions and legislation. Although the term ladino

existed during the colonial period and was used to identify both poor Spaniards as well as

hispanicized Indians, much disagreement remains among historians as to how, why, and when

the term began to express the idea of a distinctly non-Indian racial identity. Both of these issues

remain closely intertwined with Guatemala’s meteoric rise as the world’s premier coffee

republic, as the rise of the coffee based economy changed the relationship between Indians and

the state and well as required a reorganization of the social hierarchy.

Historian David McCreery argues that the shift to the coffee based economy during the

late nineteenth century constitutes nothing less than a revolution that brought about the most

substantial changes to the region since the original conquest.21 He characterizes the rise of coffee

and its effects on Indian people as a direct result of the Liberal land and labor reforms enacted

after 1871 that coerced Indians into the coffee economy. The Conservative regime of Rafael

Carrera also wished to appropriate Indian land and labor, but the regime remained fairly weak

and unable to exert much influence over the majority of Indian communities in rural areas,

making the period from 1830-1860 one of relative autonomy and independence for Indians.

McCreery cautions about using the presence or absence of rural revolts as the only criteria to

21
David. McCreery, “The Coffee Revolution,” in Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1994), 161.
 21

measure Indian resistance against the state and suggests that some historians, in their eagerness

to characterize Indians as positive actors in their own history, have overlooked the more subtle

ways that Indian people challenged the state and underestimated the acute understandings that

Indians had of their own political, social, and economic situations in relation to the growing

power of the state. 22

In contrast to the emphasis on the Liberal reforms after 1871 and their effects on Indian

communities, more recent scholarship suggests that the state’s incursion on to Indian lands began

prior to the Liberal Revolution and coincided with the beginning of coffee as a major export

product during the Conservative period of the mid-nineteenth century. Historian René Reeves

argues that an increasing focus on the experiences of Indian communities under Conservative

rule helps to explain the paradox of the large numbers of Indian revolts during the 1840s and

their relative absence during the later Liberal rule. Based on coffee export data, Reeves argues

that the dramatic increase in coffee production and its effects on Indians began in the

Conservative period and reached their zenith long before 1871. The timing of the rise of coffee

within the Conservative rather than Liberal period removes the traditional association of the

increase in coffee production with Liberal reforms; the 1871 Revolution is continuation of earlier

policies rather than a watershed moment in the late nineteenth century.23 Instead of placing

emphasis on the policy changes that occurred as a result of the 1871 Revolution, Reeves focuses

on the continuity of the Indian policies from Conservative to Liberal regimes and downplays the

traditional importance of the Liberal Revolution and its association with the coffee economy.

22
David McCreery, “State Power, Indigenous Communities, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala,
1820-1920,” in Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540-1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 96.
23
René Reeves, Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians: Land, Labor, and Regional Ethnic Conflict in
the Making of Guatemala (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 6.
 22

Scholars also continue to debate about the nature of changes to social hierarchies and

systems of racial classification during the late nineteenth century, as the term Ladino took on an

increasingly racial connotation and eventually came to signify a person of non-Indian ethnicity.

The racialized nature of Ladino as a social category took on more significance when Ladinos

began to play an increasingly important role during the Liberal period and acted as

intermediaries between coffee finqueros and Indians. Some scholars, such as anthropologist

Robert M. Carmack, have argued that the fundamental division between Indians and non-Indian

Ladinos deepened and solidified during the nineteenth century; this represents a continuation of

social divisions that began during the colonial period.24 Anthropologist Carol A. Smith

challenges the assumption that the reduction of colonial social hierarchies into the category of

Indian and non-Indian began during the colonial period and argues that these binary racial

categories coincided with the emergence of the coffee economy of the Liberal period. Indeed,

she finds that Indian and non-Indian groups cooperated during the revolt that brought Rafael

Carrera to power, reflecting the relative absence of racial and class divisions among Indians and

Ladinos. Smith argues that the racial connotations of the word Ladino, and its transformation

into a word that identified a person as non-Indian, emerged during the late nineteenth century, as

old colonial social hierarchies failed to serve the exigencies created by the coffee economy.25

Coffee required not only a large, exploitable workforce, but also a class of people capable of

managing Indian workers and mediating between Indian communities and white plantation

owners. Ladinos served as the most convenient intermediaries and came to represent not only a

new emerging social and racial class, but also served as visible representatives of the state and its
24
Carol Smith, Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540 to 1988, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1990), 126.
25
Carol A. Smith, “Origins of the National Question in Guatemala: A Hypothesis,” in Guatemalan Indians
and the State: 1540-1988 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 72-95.
 23

creeping incursions into Indian lives and lands. During the process, the term Ladino radically

changed from its colonial meanings, taking on the connotation of a non-Indian racial identity to

serve the needs of the coffee based economy that required increasing numbers of Ladinos to

manage Indian plantation workers.26

For the purposes of this thesis, I frame the Central American Exposition as a physical

representation of the aims of the later Liberal state, focusing on the changes that Liberals enacted

rather than as an instance of the continuity of Conservative policies. Indian communities

experienced a number of changes to their communities during the Conservative period, as the

Conservative conception of Indians constructed them as wards of the state that had to be

protected from colonial exploitation rather than a potential source of expendable labor in a free

market capitalist system. Additionally, I agree with David McCreery that the absence of large

scale revolts in the late nineteenth century does not indicate that Indians did not resist the Liberal

reforms in ways that did not necessarily involve violence.27 With regards to the development of

racial identities during the late nineteenth century, I rely on Carol Smith’s argument that the later

Liberal period deepened racial divisions and maintain that the Central American Exposition

reflected new social hierarchies and sought to exacerbate the division between Indians and

Ladinos in order to create an Indian workforce and a Ladino overseer class. For the coffee

economy to function, Indians had to become modern workers, but remained a social class largely

defined by their race. Indeed, the conflation of ideas of race with class bolstered Liberal claims

that Indians remained particularly suited for their role as coffee plantation workers.28

26
Ibid.
27
David McCreery, “State Power, Indigenous Communities, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala,
1820-1920,” 97.

28
Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: a History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000), 141.
 24

The emergence of Guatemala as the world’s premier coffee producing region occurred as

a direct result of the Liberal Revolution of 1871 that ousted conservative president Rafael

Carrera and transformed the nation in previously unimaginable ways. The shift to a liberal

political economy occurred generally throughout Latin America in countries such as Mexico,

with the rise of the Porfiriato, as well as in Central America, as the region sought solutions to its

persistent problem of economic underdevelopment, chronic political strife, and cultural

backwardness in comparison to the developed nations of Europe and the United States.29 Liberal

and conservative factions in Guatemala crystallized their respective viewpoints in the years

following independence in 1821 and although both sides agreed on the nature of the problems

and issues facing the nation, they differed in their approach to the construction of a modern

nation, the development of a national identity, and the solution to Guatemala’s long standing

Indian problem. For the Liberals, economic development through the promotion of coffee

exportation, the importation of foreign know-how through European immigration, and the

privatization of property constituted the panacea that they believed would catapult Latin America

into the exclusive coterie of modern, industrialized nations.

The dramatic increase in the power of the state after 1871 marked one of the most

significant changes in Guatemala. After seizing political power, the national government sought

to assert itself over traditionally powerful institutions, such as the Church, but also over Indian

communities that had retained a significant amount of political autonomy throughout the

Conservative era. When coffee proved to be a viable export crop, the Liberal state resolved to

take whatever steps necessary to ensure its success. The demands of the coffee economy forced

the state to intervene on the behalf of plantation owners in their quest to acquire more Indian

29
Woodward, “Chapter 6: Coffee Republics,” 155.
 25

land for their crops. The need to dismantle Indian lands and reduce Indian political autonomy

required a massive assertion of state power not only to legalize the acquisition of land and labor,

but also to demonstrate to foreign investors and immigrants that the government held firm

control over all people and lands within the state’s borders. The violent Indian revolts of the

1830s and 1840s that threatened political stability and potential profits had to be controlled to

protect the interests of both coffee plantation owners and the liberal government.30

The new Liberal agenda drew its inspiration from European and North American models

of development that relied on financial incentives for investors and a readily available supply of

cheap and easily exploitable labor. The positivistic ideas of French philosopher Auguste Comte

placed civilizations in a racialized class hierarchy that strongly influenced the Liberal conception

of the ideal working class as white and European. Additionally, a pronounced sense of anti-

clericalism and an unshakable faith in science and technology characterized the Liberal position.

Finally, Liberals consciously chose to forego the institution of any sort of democratic political

institutions, focusing instead on the repression of political upheaval through whatever means

necessary to create the impression of peace. Order and progress became the predominant themes

of the Liberal regimes of the late nineteenth century. 31

These Liberal political ideals placed a high degree of importance on economic

development and industrial progress and policy makers focused their efforts on creating an

export economy that would move the nation into the exclusive coterie of developed, modern

nations. Cochineal and indigo, the most important cash crops of the colonial period, had
30
Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, 116. Grandin rightly points out that the increased power of the
state may be only one of the many reasons that Indian revolts decreased dramatically in the late nineteenth century.
He argues that K’iche’ elites actually supported land appropriations as a way to increase their own rights and access
to land and he provides a detailed analysis of the class divisions within Indian communities.
31
Woodward, "Coffee Republics," 156.
 26

experienced a long period of decline after independence due to changing economic conditions

and the introduction of synthetic dyes. Following Costa Rica’s successful experiment with

coffee exports, Guatemalan leaders followed suit and cast their lot with coffee. Despite efforts to

diversify the production of export crops and prevent an overreliance on monoculture agriculture,

coffee prevailed, becoming the nation’s most valuable export.32 In an effort to generate foreign

investment in the nascent coffee economy, governments throughout Central America offered

substantial subsidies and tax breaks for coffee plantation owners, as well as for Europeans

willing to immigrate to Guatemala.33 Although a number of Germans and other Europeans

immigrated to Guatemala, their numbers remained too low for the creation a white working

class. The Indian population represented the most viable solution, despite beliefs about the

uncivilized nature of Indians and their laziness, primitivism, and barbarity. Regardless of these

preconceptions, Indians proved unwilling to participate in the coffee export economy.

The sudden high demand for cheap labor and the relative lack of European immigration

caused the Guatemalan government to set about immediately to address the labor shortage

through a variety of coercive laws and policies designed to benefit coffee plantation owners at

the expense of Indian communities and individuals. During the colonial period, royal

administrators and authorities had reaped the benefits of native labor through practices such as

the blatantly exploitative encomienda and the later, slightly milder repartimiento that awarded

native labor and tribute to Spanish citizenry.34 The cochineal and indigo industries that

32
Ibid., 159. Guatemalan leaders realized the perils of a monoculture economy and attempted to diversify
agricultural export products. Woodward notes here that Guatemala sent over 1,000 samples of separate agricultural
products to the 1885 Cotton Expo in New Orleans in an attempt to demonstrate its capacity for agricultural diversity.
33
Ibid., 157.
34
David McCreery, “"An Odious Feudalism": Mandamiento Labor and Commercial Agriculture in
Guatemala, 1858-1920,” Latin American Perspectives 13, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 102.
 27

dominated the late colonial and early independence periods did not require a massive labor force,

leaving Indians relatively unexploited. This allowed Indians to continue to exist outside of the

dominant social and economic institutions and continue subsistence agriculture. Despite periodic

attempts to assimilate Indians into the dominant culture, the middle third of the nineteenth

century allowed Indian people to reorganize and reorient their communities, live in fairly

autonomous municipios, and practice milpa based agriculture on communal lands.35 Labor

demands by the state and plantation owners remained fairly low until the shift to coffee

production and the industry’s insatiable demand for cheap, unskilled labor signaled the

reinstatement of coercive labor legislation to compel Indians to seek work on large plantations.36

The Liberal state revived the coercive mandamiento system of the early nineteenth

century, an updated version of the colonial repartimiento. These systems allowed land owners to

request that regional governors send a certain number of workers from highland Indian

communities for the purpose of harvesting crops. Although debt servitude existed throughout

Latin America, it became particularly oppressive in Guatemala, due to the already nearly feudal

relationships between landowners and laborers as well as the significant involvement of the state

in the acquisition of labor contracts.37 Landowners in need of a pool of labor would apply to the

departmental governor, who would specify which town would be required to supply workers.

The governor also dictated the terms of service, rate of pay, and length of service. Workers

received their pay in advance, but were then obligated to provide their labor to the landowner

who had requested the laborers. Workers that already owed goods or money in the agricultural

35
Frank Griffith Dawson, “Labor Legislation and Social Integration in Guatemala: 1871-1944,” The
American Journal of Comparative Law 14, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 126.
36
Ibid., 124.
37
McCreery, “An Odious Feudalism,” 99.
 28

export economy could apply for an exemption from the mandamiento, exchanging labor in the

mandimiento system for debt peonage.38 The mandimiento system often required that highland

Indians leave their families and communities for months at a time and labor in the disease ridden

piedmont of the Pacific coast. The social and economic costs of the mandamiento system for

highland Indian communities must have been enormous.

In addition to cheap labor, coffee required large tracts of land in regions where the

combination of climate and soil created the ideal conditions for coffee cultivation. Land

ownership in Guatemala represented a complicated, hopelessly tangled web of competing claims

that stretched back to the Conquest of the area in the early sixteenth century. This complex

history raised a considerable amount of doubt about the legality of ownership. In an attempt to

finally determine the availability of lands for coffee production, President Justo Rufino Barrios

passed Decreto 112 in 1873. This law required that all lands be registered with the government

within a short period of time and that all unregistered lands would be confiscated and sold to

private individuals. Furthermore, Decree 170 required that Indians produce written proof of

ownership of their plots as well as communal lands. Many Indians could not provide convincing

proof of their right to their lands and the government began to sell the confiscated property to

foreign immigrants to use for coffee plantations.39

The state confiscation of Indian lands attempted to force Indians to seek employment

opportunities on private plantations and national development projects far from their traditional

subsistence economies that centered on the cultivation of corn. Despite the hardship associated

with their sudden transition from autonomous farmers to landless peons, Indians largely refused

to provide labor for either coffee plantations or the construction of national railroads. Railroads,

38
Ibid., 106.
39
Dawson, “Labor Legislation and Social Integration in Guatemala,” 126.
 29

the most visible symbol of nineteenth century progress, also required large amounts of unskilled

and semi-skilled labor. The nation’s never-ending lack of capital caused the government to rely

on North American railroad companies to construct rail lines to facilitate the transport of coffee.

The Liberal government believed that work on railroads would force Indians to mingle with

North American workers and that as a result, Indians would passively absorb lessons about the

value of hard work and develop an appreciation for modern values. Railroads offered Indian

laborers the “high” wage of a peso per day for their labor. Indians proved unwilling to provide

railroads with the necessary labor for the timely completion of railroads.40 The chronic shortage

of Indian labor eventually led to the importation of American blacks as railroad workers for

several railroad projects throughout the country designed to improve the nation’s infrastructure

and provide an efficient way to transport coffee to costal ports for exportation.41

The Indian refusal to acquiesce to the new economy’s demands led to additional

legislation. Decreto 177, called the Reglamento de Jornaleros, passed on April 3, 1877,

effectively legalized debt peonage. Some scholars have argued that the resulting severe version

of debt peonage should more correctly be considered debt slavery, as it gave plantation owners

nearly complete control over indigenous workers.42 The law gave sweeping powers to coffee

finqueros to acquire labor through the use of local jefes politicos. The jefes politicos acted as

agents directly accountable to the government and held the power to round up Indians for labor,

as well as supervise the construction of roads, enforce labor legislation, and maintain law and

40
McCreery, “Coffee and Class,” 449-450. The Indian refusal to labor on railroads meant that foreign
workers had to be imported from the United States. Many of these imported workers were immigrants who had
found temporary employment at the 1885 Cotton Expo in New Orleans.
41
Frederick Douglass Opie, “Black Americans and the State in the Turn-of-the Century Guatemala,” The
Americas 64, no. 4 (2008): 583-609.
42
Dawson, “Labor Legislation and Social Integration in Guatemala,” 131.
 30

order.43 The coercive measures the jefes politicos used to bind Indians to coffee plantations

effectively increased the available pool of labor, but from the standpoint of landowners and the

government, shortages continued. More legislation followed. In October of 1878, the

government passed the Vagrancy Law, requiring that broadly defined vagrants register with local

jefes politicos and forcibly donate their labor for coffee or road construction or face severe

criminal penalties.44

Perhaps realizing that all international eyes would be turned towards Guatemala in 1897

with the Central American Exposition of 1897, President Reina Barrios officially rescinded the

Reglamento de Jornaleros on March 15, 1894 with the announcement of Decreto 471.45 The

October 23, 1893 issue of the newspaper El Guatemalteco reported the repeal of the repressive

labor law. According to the article, Reina Barrios chose to repeal the law to “emancipate the

Indian from the prostrate position in which he finds himself, lifting him to the level of his fellow

countrymen, and offering him the advantages of civilization.”46 Additionally, the U.S. Consul in

Guatemala, D. Lynch Pringle, sent a dispatch to the State Department about the change, noting

that it signified “nothing less than the emancipation of the laboring classes from servitude.”47 He

noted that the government, through its military agents, had previously forcibly removed the

lower classes from their homes and communities and put them to work for arbitrary wages.48
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid., 132. The timing of the effective date of the new legislation is suggestive. March 15 would be the
exact opening date of the Central American Exposition three years later in 1897. Alternatively, David McCreery
states that March 15 represents the end of the harvest season. David McCreery, “The Coffee Revolution,” 190.
46
El Guatemalteco, October 23, 1893. Translation mine.
47
United States Consulate, Guatemala, Despatches from United States consuls in Guatemala, 1824-1906
(Washington: National Archives and Records Service, 1959), Reel 10. In this type written dispatch, Pringle
originally used the word “slavery.” Perhaps feeling the word too strong, he crossed it out and substituted the milder
euphemism, “servitude.”
48
Ibid.
 31

Indians in the municipality of Quetzaltenango erected a monument to President Reina Barrios,

thanking him for abolishing the mandamiento.49

The brief glimmer of optimism generated by the announcement of Decreto 471 did not

last long. Shortages of Indian labor continued and the government could not afford to antagonize

the plantation owners, nor jeopardize potential future immigration. The president quickly

replaced the Reglamento de Jornaleros with the new Ley de Trabajadores in late 1894. The

wording of the law softened the harsh practical realties of the new legislation, but it essentially

signified a return to the labor conscription conditions as defined in the Reglamento de

Jornaleros.50 The passage of such legislation clearly indicated the growing desperation of both

the state and coffee finqueros as well as the quiet refusal of Indians to acquiesce to their demands

and join the capitalistic system as an exploited and marginalized lower class.

In conclusion, although the shift to the coffee economy occurred unevenly across the

nation, the meteoric rise of coffee as the nation’s premier export crop had unmistakable

consequences for all sectors of society. The Conservative period of the mid-century undoubtedly

affected Indian communities, but overall, Indians felt the presence of the state much more

acutely with the Liberal return to power. Indians did not suffer sudden, massive expropriations of

their communal lands, but the flurry of legislation in the late nineteenth century hastened the

dismantling of communal lands and the reduction of Indian autonomy. The development of the

coffee based export economy required political strategies that would insert the state directly into

the lives of Indian people, making the 1871 Revolution an important turning point in the nation’s

49
Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, 147.

50
Dawson, “Labor Legislation and Social Integration in Guatemala,” 132.
 32

trajectory. Liberals largely saw Indians as backwards, lazy, and uncivilized, but they had no

choice but to promote them as the nation’s workforce when the hoped for flood of European

immigrants failed to materialize. The coercion of Indians into the cash economy to provide

coffee planters with expendable, cheap labor in order to create profits for a small percentage of

the population required a massive reassertion of state authority and control over Indians.

In addition to more repressive techniques to coerce and manage Indian labor, the shift to

the coffee economy required the rearrangement of the social hierarchies that had functioned well

during colonial period. These had served the crown well when mercantile and early colonial

labor demands remained fairly low. Nevertheless, these old social hierarchies could not produce

an adequately large, seasonal workforce that coffee planters could summon on demand. Indians

had occupied a low rung of the colonial social structure, but received some protections from

rapacious Spanish exploitation and coercive labor practices. The coffee economy required a

large supply of cheap labor, meaning that Indians needed to be redefined as classed, national

workers rather than wards of the state and as productive individuals rather than primitive ethnic

groups. In turn, the creation of this seasonal workforce led to the subsequent creation of a

Ladino racial class to oversee plantation workers. Although Indians and Ladinos had proved that

they could transcend racial and class difference in the pursuit of a common cause, such as

Carrera’s revolt, the new Liberal state benefited from creating racial differences and pitting

Indians and Ladinos against each other, ensuring that they would not attempt to topple the new

social hierarchy or the government.

Indians acutely felt the effects of the veritable flood of legislation designed to force them

into debt servitude and participation in both the national and international economy. The

consistent labor shortages and subsequent legislation to rectify such shortages suggests that
 33

Indians possessed a canny understanding of the effects and ramifications of the shift to coffee as

well as the new political realities that confronted them. The Indian refusal to enter into debt

servitude may appear less dramatic than the violent revolts of the 1830s and 1840s, but had a

noticeable and immediate effect on the national economy. The coffee economy simply could not

expand without the mobilization of Indian labor and the chronic nature of labor shortages created

increasingly more coercive measures to force Indians into debt. It seems likely that Indians

realized the leverage that their position gave them and continued to refuse to work until the

pressure from the state became too intense and the stakes too great. Additionally, the Indian

choice of seemingly passive refusal over a violent revolt as a means of resistance reflects an

acute awareness of the state’s will and ability to enforce its authority over Indians in a way that it

had not been able to previously. The potential profits that the exportation of coffee could

achieve for the nation’s political and economic interests made the maintenance of social order

and the suppression of revolt especially important priorities for the Liberal regimes of the late

nineteenth century.

An examination of Guatemala’s economic and political conditions at the end of the

nineteenth century provides a historical, cultural, and economic context for understanding the

Central American Exposition. Although the exposition visually focused on the promotion of

coffee and the idea that Indians provided a modern workforce, social and economic realities

differed dramatically from the carefully crafted image. The exposition hid these realities through

the creation of exhibits that aimed to visually articulate the Liberal conception of economic

development, progress, and modernity as well as present Indians in a favorable light. The

exposition aimed to transform Indians from barbarians into modern workers, but Indians proved

unwilling to serve as the large, readily available pool of cheap labor that Liberals envisioned.
 34

The Liberal state’s aspirations of a glorious future built on coffee produced by native

labor reached its denouement at the Central American Exposition. Not only would an

international exposition smooth the nation’s entry into the international economy and promote

the coffee trade, it would also prove to the industrialized world that Guatemala had finally

escaped its chronic state of underdevelopment through the exploitation of Indian labor in the

coffee production. The transformation of the nation into a modern coffee republic required a

visual display of state authority as well as the reconceptualization of Indians as a modern labor

force instead of primitive tribes. The exposition’s organizers, composed of foreign and national

businessmen, symbolically demonstrated capitalism’s control over Indians and their capacity for

hard work on coffee plantations through the careful management, arrangements, and display of

Indian ethnographic and archaeological materials, which created specific ideas about the nature

of indigenous people. The display of Indian contemporary and ancient material culture

symbolically signaled official government control of Indians as the objects themselves suggested

that the state could structure knowledge about Indians and create particular historical and cultural

narratives. The strategic display and arrangement of Mayan culture juxtaposed with art, coffee,

and other non-Indian items left fair visitors with no doubt as to the state’s control and authority

over its Indian populations and its capacity to mobilize them on the behalf on coffee planters.

The following chapter narrates the fair and explores the ways in which the displays

visually illustrated the Liberal conception of economic development and how the exhibits

constructed and defined Indians. Expositions created a physical environment charged with

symbolic meaning that structured knowledge about the world for visitors and encouraged them to

understand social, racial, economic, and scientific ideas in a particular way that reflected the

worldview of political and economic elites. The display of indigenous people and their material
 35

culture constituted a critical element of nineteenth century expositions, as these exhibits allowed

visitors to define themselves as modern and civilized by comparison. The Central American

Exposition’s explicit focus on the conceptual transformation of Indians into modern workers

ensured that the exhibit of Indian material culture contained an artificially constructed narrative

that visually illustrated Indians as workers. The division of objects into opposing categories of

ethnographic and archaeological items served to separate contemporary Indians from their

ancient past, leaving them available for redefinition by the state.

Chapter 3: The Central American Exposition

The immense amount of planning and organization, as well as the execution of the actual

exposition provide insight into important themes and discourses that swirled through Guatemala

at the end of the nineteenth century. The creation of trade relationships, the promotion of coffee,

and the attraction of foreign investment and immigration, as well as the assertion of regional

geopolitical relationships drove the staging of many of the events that captivated the attention of

not only Guatemalans, but also drew the interest of international audiences. The spatial

arrangement of the exhibits and the strategic display of specific items of material culture created

particular ideas about the nature of indigenous people, which highlighted the image of their
 36

availability and natural inclination for the difficult task of coffee cultivation. The imaging of

these ideas about Indians underscored the ways that Liberals constructed racial and class

differences, which in turn, ultimately served to provide coffee growers with a cheap, easily

exploitable workforce of lower class Indians.

Visitors to the exposition strolled around the fairgrounds and absorbed the subtle

discourses embedded in the displays. Due to the importance of Indian labor to the success of the

coffee economy, the anthropological displays of both ethnographic and archaeological objects

constituted a crucial component of the fair’s overall message. Nevertheless, it remains difficult

to gauge the reactions of fair visitors, as few documents exist that narrate and explain individual

experiences and interactions with the displays. Dr. Karl Sapper, a highly influential German

anthropologist, recorded his visit to the Central American Exposition in a written narrative that

captured his thoughts and ideas as he moved through the fairgrounds and observed the exhibits.

His academic background and extensive fieldwork ensured that he paid considerable attention to

the displays of Indian culture at the exposition and his comments not only illuminate the visitor

response to the fair, but also the ways in which fair organizers tried to represent Indians through

the strategic use, display, and arrangement of Indian material culture.

The fair’s overall impact, despite the considerable expenses and effort to ensure its

success, fell far short of its anticipated effect. The incomplete state of many of the exhibits and

buildings well past the opening date suggested a haphazard approach to the actual execution of

the event and added to the international impression that Guatemala could not host an important

international event. The uneven quality of some exhibits disappointed visitors and further

damaged public opinions of the exposition. Ultimately, the fair ended in disaster due to its high

costs and low attendance, and the enormous amount of expense involved in remodeling much of
 37

the city to meet international standards of aesthetic acceptability bankrupted the nation. Most

tragically, President Reina Barrios was assassinated shortly after the closing of the exposition,

throwing the nation into political chaos and destroying the carefully constructed image of

progress and modernity that the fair had tried so hard to create.

Hosting a major international exposition represented a significant achievement for

Guatemala. Throughout the nineteenth century, Latin Americans eagerly embraced the

opportunity to exhibit material objects at world’s fairs in order to shed their international image

as backwards or barbaric peoples who were unable to achieve either democracy or civilization.51

Prior to staging the Central American Exposition, Guatemala participated in a number of other

international exhibitions, which provided the fair organizers with valuable experiences and

lessons about the creation of fair exhibits as well as the overall design of the actual fairgrounds.

In 1885, the nation sent objects for display to the World’s Cotton Exposition in New Orleans.

Aiming to highlight the nation’s abundant natural resources, the display featured samples of

timber, minerals, and agricultural products that beckoned foreign capitalists with promises of

financial profits. To minimize any suggestion of uncivilized Indians within Guatemala’s

political borders, the display largely excluded any evidence of indigenous culture, although some

complete sets of Indian attire appeared in the inventory, along with a backstrap loom, the pre-

Hispanic loom used to weave intricate huipiles and other woven items. Carefully arranged

twisted wire figures provided a diorama to illustrate the primitiveness of Indian life and gave a

51
The available literature on world’s fairs in general is small, but rapidly expanding. Latin American
participation in such expositions is only beginning to be explored. The best available sources at this time are
Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996) and Ingrid Fey, “Peddling the Pampas: Argentina at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889,”
In Latin American Popular Culture: An Introduction (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2000) and Maria
Alejandra Uslenghi, “Images of Modernity: Latin American Culture and Nineteenth-Century Universal Exhibitions”
(Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2007).
 38

glimpse of Indian people without the exhibition of live individuals.52 The exhibit highlighted the

abundant supply of cheap labor available to potential coffee growers and explicitly identified

Indians with the production of coffee. The English guide that accompanied the display

emphasized that Central American Indians were quite distinct from the North American variety,

as they were “peaceful, law abiding, hard working and industrious,” and able to perform both the

light and heavy plantation labor equally well.53

The nation also participated in the major 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, which drew

large crowds, owing to the grandiosity of its displays and special features, such as the Eiffel

Tower. Despite the widespread admiration for the French, Guatemala’s display focused on

attracting German immigrants, as German immigrants in Guatemala took much of the

responsibility for the astronomical growth of the coffee economy and their hardworking

Protestant nature and European genes added to their appeal as potential immigrants. In Paris,

Guatemala housed its exhibition in a distinctly German-themed cottage to reassure potential

German immigrants that Guatemala could provide them with a standard of living similar to the

one they enjoyed in Germany.54 Drawing on the valuable lessons it had learned through its

participation in these preliminary expositions, the nation prepared to launch its own exposition

that would attract global attention.

The committees that planned expositions of the nineteenth century represented a mixture

of political and elite economic interests. The responsibilities of these committees included the

approval of expenses associated with the event, the invitation of exhibitors, and the creation of

52
Francisco Lainfiesta, Guatemala at the World's Centennial Exposition, New Orleans, 1885 Catalogue of
Exhibits ([S.l.: s.n.], 1885), 30.
53
Ibid., 40.
54
[Pavilion of Guatemala, Paris Exposition, 1889], 1889. Photograph accessed through WorldCat through
the Library of Congress.
 39

rules and regulations used to judge the displays. President Reina Barrios appointed the central

committee in 1895 and the committee of the Central American Exposition met regularly to plan

the exposition and vote on motions associated with the monumental task of organizing an event

as important as an international exposition.55 Although the committee published a bi-weekly

record of its actions, little information exists about the individual committee members or their

interests in serving on the committee.

Potential visitors in both the U.S. and Europe anxiously awaited the opening day, as the

fair had received a substantial amount of attention from many major newspapers. The New York

Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all reported on the fair’s progress

during the early months of 1897. In particular, the New York Times praised Guatemala’s ability

to overcome its significant disadvantages of inexperience and frequent political upheaval and

host a major exposition. The newspapers reported that the fair’s organizers promised that the

exposition would showcase industrial wonders and machinery, as well as provide extensive

demonstrations of the nation’s recently completed railroads. Expositors could expect to win

prizes, ranging from $100 to $5000 for objects deemed unusual and advantageous to the nation.

Potential visitors learned about Guatemala’s pleasant climate and beautiful countryside, as

descriptions of the region’s wonders attempted to entice visitors to the fair. Nevertheless, the

New York Times was quick to point out that visitors fluent in Spanish would surely experience

disappointment, as Guatemalans did not speak orthodox Spanish, but rather a peculiar dialect due

to the nation’s relative isolation and the proximity of Indian tribes.56 Undoubtedly, the

exposition aimed to overcome the widely held perception of Latin American backwardness.

55
“Boletín De La Exposición Centro-Americana,” February 1, 1896.

56
“Guatemala’s Coming Fair; It Is Promised that the Exposition Will Continue from the Middle of March
to the End of Septermber,” New York Times, February 18, 1897, 17.
 40

After four years of extensive planning, the exposition opened on schedule on March 15,

1897. At 10:30 am, an assembly of government officials and the exposition’s central committee

participated in a grand parade on a route two miles long from the President’s palace to the

exposition grounds. The crew of the U.S.S. Philadelphia accompanied the President along the

route. Rafael Spinola, Secretary of the Ministerio de Fomento, gave the inaugural address, the

President pressed the electric button, and the fair officially opened.57

Unfortunately, many of the displays remained unfinished, a situation common to all

international expositions. The central committee purchased the exposition buildings from the

recent exposition held in Bordeaux, France. French engineers arrived to supervise the

reconstruction of the structures.58 Nevertheless, despite the intense gaze of international

audiences, the exposition’s main building remained unfinished two weeks after the opening day,

a fate that was all too common to international expositions.59 Not only did the buildings remain

under construction, but the vast majority of the foreign exhibits had yet to arrive, which forced

the exposition to remain open longer than had originally been intended.60 Undoubtedly, the

incomplete state of the exposition buildings unfavorably colored international impressions of

Guatemala and damaged the overall effect of the fair.

The fairgrounds themselves occupied over twelve acres situated alongside Guatemala

City’s main north-south artery, the Boulevard 30 de Junio. The visitors guide provided detailed

57
United States Consulate of Guatemala, Despatches from United States Consuls in Guatemala, 1824-
1906, Reel 10.
58
Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, (Washington D.C: G.P.O, 1898), 333.
59
Boletin de La Exposición Centro Americana, March 27, 1897. This edition reported that the main
building was almost finished. I don’t have the exact date, but assume it was finished shortly after March 27.
60
El Guatemalteco, March 18, 1897.
 41

descriptions of the exhibition buildings, but did not include a map.61 The park-like grounds

surrounding the main fairgrounds reportedly covered an area of over eight hundred acres.62 The

exposition consisted of three large buildings reserved for the national exhibits of the Central

American republics. Modeled on the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, the main semicircular

building greeted visitors behind the entrance gates. Beyond the main building, visitors

encountered a grand gallery similar to the Parisian Palace of Machinery. Two separate buildings

housed the foreign exhibits. The center of the exposition featured a two story building

surrounded by a narrow gallery for the display of fine arts and sciences. Smaller buildings

dotted the fairgrounds with restaurants, amusements, kiosks for ticket sales, greenhouses, and a

building that housed the electrical equipment necessary to run machinery. In addition to the

equipment building, the exposition constructed a separate Palace of Electricity to dazzle visitors

with electrical lighting. Finally, a luminous fountain decorated the fairgrounds.63

Fair organizers carefully designed the fairgrounds to guide the visitor through a spatial

hierarchy that emphasized the ideas and assumptions about modernity created by the

arrangement of the buildings, gardens, and amusements. The spatial arrangement of these

buildings served to provide confirmation of hierarchical ideas about civilization and culture,

illustrating government sponsored notions of progress, modernity, and citizenship. Fairgoers

61
Guía de la exposición Centro-Americana y de la ciudad de Guatemala. Con instrucciones al viajero, é
importantes datos estadísticos, políticos, geográficos, comerciales é industriales ... (Guatemala: Tipografía
Nacional, 1897). The dimensions of the fairgrounds in the official guide are given in varas and manzanas, both of
which are old Spanish measurements that continue to be used in Guatemala today. The fairgrounds are given as “12
manzanas y 8082 varas cuadradas”. I read this as the 12 manzanas plus these 8082 varas. (A manzana is the
equivalent of 1.73 acres. An acre is 4,094 square meters. Finally, a vara equals 0.70 meters.) Converting this to
meters, the total area of the fairgrounds comes to around 90,000 meters, or 300m x 300m2, or a little over 12 square
acres, consistent with the figure of 16 manzanas given in the Boletin de la Exposición.
62
“Central American Exposition,” The Washington Post, March 16, 1897.
63
Guía de la Exposición Centro-Americana, 56-58.
 42

encountered the important displays of the Central American republics first and then made their

way to the buildings that contained machinery and the fine arts. The sheer size, grandeur, and

central placement of the Fine Arts building subtly reinforced the link between the cultivation of

European-style arts and modernity. In contrast, the tiny archaeology and ethnography displays

remained far from the main exhibits at the furthest corner of the fairgrounds. Even the most

casual fairgoers would immediately understand the hierarchical arrangement of the fairgrounds

and direct their attention to the most prominent buildings.

The identity of the fairgoers themselves remains difficult to discern. Like other

expositions, the fair visually broadcast the worldview of political and elite economic interests to

subordinate classes. The exposition reflected the interests of Guatemala’s elite, leading to an

emphasis on coffee exportation, the wonders of machinery, as well as more subtle concepts such

as nationalism and modernity. Given that Indians largely lived in rural areas disconnected from

the larger national culture and often found themselves indebted and working, it seems

implausible that Indians formed the target audience for the exposition. It seems much more

likely that the fair aimed to provide Ladinos with a didactic experience that allowed them to self-

identify against the representations of Indians. For example, the exhibition of rudimentary

Indian ethnographic items allowed visitors to feel civilized by comparison, while the display of

archaeological remains subtly encouraged visitors to conceptualize of themselves as modern.

Additionally, the exposition undoubtedly provided a physical space in which to educate Ladinos

about their new roles as overseers and managers of Indian labor within the new coffee economy.

The exposition served to maintain visually the new social hierarchies necessary for the

production of coffee, but also to reassure social classes about their roles within the rapidly
 43

changing economy.64

Among the visitors to the fair, Karl Sapper, a prominent German geographer of the late

nineteenth century, visited the Central American Exposition in July. After earning a doctoral

degree in geography from the University of Munich in 1888, he immigrated to his brother’s

coffee plantation in the fertile region of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala in order to improve his frail

health. Surrounded by local Q’eqchi’ Indians, Sapper immediately set about learning Spanish

and recording his observations about the local Indian culture, including their methods for

preparing food, traditional dress, and physical characteristics. When his health improved, he set

off on foot on a trek that spanned from Tehuantepeque to Panama in search of scientific,

ethnographic, and geographic information. In the course of his twelve years of fieldwork in

Central America, Sapper radically changed the state of knowledge about the isthmus, its

geography and its people. His work acquainted anthropologists and the public with ethnographic

data about relatively unknown tribes. His detailed maps of the region won prizes at the 1893

Chicago World’s fair and he created topographic and linguistic maps for both the Mexican and

Central American governments. Indeed, Sapper’s detailed observations about archeological

ruins, Indian cultures, geography, and linguistics remained the primary sources for knowledge of

Central America well into the twentieth century.65

Sapper recorded his observations of his visit to the fair in a short document that

comprised one of the chapters of a later published volume of essays, Miscellaneous Texts and

Translations. His observations formed a narrative detailing the spatial hierarchy of the important

64
Tony Bennett, “Speaking to the Eyes,” 25-35. Bennett argues that while nineteenth century British
museums served as effective tools to illustrate visually social order, they also provided working classes with a new
“script” that defined their new social roles within a changing economy.
65
Alexander R. McBirney and Volker. Lorenz, “Karl Sapper: Geologist, Ethnologist and Naturalist,”
Earth Sciences History: Journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society, 22, no. 1 (2003): 79.
 44

features of the fair from a distinctly anthropological perspective that placed both nations and

races in the standard nineteenth century unilinear evolutionary hierarchy which equated cultural

development with attainment of civilization and modernity. Nevertheless, Sapper’s written

description of his day at the fair provides the reader with a rhetorical narrative that presumably

reflects the order in which he visited the exhibits as he moved through the fairgrounds and

describes his interactions with the displays.66 As fairs ultimately aimed to create a particular type

of experience for the visitor, his narrative provides a glimpse into the process of the official

construction of Indians as well as his interactions with collections in particular spaces.67

Additionally, Sapper’s visit highlighted the distinct ways in a highly educated visitor understood

the symbolism that fair organizers embedded in the grounds, the buildings, and the collections

themselves.

Sapper visited the exposition during the period when torrential seasonal rains discouraged

attendance. Concerts by military bands attempted to entice visitors through the gates, but

attendance remained low. Nevertheless, Sapper declared that the fair itself remained an excellent

idea, as the joint display of the Central American nations allowed visitors to understand readily

the level of cultural and industrial progress that each had attained. The five nations displayed

evidence of their commitment to industrial progress and modernization through exhibits that

featured natural resources, such as woods, coffee, and agricultural products as well as separate

buildings devoted to electricity and machinery. Among the national exhibits, Sapper recorded

66
Michael Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain
(University Park Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Here I draw on Schreffler’s analysis of a
narrative description of the Royal Palace in Mexico that creates a clear sense of rhetoricdal hierarchy within the
interior of the palace. I use Karl Sapper’s description here in much the same way.
67
Forgan, “Building the Museum.” 582. Forgan suggests that recent work on embodiment, or the actual
movement of people through physical spaces and their sensory experiences in museums can help illuminate the
intended and unintended messages that museum visitors receive and understand.
 45

seeing samples of manufactured textiles, such as silk embroidered cloth and woolen blankets,

produced by Indians. The swatches of cloth juxtaposed with saddles and fine wooden cabinets

highlighted the Indian capacity for industry and labor and suggested their hardworking nature.

Above all, Sapper noted that the displays featured coffee, the region’s most important export.

Samples of coffee filled the displays of all five nations and the exposition’s official guidebook

proudly proclaimed that the nation’s abundant Indian population provided the necessary labor to

produce the world’s finest coffee beans.68

Karl Sapper first visited the coffee displays of the Central American nations. He found

the exhibits acceptable, but complained that in order to make any sort of meaningful comparison

about the quality and quantity of coffee production in Central America, he was forced to make

repeated trips among the displays. He thought that a more useful comparison could be drawn if

the display had placed all of the coffees together, rather than exhibiting them individually by

nation. Despite his minor annoyance, he ranked the Costa Rican and Alta Verapaz varieties of

coffee as the finest, mentally creating a sense of order between the displays.69 The regional

nature of the exposition and the participation of ensured that visitors would form hierarchical

ideas about the relationships between the five Central American nations. Guatemala had

organized the exposition, positioning itself as the political leader and economic engine of the

isthmus. Nevertheless, the fact that Karl Sapper ranked the Costa Rican variety of coffee as

equal to that from Alta Verpaz indicates that visitors did not necessarily perceive the exposition

in the ways that the fair organizers had intended. Various agricultural products with export

68
Guía de la exposición Centro-Americana y de la ciudad de Guatemala, 19.

69
Karl Sapper, Miscellaneous pamphlets; translations, 1891-1906. (N.p.), 3.
 46

potential, such as indigo, wheat, and European cereals received significant places within each

exhibit, but Sapper noted that nothing in the displays attempted to explain new and yet

undiscovered uses for the native plants. Sapper, and by extension, developed nations continued

to view Central America as a place for the extraction of natural resources rather than intellectual

innovation.

Despite the growing popularity of anthropology as a legitimate science in the United

States and Europe, the archaeology and ethnography displays received little attention from fair

organizers. The rise of anthropology, history, and other social sciences as professional

disciplines in the late nineteenth century sparked academic interest in the histories and cultures

of non-Western people. Additionally, foreign immigration to the Americas, encouraged by the

availability of land and other raw materials also helped to bring Indian cultures into European

awareness and increased demand for ethnographic information about indigenous people. The

formation of professional academic disciplines concerned with Indian cultures led to the creation

of societies devoted to the promotion of such studies. For example, interested scholars formed

the International Congress of the Americanists (ICA) in France in 1875. This organization

aimed to record ethnographic, linguistic, and historic information for those people of the

Americas that existed in pre-Columbian times. It appears that in its early years the ICA avoided

concerning itself with issues of European contact, apparently expecting to find virtually

untouched, primitive tribes suitable for scientific study. Karl Sapper presented a number of

papers at the ICA meetings that focused on archaeology and ethnography. 70

Sapper located the antiquities exhibit in a separate building at the rear of the fairgrounds.

The paltry artifacts on display presented the artistic, scientific, and architectural
70
Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett and Ellen T Hardy, eds. Early Scholars' Visits to Central America: Reports by
Karl Sapper, Walter Lehmann, and Franz Termer (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology; University of California,
Los Angeles, 2000), 5.
 47

accomplishments of ancient civilizations as distinct from the contemporary culture of indigenous

people, neatly dividing the Indian past and present. The fair organizers chose not to separate

colonial antiquities from indigenous artifacts as the display contained a mixture of colonial

documents and pre-Columbian Mayan pottery, symbolically refuting both the Indian and colonial

past and denying their influence on the present. The colonial Spanish documents featured letters

from Pedro de Alvarado, manuscripts that described the construction and subsequent destruction

of the former capital of Antigua, and a seventeenth century Spanish book filled with linguistic

and geographical maps. Documentary records and maps created by Indians did not appear in the

exhibition and Sapper presumed that the fair’s central planning committee deemed them to be of

insufficient interest to the general public.71 The absence of written histories produced by Indians

disconnected contemporary Indians from their long history as well as highlighted their presumed

inability to record their own historical experiences and knowledge.

Of the pre-Columbian artifacts, only Guatemala and El Salvador presented anything and

even then, the collections were small and unremarkable. The lack of attention on these types of

artifacts and the paucity of the collection reflected the fair attempt to disassociate the Indian past

and present through reducing the history of Indian people to nothing more than a few crude,

stone tools that had no association with contemporary Indians. Sapper noted that with some

effort, the display could have accomplished something quite noteworthy, but that he had already

seen most of the collection at the 1893 exhibition in Chicago and the recycled exhibit offered no

new insights into Indian archaeological remains. The collection included vases, religious objects,

grinding stones, stone axes, and other ancient artifacts unearthed by foreign archaeologists.72 The

discovery and appropriation of Indian archaeological remains by archeologists transferred

71
Sapper, Miscellaneous pamphlets: Text and translations, 9.
72
Ibid., 10.
 48

ownership of these objects and control of the indigenous past from Indians to foreigners,

governmental officials and visitors. Sapper gave no description of the arrangement of the

display, but his list of the collection gave the impression of a haphazardly and poorly catalogued

exhibit designed to emphasize the crudeness and primitiveness of ancient civilizations rather than

their considerable archeological, astrological, or other accomplishments.

Sapper concluded his tour of the fairgrounds with a visit to the tiny display devoted to

ethnographical objects. This constituted the final display that he visited and he noted that it

consisted of an unlabeled variety of sundry items that came from each republic lumped together.

Unlike the coffee display, which emphasized the individual qualities of each nation’s particular

coffee, the display of ethnographic objects highlighted the homogeneity and undifferentiated

nature of the diversity of indigenous people throughout the isthmus, portraying Indians as a

single people. He drew clear distinctions between ethnological objects and pre-Columbian

antiquities, the former consisting of material culture of living people and the latter belonging to

ancient civilizations. Furthermore, Sapper divided the indigenous people of Guatemala into the

categories of “pagan” and “Christianized” tribes. He noted that the pagan tribes were the groups

that had retained the highest degree autonomy and individuality since the Spanish conquest.73

The display did not contain any objects from these pagan tribes in order to minimize the

suggestions that the government lacked control and authority over all of the tribes within its

political borders. Collections of ethnological objects from the Christianized tribes consisted of

ropes, nets, hammocks, and other everyday implements, implying the brutish conditions of

Indian life. Sapper complained about the lack of documentation regarding the origin of these

items, indicating the lack of effort on the part of fair organizers to present a coherent picture of

73
Ibid., 11.
 49

contemporary Indian life and the overall lackluster quality of the display itself.74 The emphasis

on indigenous tools promoted the idea of Indian people as nothing more than a rudimentary

workforce, capable of producing useful items, but only through the use of the crudest of

implements.

The fair did not host an ethnographic village that exhibited living humans, but instead

displayed traditional clothing that served as a visual representation of Indians. Most large fairs of

the era, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 featured living ethnographic villages

that allowed visitors to gawk at colonized people on display.75 The Central American Exposition

took a different approach, which illustrated Mayan life through stationary dioramas that

contained a mix of archaeological artifacts and ethnographic items. Of the most important tools

was the backstrap loom, the pre-Columbian invention used to produce such brilliantly colored

and finely woven textiles, but it received little attention in the display. Indigenous costumes

from different villages that included women’s huipiles, headdresses, traditional skirts, and men’s

trousers and shirts, adorned lifesized figures. Sapper provided no information about the figures,

giving the impression of Indians of faceless, voiceless mannequins, visible solely due to their

distinctive clothing. Besides the lifesized figures, the department of Alta Verapaz sent a number

of small wooden figurines, each dressed in typical costumes from various villages in the region.

As Sapper had conducted a significant amount of fieldwork with the Q’eqchi’ people of Alta

Verapaz, he would have been able to easily identify typical costumes and he indicated his

approval, pronouncing the display to be quite instructive to foreigners. The display did not

include a model of the interior of an Indian hut (or an actual Indian), but Sapper declared the

74
Ibid., 11.

75
Raymond Corbey, “Ethnographic Showcases,” 338.
 50

exhibit tolerably complete. El Salvador had sent a few samples of indigenous costumes on small

dressed figures without any information about their origin; Sapper declared these to be merely

fanciful images, as he had never seen similar costumes during his travels in El Salvador.76 The

invention of Indian costumes suggests that fair organizers consciously produced particular items

of material culture to give physical representation to their stereotypes about Indians and their

primitiveness. Karl Sapper complained about the lack of documentation of the objects and that

the display did not contain any model of an actual Indian hut (or an actual Indian). Despite these

shortcomings, he claimed that the display was “tolerably complete.”77

In conclusion, the promotion of coffee as the nation’s premiere export product guided fair

organizers in the construction of the fairgrounds and displays, which not only emphasized the

importance of the coffee economy, but the creation of an acceptable national image and history

that portrayed the nation as modern, peaceful, and civilized. The fair’s overarching emphasis on

coffee and other natural resources for exportation downplayed the importance of Indian labor to

the national economy. Nevertheless, the nation had to provide an explanation for its abundant

Indian population that minimized their lack of acculturation to the national culture and refusal to

participate in the coffee economy. The display of Indian culture provided the perfect opportunity

to restructure prevailing ideas about the nature of indigenous people and their role within the

global coffee market. Indians had to be shown as culturally distinct from their ancient ancestors

in order to separate them from their long history and the continuation of important cultural

traditions. The artificial division of Indian material culture into categories of ethnography and

archaeology implied that that contemporary Indians had no relationship with the ancient Maya,

effectively severing their ties to the past. The display of archaeological artifacts linked the

76
Karl Sapper, Miscellaneous pamphlets, 12.
77
Ibid., 11.
 51

ancient Maya to their material culture and the exhibited items implied the crude, primitive, and

uncivilized nature of ancient Indian life.

Once visitors conceptualized of contemporary Indians as a people without a long history

of cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions, the state could suggest subtly that Indians

constituted the ideal workforce for coffee plantations. The display of ethnographic items

complemented the archaeological display and provided the visitor with a readymade definition of

contemporary Indians. Rather than the primitive savages of ancient times, contemporary Indians

possessed the ability and inclination for hard labor, an impression made explicit through the type

of objects selected for display. The exhibition of Indian made items and tools clearly indicated

that although Indians lacked the capacity for innovation, they could deftly use basic implements

in order to complete menial tasks. The display created an image that promised that abundant

numbers of Indians could fulfill the needs of plantation owners and that their hardworking,

docile nature made them the ideal workforce to propel the coffee economy forward. The

exhibition of ethnographic materials also implied that the state remained firmly in control of its

Indian population, as the collection and display of objects symbolically transferred ownership of

the Indian past and contemporary present to government authorities and their proxies.

The next chapter compares and contrasts the ways in which fair organizers and

anthropologists conceptualized Indian cultures. Additionally, it provides information about the

realities of daily Indian life against the constructed image that fair organizers promoted in order

to serve the needs of the coffee economy. Despite the intentions of the fair’s organizers to

reinvent Guatemalan Indians as a modern workforce through displays that showcased their

capacity for manual labor, actual Indians remained far from the public view and international

eyes. Indian communities, facing pressures of both land appropriations and state sponsored
 52

coercive labor practices, coped with the rapidly changing political and economic climate in their

own ways. Rather than resort to the violent rebellions that marked the 1830s and 1840s, Indians

sought to retain control over their lives, land, and communities by protesting against their

exploitation through such means as outright refusals to work. The continuation of cultural

traditions, such as the use of indigenous languages and Indian dress also provided an important

foundation for the maintenance of Indian identities during a time of tremendous economic,

political, and social changes at both the local and regional level. Nevertheless, the coffee

economy dramatically changed patterns of Indian life, as costal migrations, exploitative debt

servitude and an entrance into the national economy altered traditional subsistence economies

and relationships within communities.

Chapter 4: Physical Anthropology, Ethnography, and Indians

The fair attempted to redefine Indian people in terms of their utility to the coffee industry

through the display of material culture meant to influence public perceptions. Fair organizers did

not intend that Indians attend the exposition; the fair provided Ladinos, coffee finqueros, and

potential immigrants new ways of thinking about Indians as a labor force rather than uncivilized

barbarians. At the same time, ethnographers also created ideas about Indians through their

observations and recorded their interpretations of supposedly primitive cultural practices and

social structures. These competing, and yet disparate, conceptions served different purposes for

both the coffee industry and the nascent discipline of anthropology. The coffee plantation
 53

owners demanded Indians in the guise of modern workers, while anthropologists required

indigenous cultures for scientific study and observation. Although these two groups

conceptualized Indians in vastly different ways and created separate constructions to represent

their ideas, the two groups held much in common despite their opposing interests in the visual

representation of Indians. Indians found themselves caught between these competing discourses

that they could not control as they attempted to adapt and respond to the labor demands of the

coffee industry.

From the small amount of biographical information available about Karl Sapper, it

appears that he came from an elite German family and demonstrated that anthropologists and

coffee plantation owners often shared similar socioeconomic backgrounds.78 Sapper’s brother,

Richard, owned a large coffee plantation in Alta Verapaz and relied heavily on the labor

provided by local Q’eqchi’ Indians.79 Sapper, a university educated German geographer and

self-styled ethnographer, shared not only his brother’s socioeconomic status, but also an interest

in the local Indian population. Nevertheless, anthropologists and coffee plantation owners

focused their attention on Indian communities for distinct reasons and conceptualized of Indians

in different ways that reflected their own economic or scientific interests. Coffee plantation

owners hoped that the promotion of Indians as a modern workforce would further integrate

unassimilated tribes into the national economy and compel them to seek labor on plantations. On
78
Although my research here focuses on Karl Sapper and his work, he was far from the only researcher in
Guatemala at the turn on the century. For example, Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, an amateur German archaeologist also
recorded ethnographic information about Indians. His papers can be found at Tulane University. See also Guillermo
Falcón, Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, German Entrepreneur in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala, 1889-1937 (Ann Arbor
Mich. [etc.]), 1980. Additionally, Franz Termer, one of Karl Sapper’s students, also produced ethnographic
research. See Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett and Ellen T. Hardy, eds. Early Scholars' Visits to Central America: Reports
by Karl Sapper, Walter Lehmann, and Franz Termer.( Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology University of
California Los Angeles, 2000).
79
Alexander R. McBirney and Volker. Lorenz, “Karl Sapper: Geologist, Ethnologist and Naturalist,” 79-
80.
 54

the other hand, Karl Sapper surely understood the complexities and demands of the coffee

economy and observed its effects on local Indian communities, but remained interested in

creating ethnographic profiles of Indian cultures rather than in their economic exploitation. The

changes brought by the shift to coffee irrevocably altered Indian communities, which added

urgency to his efforts to record information about Indians before their predicted extinction. 80 His

ethnographies provided valuable information about Mayan cultural practices and the impact of

European civilization on Indian communities, but required that Indian communities remain

culturally distinct in order to continue to be suitable subjects for ethnographic research.

The Central American Exposition captured the tension between the two conceptions of

Indians but mainly focused on the creation of a particular construct of Indians that sought to

downplay ideas about their primitive nature by exhibiting objects that demonstrated their

capacity for hard work and peaceable nature. Nevertheless, the archeological exhibit hinted that

Indians remained suitable for scientific study by anthropologists. These exhibits represented

official state constructions that visually explained the suitability of Indians for the difficult task

of coffee cultivation. Indians had no input as to their representation or the use of their material

culture to create specific ideas about their culture, history, or ethnographic present. Likewise,

Indians had no control over the stereotypes that ethnographers created for them. Ethnography

during this period represented ideas about the supposed meaning and importance of Indian

cultural practices, rather than a realistic description of particular aspects of Indian life. Both of

these conceptions constituted artificial constructions, but ultimately, ethnography remained the

more faithful depiction of Indian life due to the discipline’s emphasis on the use of participant-
80
Jacob W. Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist
72, no. 6, New Series (December 1970): 1297. Gruber argues that the rapid extinction of indigenous societies
compelled nineteenth century anthropologists to record meticulously ethnographic information about native cultures
in imminent danger of extinction. The recognition that the expansion of Western civilization had led directly to
irreparable damages to indigenous societies led to a greater focus on cultural discontinuities and abnormalities rather
than the survival and maintenance of indigenous traditions and cultural practices.
 55

observation methodologies to obtain data as well as an attempt to explain Indian culture rather

than just illustrate ideas about it.

The clothing exhibit represented Indians more explicitly than many of the other displays

at the exposition. The simple fact that the exposition contained an exhibit devoted to

contemporary Indian clothing symbolized the authority of the state over Indian communities, as

the exhibition of clothing gave fair organizers the power to create, arrange, and display

representations of actual people. In keeping with the overarching goal of reinventing discourses

about Indians, fair organizers aimed to create a display that would illustrate that Indians

constituted an orderly, peaceable, modern workforce. In fact, the clothing display constituted a

critical component of the messages that the fair organizers wanted visitors to understand, as

clothing remained one of the main markers of ethnic difference and the primary way that

individuals could be visually identified as Indian. Certain types of attire also signified

civilization for nineteenth century fair goers; despite the fact that Indian clothing failed to

conform to European aesthetic taste, it still symbolized the attainment of some degree of

civilized behavior. The display of representations rather than an actual ethnographic exhibit of

living people helped to create the impression of Indians as workers, as the mute figures

suggested silent acceptance of the conditions that the state had thrust upon its Indian populations

as well as downplayed the substantial linguistic differences that existed between different tribes.

The relative small size of the ethnographic display of Indians in the urban setting of the

exposition space that represented the nation hinted at the dominance of the urban capital over

rural Indian communities. Overall, the display of clothing allowed fair organizers create and

manipulate ideas about Indians that fairgoers would consume and internalize. The representation

of Indians through clothing proved a safer choice than an ethnographic display of living people,
 56

as an exhibit that featured actual Indians ran the risk of displaying Indians that would fail to

conform to their constructed identities and ruin the images that fair organizers had created for

them.

Karl Sapper also created ideas about Indians through his writing about their material

culture, but his constructions proved quite different from those at the fair. One of the largest

differences centered on the way that his writing suggested a largely rural region that contained a

diverse, culturally heterogeneous Indian population that remained unassimilated and

unconnected from the larger national economy or Ladino culture. Whereas the fair promoted the

idea that Indians formed a homogeneous group, Sapper counted over twenty-two different tribes

throughout Central America and differentiated them by linguistic groups as well as geographic

locations. 81 For Sapper, material culture constituted a means for identifying and classifying

Indian tribes for ethnographic studies rather than a way of creating assumptions about their

nature.82 A substantial amount of his work focused on the distribution of Indian languages and

use throughout the isthmus, indicating the continuation of linguistic traditions as well as the

maintenance of distinctly Mayan cultural traditions.

Clothing continued to play an important role in making Indians visible, but Sapper

focused more on the ways in which their clothing distinguished separate Mayan groups from

each other rather than from the dominant Ladino and European culture. He theorized about

Indian clothing, speculating that painting the body constituted the most primitive substitute for

clothing, but noted that all of the tribes that he studied used clothing of some sort. Nevertheless,

he professed some disappointment that contemporary Indian costumes failed to represent original

Indian dress, as colonial Spanish regulations concerning proper Indian clothing had considerably
81
Karl Sapper, Miscellaneous pamphlets, 22-23.
82
Ibid., 6.
 57

altered the original fashion.83 Indians continued to weave many of their own articles of clothing,

coloring the imported cotton thread with vegetable dyes, as traditional maguey fibers were only

used to produce rough woven items, such as bags. Women retained the use of huipiles and

“primitive skirts,” while men had adopted European style shirts and trousers. Additionally,

women often wrapped their hair with bright bands of woven material.84 The continuation of

these traditional methods of textile production indicated the retention of important cultural

practices, despite centuries of acculturation, assimilation, and conquest. Clothing symbolized

ethnic identity and identified individuals as part of the nation’s Indian population as well as

provided a visual link between a person and their geographic origin.85 The link between clothing

and place reinforced a sense of community between residents and allowed people to visually

broadcast their attachment to a particular place and linguistic group.

These “top down” nature of the competing discourses of fair organizers and

anthropologists and the lack of any sources that directly represent the voices of individual

Indians and their communities make it difficult to reconstruct their experiences and present a

distorted view of Indian life during this time. Nevertheless, evidence that suggests that Indians

refuted these constructs exists in various ways. A handful of secondary sources exist that

specifically examine Indian experiences in relation to the coffee industry that represent

information contained in both archival sources and oral histories. Indians also appear in primary

source documentary records, but only through official state sources and government documents,

creating the impression that Indians constituted passive recipients of state policies rather than

historical actors in their own right. In particular, labor legislation and the implementation of land
83
Ibid., 54. Sapper briefly mentions colonial Spanish regulations that governed the use of particular types
of clothing appropriate for Indians.
84
Ibid., 53-56.
85
Specific combinations of clothing patterns and colors have identified particular Indian pueblos since the
colonial period.
 58

use policies serve as valuable sources, as they tried to alter patterns of Indians life, allowing

historians a broad overview of the ways in which Indians interacted with the state. A close

reading of these sources provides at least some clues as to Indian actions during this time, but an

examination of national labor legislation fails to illuminate much about the ways that the coffee

economy affected either individual lives or community relationships.

Ethnography remains the best sources to provide information about Indian cultural

practices. Ethnographers created detailed field studies that provided significant information

about Mayan tribes, about which little been known prior to the end of the nineteenth century.

Among the anthropologists and geographers who traveled throughout the region, Karl Sapper’s

ethnographies provide the most complete and detailed descriptions of Indian life. In fact, his

ethnographic observations of Indian life remained the primary source of information about the

region for the next fifty years and continue to inform both historical and ethnographic studies

today. Sapper’s notes described Mayan languages, physical features, and cultural habits, and

provided clear evidence that despite state interventions in community life and representations

that portrayed them as modern workers, Indians maintained a high degree of cultural autonomy.

Despite the utility of ethnographies, it remains important to remember that these types of studies

create constructs of Indians that may not necessarily conform to the lived experiences of actual

people, as they reflect the observations of the ethnographer rather than the actions of the people

under observation. Additionally, ethnographers have their own biases that slant their

observations in a particular way that reflects their own cultural and historical contexts.

Nevertheless, ethnographies provide a substantial amount of information about Indian life.

Karl Sapper’s ethnographic studies covered a wide variety of themes that served to create

knowledge and ideas about Central American Indians for scholars throughout Europe and the
 59

United States.86 Using the methodologies put forth by Franz Boas that emphasized careful, high

quality fieldwork, Sapper constructed a large body of work about the region’s geographical,

climatic, linguistic and ethnographic features.87 In general, he drew his conclusions from his

direct observations, but occasionally included statements and ideas made by Indians themselves

gleaned through conversations. Additionally, he often incorporated Q’eqchi’ words into his

writing to express concepts that had no direct translation in Spanish. In keeping with then

contemporary anthropological ideas, Sapper’s ethnographic observations relied heavily on the

positivistic, universal evolutionary model that located people on a linear scale that placed

European civilization at the pinnacle and categorized Indian people as both barbaric and

primitive. His writing often described degrees of civilization, as if the attainment of certain

cultural characteristics could be plotted on a graph. Despite his determination to record

accurately information about indigenous peoples, his writing often took a distinctly Eurocentric

tone that ignored indigenous cultural achievements and praised German immigration for bringing

a higher degree of civilization and culture to Guatemala. For example, Sapper described the

gradual conversion of the Indians to Spanish as the “victorious” advance of European languages

over Indian languages. Additionally, he also noted the inferiority of certain aspects of Indian

material culture and their readiness to adopt certain types of European tools.88 His emphasis on

the material culture that Indians had borrowed due to deficiencies in their own culture implied

86
The vast majority of Karl Sapper’s writings are in German, although English and Spanish translations are
readily available, indicating a wide audience for his work. See Karl Sapper, “The Old Indian Settlements and
Architectural Structures in Northern Central America,” Annual report. (1896), Karl Sapper, The Verapaz in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: a Contribution to the Historical Geography and Ethnography of Northeastern
Guatemala (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology University of California, 1985), and Karl Sapper, Eduard Seler,
and Franz Termer, Estudios q'eqchi'es: Etnógrafos Alemanes en las Verapaces (Rancho Palos Verdes, CA:
Fundación Yax Te', 1998).

87
Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett and Ellen T. Hardy, eds., Early Scholars' Visits to Central America, 5-6.
88
Sapper, Miscellaneous Pamphlets, 33.
 60

that Indians had not acquired a high degree of civilization and would naturally seek to borrow

from the more civilized cultural practices of Europe.

Besides providing detailed information about historical and contemporary demography,

Sapper described native foods, physical characteristics, clothing, languages, and a wide variety

of material objects and their use. While Sapper, like all anthropologists of his day, strove to

capture traditional Indian cultures, the English translation of his notebook contains an account of

an Indian revolt sparked by racial tensions between non-Indian Ladinos and Indians. They

portrayed Indians as “uncivilized, very distrustful, barbarous, and inclined to rapine,” peoples

capable only of expressions of violence. The implication of their brutal nature and the exotic

description of specific cultural practices clearly established Indians as existing well outside the

dominant, mainstream Ladino culture. Indians appeared in these ethnographies as primitive,

static, and so foreign as to be incomprehensible. Although Sapper never directly stated that

Indians stubbornly stood in the way of national progress, his accounts leave no doubt as to the

cause of Guatemala’s ongoing status as a cultural and economic backwater.

His ethnographic studies often constructed Indians as unchanging, static entities mired in

their ancient past and traditions. For example, in his study of Q’eqchi’ religious practices,

Sapper insisted that the religious rituals of the nineteenth century indicated the unchanging

nature of the Indian worldview and belief system.89 Although continuities certainly existed, the

assumption that centuries of conquest, evangelization, and economic transformations had not

affected Indian beliefs reflected his conceptions of Indian people as incapable of innovation or

modernization. His descriptions of the fusion of Catholic beliefs with Mayan spirituality

suggested that Indians had received insufficient religious instruction to fully comprehend

89
Beaudry-Corbett and Hardy, Early scholars' Visits to Central America, 31.
 61

Catholicism and that their strange rituals served as proof of their limited ability to grasp the

fundamental tenets of Christianity.90 Despite Sapper’s vast amount of knowledge and

understanding about Indian culture, he remained unable to view Indian religious beliefs as

anything other than primitive superstitions that held little or no value in comparison to

Catholicism or his own staunch German Protestantism.

In contrast to his constructions of Indian religious practices, the tumultuous changes to

the region since the sixteenth century had produced a religious syncretism that proved capable of

accommodating both the Mayan worldview as well as the incorporation of Catholic elements that

Indians found to be useful. Sapper’s description of the Q’eqchi’ religious practices left no doubt

as to the extent to which the two religions had combined to create a belief system that coincided

with deeply held beliefs about the world. Sapper described the cofradía of Cobán, the religious

brotherhood that cared for the patron saint of Santo Domingo and explained how the cofradía

members believed that the images of the saints and other inanimate objects possessed a living

nature. Additionally, despite the Catholic veneer of the Q’eqchi’ religious beliefs, prayers to

various indigenous gods proved that a pantheon of deities continued to play important roles in

important rituals, such as the planting of the sacred corn. The Q’eqchi’ directed their corn

prayers to a multitude of different gods to ensure a successful harvest and closed the lengthy

prayer with pleas to the Holy Trinity, seamlessly blending the two belief systems into one that

gave spiritual meaning to all aspects of life.91

Sapper’s ethnographic studies did not explicitly discuss Indian labor on coffee

plantations, but he made notes about their agricultural practices. European tools had largely

replaced traditional ones, but the methods of planting corn remained distinctly Mayan.92 The
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid., 33.
92
Sapper, Miscellaneous pamphlets: 41.
 62

rituals and traditions that surrounded the annual corn planting represented an important cultural

practice that Indians would not alter, regardless of the supposed superiority of European planting

techniques. The Indian method of planting proved so effective that Ladinos often emulated it.93

Contrary to conventional ideas about the supposed laziness of Indians, corn planting and

harvesting clearly demonstrated that Indians put a great deal of labor into the cultivation of crops

that held deep cultural meaning and provided a physical and spiritual connection between

individuals and land that had been worked this way for centuries.94

Karl Sapper’s narrative is helpful in understanding that Indian people lived lives that

included important cultural traditions that failed to conform to fair organizer’s stereotypes.

Nevertheless, his accounts set up scientific stereotypes that also defined Indian behavior and

culture. Indians that fell outside of these constructs, such as hispanicized Indians or Ladinos that

continued to self-identify as Indian received no explanation in Sapper’s account as they failed to

conform to the standards of normal behavior that he had previously identified. Though Sapper

occasionally mentioned that he spoke with Indians or asked them questions, their responses

remained buried under the guise of what he thought they said or assumed that they meant.

Furthermore, Sapper’s stereotypes for Indians cast them solely in terms of their supposed degree

of civilization according to a linear model that would never allow them to be considered

anything more than barbarians.

In addition to ethnographies, official government records of the endless labor legislation

meant to control Indian lives and labor provide a glimpse of Indian actions at the national level.

93
Ibid..
94
Mayan creation mythology holds that gods created men out of corn. This is detailed in the Popol Vuh,
the K’iche’creation account. Allen J. Christenson, Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya: The Great Classic of
Central American Spirituality, Translated from the Original Maya Text (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
 63

The sheer amount of labor legislation indicates a steadfast refusal on the part of Indians to

participate in the national economy as well as a keen understanding of coffee growers’

dependence on Indian labor. After centuries of governmental attempts to either eliminate or

assimilate Indians communities, Indians rightly viewed the expansion of the coffee economy

with suspicion. Easy access to communal lands allowed Indians an alternative to debt labor, as

traditional subsistence farming effectively allowed entire communities to opt out of participation

in the national economy and remain firmly tied to their particular municipalities. Remaining

outside of the national economy, however, became increasingly more difficult as the state

applied overt pressure to prod Indians towards labor on coffee plantations. Surprisingly, the new

levels of control and authority that the state exerted over its Indian population did not spark the

large scale agrarian rebellions common to the 1830s and 1840s. Acutely aware of the vastly

increased power of the state, its ability to suppress rural revolts, as well as the extent to which

Guatemala had staked its future on coffee exportation, Indians during the late nineteenth century

elected to challenge the state in more subtle, but significant ways. The coffee industry could not

proceed without the acquisition of Indian labor, which allowed for more quiet forms of resistance

that did not rely on armed uprisings.

Despite the dramatic changes that the shift to the coffee economy wrought on Indian

communities, it is important to recognize the regional nature of these changes, the expansion of

coffee plantations into Indian land occurred in erratic spurts in particular areas that affected

Indians in varying degrees. Additionally, Guatemalan Indians largely did not suffer the sudden

termination of the traditional ejido system that provided community lands, nor the massive land

appropriations that characterized land reforms in other Latin American nations, such as El

Salvador.95 Much of the Indian experience depended on the extent to which communal lands fell
95
David McCreery, "An Odious Feudalism," 105.
 64

into the ideal climate zones for coffee cultivation. Coffee cultivation required specific soil and

climate conditions and coffee plantations first sprung up in favorable areas, such as the costal

piedmont and the department of Alta Verapaz. Due to the regional nature of coffee expansion,

some Indian communities in particularly remote areas felt relatively few effects from the growth

of the coffee industry, while others experienced significant changes in their communities and

access to communal lands. 96 For example, the area surrounding Quetzaltenango suffered

relatively few large scale land appropriations and the mandamiento was never applied, leading to

a minimum of disruption in the lives of K’iche’ communities within the municipality.97 On the

other hand, Q’eqchi’ Indians in the department of Alta Verapaz experienced a large number of

land appropriations and suffered disproportionately from extensive use of the mandamiento.98

In the areas most affected by the shift to forced wage labor, Indians did not willingly

surrender silently to the conditions of debt peonage. They managed to voice their objections to

the mandamientos and poor labor conditions. Lack of Spanish proficiency, illiteracy, and

unfamiliarity with legal niceties hindered Indians in their efforts to register their complaints, but

they appealed to state authorities and cited the inherent unfairness of the forced labor, demanding

the abolishment of the mandamiento system. The fact that Indian communities appealed directly

to government authorities indicated an understanding of the political system as well as the fact

that nothing less than an appeal to the highest authorities would produce the desired results. In

1885, the community of Xenacoj sent a letter to President Reina Barrios, explaining that years of

forced labor had taken the lives of many community members, leaving numerous orphans and

96
David. McCreery, “The Coffee Revolution,” 163.
97
Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, 111.
98
McCreery, “The Coffee Revolution,” 167-168.
 65

widows and questioning by what right the state could force Indians to work for the arbitrary

wages that landowners chose to pay.99 Whether the appeal received a response remains unclear,

but the letter demonstrated the initiative of an Indian community to be heard on a national level.

Indian objections to forced labor challenged not only the state’s right to coerce workers, but also

prevailing Liberal conceptions of them as passive, unintelligent, and unfit for anything other than

manual labor.

This study has not focused on issues of gender, as the available sources have not

explicitly made any clearly distinctions between the representations of men and women.

Nevertheless, it is certain that men and women experienced the shift to coffee capitalism in

different ways. Indians continued to negotiate the complexities of the new export economy and

labor practices as the coffee industry continued to grow in both economic and political

importance. Annual migration to the coastal coffee producing regions became a reality for

individuals in many communities, separating families and removing Indians from important

social structures and limiting their seasonal access to communal lands. Although mostly men

found themselves drafted for plantation labor through the mandamiento, women also participated

in this system. Within the exploitative system of plantation labor, women who worked in the

fields often suffered the most, sometimes earning only half of a man’s wage for nearly identical

work.100 The transitory nature of coffee plantation labor must have taken a particular toll on

women, as the new economy affected their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters.

The nature of coffee harvesting and production changed gender roles dramatically in

highland communities. Subsistence agriculture had provided men with a considerable degree of

economic automony, as farming communal lands allowed Indians to exist well outside of the
99
McCreery, “An Odious Feudalism,” 109. AGCA, residents of Xenacoj to President Barrios, 1885. Cited
in McCreery.
100
David Carey Jr., “Empowered through Labor and Buttressing Their Communities: Mayan Women and
Coastal Migration, 1875-1965.,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no. 3 (2006): 524.
 66

national cash based economy. The shift to debt servitude required that Indians integrate into a

capitalistic system that made them dependent on coffee planters and diminished their sense of

economic independence. Additionally, the coffee economy opened up opportunities for women

outside of their traditional domestic spheres. The work placed men and women together in the

fields and blurred the traditional gendered division of labor that characterized agricultural labor

in Indian communities. Men traditionally planted and harvested corn in the fields while women

focused their attention on their responsibilities at home. Women’s unpaid domestic labor, such

as cooking, raising children, and washing clothes, constituted an important part of daily life, but

remained unpaid. The entrance of women into a cash based economic system gave women direct

access and control over their economic futures, but also challenged ideas about women’s unpaid

labor.101 In particular, the women who cooked the rations and washed laundry for the migrant

labor force earned relatively high wages due to the necessity of their work. Indeed, their skills

allowed them to earn wages which in turn, afforded them increased autonomy within a system

that kept Mayan women economically dependent and powerless.102 We can speculate that the

intrusion of the cash based coffee economy into highland Indian life likely provoked anxieties

about changing gender roles and affected relationships between community members once

migrant workers returned to their pueblos.

In conclusion, a comparison of Indian representations at the fair against the ethnographies

produced by Karl Sapper leaves two distinct ideas about the nature of Indians and their new

economic and social roles. Both representations constructed Indians in terms of their material

culture but reached dramatically different outcomes regarding the symbolic significance of

Indian ethnographic and archaeological objects. The state emphasized the utility of Indians to

101
Ibid., 513.
102
Ibid., 502.
 67

the coffee industry and capacity for hard work and displayed Indian tools and clothing in such a

way that the visitor would understand immediately that Indians had cast off their primitive past.

In contrast, ethnographers such as Karl Sapper viewed the exhibit of these materials as

incontrovertible proof that Indian remained fundamentally primitive people mired in the ancient

past. Neither of these conceptions proved completely accurate, as Indians struggled to make

sense out of rapidly changing political, economic, and social conditions that affected traditional

community structures and subsistence agricultural patterns. Nevertheless, Sapper’s observations

prove the more compelling and believable of the two disparate constructions and his work

continues to allow glimpses into the minutiae of Indian life.

Contrary to the narrow definition that fair organizers outlined for them and the scientific

stereotypes that anthropologists created for them, Indians continued to challenge these

constructions through a variety of subtle means. Indians refuted their representations at the fair

simply by living outside of the role that the state has assigned for them. Armed rebellion

remained an unsavory option for protest, as the growing power of the state made it a risky

prospect at best. Instead, Indians lodged their complaints in economic terms through their

refusals to participate in the coffee economy. This refusal to engage in debt servitude proved an

effective measure, as coffee plantations could not survive without Indian labor. The veritable

flurry of labor laws in the years surrounding the expositions also indicates the importance of

Indians in the new economy and the desperation of government officials to coerce Indians

towards national economic participation. Nevertheless, changing land use patterns awarded

community lands to private coffee finqueros and greatly reduced Indian access to land for

subsistence agriculture. Once forced to join the cash based economy, Indians found themselves

subject to coercive laws meant to control their choices. Indians certainly went to work on coffee
 68

plantations, but did not enter into debt servitude willingly. Although there is no direct evidence,

it seems highly probable that Indians devised a number of creative ways to avoid entrapment by

the state. Additionally, written complaints about the mandamiento serve as powerful testimony

that Indians did not acquiesce to their new positions quietly.

The conclusion to this work explores the fair’s final outcome, provides answers to the

research questions proposed in the introduction, and identifies areas for further investigation.

The outcomes of the fair differed dramatically from the intentions of the fair organizers due to

the conflicting messages about the nation’s identity and the ways in which the racial and class

definition of Indians as coffee plantation labor compromised Guatemala’s chance for a unified

nation. Additionally, political upheaval and the threat of revolution confirmed international

stereotypes about the region’s shaky political foundations and economic future.
 69

Chapter 5: Conclusion

Despite its initial successes and high expectations, the fair ended in failure due to its high

costs and low attendance. The cost of the numerous public works and cosmetic improvements to

the urban area surrounding the exposition proved tremendous and led to a ten percent tax on

silver in February of 1897 in an effort to keep hard currency within the country. Banks

attempted to conserve silver and hold it in sufficient amounts to guarantee their solvency.103

Baron von Bergen, the German minister to Central America, brushed off early reports of the

exposition’s failure, arguing that it could not be considered a failure before it had even begun.

Rather than attributing the nation’s dismal financial state to the expense of the exposition, he

instead blamed the government’s expenditures on the Atlantic and Pacific railroad routes, the

improvements to the ports, and the numerous public works projects throughout the capital. He

freely acknowledged the nation’s financial difficulties, but expressed confidence that the

exposition would draw a substantial amount of foreign capital that would be able to cover the

cost of the national debt.104 Nevertheless, the large number of visitors to the exposition dwindled

to the point that in August, five times more exposition officers than visitors could be seen

103
“Finances of Guatemala.,” New York Times (1857-Current file), February 27, 1897.

104
“It Is Not a Failure,” Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File), May 11, 1897.
 70

roaming the fairgrounds. Military bands and various booths attempted to entice people through

the gates, but the torrential seasonal rains discouraged attendance.105

As early as June, American newspapers began carrying stories that claimed that

Guatemala had relied nearly exclusively on enormous loans to finance the exposition and found

itself in the awkward position of being unable to repay creditors. To stave off disaster, the nation

began printing more currency, leading to rampant inflation. Government employees went unpaid

for months. The government, already severely indebted to the national banks, attempted to

secure yet another loan of 1.5 million pesos ($700,000). Guatemalan bankers argued that a loan

of that magnitude would leave them unable to pay their depositors.106 U.S. Consul D. Lynch

Pringle reported to the U.S. State Department about the alarming state of the nation’s financial

status. The nation’s banks had reached a standstill, owing to a misguided financial policy that

allowed banks to refuse to redeem bank notes for silver. The creation and implementation of this

policy subsequently revealed that Guatemalan banks had let their silver reserves run so low, that

banks would never be able to redeem more than 25-30% of outstanding notes. This crisis

brought the banking industry to a standstill with very high exchange rates that had removed most

of the silver from the country and very little currency actually circulated. According to Pringle,

the causes of this disaster could be directly attributed to the Central American Exposition, which

had cost between three and four million in silver. The real tragedy, of course, lay in the fact that

the crisis could have been avoided with sound management and wise financial planning. The

crisis had reached such catastrophic positions that work had ceased on the northern railroad and

the army hadn’t been paid in months. Even more tragically, Pringle professed that no easy

solution existed, barring the drastic idea of selling of the Northern rail line; however, since this

105
Karl Sapper, Miscellaneous pamphlets, 1.
106
“Financial Disaster in Guatemala,” The Washington Post, June 5, 1897.
 71

project had been proposed by President Barrios himself, Pringle saw little chance that this would

happen.107

In September of 1897, U.S. papers reported that President Barrios’s popularity had

plummeted and that the country found itself on the brink of revolution.108 Shortly after the fair

had concluded, Guatemala once more found itself in a state of upheaval, as the assassination

President Reina Barrios in February of 1898 by a German named Oscar Solinger shattered the

illusion of progress, stability, and peace that the fair had tried so hard to create.109 Manuel

Estrada Cabrera assumed the presidency and eventually led the nation toward its next major

economic transformation as a banana republic.

The fair’s ultimate outcomes deviated drastically from the anticipated economic stimulus

and demonstration of cultural modernity that the exposition’s organizers had envisioned.

Instead, the exposition’s huge costs and low attendance nearly bankrupted the nation. The

assassination of Reina Barrios in 1898 underscored the region’s political instability and

discouraged both foreign immigration and investment. Finally, an unexpected drop in world

coffee prices in 1898 shattered hopes that coffee exportation would provide a viable solution to

Guatemala’s chronic underdevelopment. All of these factors combined to thwart the

exposition’s lofty goals and contributed to international perceptions of Guatemala’s

backwardness and inability to achieve any true measure of economic progress.

Overall, the fair promoted a particular way of understanding Central America and its

107107
United States Consulate, Despatches from United States consuls in Guatemala, August 18, 1897, Reel
10.

108
“Bad News From Guatemala: Barrios Unpopular and a Revolution is impending,” The Washington Post,
September 10, 1897.

109
“Barrios Dead,” Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File), February 10, 1898.
 72

Indian population based on the display of artifacts of material culture that transformed Indians

from primitive barbarians to modern workers for coffee plantations. The exposition encouraged

visitors to understand the new social hierarchies that had been created in order for the coffee

industry to thrive. The fair aimed to illustrate visually the class and racial differences between

Indians, Ladinos, and plantation owners in order to create a social hierarchy that reflected the

needs of the emerging coffee economy as well as changing social and political realities. Fair

organizers portrayed Indians as people without history or cultural traditions and emphasized the

distinction between modern civilization and the pre-Columbian past that allowed visitors to

appreciate the nation’s considerable progress in its march towards modernity in contrast to the

backwardness of Indians. The fair illustrated Indians through anthropological displays to create

ideas about the nature of indigenous people that justified their economic exploitation as well as

the appropriation of traditional Indian lands for coffee cultivation. Additionally, the display of

Indian archaeological and ethnographic remains cast indigenous people in scientific terms that

allowed them to be appropriately categorized as barbaric and hopelessly mired in the past,

allowing visitors to define themselves as modern and civilized against this stereotype.

Karl Sapper’s visit to the Central American Exhibition confirms the importance of visual

display as a means to define the cultural and racial nature of Indian people. The strategic use of

Indian material culture reflected larger, global debates about evolutionary hierarchies, scientific

racism, and colonialism that found expression in international expositions. The ritual display of

artifacts and cultural items created a distinct identity for indigenous people and placed them

within social hierarchies that provided a readily available pool of labor for coffee plantation

owners. The artificial division of Indian material culture into archaeological and ethnographic

specimens allowed the government to symbolically declare the extinction of the great Mayan
 73

civilizations of the past and the final triumph of civilization over Indian barbarity. Indian people,

relieved of their ancient past and cultural traditions, stood ready for redefinition as a docile,

industrious labor force that would propel the coffee industry to new, dizzying heights. The fair’s

representations of indigenous people ultimately served to justify the appropriation of Indian land,

labor, and control of the ancient past to serve the nation’s political and economic future.

In staging the Central American Exposition, fair organizers faced a difficult choice as to

how to represent Indians to the fairgoers. Suggestions of cultural backwardness, failure to

assimilate into the mainstream society, or the lack of official control over Indian people had to be

suppressed in order to present Indians as a modern, obedient workforce. To convey this

impression, fair organizers placed Indian cultural items and archaeological artifacts in a remote

corner of the fairgrounds, hoping instead to dazzle visitors with machinery, electricity, and the

display of fine arts. Within the few exhibits devoted to Indian cultures, the scarce

representations of Indians appeared through the fragmented remains of their archaeological past

juxtaposed with contemporary cultural objects, which encouraged visitors to make comparisons

between ancient and contemporary Indian cultures. Furthermore, no written explanation

explicitly linked the ancient remains to the present state of Indians and helped to create the

impression that contemporary Indians had no relationship to the ancient Maya. The display

stripped contemporary indigenous people of their culturally distinct, “primitive” past and left

Indians ready for redefinition by fair organizers as industrious and willing to work for European

plantation owners for low wages.

Early anthropologists, such as Karl Sapper and others, observed and recorded

ethnographic information about Indians, but continued to view them as fundamentally pre-

modern, crude, and barbaric. In contrast to fair organizers, who highlighted the discontinuity
 74

between ancient and contemporary Indians, anthropologists emphasized their cultural continuity.

Sapper’s accounts of Indian maintenance of cultural traditions firmly yoked Indians to their pre-

Columbian past. His insistence on the primitive nature of Indians reinforced predominant

Ladino and European stereotypes of them as lacking innovation, imagination, or the ability of

achieve any meaningful degree of civilization. He made no effort to explain the specific cultural,

symbolic, or spiritual reasons for the continuation of Indian traditions. Sapper’s observations

about indigenous tribes, including their physical features, dress, and languages created Indians as

the ultimate “other,” a race of exotic people mired in the past. His anthropological construction

of Indians left them vulnerable to even further economic exploitation in the coffee economy, as

he portrayed indigenous people as two dimensional stereotypes.

Indians found themselves caught between competing discourses of modernity and

primitivism that reduced them to ancient relics, brute laborers, or scientific specimens and these

discourses justified Indian debt servitude on coffee plantations. Despite the fact that neither

exposition records nor Sapper’s observations allow the reader a completely objective picture of

Indian life during this time, the available sources can provide evidence of Indian life and give a

sense of native agency that existed well outside of either official or anthropological conceptions

of Indians. For example, the artificial division that fair organizers erected between the ancient

Maya and their contemporary descendants cannot hold up under Sapper’s repeated observations

about the continuation of cultural traditions, such as the prevalence of Indian languages, dress,

and use of older tools and implements. At the same time, the conspicuous display of Indian

produced cloth indicates that Indians retained some control over the production a distribution of

certain products and actively participated in a cash economy on their own terms. Sapper’s

writing not only revealed that a large number of Indians continued practicing Mayan religious
 75

rites and ceremonies, but also that state control could not reach all corners of Guatemala.

Indigenous people refused to subsume their identities under a broad national identity that held

little meaning for them as Indians. Finally, despite the harsh conditions of debt servitude and the

hardships that seasonal migration created, some Indians managed to challenge gender norms

through their participation in the coffee economy. Indian women who received reasonable

wages, such as in the case of plantation cooks or laundresses, changed social relationships in

their communities just as much as the coffee economy altered patterns of Indian life.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Although my preliminary analysis of the Central American Exposition has aimed to

explore the representations of Indians in order to transform discourses about the nature of Indian

people and their role within the coffee economy, a substantial amount of work remains to be

completed. As this project progresses towards a dissertation, I intend to continue to investigate

the multivocal nature of the exposition and its role within the larger constellation of world’s fairs

and geopolitical relationships at the end of the nineteenth century. A substantial body of work

exists that examines the meaning and significance of world’s fairs in the United States and

Europe, but historians still know very little about expositions held in former colonial nations in

the process of economic development.

The narrative I presented here remains incomplete due to the lack of any sort of scholarly

work that provides a coherent overview of the exposition as a whole. Primary sources related to

the exposition can be found in a variety of libraries and archives in the United States, Guatemala,

and Germany, making the creation of a complete narrative difficult. In particular, the identities

of the fair organizers and the funding of the exposition demands further investigation. As Robert

Rydell and other fair historians have demonstrated, political leaders and elite business interests
 76

organized, funded, and managed international expositions for the purpose of visually

broadcasting their particular worldview and values to subordinate classes. I have been able to

locate information regarding the actions of the exposition’s central planning committee, but the

identities of individual committee members and their personal and professional interests in

promoting the fair remains a mystery.110 Additionally, it appears that the fair received a

substantial amount of funding in the form of foreign loans that could not possibly have been

repaid due to excessive spending on public works projects and the disappointingly low numbers

of fairgoers; I have not yet found any information about the sources of these funds. Finding

documentation about the sources of the exposition’s funding constitutes a critical area for future

investigation.

The physical construction of these elite ideals found expression in international

expositions, but also required a reconfiguration of urban spaces in order to reinforce the power of

urban elites. In other words, the city itself became another way for the state to assert visually its

authority and importance. In preparation for the Central American Exposition, President Barrios

embarked on a campaign to beautify the city through the construction of numerous monuments,

boulevards, and other public works. These recreations of the city’s public spaces could be

further examined to link the shift to exhibition as the dominant means to express cultural,

political, and social power through modifications to the urban landscape. The dramatic changes

to urban spaces reflected the racial and class distinctions emphasized by the exposition and left a

permanent reminder of the power of the state and urban elites to manipulate visual mediums to

broadcast their worldviews. Finally, additional emphasis on the physical changes to the capital

110
Boletín de la Exposición Centro Americana and the documents of Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores,
Signatura B 78-2, Legajo 7331 (AGCA) both contain information about the actions of the central committee and the
motions it approved. They do not contain any information about the identities of the committee members.
 77

city would help to tie the local history of Guatemala City to larger cultural and economic forces

that shaped the nineteenth century as well as provide a counterpoint to the largely rural nature of

the coffee economy.111

I have tried here to emphasize the importance of the emerging coffee economy and the

ways in which the needs of the coffee economy influenced the planning and execution of the

Central American Exposition. In the future, the exposition needs to be compared to other fairs

that took place at this time in order to better understand what made the Central American

Exposition so distinctive as well as the characteristics it held in common with other expositions.

I intend to show that while most fairs of the Victorian era attempted to create or reinforce a broad

national identity through the display of important national symbols, the Central American

Exposition failed to articulate an inclusive national vision, since organizers placed more

emphasis on constructing divisive class and racial categories that effectively prevented the

creation of a truly national identity that encompassed all citizens. In the process of tying its

future to the coffee export economy, the state deepened the distinctions between Indians and

Ladinos, creating a binary dichotomy of Indian and non-Indian racial identities that could not

coexist as an inclusive, singular national identity.

The regional nature of the fair also demands an examination of the geopolitical

relationships that existed between the Central American nations at this time. Guatemala

positioned itself as the natural leader of the region and despite the regional character of the

exposition, Guatemala intended to use the venue as an opportunity to promote itself as the

world’s premiere coffee republic. Nevertheless, Costa Rica received glowing accolades from

Karl Sapper, owing to the intellectual interest of its displays and had received similar praise after

its participation at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Guatemala, long considered by
111
I thank Dr. Kevin Gosner for this suggestion.
 78

other nation-states a cultural and economic backwater, seized on the idea of an exposition in

order to promote itself as the region’s intellectual, cultural, and economic powerhouse, despite

the assumed regional nature of the exposition. These interregional rivalries, and their

implications for the exposition, merit further attention; the exposition could also be read as an

attempt to reorient regional hierarchies that had become even more pronounced in the wake of

the changes created by the economic shift to coffee production. Inventories of objects displayed

at the exposition sent by the Central American republics as well as the list of prizes awarded to

each nation could be examined to further emphasize the regional struggles for power and

influence that undoubtedly existed.112 Additionally, regional and local histories within

Guatemala itself need to be investigated in order to more fully explain the different experiences

of Indian people as they adapted to the new economic conditions. Local municipal archives need

to be investigated in order to determine not only the types of objects sent to the exposition, but

also the process involved in their collection.

In this study, I use theories about museums and exhibitionary culture to provide a

theoretical framework for understanding the role of the Central American Exposition. Many of

112
Available sources include Carlos Arellano Torres and Exposición Centro Americana, Catálogo de los
objetos que la municipalidad de Guatemala exhibe en la Exposición Centro-Americana é Internacional.
(Guatemala: Tip. Sánchez y de Guise, 1897); Costa Rica, Primera exposición Centroamericana de Guatemala.
Documentos relativos a la participación de Costa Rica en dicho certamen. No. 1-7. (San José Costa Rica, 1896);
David Guzmán, Catálogo general de los objetos que el Estado de Nicaragua envia a la Exposición
Centroamericana (Managua: Tipogr. Nacional, 1897); El Salvador, Clasificación general de los objetos con que el
estado de El Salvador concurrió á la Exposición Centro-Americana. (Guatemala: Tip. Sánchez y de Guise, 1897);
Exposición Centro-Americana e Internacional, Catálogo ilustrado; lista oficial de recompensas de la Exposición
Centro-Americana e Internacional, 1897 y datos geográficos, estadísticos y administrativos de la República de
Guatemala .(Guatemala: Tip. Nacional, 1899). I have not yet located any inventories from Honduras.
 79

the works on the politics of museum display focus on museums in the United States and Europe,

but Guatemala’s own particular cultural history of visual display reflected the region’s specific

historical experiences and cultural realities. The creation of natural history collections and their

subsequent display in increasingly public venues helped shape ideas about Indians, social

hierarchies, and structured ideas about the natural world. Additionally, collections of

ethnographic materials aided anthropologists in their comparative studies of Indian people and

the display of these items at expositions as well as museums influenced debates about

evolutionary processes and the place of Indians within this framework.113 Further examination

of the development of Guatemalan museums would help to explain the ways in which museums

and public visual displays acted as instruments of social control as well as symbols of authority.

The investigation of Guatemalan museology and the changes in meaning of visual displays

throughout the nineteenth century would also highlight the changing discourses about the nature

of Indians and their relationship to the state. The moment in which Indian ethnographic and

archaeological material culture became collectible items in collections of natural history objects

signaled an important shift the ways that political and cultural elites conceptualized of Indians.114

At this time, no study exists that explicitly examines the relationship between world’s

fairs and the creation of national museums. Many of the objects displayed at the exposition later
113
Nelia Dias, “The Visibility of Difference: Nineteenth Century French Anthropological Collections,” in
The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), 36-52. This chapter
focuses on the creation of anthropological collections and the way that these collections helped create conceptions of
biological and racial differences.

114
Available sources include Luis Luján Muñoz, El primer Museo Nacional de Guatemala (1866-81)
(Guatemala: Museo Popol-Vuh, Universidad Francisco Marroquín, 1979); Museo nacional de Guatemala. Sección
Etnográfica. Biblioteca, Juan Gavarrete, and Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, Catálogo de las obras
impresas y manuscritas de que actualmente se compone la Biblioteca de la Sección Etnográfica del Museo
Nacional (Guatemala, 1875); Catálogo razonado de los objetos con que se inauguró el departamento etnográfico
del Museo Nacional (Guatemala: Impr. de la Paz, 1866).
 80

found their way into Guatemala’s new national museum, which boasted an entire section

reserved for ethnographic items.115 The national museum served both as a marker of cultural

modernity as well as a visual reminder of the power of display to create and promote particular

ideas about Indians and the power of the state. Indeed, the discourses about Indians that the

exposition encouraged and promoted became reproduced and institutionalized within the national

museum. Furthermore, the physical space of the museum encouraged visitors to practice new

cultural rituals, such as the cultivation of sense of reverence and respect for the exhibits, and to

better understand the relationship between Indian tribes and the state. The exhibits themselves

acted as a visual substitute for the power of the state and the official collection of Indian material

culture left no doubt as to the government’s power over its Indian populations.

Karl Sapper, through his ethnographic work as well as his narrative of his day at the fair,

plays an important role in this study. Although he made no mention of it in his description of the

exposition, he won one of the two $5000 (pesos) grand prizes for his “scientific work” and maps.

The prize committee awarded the other grand prize to Claudio Urrutia for the invention of a

topographic instrument.116 It seems significant that both of the grand prize winners received

compensation for their contributions to mapping. As Raymond B. Craig conclusively proved in

Cartographic Mexico, the relationship between national identity and a map of the physical space

115
Guatemala, Museo nacional, Catálogo, Guatemala, 31 de diciembre de 1902. ([Guatemala: Impreso en
la Tip. Nacional, 1903). Many of the objects listed in the catalog of ítems sent to the exposition later appeared in the
catalog of the national museum. Additional information about the transfer of objects from the exposition to the
national museum can be found in the documents of the Ministerio de Fomento, AGCA, Sig B-130, Legajo 16042.
Reports from the Ministerio de Fomento discuss the fate of objects left at the exposition as well as the creation of the
national museum, complete with a floor plan the clearly delineates a large area for ethnographic items.

116
AGCA, Ministerio de Fomento, B-130, Legajo 16046. This document lists a number of the
prizewinners.
 81

of a nation cannot be ignored.117 As visual representations of a national identity, maps serve to

emphasize not only the physical space of a nation, but also minimize the heterogeneous nature of

the populations within the political borders. Additionally, the emphasis on mapping may also

bear some relationships to the increasing state appropriation of Indian land through the

deployment of official surveyors and mapping.

Karl Sapper’s archaeological work, as well as the work of other German anthropologists,

and geographers in Guatemala during the late nineteenth century raises questions about the role

of anthropology and the symbolic processes of imperialism as described by Robert Aguierre in

his book Informal Empire.118 Aguirre argues that despite the fact that Great Britain never

officially had any colonial presence in Mexico or Central America, the appropriation and display

of cultural artifacts on British soil constituted a type of imperialism that allowed Britain to reap

the benefits of maintaining an informal colonial presence without the trouble of actually

establishing a colony. Similarly, many of the artifacts unearthed by Karl Sapper and his

contemporaries found their way into museums in Berlin. The work of these early

anthropologists received official sanction from the government of Reina Barrios, who likely

promoted anthropological work as a means to draw European interest to the area. Nevertheless,

the relocation of these remains removed them from their historical and cultural context

fundamentally changed both their purpose and their meaning. For example, Indians used their

ethnographic objects for everyday use, but these items assumed dramatically different meaning
117
Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico : a History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

118
Robert Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Additional parallels may be drawn with the work of Uta Raina, “Intellectual
Imperialism in the Andes: German Anthropologists and Archaeologists in Peru, 1870-1930,” Ph.D. diss., (Temple
University, 2007), in which she argues that the intellectual appropriation of Peruvian artifacts by Germans not only
served to reinforce ideas about the nature of indigenous Peruvians, but also aided in the creation of a particular
national German identity.
 82

when displayed within the exposition and the later national museum.119

It remains difficult to recreate the visitor experience at the exposition. Karl Sapper’s

narrative provides a glimpse into the exposition, but the anthropological lens through which he

viewed the displays colored his impressions. If they exist, contemporary newspaper accounts

that contain firsthand accounts of the exposition and that record the experiences of visitors would

aid in understanding how visitors responded to the displays and their messages about Indian

people. These, however, have yet to be located. It remains even more difficult to provide an

accurate description of Indian life during this time period, although I have tried to outline some

of the ways in which the shift to a coffee based economy affected Indians and the ways in which

Indian people responded to increasing state intervention in their lives and communities. The

“top down” nature of fair records and other state sources leave this project vulnerable to a heavy

emphasis on the fair organizers rather than on the actions of indigenous people in response to the

state. Archival research into land appropriations, Indian petitions against the mandamiento, and

legal complaints lodged by Indians may expand the basic details that I have sketched here.

Overall, this project allows for a more thorough understanding of how elite interests

sought to use exhibitions and other public venues as a primary means to reconstruct visually

social hierarchies that served changing economic conditions. The Central American Exhibition

reflected Guatemala’s particular historical realities during the late nineteenth century and

illustrates the ways in which visual culture altered conceptions about the nature of Indian people

in order to provide the coffee industry a readily available workforce and project an image of

modernity. Although this project focuses on the fair itself, it allows for the inclusion of Indian

actions and responses that challenge historical stereotypes of Indians. Finally, this thesis offers a
119
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96, no. 4 (December 2005): 559-571. This
article traces the ways in which objects change in meaning when they become part of museum collections as well as
focuses on the relationships between objects and objects, people and objects, as well as between people and people
in the trajectory of an item from manufacture to museum item.
 83

basis for a more thorough examination of the multiple discourses contained within the Central

American Exposition and its role within the larger cultural and historical context of and provides

a deeper understanding of the role of international expositions and their ability to transform

cultural attitudes and public opinion.

Appendix:
 84

At this time, I have not found a map of the fairgrounds themselves. Nevertheless,

through much trial and error (and with a considerable amount of help) I have produced a rough

map of the fairgrounds that helps to visually illustrate the fair organizers’ ideas about the

hierarchical arrangement of space. I base most of my assumptions about the layout and

dimensions on the description of the buildings given in the fair’s official guide for visitors,

information about the 1889 Paris fair, and Karl Sapper’s written description.

The dimensions of the fairgrounds in the official guide are given in varas and manzanas,

both of which are old Spanish measurements that continue to be used in Guatemala today. The

fairgrounds are given as “12 manzanas y 8082 varas cuadradas”. I read this as the 12 manzanas

plus these 8082 varas.120 (A manzana is the equivalent of 1.73 acres. An acre is 4,094 square

meters. Finally, a vara equals 0.70 meters.) Converting this to meters, the total area of the

fairgrounds comes to around 90,000 meters, or 300m x 300m2, or a little over 12 square acres.

The park-like grounds surrounding the main fairgrounds covered an area of over eight hundred

acres.121 Here I have only represented the main grounds that contained buildings.

The official guide provides a list of buildings and their dimensions:

A. A circular gallery 500 meters across and 155 meters “de desarrollo,” supported by arches

of “Poloncean” type.

B. A central gallery 85 meters long and 25 meters wide, forming and single nave in Dion

style of the type seen at the Gallery of Machinery at the 1889 Paris exhibition.

120
Guia de la exposicion Centro-Americana y de la ciudad de Guatemala. Con instrucciones al viajero, é
importantes datos estadísticos, políticos, geográficos, commerciales é industriales ... (Guatemala: Tipografía
Nacional, 1897), 26
121
“Central American Exposition,” The Washington Post, March 16, 1897
 85

C. A grand rectangular gallery, 95 meters by 45 meters, composed of a central space of 75

meters by 25 meters, around which runs a gallery of ten meters wide. There will be a

tower in each of the four corners. The frame of the central nave will be with arches and

that of the gallery style will be of the “Poloncean” type. (Presumably, “Poloncean” refers

to a construction type.) This gallery will have a second floor supported by intertwined

pillars. At the rear part of the building, there will be an elevated corridor, supported by

iron columns.

The guide states that these three buildings made up the principal body of the exposition, housing

the most important displays.

D. Two galleries, of 35 meters long by 22.5 meters wide in the Dion style. These are

destined for the service of Administration, police, and for parties and banquets.

E. A gallery 30 meters by 25 wide, also with the frame of the “Dion type,” destined for the

installation of motor power for moving machines.

F. Two galleries of 30 meters by 25 meters of the “Dion type” frame for the foreign section.

G. A building of two floors with a crown (“coronamiento”) of 23 meters long and 13 meters

wide, destined for the Palace of Electricity.

H. Two buildings destined for restaurants of oblong form, each one 31 meters wide and 10

meters long

I. Two buildings, destined for the exhibition of “Floriculture” (“Floricultura”:

greenhouses); one of 28 meters long and 9 meters wide and one of 12 meters long and 9

meters wide
 86

J. Two symmetrical buildings, each 17 meters long by 8 meters wide, destined for the

services of the press, mail, telegraph, telephone, etc.

K. Two buildings of 10 meters by 5 meters (no purpose specified)

L. The following kiosks and constructions, destined for particular agricultural expositions,

music, amusements, etc.

a. Two kiosks of 8 meters by 5 meters

b. Four kiosks of 28 meters by 4 meters

c. One kiosk of 24 meters by 4

d. One kiosk of 11 meters by 12 meters

e. One kiosk of 16 meters by 11

(These structures were most likely scattered throughout the exposition to provide easy

access to band performances, souvenir sales, etc.)

M. The constructions of the ticket booths, “water-closets” etc. as indicated in the plans. (No

dimensions given. These were probably small structures, likewise scattered throughout

the fair.)

I have attempted to spatially arrange buildings in a way that takes into consideration both

the dimensions given in the official guide and Karl Sapper’s written description. I believe that

the alphabetical list of buildings given above corresponds to their perceived importance in their

spatial arrangement of the fair and that the fair designers created this list to move visitors from

the most important displays near the entrance to the less significant exhibits in the back.
 87

Additionally, I think that Karl Sapper wrote his description in the order that he moved through

the fair.

Building A is listed as 500 meters in diameter, but based on the square area of the

fairgrounds, a building that size could not possibly fit into the fair grounds. Additionally, from a

practical standpoint, a building 500 meters in diameter would have a rough diameter of five

football fields, which would be quite the engineering feat in 1897. I am not entirely certain what

“de desarrollo” means in reference to this building, but I’ve chosen to represent here as a semi-

circular structure with an outer diameter of 155 meters. The entrance building at the 1889 Paris

Universal Exposition (which this fair took much of its inspiration from) took the shape of a semi-

circle as well. I believe that the main exhibits of the five Central American nations were located

here.

Building B was ostensibly constructed in the style of the Palace of Machinery of the 1889

Paris fair. In the map of that exposition, the Palace of Machinery occupied a huge space,

indicating the importance of machinery to the fair’s overall theme. The fair guide indicates that

this building was constructed in the style of the Palace of Machinery, but I have no confirmation

that it actually was the machinery building. Nevertheless, it seems likely, given that Building E

contained the motors to power electrical equipment and a large number of machines. (The

display of electricity itself merited its own palace, listed as G.)

I believe that Building C housed the fine arts section and that this is where Karl Sapper

mentions encountering a particularly uninspiring art display. Photographs of the Fine Arts

building of the 1889 Paris fair show a two story building with towers, much as described here. I

imagine that the art displays from all nations would have been on display here, as well as

photographs, sculptures, and musical instruments. I am still undecided as to where the

 88

zoological exhibit might have been. Sapper describes it before the art exhibit, meaning that it

could have been in Building B, but his descriptions of the “artistic value” of the display make me

wonder if it was, in fact, part of the fine arts display.

I am particularly intrigued by the two symmetrical buildings listed as K and I believe that

the archeological and ethnographical exhibits would have been located in these buildings. The

fact that the guide lists no purpose for these structures remains curious, especially given that all

of the other structures have a specific purpose listed (or a purpose that can be assumed). It seems

likely that labeling them as the archaeology and ethnography buildings would have drawn far too

much attention to the presence of Indians and they were left unlabeled to minimize the presence

of the Indian present or past. The inclusion of the buildings so far down the list indicates that

they would have been located quite far from the main entrance to the fair, near the rear of the

fairgrounds. This assumption is consistent with the fact that Karl Sapper’s description of the

archaeology and ethnography displays appear as the last exhibit that he visited. Finally, the

relative size of the structures in relation to the rest of the “important” buildings immediately

visually confirms the insignificance of these displays in relations to the fair’s themes of

modernity and progress and its objective of symbolically minimizing the presence of Indians.

In conclusion, the careful layout of the fairgrounds would have reflected the underlying

assumptions of fair organizers and would have served to guide visitors through the fair in a very

specific way to emphasize messages of progress, industrialization, and modernity. Both Karl

Sapper’s written description of the fair and the list of buildings in the official fair guide create a

narrative and spatial hierarchy that place the structures from the most to least important and from

the entrance to the rear of the fairgrounds. Hopefully, my future archival research will confirm

the assumptions about spatial placement that I’ve proposed here.

89