Cultural Persistence in an Environment of Suppression

Introduction
There are many ways in which cultures intersect. In this essay I address an example from cases
where intrusive cultures attempt to maintain dominance through propagation of their own cultural
attributes and suppression of indigenous cultural attributes. There are numerous examples of this
behavior. It is typical of European colonial movements throughout the Western Hemisphere,
Africa, and Asia. However, it is not the unique province of Europe. There are numerous examples
of this practice among indigenous peoples of those same regions.
The examples that I offer here demonstrate the persistence of religious expression of a suppressed
group through infiltration of the expression of the dominant group.
Among the most important attributes of cultural identity are language and the expression of a set
of cultural values that is typically referenced in English as religion. Religious ideas are expressed
in language and ceremony, that is, drama. But the drama is typically narrated so language is at the
core. Both religious manifestations and language propagate, persist, and change in similar complex
patterns.
Language, Dialect, and Idiolect
When people move into a new area with unfamiliar plants and animals they often adopt local
names. Thus, when the Spanish invaded and settled in Mexico they encountered the Nahuatl
ahuácatl, chili, and xocolatl. These became the Spanish aguacate, chile, and chocolate. Molli is
the Nahuatl word for ‘sauce,’ so guacamole simply means ‘avocado sauce.’ When the Spanish
arrived in Peru they encountered some of the same plants but the local language was Quechua. So,
what was an aguacate in Mexico was a palta in Peru; and a chile was an aji. In Belize there are a
number of trees with the same name as trees found in England which are not genetically related.
Lexical borrowing can create orthographic problems. Speakers of Arabic dominated portions of
the southern Iberian Peninsula for over seven hundred years. Numerous features in what is now
Spain acquired Arabic names. Guadalajara is from the Arabic wādī el-ḥijāra, ‘rocky valley.’
However, there is no ‘w’ in native Spanish words so in the Latin alphabet the w was represented
with either gua-, hua-, or oa-, as in guacamole, Huasteca, and Oaxaca. And at the time of the
Spanish invasion of Mexico the letter x was pronounced as ‘sh’ and still is for words in native
languages. But in Spanish is often pronounced as the Spanish ‘j,’ that is, the English ‘h.’
Since ideas, beliefs and value systems are expressed in language, it is not surprising that religious
ideas manifest many of the same features associated with language propagation and change.
Categories of Identity in Religion and Language
My Professor of Comparative Religion at Princeton Theological Seminary, Edward Jurji1, said that
the study of a religion was like peeling an onion. On the outermost layer one found the most
publicly available information, ceremonies and statements available to everyone. On the next layer
in one found the published doctrines of the group. At each layer adherents of the religion testified

1
Jurji was a Syrian Protestant Christian. St. George is particularly important in Syria as the story has it that he was a
Roman soldier born in Syria. ‘Jurji’ was the local form of the name George, Georgius in Latin..
that there was something deeper further inside. But when one had peeled back all of the layers of
the onion, one found that there was no core, only a mystery. At that point Professor Jurji said that
the only way to access the innermost layer of a religious expression was to become an adherent;
and at that moment one no longer had any interest in explaining it.
Textbooks on comparative religion typically focus, as do most social scientists, on establishing
categories. Those categories usually include presumably well-known religious expressions such
as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Those books then tend to describe
common characteristics within each group. However, the reality is far more complex. A Hindu
philosopher writing in the introduction to his book on Hinduism addresses this issue. He begins
with an attempt to define Hinduism with a series of questions. He says, “Do Hindus believe in
many gods?” The answer, he says, is “Some do, some don’t.” So, “Do Hindus believe in only one
god?” The answer, he says, is “Some do, some don’t.” So, “Do Hindus believe that there is no
god?” The answer, he says, is “Some do, some don’t.” So, he chooses to ask people if they are
Hindu. If they say, “Yes,” he interviews them about their beliefs.
All religious groups that I know anything about have a wide spectrum of expressions of belief and
practice. Furthermore, they all show signs of borrowing from other groups so that each is a
polythetic set with vague and overlapping boundaries; although, often for political purposes, those
boundaries are asserted to be rigid and obvious, often with violent consequences. As with
languages, the relationships within a category and between categories are complex. With
languages, there may be a language spoken at a larger level of organization that is a lingua franca,
a shared language of exchange but at the local level the common language may be a different
language or a dialect of a common language that is barely understood by someone from a different
area. This is certainly true of the range of Romance languages and of Arabic.
Similarly, with religion, a category can be established that acknowledges a common core but also
includes a great variety within it. As languages, religions can have common origin and diverge.
They can borrow notions from other religions and incorporate them. They can define themselves
precisely, as do Spanish and French whose academies define meaning and usage. Or they can have
no regulatory body, as English, where dictionaries that once claimed prescriptive authority now
regard themselves as descriptive. Language change over time and translation can also modify the
image suggested by text
Some religious expressions have a very specific set of attributes and well-defined authorities to
interpret those attributes. Such expressions tend to have well-defined hierarchical institutions.
Other religious expressions have relatively vague attributes and often vest the authority of
interpretation in the individual adherent.
The Persistence of Maya Religious Expression
About fifty straight line miles northwest of Guatemala City is the site of Q’umar’kaj, the last
capital of the K'iche' Maya. The site is also known by the Nahuatl translation of its name, Utatlán,
‘place of old reeds.’ The word ‘reeds’ appears in a number of city names and it is thought that it
may be metaphorical and refer to a populous settlement. The city was of sufficient importance that
Hernán Cortéz was aware of it from Mexico and dispatched his second-in-command, Pedro de
Alvarado in 1524. Q’umar’kaj was governed by four lords, one of whom, Tecun Uman, met de
Alvarodo’s army in the Quetzaltenango Valley and was defeated. De Alvarado took the remaining
lords by subterfuge, burnt them, and torched the city. He then used stones from the destroyed city

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to build Santa Cruz del Quiché2 less than two miles away and resettled the population of
Q’umar’kaj there.
It was there that a group of K'iche' court officials, among whose responsibilities was storytelling,
wrote the Popol Vuh, ‘The Book of the Community.’ According to the text this document was
used to guide the council of the lords of K'iche'. Because of material at the end of the text Dennis
Tedlock concludes that the document was written between 1554 and 1558 CE. The first part of the
document is devoted to a description of creation and the exploits of the hero twins who bring order
to the world. The latter part of the document is a catalog of the lords of the K'iche' tracing them
back to their divine origin.3
There are numerous examples of illustrations of
scenes from the Popol Vuh painted on Classic
Period (250 – 900 CE) pottery. The Kerr database
at FAMSI has fifty of them. This is Kerr 8817. It is
a depiction of God N and Hun Ahaw and may be
another version of the defeat of the Lords of the
Underworld by the Hero Twins.
These illustrations, some, as above, with captions
in Maya glyphs made it clear that the components of the Popol Vuh were not simply Postclassic
K'iche' but were a pervasive part of Maya ideology during the Classic.
El Mirador is a very large site in the northern Peten of Guatemala. It flourished from about 600
BCE to 100 CE. At that time it and many other sites in the Mirador basin were abandoned. It is
suggested that massive deforestation for the production of stucco may have been the primary cause.
It was reoccupied on a much smaller scale around 700 CE and finally abandoned around 900 CE

2
Qiché is the traditional Spanish spelling. K'iche' is the K'iche' spelling.
3
Between 1701 and 1703, a friar named Francisco Ximénez happened to get a look at this manuscript while he was
serving as the parish priest. He made the only surviving copy of the Quiche text of the Popol Vuh and added a Spanish
translation. His work remained in the possession of the Dominican order until after Guatemalan independence in 1821.
When liberal reforms forced the closing of all monasteries in 1830, it was acquired by the library of the University of
San Carlos in Guatemala City. Carl Scherzer, an Austrian physician, happened to see it there in 1854, and Charles
Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a French priest, had the same good fortune a few months later. In 1857 Scherzer
published Ximenez' Spanish translation under the patronage of the Hapsburgs in Vienna, members of the same royal
lineage that had ruled Spain at the time of the conquest of the K'iche' kingdom, and in 1861 Brasseur published the
Quiche text and a French translation in Paris. The manuscript itself, which Brasseur removed from Guatemala,
eventually found its way back across the Atlantic from Paris, coming to rest in the Newberry Library in 1911. The
town graced by this library, with its magnificent collection of Native American texts, is not in Mesoamerica, but it
does have and Indian name: Chicago, meaning “Place of Wild Onions.” Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh, pp. 28ff.

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In 2009 a twenty-six-foot stucco frieze was discovered
at el Mirador that depicted the hero twins swimming in
the underworld, a part of their struggle with the lords of
the underworld as described in the Popol Vuh. The frieze
dates from around 300 BCE. This suggests that the
central theme of the Popol Vuh was almost two
millennia old when it was written in Santa Cruz del
Quiché.

We included a stop at Chichicastenango for Sonoma State University’s Mesoamerican

Archaeology Field School because it is city with a population of about seventy thousand almost
all of whom are K'iche'. It has been a market town since before the arrival of the Spanish. Market
was held on Thursdays and Sundays in the main square. It was an interesting experience for the
students. Few of the merchants in Chichicastenango are conversant in English. Almost all of them
have K'iche' as their first language and Spanish as a second language, seldom needed. Some of our
students were minimally conversant in Spanish. It is enlightening to conduct a business transaction
in a language that is second to both parties. The market was a controlling factor in the field school
schedule since it is only open on Thursdays and Sundays.
When Pedro de Alvarado invaded from Mexico he brought with him as allies Nahua soldiers.
These soldiers sometimes translated Maya place names to Nahuatl and sometimes they adopted
new Nahuatl descriptive names. The word tenango in Nahuatl means ‘wall’ and when applied to
a town means a fortified town. Chichicastenango is the town of the chichicaste, a stinging nettle.
The earlier Maya name for the city was Chiavar and it was occupied by Kaqchiquel Maya. The
K'iche' and the Kaqchiquel languages were very similar and the people were allies. In the 1470s
there was an attempted coup in the principal K'iche' lineage at Q’umar’kaj. The Kaqchiquel allied
with the losing side and were required to leave Chiavar. They then founded the town of Iximche
as their capital. Iximche is only eighteen straight line miles from Chiavar but the current highway
between the two is thirty-eight miles long and the estimated driving time suggests an average speed
of thirty miles per hour. Chichicastenango is at an elevation of about 6,500 feet and all of the
terrain is rugged.
Since that time Chichicastenango has been a K'iche' town. When de Alvarado conquered
Q’umar’kaj in 1524, many of its residents fled to Chaviar, which was renamed Chugüilá, 'Above
the Nettles' and Tziguan Tinamit, 'Surrounded by Canyons'. These names are still used by the
K'iche'. De Alvarado was reported by his contemporaries among the conquistadors as being
unnecessarily cruel.
The encomienda was a system that originated in the wars against the Muslim territories in Spain.
Conquerors were rewarded by the crown assigning them the rights to the labor of conquered non-
Christian peoples. However, in Spain after February of 1492 it was illegal not to be Christian. The
system was used on a much larger scale in the Americas. The encomiendero was rewarded with
the rights to the labor of a certain number of individuals from a community. The leadership of the
community was left to choose the individuals. Failure to perform the required labor resulted in
beatings and death. Isabella I of Castile declared that the natives were not slaves but were free
vassals of the crown.

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Much of the highlands of Guatemala had proven very difficult to subdue and was regarded as a
war zone resulting in no Spanish settlement. Bartolomé de las Casas (c.1484 – 18 July 1566) came
first to Hispaniola as a settler. Over time he became appalled at the treatment of the native
population by the Spanish settlers. Eventually he divested himself of his slaves and entered the
Dominican order. He was controversial within the church and the court advocating that the natives
be treated as human beings and converted to Christianity only through teaching Christianity and
Spanish. He rose through the ranks in the church and finally became the first Bishop of Chiapas.
He convinced the crown to issue new laws that undid the encomienda system. There was such a
reaction that many governors in the Americas refused to enforce the new laws and the laws were
finally withdrawn. De las Casas did convince the governor in Guatemala to assign a large part of
the highlands to the Dominican order to convert through teaching. Thus, the war zone acquired the
name that is still used today, Verapaz, ‘true peace.’ Communities in Verapaz were assigned to
Dominican priests who reported to their Dominican superiors and thus were not subject to the
crown government. This, plus the fact that most of the highlands include no land that any Spanish
settler would be interested in, helped protect the local traditions. In Chichicastenango, in the 2012
census, 98.5% of the municipality's population of over 70,000 is indigenous K'iche'.
The town has two parallel governmental structures. The Catholic Church and the Republic of
Guatemala appoint priests and local government officials. And the local people elect a separate
government and maintain a separate court system applicable to local indigenous people.
The religious life of the town is patterned by fourteen cofradias, religious brotherhoods of four
men each with a female auxiliary. The leader of each cofradia is the alcalde, a position of great
honor and expense since the alcalde is responsible for paying for the feasts of the cofradia during
his tenure. The cofradias have distinctive costumes and symbols of office. Each cofradia has a
patron Christian saint but the festivals marking the saint’s day have characters in costume
reenacting roles from Maya stories and the indigenous and Spanish conflict.
The market is held in the main plaza of the town and on the southeast side of the plaza is the Iglesia
de Santo Tomás, built on the platform of a Maya temple the steps of which still remain. There are
eighteen steps from the plaza to the front door of the church, one for each month of the Maya
calendar.
Each morning, just before dawn, a fire is lit in the fireplace in the
center of the steps at the lowest level and Chuchkajaues (chew-
ka-hows), ‘mother-fathers,’ light piles of candles on the steps just
before the door of the church. Copal incense is ignited in censors
prepared from tin cans and the sun is greeted upon his arising as
he has been at Maya temples for centuries and centuries. Only
high-ranking officials enter the church through the front door. All
others use a side entrance.
Less than a kilometer to the southwest of the Iglesia de Santo
Tomás on the top of a low hill is the shrine of Pascual Abaj. All
information about this shrine is part of the oral history of the town.
Pascual Abaj is a stone image, a few feet tall, depicting a human
head and torso with the hands crossed over the chest. The carving
has earspools. Local tradition states that the image was removed from a location in the city, perhaps
the temple at the current site of the church, at the time of the Spanish occupation of the city. Abaj

5
means ‘stone’ in a number of contemporary Mayan languages. Pascual is a reference to Easter in
Spanish but it is also both a family and a given name. Local tradition suggests that it comes from
the name of a Spanish speaker who discovered the image. There is also a folk saint named San
Pascualito venerated in Chiapas and Guatemala associated with the Catholic saint Paschal Baylón.
One morning, having observed the welcoming of the sun at the Iglesia de Santo Tomás, I noticed
a family buying religious materials, candles and copal incense, from a nearby vendor at the market.
Later that day Sue and I walked up to the shrine of Pascual Abaj and arrived to witness a
Chuchkajaue conducting a ritual blessing of that same family. We stood well away, attempting to
be invisible, and took no photographs.
David Peri, a former Professor of Anthropology at SSU, a Coastal Miwok and the last speaker of
that language, told me once that the contact problem was exacerbated by the fact that the Europeans
saw the conflict as Europeans versus Indians and that the Indians saw the Europeans as just one
more enemy. The Spanish conquistadors in Mexico, Central America, and Peru had their armies
augmented many times over by Native American groups fighting against Native American
enemies. The Tlaxcalans aided Cortez against the Aztecs. In Peru, Pizarro arrived in the midst of
an Inka civil war and allied with one side. Unlike the Aztec and the Inka, the Maya had never
united into a single large political entity. Alliances shifted frequently but there was significant
conflict among the cities. Pedro de Alvarado arrived in Guatemala with a significant number of
Nahua soldiers from Mexico. After conquering the K'iche' capital of Q’umar’kaj he proposed an
alliance with the Kaqchiquel for assisting in the subjugation of other Maya groups. He moved his
headquarters to Iximche that the Nahua called Quauhtemallan, ’forested land.’ The Spanish
adopted that name and called the city Guatemala.
Chichicastenango was the site of some of the most
horrific atrocities perpetrated by the Guatemalan
military during the civil war (1960-96). What had
been the monastery associated with the Iglesia de
Santo Tomás was used for torture and there were
mass executions in the plaza.
The Guatemalan military used the same strategy as
had the conquistadors. They created and armed
Civil Defense Patrols in Maya towns that tortured
and killed other Maya.
We were there during the final phases of the war
when there was little active conflict. There was
none in the vicinity of Chichicastenango and the city had placed the monument to the left in the
courtyard between the church and the monastery.4
The monastery is currently a museum.

4“
These who wear white robes? Who are they and from where do they come?...These are those that came out the great
persecution, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the lamb.” (Revelation 7:13-14)
In memory of those who gave their life for the kingdom of God in el Quiché, 1967 April 1992. 25 years sewing hope,
Chichicastenango , 28 April 1992
6
The accord for a lasting peace was signed on December 29, 1996. We were in Guatemala City the
night before when the rebel commanders came into the city. The field school personnel were in a
private house in a wealthy suburb but we could hear the celebratory noise from the center of the
city. The next day we traveled to Chichicastenango. And the following day that city erupted in
celebration in the plaza, dancing, fireworks, food, and voladores.
The city of Santa Cruz del Quiché and the site of Q’umar’kaj are less than twenty twisty mountain
road miles from Chichicastenango. While many tourists visit Chichicastenango; few visit the
archaeological site. Indeed, there is little of interest for most people to see there. The site is on a
ridge with steep canyons on three sides. The center of the site is a plaza. Much of the stone
architecture of the site had been mined for the construction of Santa Cruz del Quiché so what
remains is mostly the thin soil and grass covered cores of the buildings.
For the Maya much of the other world is underground and caves and bodies of water are the
interface between this and that world. However, where geology did not provide convenient caves,
they were constructed.
This is also true in the Valley of Mexico at Teotihuacán. It has often been said that the Pyramid of
the Sun is constructed over a cave. However, it is not a cave but a tunnel constructed after the
pyramid was built. There is also a tunnel that was dug under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent
complex.
At Q’umar’kaj there are three tunnels that were excavated from the north side of the ridge in the
direction of the main plaza. These tunnels were investigated and described by Cal State LA
archaeologist James Brady in 1988 and 1989. The entrance to Cave 3 was blocked by the 1976
earthquake but was reported by site guards to be a single shaft of the approximate length of Cave
2. The entrance to Cave 2 was partially blocked by collapse. Brady reports the length to be 62
meters with a width approximating1meter and a height varying between 1.5 and 2.5 meters with a
rounded ceiling. Cave 1 is the most complex. Its shaft is 68 meters long and it has six side passages
and two small niches for a total length of 127 meters. The main shaft is about 1 meter wide and
the ceiling height varies between two and four meters. The side passages are clustered near the end
of the main tunnel and the southwestern most contains a 7-meter-deep pit and at its base there is a
tunnel that continues for an additional 9 meters.5

5
Brady, James E., “Caves and Cosmovision at Utatlan.” California Anthropologist XVIII (1): 1-10. 1991
7
 When Sue and I first visited the site, we had one of the site guards
as a guide. There was evidence of a fire at the entrance to the
tunnel. It was very smoky inside and a flashlight provided only
limited visibility. The walls of the tunnel were covered with
greasy soot left from the burning of copal resin. At the far end of
the tunnel there were the remains of many candles that had been
burned there and flowers. The site guard told us that the umbilical
cords of K'iche' females were deposited in the pit and those of
males were hung in trees. I can find no reference that confirms
that.
The field school at el Ujuxte was conducted in Januaries of 1995,
1996, and 1997. Each year we took the students to Q’umar’kaj.
One year we only ventured part way into the tunnel because I
could hear voices and did not want to disturb a ceremony.
There was also evidence in the main plaza of continuing ritual
practice. Here Sue stands beside the recent remains of a fire with
floral offerings at the cardinal points. The colors of the flowers are consistent with the traditional
Maya color associations with the cardinal points, red in the east, white in the north, black in the
west, and yellow in the south.
Persistence
A persistent question of the lay public to Maya archaeologists is, “Whatever happened to the
Maya?” And the answer is, “Many things.” Prior to European contact their society had been
transformed by a centuries-long drought. They suffered a particularly violent European invasion.
The Columbian exchange contributed Smallpox and Malaria and in many places the infection
moved faster than did the Spanish invasion. Having no defense against the virus and plasmodium,
the mortality rate of the indigenous population was high. The northern Pacific coast of Guatemala
and the southern Pacific coast of Mexico was densely populated before the Spanish conquest. It is
a very low lying coastal plain with mangrove swamps, a perfect place for the mosquitos that
transmit Malaria. For a long time Spanish documents refer to it as the despoblado, ‘deserted or
uninhabited place.’
Guatemala is the most class rigid of any of the Latin American areas with which I am familiar and
agricultural interests, largely supported by the United States, divested the Maya of land and
provoked raids into the highlands to capture workers well into the twentieth century. In 1944 the
dictator Jorge Ubico Castañeda was overthrown ending his thirteen-year reign. Technically he was
elected president in a series of elections where he was the only candidate. He had provided
significant concessions to foreign coffee and fruit companies that maintained deplorable labor
conditions. The period from 1944 to 1954 was a period that promised general reform but that ended
in a coup in 1954 led by the CIA overthrowing the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz. The
Guatemalan civil war lasted from 1960 to 1996. Many of the groups that opposed the government
were Maya and the army adopted a policy of genocide.
There are currently over six million Maya in Guatemala, a little over 41% of the population of the
country; there are probably about a hundred thousand in Mexico and smaller numbers in Belize,
Honduras, and El Salvador.

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 Connotation
With connotation symbols can be shared but assigned different meanings. This is frequently found
when a dominant ideology is repressing other expressions. Yoruba brought as slaves to the
Caribbean also brought their religious expression with them. The descendent expression in Cuba
is Santería that is commonly described as polytheistic. More correctly it is a monotheistic religion
the principal deity of which is neither female nor male and can manifest itself with three primary
faces and can interact with adherents through intermediaries called orishás in Cuba. Santería is
also often described as syncretistic with Catholicism. That, however, is a matter of perspective.
Catholics consider Santería to be a separate and fundamentally dissimilar religion. Santería
practitioners view the religious expressions as syncretized; “For me, Catholicism is the same thing.
There is no difference, if you’re capable of believing in God, you are believing in the Catholic
God. You are believing in the Yoruba God. You believe in all because God is one.” Luis Pedroso. 6
Only Catholicism was tolerated in Spanish colonial Cuba and the adherents of what is now Santería
practiced their religion publicly in the guise of Catholicism by providing the images of the saints
in the churches with orishá connotations. The constitution adopted after the Cuban war of
independence in 1898 established freedom of religion but the Catholic establishment regarded it
as witchcraft and associated with criminality. Fidel Castro’s revolution established Cuba as an
atheist state. The government sought a common Cuban cultural identity and did not support the
notion of a separate Afro-Cuban identity, with which Santería was so closely identified. The Cuban
Communist Party removed atheism as a prerequisite for membership in 1991. A year later, the
constitution was amended to define Cuba as a secular rather than an atheist state. And the
government is faced with a dilemma since Afro-Cuban culture is an attractive tourism feature.
When we were in the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity in Trinidad, Cuba, we noticed that in
the side alcoves that housed images of various saints there were extensive floral offerings to some
saints that are relatively minor in the Catholic calendar and none at the images of major figures.
Our guide told us that the offerings were to the orishá connoted by that saint’s image. A great deal
of Santería is practiced in home settings so public structures of ritual are not necessary.
Santa Barbara is identified with Changó, a male orishá upon whom many adherents meditate. Santa
Barbara’s feast day is December 4 and it is a major holiday in Cuba.
Taíno
Closing
There is no conclusion because the process is ongoing; there is only a closing to this episode.

6
Merten, Paxtyn, “Santería and Catholicism: Two religions, coexisting in Peace, Northeastern Journalism in Cuba
2018.
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