Chojnacki 2010 Indigenous Apostles

INDIGENOUS APOSTLES
This is No. 46 of Studies in World Christianity and Interreligious Relations.

The Studies are a continuation of the Church and Theology in Context
series.
The Studies are published by the Foundation for Studies in World

Christianity and Interreligious Relations in collaboration with the Nijmegen
Institute for Mission Studies and the Chair of World Christianity and
Interreligious Relations at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
The aim of the Studies is to publish scholarly works on Christianity and

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between them. The Studies are peer-reviewed.
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Editorial board:
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Francis Clooney, Cambridge, United States of America.
Diego Irarrazaval, Santiago, Chile.
Viggo Mortensen, Aarhus, Denmark.
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Abdulkader Tayob, Cape Town, South Africa.
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Manuscripts for consideration can be sent to Frans Wijsen, Radboud

University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
INDIGENOUS APOSTLES
MAYA CATHOLIC CATECHISTS
WORKING THE WORD
IN HIGHLAND CHIAPAS
RUTH J. CHOJNACKI
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

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In grateful memory of my
Mother and Father
and
with admiration and gratitude
for all who practice
the Word of God in
Santa Maria Magdalenas
6 Introduction
Introduction 7
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Orthographic Note 11
Introduction 13
Chapter 1: Contexts and Conversion

Origins of an Ecclesial Cargo 25
Chapter 2: Constructing Highland Mission

Proposals and Problematics 51
Chapter 3: Position and Place

Church, State, and Mission on the Ground 87
Chapter 4: Proclaiming Religion, Reclaiming Land

History, Cognition and Religious Change 115
Chapter 5: Working the Word

Constructing a Tzotzil Maya Theology 145
Chapter 6: Decolonizing the Saints

From Myth to History 171
Chapter 7: Epilogue
Doing What the Apostles Did 181
Bibliography 191
Index of Names 203

8 Introduction
Introduction 9
Acknowledgements
This book owes its existence to the generosity of the catechists and Catholic
community of Santa Maria Magdalenas. Their engagement of the new age of
globalization with the power of Christian faith showed me the face of the
world church.
Whatever intellectual light this study sheds owes substantially to Jonathan
Z. Smith, distinguished scholar of religion at the University of Chicago.
Other Chicago scholars – theologians Anne E. Carr and Kathryn E. Tanner
and. Mexican historian Claudio Lomnitz – encouraged me by word and
scholarly example. Dartmouth Mayanist John Watanabe generously critiqued
every page I wrote.
The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and the Office for World
Mission of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee opened the door to Chiapas for
me. Bishop Samuel Ruiz García and the pastoral agents of the Diocese of San
Cristóbal de Las Casas extended extraordinary hospitality in the midst of war
and peace negotiations. So many friends supported me in countless ways in
Chiapas. At terrible risk of overlooking any in naming some, I am especially
grateful for insights and companionship to the late Andrés Aubry, Hrna.
Clemen Becerra, George Collier, Dra. Margarita Herrera, Hrna. Luci Jimé-
nez, la familia Ruiz Martinez, Charlene Floyd, Padre Eduardo García, Pati
Gómez, the late Angélica Inda, Christine Kovic, Diane, Jan and Jacob Rus,
Sr. Giulli Zobelein and colleagues in the Centro de Derechos Humanos,
“Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.”
Family, friends, and fellow scholars here at home patiently stood by me
as I wrote. Abena Apea, Mary Finger and Sheri Lee at DePaul University
gave me time and assistance to complete the manuscript. Robert Schreiter
and Frans Wijsen generously enabled its publication.
Cary Tucker could not have dreamed that marriage entailed proofreading
and indexing. I am grateful for his unstinting labor on these pages and for so
much else outside of them
10 Introduction
Introduction 11
Orthographic Note
Spanish language words are italicized in this study except in cases where they
have been accepted as loan words into English and included as such in the
American Heritage Dictionary. In lieu of a glossary, all words and terms
which have specific meaning in Highland Chiapas and/or for its inhabitants
are defined within the text; these definitions are amplified in the footnotes.
Tzotzil Maya words are accompanied by their Spanish and English
equivalents in both text and footnotes. I have generally followed the spelling
for these words given by Robert M. Laughlin, The Great Tzotzil Dictionary
of San Lorenzo Zinacantán. Definitions have been verified with this refer-
ence.
I have adopted the convention of pluralizing the names of Highland Maya
linguistic groups following the English, rather than Spanish, form: thus,
Tzotzils, Tzeltals, rather than Tzotzils, Tzeltales, etc. Indian and Ladino are
capitalized when used as nouns, but not when uses as adjectives. As is
customary in Chiapas, in this study the word “indigenous” is synonomous
with both the noun Indian and adjective indian.
I relied on transcriptions and translation of tape recordings of Tzotzil
homilies into Spanish by native Chamula assistants. The Tzotzil spoken in
Magdalenas varies somewhat from their dialect, but not to a degree of mutual
incomprehension.
In the footnotes, references to field transcripts are denoted FT, to field
notes FN. In both of these cases, dates of actual recording follow.
12 Introduction
Introduction 13
Introduction
This field-driven study tells the story of conversion to Catholicism and birth
of new ecclesial community with the arrival of Vatican II mission in Santa
Maria Magdalenas, a Tzotzil-speaking village in Mexico’s Maya highlands.
In the southeastern frontier state of Chiapas, the nation’s move onto the
global economic stage in the last third of the last century drove young Mag-
daleneros to search for alternatives to peonage. A few eagerly seized upon
invitation from the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas to become cate-
chists. Their ensuing critique of the close articulation of traditional Maya
ritual practice and the highland’s near-feudal political economy proved
definitive in both spheres. Exercising newly-acquired biblical literacy, they
upended the tradition of their fathers – costumbre – and claimed expropriated
ancestral land as their own. In this dialectical religious passage, they founded
a wholly Tzotzil Maya Christian community and constructed a distinctive
peasant theology in communion with the world Catholic Church.
Within the vast collection of Catholic theological and biblical studies
arising from Latin American liberation, inculturation, and ecclesiological
thought and practice, works addressing the Mexican church, the second
largest in the world, are arguably underrepresented. More to the point, Mex-
ico’s highland Maya remain almost theologically unnoticed as they engage in
the most significant transformations of local religious practice since the
Spanish Conquest.
This case study responds to this lacuna. It also invites scholars of religion
and theologians to consider everyday religious practice by countless remote
small-scale communities in regions like highland Chiapas as an indispensable
datum for understanding the current explosion of Christianity in the South.
I first encountered the catechists of Magdalenas during a summer ministry
education field placement with the Human Rights Center, “Fray Bartolomé
de Las Casas,” then housed in the curia of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de
Las Casas. The obvious authority of these young men as they directed open-
air processions into church at the fiesta of Santa Maria Magdalenas immedi-
ately intrigued me, a guest of the parish pastoral team. This was so especially
because I also observed elders holding traditional bastones (staffs) of Maya
authority passively surveying the scene from the opposite side of the plaza,
mere spectators at the annual celebration of the village patroness.
My dissertation proposal in religion and culture outlined a plan to investi-
gate this apparent generational divide. But it also asked; Who were these
young men? How did they come to lead the Catholic community in this
14 Introduction
ancient Tzotzil Maya pueblo? Why did these profoundly impoverished

peasants so readily donate time and energy to liturgical celebrations far from
corn and coffee fields on which their very survival depends?
The Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago
approved a doctoral project addressing these questions under the direction of
a founding scholar in the academic study of religion. The discipline arose, in
part, to obviate theological bias in the study of religion and my project seeks
to comply. But, given its questions, the scholarly adequacy of my investiga-
tion required critical readings by theologians and anthropologists of Meso-
america as well. This study, then, is necessarily interdisciplinary, engaging
theory in the study of religion, anthropology, and other social sciences as
well as aspects of contemporary theology.
Despite historic and continuing missionary contributions to (and partici-
pation in) anthropology, mistrust of Christian mission within the discipline is
the stuff of academic legend. Indeed, I witnessed its unfortunate effects on
relationships between pastoral agents and Mayanists during my time in
Chiapas. Contributing to mutual exchange among these actors became
another goal.
MAP 1: Chiapas encompasses 28,700 square miles on Mexico’s southeastern frontier (the size
of The Netherlands and Belgium combined). The borders of the municipios (townships) of
Larrainzar and Chenalho’, the subregion of this study, touch the western- and eastern-most edges
of the Tzotzil Maya linguistic zone.
Introduction 15
Finally, this account shows indigenous Catholic leaders to be powerful

agents in their own evangelization and in the unfolding of its inevitable
socio-cultural, economic, and political consequences. The transformative
power of their faith on the ground constitutes the core of my argument.
Overview in Context
The 1994 New Year’s Day uprising by the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas unleashed a flood of socio-political analysis in
Mexico and around the world. The remaking of the Diocese of San Cristóbal
de Las Casas in the image of the Maya majority under Bishop Samuel Ruiz
García figures importantly, though not always accurately, in this literature.
Bishop Ruiz would undoubtedly name the nearly 8,000 indigenous
catechists trained during his episcopate (1959-1999) as principal agents in
this reinvention of both local church and Maya society. At the outset of my
field work in 1993, the ecclesial communities they led in the diocese’s
Tzotzil pastoral “zone” (one of seven) embraced nearly 70% of 200,000
inhabitants (Informe Ad Limina 1988-93).
Under the Spanish crown, tutelage facilitated by “reduction” of secularly
dispersed Maya settlements to clerically dominated pueblos shaped mission
in Chiapas as in most of Latin America. Missionaries and colonial adminis-
trators alike considered its natives legally and theologically minores, lacking
reason. Today, new Maya Catholic communities are reconstructing both
religious ritual and economic production as they repossess their ancestral
territories.
World systems, neo-marxist, and post-colonial political-economic and
social theorizing offer leads to interpretation of these processes. But by
themselves they do not account for strategic, not simply default, decision by
substantial communities of highland Maya to confront the inescapable and
inevitably divisive assault of a globalizing political-economy on their world
by yet another course: self-conscious revitalization of collective quests for
autonomy in ancestral places.
The rubrics “closed corporate community” and “regions of refuge”
framed anthropological discussion of the Mexican highlands into the late
1960s. Given current Maya engagement with the global market, new infra-
structure and technology, and, not least, political struggle echoing globally,
small-scale peasant community anthropologists once regarded as virtually
hermetic are ever more porous.
The surprise EZLN revolt made Mexico’s Maya players in the nation’s
ambiguous late-twentieth century democratic opening and raised the profile
of the hemisphere’s native peoples on the international stage (and the World
Wide Web). Tzotzils, Tzeltals and members of Chiapas’ other Maya groups
16 Introduction
today participate in local, national and international socio-political networks,

pan-indigenous movements, and the global flow of migrant labor.
Modern Maya struggle for social-cultural freedom is as old as what
Nancy Farriss calls “the collective enterprise of survival” in the wake of the
Conquest (1528 in the Maya highlands). Following Mexican independence
(1821), Tzotzil Maya maneuvered within colonial confines to maintain
relative autonomy through costumbre, a constellation of religious and social-
cultural practices imbued with Spanish Catholicism but revered as ordered by
the ancestors and enforced by community elders. Costumbre – a type of
invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) – accounts in large part for
the endurance of highland Maya identity into the twenty-first century.
In Chiapas, its ritual ingenuity and cosmological complexity manifest
creative intellectual engagement with modern Maya life under intensely
caste-conscious domination by mixed race elites (called “mestizos” else-
where in Mexico, but “ladinos” in Chiapas). In Tzotzil Maya, cargo service
to the saints is abtel – work – to please the divinized patron(ess) who upholds
their local world but also threatens it with her wrath. Obligatory ritual propi-
tiation according to costumbre decides the difference.
MAP 2: MAGDALENAS /ALDAMA, 2657 hectares of mountainous terrain ranging in altitude from
1500 to 500 meters, lies 37 kms. NW of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Magdaleneros cultivate
limited arable land as milpa (corn, beans, and squash) for subsistence, coffee and some bananas,
for cash. They harvest forests and scrub for firewood.
Introduction 17
But for a cohort of young men in Magdalenas, repeated dislocations owed

to abrupt shifts in Mexican and global political economy beginning in the
1970s particularly affecting its agricultural sector sharpened the contradiction
between semi-proletarian labor outside the community and obligatory ritual
work within it.
Leaders of the Catholic community today trace their conversion to “illu-
mination” of a counter-intuitive yet wholly inner-worldly alternative possibil-
ity (Lawson). They came to see that communal well-being could be secured
by fraternal relationship to saints who, on their reading of the Bible, also
“worked.”
Their decisive move – re-cognizing the “work” of cargo to be literally
burden, as alienating as the bodily labor required to pay for its ritual materials
– involved pedagogical disruption of the habitus (Bourdieu). Post-Vatican II
renewal of Catholic mission in the highlands made young Mexican highland
Maya men the required pedagogues. Textual liberation from the intellectual
and social confinement inhering in orality quickened and intensified native
reflexivity and critical capacity (Goody and Ong). In short, with biblical
literacy Tzotzil peasant catechists acquired what was for them a novel form
of work, authorized by – and in their exegesis of – God’s Word.
In Magdalenas recently converted Catholics use the word “religion” to
distinguish their new ritual practice from costumbre and their rupture with
“the way of the ancestors” (Nash 1985). More precisely, for Magdalenero
Catholics religion means celebrating La Palabra de Dios, “the Word of
God,” signifying for them both Christian scripture and the exegetical com-
munity it calls forth. The “work” of La Palabra de Dios, like every form of
intellectual labor, is owned in its performance, beginning with translation of
Spanish scripture into Tzotzil.
The ritual “work” of cargo addresses the realm of patrons, divine and
human, who extract indigenous labor through hierarchical and relatively
static structures of obligation and domination. La palabra de Dios reverses
this regime: “working the Word” through dialogue among themselves em-
beds scriptural narrative in the world of peasant production. Just so Magda-
leneros identify with the saints and place ritual in service of their own pro-
ductive pursuits.
In other words, the catechists replaced propitiation of the saints with
biblical exegesis as a means of access to power, sacred and secular. They
came to see that ritual service to the saints required peonage and/or proletari-
anization. In the worst case, it meant forfeiture of land to meet its costs. Their
preaching led their peers to the same conclusion. La Palabra de Dios re-
placed costumbre for a majority of Magaleneros in the mid-1980s as a way to
reclaim their land and redirect their labor to it.
18 Introduction
Their wholly religious but expressly inner-worldly project replaces the

trope defining Maya ritual – cargo “work” – in a double sense. For their new
“work” – exegetical articulation of intellectual and agricultural production –
is socio-culturally planted by Maya themselves on their once-expropriated
but now reclaimed ancestral land. From there, empowered by Christian faith,
they strive to assertively engage the world in all its global complexity.
In traditional discourse, Tzotzil Maya is “bats’-i k’op – the true word,”
the language of the community founded by Mary Magdalen at a site thought
fitting to its status as the center of the world. Magdalenero Catholics replaced
this local myth with sacred history narrated by the “Word of God,” the
scripture of a world religion.
Theoretical Engagements
For the Tzotzil Maya, Catholic Christianity is an intrinsically local and
eminently practical affair that liberates human agency in the current age of
globalization as in the historical past. A formulation from an anthropology of
colonialism – “dialectics in a double sense” – offered initial interpretative
entreé to field findings (J. Comaroff 1985). Contemporary highland Maya
Catholicism exemplifies the interplay between structural constraint and
human agency on the one hand and between global systems and local proc-
esses of dominance and subordination on the other.
The argument here points to biblical literacy and its cognitive entailments
as powerful motors of individual agency and social change where oral tradi-
tion and illiteracy prevail. Together they constitute the switchplate of the turn
from costumbre to the social-historical construction of what Magdalenero
converts call “religion.”
Religion continues to escape consensus definition, and some question
whether its definition is a useful project at all (J.Z. Smith 1982, 1998; Miz-
ruchi 2001). This study attempts to show religion as at once second-level
reflection and thoroughly social practice in which the symbolic relates
dialectically to the material, ritual design to everyday life. Bourdieu’s theory
of practice (1977, 1990a, 1990b, 1991) joins the work of the Comaroffs on
colonialism and religion (1982, 1985, 1992, 1997) as touchstones in this
respect.
While the question of belief(s) arises, more important to this argument is
the salience of cognition in religion (Boyer 1994, Lawson 2000; Lawson and
McCauley 1990). The Christian tradition affirms the rationality of faith in
innumerable ways, beginning with the New Testament writers (e.g., Romans
12:2, Eph. 4:23, 1 Peter 3:15) and the hermeneutic enterprise demanded by
their theologically plural texts. With countless generations of Catholic theo-
logians, Magdalenero Catholic catechists explicitly name and promote
Introduction 19
rationality as intrinsic to biblical faith. Their distinctive everyday religious

practice applies this relationship to agricultural production as well.
Reflexive appropriation and exercise of critical rationality is entailed in
the passage from orality to literacy (Goody 1968, 1977, 1986, 2000; Goody
and Watt 1963; Ong 1982). In our case, the acquisition of literacy and its
intellectual entailments liberates from tradition and warrants religious auton-
omy. More specifically, for highland Maya catechists and their ecclesial
communities, biblical literacy motivates rejection of the obligatory dictates of
costumbre and empowers religious construction of a viable local world (J.Z.
Smith 1978, 2004; Mack 2000). Put another way, they deploy the Bible as a
tool for work, intellectual and agricultural, to negotiate globalization’s socio-
economic disruptions on their own terms.
Over the last thirty years, varieties of neo-marxist, post-colonial, and
post-structuralist thought arguably worked along with theories of practice
(Bourdieu 1977) and practical reason (Sahlins 1976) to dethrone functional-
ist, structuralist, and every other static and conflict-free notion of culture
(Tanner 1997). In this study, culture is construed as a dynamic historical
construct, a site of ongoing contest convergent with hegemonic struggle.
(Gramsci 1971, Williams 1977).
From this perspective, power relations are an inescapable datum of
cultural-religious as much as socio-political practice in everyday life (de-
Certeau 1984, Scott 1985). This is decidedly the case in highland Chiapas.
The play of power – experienced in individual agency, at work in interper-
sonal relationships, and decisive for social formations (Christian mission
among them) – is a framing theme for this study.
I began field work shortly after completing theological studies infused
with concern for justice and hospitable to inculturation and liberation cur-
rents. Thus, as I engaged a local church pursuing a pastoral strategy in tune
with these theological orientations, the emergence of a missionary-Maya
problematic came as an unexpected challenge. To understand apparent
contradictions in mission on the ground, historical ambiguities in Mexican
church-state relations became relevant, as did Dumont’s theory of hierarchy
(1980).
Misrecognitions traced to their largely Mexican urban middle class status
accounted for missionary missteps I observed in the field (Bourdieu 1990).
But pastoral agents also seemed to under-appreciate that difference (Todorov
1984; J.Z. Smith 1992, 1998) and place (LeFebrve 1991) are not simple
givens but rather unavoidable negotiables in human affairs. Viewed through
this insight, contradictions appear in strains of Catholic inculturation and
liberation thought as well as missionary practice.
This investigation proves the indispensability of ongoing translation in
both practice and study of world Christianity (Amaladoss 2005; Sanneh
20 Introduction
1989, 2003; Schreiter 1997). It contributes modestly to a series that takes up

this urgent necessity in a substantive and serious way (Wijsen 2007).
As world systems theory and other global analytics entered scholarly
discourse, one distinguished anthropologist astutely countered that we cannot
know “what is happening in the world” except by attending to human beings
and their activities at specific times in relatively circumscribed places (Nash
1981). Just so, the argument here is principally determined by what Tzotzil
Maya Catholics told and showed me while I enjoyed the great privilege of
sharing their daily lives. Their story calls attention to indigenous catechists
and other local grassroots church workers as consequential leaders for to-
day’s world church.
Sites and Methods

During my principal fieldwork in 1993-95, and shorter summer stays in 1997,
1999, and 2001, Santa Maria Magdalenas was an agencia (political subunit)
of San Pedro Chenalho’, one of 110 municipios (elemental cells of the
Mexican federation) within the state of Chiapas. The Catholic community in
Magdalenas belongs ecclesially to the parish of San Andrés Apóstol encom-
passing the neighboring municipio of Larráinzar and canonically attached to
the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Its divided civic and religious
location, largely determined by mountain geography, contributes to the
pueblo’s separate identity within the wider Tzotzil linguistic zone.
Under circumstances of ceasefire and intense intra-community conflict, I
was unable to conduct a religious census of the pueblo. The 2000 Mexican
census (notorious for undercounts in the Maya highlands) recorded 1883
inhabitants in Magdalenas (Aldama officially) and its dependent parajes
(hamlets).
In the two principal sites for this study, Magdalenas center (pop. 735) and
the paraje (hamlet) Cotsil nam’ (pop. 190), there were eleven and six cate-
chists respectively when I arrived in July, 1993. More than half the popula-
tion over age fifteen in these settlements was literate. The ten other hamlets
the census counts within Magdalenas were majority illiterate, by a ratio of
two to one in most cases. These measures suggest correlation between liter-
acy and religious affiliation, a matter of considerable relevance for the
argument advanced here.
My freedom of movement and investigation – including written and
electronic recording of catechist homilies, life histories, and other interviews
– owed to my association with the diocesan human rights office, regular
participation in liturgies, manifest identification with the catechists, and
frequent residence in their homes. Towards the end of 1994, I began to
become acquainted with Protestants, many of whom maintained relationships
with members of the Catholic community after its initial fracture by break-
Introduction 21
away Presbyterians in 1986. But traditional practitioners of costumbre con-

tinued to regard me warily, as they did all kaxlanes (Tzotzil for foreigners).
Throughout I attended monthly gatherings of all catechists in the parish of
San Andrés Larraínzar, whose numbers fluctuated between 130 and 180
during my time in the field. I also observed two of their annual week-long
required courses and similar diocesan courses for catechists in other mu-
nicipios as well. As a result I came to know many catechists and participate
in liturgies beyond Magdalenas and the parish of San Andrés.
I consulted the archives of both the Diocese of San Cristóbal and the
municipio of Chenalho’, as well as official state and national agrarian affairs
archives in Tuxtla Gutiérrez (Chiapas state capital) and Mexico City. Unfor-
tunately, the most complete historical collection of catechetical course
material was destroyed in 1994 by women religious who feared their seizure
following death threats against Bishop Ruiz for allegedly promoting the
EZLN.
In this study, characterizations of pastoral agents and their views do not
pretend to represent all who worked in the diocese. Evidence for most of
these characterizations comes from (1) conversations with missionaries who
consistently contrasted pastoral strategy in the Diocese of San Cristóbal with
pastoral options elsewhere in Mexico; (2) direct statements by pastoral agents
that they sought work in the diocese and/or might leave were its strategy to
take a conservative turn; (3) common knowledge that an unknown number of
pastoral agents left the diocese in disagreement with its pastoral strategy; (4)
observation of diocesan assemblies where dissent was virtually nonexistent;
and (5) personal witness of diocesan affairs from my position in an office of
the curia.
It should be noted that the Catholic community’s successful challenge to
Tzotzil tradition shattered religious unity in Magdalenas into more than two
pieces. “Religion” means precisely something other than given communal
tradition, as suggested by the term’s interchangeability with Catholic practice
in Magdalenas (and validated by scholarly interest in religion as a discrete
phenomenon). In fact, this Tzotzil Catholic community’s break with tradition
effectively opened a pandora’s box of “religions,” so that, by the time my
first long field stay ended in 1995, five new Protestant communities had
arisen in the pueblo, and one of these, the Presbyterians, had already split in
two. This exemplary instance of religious fragmentation ensuing from the
collapse of tradition is not addressed by this study but obviously deserves
further investigation.
A final methodological note highlights my focus on Catholic religious
practice in the context of war and uncertain ceasefire. In the Tzotzil high-
lands, Catholics generally endorsed the Zapatista political agenda, and a few
catechists told of recruitment by the EZLN. Though some in the parish of San
22 Introduction
Andrés, including Magdaleneros, enlisted in the indigenous army and others

lent it material support, the stated position of La palabra de Dios was un-
equivocal: Armed struggle and political activism were (like religion) matters
of choice, not obligation.
For this reason, in addition to overriding interest in Catholic life and ritual
practice, neo-Zapatismo figures contextually, but not thematically, in this
work. Desire for peace remained paramount when I last visited in Summer
2008.
Structure of the Study
The overall design of my argument reflects the dialectical character of

conversion to Catholicism and its everyday practice in Magdalenas. To
unpack this complex process, the study proceeds along a thematic spiral,
taking matters broached in one chapter to greater depth in another. I interpo-
late theoretical considerations into the overall narrative flow of the argument
at several junctures.
Chapters One to Three are largely contextual, addressing the socio-
cultural and political history of church and nation in Mexico, particularly as
their ambiguous relations impinged upon the highland Maya and renewal of
mission among them. Readers interested in the construction of local Tzotzil
Maya theology will find in Chapters Five to Seven a fine-grained account of
its unfolding in homiletic dialogues and a related account of catechist de-
colonization of once-deified Catholic saints.
Though the argument forms an integral whole, readers can profitably read
individual chapters according to particular interests.
The first chapter describes how the originally ethnically protective Maya
civil-religious cargo hierarchy evolved historically into a medium of domina-
tion in the highlands of Chiapas. It also takes up Mexico’s modernizing
policy towards its native peoples and introduces the theme of biblical literacy
as requisite of conversion to Vatican II Catholicism in Magdalenas, as else-
where in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.
Hegemony and approaches to ethnic-cultural difference emerge as key
mission problematics in Chapter 2. It is organized as a kind of thematic
palimpsest. A sketch of post-Vatican II renewal of mission in Latin America
leads to presentation of Bishop Samuel Ruiz’s published thought on the
evangelization of the continent’s indigenous peoples. A brief history of
church-state relations in Mexico, politically ambivalent on the one side and
historically anti-clerical on the other, follows. These wider discussions frame
an account of late twentieth century mission to the nation’s Indians, moving
from contradictions in ecclesially-sponsored Indian Theology to critique of
pastoral discourse in the Diocese of San Cristóbal.
Introduction 23
In Chapter Three, spatial discourse exemplifies frustrated missionary-

Maya encounters in the parish of San Andrés Larraínzar. In counterpoint, a
portrait of diocesan catechetical courses argues that the acquisition of literacy
effectively formed young Tzotzil Maya in liberation praxis, ironically leading
to a reversal of pastoral initiative in the local church.
Chapter Four, the pivot of the argument, explains how sharp fluctuations
in Mexican political economy compelled novice Magdalenero catechists to
train newly acquired critical skills on cargo ritual. One catechist’s theological
reflection on how he evangelized his peers bridges to an historical narrative
of “the year of liberation”(1986) from obligatory ritual cargo in Magdalenas
culminating in resettlement of their ancestral territory.
In Chapter Five, I employ transcripts of catechist biblical exegesis to
unravel the intellectual-agricultural dialectic Magdaleneros call “working the
Word.” Through regular homiletic exegesis, they draw scriptural narrative
into the world of peasant production and, I argue, self-consciously own their
power along with the Word.
Chapter Six elaborates this point by sketching the ancient origins of saint
cults and then Spanish colonial import of communal patron saints to Latin
America. Magdalenero catechists de-colonized both the saints and their
relationship to them as they identified with gospel histories in constructing
their local theology.
To conclude the study, Chapter Seven presents a Magdalenero Catholic
reading of Mary of Nazareth and John the Baptist as exemplars of the Chris-
tian way of life Tzotzil Maya catechists preach “as the apostles did.”
24 Introduction
Contexts and Conversion 25
Chapter One
Contexts and Conversion

Origins of an Ecclesial Cargo
... In those times, nobody said anything. Nothing. The enganchadores [labor
recruiters] even beat us. That’s how it was, so ugly. But poor indigenous, no
one knew how to read or write, we didn’t even know how to speak Spanish.
So we just stood there, looking at the Ladinos [non-indigenous Mexicans].1
Introduction
In the course of a generation, the catechist, a vocation authorized by the
Roman Catholic Church and recognized as such throughout highland Chia-
pas, also became in Santa Maria Magdalenas an authentically Maya construc-
tion. Among Magdaleneros the articulation of the Catholic office of catechist
and the Tzotzil obligation of community service known as “cargo” trans-
formed the meaning of both structures in church and community alike.
Alterations in cargo occurred throughout the highlands in this period, in
part in response to shifts in the political economy of Chiapas which, in turn,
reflected the Mexican state’s erratic attempts to mold the nation’s productive
forces for competition in the global marketplace. In this disruptive context a
newly-activist Catholic church animated by Vatican II re-entered remote
Maya hamlets to call forth indigenous collaborators. In Magdalenas this
appeal resonated particularly with the disenchantment of restive young men
for whom long-fixed ideological and geographic boundaries of community
and tradition encompassing cargo had become increasingly porous, and hence
problematic.
The wider contexts for this local phenomenon included Mexican ideology
and state policies bent upon integrating indigenous people into the nation –
indigenismo – while siphoning the heretofore largely untapped natural
resources of Chiapas toward the developing middle and northern third of the
country. Both indigenista and national development purposes advanced along
the path of corporatist centralism reliant on caciquismo, or political bossism,
an intractable feature of Mexican politics at all levels. In highland Chiapas,
this mechanism followed the colonial logic of ethnically-coded dominance
––––––––––
1 Quoted by Rus, Rus, and Hernandez 1990: 7.
26 Chapter One
and subordination untouched by Mexico’s Independence and Revolution in

the last two centuries.
Profoundly affected by both events, Mexican Catholic church pastoral
strategy had long been driven by concern for survival in the face of anti-
clerical hostilities which, in Chiapas, led to the flight of more than one bishop
and all but precluded assertive evangelization among remote indigenous
communities. To cope with and resist conditions of neglect and exploitation
by ecclesial and secular powers respectively, highland Maya indigenous
continually re-invented ancient social designs. Among the Tzotzil Maya, the
civil-religious hierarchy of cargos, successive periods of strictly defined
community service, integrated all adults in local political governance and
ritual observance by unquestioned obligation. Embedded in costumbre, the
legitimating tradition of the ancestors, cargo constituted social identity,
granting graded levels of prestige to adult males and their spouses.
When in the early 1960s the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas
inaugurated courses for indigenous catechists to promote its own reconstitu-
tion among the Maya, it unintentionally abetted the realignment of social
forces already underway in highland communities suffering the stresses of
economic dislocation. Estranged from cargo and costumbre by their partici-
pation in the labor of their fathers, ritual and gainful, young Magdaleneros in
search of alternative avenues of advancement responded eagerly to the
church’s invitation. They thus became not only protagonists in the remaking
of local Catholicism but – motivated by new sources of identity, authority,
and ultimately power – pivotal agents in the decolonization of their highland
Maya world.
Context mediated the liberation of these young men from the double
confinements of ancestral tradition and ethnic subjugation. Interpreted
contextually, their ascent to leadership in the decolonization of their local
community and revival of the diocesan church began with and remains a
religious passage.
Chiapas: Ecclesial Challenge and Episcopal Renewal

Inscribed on the episcopal seal at the installation of Samuel Ruiz García as
bishop in the cathedral of San Cristóbal de Las Casas is a verse from
Jeremiah: “To root up and to tear down, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1, 10b)
(Fazio 1994:80). The text aptly describes the cultural-historical drama of his
episcopate. But its critical events and effects resulted from his pastoral
decision only by way of a multi-leveled dialectic. The bishop himself would
be the first to agree that Maya indigenous, whose historic priority and demo-
graphic dominance defined his see as mission territory, drove this dialectic.
The complicity between missionaries and colonizers, as individual actors
often one and the same, has been demonstrated often (for Chiapas, see
Wasserstrom 1983:12-69). But studies of colonization have often overlooked

the subjectivity of indigenous people in the evangelization process, as recent
anthropology shows (e.g., Jean and John Comaroff 1985, 1991, 1992).
In fact, during Bishop Ruiz’s episcopate evangelization did not so much
incite as accelerate movement by an already-mobile Maya population. In the
Diocese of San Cristóbal, the coordinates of colonial complicity arguably
reversed as missionaries allied with and, in important respects, followed
indigenous Catholics in their transformation into self-conscious subjects of
decolonization. The catechist cargo emerging from this mutually converting
relationship figures socio-cultural metamorphosis of the highland Maya
world and radical renewal of a church embedded within it by catechists as
leading ecclesial actors.
Consecrated bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in 1960
in the old Ciudad Real, the highland’s colonial capital, Samuel Ruiz García
confronted a local church at the extremes of the most marginated state in
2
Mexico. Problems of personnel and infrastructure defined the ecclesially
precarious situation: the new bishop counted just thirteen priests to attend a
geographically isolated, economically underdeveloped, and politically near-
feudal Mexican frontier territory covering some seventy thousand square
kilometers with a population of nearly one million. Only the Pan American
Highway linked the vast interior of mountains and jungle to the more com-
mercially developed Pacific Coast; and this road, which finally reached the
Chiapas highlands in the late 1940s, remained just partly paved when Samuel
Ruiz arrived.
The ladino (non-indigenous or acculturated Mexican) population concen-
trated in a half-dozen small cities accounted for far less than half of the new
3
bishop’s flock: the majority were Maya indigenous people who lived dis-
persed and profoundly impoverished in remote hamlets, or parajes, accessi-
ble only by ancient footpaths.
Under Lucio Torreblanca, the bishop’s immediate predecessor, each of
the few priests in the diocese necessarily assumed pastoral responsibility for
vicariates of several municipios (townships); most maintained permanent
residences in the larger cities and towns, many not in their parishes. They
made their rounds by horse and foot to baptize, hear confessions, and cele-
brate mass, visiting decrepit colonial-style churches or mud-thatched chapels
––––––––––
2 The Diocese of San Cristóbal spans 36, 821 sq. km., about 5000 sq. kms. smaller than The
Netherlands (Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas Informe Quinquenal Apostolorum Ad
Limina, 1988-1993).
3 The five Maya language groups in the Diocese of San Cristóbal: in order of population:
Tzotzil (291,550); Tzeltal (278,574); Ch’ol (140,806); Tojolobal (37,667); and Mam (5450).
Institución Nacional de Estadística, Geografía, y Informática (INEGI), 2000.
28 Chapter One
scattered in valleys and plateaus amid the mountains at most twice a year,
often just once, for patron saints’ fiestas.
The obstacles to evangelization posed by meager infrastructure and scarce
personnel in the sprawling diocese were aggravated in San Andrés Larráinzar
by socio-cultural and ethnic fractures epitomized in the histories of its recent
pastors. Officially assigned to the vicariate of Chamula, the most densely
populated of all Tzotzil municipios, their territory included two neighboring
municipios, Zinacantán and San Andrés.
In 1950, eight thousand eight hundred people lived in some forty-five
parajes in the parish of San Andrés, including Santa Maria Magdalenas.
Depending on weather conditions, often dense fog, up to seven hours were
needed to traverse the barely-graded eighteen km. dirt road from San
Cristóbal to San Andrés by truck; during the rainy season (May-November),
the mountain track often became impassable (Orozco 1968). Simple physical
access required great resourcefulness and determination from any visitor to
San Andrés.
San Andrés was particularly unfortunate in its mid-twentieth century
pastors. Appointed in the early 1950s, Padre Fernando was preoccupied with
liturgical correctness, rules governing mass stipends, and similar stipulations
of the “licit,” a favored term. In one letter to the bishop, impoverished Tzotzil
parishioners protested the priest’s celebration of a holy day mass at a ladino
hacienda for its stipend, abandoning them to their own liturgical devices. In
January 1953 they asked the bishop to remove him, complaining that he
attended them only on important fiestas or when it was “convenient;” tried to
destroy their ancestral religious icons; talked “nonsense” instead of teaching
“doctrine;” and continually “disparaged” them (Archivo del Obispado –
Epescopal Archive, Box 4).
The family of his successor, Padre Jorge, ranked high among the Ladinos
who controlled the lucrative alcohol trade in the highlands. Among the
Tzotzil every inter-personal pact, sacred or secular, was sealed by exchange
of rum. The ritually-driven rum trade was thus strategically positioned in the
highlands at the volatile intersection where culture and commerce met – and
where, as argued below, Ladino and Indian re-enacted the paradigmatic
colonial transaction of conquest and enslavement. Like his negligent prede-
cessor, Padre Jorge was a diocesan cleric, his prestige wholly dependent upon
his relationship with the bishop and his ties to San Cristóbal’s local elite.
Their colonial aura inevitably compromised the pastor’s standing among the
Tzotzil.
Embodied in these pastors, the fragile association between the Diocese of
San Cristóbal and its indigenous population was wholly transformed by the
remarkable fit between Samuel Ruiz and the agitated historical conjuncture
of his arrival in Chiapas (Fazio, passim).
Born in 1924 in Irapuato, Guanajuato, hotbed of resistance to Mexico’s

post-Revolution anti-clericalism, the new bishop came to San Cristóbal from
a family steeped in Cristero sentiment.4 His father, whose wife conceived
Samuel on one of several sojourns in the United States to augment the family
income, led the Knights of Columbus and Catholic Action in Irapuato.5
Prevented by his wife from joining armed Cristero bands, Maclovio Ruiz
eventually relinquished Catholic Action leadership to enlist in a local politi-
cal organization opposed to the socialist orientation of President Lázaro
Cárdenas (1934-1940).6
The assassination of the family’s parish priest in a crowded church by a
hired hand of Masonry remains among the bishop’s most salient childhood
memories. In short, the young Samuel Ruiz was nurtured by a politically-
alert family enmeshed in the social and ideological combat which shaped
post-revolutionary Mexican Catholicism.
Ruiz’s intellectual gifts were honed by study in Rome where he lived and
was ordained between 1947-52. Doctoral work in scripture at the Pontifical
Biblical Institute culminated with a summer in Jerusalem, cementing the
biblical foundations of his mature pastoral theology. He had taught seven
years and was rector at the seminary for the Diocese of León when named to
the see of San Cristóbal in 1959; at age 35, he was among the youngest
bishops in the world.
Studious, energetic, and well-informed, Samuel Ruiz shared the Mexican
hierarchy’s fervent anti-communism. His first pastoral letter, issued in
October 1961, invoked the legend of David and Goliath to describe the
“Catholic’s obligation” to combat Marxist atheism (Ruiz García 1961). For
the new bishop, whose study of sociology was limited to functionalist texts,
the alternative was communism or religion. He was a staunch institutionalist,
solidly aligned with the doctrinal consensus among his episcopal peers
(Blancarte 1992:167-201).
The bishop’s anti-communism extended to suspicion of the work of the
National Indigenous Institute (INI) which arrived in the highlands in 1951 to
implement the Cardenista indigenist agenda for Mexico’s native peoples by
establishing schools, clinics and other ameliorative programs among the
highland Maya. One student of Mexico’s Indians saw in Samuel Ruiz a
“fanatic” obsessed with “combat” against communists and Protestants alike.
In response to an anthropologist’s charge that the diocese stood in the way of
––––––––––
4 Crying, “Viva Cristo Rey – Long Live Christ the King,” Cristeros waged a violent crusade
against Mexico’s revolutionary anti-clerical government (Meyer 1974-76).
5 On the birth of Catholic Action in Mexico as an alternative to the Cristeros, see Blancarte
1992.
6 “Sinarchism” appealed to Catholics opposed to left-leaning post-Revolution Mexican
regimes who eschewed Cristero violence (Meyer: 1977).
30 Chapter One
indigenist reforms, the bishop defended pastors who quarreled with INI’s bi-
lingual teachers, asserting that Indians deserved a Catholic education rather
than pro-communist “propaganda.” To bolster his argument, the bishop cited
Fidel Castro: his ascent to power announced, in the bishop’s militant Catholic
view, an era “of conflicts and crisis” (Benítez 1967:151-54l).
The bishop’s intellectual confidence, bolstered by biblical faith and
inherited social conscience, drove his determination to repair centuries of
ecclesial weakness in the highlands. Any reform depended initially on aug-
menting both the quality and quantity of clergy in Chiapas. In addition to
attempts to shore up an antiquated, depopulated local seminary, among the
new bishop’s earliest acts was to invite the Dominicans to return to the
Diocese of San Cristóbal and join the priests of the Sacred Heart and the
Jesuits who had been recruited by his predecessor, the latter reaching Chiapas
in 1959, just a few months before the new bishop.
The arrival of men from these cosmopolitan religious communities
enabled the church to extend its presence physically to the more inaccessible
areas of the diocese, some of which had not seen a priest in many years. They
also provided the bishop with intellectual companionship as he searched for
an evangelization strategy equal to the several challenges – logistic and
linguistic, cultural and socio-economic – posed by the indigenous, the major-
ity of his flock, as well as the local ladino elites who despised them.
Arguably the most far-reaching of the bishop’s initial decisions imple-
mented a suggestion by the Apostolic Delegate, the Vatican’s representative
in Mexico, Luigi Raimondi (Fazio 1994:77-80,102). With the Delegate’s
financial contributions backing his moral support, Bishop Ruiz invited Marist
brothers and Divine Shepherd sisters to establish schools for catechists in San
Cristóbal, as the church had throughout Latin America to form local lay
leaders capable of nurturing the faith in the absence of adequate numbers of
clergy. This fateful move quickened socio-cultural ferment in remote indige-
nous hamlets. To understand why this is so requires exposing the backbone
of highland Maya social organization as it existed when the bishop began his
work – the cargo system, and the inevitable accompaniment to its practice,
rum.
Dialectics of Subordination
Anthropologists are agreed that cargo was structurally essential to indigenous
community in the Maya area:
[The cargo system] is virtually the entire social structure of the Indian municipio
[township]. At the most general level of social integration this structure does [for]
Indians what kinship does for African societies, and what the social class system
does for ladino societies (M. Nash 1958:65-75).
But by the mid-1960s cargo was becoming increasingly unserviceable in the

Chiapas highlands, though a fully satisfactory explanation for its demise
remains elusive (Tax 1937; Cámara 1968; Carrasco 1961; Cancian 1965,
1967, 1992; DeWalt 1975). But it is also significant that studies of cargo fail
to address the most salient feature of the system as seen by Maya Catholics
who came to reject it – namely, its tie to trago, or ritual alcohol consumption.
The view of Magdaleneros from below and inside widens the accepted socio-
economic interpretation of cargo in its late-modern form to include the
symbolic dimension that motivated their abandonment of it.
Cargo
Although vestiges of pre-Hispanic Maya society can be found in the archae-
ology of post-colonial cargo hierarchies, the structure ordering the social
world of Magdalenas for the catechists’ fathers and grandfathers was almost
surely of late- nineteenth century origin. Melding elements of Spanish town
government and Catholic cofradías (cultic associations to serve communal
patron saints imported by Spanish missionaries), the Tzotzil, like other
highland Maya linguistic groups, constructed a series of age-graded commu-
nity duties. These were alternately civil (principally administrative-juridical,
attached to the municipal agency office) and religious (principally ceremo-
nial, connected to the church). The principal authority on cargo practice in
Chiapas notes that civil-religious hierarchy shares a limited number of
characteristics throughout the Maya area. Ascent of what anthropologists
metaphorically called the cargo “ladder” established social identity, bestowed
prestige, measured rank, conferred authority, and inculcated an ethic of
service in all adult males (and their families) in a given community (Cancian
1967:289).
But the actual functioning of cargo varied historically among communi-
ties, their differences reflecting distinct socio-economic positions within the
larger regional world. This world was, of course, ladino-dominated, a fact
supporting interpretations of the cargo hierarchy as an indigenous socio-
cultural defense mechanism. Thus, it has been argued that social control of
wealth via obligatory cargos integrated and insulated Maya settlements
against foreign intrusion so effectively they exemplify the ideal-type of
“closed corporate peasant communities” (Wolf 1957).
Whether or not any Maya community in the Chiapas highlands ever
maintained total closure and seamless corporate integration, economic
developments beginning during the mid-nineteenth century decidedly eroded
their community-insulating effect. One important study demonstrates that the
cargo ladder, ostensibly a creation of autonomous Maya socio-religious
tradition, historically mirrored how differently situated highland communities
fared in their relations with the dominant world (Rus and Wasserstrom 1980).
32 Chapter One
The Cargo Hierarchy in Magdalenas, c. 1970

Civil ------------------------------- Religious
Principal or Pasado
|______
\Alférez
I Alcalde _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ /
II Alcalde (gubernador)
III Alcalde
IV Alcalde_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
|Capitán
|Cavilto
Regidor (9)_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ /
|Mayor (9)_ _ _
\ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Mayordomo (7)
__________________________________________
Principal = elder who has completed all cargos.
Attached to municipal agency: alcalde = assistant to municipal agente, salaried civil municipal
officer appointed by state; regidor = tax collector, registrar; mayor = police. Attached to the
church: alferez = fiesta sponsor; capitán = races horses at fiesta; cavilto = recruits maxpat, other
ritual/ fiesta attendants, performs Semana Santa passion ritual; mayordomo = church caretaker.
*= number of persons holding the office at any one time
For example, in the municipio of Chamula on the southern border of Magda-

lenas, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) regime bi-lingual
municipal scribes insinuated themselves into community governance by
securing cargo appointments for themselves. The first loyalty of these men
was not to communal tradition but to the political apparatus to which they
owed their entry into Chamula as agents of indigenist reform. These men
eventually had themselves named to religious cargos, thus gaining the right
reserved to religious leaders to sell the home-brew pox (Tzotzil rum) and
ultimately the opportunity to replace communal elders as they died.
Development programs initiated by the INI in the early 1950s expanded
the power base these erstwhile scribes constructed as they became the first
school teachers, health workers, and owners of trucks and cooperatives in
Chamula (Rus 1999:293-300). Today, Chamula’s civil-religious hierarchy
reflects disposition of political patronage enabled by their monopoly of local
power in the name of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to which
they owe their positions.
According to Tzotzil tradition, a Magdalenero catechist explains,
..to realize a cargo is to please a saint. It’s a response of the people for all that the
saints have done for them – giving them food every day, health, life. In return for
carrying out a cargo the saints assure the cargo-holder a long life on this earth, as
well as the things necessary for life – food, money, housing, everything . But
cargo also has to do with our fathers and the community. To realize a cargo gives
a person prestige in the community, he’s more respected as a person (FN
21.VII.93).
But, as the recent history of Chamula shows, the reciprocity binding indi-
viduals to the community through sacred obligation to the saints could
alienate as well as integrate, in part because the cargo “ladder” was never
simply a structure ordered by fixed rungs (or rules) following ancestral
tradition. Instead, cargo practice was inevitably vulnerable to strategic
manipulation within a context wider than the local community and subject to
extra-communal power.
By tradition sacred in origin and in local discourse unalterable – “es
costumbre, it’s tradition” – Tzotzil cargo remains an eminently historical
artifact whose architecture was always potentially variable, the specific
contours of its practice manifesting both the degree of internal cohesion in a
given community at a given moment and the specific coordinates of its
subordinate position within the larger ladino world in which it is embedded.
To gloss cargo in this way – as a socio-historically charged indicator of the
dialectics of dominance and subordination in a regional world – draws
attention beyond its formal structure to its actual practice. In this realm,
7
cargo’s universal ritual accompaniment – trago, drinking – is the solvent of
the system and the critical trope for the way of life it sustains.
Trago – Drinking
As obligatory offering to the saints, cargo constitutes a type of Mauss’ “total
social phenomenon,” ordering all relations in a given Tzotzil community
within the framework of the legitimating belief that life itself, biological as
well as social, depends upon it (Mauss 1967). Until recent decades, perhaps
no other social phenomenon dominated modern Maya discourse as much
(Haviland 1977).
At all key moments in its bestowal, the “gift” of cargo – the offering of
one’s self in one’s service to the saints/community – requires drink, to
motivate the partners in the transaction and to validate its authenticity.
Obligatory gifts and consumption of trago occur when a man is notified of
his cargo appointment and when he accepts it; when he is installed in his
cargo and when he relinquishes it; and, most characteristically, during the
several ritual performances entailed in fulfillment, in particular, of religious
––––––––––
7 The Tzotzil use trago synonymously with pox = Spanish aguardiente (cane-based, home-
brewed spirits) for the drink itself and for the act of drinking it.
34 Chapter One
cargos. In fact, trago is the critical feature of cargo in contemporary ration-

ales for its rejection, for catechists signifying a disposition at best wasteful
and at worst destructive of both character and community.8 Their decidedly
negative pronouncements beg examination of the articulation of cargo and
trago with the suspicion that the latter, at least, is something other than the
benign instrument of reciprocity undergirding local Tzotzil communities, as
argued by some.9
Though the fermented corn brew chicha figured in pre-Hispanic Maya
ritual, Spanish colonists introduced rum to Chiapas and with it the de-
ritualization of indigenous alcohol consumption (Crump 1987:239-49;
Navarrette Pellicer 1988:83-98; Eber 1995:15-36). Imperial favor of cane
commerce in Cuba and Brazil encouraged expanded distilling in the hot
Chiapanec lowlands as a productive outlet for mills attached to sugar fincas
planted with cane imported originally from the Canary Islands. Despite royal
prohibition and ethical protests from churchmen like Bartolomé de Las
Casas, clandestine production created a lucrative internal market, particularly
among indigenous indentured to sugar mills.
This original linkage between forced labor and non-ritual alcohol con-
sumption steadily widened as corrupt civil, military, and (even) religious
authorities exploited the indigenous market driven, most powerfully, by
landowners who paid (and thus plied) with rum workers drawn from the great
labor reserve composed of landless indigenous, particularly after liberal
disentailment in the nineteenth century. The expansion of capitalism during
the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876-80, 1884-1911) perfected the system of
enganche (enganchar = hook). Highland labor contractors for lowland fin-
queros (plantation owners) “hooked” indigenous workers with offers of
money and/or credit, and, always, rum, then transported them to San
Cristóbal, where they were further indebted by days of drinking before being
delivered by armed escorts in long processions to coastal coffee lands.
Recounting a career begun in 1939, a contemporary “hooker” describes how
he and his peers “conquered people in the villages”:
....first they gave him [indigenous recruit] his portion of trago, then the worker
asked for it himself, since he had in his net bag the money that had been ad-
vanced. And so, ‘a mamar trago’ [he got drunk] (Navarrette Pellicer 1988:93).
––––––––––
8 For similar comments on cargo by catechists in Guatemala, see Warren, 1989: 99 and
Watanabe 1992: 207.
9 Many anthropologists resist negative interpretation of Maya alcohol consumption to defend
traditional ritual. But at least one demonstrates that ritual alcohol use is, in truth, “negatively
functional” (Cortés 1988:157-85).
Twentieth century capitalist development steadily integrated Chiapas into the

Mexican national economy, eroding subsistence maize agriculture. Inevita-
bly, it also increased indigenous need for cash. Thus abolition of forced labor
and the first stirrings of agrarian reform following the Revolution could not
weaken an equation as richly symbolic as it was real: work in exchange for
rum.
From their earliest acquaintance with it, Maya peoples evinced profound
ambivalence towards the alien substance purveyed by colonial sugar millers,
protesting its presence in their communities following an ideological equa-
tion of their own: rum = Ladinos = devil = death. When the State of Chiapas
restricted rum sales to ladino vendors, the most successful of them combined
distilling with enganche, insuring that what cash Maya peasants earned
bought rum and thus a high level of indebtedness that could only be paid off
by labor on coffee fincas (Crump 197: 39-49). As one planter summarized,
“Take aguardiente [Spanish, rum] away from the Indian and what will
become of coffee? Coffee plantations run on aguardiente as an automobile
runs on gasoline” [Cited by Eber 1995: 30).
In this pernicious system, the perversity of the Indian’s position vis a vis
the Ladino’s is more adequately expressed through the colloquialism “a
mamar (to nurse on) trago” – get drunk. The linguistic link between infancy
and drunkenness in the Spanish mamar resonates with the well-attested
symbolic equivalence of milk and wine, and even more so blood and wine:
10
“all are symbols of life; all are fertility symbols” (Jellinek 1977: 854-55).
Taken together, rhetorical clue and symbolic analysis establish trago as a
potent carrier of cosmic and social meanings, and their convergence in
highland Chiapas.
According to one important study, alcoholic beverages came to predomi-
nate in ritual practice principally because they – unlike milk, water, or other
drinks – physiologically effect the illusion of power: “we feel stronger, more
powerful, more self-confident” when we drink .11 The felt meaning so em-
bedded in drinking is further reinforced by the common Maya belief that
alcoholic beverages build the blood, i.e., sustain life.12 For indigenous living
in the often-frigid highlands, blood heats the body as the sun heats the earth:
––––––––––
10 Jellinek notes the Roman fertility festival at which wine was admitted to the temple only as
milk and cites Frazer’s report of a Javanese search for palm wine : “Let him slake his thirst!
Mother’s breasts are full to overflowing” (ibid.).
11 Countering the symbolism of drinking as such: “In the last analysis, when a choice [among
beverages] can be made [in ritual], it is undoubtedly the pharmacological effect of alcohol
which is decisive” (Jellinek 1977: 854).
12 “Reading” the pulse persists among modern Maya healers: “The blood of the curer enters
into communication with that of the patient when he holds his own thumb pulse against the
patient’s pulse” (J. Nash 1989: 426-27, n.13).
36 Chapter One
heat-as-life – ultimately bestowed and maintained by the gods – connotes

supernatural power (Watanabe 1992: 88). Thus in the Maya highlands rum is
somatically equivalent to blood, while the “tremendous prestige” universally
attached to alcohol is divinely legitimated (Jellinek 1977: 857).
More than coincidentally, those who hold religious cargo, or serve the
saints/community, are said to have “heated their souls” through their associa-
tion with these deified patrons.13 But, as already shown, cargo service is not
altogether innocent, either as an act of religious devotion or as an expression
of altruism. Required expenditures on trago always resulted in overwhelming
debt which could only be repaid through seasonal labor in ladino enterprises.
Viewed in this context, cargo obligation can be interpreted as ritual recon-
struction of the original enslaving colonial link between work and drink,
established with indigenous indenture to the early sugar mills and perfected
through the modern mechanism of enganche.
A Tzotzil elder recounts the demonic origins of rum:
The Devil thought about how he could transform chicha [fermented corn brew] to
conquer Our Father. The Devil got together with his demons and....made an appa-
ratus that is moved by two horses to extract the syrup of the sugar cane and with
that he made rum.... But then he went and deceived Our Father Jesus Christ....
“That’s your drink, but it’s no good,” said the devil. “This is mine; it’s better.
Mine gets us drunk really well,” he said.... Then Our Father drank it and he got
drunk.... In the end the Devil tricked Our Father Jesus Christ. That’s why now
rum is the Devil’s, according to ... the ancestors (Eber 1995:15-16).
In biblical discourse, the Devil is, of course, “the father of lies.” In this
account, the Devil’s Tzotzil persona pursues a strategy of deception employ-
ing tactics (a horse-drawn “apparatus”) and means (rum) for an end (con-
quest), all facilitating Spanish colonization, a trick victimizing even the gods.
Civil-religious hierarchies undoubtedly enabled highland Maya communi-
ties to defend indigenous identity against colonial assaults. But Mexican
independence and the advance of capitalism on land-, labor-, and resource-
rich Chiapas subverted this purpose. Cargo holders ritually enacted complic-
ity in the “trick” of the Devil by drinking to figurative death, somatically in
drunkenness and socially in debt. In either case, their bodies were no longer
their own (Nash 1989:233 and passim). But “our Father Jesus Christ” had
suffered the same deception and so shared their enemy.
––––––––––
13 Gutieras-Holmes documented this traditional Tzotzil view of cargo (1961: 72-73, 306).
Tzotzils today prefer Pepsi or Coca Cola – now widely used in traditional ritual as a less
costly alternative to pox – depending on which they perceive to “heat” better.
Open struggle was (literally) unthinkable against so powerful a foe as the

Devil (= ladino world = advancing capital). The revered ancestors prescribed
ritual exchanges with “our Father” and among peers which called for imbib-
ing the foe in the medium, trago, he gave them. Tradition, and the salience of
trago in it, thus bound indigenous communities in misrecognition of its actual
effect: delivery of their bodies to the dominant world.
Cargo is central to costumbre, and so to the persistence of highland Maya
community over five centuries. Neither a matter of idols behind altars nor
blind adoption of Christian forms, costumbre resulted from active appropria-
tion of them to preserve a Maya place in a colonially-fractured world (Farriss
1984). But the articulation of cargo and trago undoubtedly facilitated subor-
dination of highland peoples to ladino interest.
Of course, hegemonic strategies are plural. Mexico’s modernizing project
rivaled the decline of cargo in disturbing highland Maya social equilibrium,
and its contradictions were also instrumental in facilitating Maya conversion.
Modernization: Indigenismo vs. the Indigenous

Change originating in the regional world, always an influence on local Maya
social forms, accelerated in the 1950s as economic investments and indigen-
ist policies transformed highlands infrastructure, material and socio-cultural.
The arrival of the Pan-American highway in 1948 quickened the pace of
expansion in commercial agriculture integrating Chiapas into global market
strategies increasingly favored by the Mexican government as commodity
prices returned to pre-World War II levels and continued their rise for the
next 20 years.
Rapid multiplication of new secondary roads brought trucks closer than
ever to remote Maya hamlets, enabling ladino middle men to carry both
surplus maize and land-poor laborers to and from booming lowland agribusi-
ness venues. Close historical analysis of the last century reveals the essential
paradox of state-directed modernization in the Maya highlands:
Expansion of infrastructure in central Chiapas—indeed, the entire program of

modernization and transculturation which state and federal agencies had put into
effect there—had in reality caused living standards to decline (Wasserstrom 1983:
212).
This counterintuitive result had everything to do with ethnic relations, mani-

fest above all in land ownership. The number of acres under cultivation in the
state doubled between 1950 and 1970 as Chiapas became the leading pro-
ducer of coffee in Mexico and the largest supplier of the nation’s dietary
staples, corn and beans (Benjamin 1996: 223-24).
38 Chapter One
But Maya peasants, whose best lands were seized by Ladinos following
disentailment in the mid-nineteenth century, were largely excluded from the
benefits of this agribusiness boom. Under Mexico’s revolutionary agrarian
reform, presidential decrees might declare marginal ladino estate lands
“affected” for distribution. But these declarations went largely unobserved in
Chiapas (Esponda y Pólito 1995:112-113) because, as one Maya campesino
explained, “the government and the finqueros are the same” (Benjamin
1996:223).
Land poverty had crippled Maya for generations (Harvey 1994:6-7); it
deepened as an expanding population and the introduction of fertilizers
exhausted the land’s productive capacity (Wasserstrom 1982:195). Linked
ever more inextricably to global markets, Mexico’s highland Maya thus
found themselves struggling with growing desperation to maintain minimal
subsistence from the one resource that guaranteed at least the illusion of
socio-cultural autonomy, the land.
Promoted by progressives to end indigenous margination, in Chiapas the
Mexican policy known as indigenismo actually masked the modernizing
capitalist erosion of the material basis of highland Maya society. Following
the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the Mexican philosopher José Vascon-
celos, director of the Ministry of Education, envisioned a “cosmic race”
incorporating indigenous peoples into the nation. The ethnically-coded
hegemonic project underlying subsequent schemes supplied by Mexico City
intellectuals in fact echoed the rhetoric of local notable Manuel Pineda:
[Indians] think that only agriculture is capable of fully satisfying human needs. To
open to Indians horizons other than work on the land, to which they devote them-
selves with so much good will, would be an issue, for agriculture needs so many
more hands while the ladino masses demonstrate the strongest repulsion towards
this activity (quoted by Favre 1971: 311).
Pineda, in fact, expressed the highland elite’s great fear: wholesale “ladinoi-
zation” of an indigenous population with capital expansion into their home-
land. Without the “Indian,” the “Ladino,” whose ethnic identity was con-
structed in San Cristóbal on parasitical domination of the surrounding high-
lands, would cease to exist (ibid.).
Government agreement that the Maya needed “regeneration” only La-
dinos could bestow showed in the colonial relations that ruled rural schools
(Pineda 1993:66ff.). Recalling residence in the school at San Andrés early in
the last century, one erstwhile Tzotzil student wrote:
I wanted to learn more and more. Nevertheless, we [Maya peasants] didn’t ad-
vance because many times indian students were treated by the [ladino] teachers
like laborers: the biggest collected his firewood, served as errand boys and por-
ters; I, who was smaller, cleaned his house, carried water and sometimes took care
of his little children. While we did all this, the Ladinos had classes (Arias 1990:
83).
The Maya memoirist provides an apt trope – indigenous peasants carrying

water for ladino government agents – for the caste ideology embedded in
indigenismo.
President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) is often revered as the redeemer of
the Mexican revolution for his far-reaching land and labor reforms. Yet his
attitude toward Mexico’s indigenous was similarly colored by caste.
Cárdenas, himself of Tarascan Indian heritage, regarded the nation’s indige-
nous peoples as an ‘ethnic proletariat’ (Becker 1995: 70). Despite a genuine
desire to ease the economic misery of Mexico’s indigenous, Cárdenas consis-
tently instrumentalized Indians, as did the zealous rural teachers and political
organizers who spread his vision. In 1939 the President was asked to recon-
sider invitation of Mexican Indians to an international conference on indige-
nous peoples:
...most of the Indians will be unable to deliberate and figure out ways to help the
evolution of the various American Indian races... Instead, send competent, quali-
fied people knowledgeable about the idiosyncrasies and needs of the various In-
dian races (ibid.: 159).
Wanting nationalist icons, Cárdenas replied: “Your point is right... Even so,
invite, along with the qualified people, one or two Indians” (ibid.).
Never the exotic innocents envisioned by elites intent on inventing the
nation, ambitious highland Maya were thus drawn to the spoils of moderniz-
ing reform (ibid. 115). In short, indigenismo perversely produced indigenous
caciques who served the nation against their communities: “the Indians were
integrated, but as proletarians and peasants, official clients, and (occasion-
ally) official caciques” (Knight 1991: 268).
The indigenist legacy of Cardenismo – a surreal modernist mix of nostal-
gic idealism, righteous reformism, and ambitious statism encompassed by
structures of caste and capital – loomed large when in 1948 the Mexican
government founded the National Indigenist Institute (INI). Wary of earlier
unwanted intrusiveness, INI trained its own bi-lingual indigenous “promot-
ers” to win consent for its projects. Inevitably, INI training pulled all promot-
ers out of their communities in every sense:
Naturally ... measures were taken to orient the student [promoter] to forms of life
totally distinct from [Maya] tradition...: change of behavior in view of new situa-
40 Chapter One
tions in dining rooms, in dormitories, in the street, in the classroom, in relation to

teachers.....and others [behaviors] that permitted the formation of a new type of
citizen, totally distinct from ...what they had had as subjects of exploitation.
(Montes S. 1976: 82-83)
The equally “natural” result of this process was “the ladinoization of many
promoters” who adopted “a negative attitude toward the indigenous” (Mo-
diano and Pérez Hernández 1976: 67). Inevitably, a majority of them aban-
doned their home communities entirely (Montes S. 1976:92).
Like the socialist zealots of the Cárdenas period, INI agents undertook the
re-making of indigenous society, beginning with the collaborators they hoped
would provide entrée to it. What Bourdieu calls “the appropriating by the
world of a body” (Bourdieu 1977: 89) was enacted, in the first instance, by
physically removing promoters from indigenous territory. More irreversibly,
INI inculcated modes of appearance and behavior that distanced its indige-
nous trainees from Maya culture. The indigenists’ world finally inhabited the
promoters they recruited in the name of cultural non-intervention.
In short, seeking to “protect” the Maya by introducing them to the bene-
fits of modernity, INI could not evade the structure governing the outcome of
every preceding indigenist project in Chiapas. Implementation required re-
making the Maya in INI’s own image and interest, the better to serve both.
The young Maya men who became Catholic catechists in Magdalenas and
other highland communities came of age in a late-1960s conjuncture of the
contexts described above: new church leadership pressing for strategies
(elaborated below) to revive a moribund Catholic presence among the Maya;
systems of domination fraying Maya communal organization and religious
tradition through misrecognized mechanisms of cooptation, cargo in particu-
lar; and state-directed modernization appropriating Indians in order to assist
them.
The road is a fitting icon for the cultural contiguity of these contexts: the
explosion of routes through the mountains and into remote indigenous vil-
lages since the Cárdenas regime invited global capital and the Mexican state
into the interstices of Maya community life. But cargo continued to impose
debt while arable land disappeared, market consumption increased, and
migratory labor remained essential to survival.
Under these conditions, new roads offered no exit for most young Magda-
leneros. Bilingual schools did suggest a means of mobility. But for most
students, the classroom actually presented only another humiliating encounter
with the dominant world which kept them in their place even as it encroached
upon their territory.
But the highland Maya have persisted since the Conquest by continually
opening alternatives paths. In this case, young men seized upon a new reli-
gious discourse as a way to re-define power-relations first within and then
beyond the community, and thus achieve mobility on their own terms.
Conversions and Continuities

The varieties of religious conversion may exceed those William James
asserted for religious experience (Gallagher 1990; Hefner 1993; Rambo
1993), and it is only recently that anthropology has focused on the introduc-
tion of Christianity among indigenous peoples (cf. Horton 1971, 1975;
Beidelman 1974, 1982; Jean Comaroff 1985; J. and J. Comaroff 1991, 1992;
Burridge 1991; Hefner 1993). In the case of Chiapas, the original conversions
to this world religion are now the domain of historians; but their conclusions
suggest, at least negatively, the salience of Maya agency in what is often
described as unilateral conquest.
A landmark study of the Yucatec Maya during the colony distinguishes
between the private/polytheistic/local and public/monotheistic/universal
levels of indigenous belief, arguing that the adaptability of pre-Conquest
Maya cosmology accommodated Christian doctrine coherently, if not always
readily, at the latter level (Farriss 1984). This history rejects the ‘idols behind
altars’ paradigm of indigenous resistance to Christian mission, portraying,
instead, a gradual, discontinuous process of “creative synthesis” that “Ma-
yanize[d] the Christian framework of public worship” in the Yucatan (ibid.:
318-319].
To the same end, indigenous revolts punctuated the early-modern history
of the Maya highlands. The most famous of them – the Cancuc Rebellion of
1812 among the Tzeltal and Cuscat’s Rebellion of 1867-71 among the
Tzotzil – originated in revitalization movements seeking to end “the Spanish
monopoly of the Catholic religion” (Bricker 1981: 69 and passim). This
history, like the extraordinary survival of the highland Maya into post-
modernity, presumes an alternatively active and dormant but always poten-
tially assertive agency among indigenous for whom cultural survival and
religious autonomy are co-dependent values.
Just so, the modern historical conjuncture limned above produced reli-
gious rupture between costumbre and Catholicism as young men re-activated
Maya religious agency in the highlands once again in the late 1960s. The
argument that dissolution of traditional religious cosmologies can be ac-
counted for by modernizing forces “in the air,” obviating the need for mis-
sionary intervention to cause and/or explain conversions to Christianity
during Africa’s colonization, is suggestive (Horton 1971, 1975). Setting
argument’s validity aside, neither the broad processes of modernization nor
the re-energized preaching of missionaries in by themselves account for the
42 Chapter One
rejection of costumbre and rise of the Catholic church there in late twentieth
century highland Chiapas.
Rather, the Word of God, re-introduced into Maya communities with new
vigor following Samuel Ruiz’s arrival in San Cristóbal, became an instru-
ment of liberation in the hands of young men who, in conquering literacy,
read God’s salvific message into their historical milieu with transformative
effects. In this case, conversion was a turning, in the first instance, from
trago to text; and literacy, to paraphrase Bartolomé de Las Casas, became the
indispensable way (Las Casas 1993).
The ensuing reversal(s) of authority upset tradition in the Tzotzil com-
munity of Santa Maria Magdalenas and elsewhere in the highlands and
redirected post-Vatican II Catholic evangelization as converts became cate-
chists, reading themselves in the sacred text and claiming it as their own. In
so doing, they assumed authorship of world and lives until then heavily
inscribed by Ladinos.
Fathers and Sons – a Conversion Story

Local clergy complaints about the activities of INI’s bi-lingual teachers
announced the presence of new players in the highlands. Bishop Ruiz re-
cruited missionaries broadly: among the first foreigners to respond was Padre
David, an ex-Jesuit North American who was assigned to the parish of San
Andrés Larrainzar in 1962. Inspired by Catholic Action and its ameliorative
agenda, he set about organizing an experimental potato farm and support for
a health clinic staffed by North American women religious (Archivo Dioce-
14
sano, Box 10; Orozco mss).
But his overriding pastoral concerns were to root out alcohol consump-
tion, in his view the primary vice of his flock, and to develop a cadre of
catechists to evangelize the parish’s forty-four parajes: “the first thing a
priest looks for is a catechist” (FN 21.VIII.42).
Padre David’s initial recruit was a fiscal,15 ritual advisor for the initiating
cargo of mayordomo whose assumption was, the pastor observed, the first
step to alcoholism (ibid.). Highly respected for his cargo, early in 1963 this
fiscal attended the course for catechists given by the Marist fathers at the new
school now operating in San Cristóbal under the direction of Bishop Ruiz and
the patronage of the nuncio.
––––––––––
14 Letters between the priest and funders of his projects show the concern about Tzotzil diet
and lack of commercial markets. The U.S. women religious serving San Andrés had re-
sponded to Paul VI’s call for “papal volunteers.”
15 The missionary’s selection was historically astute. During the early colonial era, fiscales
served as Catholic agents in outlying hamlets priests rarely visited. Their role included bury-
ing the dead and gathering children for catechism (Farriss 1984: 233-239).
On his return the catechist worked alone under close clerical supervision
for several years, translating into Tzotzil rudimentary knowledge acquired
from monolingual Marists: prayers, songs, and exhortations to obey God and
abandon sinful ways.
In 1968, this fiscal-catechist recruited five other indigenous parishioners
for the course in San Cristóbal. Meanwhile the pastor of San Andrés, unsatis-
fied with incremental growth in catechist numbers, resorted to a strategy as
old as the first Mexican missionary reductions. With funds from a European
relief agency, he established a residential primary school for boys in the
cabecera (site of the parish church center and official seat of township
government, literally “head town”) near the parish compound where none
had existed before. This venture led to a secondary school in San Cristóbal
that the missionary hoped would foster vocations to the diocesan seminary
whose facilities it shared.
Among the first pupils in the mission primary school was the Andresero
(resident of San Andrés) Daniel: his story, though in some aspects excep-
tional, traces the nearly universal pattern of conversion by parish catechists.
Daniel’s father held prominent cargos and was an honored curandero (village
healer) as well; his prestige gave his son a privileged place at fiesta celebra-
tions. But, Daniel recalls, “it was the hardest thing, to see my father drunk”
(FN, 7.21.93). The boy hid or fled the house rather than watch his father beat
his mother in drunken rages. The family tilled more fertile land than most
and, rare among the Tzotzil, owned three horses and a few cows; Daniel
greatly admired his father’s capacity for work.
Nonetheless, he remembers shivering through frigid nights and rising in
the frost of early morning to walk to school alone in his only set of clothes.
The pains that poverty inflicted during these journeys was further aggravated
by the shame he experienced in the one-room school where ill-prepared,
ladinoized INI teachers using opaque Spanish texts failed utterly to reach
him: he quit primary school after two years. To relieve his consequent de-
pression, following a three-day fast his father took him to pray to the Virgin
of the Assumption in Ixtapa, five hours’ walk from their homestead, “so that
I might learn” (ibid.).
Recitation of ritual formulae according to costumbre rescued Daniel from
despair following failure in school. But he never returned to the public
primary and refused to follow his father in ascent of the cargo ladder, not
because he objected to service of the saints but from abhorrence of trago. A
transfer of identity resolved the boy’s dilemma while dissolving psychologi-
cal conflict in social critique.
San Andrés’ first fiscal-turned-catechist had created the nucleus of a
revitalized Catholic community; its existence addressed several sides of the
boy’s dilemma. His brother-in-law’s invitation to join this new community
44 Chapter One
assured affiliation with his family, at least laterally. At the same time, he
discovered an alternative path to social prestige in a new, but unquestionably
sacred cargo: catechist. As important, he satisfied his thwarted desire for
learning by mastery of religious doctrine with a convincing rationale for
rejection of trago: the drunkenness of any of his children dishonored the one
true God, loving father-creator of all.
In short, in catechist preaching Daniel discovered a God formed after the
image he sought, and could not find, in his own father. He also found a
community in which social worth depended on the free gift of God, not
obligatory drink.
The boy’s conversion entailed both severe costs and substantial rewards.
His parents fiercely opposed his attendance at catechist-led meetings, fearing
their loss of a laborer for the family milpa (traditional landholding sown with
corn, beans, and squash) and their son’s loss of “the things of costumbre”
(FN 7.21.93). Despite being denied meals and occasionally suffering captiv-
ity at home, Daniel defied his father to pursue an affiliation in which he
experienced acceptance. Moreover, his vow never to succumb to his father’s
drunken ways became transcendentally secured.
He received his first holy communion without parents or padrinos (god-
parents), feigning their indisposition. Then, at age fourteen, five years after
defying his father to hear the Word of God, Daniel left his parents’ home,
despite their threats, to attend the month-long Marist course for catechists in
San Cristóbal with some twenty-five other Andreseros (residents of San
Andrés), conscious that this act constituted a decisive break with his father
and ancestral tradition.
Shame and domestic rebellion had pushed the boy to seize a socio-
religious alternative to costumbre. But cargo per se was not what he re-
nounced: he prized both its accepted purpose – service to the community, and
its social reward – the value placed on the word of those who reached the
cargo ladder’s highest rung. Nor, at least in its origins, was his conversion
triggered by religious doubt.
To the contrary, he admired his parents’ “great faith – they prayed with
candles, regularly, every fifteen-twenty days, not out of obligation but in total
security that the Apostle (San Andrés) would give them all they needed and
asked for” (FN 7.21.93) and honors memories of tradition’s healing pilgrim-
age after he abandoned school. Rather as he pondered his painful circum-
stance – he had one change of clothes, slept on the ground covered by torn
blankets, went barefoot until age 13 – “I felt these questions inside, in my
very body, I don’t know why I had these questions, I never told anybody
about them” (FN 7.21.93).
At first provoked by poverty and familial anguish, then reinforced by
classroom alienation, questions felt “in my very body” disposed him to find
answers in an alternative community offering not just psychic relief but a

new world of meaning.
The Lure of Literacy

The essential medium of the world in which Daniel found both refuge and a
future was the written (Spanish) word. He cites “illumination” to account for
his ready understanding of Catholic prayer and precept initially absorbed by
memorization. The mature catechist also recounts a vision during an open-air
course conducted by an early catechist:
It was a kind of apparition. There was a huge cross with the colors of the rainbow.
A piece of paper fell down from it, looking like a beautiful rooster or chicken, and
landed on my folded arms. I put it in my pocket without looking at it or telling
anyone about it and ran home so my [brother-in-law] could read it. There were
lines of colored writing on this tiny piece of paper. It said I would get 500 pesos
[US$165.00]. It wasn’t signed (FN 7:31.93).
Daniel’s vision attests to the enormous attraction and promise of the written
word in a largely oral culture on the margins of an ethnically-divided world
in which literacy functioned as an instrument of domination (Cornelius 1991;
Genovese 1974: 561-566; Goody 1968; Sanneh 1989, 1993). The images
embedded in it gloss the divide while showing the Word of God to effect
Christian conversion not only as message of salvation but as medium of
social power.
Listening to a lesson he was as yet unable to read, Daniel perceived the
quintessential Christian symbol conflated with the Maya sun-god in rainbow-
colored hues hovering over the field, confirming the divine source of his
good fortune. Its announcement came in the form of a dietary luxury
(chicken) reserved in most Tzotzil households for those rare occasions when
they consumed animal protein. To secret an unearned treasure defends
against envy, characteristic vice of peasant communities whose social organi-
zation assures shared poverty through devices such as cargo.
The family member responsible for his entry into the Catholic community
and, not incidentally, his first literacy instructor, became the obvious choice
to decode this prophesy of economic windfall for the impoverished fledgling
reader. The words had dropped from heaven whose authority they surely bore
in the absence of a human signature. The paper was tiny, its recipient empha-
sizes, a sign of the precariousness of its promise. But it could not have been
grander: wealth, and hence well-being, betokened by brightly colored words.
The vision’s interpretation depends on contextual clues. Its symbolism
describes realistic ambition rather than fantastic wish, linking, as it does,
well-being (chicken, rainbow colors, money) and written text, just as wealth
46 Chapter One
had historically been limited to literate Ladinos (and their indigenous clients)
in highland Chiapas. Far from confinement within the boundaries of one
man’s idiosyncratic psychic experience, in various guises these associations
are echoed repeatedly in conversion stories told by the catechists of Magda-
lenas.
All were exposed to literacy but finally denied it in public bi-lingual
schools staffed by ladinoized indigenous teachers, when not Ladinos them-
selves. As Rudolfo, another catechist who now tutors less-literate peers in the
Bible, explains, “I went to school for eight years and graduated from primary.
But nothing entered my head there” (FN 10.7.93). Aware of the power of
literacy by humiliating encounters with Spanish-speaking vendors, employ-
ers, and government agents – including teachers – (“indito” – little Indian,”
they called me, Rudolfo recalls), reading and writing became highly desir-
16
able, even revered and mystified, capacities.
While indigenous scribes had been present in highland communities since
early colonization, they were essentially agents of ladino government over
and against Maya community. It had been decades since an indigenous agent
of the church had appeared in any highland hamlet.
But when a new generation of Maya catechists appeared in the parish of
San Andrés in the mid-1960s, they modeled in their persons and created with
the text an extraordinarily congenial context for the acquisition of literacy.
Here was not merely an immensely desirable skill but an alternative future
for young men disenchanted with cargo but unwilling and/or uninvited to
pursue social options entailing ladinoization.
This world of words was explicitly indigenous and implicitly tied to the
Spanish language, heretofore an exclusively ladino medium. By his very
translation in a Tzotzil field of a religious lesson originally learned in Span-
ish, the fiscal-catechist straddled boundaries that could not be bridged in
state-sponsored INI school rooms ruled by ladinoized bi-lingual teachers.
Not every catechetical lesson took place in the essential locus of Tzotzil
life – “el campo – the countryside.” But the religious discourse of the first
Andresero catechists was, by missionary necessity, linguistically and socio-
culturally situated wholly in indigenous territory. Presumably every person in
attendance understood that the instructor came in the name of the priest; but
this non-indigenous presence was remote, indeed practically invisible. The
convening agent of this Tzotzil gathering shared the assembly’s ethnic, as
well as linguistic, identity. His authority, however, rested not only in the
hearing accorded him by his fellow Tzotzils but on his access to the dominant
––––––––––
16 In one of many demonstrations of the esteem with which Tzotzils regard literacy, usually
undemonstrative women quite openly expressed astonishment when a teenage girl read to
them about weaving from an illustrated primer.
world. This access, historically forbidden to Indians, was conferred in the

first instance by bi-lingualism, articulating a moral agenda.
The central axis around which this agenda turned was trago, the neuralgic
point of rift between fathers and sons threatening the reproduction of Tzotzil
tradition in the parish of San Andrés, including the village of Santa Maria
Magdalenas. Challenging the socio-religious practice fathers saw as life-
giving and sons as death-bearing, the catechist preached the Word of God
which epitomized as text both lucidity and mobility, and explicitly con-
demned drunkenness.
Elias, among the first catechists in Magdalenas, guards a picture of
himself at seventeen standing with head bowed behind his parents under the
shelter of the ceremonial tent marking the high-status cargo of alférez, or
fiesta-sponsor, reached by only the few men of sufficient means. But Elias
now agrees with another catechist’s sardonic assessment: “His [Elias’] father
can’t get ahead at all. He’s a terrible worker. The only thing he knows how to
do is eat and drink” (FN 5.13.94).
It took the Magdalenero Bartolomé a long time after he had left his
father’s household and established his own to become a catechist. His con-
version story explicitly ties drink to immobility:
My wife and I heard the Word of God. When they asked me to serve in the [town-
ship] agency, I knew I couldn’t make good decisions if I was drunk. We went to
church every day for a week to ask God to help me quit drinking. And when I did,
I joined the Catholic community and worked for the people in the agency, too. I
never drank again (FN 11.2.93).
Translated from Spanish to Tzotzil, the medium enforced the message: God
was reached not by offerings of rum under obligation enforced by the elders,
but rather by observing God’s Word in free association with peers. For the
more ambitious, knowledge of the Word meant learning to read the Spanish
Bible and thus mastering the idiom of social mobility, not under the tutelage
of government teachers but of Tzotzil campesinos fulfilling a novel, but
transparently authentic, cargo. In short, the catechist cargo relied on text
instead of trago as medium of intercourse with God and literacy as cargo
service to Maya community.
Early anthropology of literacy (e.g., Goody and Watt 1963; Street 1984)
acknowledges religion as a foundational locus for literacy practice; indeed,
Goody argues that religion, commerce, and state bureaucracy were the
motivating vehicles for the written word (Goody 1986). Goody further claims
for literate religions extraordinary privileges and tacit ideological power,
asserting that the fixity and transportability of the text enables theological
48 Chapter One
(monotheistic) and ethical universalism to replace the contextually-specific

gods and norms of local, oral religions.
How this might be so rests in a paradox: religions bound by a book
readily cross boundaries, the universality of their exclusive claims attested by
the mobility of their sacred texts (cf. Sanneh 1989, 2003). Hence the claim:
You cannot practice Asante religion unless you are an Asante.... Literate religions
... at least alphabetically literate ones, are generally religions of conversion, not
simply religions of birth. You can spread them like jam....
In fact, the written word, the use of a new method of communication, may some-
times provide its own incentive for conversion, irrespective of the content of the
Book; for those religions are not only seen as ‘higher’ because their priests are
literate and can read as well as hear God’s word, but they may provide their con-
gregation with the possibility of becoming literate themselves. What I am claim-
ing here.. . is that only literate religions can be religions of conversion in the strict
sense.... (Goody 1986: 5)
Setting aside the final assertion, read in the highland Maya context, “the
possibility of becoming literate” emerges as something more than the univer-
sal human cognitive capacity, and presumably socio-cultural ambition, to
acquire a “technology of the intellect,” Goody’s shorthand for the formal
cognitive import of literacy (1977:16). Goody adduces the “evident perfor-
mative force” of the text in an exemplary Ghanian courtroom: court-room
oaths sworn on Bible or Qur’an unequivocally won over witnesses in whose
eyes those attested by appeal to a local shrine (i.e., the purely oral and/or
visual) appeared inferior in contrast (ibid.: 5-6).
The “force” of the texts in the Ghanian case derived, by implication, from
three “critical” attributes: the “status” of those who possessed, i.e., could
read, them; their “outside,” foreign origins; and, most powerfully, “the gap
between code and actuality” they represented (ibid.:6, 12, 25).
Viewed from the standpoint of the youth transfixed by a vision in a
highland field, the power of these attributes resides in the dialectical relation-
ship among them. The paper that fell from the sky and the bilingual catechist
whose translation of the Word occasioned the daydream both constituted
texts. That is, they crossed boundaries and transcended locations – geo-
graphic, socio-cultural, and linguistic. Further, the Word evinced the gap
between word and world while the catechist’s preaching embodied its liberat-
ing potential.
Ultimately, the apparent fixity of the text challenged the presumptive
fixity of Tzotzil tradition. Here was a reality “above” costumbre in every
sense. It promised not only delivery from immediate cultic debt – the practice
of the Word of God “costs nothing,” one catechist declared (FN 10-X-93).
Even more compelling, it opened a way up from under dominating authori-
ties, indigenous and ladino, and their world(s) of obligation within and
subordination without. Appropriating the Word of God and “managing” it
(manejar, meaning ‘to use or operate with,’ is the term favored by catechists
for deciphering the Bible), Magdalenero youth saw the possibilities of effec-
tive defense against co-optation, resistance to domination, and ultimately
subversion of ladino hegemony. For,
Even in ordinary times the normative implications of the text often provide a
yardstick for the difference between reality and potentiality, between what is and
what should be, between existence and Utopia. In this way it supplies a measure
of our discontent. (ibid.: 20).
The catechist Rudolfo explained how it was that Catholics of Magdalenas

instituted a “semicollective” to increase, and equalize, agricultural production
by pooling and working their tiny and parcels together:
In Genesis it says God intended the land for everyone, not just some few people.
... In Acts 4 we heard how the apostles worked. When Jesus died they made an
agreement. They decided to have all their goods in common. (FN 8. 12.95).
For these Magdaleneros, scripture’s communistic message was not restricted

to economics. The “we” appropriating its utopian announcements resulted
from the social production of a “textual community” (Stock 1983:90) em-
powered in its very gathering to reform traditional modes of production and
thus attenuate the effects of ancestral poverty by reading a text that in princi-
pal is – just as the land in Genesis – “intended for everyone.”
Eliding the logic of dominance and subordination that had ruled the Maya
highlands since the Conquest, the text figured the autonomy it promoted. In
other words, for Magdalenero catechists, the Bible legitimated free rational-
ity, rather than obligatory intoxication, as privileged means of access to the
divine and just so liberation from secular oppression.
Young men of Magdalenas were humiliated by encounters with this
regime in painful migratory treks to the fincas and INI-sponsored schools.
They were thus the first in their community to grasp the liberating possibili-
ties of the new arrival of the Word of God into the world of their fathers.
Their “conversion” meant, in the first instance, freedom from the obligations
of cargo and trago. Secondarily, it led to the Christianization of their under-
standing of Maya cargo and, at the same time, the Mayanization of Christian
ministry. Ultimately, it raised hope for a new assertion of Maya identity as
50 Chapter One
the communities they formed decoded secular domination in and through

their shared deciphering of scriptural text.
As a new basis of reciprocity within the community and as a “technology
of the intellect” transcending confinement from without, the Bible carried by
Maya catechists reached highland communities undoubtedly as una buena
palabra – a good word, as they like to say. How they advanced in its posses-
sion and assumed its power is the story of their passage from objects to
subjects in the missionization project whose schools for doctrinal formation
became venues for liberation.
Constructing Highland Mission 51
Chapter Two
Constructing Highland Mission

Proposals and Problematics
Introduction
There exists today a substantial anthropology of mission theorizing its disrup-
tive processes and finding them charged with power-laden dialectics. Jean
and John Comaroff’s exemplary work on colonial and post-colonial South
Africa demonstrates how these dialectics implicate even the most trivial
features of human society and culture. Bridging history and ethnography, the
Comaroffs’ work uncovers the multitude of contests set in motion in every
domain at all times and places of missionary venture (1985, 1991, 1992,
1997). Using their anthropological analytic “challenge and riposte,” this
chapter and the next begin to reframe an enterprise celebrated for its decolo-
nizing intentions: renewed Catholic evangelization of Mexico’s Indians
during the second half of the last century.
As it came to know the Maya in Chiapas, the Diocese of San Cristóbal de
Las Casas became a laboratory for new approaches to evangelization imbued
with Catholic theologies of inculturation and liberation. But these theologies
were not entirely free of “the essence of colonization,” as the Comaroffs
define it: “seizing and transforming ‘others’ by the very act of conceptualiz-
ing ... them in terms not of their choosing ... assuming the capacity to ‘repre-
sent’ them....” (Comaroff 1991:15). In the Maya highlands, the peculiar
history of Mexican church-state relations and the literally “habit forming”
(ibid.:23) Mexican hegemonic consensus inevitably compromised well-
intentioned pastoral proposals. Challenge and riposte between missionary and
Maya appear insinuated in the laminated layers of these proposals when they
are peeled apart historically from the top.
Vatican II Mission: Inculturation Theology and its Limits

When in the late 1960s Magdaleneros arrived in San Cristóbal to attend
diocesan courses designed to create an indigenous catechetical cohort in the
highlands, they entered an ecclesial world in flux, globally and locally.
Responding to the “signs of the times,” its signature theme, Vatican Council
II (1962-65) reoriented the self-understanding of the Catholic church through
related moves toward aggiornamiento – updating, the goal of Pope John
52 Chapter Two
XXIII’s surprising call for an ecumenical council at the outset of his pontifi-
cate.
The Council ratified modernity by admitting the findings of critical
biblical studies and, in a more limited way, the ascendant social sciences into
ecclesial discourse. In doing so, Catholic bishops placed the church in service
to a world they explicitly acknowledged to be autonomous relative to its own
mission.
Moreover, while European and American prelates and scholars set the
terms of discussion at the Council, attendance of unprecedented numbers of
bishops from Africa, Asia, and Latin America signaled the entry of Christian-
ity into what Karl Rahner called a “third age” auguring abandonment of its
1
centuries-old Eurocentric posture to stand as an authentic “world church.”
The Council’s pastoral-intellectual departures had their greatest immedi-
ate impact in Latin America. Its episcopal delegates, already regionally self-
identified through formation of the Latin American Episcopal Council
(CELAM) in 1955, left Rome decided to take stock of their local church
under the Council’s renewing impulse.2 The resulting August, 1968, CELAM
consultation at Medellín, Colombia, under the programmatic title “The
Church in the Transformation of Latin America in the Light of the Council,”
became historic through its articulation of a developing liberation theology.
CELAM’s explicit condemnation of “structural violence” inflicted on the
impoverished majority by global capitalism and its endorsement of the
“preferential option for the poor” as a theological principle were subse-
quently adopted by the Vatican itself (Galilea 1987: 61ff).
The critical opening in Catholic thought affirmed by Vatican II and
instantiated in the teachings of Medellín reverberated throughout the church,
including those areas designated “mission territory,” areas and populations
ecclesially neglected, alienated, or simply untouched.
Though he played no visible role at Vatican Council II, Samuel Ruiz, an
unusually young delegate, was impressed by the African bishops’ discourses
on the dilemmas intrinsic to evangelization of non-Western cultures. He also
made contacts with Europeans eager to collaborate in confronting them. One
of these, Pierre Boulard, supported by sociologist-consultors to a new asso-
ciation of Mexican bishops serving marginated populations (Union for
––––––––––
1 Of some 2642 prelates present at the Council, there were 849 Europeans, 932 Latin Ameri-
cans, 256 from Asia, 250 from Africa, 239 from North America, 70 from the Pacific Islands;
Alberigo and Komonchak 1995: 2; Rahner 1979: 716-27.
2 Gustavo Gutierrez notes that while Latin American participation at Vatican II was “limited,”
Chilean Bishop Manuel Larraín conceived of a CELAM meeting “to take stock of our situa-
tion in the light of Vatican II” during the Council (in Alberigo, Jossua, and Komonchak
1987: 182-83).
Episcopal Mutual Support – UMAE), initiated a series of meetings in Chia-

pas.
As a result, in 1967 Bishop Ruiz and his pastoral agents divided the
highland diocese into six geo-linguistic “zones” serving distinct Maya lan-
guage groups to encourage attention to the particularities of micro-missionary
fields. This structural acknowledgement of linguistic difference within the
diocese provided the experiential reference for a shift in pastoral strategy for
Bishop Ruiz who, until then, had pursued the familiar Catholic Action
assistencialist model, i.e., education and health initiatives supported by
international aid to ameliorate Maya margination.
At the urging of Jesuits in his diocese, in April, 1968, Bishop Ruiz at-
tended the first continent-wide meeting on mission in Latin America held in
Melgar, Columbia, one of several gatherings preparatory to Medellín. In
retrospective evaluation some thirty years later, Bishop Ruiz depicts himself
as driven to anguished self-examination by anthropological critique of
Christian mission:
I felt full of desperation... Then, ‘what was it to evangelize? ....Should I just sit
and contemplate cultures or try to revive them in their pre-Columbian splendor?
Why did God permit the existence of so many cultures? ... He himself was born
into and embraced a certain culture, even spoke the dialect of the Nazarenes on
the road to Galilee (Fazio 1994: 87).
In this context, a presentation to the assembled churchmen by the Columbian

anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was, to the young bishop, “a
revelation” (ibid). He concluded that accepted modes of evangelization on
the continent – including those he had undertaken in Chiapas – were counter-
evangelical, exuding paternalism, if not outright domination.
At this same meeting, the Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the seminal figure
in liberation theology, formulated Vatican II missiology to offer a theological
way out. His presentation recuperated the patristic doctrine of Justin Martyr,
logos spermatiko – seeds of the Word:
We are taught that Christ is the First-born of God...that he is the Word in whom
all mankind have a share.... Thus whatever has been spoken aright by any man
belongs to us Christians; for we worship and love, next to God, the Logos which
is from the unbegotten and ineffable God; since it was on our behalf that he was
made man... ...[ancient Greek] writers were able, through the seed of the Logos
implanted in them, to see reality darkly (in Shorter 1988: 76-77).
Divine revelation, on this account, is inevitably mediated by cultural particu-

larities. So-called logos Christology prescribes the discovery of the (univer-
54 Chapter Two
sal) Christ-event within (particular) cultures rather than its imposition upon
them.
Nominated to direct CELAM’s Department of Missions and from a
similar position with the Mexican Episcopal Commission for the Indigenous,
Bishop Ruiz embraced this ancient formulation of what contemporary theol-
ogy calls ‘inculturation.’3 From national and international missiological
platforms, he publicly rejected the implicit paternalism in Catholic Action’s
program of moral and social uplift masterminded by missionaries.
Within his own diocese he urged an “incarnational,” “inculturating,”
insertion into local indigenous reality directed toward “integral liberation.”
This theological current rethinks what Ignacio Ellacuria calls the “historical
transcendence” of biblical events, discovering in them “history as corrobora-
tion and demonstration of God” in order to argue “a single praxis of salva-
tion,” at once historical and transcendent, i.e., eschatological (Ellacuria and
Sobrino 1993: 251-89).
But theological warrants by themselves could not remap mission. Indeed,
read closely, the document produced by the Melgar meeting actually con-
strained the renewal in mission it hoped to instigate. It proposed: varied
“circumstances” would produce different realizations of a “unique and
identical” missionary task; “autochthonous” churches could emerge within a
universal ecclesial paradigm; paternalism and alliances with power elites
should be rejected in favor of advocacy for structural change; the church,
nonetheless, should assume responsibility “to prepare” marginated popula-
tions for the inevitable arrival of technology and secularization; and mission
should work to reverse indigenous alienation from national culture(s) (Depar-
tamento de Misiones – CELAM 1989: #13-15; 19; 21-26).
In short, Melgar missiologists acknowledged the fundamental problematic
of mission: How can the liberating message of Christian doctrinal universals
be mediated within particular, highly varied cultures? But they also continued
to postulate higher orders and/or centers – universal church, modernization,
the nation state – from which “the unique and identical” mission would
approach what ipso facto became lower orders and/or encompassed peripher-
ies, e.g., authochthonous churches or vulnerable and isolated indigenous
populations.
Thus while drawing on liberation theology’s critique of predatory capital-
ism, inculturationist proposals failed to fully examine, and/or unintentionally
––––––––––
3 Pope Paul VI summarized the idea of inculturation: “what matters is to evangelize man’s
[sic] culture and cultures (not in a purely decorative way, as it were, by applying a thin ve-
neer, but in a vital way, in depth and right to their very roots...” Evangelii Nuntiandi 1975:
#20. Important full-scale studies addressing inculturation include Amaladoss 2005; Arrupe
1981; Bamat and Wiest 1999; Roest Croellius 1981- ; Irarrázaval 2000; Schineller 1990;
Schreiter 1985, 1997; Shorter 1988.
reiterated, premises and structures of mediation that suggested domination in

a less dehumanizing but arguably still problematic register. A hierarchical
church remains not least among these mediating realities.
In an address to a 1973 international mission forum, Ruiz rejected what
he called “sandwich religion,” a composite of Christian concepts grafted onto
traditional cosmologies as mere additives, formulaic veneers, or selective
substitutions (Ruiz García 1973: 21-30). Correctly understood, Christian truth
is not a doctrine but “an event ... saving history,” in principle translatable in
the terms of any culture. The task of mission is
not to create one great universal monoculture; rather it is... to make the Word
flesh ... according to the particular characteristics of the culture ... [and] lead to
both the development of its individual characteristics and unity with other cultures
... to give light to people in their movement.... (ibid.: 25-26).
Despite its historicizing tone, the bishop’s argument for what he called the
“incarnational principle,” like the Melgar document, evaded significant
impediments to the ecclesial embrace of cultural pluralism. In his formula-
tion, mission’s challenge – to preach the Christian gospel as a source of “light
to people,” that is, a universally translatable value – operates as principle
rather than problematic. By focusing on mission’s theological dimension, the
bishop pushed its mediating agents to the periphery of concern.
This discursive strategy assumes the compatibility of hierarchy – “the
incarnation of the Church has been entrusted to the totality of its members
according to the place which each one occupies in this mystic Body” (ibid.) –
with autochthonous churches envisioned as the end of inculturation.
But authochthony implies “place” as a locus of meaning and value,
begging questions about who maps and assigns locations. Similarly, though
Ruiz acknowledged the missionary’s “disturbing influence,” he assumed she
will be “free from any negative testimony of oppression and injustice” simply
by ecclesial association (ibid.). With faith in the power of God and trust in
missionary beneficence, he offered this innocent prognosis:
God will then continue doing his own work; men will hear his voice and, without
pressure, in a sublime act of acceptance of the ‘unknown God,’ will orient their
lives toward Him.... Then will spring forth a Church which is truly incarnate, a
Church which can be said to be autochthonous (ibid.: 28).
The bishop’s elevated vision evades the critical questions: whether and how
autochthony can result from mission under the auspices of “the Universal
Church in its hierarchical aspect” (ibid.) even (and particularly) when in-
formed by a theology of inculturation. These questions were implicitly
56 Chapter Two
addressed at both Melgar and Medellín by appeals for decentralization of the

church. But Catholicism’s fundamental institutional constraint – hierarchy –
remains an unexamined given in CELAM documents, as in other post-
conciliar mission proposals.
The compatibility of religious hierarchy – arguably best understood as
encompassment (Dumont 1970: 65-78) – and autochthony, and other, simi-
larly vexing theoretical issues are most amenable to analysis viewed from
within the circumstance(s) they seek to address. But in this connection, too,
normative ecclesial discourse truncates the analytic enterprise.
In official church pronouncements, “circumstance” generally denotes a
theological locus and culture is construed as a repository of meanings and
values without reference to the social determinants of its creation and trans-
4
mission. These latter include power relations tied to Marxist prescriptions for
class struggle in the minds of Latin American prelates schooled to battle
atheism and exposed to social thought generally in its functionalist varieties.5
Thus in church documents circumstance is fused with culture construed
principally, if not exclusively, as an idealized sphere of symbols, detached
from social origin or effect (Suess 1994: 12). In short, what an Asian theolo-
gian criticizes as “inculturation fever” (Pieris: 1994: 32) reduces (or elevates)
ritual and symbol to aesthetics (Angrosino 1994: 824-32).
This theologically-refracted view of culture is of an ecclesiological piece
with limited scrutiny of the church’s practice of power in Latin America, the
world’s most Catholic region. Bishop Ruiz and his episcopal allies at
Medellín and since have often publicly recognized and rejected church
alliances with governing elites who ignore structural poverty and human
rights. The more progressive among them acknowledge that the church is
embedded in social processes and thus only relatively autonomous. They also
accept the inevitability of conflict with the dominating regimes they criticize.
Yet it is difficult to discover in the writings of these bishops evidence of
critical reflection either on the everyday practice of power required for the
church’s institutional survival, or on the social origins and location of church
agents as bearers of power in pastoral action. Instead, the pronouncements of
––––––––––
4 CELAM’s 1992 Santo Domingo document proposes: ‘promoting an inculturation of the
liturgy...maintaining the value of universal symbols in harmony with the general discipline
of the church;’... ‘promoting indigenous...autochthonous cultural values by means of an in-
culturation of the church.” CELAM, 1992: #248. A Chilean comment on CELAM’s refer-
ence to “Christian culture,” “everything is reduced to the sphere of values... From this view-
point, inculturation is reduced to an undertaking to moralize culture in accordance with
Christian morality.” (Castillo 1994: 76).
5 Bishop Ruiz describes Latin American bishops’ training: “Little was said of Marx. ... We
studied Spencer and [functionalist] other sociologists.... Society was thought to be stable ...
Change was an aggression against the established order. ...at Medellín... structural analysis
began ...” (Fazio 1989: 66).
Latin American bishops’ display their often innocent, nearly unswerving, and
perhaps inevitable belief in the institution whose hierarchs they are. In effect,
their status obviated critical insight into everyday ecclesial entanglements in
webs of power.
Dumont’s argument that religious hierarchy “cannot give a place to power
as such, without contradicting its own principle” – i.e., the religious as such,
for Dumont the realm of purity or “the whole”– explains why the church’s
institutional self-understanding was skewed in this way (Dumont 1973:77).
Statements by Samuel Ruiz himself express the inevitable (according to
Dumont) contradiction between suspicion of counter-evangelical political
alliances and innocence regarding the church’s own practice of power.
In a 1993 address to the World Parliament of Religions, the Bishop
insisted that conflict is intrinsic to the human condition and condemned the
Conquest’s immoral “imposition of religion and culture.” He echoed CE-
LAM’s call for correction of the first evangelization by ecclesial conversion
to the poor and rejection of secular power (Ruiz García 1993: 22-29; cf.
Puebla 1975: # 1157-58).
But in reference to intra-ecclesial conflicts, the Bishop also proposed:
...if according to its constitution it [the church] maintains its hierarchical nature, it
is to assure ... service to the ecclesial and human community as free as possible
from political eventualities and situations. It [the church] is a hierarchy instituted
to promote democracy. This is a conflict [between hierarchy and democracy] that
is somewhat artificial since every institution (and all religion) has transcendent
points that are never negotiable.... (ibid.: 25).
Precisely as Dumont’s theory predicts, the bishops asserts that hierarchy

necessitates a church free from – ‘pure’ of – politics because its “hierarchical
nature” demands it be so: power is “not allowed for by the theoretical hierar-
chy of pure and impure” (Dumont 1973: 77). Just as the Brahmanic priest-
hood stands for (religious) purity from (organic) pollution, so the church, in
Ruiz’s argument, embodies freedom (purity) from politics and promotion of
democracy as requisite to the absolute (religious) dignity of human being.
Yet the very existence of non-negotiables compels the exercise of power.
Indeed, hierarchy’s ‘freedom’ depends upon enforcement of order against
chaos (for Ruiz, the inherently conflictive human condition).
Thus assertion of ‘non-negotiable transcendent points’ begets contradic-
tion as transcendence begets hierarchy. Or, put another way, hierarchy
(emblem of the divine whole) necessarily subjects power (the political order)
to itself while requiring power – its own as well as that of secular allies – to
do so. But power in this double sense must be hidden from hierarchy for
hierarchy to be itself: “[hierarchy] must give a place to power without saying
58 Chapter Two
so, and it is obliged to close its eyes to this point on pain of destroying itself”
(ibid.).
Intended to reinvent Christian mission, accepted inculturation theology
fails to address this fundamental problematic. Catholic mission constructed
on such theological elision generally moves from the universal to the local
without noting the passage through power this traversal necessarily entails. In
the case of Mexico, a leap from the universal to the local without passing
through the nation could only be an illusion for historical reasons directly
impinging on renewal of mission to the Maya.
From Equivocal Accomplice to Ambivalent Critic: Post-Revolution Mexican

Church
The peculiar history and position of the church in relation to state and society
in Mexico – overwhelmingly Catholic culturally as well as statistically –
accounts for the contradictions in Catholic mission in highland Chiapas
6
(Camp 1997: 4-5). Indeed, the sinuous post-Revolution struggle of the
Mexican church to survive hostile governments lies scarcely hidden beneath
the recent renown of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Alternately
celebrated and criticized for its pastoral innovations, the controversial diocese
is more adequately portrayed by palimpsest than polemic.
Hierarchs and statesmen brought an end to the Cristero revolt, the bloody
Catholic traditionalist struggle against the Mexican Revolution’s anti-clerical
secularization of society, through the construction of a modus vivendi which
ceded the church moral and doctrinal influence (particularly through its
schools) in exchange for its acceptance of state dominance of the nation’s
7
political economy (Blancarte 1992: 32). The more or less “hidden” collabo-
ration of bishops and bureaucrats in the interest of social control failed to
prevent occasional church-state skirmishes (Reich 1995).
Official hostility to the church was actually enshrined in the Constitution
of 1917 which denied juridical identity to the church while the state set the
number of priests allowed in Mexico (in 1931, one cleric per 50,000 Mexi-
cans) and blocked the entry of foreign priests altogether.8 As a result the
––––––––––
6 According to Camp, despite persistent official anti-clericalism, the percentage of the
Mexican population that called itself Catholic dropped just 9% from 1900 to 1990 when it
stood at 90.28% of 63,285.027 Mexicans. Carlos Fuentes epitomizes the cultural force of
Mexican Catholicism thus: “I am a nonbeliever, but I am a Catholic in the sense that I be-
long to a Catholic culture. I can’t get away from it. It impregnates everything – my world
view, my view of politics, my view of women, of education, of literature” (Camp 1997: 5).
7 “In the Mexican context, the church disputes the masses with the state” (Blancarte 1996:
32).
8 The 1917 Constitution’s “anticlerical virulence” aimed at “preventing the Church from ever
recovering its social strength” (Loaeza-Lajous 1990: 279). Under it church ministers had no
church’s voice was diminished and its power severely attenuated in the
public sphere. Nonetheless, Catholicism remained the dominant domestic
socializing influence on policymakers as well as priests (Camp 1997: 11).
Mutual tolerance between these similarly socialized elites defined Mexi-
can Catholicism’s institutional peculiarities (Camp 1997:11). Lay activists,
women religious, and priests were drawn largely from the middle class to
pursue a moralizing devotionalism that left socio-economic matters, includ-
ing organization of peasants and workers, to the state. Before Vatican II,
Mexican seminaries were characteristically Tridentine in teaching and disci-
pline, their residents monastically segregated not only from secular society
but from any intellectual influences that challenged traditional dogma and
devotion (Camp 1997:162; Pomerleau 1985: 252-54).
In so far as the church extended its moral vision beyond care for individu-
als, it did so through hierarchically directed and often secret gestures to
ameliorate injustice via ecclesially chartered lay organizations such as Catho-
lic Action; and this group operated almost exclusively within circumscribed
parochial spheres (García Gonzalez 1984: 363ff).
In short, the church acceded to privatization of religion while advancing
social values – “unity, order, social peace and conformism” (Loaeza-Lajous
1985: 48) – which legitimated the state’s authoritarian regime and its co-
optation of labor and other social groups.
This tacit division of ideological labor played out in the surreal socio-
religious atmosphere created by church’s “irregular” legal situation:
... the Catholic Church, violates if not the letter, decidedly the spirit of ALL [sic]
constitutional precepts, and this in a systematic and permanent way. What is
more, this irregular situation is known and accepted, or at least tolerated, by the
state. Thus...in a country whose population is predominantly Catholic...the Church
is outside the law (de la Rosa 1985: 2).
The Mexican church’s outlaw status explains its “equivocal complicity” vis a
vis the state up through its early reception of Vatican II (Loaeza-Lajous 1985:
44). Always alert to its precarious legal position, the church pursued a strat-
egy of survival conveniently congruent with anticommunist tercerismo9 then-
current in Latin America (Sigmund 1973: 61-76).
Accordingly, Mexico’s bishops carefully refrained from political pro-
nouncements except those asserting the right, and duty, of Catholics to vote
political rights; “lay education” became the norm in all schools; and the church could own
no property.
9 Tercerismo rejected both communism and unregulated capitalism, a position echoed in
official church social eaching, e.g., John Paul II, Centissimus Annos (1991).
60 Chapter Two
(and thus the church’s capacity to convoke). The bishops’ rigid survivalist
political posture also determined its foreign policy. It concurred with the
secular elite’s antipathy towards Mexico’s Protestant northern neighbor and
maintained a sense of exceptionalism relative to Latin America, ultimately
founded on Mexico’s invented national(ist) tradition: What Loaeza calls an
“autochtonous system of symbols” created during the movement for inde-
pendence – “an idiosyncratic blend of Marian devotion, anti-españolismo and
Neo-aztecism” (Loaeza-Lajous 1979: 275) – fit the elite imaginary making
10
Mexicans revolutionary heirs of a “cosmic race.”
Whether labeled complicity or collaboration, the church’s stance toward
the state undoubtedly enhanced its social position. One measure is the re-
markable mid-century increase in Mexican Catholic religious personnel
staffing a growing number of church-sponsored institutions.11 But this institu-
tional strength only accentuates the church’s political timidity, especially its
failure to address the deepening poverty of Mexico’s majority and suppres-
sion of voices that called attention to it.12
Intra-ecclesial tension arguably reflected the divided consciousness of the
nation’s governing elite. In brief, Mexican modernization was directed by a
corporatist state that fetishized traditional authority, i.e., the caudillo (politi-
cal boss) and the patron. The nation’s political economy was advanced by a
similarly schizophrenic nationalist ideology which sacralized the heroic
mestizo campesino while seeking to “improve the race” through industriali-
zation underwritten with foreign investment. National myth notwithstanding,
in the last century Mexico’s largely-urban middle class expanded rapidly
from 17% of total population in 1960, 25-30% by mid-1980s (P. Smith
1991). This sector produced the church’s personnel and drove its discursive
support for the elite’s hegemonic project.
In October, 1968, the Mexican government massacred some 500 student
protestors who effectively exposed this project at Tlaltelolco, an historic
––––––––––
10 This phrase comes from José Vasconcelos, Mexican Minister of Education during the 1920s.
Loaeza-Lajous summarizes: “To rally Creoles, castas and Indians against Spain, [independ-
ence movement leaders] proclaimed what was essentially a fiction, the myth of a Mexican
nation which was the linear heir of the Aztecs. In practice, however, the insurgents fought
behind the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe” (in Brading 1985: 55).
11 Between 1940 and 1960, the number of priests in Mexico grew from 4220 to 6466; the
number of women religious more than doubled, rising from 8123 to 19,400 (de la Rosa,
1985, p. 281).
12 For example, the Society for Mexican Theology (STM), Young Catholic Workers (JOC), the
para-ecclesial National Center for Social Communication (CENCOS), the Union for Episco-
pal Mutual Support (UMAE), and the Mexican Social Secretariat (SSM) – the last three es-
tablished by the bishops themselves – were either brought under official church control or
formally separated from it and ceased to function by the mid-1970s (García Gonzalez; 1987:
363-97; 442-446; also Muro González 1994: 94-101).
plaza in the heart of the nation’s capital.13 The failure of Mexico’s bishops to
endorse the students’ cause and condemn the state’s violent response despite
broad moral revulsion across the nation revealed the depth of its investment
in social stability.
Earlier that year the hierarchy attempted criticism of the regime’s eco-
nomic development strategy in a “Pastoral Letter of the Mexican Bishops on
Development and Integration of the Country” (García 1984: 381-83; Blan-
carte 1992: 32-36). Noting the failure of state-directed projects, the document
called for free unions and the assumption of social responsibility by all –
“todos somos responsables.”
But the bishops refused to fault the regime directly for growing social
inequalities. To the contrary, it recognized the state “as administrator of the
common good” and tacitly endorsed the hegemonic consensus: “...no one
should project his orthodoxy to condemn others, neither is it licit for a Chris-
tian to try to impose his criterion....” (quoted by Blancarte 1992: 236).
An increasingly vocal minority of clergy and laity chafed at the institu-
tion’s failure to assimilate Vatican II’s call for renewal or assume the pro-
phetic stance of Medillín. But, as one Mexican historian observes, “The
Council had reached the country at an inopportune moment” (Muro Gonzalez
1994: 104). In fact, Vatican II and Medillín took place at the height of the so-
called “milagro mexicano – the Mexican miracle,” a period of steady eco-
nomic expansion and singular political stability (P. Smith 1991: 321-62).
In this circumstance, the center of gravity of the Mexican church on the
ground – the burgeoning middle class and the clergy and women religious
that emerged from it – weighed against change. The bishop of Tuxtla
Gutierrez, capital of Chiapas, voiced the consensus in an Independence Day
invocation:
Our current President and President-elect have repeatedly committed themselves

to a nationalist policy; to not impose imported foreign schemes and to seek a more
just order on the path of liberty. This is an attitude that we Mexicans ought to
back and demand at all times. Because no Mexican wants the hammer and sickle
to substitute for our national flag ... we want no other stars shining in the Mexican
skies than those on the mantle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, creator of our unity
(Blancarte 1992: 411-412).
But uneasiness with such ecclesial appeals existed at the church’s episcopal
center, as well as among progressive pastors. At the conclusion of his first
term (1980-82) as president of the Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM),
––––––––––
13 See first-hand accounts of this still-resonant event in Poniatowska 1975; investigations and
publications continue in Mexico.
62 Chapter Two
just three months after the Bishop of Tuxtla’s nationalist paean, Cardinal
Ernesto Corripio Ahumada borrowed from a homily by the then-Archbishop
of Cracow, Karol Woytyla, in blunt ecclesial self-criticism:
We’ve not known how to extricate outselves from the narrow juridical corner in
which we’re enclosed because we’ve said: We’re not going to lose what we
have... the State has been tolerant,...etc., etc. ...the Church in Mexico leads a
shameful life... we’ve invented formulaic pretexts to avoid more vital and de-
manding, more daring and evangelical, undertakings (Blancarte 1992: 409).14
Juridically “cornered”, the Mexican church shared the state’s notorious

centralization and obsession with control, a fact surely contributing to its
inability to respond to clerics urging change on behalf of those pushed further
to the margins of society by Mexico’s political economic advance. The
alarming 1982 devaluation of the peso following the collapse of oil prices
exposed serious weaknesses in Mexico’s “miraculous” modernizing project
(P. Smith 1991: 377-383). It also further emboldened Mexican pastoral
agents critical of the church’s political passivity. Denied an institutional
voice, they sought alternative routes to effect the Latin American bishops’
1979 Puebla pronouncement of a “preferential option for the poor.”
Some clerics seized on development of ecclesial base communities among
the urban poor to advance social justice ‘from below.’ Others maneuvered
against statist and ecclesial authoritarianism in the clergy-poor dioceses
encompassing the most marginated Mexicans, its Indians. Bishops in the
southeastern states of Oaxaca, Tehuantepec, and Chiapas, in particular,
initiated the “more daring and more evangelical undertakings” to which
Corripio called the church. Here the “world church” presaged by Vatican II
came to Mexico in the form of other worlds within it.
From the Center to the Periphery: Indian Theology in “a country without

Indians”
The Mexican church was geographically centralized to an extraordinary
15
degree. The shape of the church’s discourse inevitably bore the marks of
this geography, its social-political authority both deriving and flowing from
the country’s urbanizing center whose weight only grew as Mexico’s socio-
economic middle expanded and gravitated there as well.
––––––––––
14 “Corripio ... made his own a homily of Karol Woytyla [and] completely assimilated the
Polish example to the Mexican” (Blancarte 1992: 409).
15 In 1957, there were thirty-five dioceses and five mission regions within five ecclesiastical
provinces, all in the center of the country: Mexico City, León, Puebla, Morelia and Guadala-
jara. (García Gonzalez 1984: 367-368.)
But decentralizing moves by Luigi Raimondi, apostolic delegate to

Mexico from 1957-67, disrupted this structural status quo. Among twenty-
four new dioceses created under his direction,16 two were carved within the
centuries-old episcopal territory of Chiapas in Tapachula (1958) and Tuxtla
Gutierrez (1964), leaving the Diocese of San Cristóbal with a majority-
indigenous population. Thus just as Vatican II turned the universal church
toward the modern world, spatial reconfiguration of the Mexican church
directed its focus towards the indigenous world within it.
At the instigation of Bishop Lucio Torreblanca (1894-1961), the immedi-
ate predecessor of Samuel Ruiz in the see of San Cristóbal, CEM established
the Episcopal Commission for Indigenous (CEI) which organized a National
Indigenist Congress in 1960. In response to Congress deliberations, CEM
formed the National Center for Assistance to Indigenous Missions (CE-
NAMI) the next year.
Clodomiro Siller, director of CENAMI during much of its history, attrib-
utes the church’s long neglect of the nation’s Indians to Tridentine dogma-
tism and political insecurity. In fact, Mexico’s bishops, until well into this
century largely Spanish-born or creole, saw no reason to alter a colonial
approach to the nation’s native peoples. They opposed clergy who mobilized
the nation’s Indians during the War of Independence (1810-1821) and never
evinced solidarity with those dispossessed by mid-nineteenth century liberal
disentailment (Siller in Ortoll et al 1985: 213-239). Following the Mexican
Revolution (1910-20), Siller argues,
the best tradition of the Church [identified with Bartolomé de Las Casas]... forgot
that there were indigenous...[and] became nationalized within the Mexican mod-
ernizing project ... officially and ecclesially, Mexico had come to be a country
without Indians (ibid.: 232).
Incorporated as a civil association with government tax exemptions and

import licenses, CENAMI followed an integrationist program ideologically
in line with indigenista proposals for resolution of Mexico’s “indigenous
problem” (see Ch. 1 above). In short, in its initial phase the church’s re-
discovery of the indigenous accommodated its survivalist political posture.
Dioceses in the Pacific Southeast assumed a more experimental stance
and promoted indigenous socio-economic development with CENAMI
resources. A few sympathized with Samuel Ruiz’s move toward liberation
praxis, to “accompany” alongside, rather than assist from above, indigenous
collaborators theologically envisioned as subjects, not objects, of evangeliza-
tion. The bishop’s appeals to European and North American foundations
––––––––––
16 CEM expanded from 60 bishops to 80 during of Vatican II (ibid.).
64 Chapter Two
brought funding for health and education projects directed by clergy and
women religious whom he personally recruited from Mexico’s clergy-rich
urban centers, as well as from Europe and North America.17
Maya margination remained the paramount focus of missionary concern,
leavened in the diocese by Latin American liberationist ideas. But the design
of missionary action bore the imprint of interests as well. In the Diocese of
San Cristóbal, progressive clergy released radical visions supressed at Mex-
ico’s ecclesial center or in home churches elsewhere. Many members of
religious congregations embraced missionary outreach as a means to the
renewal of their own communities in accordance with Vatican II.18
Those clergy eager to challenge Mexican capitalist corporatism and align
the Mexican church with CELAM’s “option for the poor” readily perceived
the power vacuum created by government neglect of the Maya. Their at-
tempts to fill it reflected eagerness to free the Maya from servitude to high-
land elites but also the church from alliance with the Mexican state.
Indeed, not a few missionaries came to Chiapas by a kind of self-
selection, seeing in Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist orientation support for pro-
gressive projects shunned in other dioceses.19 In addition to health and social
services expected of Christian mission, they worked against landlessness and
other structural problems, many focusing on cooperatives as alternatives to
state entities such as the National Peasant Confederation (CNC).
Missionaries less inclined to challenge either the state or traditional
missionary methods nonetheless hoped their service to Mexico’s marginated
would rebound to expand the vision of their sending religious communities.
In effect, missionaries moved from paternalism to liberation strategy all the
while remaining embedded within their habitus (Bourdieu 1975).
Put another way, Mexican pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal
regarded the Maya homeland as an essentially “foreign” missionary field.
While this approach entailed a willingness to learn rather than impose, it also
meant that when Mexican missionaries entered Maya territory they con-
fronted the “other” within. In other words, they bore the peculiar ambiva-
lence of Mexican caste consciousness resonating in Mexico’s nationalist-
indigenist discourse.
––––––––––
17 Ivan Illich charged that Paul VI’s “papal volunteers” were motivated by the left’s political
failures in the U.S. (Costello 1979). Many Mexican clergy were eager to challenge the state
and align the nation’s church with CELAM. One priest said he would leave Chiapas rather
than serve under a bishop who forbade pursuit of his own progressive political agenda (per-
sonal communication, July, 1991).
18 For example, Dominicans working with native peoples in Latin America proposed that
evangelization “represents the historic opportunity to recuperate the spirituality of our mis-
sion and rediscover new incarnational possibilities for our charism” (Salado 1991: 94).
19 This was the view of a priest with over twenty years experience in Chiapas at the time
(personal communication, Spring 1994).
Animating romantic evocations of mestizaje and apotheosis of “the

cosmic race,” the Indian figured within the invented Mexico as both emblem
and problem. The cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, heart of the national
narrative and devotional core of Mexican Catholicism, enshrined the Nahua
catechist Juan Diego as privileged recipient of divine favor. As one historian
argues, guadalupanismo made the Indian the talisman of Mexican national
identity: “Apparition of the Virgin Mary at Tepeyac, so precisely dated in the
year 1532, must surely be interpreted as a foundation myth” (Brading 1984:
30). And Mexican independence from Spanish domination through divine
intervention stipulated that it be precisely Juan Diego, an Indian untainted by
Peninsular connections, who received her.20
The legend of Guadalupe legitimating the nation’s independence was
actually invented by the eighteenth century Creole preacher and theologian,
Miguel Sánchez, who assimilated Juan Diego’s Virgin-visitor to the Woman
of the Apocalypse (Revelations 12). Indeed, prior to Sánchez “no one had
explicitly referred to an ‘apparition’ of the image at Tepeyac....” (Lafaye
1976: 243; see also Brading 2001: 1)
By raising the competition to the supernatural level, Miguel Sánchez made it pos-
sible for his compatriots to triumph ‘magically’ over the gachupines [peninsular
Spaniards].... Guadalupe would be forever and ever, saecula saeculorum, the ‘let-
ters patent’ which ennobled the Mexican people (ibid.: 252).
When Guadalupe is seen this way, Juan Diego is transmuted from agent to
instrument through a theological maneuver readily put to distinctly power-
political ends. Ipso facto, the Indian’s autonomy is negated in his assimilation
to a whole in which, and from which, he remains necessarily always only
(a)part.
Teología India – Indian Theology

The service of Guadalupe to Mexican nationalism evinces the fundamental
problematic confounding renewal of mission to the nation’s natives. CE-
NAMI’s initial development projects implicitly endorsed official indigenist
definitions of the Indian “problem.” But deepening contact with indigenous
people increased the appeal of inculturationist strands of post-Conciliar
theology.
––––––––––
20 “This autochthonous aspect of the cult of purely American images of the Virgin was of
capital importance; it was one of the ways in which the sentiment of American patriotism
could find more or less conscious expression at a time of pervasive distrust of the Spanish
monarchy and fear of its capacity for repression” (Lafaye 1976: 229).
66 Chapter Two
As Bishop Ruiz pronounced, “Christopher Columbus did not carry God in

his three caravelles, but rather God was already present in indigenous com-
munities” (Kan et al 1998: 35). This critical theological insight recommended
Maya religiosity to missionary attention, eventuating in an attempt to identify
“teología india – indian theology” at church-sponsored encuentros (encoun-
ters) among them in Mexico and Guatemala.21
But the record of the first of these shows how the project failed its pur-
pose from the indigenous point of view. Maya and others chosen from native
communities to attend this meeting hosted by CENAMI in Mexico City, in
September, 1990, participated actively in plenary sessions and workshops. A
Kuna (Panamanian) priest voiced their theme: “God is not the property of any
people” (CENAMI 1992: 301).
Yet bishops and CENAMI theologians and staff, not invited indigenous
representatives, set the meeting’s agenda and gave its principal addresses.
Indian participation was generally limited to those invited bilingual represen-
tatives willing and able to travel to the capital. Misalignments between these
ecclesial and indigenous elites, and between them and their respective con-
stituencies, evince the conceptual and operational contradictions embedded in
teología india.
A preface to the 1990 meeting written by a Zapotec (Mexican) Indian and
CENAMI staff member revealed the project’s misrecognized concern:
Indian theology is necessary to safeguard the grandeur of the human spirit and
preserve the evangelizing mission of the churches which is called into question
each time the utopian hopes of any of earth’s peoples are beaten or pulled down
like useless trees (CENAMI 1992: 10).
Teología india presumes that Indians have, like peoples everywhere, always
produced theology. But, as described programmatically here, the project
remained an ecclesial enterprise responding to an ecclesial predicament,
locating native peoples in reference to it.
Thus, the preface dissociates indigenous history from theology, postulat-
ing instead “a vision of transcendent reality” uniting all the native peoples in
the Americas, the history of wars among them having “an explanation totally
at the margin of these theological desires that animated them” (ibid.: 12).
More to the point, according to the author these “transcendent” desires so
converge with Christ’s that they uniquely mediate redemption, “better con-
served in our peoples, because of the cleanness of heart of the poor, than in
many contaminated receptacles of the Church” (ibid.: 14). The author adds:
––––––––––
21 Envisioned as a pan-American movement, the bishops’ interests and limited resources
determined the location of these meetings.
In this sense we believe that theological dialogue will be not only beneficial for
the Indian people, but enriching for the church which will rediscover itself with
the purest of the Christian tradition (ibid.: 33).
At a teologia india gathering two years later, the bishops of Mexico’s South-
east lamented that at its 1992 meeting in Santo Domingo, CELAM continued
to view the church, rather than native peoples, as principal protagonists of
inculturation. These bishops also warned against ecclesial efforts to
strengthen indian identity that might “instrumentalize or fossilize the indige-
nous” (ABYA-YALA 1993: 333). The Mexican bishops’ critique further
credited their own move from pastoral indigenista to pastoral indígena –
replacing an integrationist agenda with respect for indigenous difference – as
an advance beyond Santo Domingo.
Yet, in this same message, Mexico’s most vigorous proponents of indige-
nous agency echoed teología india’s exoticizing presumption: “they [indige-
nous peoples] constitute a reserve of humanity where other human beings and
the church itself can wash themselves” (ibid.: 323). In short, removing the
indigenous from history’s ‘contaminations’ and portraying them as carriers of
purity and transcendence effected the very instrumentalizing move teología
india was ostensibly conceived to counter.
Critical theory locates this “interesting and ... difficult” contradiction in
“the hegemonic in ... its transformational processes” (Williams 1997: 111).
Viewed with this insight, teologia india evinces the misrecognitions entailed
in the social position of leading actors in Mexican mission renewal. From its
vision of the indigenous as a purifying “reserve” follows the project’s attempt
to recuperate the myths, rites, and symbols preserved by “los sabios y an-
cianos” – wise men and elders – repeatedly and reverentially invoked during
its meetings.
But few of these were actually in attendance, and neither they, nor the
younger generation who composed the majority of teología india’s indige-
nous participants, directed its agenda and process. These were set by CE-
NAMI’s clerical organizers and their indigenous protegés, the former in
particular, as Williams puts it, “within or against” and therefore complicit in
Mexico’s hegemonic consensus (ibid.: 111-114).
In other words, though “against” statist and ecclesial domination of
indigenous peoples, CENAMI activists were caught “within” hegemony’s
embrace by social location. Theologians and bishops as institutional elites
and their indian acolytes as community elites were equally removed from
everyday indigenous social-religious practice precisely by their re-
presentation of it.
In fact, its principal promoter argues that “renewal” of indian religion
depends upon theological “confrontation;” put another way, teología india
68 Chapter Two
requires a reflexive move. CENAMI’s director himself expresses the concep-

tual confusions implied by this requirement. He locates Indian theology
“above all in historical resistance” (ibid.: 60). Yet his method demands rising
above everyday “indian social experiences” to distill from them the transcen-
dent tied specifically to an originary horizon of pre-Columbian purity: “In-
dian Theology ... must be, within this arc from the past for the present and of
the future of the Indians of this America called before Tahuantinsuyo, Abya-
Yala, Anáhuac...” (61). He finds the pre-Columbian in rites, songs, sayings,
etc. whose relationship to historic resistance remains unexplained.
Curiously, in the same volume, Bishop Ruiz (accurately) observed:
The communities of the diocese [of San Cristóbal de Las Casas ...were, it seems,
small maya [sic] groups dominated by the Maya. Therefore, with the Spanish
Conquest, they passed from one domination to another. ...there is a rupture in
their historic consciousness. They don’t celebrate memorable dates in their own
history ... they don’t regard the monuments, the pyramids, the ancient ruins in
their own territory as the heritage of their own past; rather they speak of it as
something ‘the ancients’ did (Ruiz Garcia 1991:160 [emphasis in original] ).
The bishop adds, “the Indians have not reflected on the Christian faith with
their own instruments of reflection, such as their myths” (ibid.). In short, with
proponents of teología india, he privileges mythological reflection and
confines the transcendent in indian culture to it.
The incoherence of teología india – alternately elevating and questioning
Maya history and consistently privileging myth and analogous discursive
forms – evinces the conceptual inadequacies and conjunctural concerns
debilitating the project as such. Samuel Ruíz addressed the suggestion that
indian theology represents a regression unfavorable to political liberation
thus:
Actually, we have a walled-up [Indian] religion. There was no dialogue [during

the first evangelization]. Christianity imposed itself on the Indian, and the current
culture is doing the same thing (CENAMI 1993: 85).
Separating himself from “current culture” (presumably Mexico’s moderniz-

ing variety), Ruíz proceeds to specify indian religion: “There is no reason
that the Church should continue to fear talk about indigenous rites or myths.
The practice of Indian Theology involves the rites of the people” (ibid.).
These rites and myths, according to the critique of Santo Domingo he co-
authored with the bishops of Southeastern Mexico,
ought to be presented to all the members of the church and the Mexican people:
Let us not forget that each people has a historic vocation to fulfill ... [and] in these
indigenous cultures we find ... a rich vein of life ... in the search for alternative
models of a just, fraternal, solidary society. Let us drink from these ancestral veins
(ibid.: 334).
In short, episcopal sponsors of teología india found an ecclesial alternative in

the indian ancestral. But this essentialist appeal effectively reinforced the
‘wall’ surrounding indian religion while pretending to breach it. Bishop Ruiz
concluded that repair of the rupture in Maya historical consciousness required
recuperation of the past encased in rites and myths. Privileging these media
for their perceived theological resonance amounted to a further critical
mistake. In fact, “rupture” is precisely not destruction, no more than does the
failure of Indians to own “the pyramids on their own territory” as their
heritage mean they are a people without history.
Critical theory observes that hegemony, as “a saturation of the whole
process of living... limits ... what ultimately can be seen....” (Williams
1997:110). The bishops of Mexico’s southeast envisioned indigenous com-
munities as “models of a just, fraternal, solidary societ[ies].” With Cardinal
Corripio, they also perceived a conjunctural need for redemption at various
sites: mission from its historic injury to the indigenous, the church from its
complicity with the state, society from neo-liberal capitalism. Redemption
demanded a cleansing medium pure enough to dissolve these “contamina-
tion(s).”
For Mexicans nurtured in Guadalupanismo, this medium resided in the
“ancestral veins” of indigenous peoples presumed to be ‘unstained’ by
history because placed at its margins. But teología india’s apotheosis of
indigenous rites and myths as reservoirs of redemptive purity unintentionally
inverted the project’s original intention. Preserved in historical stasis, the
project of Indian theology constrains indian thinking in the here and now.
Indigenous participants in the project’s gatherings, uninvested in ecclesial
purification, readily perceived this constraint. Their evaluation of the pro-
ject’s 1992 meeting in Guatemala concluded:
First - Confronted with the information [by the meetings] we realize that we have
lost much of our culture, but we are motivated to remake our theology.
Second - The difficulty of elaborating this theology is noted....
Third - There wasn’t space to say what we carried inside....
Fourth - The speeches were very academic, pronounced by specialists.... [who]
limited our participation, since it was a gathering of Indians and, as it turned out,
there was a certain lack of respect.
70 Chapter Two
Fifth - The Indians would have liked to speak about the theological experience of
their communities.
Sixth - The important thing is not to spread information collected in books ....
Maya culture is an experience not a theory.
Seventh - It’s necessary to give the Indian the place that is his in a gathering of
Indians. It’s useless to know the Bible if our culture isn’t recognized. (CENAMI
1993: 191, my translation.)
A Guatemalan priest validated this complaint:
...for the majority of the participants, the level is very elevated.... Our people have
their own identity, their own face, their experience of life. Surely it’s not our job
to design their life and their face. (ibid.: 189)
Another intervention identified the critical point:
The process of bringing Indian theology to light is vulnerable to the danger of pro-
fessionalization... of being reduced to a way of life for some. It has to be asked
[whether] Indian theology is being used to enrich Christian theology in its new
evangelization project. When one speaks of an autochthonous church it’s neces-
sary to define what one understands by autochthony (ibid.:192 [emphasis added).
The Greek khthon – earth – fixes the root definition: autoch-thonous = “one
sprung from the land itself,” (American Heritage Dictionary 1996). The
indigenous complaint registers this meaning precisely: “the Indians would
have liked to speak about the theological experience of their communities.”
In short, given space they would have spoken from their place – not a pure
‘originary’ past of mythical construction but a ‘contaminated’ historical site
of ongoing cultural production.22
Designed by ordained theologians, and thus ipso facto distanced from
indigenous space and place, teología india necessarily reduces to “informa-
tion collected in books” rather than the “theological experience” of living
Maya communities. “Confronted” and, in some measure, affronted (“there
was a certain lack of respect”) by “information” about their own past, the
indigenous critic concluded: “this seems ... like a course of formation....”
(CENAMI 1993: 192). In short, the indigenous commentator warned of
(re)conquest in a different key.
––––––––––
22 Humanistic geography has been usefully adapted for the study of religion (J.Z. Smith 1987:
26-46).
The re-presentation of the autochthonous other is inherently problematic,

as an ample literature shows.23 Moreover, the authochthonous cannot be
adequately represented by putatively purified extracts (rites and myths)
because it is situated by definition. In short, evasion of situation led teología
india into re-colonizing paradox. Seeking redemption from the historical
complicities that had assured its socio-political position, the Mexican church
elevated the Indian. But in doing so, it unintentionally replicated, rather than
escaped, the logic of hegemony rooted in conquest and colonization.
Some Critical Theory for Theology

Vatican II propelled the Mexican church to the periphery and its ecclesially-
neglected indigenous peoples; yet its missionary project(s) remained tacitly
tied to the center. Mission’s principal theoretical resource for renewal – the
theology of inculturation issuing from Vatican II – drew on retrieval of the
formulation logos spermatikos, seeds of the Word of God in the world. But
this retrieval restricted this presence to a discursive frame – the symbolic,
mythic, ritual – excluding critical social dimensions of cultural production in
historical practice.
Moreover, the theological foundation of inculturation thinking – the
incarnation of God in history – postulated an intervention from without. Its
missionary corollary apparently entailed, at least for early missiological
revisionists, theological excision of traces of the transcendent in circum-
stances historically and socio-culturally distant from this event, and from
themselves. Whatever value these traces might hold were thus implicitly
ascribed not to their authochthonous origins but to their centripetal reso-
24
nance.
For teología india discernment of an authentic manifestation of God in
culture seems to be the exclusive faculty of those able to identify and inter-
pret it as such; in short ‘specialists’ who privilege theologically resonant
discursive forms and, ipso facto, themselves as interpreters of them. Such
interpretation implies that the universal meaning of God’s incarnation in
Jesus of Nazareth is uniquely established by agents of the church.
The question thus arises: Is there a necessary homology between message
and messenger in Christian doctrine, such that the incarnation as the center of
history in principle requires a hierarchical church to map its meaning? Here
––––––––––
23 Representation of the other, a foundational theme for subaltern and post-colonial studies, is
thematized in a variety of disciplines: e.g., for anthropology, Clifford 1988; philosophy,
Levinas 1998; the study of religion, J.Z. Smith, 2004; ritual theory, C. Bell 1992.
24 J.Z. Smith argues the availability of the idea logos spermatikos to just such a colonizing
maneuver. (1987: 101-02).
72 Chapter Two
we have an ecclesiological variant of the question of the center early notions

of inculturation beg but do not resolve.25
The idea of the center implies a periphery just as the universal points to
the particular. Conceptually center and periphery are relationally fixed to
each other as spatial referents; the relation itself is not readily amenable to
reconstruction. But the conjunction universal-particular can be, and has been
historically, variously construed.
For the ancient classics, the divide between them permits no mediation
without contradiction, i.e., the universal either dissolving or being corrupted
by the particular; in classical Christianity, the divide requires mediation by
divine intervention (the Incarnation) whose universality is henceforth embod-
ied in a particular, exclusive group (the church); and for moderns, the divide
is abolished by transparency of the real to reason and Christianity’s incarna-
tional principle cancelled through embodiment of the universal in European
culture (Laclau 1996: 46-49).
The identification of church with European culture gave rise to Christen-
dom and the colonial result inculturationist mission hopes to undo. But it
cannot do so while tied to an incarnational logic which subdues or destroys
difference by universalizing one particular.
But suppose difference is a condition of universality. Conceived as
“missing fullness” and/or “receding horizon,” “the universal is incommensu-
rate with the particular but cannot exist without it” (ibid.: 52,57). This idea is
congruent with strains in Christian eschatology. For example, proclamation
of the resurrection is a signal of “divine dispersal,” implicit in the absence of
the risen Christ who has gone ahead (Mt. 28, 7) and a Kingdom already
arrived but yet to come (Duquoc 1980: 63, 67). Dispersal points to the
periphery and the possibility that “universality happens on the fringes” (ibid.:
69). In other words, something new – unanticipated and uncontained by the
center – might emerge at the periphery.
Bishop Ruiz and his fellow bishops’ desire to promote indigenous subjec-
ivity proceeded tacitly from a variant of Christian eschatology, as attested by
their repeated affirmation of indigenous peoples as ‘subjects of their own
history.’ But their theological construals of culture melded with their hierar-
chical positions to constrain disclosure at the periphery. An instance of this
effect, Mexican mission’s struggle to undo its colonial past through rites of
purification like teología india unintentionally distanced difference, thus
sustaining the status of the nation’s indigenous as the other within.
––––––––––
25 Robert Schreiter, for example, acknowledges that the normative status of tradition within
Christian theology is the unresolved agendum of inculturation and that ecclesiology is “one
of the major issues in the developing of local theologies....” (1985: 38). Baum holds that
Roman Catholicism itself is an inculturation of the Gospel and, as such, impossible to incul-
turate (1994: 101-103).
The historical conjuncture had more than a little to do with this result,
related to disruption of the hegemonic consensus whose hidden architecture
privileged hierarchical forms derived from Roman Catholicism. Historically,
the principle of hierarchy governing the universal church became embedded
in the logic ordering the Mexican nation according to an “hierarchical and
organic image... made up of complementary, unequal and interdependent
masses” (Lomnitz-Adler 1999: 289).
Caste consciousness originated as a shaping force in Mexican national
culture through Thomistic legitimation of Spain’s encompassment of colo-
nized nations “in a chain of subordination and complementarity...[with] the
26
king and the pope at its apex” (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 262). The notion of
“purity of blood” allowed the Hispanicization of the church through the
subordination of new-world converts to Spaniards, just as Moslems and Jews
were subordinated to Old World Christians in Spain: the required vigilance of
Spaniards over Indians in matters of faith legitimated the domination of the
one over the other in political economy (ibid.: 263-64).
Liberalism promoted universal citizenship which advanced class over
caste as a principle of social order. It did not eliminate the valorization of
(European) whiteness founding colonialism’s highly elaborated ordering of
castes (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 271-72). The Mexican Revolution promoted the
mestizo as hero in the nation’s cultural self-understanding. But revolutionary
indigenismo postulated the Indian as guarantor of the nation’s soul, while
aspiring to modernization and the benefits of capitalism, associated with
North America and Europe and thus whiteness. Thus the Indian remained the
ideal(ized) subordinate in the construction of the Mexican national commu-
nity “which had an Indian soul, a mestizo body, and a civilized future” (ibid.:
280).
Bishop Ruiz insists that pastoral strategy in the Diocese of San Cristóbal
proceeded not from theology but from experience. He clarified his under-
standing of liberation theology’s origins thus:
For me as a Christian, commitment is first: I have to intervene. ...This is what is

happening in Latin American theology, it [theology] isn’t the first action of the
Christian but the last. The first is committed encounter with the poor, with the
marginated, the option, we said (quoted in Marcos 1998: 44). 27
––––––––––
26 Another historian shows that Thomism legitimated Spanish colonialism as an enterprise of
conversion: Seed 1993: 635-40.
27 The Bishop again: “The process of making this option was simple: the poor were there and
we were working with them... The new theological explanation simply affirmed an option
that was obvious for us.....” (Ruiz quoted by Andraos 1999: 14-15).
74 Chapter Two
Unquestionably, near permanent socio-political crisis in Chiapas shaped

Bishop Ruiz’s episcopate as the state’s feudal social order was yoked to
economic strategies of Mexico’s one-party government.28 Equally unques-
tionable is the fact that the diocese’s denunciation of neo-liberalism as a
threat to indigenous survival met with hostile resistance that piously defendly
Mexican Catholicism against ‘imported,’ read marxizing, theologies of
liberation.29 In the circumstance, the bishop’s disassociation from theology
(mis)construed by opponents as both unorthodox and unpatriotic can be
understood as episcopal prudence.
Nonetheless, though the dynamism and novelty of pastoral action in the
Diocese of San Cristóbal among the Maya may not have been scripted by
theologians, invocations of inculturation and, more emphatically, liberation
dominated its discourse. This discourse constituted the not-so-hidden tran-
script of the ongoing negotiation of hegemony in Mexico which erupted in
the 1968 violence at Tlaltelolco. The church, historical patron of consensus,
subsequently became an active party in a now-open, now-hidden but continu-
ally deepening struggle for power to reconstrue the nation in the persons of
ecclesial agents who sought room for personal and/or political maneuver at
the margins of the nation.
To repeat an important theoretical observation: “The most interesting and
difficult part of any cultural analysis ... seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its
active and formative, but also its transformational processes” (Williams
1997: 111). In post-Tlaltelolco Mexico, surely a transformational moment,
theological constructions such as teología india inverted the terms of coloni-
zation without reversing the relations embedded in ecclesiastical hegemonic
consent. Liberation proposals contested consent. But a species of political
myopia in them ascribed critical values in the hegemonic equation, including
30
popular religion and ethnicity, to false consciousness.
The Diocese of San Cristóbal: Liberation and Difference

On the ground in Chiapas, liberation practice said less about this argument
than about the effects of social positions and dispositions in the missionary
encounter. More precisely, in the case of highland Maya mission, the social
––––––––––
28 Neo-liberalism’s negative effects in Chiapas contributed to the 1994 Zapatista revolt
(Harvey 1998; Rus and Collier 2003).
29 Apart from well-known Vatican critiques, in their 1975 “Andes Document,” Latin American
bishops themselves called liberation theology “a fundamental danger to the faith of the peo-
ple of God,” adding: “In the portrait of the ‘popular church’ presented by these theologies,
we are unable to recognize the face of the true church of Christ” (cited by Allen, Jr. 2000:
16).
30 Exemplary is the Sandinista government’s (1979-89) fractious relationship with Nicaragua’s
Miskito Indians. Many fault liberation theology’s initial neglect of cultural considerations.
In anthropology, among the more influential is Burdick 1992.
location of missionaries arguably mattered as much or even more in the

hegemonic contest than their theology, particularly given the stakes – power-
relations in the Mexican nation-state, and the principal arena in this contest –
(socio-cultural) difference.
Preaching an autochthonous church of socio-politically liberated Maya,
the Diocese of San Cristóbal inevitably met with resistance and, with time,
increasingly aggressive assaults from highland Ladinos who correctly per-
ceived the church’s preferential option for the indigenous as a threat to their
power. Among pastoral agents who regarded political self-definition as an
unavoidable consequence of liberating mission, these attacks only confirmed
their prophetic identity.
Yet actual evidence of missionary-Maya encounter suggests that preoccu-
pation with opponents without inhibited examination of obstacles within
mission’s decolonizing intentions. In short, what Bourdieu calls “marks of
social position and hence social distance... between social persons conjunc-
31
turally brought together” rendered liberation constructions inadequate to the
essential missionary task in the Maya highlands, the negotiation of differ-
ence.
Hegemony’s hold on ecclesial actors is particularly evident in the history
of diocesan attempts to revamp church structures. Bishop Ruiz introduced
new forms of shared authority in diocesan governance in keeping with
Vatican II notions of collegiality (Komonchak: 77-90, Vischer: 233-48 in
Alberigo et al 1987). The most novel of these were diocesan assemblies
featuring sometimes spirited debates over mission strategy. These debates
intensified as organized political movements sought to co-opt ecclesially-
activated indigenous people, and/or pastoral agents themselves, to advance a
32
radical anti-government agenda. Following the meeting of Latin American
bishops at Medillín, the diocese moved from a reformist posture of “incarna-
tion” (its 1968 formulation) to a more radical option in 1975 for “work with
––––––––––
31 “[I]t is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry
with them, at all times and in all places, in the forms of dispositions which are so many
marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions, that is
between social persons conjuncturally brought together (in physical space ...) ... in short
‘knowing one’s place’ and staying there” (Bourdieu 1977: 82).
32 The Socialist Worker’s Party (PST) and the Mexican Worker’s Party (PMT) appeared in the
diocese’s Tzeltal Zone beginning in the mid-1970s (Iribarrán Pascal 1997: 93-120). In this
same period, the Popular Politics (PPs) presented an “offer” to pastoral agents there: “You
take charge of pastoral matters and we handle political organization. You have the commu-
nities in your hands; in this way we can complete our work” (cited by Collier 1994: 74).
Many implicated diocesan priests and catechists in the 1994 Zapatista uprising. Unreliable
research and tendentious logic disqualify most of these claims. In fact, catechists diverged
widely in their political options (Leyva Solano: 1995: 375-405).
76 Chapter Two
the poor and for the poor...to bring about an autochthonous church” (Irribaren
Pascal 1985: 7).
This same diocesan assembly confessed church complicity in oppression
before declaring that those who could not opt “towards the oppressed, the
poor, the addressee of the Gospel” had no place in the Diocese of San
Cristóbal (ibid.: 8). A year later, progressive elements in the diocese pressed
their critique of the church’s “social relations with power...” at a meeting that
became known as the “Assembly of the ‘option for popular power’”(ibid.:
12).
The chronic inability of the Diocese of San Cristóbal to arrive at a stable
organizational structure reflected internal conflicts provoked by this diocesan
33
“line.” Some pastoral agents challenged hierarchical ecclesial authority with
both Vatican II’s gesture to collegiality and the discourse of popular struggle.
Others effectively enacted personal-political agendas motivating their move
to Chiapas.34 But there were still others who questioned and/or openly re-
sisted this move towards ecclesial political activism, citing church doctrine
absorbed in Mexico’s unreformed seminaries. In sum, fissures within the
missionary cohort in the Diocese of San Cristóbal mirrored fractures in the
Mexican national consensus. 35
Contests over proposals for a viable structure of shared authority and a
consensus option for the poor mired the diocese in indecision.36 Insistence on
governance by consensus to resolve an essentially evolving and therefore
contested pastoral agenda; proposals for political action by a constitutionally
disenfranchised and emergent local church; and, in particular, espousal of
popular power in Chiapas among clerics educated and ordained in elite
circumstances elsewhere – these and other contradictions inevitably divided
missionaries in the Diocese of San Cristóbal. But their debates would un-
doubtedly not have reached such fevered intensity except for the historic
1974 Maya assembly in San Cristóbal known as the Indigenous Congress.
––––––––––
33 A Mexican woman religious recorded this view in her personal diary (FN 15.X.94). Though
the notion carries marxist connotations, a pastoral “line” in Mexico may mean more than the
presence or absence of a stated political project.
34 One priest arrived in San Cristóbal as a “refugee” from the 1973 collapse of Allende’s
marxist regime in Chile; other priests were inspired by Nicaraguan church workers who par-
ticipated in the Sandinista revolution (1976-1990).
35 An extreme example was the pastor in San Andrés Larrainzar “They’ve [diocesan pastoral
agents] forgotten to try to save souls, to teach people to avoid sin and practice virtues.... We
try to save souls, they teach people to struggle” (FN, 21.VIII.93; see Ch. 3). A significant
fraction of Mexican clergy close to local Ladinos shared this view.
36 For example, in 1977 the Priest’s Council proposed a Diocesan Coordinating Council to
oversee four regions, each with a regional council and an episcopal vicar. Instead, the dioce-
san assembly convened that year established a larger assembly of all pastoral agents. But
this structure dissolved a year later over the decision to reject the proposal for formal alli-
ance with the PPs (Irribaren Pascal 1997: 12; see n. 33 above).
This event as much as any other prior to the 1994 Zapatista uprising specifies
why the “search to reposition” pastoral work became, for many, a kind of
‘torture.’37
In an admission that the church occupied a vacuum created by a govern-
ment interested in the Maya only for their ballots (Sonnleitner 1999: 46), the
State of Chiapas asked the Diocese of San Cristóbal to assume organizational
responsibility for a gathering of indigenous to honor Fray Bartolomé de Las
Casas on the 500th anniversary of his birth. Preliminary planning for the
Congress had been directed by an agency implementing the Echeverria
government (1970-76) policy of “shared development” (P. Smith 1991: 365-
375). But this PRI-dominated agency disqualified itself by collaborating in
nullification of the early-1974 election of the first-ever opposition govern-
ment in the municipio of Chamula, the largest in the diocese (García de Leon
1995: 130).
The church stepped into the breach, offering its infrastructure for a series
of preparatory consultations. Local assemblies involving some 400,000
indigenous people designated 1230 delegates who gathered in a San Cristóbal
auditorium from 12-15 October 1974 (ibid.: 120). The event was the first
public Pan-Maya native-language discussion of conditions of indigenous life
ever held in Mexico. With indigenous themselves facilitating translation
among the various linguistic groups, the Congress reviewed a history of
oppression and formulated consensus demands for redress of ancestral
grievances with an assertiveness not seen among the Maya since the armed
38
revolts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the immediate post-Congress period, the Maya of Chiapas could
neither implement nor sustain the unity of political interest manifest in this
unprecedented event. The state government rejected its demands and
launched a campaign of repression targeting any organizational evidence of
an independent indigenous political voice. Thus, the Indigenous Congress
dissolved into discrete local initiatives. Pastoral agents joined with the
political activists to promote indigenous consumer and production coopera-
tives; some secretly allied themselves to militant revolutionary organizations
(Proceso núm. 880: 1993).
––––––––––
37 “If we want to move toward structures of greater service divested of power, we submit to a
tortured search to resituate our work. If we want to live authority as service ... and so modify
diocesan structures, we have to respond to constant appeals from without that de-
mand...decisions taken vertically, without time for solidary shared decision making”( García
González: 1979: 23-24).
38 The most famous of these are the 1712 Tzeltal revolt and the 1867 Tzotzil uprising. This last
revolt began in Chamula following government attempts to suppress a cult constructed by a
self-ordained indigenous priest, Pedro Cuscat (Bricker 1981).
78 Chapter Two
This brief event-history reveals the core problematic of Maya–missionary

encounter in highland Chiapas: misrecognitions entailed in Mexican mission-
ary renewal running up against indigenous revitalization. In short, preoccupa-
tion with the architecture of power within diocesan structures in fact masked
concern for the architecture of power without.
Missionaries attributed the frustration of their desire for solidary decision-
making to activists appeals for political alliance which forced a reversion to
‘vertical’ procedures within the diocese. The re-entry of the church as an
active player in Chiapas and the subsequent arrival of activists with a revolu-
tionary national agenda disrupted the local correlation of political forces. The
history of Mexican church-state relations echoed in this conjuncture. The
indigenous majority, as both symbolic guarantor of national cultural identity
and real repository of social-political power in the highlands, functioned as
both motivation and object of hegemonic contestation. Within this socio-
political dynamic, the church engaged not only the state (federal, state and
local in monopolistic PRI-party fusion). It also contended with newly-arrived
39
political activists, with their own inner divisions, and, by implication of all
the foregoing, with the indigenous it had come to serve.
Arguably, questions about who decided and how in the diocese – through
horizontal/solidary or vertical processes, and/or representative or direct
mechanisms – arose but remained unresolved because the voice ultimately at
stake was indigenous.
Given their historically contested and constitutionally restricted legal
status, Mexican pastoral agents understandably wavered on the theological
warrants, as well as legal consequences, of overt political protagonism. But
preoccupation with local ecclesial structure and anxiety about proposals for
political activism reached ‘torturous’ levels finally because the church
remained uncertainly situated in relation to the Maya.
A liberationist reading of the Indigenous Congress in a diocesan journal
makes the point:
It [the Indigenous Congress] was a revelation of their [indigenous] critical con-

sciousness, their latent potential....
First - It was a popular voice. They assumed more solidarity as an ethnic group,
as poor, as oppressed, in search of solidarity with all those who seek their libera-
tion.
Second - It was an analytic voice, in possession of data, facts, people, dates, and
places.
Third - It was a denunciatory voice.
––––––––––
39 Division and debate tore leftists in Chiapas in ways analogous to contests within the church
(Harvey 1994: 138-151).
Fourth - They showed themselves such as they are: poor, indigenous campesinos.
In their language with its dynamics, with their high regard for consensus and
communitarian sensibility, and their own temporal rhythm (El Caminante, April
1978: 11-12).
Intended to praise indigenous initiative, the tropes above – beginning with the
announcement that an indigenous “popular voice” appeared as a “revelation”
– actually disclose a compromised liberation agenda.
As Bourdieu argues, “the ‘people’ or the ‘popular’... is first of all one of
the things at stake in the struggle between intellectuals” – in this case, be-
tween progressive activists and missionaries forced into uneasy dialogue in
Chiapas (1990: 150). The struggles within each sector as well as those
between them were both persistent and acute precisely because they ad-
dressed not just the question of immediate distribution of regional political
power but the national hegemonic consensus. Missionaries experienced the
indigenous voice as a “revelation” because it was silenced through objectifi-
cation of “the other” that justified original conquest of the Indians and their
subsequent symbolic elevation by church and state alike.
Mission betrayed its ambivalent placement in this colonial dynamic,
contesting hegemony while adopting its objectifying discourse. It recognized
the ‘popular voice’ in the language of distance, and deployed liberation
tropes – critical, analytic, denunciatory – in a way that accented labels of
difference – ‘poor, indigenous campesinos,’ with ‘their language, dynamics,
values, communitarian sense, temporal rhythm.’
Among the most politically alert priests – those most likely to find in-
digenous “critical conscience” a surprising “revelation” and most eager to
direct their “latent potential” to radical ends – entrapment within their own
socio-cultural world or habitus) obviated any view of Maya reality except
from without.
Freire’s Misrecognitions and Liberation Thought

Liberation tropes – critical, analytic, denunciatory – genealogically trace to
Paolo Freire’s program for Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1996 ed.), the proto-
type of liberation praxis for Gustavo Gutierrez (1973: 233-235). Gutierrez
quotes Freire to thematize the prophetic vocation, “annunciation and denun-
ciation,” the same words pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal used
to describe their own missionary vocation (ibid.: 233, 248 n.109). Reading
Freire himself elucidates the contradiction embedded within this vocational
self-understanding.
Freire counters what he calls “banking education” (domination “deposits”
knowledge through its schools) with dialogic “conscientization” through
teacher-student partnership to critique the latter’s historical circumstance or,
80 Chapter Two
in Freire’s word, “reality.” This scheme assumes the pre-critical “submer-

sion” of the oppressed in this reality and “housing” of the oppressor within
their consciousness (Friere 1996: 27-33 and passim). For example, Freire
characterizes peasants thus: “The latter [peasants], usually submerged in a
colonial context, are almost umbilically linked to the world of nature, in
relation to which they feel themselves component parts rather than shapers”
(75 n.9; cf. 43).
For Freire, pegagogic “humanization” occurs as “the people’s empirical
knowledge of reality, nourished by the leaders’ critical knowledge, gradually
becomes transformed into knowledge of the causes of reality [sic]” (115).
This happens as investigators “decode” the reality of the oppressed which
these “leaders” correctly understand to be an historical construction, not a
God-given or otherwise preordained natural datum, as, Freire implies, peas-
ants – “whose gestures to some extent simulate those of the animals...and
40
[who] often consider themselves equal to the latter” (155) – regard it. In
other words, in Freire’s thought “conscientization” presumes unconscious-
ness, just as the pedagogue’s decoding assumes peasant ‘latency.’
Freire’s breathtaking caricature of Latin American peasants dismisses
their contributions to the making of their nations;41 it also betrays a funda-
mental contradiction in now-classic liberation thought. In it, distance between
theory and practice in the construction of a theory of practice reflects a real
social distance, usefully interpreted through the idea of place and placements
(Bourdieu 1977: 104; de Certeau 1984: 51-52). This becomes clear with close
reading of Freire’s discussion.
Warned against the imposition of their values, Freire’s pedagogues
nonetheless hope “the people” will come to share at least one of these, i.e., “a
correct [critical] method of approaching reality” (Freire 1996: 92). But thus
described, criticism is neither purely methodological nor lacking imposable
values.
Freire’s prescription for the pedagogical practice of criticism makes this
abundantly clear. Investigators “decode” what they, approaching from out-
side, see as a “totality,” attempting to “split it by analyzing the particular
dimensions which impress them” (ibid. – emphasis added). Those living in
the “area” under investigation participate in this process.
––––––––––
40 Significantly, Freire distinguishes European from the Latin American peasants on this point:
“Proposing as a problem, to a European peasant, the fact that he or she is a person might
strike them as strange. This is not true of the Latin American peasants...whose gestures to
some extend simulate those of the the animals and the trees....” (ibid.). Freire himself was of
urban middle class origin.
41 Peasant revolts in Latin America have been amply documented (Mallon 1995; for Chiapas,
García de León 1985).
But its aim is to enable the investigator to “penetrate the totality itself” in
order to surface “generative themes” or “[re]codifications” from the contra-
dictions in the totality which they are uniquely positioned to perceive (ibid.).
These are, in turn, to be re-presented to the inhabitants in a “thematic
fan...[to] objectively [re]constitute a totality” (ibid.). As they in turn decode
it, these same inhabitants come to see themselves immersed in this totality
and, in so doing, emerge to critical consciousness.42
Focusing on reality to mediate mutual dialogue, ‘inhabitants’ are to work
with ‘investigators.’ Yet Freire allows the latter to unilaterally introduce what
he calls “hinged themes” (101-102). Fundamental among these is a culture
concept setting forth “the role of people in the world and with the world as
transforming rather than adaptive beings;” in other words, an explication of
the relation between the “contradictions” decoded by investigators and “the
view of the world held by the people” (ibid.) As with Freire’s view of peas-
ants, the peoples’ “view of the world” is actually a matter of “feeling their
needs” (98).
The pedagogically-foundational “hinged theme,” in fact, implies separate
worlds necessitating a hinge the investigator is uniquely privileged to pro-
vide. Etymological assistance comes from noting that investigare = to track,
from vestigium = footprint. Freire’s pedagogical investigator imposes on the
world of the inhabitant as he “decodes” what can only be his own footprints –
what impresses him, since the “submerged” inhabitants are only capable of
“feeling their way.” But, as Freire’s appeal for dialogue itself argues, human
“inhabitants” are never completely “submerged,” wholly adapted, animal-
like, to their “habitats.”
In other words, what to Freire’s investigators from elsewhere is an “area”
awaiting their “decoding” to its inhabitants is a place, a locus of meaning and
value where they feel not merely their needs but their home (J.Z. Smith 1987:
26-29). Objectified in the theoretical distance of the investigator’s construc-
tive (colonizing) procedure – his ‘penetration of the totality,’ “the people”
encountered in an anonymous “area” might be mistaken for simple compo-
nents of nature “umbilically” sutured to it. But in everyday practice “peas-
ants” have already named a “place” through their occupation of and with it,
that is, their transformational labor, according to Freire’s own anthropology,
unless pedagogical “humanization” proceeds, as his naturalistic metaphors
unfortunately imply, ex nihilo. The contradiction, unwanted yet logically
begged, arises from social distance frustrating the dialogue Freire’s pedagogy
prescribes, as his theory constrains the practice it proposes.
––––––––––
42 Freire quotes Malraux’s citation of Mao: “we must teach the masses clearly what we have
received from them confusedly” (1996: 74, n. 7).
82 Chapter Two
Reprise: Liberation Discourse in the Diocese of San Cristóbal

Freire’s proposals echoed in the liberation discourse of the Diocese of San
Cristóbal. There mission’s commitment to “popular power” in the aftermath
of the Indigenous Congress entailed the populist paradox. As pastoral agents
separated themselves from the state on one side and progressive political
competitors for indigenous favor on the other, missionaries hid from them-
selves, as Bourdieu predicts, “the break with the ‘people’ by gaining access
to the role of spokesperson” (1990: 152). For despite the diocese’s desire for
an authochthonous church, the Maya were conspicuously absent from its
assemblies.
Pastoral teams eagerly recruited indigenous collaborators in mission at the
base, and convened them for the Indigenous Congress where they developed
their own political agenda. But the Diocese of San Cristóbal did not admit
them into the assemblies where its pastoral agendas were set. No stated
policy restricted indigenous participation at these meetings, but neither were
they invited to them. When pastoral agents called attention to “the grand
absence in the Diocesan Assemblies ... the people,” they received the follow-
ing response:
The voice of the people actually reaches the assembly by mean of the pastoral
agents.
The people cannot be brought into interminable meetings with language, dy-
namics, and forms foreign to their cultural ways.
The people do not assume the political use of analysis as an instrument of so-
cial transformation in an orthodox way. Popular mechanisms of appropriating re-
ality are not generally analytical since these correspond to the culture of industrial
society and our people are involved and live in an agrarian culture.
The people have real participation in diocesan co-responsibility by means of
their community assemblies and catechetical structure which is directly related
with [geo-linguistic] zonal [pastoral] teams (Irribaren Pascal, 1997: 45-46).
“Diocesan corresponsibility” confirms missionary aspiration to an authenti-

cally autochthonous local church. Indeed, recruitment of Maya collaborators
at the parish level accomplished these ends de facto to a significant degree,
validating the good faith in diocesan discourse.
But the rationale for indigenous absence from diocesan deliberations
neatly evinces the contradiction in the diocese’s liberation strategy. The
missionary argument above ratifies the break with “the people” effected by
those who speak for them; indeed, it actually announces multiple ‘breaks.’
Fundamental is the designation of pastoral agents as spokespeople, ipso facto
objectifying the living “voice of the people” as something to be read and
rendered, in short, re-presented by them. But such textualization means
“rescuing the said from its saying”. It stipulates an interpreter who, on assum-
ing the power to articulate a foreign world, exercises power over it (Geertz
1983: 32).
These moves – like Freire’s described above – disjoin worlds while
ordering them hierarchically, description of one world by another becoming a
kind of prescription. Thus, we have the industrial world of “analysis” and the
agrarian world of “ways” (proxies for Freire’s “critical” and “empirical”
spheres), the ostensibly benign relativism in this division actually effecting
what one anthropologist calls “cognitive apartheid” (Sperber 1985: 62). The
implicit equation of “analysis” with “orthodoxy,” juxtaposed to presumably
unorthodox “popular mechanisms of appropriating reality,” decisively privi-
leges the pastoral agent-analyst, “rescuer of the said,” over the indigenous-
sayer, immersed in theoretically mystified cultural “ways.” This reversion to
Western evolutionary thought – industrial analytic orthodoxy ascendant over
agrarian cultural ways – unintentionally opens “the despicable hierarchical
gap” of conquest and colony (ibid.).
In this scheme, participation by indigenous in direction of the diocese is
“real” via the social fiction to which pastoral agents subscribe by ascribing to
themselves power to transmit ‘the voice of the people’ (Bourdieu 1990: 138-
139). As Bourdieu argues, the “world-making,” classificatory power consist-
ing in decomposition and analysis through the use of labels –in this case,
‘industrial,’ ‘agrarian,’ ‘the people’ – constitutes symbolic power, propagat-
ing “a vision...of social divisions” through cognition and recognition (ibid.:
137-38).
In highland Chiapas, mission’s classifications replicated the constructions
of Mexican hegemony: Liberationist thinking ironically placed the church in
what might be called optical collusion with the state, envisioning orthodoxy
as a mode of cognition that required the opacity of indigenous “cultural
ways” (de Certeau 1984: 50-60, 65-70).
Demonstrations of colonialism’s reliance on similar divisions have
multiplied in recent years, the categorization of South- and Meso-American
peoples as “Indian” an egregious example (Silverblatt 1994: 279-98; Said
1978). Less examined is the analogous categorization embedded within
variants of putatively post-colonial liberationist thought. In the argument
offered above, social transformation depends upon techniques of political
analysis which, like their industrial-technological analogue, select manipu-
lable dimensions of a larger human performance, marginalizing the remain-
43
der to the sphere of what are called, in our example, “cultural ways.”
––––––––––
43 Michel de Certeau’s calls attention to the relegation of practical “know-how” to the folkloric
sphere: “Thus know-how takes on the appearance of an ‘intuitive’ or ‘reflex’ ability, which
is almost invisible and whose status remains unrecognized. The technical optimization of the
84 Chapter Two
Veritable dogma in the liberationist thinking espoused by progressive

pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal, “analysis” dissected power
relations at stake in the hegemonic struggle at the level of the nation-state to
which these middle-class clerics, products of the modernizing urban sociali-
zation they share with Mexico’s political elites, were largely oriented. In
short, shaped by their habitus, the protagonists of liberation, like sponsors of
teología india, carried the center to the periphery. Thus they consigned its
peasants to the margins of cognition where, viewed from without, analysis
floats like a foreign body on a sea of archaic “language, dynamics, and
forms” (i.e., symbols and myths).
By the mid-1990s, the question of the “relocation” of pastoral work in the
Diocese of San Cristóbal had been answered. A self-denominated “núcleo” of
non-elected advisors to the bishop came to dominate diocesan assemblies.
The núcleo enforced an increasingly politicized pastoral “line” as now-
mobilized indigenous confronted an intransigent state government. The key
point of contention between the Maya and the state was control of land and
other resources whose value rose exponentially with Mexico’s neo-liberal
turn in the 1980s.
Núcleo intelligentsia, alumni of elite ecclesial academic institutions and
government bureaucracies in the capital and abroad, formulated conjunctural
“analyses” directed to political-diplomatic, church-state preoccupations.
Defense of the diocese against attack by a growing list of political enemies –
from local highland elites to the federal government, and a papal nuncio
intent on protecting the 1992 constitutional reform recognizing the church –
44
clearly motivated these preoccupations. In the nucleo’s political taxonomy,
the highland Maya were classified with politically active social movements
or organizations but otherwise had no place.
J.Z. Smith (1992) calls attention to metonymic and spatial representation
of the “other,” exemplified by domination through naming and exclusion
distinguishing between center and periphery, within and without. He points,
further, to the ambivalence inhering in each of these constructions. For
example, naming the indigenous agrarians or campesinos implies we are not
but could be ‘them,’ possibly for better (because uncontaminated by moder-
nity), possibly for worse (because ‘poor’ and ‘oppressed’). Excluding them
from diocesan assemblies implied their incapacities but also spared the
nineteenth century ... left to everyday practices only a space without means or products of its
own ... an overly silent land, still without a verbal discourses....” (1984: 69).
44 In Fall 1993, a diocesan assembly convened to consider the threat of Bishop Ruiz’s removal
from his See at the instigation of the papal nuncio Girónimo Prigione, who had engineered
constitutional recognition of the Mexican church in 1992. The scheme of analysis offered by
the núcleo at this gathering: I Map of Elements II. Possible scenarios. III. Consequences. IV.
What to do? V. Dynamic of the bishops ( FN 29.X.93.)
indigenous the ‘interminable’ debates which ‘torture’ us. Thus society – in

this case the church – questions itself as it constructs the other. Named and/or
excluded, the other remains a shadow presence within.
But there is no such ambiguity in a third, unequivocal representation of
the other as unintelligible, requiring ‘us’ to speak for ‘them.’ In Smith’s
felicitous summation: “The focus on the other as unintelligible has led,
necessarily, to ‘their’ silence and ‘our’ speech” (ibid.: 10).
Highland missionaries re-presented the “voice of the people” confirming,
as Bourdieu argues, “the break with the ‘people’ that is implied by gaining
access to the role of spokesperson” (Bourdieu 1990: 162). Indeed, they
confined indigenous “real participation” in church renewal to the Maya’s
own community assemblies and/or catechetical gatherings. Their embrace of
the “political use of analysis as an instrument of social transformation” – in
diocesan discourse the “orthodox” core of liberationist “language, dynamics
and forms” – mystified the “cultural ways” of “the people.”
Ironically, if not tragically, this move entrenched pastoral agents on the
other side of the cultural divide they hoped to bridge by commitment to
inculturation. In short, diocesan mission thought constructed two worlds,
urban industrial and rural peasant, by “analysis.” The response of highland
Maya catechists to mission’s proposals asserted, instead, the reconstruction
of their own place(s) in practice.
86 Chapter Three
Position and Place 87
Chapter Three
Position and Place

Church, State, and Mission on the Ground
Introduction
Bishop Ruiz’s evolving vision of an “autochthonous church” –Tzeltal for the
Tzeltales, Tzotzil for the Tzotzils1 – entailed the devolution of pastoral
initiative to indigenous catechists. Eager campesinos descended from remote
mountain dwellings to convent classrooms in the highland metropolis at the
church’s invitation, but the initiative in their transformation from peasants to
preachers never rested wholly in the hands of missionary mentors. Many
Maya indigenous viewed mission’s reappearance in their territory as an offer
of relief from government neglect and commercial exploitation. Those who
left their communities to become catechists transformed the church’s pastoral
innovations into implements for reconstruction of indigenous territory on
their own terms. First hesitant and tacit, then insistent and overt moves by
these young men confirmed the dialectical nature of the missionary encoun-
ter.
Mission and the Contest for Hegemonic Consensus

A byproduct of anthropological interest in colonialism, recent applications of
social theory construe missionaries as disjunctive figures who embody and
elicit alternatives. Kenelm Burridge sees missionaries as “inherently provoca-
tive,” setting off individuating processes among traditional peoples (1991: 92
and passim). T.O. Beidelman argues that in mission practice and preaching
––––––––––
1 Bishop Ruiz’s favored phrase echoes Pope Paul VI’s exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi. John
Paul II developed these ideas, particularly in Africa: “[The Gospel message] does not spring
spontaneously from any cultural soil; it has always been transmitted by means of apostolic
dialogue ... a certain dialogue of cultures” (Catechesis Tradendi 1979: #53). To Kenya’s
bishops, “There is no question of adulterating the Word of God, or of emptying the cross of
Christ of its power, but rather of bringing Christ into the very centre of African life and of
lifting up all African life to Christ. Thus, not only is Christianity relevant to Africa, but
Christ, in the members of his Body, is himself African” (in Shorter 1988: 227, emphasis
added). Yet, though he affirmed use of the vernacular by Cyril and Methodius among the
Slavs, John Paul never used Justin’s formula “seeds of the Word” and variously signaled his
nostalgia for what Shorter calls “a vanished Christian monoculturalism” (233), even the res-
toration of “Christendom.” Of course, inculturation strategies have been implemented
throughout the world with varying outcomes.
88 Chapter Three
ethnic and class biases become unconsciously confused with religious uni-
versals to socio-cultural effects that missionaries scarcely comprehend (1974,
1982).
Following Beidelman’s lead, the Comaroffs show how British missionar-
ies responded to discomfiting socio-cultural transformations in modern
England by ‘colonizing native consciousness’ in South Africa according to
the pattern of their own pre-industrial past (1991, 1997). In the dialectical
process that ensued, natives emerged as critical protagonists in the remaking
of their own homelands (ibid.; also J. Comaroff 1985).
This theoretical focus on disjuncture as cause and effect in mission, and
misrecognition as the preferred category for interpreting missionary methods
and motives, invites attention to social fact as well as pastoral proposals. The
most obvious is, of course, that by definition missionaries are sent from one
place to another.
As already described, a new influx of missionaries in Chiapas occurred
just as Mexico entered a prolonged phase of social-political crisis, exposing
points of vulnerability in the post-Revolution hegemonic consensus. Whether
explained by the advance of neo-liberalism and/or rising pressure for democ-
ratization, the crisis unsettled the aspiring middle classes and the institutional
church which drew its leadership from them. Divided in its reception of the
more progressive strains of Vatican II, the Mexican church hierarchy none-
theless began to assert its voice in public affairs, hesitantly but at a higher
volume than at any time since the Revolution. In other words, the decision to
revive the church at the periphery, and particularly among the indigenous,
reflected a renewal in institutional self-confidence as well as evangelical
spirit.
In this socio-cultural climate, a number of priests and sisters perceived in
the periphery an arena open to their vision of an ecclesial alternative to the
moral bankruptcy in the nation’s political regime. The church represented a
singular vocational choice in Mexico where the government controlled,
directly or indirectly, most avenues of social advancement. Whether ideo-
logically repelled or socio-economically frustrated by the regime’s near-
monopoly on opinion and opportunity, many pastoral agents chose mission at
2
this juncture in a spirit of dissent.
––––––––––
2 “Rank-and-file clergy...identify essential differences between themselves and government
officials.... they believe that politicians understand very little about the church and about
what clergy do. They argue that numerous politicians ... tied to the Masons retain interpreta-
th
tions of the Church that border on 19 century myths” (Camp 1987: 299-300). Anti-clerical
(if not Masonic) sentiment remains alive among Mexican politicians as attested by “tremen-
dous opposition” to Carlos Salinas’ unprecedented decision to invite church hierarch’s to his
1988 presidential inauguration (ibid.: 31-32) Vicente Fox met with similar disapproval for
religious gestures at his 2000 inauguration (La Jornada 12.02.00).
The more politically-oriented among them regarded themselves as

competitors in a contest for the soul of society. In their view, the
distinctiveness of their vocation lay precisely in sounding the call to social
responsibility their peers in other sector – governmental, academic,
journalistic – failed to voice.3 Priests in Mexico (as elsewhere) have always
exercised authority simply by dint of education in a relatively unschooled
society. For the majority of the 200 clerical and lay pastoral agents in
highland Chiapas, the margination of the Maya resonated with their sense,
heightened after 1968, of the margination of the church from its rightful place
place as moral arbiter of the Mexican nation.4
Many of these missionaries had responded to personal invitations from
Bishop Ruiz, attracted by his determination to implement the teachings of
CELAM. They discovered in the social-political vacuum created by long-
standing ecclesial and government neglect in the Maya highlands both need
and opportunity to exercise their vocation as conscience to society, often
fraught with difficulty in the urban areas from which they generally came.5
Within the expanded space for maneuver at the periphery, these mission-
aries dissented from the Mexican national consensus through double, contra-
dictory moves. They opted for the poor by promoting indigenous human
rights within a social-political order that tacitly denied or overtly violated
them. When conflicts with the state inevitably followed, they re-asserted the
role of the church and its agents as conscience of society. Indeed, many
elements in the Diocese of San Cristóbal presumptively conflated popular
struggle by Maya indigenous in Chiapas with reclamation of a place for the
church in a public sphere imbued with revolutionary anti-clericalism.
But the highland Maya had played only an ancillary role in the Mexican
Revolution (García de León 1985) and could not share the investment of
middle class clerics in reasserting the Catholic church vis a vis the Mexican
state. Historically, church-state relations remained within the ambit of contest
for Mexico’s hegemonic consensus in which its indigenous peoples figured
as objectified ingredient of national myth.
The pastoral initiatives of Bishop Ruiz in service to them incurred the
wrath of successive governors in the state of Chiapas. In the most notorious
––––––––––
3 “Perhaps the single value most likely to promote disagreement among clergy and politicians
is the issue of social responsibility. ...[T]he clergy has placed this issue at the forefront of
Catholicism’s tasks in Mexico ...” (Camp 1987: 30)
4 A CEM-commissioned study affirms that activism by agents of the Diocese of San Cristóbal
under Bishop Ruiz responded to a political vacuum in Chiapas. According to the ex-Jesuit
historian Jan de Vos: “The Catholic Church, together with the protestant [sic] churches, will
continue occupying these spaces until government and society become sufficiently mature to
take charge of their civil oblications” (quoted in Meyer 2000:187).
5 Personal communications. See above, Sites and Methods section of the Introduction to this
study.
90 Chapter Three
instance, in the fall of 1991 the state imprisoned a priest four days after the
bishop held a press conference to denounce the deteriorating human rights
situation in the highlands. Father Joel Padrón was held from September 19 –
November 5, 1991, accused of abetting a Tzotzil peasant land invasion.
A tense public stand-off between the bishop and Governor Patrocinio
González Garrido culminated in a march by 11,000 indigenous to the state
capital demanding the priest’s release. Padrón was freed on judicial orders
won by the arguments of diocesan lawyers. (Gómez Cruz and Kovic 1994:
165-67).
In Mexico, conflicts between a governor named by the president and a
bishop appointed by the pope became, as a matter of course, subject to
discussion in the nation’s capital. In this instance, church and state shared
mutual interest in normalization of relations via constitutional reform, the
church to enhance its status in the public sphere and the government to
6
dismantle obstacles to its neo-liberal global ambitions. These goals intensi-
fied the concern President Carlos Salinas shared with the papal nuncio,
Archbishop Girolamo Prigione, about a public collision between governor
and bishop in Chiapas. Thus, turbulence at the periphery required corrective
action from the center.
A pastoral letter indicting the government’s neo-liberal policies which
Bishop Ruiz presented to John Paul II on his August, 1993, visit to the
Yucatan confirmed for the nuncio complaints he had gathered from Chiapan-
eco elites. When Archbishop Prigione summoned Bishop Ruiz to his office in
October, 1993, Gonzalez Garrido, now Mexico’s secretary of government,
approved. At their meeting in Mexico City, the nuncio informed Ruiz of a
letter from the Vatican announcing its investigation of his work and teach-
ings. He further solicited the bishop’s resignation.7
Reaction to this incident illuminates how highland mission was impli-
cated in national church-state politics. Pastoral agents mobilized a public
campaign accusing the nuncio and the government of collusion to suppress
––––––––––
6 A student of church-state relations at Colegio de Mexico and the London School of Eco-
nomics, observes that church, as much as state, had political motives for seeking its legaliza-
tion – namely, constitutional right to its increasingly assertive occupation of space in the
public sphere (Loaeza Lajous 1990: 152).
7 There is no official account of this conversation. The newsweekly Proceso quoted the
Vatican letter as charging the bishop with “a marxist analysis of society,” “errors in govern-
ance,” “incorrect theological reflection,” and an “exclusionary” pastoral practice favoring
the indigenous (8.XI.93):18). A prominent journalist reported: “The Mexican government
has imposed, and the rulers of the church have accepted, [Bishop Ruiz’s] removal ....The
decision obeys governmental necessities, not requirements of ecclesiastical government” (El
Financiero 24.X.93).
the diocese’s defense of the indigenous.8 Progressive Catholic lay leaders in

Mexico City, reading the move against Bishop Ruiz as an assault on their
own democratizing agenda, responded by invigorating a campaign to nomi-
nate the bishop for the Nobel Peace Prize. Counting on Bishop Ruiz’s wide
connections with progressive prelates in Europe and Latin America, they
worked in tandem with an office the bishop had established in Mexico City.
The CEM was already resentful of the nuncio’s usurpation of their author-
ity in negotiations with the Mexican government culminating in the 1992
constitutional reforms legalizing the church; they tacitly endorsed Bishop
Ruiz’s pastoral approach. Bishop Ramón Godinez Flores, secretary general
of CEM, affirmed the canonical fact that a nuncio has no power over bishops;
significantly, he added that as a foreigner this nuncio had no legal standing to
act for the church in Mexico.9 Antonio Roqueñí Ornelas, legal advisor to
Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, CEM president and primate of Mexico,
pronounced that “any action against Samuel Ruiz could provoke problems of
division within the Catholic hierarchy itself” (Proceso 8XI.93: 25).
Support from Corripio reflects Bishop Ruiz’s emergence as a leader of
CEM’s moderate majority through his association with the Group of Bishop
Friends (GOA), formed to secure support from CEM centrists for its progres-
sive agenda (Fazio 1994: 263-66). Thus at a critical moment, the bishop was
rewarded for his adhesion to church institutions and to peers who were
undivided in their defense of ecclesial autonomy against foreign intrusion by
an interventionist Italian nuncio they perceived to be allied with a secularist
state.
Following the January, 2004, Zapatista uprising, the bishop travelled to
Rome intending to clarify his role as mediator between the government and
the insurgents as well as to circumvent the nuncio in the ecclesiastical cam-
paign against him. Recognition by eight curial officials there effectively
ended the immediate threat of the bishop’s removal (Meyer 1996:103; Fazio
1994: 322-23).
––––––––––
8 A delegation of diocesan pastoral agents had preceded Bishop Ruiz in meeting with Prigione
to protest reports of his impending removal. These had circulated throughout the previous
summer following a visit to Chiapas by the Nuncio during which, pastoral agents suspected,
he had met with the Bishop’s opponents. The delegation’s defense of the Bishop and pledge
of obedience to him provoked the Nuncio to angry denunciation of Ruiz’s “grave errors.”
Proceso, 8.XI.93, 19-20.
9 Prigione disregarded the CEM in his proposal that the church register as a ‘civil association’
under the title “Roman Catholic Apostolic Church of Mexico.” The bishops responded that
no such entity existed and reminded the nuncio that each bishop is an autonomous successor
to the apostles. The government settled the dispute, recognizing a single Mexican Church
but requiring that the archbishop of Mexico City and the president of CEM – not the nuncio
– sign the request for legalization (Camp 1997:38).
92 Chapter Three
Thus a battle in defense of the periphery was fought largely at the centers,
national and international, to which the originating “cause” for this war of
position – the Maya indigenous – had no access. The pastoral strategy which
so aroused the nuncio and his government allies was unambiguously directed
towards justice for the indigenous. Achievement of this objective demanded a
decided shift in the balance of power in Chiapas, a resource-rich border state
of considerable strategic importance to the nation. But in this instance,
locating Chiapas simply according to its economic and geopolitical coordi-
nates, and/or limiting the measure of the contest over its bishop to power-
political equations, forecloses interpretation.
State interests would inevitably fall into this error. But that leading agents
of the church would do so bears directly on mis-takes in mission to the Maya.
In the event, the social location of pastoral agents motivated their preoccupa-
tion with the position (in Gramsci’s sense) of the church relative to the state
in the national hegemonic contest. The institutional church remained a unique
source of authority for members of the urban middle class aspiring to a voice
in direction of a nation whose one-party regime owed its extraordinary
endurance to mastery of the art of cooptation.
Historically having met with uneven success in struggle against this statist
strategy, the Mexican church could rely on its hierarchical nature to evade
total absorption by it. Yet, as already noted, hierarchy’s characteristic claim
to moral purity and political disinterest requires hiding from itself interests
whose misrecognition makes them all the more absorbing. The plausibility of
this explanation for the maneuvering of pastoral agents in their contest with
the Mexican state rests on the substance of the stakes involved.
Stated most broadly, the militant majority of diocesan pastoral agents
sought an end to corporatist one-party government and the democratization of
Mexican politics at all levels. More immediately, they opposed the neo-
liberal policies of a disintegrating regime which threatened the survival of the
indigenous poor with whom pastoral agents fused their own aspirations.
From this perspective, church-state politics remained within the ideologi-
cal ambit of the Revolution understood as a “bourgeois civil war” for control
over the modernization of Mexico and defense of the nation against foreign
intrusion (Womack 1991: 128). Progressives in the church condemned the
nuncio’s role in legalization of the church and the pretended removal of
Bishop Ruiz in precisely these terms, while the Bishop himself resorted to
Rome for rescue of Mexican national ecclesial autonomy from an engulfing
10
state.
––––––––––
10 Bishop Ruiz read formal Vatican acknowledgement.of his pastoral letter En esta hora de
graciaI (1993) as agreement with its the critique of neo-liberalism. Following John Paul II’s
The Bishop’s move involved a double paradox: an embattled church

appealed for the periphery to the nation through a universalizing center,
while, with this approach, liberation practice sought support from Vatican
authorities notoriously suspicious of its implicit critique of hierarchy. For
reasons of its own, Rome preserved the Bishop from his enemies. But reading
the route to this outcome locates points of missionary detour missing the
Maya.
In brief, though intending to reach the periphery, mission’s ecclesial roots
at and social-political orientation to the center(s), ecclesial and national, cast
the struggle for highland indigenous dignity in power political terms which
countered the hegemonic while remaining positioned within it. Indeed,
‘position’ becomes an essential trope for understanding missionaries as
ecclesial and national actors as well as the critical disjunction in their relation
to the Maya following from these roles.
As already noted, Mexican missionaries were generally formed in the
socio-geographic center(s) of a rapidly urbanizing nation and its rising
middle-class. Their mobility in this double sense aggravated the uncertainty
these missionaries, like the uprooted in all times and places, experienced on
strange territory. By dint of office in a church reemerging in both the nation’s
public sphere and in the Maya highlands, their uncertainty inevitably segued
into preoccupation with position on the shifting terrain of Mexican national
consensus.
This preoccupation was a legacy of historical church-state struggle
extending back to the epoch of colonization and could be expected among
contemporary clerical traditionalists. But concern for position compromised
the progressive impulse among liberationists as well. Indeed, liberation
thinking failed to destabilize the hegemonic platform to which, in the end, its
proponents remained tethered by their own construction: an ideology tied to
the hegemonic discourse of capitalist modernization, privileging its analytic
11
methods and categories to advocate structural socio-economic change.
In short, sent to the periphery, not a few missionaries to the highland
Maya remained of the center by ideological preference and vocational choice,
weighted with history and habitus. To be missioned is to be sent and thus put
‘in the way’ of others, as Burridge asserts. The irony of mission in highland
Chiapas is that in seeking to reverse colonial relations with Mexico’s indige-
1993 visit to Izamal, Mexico, where the bishop delivered his letter, Ruiz announced papal
endorsemenf of a Maya autochthonous church.
11 Wherever adopted liberation ideology employed marxist categorites for critique of capital-
ism. Arguably, capitalist modernization advanced in Mexico more rapidly than elsewhere in
Latin America due to post-Revolution national consolidation as well as proximity to the
United States.
94 Chapter Three
nous peoples pastoral agents at the nation’s periphery became consumed by

the hegemonic contest at its center.
For highland indigenous position in this game could not matter. For them
the periphery was always already a center, neither a vocational choice nor a
hegemonic position, but a place secured by everyday historical practice. Put
another way, socio-geographic location remains, for the majority of Mexico’s
highland Maya, not a matter of maneuver but of being-in-the-world: peasant
mapping of ancestral territory with their bodies through labor on the land.
The state, historically predatory toward labor and heedless of indigenous
interest, could only be an intruder here. Ordained to mobility by vocation and
impelled to maneuver by national conjuncture, the church, for its part, re-
entered the highlands unable to fully appreciate the how profoundly place
mattered to the Maya. An effect of the displaced status of missionaries as
such, this matter of in-disposition mirrored the center-periphery dialectics of
modernity and colonization which liberation thought, despite decolonizing
12
intentions, extended through its fundamentally utopian structural discourse.
Already so inclined by middle class mobility and hierarchical privilege,
pastoral agents who embraced liberationist ideas to defend the indigenous
poor against the depradations of capitalism with the best of evangelical
intentions slighted the significance of place as a matter of course.
Missionaries on the Ground

Missionaries in the parish of San Andrés failed to grasp this source of mean-
ing in different and conflicting ways. The most pronounced difference lay
between the traditionalist pastor who inaugurated the church’s reappearance
there after years of neglect and the liberationist pastoral agents who suc-
ceeded him. Tensions between them arguably accelerated indigenous moves
to make themselves missionaries on their own terms for their own place.
North Americans were the first to respond to Bishop Ruiz’s appeal for
pastoral presence in San Andrés. They were impelled by the meld of spiritual
zeal, entrepreneurial individualism, ascetic adventurousness, and ecclesial
13
responsibility typical of the missionary vocation. Characteristically optimis-
tic and pragmatic, they embraced the call for development articulated in Pope
––––––––––
12 The absence of place as a significant consideration in social science generally has been
noted (Agnew 1989: 9-29). For a postcolonial critique, see Gupta and Ferguson 1995: 6-23.
13 Bishop Ruiz himself noted that pastoral workers in his diocese found work among the
indigenous “attractive” not only because of their poverty but because they “were more ex-
otic [in]... their languages and mysterious world” (Andraos 1999: 14). Beidelman (1984:
243) calls missionaries “repressed adventurers,” a label he attaches to colonial administra-
tors as well. Undoubtedly, many missionaries are motivated to a degree by ego ideals em-
bracing intrepid exploits in strange lands. Of course, it does not follow that such “adventur-
ers” are repressed.
Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio – On the Development of Peoples

(1967), the seminal ecclesial condemnation of a global political-economy
shaped by colonial and neo-colonial structures. The encyclical called for
“bold transformations in which the present order of things will be entirely
renewed and rebuilt” (#32) to end “the international imperialism of
money”(#36).
The pope promoted the poor’s self-direction in their own development.
But while the encyclical cast basic education and literacy as “privileged
means of economic progress and development”(#35), its rhetorical design in
fact privileged appeals for increased foreign aid, establishment of an interna-
tional development plan, and a world political authority. Reliance on institu-
tional instrumentalities rather than popular initiatives as motors of develop-
ment was of a piece with papal rejection of violent social change (though
14
Paul VI cautiously allowed the possibility of just revolt in extremis).
This institutional orientation sheltered highland missionaries of all na-
tionalities, including those who espoused liberationist challenges to it. In-
deed, accounts of missionary – Maya encounter on the ground show pastoral
agents intent on challenging the social order but unable to relinquish their
position within it. This missionary predicament demonstrates the invulner-
ability of hegemony to simple ideological challenge. It also reveals place to
be an indispensable ingredient of gospel proclamation.
Unreconstructed Mission
Padre David Anthony arrived in San Andrés Larráinzar as its first resident
priest in over fifty years by a circuitous but ambitious route fitting his entre-
preneurial approach to mission. This U.S. Marine veteran was dismissed by
the Society of Jesus when he rebelled against its refusal to offer him a mis-
sionary assignment. He was subsequently admitted to the inter-diocesan
Catholic seminary founded by Mexico’s bishops in Montezuma, New Mex-
ico, to free students from anti-clerical pressures and revive Tridentine train-
15
ing. After his ordination in 1962, he accepted Bishop Ruiz’s invitation to the
priest-scarce Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. In San Andrés, Padre
David bent Mexican Catholic Action strategy to his business-like style.16
Soon after his arrival he recruited a leading fiscal (traditional Maya ritual
specialist) as his first catechist, sending him first to the Marist school for
––––––––––
14 One commentary on Populorum Progressio addresses influences on Paul VI’s nuanced
formulations, including the statement on revolutionary violence (Dorr 1983: 31, 139-156,
303 n. 78).
15 Camp notes the “integrating” function of Mexico’s first national seminary: “Alumni agree
that because they were Mexicans living in a foreign culture, it brought them closer together”
(1997: 168). P. David presumably absorbed the clerical integralism fostered at Montezuma.
16 On Catholic Action, see Poggi 1967; on Catholic Action in Mexico, Aspe Armella 2008.
96 Chapter Three
catechists in San Cristóbal and then into remote parajes (hamlets) to seek
other converts, among whom were the first catechists in Magdalenas (see Ch.
4). A year later he established a parish dispensary and welcomed two North
American women religious to staff it. They had responded to Paul VI’s call
for “papal volunteers” to promote development in Latin America (Orozco
n.d.).
Drawing on U.S. and other foreign funding, in the early 1970s the priest
launched a residential boys’ primary school in San Andrés. Later, with the
support of the bishop, he established a secondary school in San Cristóbal,
17
recruiting indigenous youth with assurances of material support. By the
mid-1970s, the missionary had allied with Mexican state bureaucracies and
an international agronomy program to develop an experimental ranch for the
cultivation of potatoes to diversify both the diet and the commercial activities
of his indigenous parishioners (Anthony 25.III.1974). In short, the pastor
established a version of the classic mission station in San Andrés.
P. David appears to have been supremely confident in the efficacy of his
various projects. But mutual suspicions quickly arose between the foreign
priest and San Andrés’ traditional civil-religious hierarchy as they competed
for the community’s religious allegiance. The latter’s mistrust only deepened
when the priest purchased scarce arable land for his ranch. His friendliness
towards resident Ladinos, natural allies to the expatriate priest, further alien-
ated local indigenous.
Then, in 1974, simmering resentment of perennial socio-economic abuses
by merchants and ranchers of San Andrés Larráinzar erupted in their violent
expulsion from the municipio by a roving band of indigenous armed with
machetes and led by local Tzotzil authorities. P. David found himself among
those accused of illicit landholding. He became further isolated from both
sides in the conflict when indigenous displaced Ladinos as majority residents
of the cabecera (township center) (Anthony n.d.).
Catechists and students in his schools were initially grateful and devoted
to the missionary for the material opportunities his projects offered. But they,
too, gradually grew disenchanted with them. For example, the priest sent the
Magdalenero Elias to Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state’s political and commercial
capital, to peddle potatoes harvested on his experimental ranch. Now a
highly-respected Catholic deacon in the parish, Elias remembers what
seemed incomprehensible Ladino behavior. The most salient souvenir of his
urban experience is an image of one Tuxtla resident’s casual disposal of
unwanted, but still-wearable, clothes in a local garbage dump.
––––––––––
17 See Anthony-Ruiz correspondence, 18.VIII.1972, 6.VI.1974, 25.IX.1975, Archivo Dioce-
sano, San Andrés Larráinzar, 1950-1990, caja #4, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas.
[Subsequent references to this source generally name correspondent(s) and date(s) only.]
Alienated by this and similar perceived Ladino excesses, Elias reached

two conclusions: He preferred working his own land on his own terms to
selling for the pastor a crop which he knew, as a veteran agriculturalist,
would not prosper on Magdalenas’s terrain. And he rejected the offer of
secondary schooling in the state capital from a Ladina patron, choosing to
continue catechetical training that had already made him a community leader.
Elias abandoned the urban market just as the dispute between P. David
and pastoral agents opposed to his pastoral approach reached the point of
rupture. A 1980 memo detailed the points of conflict between forces for
renewal and those resisting it within the Tzotzil pastoral “team.” Addressed
to curial officials in San Cristóbal, the document “Catechist Movement in
Larráinzar” notes the “double, contradictory presence” at monthly parish
catechist meetings of David and Madre Lourdes, a Mexican religious whose
pastoral approach openly challenged the U.S. missionary’s pre-Conciliar
ecclesiology.
The document argued that the priest’s paternalistic style produced cate-
chists who were “legalists, casuists and dependent” while Madre Lourdes
unintentionally encouraged their tutelage through an intensely personal
approach. The collective author of the memo espoused “a new style of
accompanying them [catechists] ... [with] neither recipes nor dogmatic
solutions but hope for their thoughts, as well as that of the [parish] team that
18
accompanies them.”
The debate deepened when Mexican Dominicans replaced Madre Lourdes
in the early 1980,19 each side entrenched behind opposed pastoral-political
“lines.” David appealed to theological tradition, citing “the mind of the
church” and the will of the pope as warrant for his conviction that the first
duty of the missionary is to “save souls,” not, as he characterized the bishop’s
“badly mistaken” strategy, to foment social struggle (personal communica-
tion, FN 21.VIII.93). Tainted in the eyes of the priest by their association
with the diocese and frustrated as a team by his exercise of hierarchical
privilege, the women religious grew closer to diocesan proponents of libera-
tion thought. In good measure an exhibit of gender politics, the power strug-
gle among the missionaries became unnegotiable.
Though they understood its ideological terms, catechists witnessing this
drama perceived it quite differently. For them the paramount issue was
––––––––––
18 “Movimiento catequistico en Larráinzar,” Archivo del Obispado, San Andrés Larrainzar,
caja #4., undated. Padre David restricted contact with his flock to required liturgical and
sacramental functions. Elias offered this point of contrast: “Madre Lourdes spent time with
us, here in our homes. Padre David celebrated mass and then left as fast as he could.” (FN
12.XI .94)
19 When one of the U.S. women religious left Larráinzar to marry, Dominicans sisters came
from Mexico City to take her place.
98 Chapter Three
neither theological nor political “correctness” but local advantage, or, put
another way, everyday practice and its production of place. Their discourse
about the missionaries is locative, embedded in spatial semantics rather than
theological claims, much less structural analysis.
Catechists had asked Bishop Ruiz to remove the priest from the parish as
early as 1980. The bishop responded by encouraging new forms of ministry,
including ordained indigenous deacons who would, he hoped, eventually
serve their people alongside Maya Catholic priests. The reorganization of
pastoral workers into teams reinforced the bishop’s move which, not inciden-
tally, coincided with the diocese’s option for “popular power.” The women
religious in the parish of San Andrés eagerly embraced consensus pastoral
decision-making to curb the pastor’s authority and enhance their own. They
inevitably regarded the catechists as allies whose communitarian tradition
favored the new pastoral model.
These developments abetted the deterioration in catechist relations with P.
David and were brought to a climax with their request for his removal in
early 1990. This time they stated the terms of their revolt against him in two
20
letters to the bishop (Catechists 6.I.1990; 26.III.1990).
Introducing their initial complaint, the catechists’ noted that P. David had
taken steps to establish a convent of conservative women religious in the
parish, a potential counter-influence to the Dominican sisters (Catechists
6.I.1990). Then they voiced the true reason for their concern: the pastor had
promoted division in the parish by seeking endorsement for this project
among parish indigenous without consulting them.
In short, the pastor’s move was just the most recent instance of unilateral-
ism figured in various forms of invasion and exclusion on his part. The letter
alleged that P. David had long factionalized communities by forming rump
groups loyal to him rather than the diocese in villages far distant from the
parish church in the cabecera. (township center). It also charged that he
illicitly possessed indigenous land and diverted funds solicited from foreign
sources to buy hotels and other property in San Cristóbal rather than for
21
parish purposes.
The letter then expanded the list of pastoral affronts: P. David refused to
admit catechists to the elaborate compound he had built apart from parish
property, designating the threshold to his office a boundary he forbade them
to cross; limited his participation in catechist meetings to brief appearances;
––––––––––
20 The second of these letters appeared over 1900 indigenous signatures, most actually
thumbprints.
21 I could not verify this last claim. Direct observation and reports from credible sources
corroborate the remaining charges.
and restricted their participation in the liturgy, curtailing catechist translations

of his sermons and presiding with his back to the people (6.I.1990).
The catechists began their second letter to the bishop: “the priest never
takes an interest in the problems and the necessities of the people,” citing his
refusal to follow the diocesan “line” which enjoined them to “speak about our
situation of hunger and misery from the light of the word of God” (26.III,
90). Then they explicitly enlisted liberation ideology in their appeal for the
priest’s removal, noting their need to “speak of oppression and capitalist
exploitation” and David’s anticommunist warnings against Nicaragua and
Cuba while “he never says anything against Yankee imperialism...” (ibid.).
The translation of missionary dispute into marxist terms begs the suspi-
cion that pastoral agents sympathetic to so-called ‘popular organizations’
22
guided the letter’s composition. In any case, what Freire calls ‘conscientiza-
tion’ echoes in the self-proclaimed awakening of these peasants: “If years
ago we were manipulated as much by municipal authorities as by the priest,
now we are different but the priest believes we remain asleep” (6.I.1990).
But liberation discourse by itself hardly explains how the catechists in
fact awakened. Indeed, their ideological argument appears as a coda to over
nine pages of handwritten complaints against the priest whose unifying theme
comes not from liberation thought but indigenous practice: The priest doesn’t
“try to understand and respect our way of working,” “take into account the
opinion of his catechists ... [or] enter into agreements [acuerdos] with the
catechists,” “live with the people ... [or] stay with us in our meetings and
courses...” (26.III.1990).
In actual fact, the priest maneuvered within boundaries, secular and
sacred, that marked his place above and apart from the indigenous and their
“way of working.” As the catechists charged, he had abandoned quarters on
church grounds local Catholics of the diocese shared with traditionalists in an
23
uneasy modus vivendi. Instead, he directed his various projects from his
own walled quarters, leaving them only to visit his other properties, or to
meet sacramental needs in the parajes where the majority of his flock lived.
These visits are best remembered by the catechists for the priest’s refusal
of indigenous hospitality, including meals specially prepared for him. He was
––––––––––
22 Among these was the catechist-turned-pastoral agent Daniel. One of very few catechists in
the entire diocese to have received a high school diploma (bachillerato), Daniel’s brief ca-
reer as a public school teacher took him to areas bordering the Lacandon Jungle where the
EZLN began and still maintains its principal base. Daniel himself left the pastoral team in
1993 to eventually become a Zapatista negotiator in peace talks with the government (FN
20.IX.92; end) 1993, and direct witness, March, 1994).
23 This colonial edifice was under the bishop’s authority and included pastor’s quarters. Like
all church property in Mexico, it was legally state-owned and accommodated traditional
Maya as well as Catholic ritual.
100 Chapter Three
obviously eager, as Elias perceived, “to leave as fast as he could” (FN

11.XII.94). Mounted on horseback, he raced across Tzotzil territory, above
and past indigenous peasants who, when fortunate enough to own them,
relied on their horses exclusively to carry agricultural burdens; they them-
selves always traveled on foot. 24
In short, the priest moved across the surface of indigenous lands and lives
in pursuit of projects irrelevant and/or dismissive of their everyday produc-
tion. Whether real or imagined, then, his real estate investments in the high-
land metropolis epitomized the catechists’ view of their pastor’s remove from
their lives.
This is a matter, above all, of sharing lots in a double sense. The cate-
chists’ letters link in immediate succession charges that the priest illicitly
occupied land claimed by landless Andreseros and refused to enter into
agreements with them. Significantly, these charges are semantically joined in
both letters, a complaint about the priest’s failure to consult followed by an
accusation concerning his landholdings. Pairing the spatial and the proce-
dural, the catechists’ rhetorical strategy asserts productive principle. For the
Maya, occupation of ancestral land is legitimated by common agreement;
occupation with this land affirms its status as communal place, never wholly
private property. In other words, socio-economic production makes the place,
and the place both figures and enables a “way of working.”
The illegitimacy of the priest’s landholdings, following this scheme, was
manifold. According to the catechists, in the early 1980s several landless
Andreseros had petitioned under Mexico’s agrarian reform law for title to
thirty-two hectares of land the priest occupied, a move to which he responded
by gathering signatures among his followers to validate the legality of his
possession. This (apparently successful) appeal to the state in defense of
property rights clearly violated communal norms. But implicit alliance with
the state, placing property over community and against the landless, was far
from the priest’s only, or even most grievous, transgression. Equally, if not
more, offensive, his solicitation of support provoked political division among
indigenous whose survival depended on communal consensus.
The priest’s choice of potatoes rather than corn on what he called “ex-
perimental farm ‘San Amadeo’” substituted imported experiments in devel-
opment for indigenous agricultural wisdom. He promoted potatoes for their
commercial as well as nutritional value, envisioning, at his most expansive,
indigenous modernization – schools, roads, and other infrastructure – via this
––––––––––
24 Jan and Diane Rus, anthropologists who arrived in neighboring Chamula in the 1970s,told of
being left in the dust as P. David galloped past them on horseback (personal communication,
Summer 1994).
single crop.25 But, just as Tzotzil campesinos had predicted, the potato neither
did nor could prosper in Larráinzar’s climate and terrain.
Catechists, unconvinced of its viability from the start, remained affected
by the message of this agricultural scheme long after its material collapse.
Years later Elias recounted a conversation in which the priest criticized the
catechists’ failure to raise cattle. Elias remembers, “I asked him, ‘What land
would we use to graze them?’ He didn’t even understand that you need land
to feed cows, and we hardly have enough land for our milpas!” (FN
12.XI.1994). Equal parts exasperation and disdain colored the campesino’s
memory of the missionary’s facile disposition toward the ground (literal and
figurative) of indigenous existence.
In short, where indigenous planted, the missionary supplanted. To the
foreigner a mere site for experiment, “land for our milpa” had for centuries
assured Tzotzil social-cultural survival. The priest’s allies – from state
agrarian agencies to international development bureaucracies and funding
sources – were as alien to the Maya as the potato. The crop – like his refusal
of their hospitality and his horseback trips over their land – unmistakably
signified his dis-placement.
Given his posture in Tzotzil social space, P. David unsurprisingly rejected
Vatican II recognition of the laity, and thus catechists, within the church
itself. Virtually boycotting their meetings, just as he did diocesan assemblies
and team dialogue, the priest carefully protected priestly liturgical preroga-
tives. He dismissed the need for sacramental preparation, a responsibility
specific to the catechetical office, frequently baptizing and presiding at
marriage without it despite catechist protestations. In another letter to the
bishop, they complained that David had told them “that sacramental prepara-
26
tion is our thing,” and, as merely such, dispensable (3.III.1978).
Indeed, the priest’s resistance to renewal consistently undermined cate-
chist authority. He regularly suspended their translations into Tzotzil of his
Spanish homilies, ostensibly to shorten them. Perpetuating the linguistic
distance separating missionary and Maya, this act effectively denied indige-
nous full access to the Word of God, the very basis of their renewed Catholic
community. Catechists remember with particular bitterness P. David’s mode
of presiding at liturgy. Eschewing the reforms of Vatican II, he stood alone at
––––––––––
25 Correspondence related to the project includes a 1974 report in English projecting this vision
to U.S. donors (30.V.1974)
26 This letter complains that though David told the pastoral team he accepted the need for
preparation before baptism, he informed “the people that preparation is our thing. Every day
the problem intensifies, above all among the elders and those who do not accept prepara-
tion.” Apparently, in his concern to “save souls,” the pastor regarded catechesis as secon-
dary to sacramental performance.
102 Chapter Three
the recessed altar of the parish church, his back towards kneeling indigenous
worshippers below.
This ritual gesture aptly figured the missionary’s regard for hierarchical
privilege as a sacred duty intrinsic to the priestly vocation, granted by ordina-
tion from above and, for him, essentially indivisible. But his vertical theology
paradoxically led to self-defeating contradiction of hierarchical principle.
Catholic priestly ordination bestows not ministerial autonomy but a share in
episcopal office. P. David’s resistance to Vatican II’s extension of this
theological understanding to affirm the priestly vocation of the laity led to
direct conflict with Bishop Ruiz. In brief, the pastor was insubordinate to the
hierarchy he pretended to uphold, as the bishop insisted on the laity’s place
within it.
Respect for episcopal authority, as well as the integrity of diocesan
pastoral strategy, demanded that the catechists’ petition be granted. Bishop
Ruiz decided that P. David could remain in San Andrés “to attend urgent
27
cases” while the diocese sought a new pastor and the Dominican sisters
assumed responsibility for general pastoral care in the parish (28.IV.1990).
Mission Misplaced
The letter communicating to parish catechists the bishop’s decision to dismiss
P. David as their pastor closed with the following exhortation:
You are the ones who must continue the work in your communities, without be-
coming discouraged and never losing sight of our task: the construction of the
reign of God in our land... (ibid.).
P. David had accepted neither the ecclesial devolution nor the definition of
the missionary task these words asserted.
For Maya catechists, alliance with the diocese arguably turned on their
construal of a critical phrase, “the construction of the reign of God in our
land [emphasis added].” Theologically, the arrival of God’s rule in time and
space defines “integral liberation,” the rejection of every form of dualism to
find “identification without total identity” between eternal salvation and the
achievement of justice in the world (F. Schüssler Fiorenza 1991: 848).
“World” here denotes the sphere of actual human existence.
It is this soteriological geography that the Diocese of San Cristóbal
recommends to the catechists (as refusal of it warranted P. David’s dis-
missal). In other words, conversion from costumbre to the Word of God
promised alternatives to impoverished peasant lives in the here-and-now of
––––––––––
27 Under the terms of his dismissal, P. David was allowed to hear confessions, baptize, and
celebrate mass in Larráinzar only in emergency.
their ancestral territory. This understanding of salvation also served as the

basis for catechist collaboration with pastoral agents in mapping mission.
Nonetheless, liberation thought failed to take into account the crucial
matters of social location and habitus, in this instance strikingly expressed in
divergent valorizations of place. In everyday practice, missionaries misread
catechist spatial gestures and thus missed altogether Maya desire for mutual-
ity in mission.
In San Andrés, the catechists made this desire visible in actual parish
architecture, seeking to anchor the church in their place as they claimed their
place in the church. When Bishop Ruiz asserted his episcopal authority by
withdrawing P. David’s priestly faculties in the parish, the missionary ap-
pealed his case to Rome. But Maya catechists validated their victory in the
dispute by proposing renovation of the local parish compound to create
suitable quarters for the dismissed pastor’s replacement and meeting rooms
for themselves there as well. Situating their meeting rooms within the walled
28
parish convent would legitimate catechist agency in mission, just as the
priest’s residence there would incorporate the church into the local commu-
nity.
In effect, for the catechists the ecclesial field was analogous to the agri-
cultural, a place to be occupied by common agreement for community pro-
duction. Thus the arrival of God’s reign in indigenous territory required their
occupation of sacred space alongside the priest to create the local church
together as full partners.
With encouragement from Bishop Ruiz, Sergio Hernández, the new
pastor in San Andrés, had fled a Central American seminary opposed to
liberation thought.29 Wholeheartedly committed to the bishop’s project, he
dramatically signaled a new ecclesial regime in San Andrés by inviting
indigenous eucharistic ministers and deacon-candidates to stand with him at
the altar facing the assembly during Sunday liturgies. On Saturday evenings
he met with catechists who would read Sunday’s scripture readings and/or
translate his homily for vocabulary lessons and exegetical discussions.
The new pastor also encouraged parish-wide catechist organization,
including formation of a mesa directiva30 – a board of directors – to convene
and preside over their monthly meetings, coordinate rotating liturgical as-
signments, and arrange pastoral visits to local communities. Padre Sergio also
entrusted the mesa directiva with the keys to the parish convent for their use
in his absence, a powerful endorsement of catechist leadership in the parish.
––––––––––
28 “Convent” refers to often enclosed grounds adjacent to the church proper.
29 Sergio attended the seminary in Puebla, site of the 1978 meeting of CELAM.
30 This group consisted of five men chosen by fellow catechists at annual elections to serve one
year terms on a rotating basis.
104 Chapter Three
The young pastor nonetheless failed to take up full-time residence in the

quarters they had remodeled for him at their own expense.31 Instead, he
maintained rooms at the cathedral rectory in San Cristóbal, commuting to San
Andrés on Saturday evening and leaving after the late-morning liturgy for
Sunday dinner with the cathedral pastoral team or Ladino friends.
P. Sergio faithfully celebrated mass, baptisms, and confessions during
patronal fiestas and annual pastoral visits to some 50 local parish communi-
ties that could last up to three days.32 But priestly duty rather than personal
interest seemed to motivate these visits, marked as they were by friendly but
limited interchange with local villagers whose language the pastor, a fairly
introverted and passive man in any case, made no effort to learn.
During longer stays in indigenous hamlets for fiestas or catechetical
courses, the priest passed the time between liturgical duties tuned to the
outside, reading church journals or listening to a portable radio. On Saturday
evenings in San Andrés, he took meals with a local indigenous family but
also went out of his way to cultivate relationships with one of the few local
ladino families remaining in Larráinzar.33
P. Sergio’s immigration status was precarious. Mexican authorities
required that he renew his visa annually in the federal capital and indefinitely
delayed approval of his application for the religious residence status allowed
by the 1992 constitutional reforms that legalized the church. The ex-patriate
pastor remained acutely aware of his vulnerability to arbitrary state action
against foreigners.34
His tenuous immigration status notwithstanding, P. Sergio’s bonds with
Mexicans in San Cristóbal and Larráinzar argue that legal concerns do not
explain his decision to leave the rooms the catechists had prepared for him
vacant and reside at the cathedral in San Cristóbal instead. Apparently feeling
less foreign to Ladinos than Maya, Sergio located himself among the former,
at a distance from the indigenous and unbridgeable by his liberationist
commitment.
––––––––––
31 The simple facilities included a ten by twelve bedroom-office with new cement floors,
painted plaster walls, and a bathroom with a flush toilet and shower supplied by a hot water
heater – all features absent in Maya adobe and/or wood dwellings.
32 Seventy-three villages stood within parish boundaries, but not all of these had chapels and
some villagers traveled to other communities for pastoral visits. At yearly visits for the local
fiesta the priest would say mass and lead rosaries over several days.
33 The head of this family was a notorioius coyote or middle-man who bought coffee at
exhorbitatn prices from local Maya peasants with no other means to market their harvest.
34 In 1987 Mexican immigration authorities expelled a Belgian priest, presumably to signal
government disapproval of diocesan pastoral work. Following the 1994 Zapatista uprising,
at least five more priests in the diocese – Spanish, French, Argentinian, Canadian and United
States citizens – were expelled from or denied re-entry to Mexico.
The Dominican sisters who served with him, Mexican nationals sent from
their motherhouse in the federal district, had sleeping quarters in a hamlet an
hour’s walk from the cabecera. But they rarely used this outpost, preferring
their spare but comfortable convent in San Cristóbal where they assisted
Dominican missionaries. Their alliance with these leading advocates of
liberation praxis in the diocese, two of them members of the núcleo, para-
doxically reinforced their social distance from the Maya whom they sought
as collaborators in mission.
A Dominican sister from the U.S. who worked with the Larráinzar team
from the mid-1980s to early 1990s provided the exception proving the rule
that apparently governed the Mexican sisters’ relations with the catechists.
Only at her insistence did they undertake extended visits to Maya hamlets.
The sisters’ evident insecurity among the Tzotzil increased as the diocese
intensified its defense of indigenous rights. Indeed, one can detect an inverse
ratio between the ever-increasing number of diocesan denunciations of
human rights violations against the Maya, a strategy pushed by the núcleo,
and the frequency of the sisters’ visits to their communities in Larráinzar.
The departure of the U.S. sister who drove the community truck provided a
logistical excuse. But a reluctance to leave San Cristóbal that approached
paralysis following the Zapatista uprising begs further explanation.
Three summers after the twelve-day indigenous uprising, as a series of
Zapatista-initiated referenda promoted the insurgents’ agenda while a partial
accord with the government sat in congressional limbo, Elias reported asking
one of the Dominican sisters after Sunday mass why she no longer came to
his, and other, parish villages. She whispered her reply: “Because you are
Zapatistas.” Elias urged her to visit and “see for yourself.” But the nun could
not be persuaded. The deacon interpreted her response with equal parts
chagrin and bewilderment: “Tiene miedo – she’s afraid” (FN 25.VII.97).
At that moment Mexican army troops were deployed throughout Chiapas;
outposts on either side of San Andrés controlled access to Maya hamlets. In
at least one notorious instance two years later, they also protected unpredict-
able right-wing paramilitary forces resentful of the Zapatistas’ appeal, and in
35
some cases outright control, in highland communities. But the danger of
violence in Chiapas was restrained by broad national sentiment against armed
solutions by either government or insurgents. Moreover, the nun’s fear had
neither obviated the deacon’s asking nor her entertaining his question: a
––––––––––
35 It is widely agreed that the December, 1997 murder by paramilitaries of 45 Maya indigenous
in their chapel at Acteal, Chenalho’ could not have occurred without the acquiescence of
Mexican soldiers stationed within earshot of the atrocity. See 1998 reports by Centro de De-
rechos Humanos, “Fray Bartolomé de las Casas” (www.frayba.org.mx).
106 Chapter Three
shared ecclesial agenda of liberation had accustomed catechists and mission-

aries to a certain discursive association.
But they remained practically dis-sociated, missionaries to Larráinzar
regarding indigenous from without and, against their own intentions, above.
On the one hand, the fear Elias glimpsed in the nun’s response reflected the
sense of exposure readily befalling a non-Maya visitor to highland communi-
ties even in normal (i.e., peaceful) circumstances, missionaries unexcepted.
The segue from an outsider’s feelings of vulnerability to disabling fear in
this circumstance certainly owed to the unique role of the church in Chiapas,
molded by the longue durée, national and regional, and acutely tension-laden
in the immediate conjuncture. Having moved into a political vacuum to assert
its moral authority, the Diocese of San Cristóbal became the preferred be-
cause historically acceptable target of local and national resentment of
indigenous collective assertion.
Modern Mexico’s anti-clerical tradition was refracted in Chiapas through
the local elite’s feudal sense of privilege, and the Zapatista uprising provoked
its most venomous expression. To employ the historic vocabulary of Mexican
national culture still used in the highlands, los indios, according to these self-
styled gente de razón, were incapable of initiating any project of conse-
36
quence. This ethnicizing logic attributed Zapatista success in rousing na-
tional and international attention to mentors in the Diocese of San Cristóbal
who promoted its preferential option for impoverished highland indigenous.
Ironically, pastoral agents such as Elias’s interlocutor belied this inaccu-
rate conclusion while unintentionally inverting its logic.
The missionary’s reply “you are Zapatista” articulated intractable contra-
dictions in mission. In brief, it acknowledged indigenous agency but refused
its effects. Affixing a label to her collaborator, the pastoral agent marked the
chasm between mission and Maya widened by pastoral agents carrying socio-
historical weights they misrecognized in their desire to disown the church’s
colonial past. Their eagerness to assert the church’s (political) autonomy
complicated the project of the Diocese of San Cristóbal as it challenged the
state’s oppressive stance towards the indigenous by defending their human
rights, and then embraced the role of mediator between the government and
politicized Maya indigenous the Zapatista uprising thrust upon it.
––––––––––
36 The racial ideology behind these labels, indios (Indians) at one pole and gente de razón
(“reasonable people”) the other, originated with Spanish colonizers. They constructed an
“erudite classification of castas,” multiple groups classified under distinctive mixed-race
labels, e.g., Spanish and Indian = mestizo; Mestizo and Spanish = castizo, etc. (Lomnitz-
Adler 1992: 261-281.
This activist posture inevitably wrapped the diocese’s claim to autonomy

in ambiguity and exposed it to attack by opponents. Indeed, the president of
Mexico himself discredited the church as proponent of a “theology of vio-
lence,”37 thereby publicly unmasking a not-so-hidden (and ultimately success-
ful) strategy to frustrate ecclesial mediation.38
Though antithetically situated and motivated as rhetorical gestures, the
president’s bombast nonetheless echoes the subtext of the missionary’s
whisper: indigenous people on the move unsettled the status of the principals
joined in hegemonic struggle. In other words, church and state regarded the
indigenous from opposed points of view, except in this one respect: both
stood within an historically established and now wobbling frame of asymmet-
rical power relations that excluded and/or objectified Mexico’s Indians.
Elias’s bewilderment in the face of the missionary’s response glosses the
point. For him, whether or not he, or anyone in his community, could be
called Zapatista simply did not count so far as his relation with the church
was concerned. He respectfully accepted but did not fully understand the
missionary’s fear because he neither did nor could participate in the struggle
for position it expressed. The deacon approached the missionary assuming
that their collaboration eclipsed her concern about what, to him, remained a
matter of (mere) political adhesion incidental to a more fundamental affilia-
tion. His invitation signaled that occasional meetings in the cabecera – even
when the occasion was, as in this instance, sacred liturgy – could not substi-
tute for encounter with Maya life at its intimate source, the local community
created through everyday life and labor.
Urging the missionary past her objections, Elias pushed liberation to-
wards an interpretation she, preoccupied with (political) position, could not
comprehend. For Elias and his fellow catechists, possession of a place to
stand is paramount, liberation practice seized as a means to this end and any
other offer regarded in relation to it. Thus the deacon had earlier refused a
Zapatista recruiter: “My community needs me,” he reasoned; “advances” in
its socio-economic well-being life nurtured by catechist-led “religion” would
be imperiled in the absence of his leadership (FN 9.I.95). 39
––––––––––
37 Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo employed this phrase during a visit to the state capital,
ostensibly to advance peace in Chiapas. La Jornada 1.VI. 98.
38 The bishop dissolved the National Commission on Intermediation (CONAI), shortly after
President Zedillo’s rhetorical assault amid mounting political evidence that the government
was uninterested in a political settlement with the EZLN, much less one brokered by the
church (Proceso, June 1998). Miguel Álvarez, secretary to Bishop Ruiz, confirmed this in-
terpretation (personal communication May, 2000).
39 The Zapatista militant made more than one visit to the community in search of Elias before
the January 1, 1994, uprising in Chiapas. Elias explained why he failed to enlist: “Why
would I want to risk death, leaving all the [natural] marvels of this world?” (FN 17.VII.97).
As the standoff between the EZLN and government troops segued into political stalemate,
108 Chapter Three
For the Tzotzils of Magdalenas, being-in-the-world is being-together-in-

place, with place the essential vantage point for religious and political views.
Elias’s invitation to the missionary echoed the Tzotzil disposition in the
standard interchange with visitors to Magdalenas: “¿Cómo estas? Aquí
estamos, como siempre. – How are things? Here we are, as always.”40
In other words, to be Tzotzil is to be emplaced within Tzotzil territory, a
product of everyday life and labor. For the deacon, liberation practice ori-
ented this occupation and deepened its value: for him, catechist and pastoral
agents, both heralds of liberation, belonged on the same ground.
Elias’s invitation, like the living quarters catechists constructed for their
pastor, manifests Maya indigenous engagement with the historical conjunc-
ture, including the church’s reentry into the highlands. Missionary misrecog-
nition of Maya accommodations to their presence in San Andrés, on the other
hand, demonstrates the paradoxical persistence of primordialist ethnocen-
41
trism even among missionaries committed to reading the “signs of the
times” (Mt. 16:3, Gaudium et Spes 1965: #4).
In brief, liberation offered no deliverance from the trap of ethnicizing
logic. Its utopianism favored a time- and space-less view of the indigenous
that privileged structural policies made at the center(s) (local and national)
and thus unintentionally reinforced a (colonial) hierarchy of places.
This is not to say that missionaries confused contemporary Maya with the
ancestral architects of Mesoamerican pyramids, nor that the church denied
the agency of those whom, after all, it named catechists (and among whom it
came to detect Zapatistas). Rather, it is to argue that missionary reluctance to
reside in Maya (geographic) space maintained missionary and Maya each in
their (social) place, the former apart from and, inevitably, above, the latter.
Liberation thought regarded the Maya as subjects of their own history.
But viewed at the distance measured by missionary ties to global, national,
and regional power centers, in pastoral practice they remained objects of
pastoral reflection and political label. In sum, in a different place, Maya
indigenous embodied, for missionaries, the other.
The other in its several forms is, of course, a historical construction,
resulting from encounters with difference transmuted by an alchemy of
the deacon and the Catholics he led became more committed to the Zapatista cause. Years
after the uprising Elias expressed admiration for the “courage” of one EZLN recruit he knew
personally; but never took up arms himself.
40 This ritualistic interchange is an instance of locative usage characteristic of everyday Tzotzil
discourse. E.g., “Tec oyan – you remain here” is the universal saying on leaving a house; the
typical greeting on the road is “te chivat – you’re going [away from here].”
41 For critiques of primordialist notions of ethnicity, see Wilmsen and McAllister (eds.) 1996.
obduracy and desire into relations of power.42 Spanish colonial ‘discovery’ of

ways and worlds heretofore unknown to the European is the paradigmatic
case. Perceived through Christian certainty and technological superiority,
native peoples appeared not interestingly different but intolerably other.43 For
the colonizers, alterity seemed not an invitation to inquiry but a motive for
assimilation or annihilation (Todorov 1984).
In encounters with difference, dialogical interest requires acquiescence to
the exercise of power by others on their own terms. It means, further, recog-
nizing that, though not identical, such terms are, in principle, mutually
translatable because of the same (human) order.
Missionary determination to undo the dehumanizing effects of conquest
and colony in the Chiapas highlands undoubtedly promoted the exercise of
Maya power. But liberation analysis as much as Mexican national culture
presumed its relative inefficacy, unintentionally undervaluing the essential
task of translation. This contradiction was not a simple result of theological
naiveté on the liberation side, but a complex product of social formation, the
habitus, of the late-twentieth century Mexican middle class.44 In their encoun-
ters, missionary contradiction rebounded against Maya clarity as indigenous
themselves shaped the task of translation to leverage power already in their
possession. In practice, then, liberation arrived in highland Chiapas not with
missionary analysis but with the contradictions embedded in it – and, inevita-
bly, on Maya terms, in Maya place.
Courses – Rites of Literacy, Performance of Liberation

The Diocese of San Cristóbal conferred catechist status on Maya peasants
depending on their attendance of annual catechetical courses. The evolution
of these exercises distinguished teachers from students socio-culturally as
well as pedagogically. It also traces the reversal in missionary initiative
limned above.
Initiated by church hierarchs in an attempt to bridge the cultural-religious
gap between Vatican II Catholicism and Maya tradition, these courses be-
––––––––––
42 Post-colonial studies is the obvious source for the articulation of prejudice and power. The
locus classicus is, of course, Said 1979. Other scholars cogently argue that cultural differ-
ence is a historical process of differentiation “produced and maintained in a field of power
relations,” and call for “interrogating the ‘otherness’ of the other’” with a “willingness to
interrogate, politically and historically, the apparent ‘given’ of a world in the first place di-
vided into ‘ourselves’ and ‘others’” (Gupta and Ferguson 1995: 16-17). On colonialism and
desire, Stoler 1995.
43 J. Z. Smith distinguishes between otherness and difference (1992) and offers a critical
genealogy of race (2001: 3-21).
44 In the case of Larráinzar, mission strategy was constrained by diocesan policies largely
devised by priests from Mexico’s urban centers and sustained for over thirty years by
women religious from the same Mexican community headquartered Mexico City.
110 Chapter Three
came rites of passage from which peasant catechists emerged, in ecclesial

eyes, as trustworthy collaborators. Religious novices in their own eyes, the
catechists, in turn, increasingly assumed authority for the design of their
religious formation and, consequently, the religious architecture of their
communities. In short, though indispensable as conveners, pastoral agents
figured more often as witnesses than mentors of Maya who authorized their
own learning and religious formation.
Beginning in 1962, catechist courses were offered in the new schools for
catechists established in San Cristóbal at the urging of the papal nuncio
(Iribarrán Pascal 1988). Elias recalls his month-long 1971 sojourn at the
Divine Shepherd convent there:
I went because I wanted to see what it was like. We learned prayers and how to
sing songs, and very little of the Word of God. It was nothing like what we do
now in our courses. At the end of the course, Don [Bishop] Samuel [Ruiz] came
and gave us a card that said we were catechists. We took home la doctrina
[Catholic manual of hymns and devotional prayers].45
The catechist Daniel remembers learning about the sacraments and “a bit of
the gospel” at a course of that early period held in the diocesan seminary
under harsh conditions: “there wasn’t enough food and we lost weight.”46
Jorge, who was fluent in Spanish when he responded to an appeal for help
from other catechists, recalls early experiences in San Cristóbal as do most
Magdalenero catechists: “muy duro – very difficult” (FN 12.VIII.95).
The “difficult” in these experiences was manifold. Many young men
embarked for courses in San Cristóbal over the understandable objections of
their parents. The absence of any family member, and certainly an older son,
seriously reduced a peasant household’s productive capacity. The diocese
itself had limited resources for maintaining indigenous men who arrived in its
classrooms with little more than the clothes they wore. Petates (straw mats)
were the only beds available in rudimentary dormitories, and meals rarely
deviated from the traditional indigenous diet of rice and beans.
Presented by men and women religious residing in the highland metropo-
lis to Maya peasants who as late as the mid-1960s were prohibited use of its
sidewalks, the early catechist curriculum was utterly opaque linguistically
and socio-culturally. Catechists themselves served as ad hoc translators for
instructors who made little attempt to learn the various Maya dialects in the
––––––––––
45 Field transcript 22.VII.1995. [Transcriptions of tape recorded conversations and homilies are
denoted FT in subsequent references.]
46 Typescript of autobiographical notes Daniel entrusted to me in October, 1993.
diocese47 and confined their lessons to elementary moral precepts and prayer
– the Sign of the Cross, the Our Father and Hail Mary. Yet Daniel notes that
only one of the thirty young men from San Andrés with whom he attended
his first course failed to finish (FN 24.VII.1993).
Daniel himself had little difficulty assimilating the doctrine he heard in
San Cristóbal, largely because it responded to the restlessness that led to his
enrollment as a catechist. He cites his first course as pivotal to his subsequent
life trajectory which, though exceptional in achievement (teacher certifica-
tion), typified both motive and direction of a common catechetical itinerary
(autobiographical notes 1993).
The most salient marker of their religious conversion, proscription of
drink, resonated with all the would-be catechists. Repudiation of ritual
alcohol consumption signaled liberation from the rule of fathers they had
literally left behind ritually as well as geographically to embark on catechet-
ical training. In doing so, the majority crossed the threshold of literacy
previously barred to them either by economics and/or, if they had attended
school, by teacher absenteeism in putatively bilingual highland government
48
schools.
Thus, Jorge, a popular municipal agent in Magdalenas, had learned the
rudiments of reading as a boy while working as a clerk on coffee fincas. But
his chronically-indebted father, fearing loss of his labor in the family milpa,
forbade his acceptance of a teacher’s invitation to attend secondary school in
the late 1970s. In 1985, a catechist invited him to take the course in San
Cristóbal.
By this time, the curriculum was guided by liberationist scriptural her-
meneutics rather than church doctrine. Jorge’s frustrated educational ambi-
tion found satisfaction in the acquisition of biblical literacy: “God has written
in the Bible what He wants. The Word of God itself teaches what He says
and where He says it, in which verses” (FN 8.VIII.1995).
Jorge offers more than a proof-text to legitimate what amounted to a
world-altering critical move. Encouraged by the preaching of catechists to
reject ritual drink and cargo service, Jorge explains how catechetical training
enabled him to rationally appropriate this life-turn: “There [reading scripture
––––––––––
47 Although Bishop Ruiz encouraged pastoral agents to deepen their understanding of the
Maya through anthropology and language studies, by the mid-1990s only a handful of mis-
sionaries had mastered more than minimal conversational Tzeltal or Tzotzil, and fewer
Ch’ol or Mam, the minority dialects in the diocese.
Significantly, foreigners – a German who compiled a Mam Maya dictionary and a Canadian
priest fluent in Tzotzil – were among these few.
48 Mexican law required bilingual instruction. In highland Chiapas, teachers were either
Ladinos barely familiar with any Maya language, or Maya natives from different communi-
ties unfamiliar with the local dialect. Teachers were frequently absent, and Spanish-Tzotzil
primary textbooks arrived only after the 1994 Zapatista uprising.
112 Chapter Three
in San Cristóbal] I could think, because there I knew the Word of God”
(ibid.)
Daniel seconds Jorge’s assessment. An early primary school drop-out,
this eager student consciously linked and equally valued Spanish and biblical
literacy. Their acquisition in tandem propelled him far beyond his father’s
world, to preparatory school and a teaching certificate as well as religious
leadership in his home community. His account of this remarkable advance
states the crucial point: “This first [catechetical] course was very important; it
gave me power” (ibid.).
Spanish and the Bible functioned as ethnic diacritics in Chiapas as else-
where in Latin America. These young Maya indigenous had known nothing
beyond village milpas except the confinement of finca labor before trekking
to convents in the highland metropolis. Thus, their initial courses became
authentic rites of social-cultural passage.
One leading pastoral agent recounts indigenous dramatization of highland
Maya history for the visiting papal nuncio. He had intended the exercise to
enable the nuncio and others in the audience of pastoral agents “to understand
the people as they saw themselves.” To the amazement of all present, the
indigenous narrator began: “My excellency, I’m going to tell you how our
life is. Look: the life of the Indian is really tough. The life of our children is
screwed” (Fazio 1995: 69-80).
This spontaneous diagnosis of contemporary Maya life astutely epito-
mized highland history. It also displayed the reflexive impact of catechetical
training, uniquely enabling indigenous to (re-)see themselves in a different
image, refracted through texts, teachers, and each other within convent
classrooms. In effect, exchange of agricultural for academic tasks and entry
into a space designed expressly to advance conversion re-situated Maya
indigenous in a ritually transformative way.
Spatial-temporal suspension of everyday life – the sina qua non of ritual –
heightened the critique of indigenous reality instigated by the social-
economic displacements which initially motivated the positive response of
young Maya males to ecclesial recruitment. The leisure of time away from
milpa and machete, wielding the intellectual tools and experiencing the
material privileges marking Ladino space – pens and notebooks, texts and
49
clocks, regular (if simple) meals and, not least, the hygienic advantages of
floored and cemented housing with indoor plumbing – provoked fascination
and incited critical thought.50 During courses, peasant catechists paused from
––––––––––
49 It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which catechists focused on meals, clearly a highly
valued secondary gain of catechetical training.
50 Peasant fascination with plumbing fixtures they naturally associated with Ladino society
resonates, albeit in the wholly different material register, with Ricoeur’s seminal notion:
“the symbol gives rise to thought” (1967: 347).
their normally unceasing material labor on a symbolically-constructed plat-

form from which they could re-imagine themselves. In other words, they re-
possessed their power in the world ipso facto made available to their
(re-)design.
As pastoral strategy in the Diocese of San Cristóbal evolved to fit socio-
linguistic circumstance, pastoral agents entrusted the Bible – until then
exclusively possessed by literate Ladinos – into Maya hands. Missionaries
recommended (Spanish) chapter and verse for discussion sessions among
catechists from which these teachers had barred themselves by failing to
study Maya languages. Instead, they commissioned the few minimally
literate Maya among the catechetical trainees as teaching assistants.
These men, in turn, expanded their primary school learning by leading
their illiterate, largely monolingual peers through Spanish texts. The eventual
addition of Maya language scriptures to the curriculum furthered the critical
effect.51 Juxtaposition of Spanish and Tzotzil Bible texts for the sake of
translation represented graphically the boundaries the catechists crossed in
what amounted to a pedagogical exodus.
In this way, the discovery of the Bible became for novice catechists an
empowering re-discovery of each other as Maya, i.e., positively differentiated
within the Ladino space in which they gathered. Through labored conquest of
textual meanings, they discovered and appropriated their own intellectual
resources, acquiring the power of bilingualism – invaluable in the highlands –
in the process. They did so in encounters whose pivotal transaction – the
handing over of texts for translation and exegesis – ritually focused cultural-
linguistic distinctions between (ladino) pastoral agents and their (Maya)
protégés.
In other words, novice Maya catechists practiced liberation as they
acquired literacy. Inevitably, they discerned themselves in Israel’s oppressed
and then liberated peasant tribes. The scriptural narrative at one and the same
time mirrored and elevated Maya lives in their own eyes as catechists came,
in their words, to “manejarlo – handle it.” The connotations of this usage are
exponentially amplified by the catechists’ word for linguistic mastery:
“dominación – domination.”52 Thus catechists became a ‘people of the book,’
claiming the Bible as their own by making it a tool for their own cultural-
religious reproduction.
––––––––––
51 The US-based and Protestant-dominated Summer Institute for Linguistics (SIL) entered the
highlands in the late 1930s (Rus and Wasserstrom 1981). But The Diocese of San Cristóbal
rejected its translations as theologically tainted. A Tzotzil Bible ecumenically
produced under diocesan sponsorship became available in 1997.
52 Catechists distinguish between those able or not to “dominar” Spanish. Interestingly,
“Spaniards then [during conquest of the Philippines] as now, always referred to learning a
foreign language as a matter of ‘dominating’ it” (Rafael 1988: 26, n.9).
114 Chapter Three
Original colonial mission obviated such an outcome, indoctrinating from

above and requiring the ‘reduction’ of indigenous to spaces controlled exclu-
sively by the masters of doctrinal manuals. In the decolonizing circumstances
of late-twentieth century highland Chiapas, however, the mission encounter
proceeded from different premises. Catechetical training endowed Maya
already mobilized by structural change with new resources for maneuver in
their homelands and movement beyond them. Biblical literacy as such, as
argued above and further developed ahead, became the most important of
these.
The social re-positioning figured in transmittal of the text also inevitably
laid the foundation for change in the calculus of power entailed in mission as,
Bible in hand, the catechists began to place themselves on new footing with
pastoral agents. Indigenous autonomy, regulating ideal for inculturation and
liberation theologies, advanced through dimensions of everyday practice
overlooked by missiological proposals oriented to the symbolic sphere and,
in the Diocese of San Cristóbal, overlaid with political concern.
Thus, missionaries who were surprised by a Maya performance in a
metropolitan convent could not have foreseen their erstwhile students’
reversal of colonial reduction. Indeed, as catechists returned from church
classrooms in the highland metropolis, they confidently seized ecclesial
initiative and remade the local church in Tzotzil territory.
Proclaiming Religion, Reclaiming Land 115
Chapter Four
Proclaiming Religion, Reclaiming Land

History, Cognition and Religious Change
Introduction
In October, 1985, catechists led a caravan of Catholics to the cabecera of San
Pedro Chenalho’ and secured abolition of the obligation attached to certain
ritually-significant cargos in Magdalenas through the mediation of municipal
government officers. The struggle with local traditional authorities to elimi-
nate what was, in the catechists’ estimation, the most onerous feature of
costumbre marked definitive establishment of a renewed Catholic community
in Magdalenas.
What one catechist called the “year of liberation” in fact punctuated
historical developments in the highlands of Chiapas extending backward to
nineteenth century ladino usurpation of Maya lands following Mexican
independence and forward to the Zapatista campaign for indigenous auton-
omy. Reversal in the correlation of ladino and indigenous forces sought by
Zapatista supporters began, from the point of view of its Maya protagonists
in Magdalenas, with a religious revolution whose pivotal events were quite
circumscribed in time and space.
Structure and Religious Agency: A Local History

The crisis in land and labor in Chiapas during the 1970s and 1980s and the
resulting structural shift in highland Maya political-economy, most explo-
sively announced by the 1994 Zapatista uprising, has been amply docu-
mented (Cancian 1992; Collier 1990, 1994a, 1994b; Harvey 1994, 1998; Rus
1976, 1995, 1999; Rus and Collier 2003; Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mat-
tiace 2003; Viquiera and Ruz 1995; Wasserstrom 1975).
What has not been widely recognized is that for catechists and other
Catholics from whom this crisis elicited a radical response, land and labor
became religious data in the post-Independence highlands through their
modern articulation with cargo practices. Never barely material phenomena
for the Tzotzil Maya, land and labor’s religious import in Magdalenas is
116 Chapter Four
substantially informed by the evolution in their distinctive socio-economic

structural relationship in Chiapas.1
At its root lay the passage of highland Maya lands into ladino hands
facilitated by state legislation following liberal disentailment in the mid-
nineteenth century. Eviction from their lands drastically reduced the capacity
of indigenous campesinos to sustain their traditional milpa mode of produc-
tion (Wasserstrom 1975). Joined to the struggle for political integration,
modernization through capital expansion became Mexico’s national project
under the government of Porfirio Díaz (1876-80, 1884-1911). His policies
lured foreign investors to Chiapas where Germans, in particular, created
coffee fincas in the lowlands and highland locations in tierra caliente (hot
country) requiring large pools of reliable labor during the harvest.
To meet this need, head taxes and other forms of extortion added debt to
hunger in the highlands, forcing virtual armies of Tzotzil and Tzeltal into
annual migrations of 3-4 months for meager finca wages to fend off creditors
and to buy subsistence corn which their equally meager land parcels could
2
not produce.
Demography adds a critical aggravating ingredient to this scene: popula-
tion rose steadily in the highlands throughout the twentieth century, reaching
the point of explosion between 1970 and 1990 when the overall state popula-
tion grew by 104% (Rus 1995:81-82).
As catechists remember their childhoods in the 1960s, conditions in
Magdalenas mirrored the political-economic pattern found in most Maya
indigenous municipios (Rus and Collier 2003). Large swaths of their com-
3
munal lands had fallen into ladino hands. By the middle of this century,
ladinos had established twenty-eight separate ranches within the boundaries
of the traditional pueblo, monopolizing the resource base of indigenous
thereby forced into peonage.
Thus it is that, with rare exceptions, contemporary catechist life histories
begin with stories of their coming of age on coffee fincas. Etched in Maya
memories, finca names themselves – e.g., Germania, Hanover – communi-
cate the essential foreignness of the experience of debt peonage, as well as its
––––––––––
1 Weber is of course the locus classicus for this line of approach. Jean Comaroff directed my
attention to the symbolic valence of peasant production.
2 Of a total of 125,000 to 150,000 working age Maya in Chiapas, 60,000 to 75,000 were
engaged in migratory agricultural labor at mid-twentieth century (Rus 1995: 81-82). Wages
were as low as 2 pesos a day [MX Peso = U.S.$0.10 in 1951, $0.03 at 1982 devaluation]
(Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática 1985: 811).
3 “Aldama,” as Santa María Magdalena is officially known, encompasses 2684 hectares. No
official data fixes relative percentages of pueblo land held by indigenous Magdaleneros and
ladino ranchers in this period though informants insist that Ladinos had annexed the largest
and best plots.
structural origins.4 Larger families with several work-age sons who pooled
their earnings eventually were sometimes able to rent milpa land in the
Central Valley. The explanation for this economic migration offered by the
head of one such Tzotzil family who spent six years in a lowland town 80
kilometers to the southwest of Magdalenas, epitomizes highland political-
economy from the indigenous standpoint: “We didn’t have enough land here”
(FN 25.X.94).
Local politics deepened the socio-cultural rupture entailed in alienation of
highland Maya land and labor. In the most pernicious of political maneuvers,
powerful highland ladino landowners subverted indigenous agency and the
ethnically-protective design of indigenous civic-religious hierarchy by co-
opting community elites who assigned cargos (Rus 1999).
A leading Magdalenero catechist offers a striking account of how this
distinctive armature of highland Maya communal cohesion was turned into
an instrument of their disenfranchisement. He recalls that during his child-
hood the local cacique effectively abdicated his authority over communal
land to “Don Rey” (literally, “sir king”) as the natives referred to the domi-
nant landowner known to fellow ranchers as the apoderado, the empowered
[person] who served as rancher fiduciary with Maya peasants and the state
(FN 5.I.02).
This lamented cacique-apoderado axis enabled Ladinos to trade trago
(rum) and cash for the land of Magdaleneros desperate to acquire these
essentials of fiesta sponsorship and other ritual obligations. As available
communal land to work and thus trade was annexed by ladino ranchers in this
way, land-hungry Magdaleneros were forced to the fincas to finance cargo
ritual. Thus they assured their social status within the community, the only
place highland Maya knew any standing at all, at the expense of their land.
In short, finca labor essentially subsidized traditional Tzotzil Maya
communities while leaving them dependent on land far from home they could
never hope to own (Rus 1995). But in Magdalenas, the manipulation of cargo
robbed this “subsidy” of its putative salutary effects as ladino subornation of
communal authorities subverted costumbre. In effect, this ultimate ground of
indigenous communal identity became a ladino mechanism for Maya dis-
placement not only from but also within their ancestral territory.
Highland political economy shifted dramatically with the turn in mod-
ernization strategy under the government of Luis Echeverría (1970-76).
Determined to re-establish the state’s legitimacy following the 1968 student
massacre at Tlatelolco, the Mexican president launched a populist program of
––––––––––
4 Maps of Chiapas dated 1971 and drawn by Karl Helbig were given me by collector in San
Cristóbal; one is entitled, “Chiapas: Schema der Landaufteilung, hier in einem Teil des
Sosconusco.”
118 Chapter Four
“shared development” that de-emphasized commercial agriculture in favor of

peasant corn-producers (P. Smith 1991). The new administration co-opted
young university-trained activists to drive this strategy on the ground. They
formed a technocratic cadre that effectively bypassed local community
caciques to stimulate advances in production with federally financed techni-
cal advice, credit, and other inputs (Schmidt 1991: 87-88).
One of these technocrats, a government-appointed agrarian reform engi-
neer, arrived in Magdalenas in late 1971 to implement the survey of commu-
nal lands authorized by the Law of Agrarian Reform passed that year (FN
12.VIII.99). This law established procedures for titling communal lands
promised by the victors of the Mexican Revolution (Mendieta y Nuñez 1982:
490-92).
Catechists and their elders alike readily recall the “gran peregrinación –
great pilgrimage” undertaken by the entire community in response to the
engineer’s initiative. Fathers and sons assembled to trace the path of the
ancient mojones (traditional boundary markers) defining the ancestral lands
of Magdalenas (12.VIII.99.) Chosen by indigenous and ladino informants
alike to describe this event, the word “pilgrimage” precisely fits its ensuing
ritual effects.
An immediate motive for this dramatic public procession was a long-
standing dispute with the neighboring pueblo of Santa Marta over a shared
border close to a river subject to periodic flooding. Worked by Marteños
when high river levels blocked the passage of Magdaleneros, land tradition-
ally claimed by the latter was eventually ceded to their neighbors (ibid.). The
resolution of the inter-community contest following nature’s dictates remains
relatively forgotten today. But the communal “pilgrimage” it occasioned
decisively altered the self-understanding of ladino witnesses as well as
indigenous participants.
The (ladino) grandson of Don Rey recalls, “The ranchers were terrified”
as they watched Magdaleneros process over their lands (FN 24.VIII.99). The
ritual power of the community’s action, as well as the rationality of ladino
anxiety, showed in its effects on indigenous participants. Magdaleneros today
assert that public reclamation of their land required submission to their
authority within it, implying imposition on ladino residents of cargo service
and cooperación, as they refer to fiesta and other local taxes (FN 15.VIII.99).
Though lacking effective means to enforce these obligations on the
ranchers at the time, indigenous proclamation of legitimate authority over
Ladinos decisively altered power relations in the community.
Within months of inscribing the boundaries of their territory with their
feet, Magdaleneros took steps to secure the plan definitivo (definitive map) of
the pueblo, financing the first in a long series of delegations to the nation’s
capital to secure presidential recognition of their land claims.5 The leader of

the initial two-man delegation is now a catechist, converted to Catholicism
through the joint persuasion of his son and son-in-law, the deacon Elías.6
This attempt to legitimate Magdalenero claims on ancestral land shared
the fate of hundreds of similar appeals from Chiapas. Mexico’s Secretariat
for Agrarian Reform delayed action nearly a quarter of a century on the
petition it first received, according to its own records, from “a group of
peasants from the center of the settlement called ‘Aldama’ previously ‘Santa
María Magdalena’” on January 24, 1972.7
In Magdalenas, ongoing preoccupation with the plan definitivo8 framed
what became a more urgent struggle over everyday disposition of communal
land. In the event, juridical and inter-ethnic concerns over its possession
devolved into fierce inter-generational religious contention among Magda-
leneros themselves.
The breach between fathers and sons who had begun taking catechist
courses in San Cristóbal became unbridgeable when yet another shift in
Mexico’s political-economy prompted revaluation of local land as young
men began to focus on its actual use. This revaluation was indirectly
prompted by discovery of oil reserves that transformed Mexico into a player
in the world system. Relying on the promise of oil, the federal government
abandoned what remained of its determined economic nationalism in favor of
neo-liberal emphasis on export agriculture. Hundreds of indigenous share-
croppers and debt laborers alike became unemployed as thousands of hec-
tares of corn fields were converted to pasture in Chiapas.
Meanwhile, the longstanding dominance of highland Maya in low-paid
finca labor was challenged by experienced Guatemalan coffee workers who
accepted even lower wages as they flooded into Chiapas to escape their
country’s brutal civil war (Rus and Collier 2003). Coffee itself increasingly
shaped Mexican agricultural policy following the 1973 restructure of the
Mexican Coffee Institute (INMECAFE). This policy move promoted com-
––––––––––
5 Mexico’s 1971 Agrarian Reform Law required that an “agrarian delegation” initiate the
petition for recognition and titling of common lands. (Nuñez y Mendieta 1982: 40). Neo-
liberal reforms advance by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) abolished com-
munal land rights and, not incidentally, contributed to the Zapatista uprising.
6 This man remembers wearing his traje and sandals to the Department of Agrarian Affairs
and Colonization to enter the petition.
7 Diario Oficial de la Federación 26 de septiembre de 1976:72. This entry names the catechist
noted above as one of the original petitioners. The State of Chiapas isued the map authorized
by this 1976 on February 14, 1997, i.e., more than twenty-five years after the January, 1972
petition.
8 At a July, 1993 community assembly I witnessed, some 150 Magdaleneros deliberated for
six-hours to reach consensus on matters including phone calls to Mexico City and travels to
the state capital seeking action on the plan definitivo (FV 10.IX.93).
120 Chapter Four
mercialization through price regulation and government assistance to growers

at all levels, including small producers (Martinez Quezada 1994: 42-43). In
the ensuing twenty years, the number of Mexican coffee producers grew from
97,000 to 193,000; coffee moved from a quarter to a third in share of the
nation’s total agricultural exports; and Mexico became the world’s fourth
largest coffee producer (ibid.: 41).
Like many Tzotzils replaced by Guatemalans on lowland fincas, some
catechists had found jobs in the vast public works projects financed by
government borrowing against oil. Construction of refineries in neighboring
Tabasco, dams on Chiapas’ Grijalva River, and roads and bridges throughout
Mexico’s depressed southeast lured landless indigenous laborers. They also
found work in the coastal resort areas of the Yucatán peninsula as the gov-
ernment promoted tourism with hotel and infrastructure projects.
An instance of the socially explosive ironies of globalization, these
government initiatives propelled Mexico’s rise in the global economy but
eventually turned Magdaleneros back to their highland homes. There the
dialectics of religious awakening among Catholic converts definitively
upended the community’s modern social-cultural order.
For the young men of Magdalenas, the economic attraction of public
works outweighed their heavy social cost only for a time. Subjected to harsh
proletarian conditions, they suffered lasting moral as well as physical injuries
during long hours of heavy labor under abusive ladino foremen. Thus, when
construction jobs evaporated following the 1982 collapse of Mexico’s oil-
driven economic boom, Magdaleneros returned home as much drawn by
desire as forced by necessity.
The deacon Elias remembers working in the oil fields,
...in the sweat of the sun; we slept naked on [concrete] slabs, 120 in one big room;
we got up at 3 a.m. and they [foremen] decided everything, how we should work,
where we should be all day and night (FN 20.XII.94).
“They looked down on us, always made themselves superior,” one Catholic
chorus member recalls of hotel construction in the resort city of Cancún
where he suffered his first painful hernia. “María [his new wife] sat solita (all
alone) – all she had was the radio” (FN 17.X.93). One catechist points to
shoulders scarred from bearing loads of cement (FN 18.VIII.95). Another
sums up the motives of his peers as he explains his decision to abandon a six-
year, on-and-off construction career in Villahermosa:
They mistreated us, ordered us around, we didn’t speak Spanish well: I thought,
it’s better to work in my milpa, sow beans (FN 17.IX.93).
Far from a retreat into nostalgia, this young man’ evocation of milpa explains
the de-proletarianization of his peers. They returned to their place of origin in
urgent search of a project for its future. In effect, rejection of ladino domi-
nance over their bodies in oil fields and construction sites resonated with
discovery that the ways of their fathers could be questioned. To elucidate this
resonance is to chart the course and fix the terms of religion’s critique, and
eventual displacement, of costumbre in Magdalenas.
Religion, Re-cognition, and the Dialectics of Conversion

Several young Magdaleneros had already embarked on catechist courses
against their fathers’ wills, before being forced to look for new work abroad.
Now steady advances in literacy together with possession of the Bible
amounted to a critical platform from which they re-surveyed their home
territory. From this altogether novel (for them) critical perspective, social
scars on the land inflicted by tradition were as transparent as bodily injuries
suffered in peonage.
The deacon Elias describes his “illumination” following absences from
Magdalenas for catechectical courses and peonage:
[I saw] women and men lying drunk on the side of the roads to San Andrés. Even
the old catechist drank after baptisms. Vacant lands [were] grown over with
weeds (FN 12.I.02).
More realistic than Daniel’s visionary “illumination” during a catechist

course – a colored text dropped from the sky promising a windfall of cash
(see Ch. One) – the source of Elias’ religious revelation was nearly the same.
Both catechists “saw” and deconstructed their poverty through removal
from it, textual and geographical. They disproved divine ordinance of their
material circumstance by reading the Word, the method as effectively as the
message opening access to a discursive domain unsuspected by their fathers
and denied them by ladino overseers. In Goody’s evocative portrayal of
literacy as a reflexive exercise, “bouncing thoughts between oneself and a
piece of paper” potentiates intellect as well as social standing (Goody 2000:
148).
Thus, as catechists accrued the social “prestige of writing” (ibid.: 118) –
historically restricted in the highlands to ecclesial, governmental, and com-
mercial actors – they also felt inwardly empowered. The consequent altera-
tion in their relationship to themselves entailed a parallel revision of their
relationship to the world, raising questions they had not considered before
they encountered the text.
Most significantly, in the context of re-entry to Magdalenas, their
appropriation of the Bible prompted the question, how could they effectively
122 Chapter Four
repossess the land they had recently confirmed to be their own? Necessity
motivated the query. The material-symbolic dialectics of peasant practice that
embodied Magdalenero conversion delivered its response.
During the preceding decade, many highland Maya had unintentionally
forged a potent weapon against peonage as they transplanted coffee seedlings
in their domestic gardens. In these experiments, they complemented native
agricultural skills with knowledge accrued on the fincas (Martinez Quezada
1994: 65-66). When INMECAFE began dispensing credit and other inputs to
promote coffee production among Mexico’s small growers, Maya indigenous
joined Ladinos in petitioning for government aid (ibid.: 66ff). The value
added to their land by prospects for this cash crop compelled new scrutiny of
its traditional disposition, in the case of the catechists with a new religious
refraction.
According to their exegesis of Genesis and Exodus, the universal destiny
of created goods legitimated Magdalenero claims on ancestral land while
Hebrew liberation from slavery anticipated their own emancipation from
peonage. As significant, the intellectual passage that validated this hermeneu-
tic – the acquisition of literacy and the cognitive transformation(s) it entailed
– led to a religiously decisive re-cognition: Ladino monopoly of their land
was sustained, as the catechists now saw it, by what amounted to Maya self-
eviction.
This re-cognition, specifically focused on tradition and land, constituted
the “illumination” cited by leading catechists. Its personally arresting, con-
sciousness-altering power derived from both counter-intuitive force and
contextual fit. The social enslavements shaping their early biographies –
childhood submission to domestic drunkenness, adolescent exile to the
miseries of the fincas, adult subservience to ladino economic orders – were
disrupted by the biblical text, the process of its appropriation validating its
message. The synergistic effect revealed the oppressive underside of costum-
bre.
Put another way, literacy bestowed the power of a textual alternative to
tradition in a double sense. The Bible was transformed from inaccessible
object to prized possession through inquiry, verbal and conceptual, inevitably
transferred to the given order of the world. In other words, reflexive interac-
tion between self and world facilitated the separation between self and world
(Goody 2000:48). Just so, the lapidary interrogative punctuating gospel
proclamation by the deacon Elías – “¿Cómo es possible? – How is it possi-
ble?” – evinces the break with Tzotzil tradition’s intuitive social ontology
through which the catechists entered “religion” (Boyer 1994: 34ff).9
“How is it possible,” Elias wonders with his newly-literate brother cate-
chists even now, that Magdaleneros had abandoned both themselves and their
land to cargo and trago, i.e., ritual drinking. “How is it possible” that so
much of what land they did possess was haphazardly tended and/or given to
sugar cane supplying trapiches (domestic distilleries) rather than corn? And,
especially after the arrival of coffee “en grande – big time” via INMECAFE
inputs, “How is it possible” that so much of those communal resources
remaining in Magdalenero hands stood as tierra vacante – empty, unoccu-
pied land?
The new salience of “empty” land owed substantially to the altered
context of agricultural production in Chiapas. Whereas sugar cane cultivated
for personal consumption linked to cargo guaranteed debt, coffee for com-
merce promised cash – and, even more important to young Magdaleneros, a
communal future. Access to the means of coffee cultivation “illuminated” a
way ahead on the land to which they had returned, prepared by their wider
regional experience for new terms of exchange both within and beyond the
community.
Disposition of the critical matters – cane, coffee, and above all, land for
subsistence milpa as well as cash cropping – had thus become, for the cate-
chists, a question of alternatives with starkly different social and economic
valences. Decisions related to them became, in turn, the stuff of religious
conversion understood dialectically, that is, structural constraints and/or
stimuli impinging, indeterminately and variously, on symbolic practice and
10
vice versa. In sum, following from the fit between desire and opportunity,
for the catechists of Magdalenas “illumination” was effected as they envi-
sioned coffee cultivation as a way to (re)possess the land and their own
labor.11
The capacity to formulate and pose the critical question “how is it possi-
ble” for things to be as they are depends, of course, on a sense of what they
might otherwise be. The apparent triviality of this observation should not
––––––––––
9 A leading advocate of the application of cognitive theory to the study of religion, Boyer
argues that counter-intuitiveness is characteristic, even defining, of religious representations
as such.
10 Though Elias took his first catechist course in 1973, he sets the date of his own “illumina-
tion” precisely in 1979, coinciding with establishment of PIDER-Mecafé – Program of In-
vestment for Rural Development (“improvement of coffee plantations – in the highlands”).
11 Burton Mack points to “the dimension of change or production” and defines religion as “a
practice that produces myths and rituals of ideational consequence for the structure of a so-
ciety as a whole” (2000: 283-296). Among “the forces and features of social existence” with
which religion is concerned, Mack notably includes “a group’s attitude toward the land”
(293).
124 Chapter Four
obscure the compelling power of the phenomena it describes. In the case of

the catechists of Magdalenas, desolate fields and drunken fathers came to be
re-cognized as a product of self-eviction in so far as the acquisition of liter-
acy deepened reflexivity and context urged evaluation of their standing on
the land.
Put another way, the sense of self-possession engendered through the
critical-intellectual exercise(s) of catechetical training propelled desire to
(re)possess ancestral land. This desire was, in turn, legitimated by both
Mexican law and God’s Word. It was rendered both urgent and hopeful by
the constraints and opportunities of the political-economic conjuncture.
The religiousness of these moves, evinced by their counter-intuitive and
reflexive character, is further confirmed by the pivot around which they
turned: cargo ritual and the unmasking of its subversive effects on Maya
community. In short, in the eyes of the catechists, the transforming power in
re-cognition of a mis-recognition confirmed the ritual domain to be a matter
of life and death.
Excursus: Fragment of a Theological Brief for Ritual Reform

When asked how the Word of God arrive in Magdalenas, the deacon Elias
took up pen and paper. His ready resort to the instruments of literacy figures
his profound engagement with the cognitive effects attending this “technol-
ogy of the intellect” (Goody 1986, 2000).
The ability to suspend the social ties that restrain questioning in oral
culture and to interact systematically with oneself, the features of literacy
which promote reflexivity and, with it, criticism of the world beyond the text,
enabled the catechists of Magdalenas to break with the order of the ancestors,
as suggested above. Goody argues further that literacy advances logical
abstraction by both making the implicit explicit and rendering words them-
12
selves objects of reflection (Goody 2000: 140-48). Further, he points to the
advance of second order intellectual production with literacy, proposing
theology as an example of “thoughts about thoughts” (Goody 1986: 37-38).
But Elias demonstrates how the acquisition of literacy so understood
makes theology something other than “thoughts about thoughts.” In his case,
the obscurity imposed by tradition on local reality dissolved to reveal the
(relatively) transparent realm of human.
Thus, his theological reflection, with commentary:
––––––––––
12 Goody argues that the “gap” between oral and literate societies postulated by evolutionists
lies not in so-called “mentalities” but in “outcomes” of the application of identical (human)
capacities using different “tools of the intellect” (2000:150).
FOUNDATION AND ORIGIN OF THE WORD OF GOD13

From the beginning we teach Christian doctrine. We ask:
Where is God?
Who is God?
What is God?
And so we talked, with a firm will, to men and women, where we found patience,
[with] friends and relatives...
While not exhausted by this purpose, the dialogue the deacon initiated with
these questions demonstrates, even long after its inciting events, how reform
of cargo drove evangelization in Magdalenas. Prompted to respond to his
own questions, Elias offered the relevant corollaries:
Where is God? God is in the love of each person. God wants us to share love. We
need to act like brothers to all. If you do this, you are going to have more friends,
now all in right mind, not through drinking. It’s better for everybody. Now it’s
another way, not drinking. Carrying on with work and good counsels and exam-
ples [emphasis added].
In the deacon’s hermeneutic, the foundational Christian affirmation – “God is

love” (1 John 4,8) – and its moral correlatives at once condemn one “way” of
human association and envision another, the drunken camaraderie of cargo to
be replaced by the rational community of work. As in catechetical courses,
God is located in “right mind,” that is, rational enterprise opening on emanci-
patory possibilities: it is “better for everybody.” Word (“counsels”) and work
(“examples”) replace drinking as orienting religious categories for “another
way” of constructing Maya community.
Who is God? He is a God who always has his way of acting in a people or a fam-
ily.... A people’s way of acting requires good conditions. To burn candles, in-
cense, drink – without thinking, how is God – though one loves God, it’s in vain.
God wants the truth; they [traditionalists] act without thinking, through costum-
bre. God is in all places, permanent. If God is permanent, people need to move
ahead in life [emphasis added].
Its logical leaps included, this gloss makes striking theological-

anthropological claims about God’s relation to, and human action in, the
world. God’s “way” is disclosed in human ways, but only in so far as both
are rationally considered. This restriction derives from God’s unrestricted
presence, “in all places.” If God is omnipresent, then God can (even must) be
––––––––––
13 FN 13.VIII.95.
126 Chapter Four
sought, and thought, free of the constraints of costumbre. Its obligatory ritual
gestures, bound to specified objects and places, are “vain” precisely because
they are performed “without thinking” about God and about (the) human
condition(s).
God’s truth is revealed in human action, but only in “conditions” rendered
“good” by human thought. The warrant for such thoughtful action is the very
“permanence” of God, endowing value on human endeavor – that is, con-
scious, purposeful effort – as such. An omnipresent God’s way is revealed, in
short, as a human way “ahead in life.”
Then, What is God? He is not a God who hides, he is a God who comes near. He
is with you during all your work. If you don’t know what God is, don’t have a line
– do whatever you feel like doing – if you don’t think carefully about what you’re
doing, what good is it? [emphasis added].
The deacon’s response immediately turns the question of divine being against
any form of essentialism. Instead, God is described relationally, his presence
and approach to human being particularly manifest in work. God invites,
even more, is a “line,” a rational direction, for work. This truth is transparent
(God does not “hide,” but rather “comes near”) and warranted by the “good”
it yields. So the deacon’s catechism concludes:
If you grasp these three questions, now you no longer have difficulty, now no one
can dominate you because you understand [emphasis added].
The “good” lies, first of all, in the questioning itself, more exactly in the
critical spirit precisely as counter to domination, the supreme “difficulty.”
Implicit in Elias’ text as a whole, “domination” includes all the enslaving
dimensions of costumbre from the catechist point of view – obligation,
addiction, peonage, and the social and material alienation(s) resulting from
them.
Religion, the deacon implies, liberates by “understanding” these enslave-
ments. Its alternative “thinking” about God criticizes costumbre as “vain,”
i.e., fruitless and unproductive, precisely because unthinking. The God who
“wants truth” wants “thinking” and all that follows from it, according to the
deacon. Above all God wants “good conditions” and “a move ahead,” in
other words, production and the future it makes possible. For the deacon,
locating God “in the way of acting of a people” amounts to assimilating
thought to work and so offering a future on the land worked as one’s own.
Not least important, on this liberating understanding domination is
neither an abstract force nor an anonymous structure. As the deacon implies,
the “difficulty” of domination begins as difficulty with an implied someone,
in the case of the catechists, their elders and, by extension, the Ladinos whose
peons they had become.
According to Elias, the “Word of God” (i.e., the Catholic community)
took root in Magdalenas with the critique of costumbre. This critique – like
the theology it engenders – was originally enacted and elaborated in a bitter,
nearly violent struggle of sons to undo the binding of their fathers to Ladinos
via cargo practice.
The “Year of Liberation”: Cargo Struggle in Magdalenas

In December, 1984, Rudolfo, who began attending celebrations of the Word
of God soon after his father planted his first mariposas de café (coffee
14
seedlings), in the late 1970s, refused the nightly dance during the Christmas
novena required of cavilto, the cargo he served that year. It was not, he
explained, just that dancing was a waste of time. Worse was the customary
ritual drinking while they danced that cost caviltos money, lucidity and,
consequently, productive labor.
But cavilto entailed another, even more repugnant obligation during
celebration of the Lord’s Passion. Caviltos were required to recruit two
maxpat to trace Christ’s way of the cross through the village on Good Friday
while swinging a glass-studded ball of wax against their backs to emulate
“the scourging” described in gospel passion narrative (Mark 15,16ff.). Pain-
ful in itself, the procession’s mutation into public spectacle compounded its
humiliations. Scores of Ladinos traveled annually to Magdalenas to watch the
two maxpat anesthesized by trago make their bloody way to eventual col-
lapse at the end of the appointed route.
Abetted by brother catechists, Rudolfo’s refusal of cavilto duties enraged
the elders of Magdalenas. The traditional Christmas novena thus marked the
opening act in the community-rending drama whose prologue had unfolded
during the previous spring’s Holy Week when another catechist declined to
serve as maxpat.
Named in the gospels, the authority behind the ritual suffering of maxpat
was endowed with anonymity by cargo, the social structural core of Tzotzil
costumbre. Anonymity – es costumbre – endowed cargo with obligatory
force. But it also facilitated cargo’s subversion.
The presence of Ladinos spectators begs the critical connection. Don Rey
and the ranchers who depended on him routinely beat Magdaleneros with a
whip as he rode through the pueblo to oversee their properties (FN 5.I.02). As
in the case of all cargo, Magdaleneros could only be persuaded to undertake
maxpat by gifts of trago from caviltos, the same cargo holders who supplied
trago for obligatory consumption during the nine-day Christmas novena. “Se
––––––––––
14 Coffee seedlings look like butterflies (mariposas) to the Tzotzil.
128 Chapter Four
gastó mucho, los caviltos – caviltos spent a lot” (ibid.) and fell deeply into
debt to Ladinos when they recruited maxpat. Far more than innocent specta-
tors of the ritual, then, Ladinos were implicated in maxpat flagellation by
indigenous debt paid off through forced labor that was not infrequently
disciplined with a whip.
Yet, Ladinos effectively underwrote the maxpat rite and all its humilia-
tions with indigenous consent. As if to ratify their agreement, prescribed self-
flagellation during the bloody rite of Holy Week invariably incapacitated
15
cargo-holders for days after the event. In short, the cargo (en)acted the
complicity of indigenous actors in the infliction of obligatory, trago-fueled,
and anti-productive – i.e., mindless – cargo suffering as such.
Thus, the catechists’ 1984-1985 revolt against the cavilto-maxpat com-
plex unmasked and subsequently reversed the domination it enforced, re-
claiming Magdalenas in the process.
In the immediate aftermath of the Christmas revolt, traditional authorities
armed with machetes and rifles paid threatening night visits to the catechists
and their supporters. Except for the authorities and certain cargo holders
required to reside in the center during their year(s) of service, most Magda-
leneros lived in domestic units near ancestral parcels scattered widely within
communal territory. Now, encouraged by a newly-converted local municipal
agent, as well as arrival of a road from San Andrés and the prospect of
16
electricity engineered by the government, leading catechists and other
newly-converted Catholic families moved their homes to the community’s
traditionally empty center in self-defense (FN 4.I.02). Gathering for worship
daily in the templo on the pueblo’s plaza and across from the municipal
agency where traditional authorities ruled, the nascent Catholic community
that called itself the Word of God thus staked its claim to authority in Santa
María Magdalenas.
Remaking Magdalenas
On New Year’s Day 1985, the traditional date for inauguration of new
authorities and cargo holders among the Tzotzil, municipal officers from San
Pedro Chenalho’, the township center, arrived in Magdalenas. The elders had
appealed to these government officers to enforce their ancestral authority to
impose cargo obligations. But the visit failed to quash the catechists’ rebel-
lion.
––––––––––
15 The parenthesis here is meant to signal agreement that ritual meaning lies in neither prior
script nor subsequent interpretation but in ritual performance itself (C. Bell 1992).
16 One Mayanist attributes the “florescence of hamlets” in the municipio of Zinacantán to
improved infrastructure. He explains the growing number of chapels by linking new eco-
nomic opportunities and the erosion of cargo, but acknowledges the Catholic church and its
catechists only in passing (Cancian 1992).
By this time five other catechists worked alongside Elias and Nicolás, the
first Magdaleneros trained in Bishop Ruiz’s new schools for catechists, to
lead a Catholic community that had grown from fewer than fifteen house-
holds in the mid-1970s to nearly forty of a total of two hundred families in
Magdalenero territory. Most of these had entered the Word of God when it
was time to marry or have their children baptized.
Fueled by determination to defend themselves against the elders follow-
ing the New Year’s Day visitation, the catechists accelerated their efforts to
proselytize their peers, initiating pláticas (conversations) according to the
formula sketched by Elias for evangelizing “friends and relatives.” Having
defied parents who locked him out of the house on Sundays in disapproval,
Nicholás now offers a succinct, straightforward account of the catechists’
shared convictions:
The Word of God is good [favorable], it changes our behavior, it’s good news for
us, changing our life: it improves the family, our [socio-economic] situation be-
cause we don’t drink or rob or abuse others.... I like the singing we do [at liturgi-
cal gatherings]. And we don’t go to the finca any more (FN 5.I.02].
Abandonment of finca labor meant ritual reconstitution of community just as

liturgical reclamation of the templo at the center of Magdalenas signified an
end to this disaggregating effect of cargo.17 Permanent domestic settlement at
the pueblo’s center at once facilitated daily gatherings in church and encour-
aged the reconstruction of relations of production already underway through-
out communal territory.
Small groups of families persuaded by catechetical pláticas began aban-
doning scattered and isolated dwellings from which they were easily re-
cruited for the finca to form the nuclei of permanent hamlets outside the
center. Where they considered tilling first “empty” (uncultivated) communal
18
land and then ladino ranches. These prospects emerged with the profitability
of coffee cultivation, but became plausible through the dialectically-formed
Maya re-cognitions described above.
––––––––––
17 The catechists’ critique of cargo argues that the anthropological trope “the empty center”
figures not an innocent oscillation between productive dispersion and ritual gathering but the
evacuation of ethnic power among the highland Maya with nineteenth century development
of agribusiness.
18 Magdaleneros agree that the deacon Elias was responsible for the “foundation” of Catholic
communities in the hamlets of Xuxchen, Saclum, Yabchivit, and Cotsil’nam. A school was
located at this last site in the 1950s, but none had permanent residents until the 1980s cate-
chist campaign Though they evoke the “textual communities” summoned by late medieval
religious reformers (Stock 1983), these Tzotzil communities came together not only for tex-
tual conquest but also for the productive possibilities it entailed.
130 Chapter Four
On the one hand, the death of Don Rey in 1976 followed by the collapse
of corn prices in Mexico weakened ladino rancher resistance to Magdalenero
assertion of ancestral territorial rights, progressing from the 1971 boundary
procession, through the pueblo’s ongoing campaign for its plan definitivo, to
catechist plans for purchase of ladino-held land. On the other, these devel-
opments at once motivated and embodied religious conversion among Mag-
daleneros.
As early as 1979, thirty families had begun working six hectares of vacant
communal land in Pucujvits at the northwest corner of Magdalenas. By 1983,
two groups from Magdalenas center and two more from Elias’ paraje, Cot-
sil’nam, had also put vacant land into production (FN 12.I.02).
Up until then most families who had any land at all reserved a portion of
their plots for sugar and clandestine production of pox (rum) for ritual con-
sumption. Now bananas, corn, and coffee seedlings filled this land and other
“vacant” territory re-claimed for cultivation. Animated by catechetical
“conversations,” the groups dedicated to this mode of diversified, cooperative
production formed precursors to the socios, or partnerships that evolved hand
in hand with new religious affiliation. These partnerships strategized outright
purchase of ladino ranches to effectively reconfigure Magdalenas as Maya
territory (FN 10.I.02).
The fury the elders directed at the catechists, then, responded to the
radical reach of displacement (and replacement) propelled by the young
men’s revolt. Residence at the center had traditionally signified civic-
religious authority, governing distribution of communal land as well as
political and ritual order. The convergence of new Catholics there abetted
cultivation of vacant communal land, the latter ratifying the former in de
facto defiance of the rule of the elders.
Liturgical gatherings in the church anchoring the pueblo’s public plaza
tacitly celebrated the devolution of authority, attracting Magdaleneros with
the appeal of a fiesta every day, unencumbered by the prescriptions of cos-
tumbre and the yearly round of fiestas it governed. Echoing Nicolás, Rudolfo,
whose refusal of the requisites of cavilto during the Christmas novena insti-
gated the cargo revolt, traced the beginning of his conversion to the sounds of
liturgy reaching across the plaza as he returned from his distant milpa each
afternoon. He approached the catechists to ask how he could join newly
gathered community, simply “to sing with them” (FN 25.VII.93).
Thus, amid acute communal tension verging on violence, by October,
1986, the catechists had succeeded in enlisting a majority of Magdaleneros to
their side in the cargo contest, some one hundred of two hundred families. A
simple desire for congregation as much as the catechists’ critique of cargo
presumably drew many Magdaleneros to Catholic liturgical celebration. But,
at its climactic moment, critique of cargo proved decisive.
Usually the product of consensus during community assembly, the rela-

tively close margin between those who supported the elders and those led by
the catechists made it impossible to reach community agreement on the
catechists’ demand for relief from ritual cargo obligation. The disputing
parties thus traveled to the seat of municipal government intent on a legal
settlement of their dispute, the traditionals on foot, the catechists by truck, as
Rudolfo gleefully emphasized.19
Their mode of transport metonymously confirmed the catechists’ critical
advantage, just as appeal to “los licenciados” (university-educated govern-
ment authorities) in the cabecera to adjudicate their contest measured the
cognitive distance between youth and elders. Literacy liberated the catechists
from costumbre’s obligatory order. The reflexivity it engendered at once
enhanced catechist agency and loosened tradition’s stranglehold. In the end,
the catechists won a written document legitimating abolition of obligatory
20
cargo their elders had long enforced by oral tradition.
The catechists had made the authority of “los licenciados” an instrument
of their own emergent power. In doing so, they ironically inverted the per-
verse alliance through which Ladinos had suborned indigenous authorities to
dominate the land and so highland political economy generally. They carried
back to Magdalenas a settlement establishing the voluntary status of three
ritually significant cargos – cavilto, capitán,21 and alférez, this last the enor-
mously costly and indebting obligation of fiesta sponsorship.22
“We Own the Pueblo Now.”

It seems probable that in this instance official support of Magdalenero Catho-
lics reflects the state’s desire to defuse conflict in an area of the highlands
relatively unaffected by militant peasant organizing roiling other areas of the
state (Harvey 1998: 147-64). For this study, far more significant than the
state’s motives was the catechists’ effective cooptation of its agents to ad-
––––––––––
19 Nicolás, however, recalls that Catholics walked to the township center, San Pedro
Chenalho’. It is quite possible that the catechists could not secure truck transport for so large
a number. Rudolfo’s recall of a journey by truck may be true for catechists and some sup-
porters, with the actual number of vehicles exaggerated by memory to emphasize the elders’
travel on foot.
20 Literacy means “the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures...
[and moves towards] greater interiorization and openness” Ong 1982: 179-80. Catechist re-
jection of cargo as obligatory communal structure was a conscious decision mediated
through the critical distance from taken-for-granted social order acquired with literacy.
21 The obligation distinguishing capitán, horse racing through the center at certain fiestas,
threatened injury and loss of production.
22 One older man who had “passed” all cargos before becoming a catechist estimates that his
turn as alférez in 1984 cost him NP$300,000, or U.S. $2000(FN 22.VII.94). In the mid-
1990s, the annual income of a typical catechist was U.S. $600-800.
132 Chapter Four
vance what they came to call their “liberation.” In effect, their defeat of
obligatory cargo inaugurated the era of “religion” and a new structure of
production, and so of power relations, in Magdalenas. As the deacon Rudolfo
reports, “The catechists said, ‘We own the pueblo now’”(FN 30.VII.97).23
Their use of the word “liberation” in this connection was (and is) not
ideological. Rather, it denotes the concrete religious motive and mechanism
for the catechists’ revolt against tradition, made explicit in the agenda they
carried to the cabecera.
Their objective was neither the overthrow of the cargo system as such,
nor the ouster of the authorities who enforced it. Those cargos deemed
necessary to the civil order necessary for production – e.g., mayor (police
officer), regidor (town clerk), and alcalde (mayor-judge consultant to the
agente (municipal agent) remained unobjectionable to the catechists. Most
catechists periodically assume these civil offices even today. And they
continue to duly honor los principales, elders who have “passed” through all
cargos. Indeed, Nicolás cites backing from a few principales as a contribut-
ing factor to the power of the catechists’ position as the cargo struggle wore
on (FN 5.I.02).
This struggle pivoted, around the obligation to undertake those traditional
ritual cargos which compromised – through drunkenness, debt, and bodily
endangerment – their autonomous pursuit of production on land they hoped
to make their own through their revolt.
In catechist conversion narratives, obligation contradicts autonomy
discovered and seized through re-cognition of an alternative way of being in
the world. Put another way, “liberation” came through “illumination,” the
word the catechists favor to denote the cognitively- arresting irruption of
possibility within the given ontology of costumbre.
24
Possession of the Bible denied the unquestionable (i.e., sacred ) status
of tradition as (ontological) source of truth and (cognitive) guide to knowing.
Its revelation of God’s presence in human endeavor challenged costumbre’s
restrictive sitings of the sacred. The catechists’ passage to criticism through
literacy effected the human empowerment this revelation warranted.
––––––––––
23 It is worth noting here that in the mid-1980s, when Magdaleneros celebrated liberation from
cargo and reclaimed their land, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation enjoyed only em-
bryonic status in jungle lowlands of Chiapas. The rebel leader Subcomandante. Marcos
dates the official formation of the EZLN November 17, 1983. Only in 1988-89 did Zapatista
membership expand to significant numbers, growing from 80 to 1300 (Harvey 1998: 164-
67).
24 This definition of the “sacred” comes from Roy Rappaport. He attributes it to “Ultimate
Sacred Postulates” that are “counterintuitive” and “consequential” and “can be falsified nei-
ther logically nor empirically .... [and] ...verified neither objectively nor logically.... And yet
they are taken to be unquestionable” (1999: 280-281, emphasis in original).
These young men initially addressed their critical freedom to the ritual
sphere but did so to expand their sphere of action as such. Thus they reiter-
ated their claim to space for autonomous Maya production on more than one
plane of signification. Repudiation of maxpat entailed refusal of the ritual’s
route encompassing the center. The prescribed ritual map itself arguably
signified ladino constraint on indigenous peasant production, constraint
sustained by the misrecognition(s) embedded in cargo.
As catechists encouraged Magdaleneros to settle the center and found
new hamlets, they destabilized the dual hierarchies complicit in their oppres-
sion. In effect, youth displaced their ladino overseers along with their elders
as they established a new spatial design for production. Daily communal
liturgical gatherings – an utterly novel ritual practice for the Tzotzil – ratified
this transformative process. By its dialectical logic, release from the costum-
bre meant definitive emancipation from centuries-old colonial domination.
Put another way, Magdaleneros use the word “religion” in the first instance
to signify liberation from tradition’s ritual obligations. But they realized
religion by reclaiming their ancestral place on the land.
25
“The Whole World has Changed.”
While nearly all studies of recent highland history acknowledge its world-
changing effects on the Maya, they generally assign events to separable
symbolic and material planes and attribute far more explanatory weight to the
latter.26 Doing so inhibits historical interpretation of one of the more remark-
able features of contemporary highland life: material and symbolic dialectics
on the ground bringing about the (re)production of new Maya social space, in
our case relocating Magdaleneros according to the contours of their conver-
sion to post-Vatican II Catholicism.27
Stated more exactly, the founding of new hamlets in Magdalenas at the
instigation of the catechists, each with its own chapel for liturgical gather-
ings, reconfigured the pueblo’s territory to conform with catechist ascen-
––––––––––
25 I borrow this phrase from Rus: 1994.
26 Cancian, Collier, Harvey, and Rus all acknowledge the presence of new religious actors on
the scene. But the theoretical approaches these scholars employ fail to address how religious
change figured in the transformation of the highlands during the last half of the last century.
27 Important exceptions are Cancian 1990, 1992 and Burguete Cal y Mayor 2000: 259-73.
Indirectly confirming the present study, Burguete describes “the structural dimension of
autonomy” in six spheres in the “reindianisation” of Mexico’s highland Maya: 1. demo-
graphic – Ladinos today live in only two of fifteen highland municipios; 2. the passage of
land into indigenous hands; 3. political – Maya political officers, even in San Cristóbal de
Las Casas; 4. agricultural – renewed peasant production on ancestral now with marketable
crops; 5. economic – indigenous control over previously ladino-dominated market sec-
tors....summed up in 6. reconquest – “Tsotsil and Tseltal [sic] immigrants have taken over
entirely, reshaping urban space” [in San Cristobal de Las Casas] (269).
134 Chapter Four
dance at its center. The world changed in Magdalenas, then, as indigenous

changed their socio-geographic position in it, immediately motivated and
empowered by what the catechists call “religion.”
MAP 3 TRANSFER OF LAND IN MAGDALENAS following the 1984-85 cargo struggle began with
purchase of ladino ranches by catechist-led socios.Of 28 ladino ranches within the pueblo into
the 1980s, in the mid-1990s all but two had been purchased by indigenous Magdaleneros
organized into socios largely according to religious affiliation.
MAP 4 MAGDALENAS RESETTLED with the founding of new parajes by catechists, each with its
own chapel housing the santissima (Eucharistic host) where the Word of God gathers for
deailing rosary and weeklycommunion liturgies. [Note: the pueblo’s other parajes not shown
here.]
Henri Lefebvre theorizes:
... produced space can be decoded, can be read. Such a space implies a process of
signification ... interested ‘subjects,’ as members of a particular society, would
have acceded by this means at once to their space and to their status as ‘subjects’
acting within that space and (in the broadest sense of the word) comprehending it
(1991: 17).
136 Chapter Four
Lefebvre’s critical marxist project grants logical priority to action over

language, specifically to “activities which mark the earth, leaving traces and
organizing gestures and work performed in common” (ibid.: 16-17). His
quasi-evolutionary hypothesis – that language originated in spatial ordering
of perceptual chaos – invites alternative frames for the spatial articulation of
the material and the symbolic, the religious particularly salient among the
possibilities. That textual and territorial concerns both matter to religion in
multiple times and places is a truism. 28 Contemporary highland Maya conver-
sion to Christianity argues at minimum that context is more substantial than
accidental consideration for religious and theological studies.
Newly-converted Magdalenero Catholics acceded “at once to their own
space and their status as ‘subjects’ acting within that space” through the
several “comprehensions” sketched above. Sharp turns in Mexican develop-
ment strategy both instigated the re-mapping of Magdalenas and altered the
conditions of highland political economy. These new circumstances urged a
rising generation of Maya to reorient their standing on ancestral land. A
significant segment among them found their bearings through the acquisition
of literacy, more precisely, of heightened reflexivity entailed in their en-
gagement with the biblical text.
In Lefebvre’s terms, the articulation of space and language arose in this
case with indigenous empowerment precisely through biblical literacy. In
other words, Magdalenero conversion to Christianity was realized, in the
strict sense, in the liberating practice of literacy as it dialectically engendered
a new mode of work and thus the (re)configuration of ancestral territory.
Again, Lefebvre’s theory supports a correlative line of argument: “a new
space will [also] restore unity to what abstract space breaks up” (ibid.: 52).
His reference for abstract space is the technologically homogenized and
hence (for him) socially alienating urban megalopolis. Colonial ladino
domination arguably achieved an analogous effect in the highlands of Chia-
pas, abstracting and thus alienating the land from Maya community (Mack
2000).
The origins of the “empty center” in traditional patterns of pre-conquest
Maya agricultural settlement does not rule out its evolution into a means of
Maya socio-political dispersal, as subversion of its ceremonial purpose
effected ladino suppression of Maya autonomy (Rus 1999: 33ff.). Catechist
re-cognition of this situation, exhibited in their selective refusal of ritual
cargo, enabled its deconstruction, a cognitive process religiously realized as
practically consequential social subjectivity. Put another way, for the cate-
––––––––––
28 Paradigmatic instances are ancient Israel’s identification with “the promised land;” the
political dictum cujus region, ejus religio in early modern Europe; and, most relevant to this
study, the reduction of native peoples to colonial mission compounds in Latin America.
chists reflexive comprehension of their situation amounted to taking hold of

themselves. The demonstrably religious sense of self-possession among these
Maya peasant-converts culminated in re-possession of their land.
“Everything Through the Word of God”

When young Magdaleneros began taking catechist courses in the mid- 1970s,
the agriculturally choicest flat lands of their ancestral territory was divided
among twenty-eight ladino-owned ranches. Over the course of nearly a
decade beginning in 1986, the year ritual cargo obligation ceased, twenty-six
passed into the hands of the Tzotzil of Magdalenas. Of these ranches, twenty
were purchased by those practicing “religion,” the large majority organized
into socios composed of catechist-led Catholics.
Nicholas, who traveled to San Cristóbal for his first course in 1973
explains this remarkable land transfer from the indigenous point of view:
The ranchers sold because they saw that we were organized .... The indigenous
grabbed everything through the Word of God, giving up drinking, and working
FN 5.I.02).
The catechist’s rhetorical scheme itself interprets the events he describes.

“Organize” entered highland Tzotzil vocabulary with liberation discourse.
But the instrumental efficacy it implied signified strategic disposition rather
than ideology in Magdalenero usage.
Emphasizing the pivotal role of cognition in religious belief, Lawson
reminds us that agency is always at play in “human cognitive traffic with the
world. Human beings consistently adopt the intentional stance in their deal-
ings with each other” (2000: 83, 108). In this instance, “organization” serves
as a trope for indigenous initiative(s) which, as Nicolás suggests, reversed the
historic direction of ladino-indigenous “cognitive traffic,” compelling ranch-
ers to see intentions otherwise invisible to the dominant. In Maya peasant
hands, the Word of God functioned as switchplate in this reversal, the re-
cognitions it stimulated among Magdalenero youth articulating with struc-
tural economic shifts to alter altogether the defining terms of Ladino-indige-
nous exchange.
As the catechist’s rough logic suggests, release from cargo debt and drink
led to accumulation of economic capital and its pooling by socios, transform-
ing indigenous debtors into buyers and Ladinos into sellers. In short, their
erstwhile peons compelled ranchers to negotiate what hitherto they had
effectively seized at will (Wasserstrom 1975: 108-141).
Ranchers had been awakened to indigenous intentions by the 1972 pro-
cession marking ancestral boundaries. A generation later they confronted
138 Chapter Four
reconfiguration of Magdalenero territory as new indigenous hamlets arose on

previously abandoned communal land. The case of Cotsil’nam is exemplary.
The site of a government school since mid-century, this land stood mid-
way between the center of Magdalenas and the pueblo’s most extensive
northern stretch of tierra caliente (hot land) suited to coffee cultivation. But
it remained unoccupied until early 1986 when, in the simmering aftermath of
the cargo struggle, the deacon Elias led a group of twenty-six families who
left their scattered dwellings to construct neighboring residences on an
overgrown plain below the school. As predicted by Elias’ choice of “friends
and relatives” as initial candidates for conversion, other close kin and/or kin
groupings joined a core group of in-laws, most related by blood and/or
marriage to one or another of seven catechists, in building the new commu-
29
nity.
Construction in Cotsil’nam began shortly after New Year’s Day, 1986,
when a Catholic was installed in the pueblo’s center as the local municipal
agente, ratifying catechist ascendance in Magdalenas, including all its subor-
dinate parajes. Elections for new representatives to the comisariado, the
official entity with jurisdiction over vacant communal land throughout the
pueblo, were scheduled for the following May.
The elders and other traditionalists, embittered by the October, 1985,
cargo settlement, continued to challenge the catechists. In February, 1986,
municipal authorities in San Pedro Chenalho’ granted “representatives of the
traditionalists in the Agencia Magdalenas” the keys to the church cabinet
housing the statue of Mary Magdalene while exhorting them “to maintain
peace and tranquility in the settlement and with all the inhabitants who
profess the Catechist religion [sic]” (Ruiz Arias-Sántis Vázquez et al, 13
30
II.86). Power over the icon of the community’s patron signaled traditionalist
pretensions to control of the resources she guarded.
Viewed against this lingering opposition, the founding of Cotsil nam
amounted to a preemptive move towards tierra caliente and collective coffee
cultivation, effectively repudiationg costumbre's confinement of the patron-
ess to myth. When Catholics won the comisariado in May elections, Elias,
Nicolás, Rudolfo – all catechists – and three other Catholics were physically
––––––––––
29 “Kinship and friendship networks are fundamental to most conversions ...” But how
relationships figure in conversions begs explanation: as Rambo writes, “relationship dynam-
ics need to be more systematically examined.” (1993: 108ff.). The introspective and/or af-
fective language of “religious experience” is almost non-existent in Magdalenero conversion
accounts. Though personally felt and motivating, the “illumination” some cite remains pri-
marily a cognitive phenomenon, fitting theories of conversion that view religion as world
building rather than (solely) self-transforming.
30 Documents cited in this section were found in the Municipal Archives, San Pedro Chenal-
ho’, Chiapas.
assaulted by politically-weakened traditionalists, according to a complaint

addressed to municipal authorities the same day (Vázquez Jiménez-Ruiz
Arias 16.V.1986).
The response from the cabecera affirmed the Catholics’ hold on the
comisariado – “the decision of the majority realized in a democratic election”
(Acta de Acuerdo [agreement] 16.V.1986). More significantly, it confirmed
their command over political discourse in Magdalenas, as well as disposition
of its land.31
Indeed, invocation of democratic principle in the political sphere paral-
leled the catechists’ move in the ritual sphere: release from unquestionable
(i.e., sacred) tradition through and for critical practice. In Magdalenas,
religion arrived with the latter, originating in acquisition of literacy along
with the Word of God, the text testing context.32 That is, whereas orally
transmitted tradition arises from, accommodates, and ultimately enforces the
given social order, with literacy and the Word of God came the relative
autonomy of religion through the text’s incitement to interpret, contest, and
overthrow tradition and, finally, remake context. In Magdalenas, religion was
born from the (social) body gathered through and for this constructive proc-
ess, and realized (in the strict sense) in production of place.
To return to our example, the aggregation of Catholics in Cotsil’ nam
positioned them to alter the disposition of the land through a double effect.
Proximity facilitated an acuerdo (agreement) among them to form a socio
(partnership) for purchase of land which became available when ladino
ranchers “read” the new hamlet as reason to accede to a proposal made
financially viable, in turn, by the overthrow of cargo obligation.
33
The history of the ensuing transaction can be traced back to youth’s
return to Magdalenas from fincas and other venues abroad and, among
––––––––––
31 “Discourse” here includes those power-laden practices which construct society and, in the
Gramscian sense, present a functional, more enduring alternative to force. “Every social
practice is ... articulatory [or discursive]. it always consists in the construction of new differ-
ences” (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moufee, cited by Murphy in Braun and McCutcheon
2000: 401). Murphy continues: “This strange object we call ‘society’ (and the same can be
said about ‘culture,’ ‘religion,’ etc.) is nothing more than an ensemble of discourses, or dis-
cursive articulations. ‘Society,’ in other words, is not a substance ...; it is simply the ongoing
practice of its various and multiple articulations” (ibid.).
32 Goody notes “the profoundly conserving force” inhering in the written word yet argues the
key point: “a written religion... is never a purely conservative (as distinct from conserving)
element in society.... Even in ordinary times the normative implications of the text often
provide a yardstick for the difference between reality and potentiality, between what is and
what should be, between existence and Utopia. In this way, it supplies a measure of our dis-
content” (1986: 20).
33 The deacon Elias, his brother- and father-in-law and nine other close kin and fellow
Catholics bought fourteen hectares from three adjoining ranches over the course of three
years.
140 Chapter Four
Catholic converts, rejection of tradition’s obligations as vehicle of their

displacement. These moves located them as their new theology located God,
in “right mind” and “work.” It also enabled them to fill the “empty” center
and till the “empty” land throughout their ancestral territory as the pattern of
new settlement – work on uncultivated common land, formation of socios,
and purchase of ladino ranches – repeated itself at various sites throughout
the pueblo.34
The “world” of the Tzotzils of Magdalenas had, indeed, changed as their
position in it changed, Catholics rejecting obligatory cargo to thus repossess
and reposition their bodies, individual and collective, in space.
Magdalenas, as the archaeological data show, existed in some form as a
Tzotzil Maya place before Spanish Dominican missionary “reduction” five
centuries ago.35 Remarkably, this original foreign intrusion failed to defini-
tively destroy autonomous Tzotzil discourse and production, though the
subsequent advance of ladino commerce and capital in the highlands pro-
foundly compromised both.
But the erosion of Maya society by colonization was not simply a matter
of eviction, dispersal, and geographic reduction as such. Rather, these mate-
rial mechanics articulated with symbolic process, epitomized by ritual cargo,
to insinuate the alien into body and consciousness, individual and social,
eviscerating Maya autonomy from within. As the involutions of maxpat and
other rituals show, the alien was actually infused through obligation meto-
nymously figured in compulsory consumption of trago which, like colonial
reduction, indentured Maya bodies to others’ projects. The consequent
deformation in social relations alienated their ancestral land as it was given
over to ladino domination and/or trago-induced indigenous neglect.
The most conspicuous marker of conversion to Catholicism in Magdale-
nas as throughout the highlands – fierce repugnance towards trago – does
not, in the first instance, signify a personal turn from vice to virtue, as in the
discourse of modern evangelical conversion. Rather, rejection of trago means
reclaiming autonomy materially realized, for Tzotzil peasants, in the individ-
ual body fit for work and, in turn, restoration of the social body to its place on
the land.
On the road near Larrainzar one day, Elias pointed to the drunken demand
of one Tzotzil on another to drink with him. With a shot glass in one hand
and a flagon of pox in the other, the swaying beseecher pushed against the
other’s arm, the gesture meant to force compliance with his demand. A
––––––––––
34 Not all socios were composed solely of catechists-led Catholics, but catechists led the
transfer of land from Ladinos to Magdaleneros in this period. (See maps above showing lo-
cation of ranches and new hamlets with chapels in Magdalenas before and after the cargo
struggle.)
35 Magdalenas Probanza 1570 [personal photocopy courtesy of Jan Rus]; Calnek 1961.
common sight where costumbre endures in highlands Chiapas, the scene

spoke for itself. Elias offered this gloss: You can never know where you stand
in relations cemented in this way, compelled and cognitively impaired as they
were by trago (FN 7.IX.94). Associations founded on such exchanges, Elias
implied, are inevitably unreliable because unfree.
Bourdieu argues that “the implicit pedagogy” of the “social field ...
shapes” those in it through operations such as this ritual
to obtain from them that undisputed, pre-reflexive, naïve and native compliance
with the fundamental presuppositions of the field .... The countless acts of recog-
nition which are the small change of the compliance inseparable from belonging
to the field, and in which collective misrecognition is ceaselessly generated are
both the precondition and the product of the functioning of the field (Bourdieu
1990: 68).
Such misrecognition upholds practical belief (“undisputed, pre-reflexive,

naïve and native compliance”) inscribed in the body so that “bodily hexis”
(the organization of the body and its deployment in the world) is,
political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a

durable manner of standing, speaking, walking and thereby feeling and thinking
(ibid.: 69-70).
Bourdieu cites Plato’s polemic against mimesis 36 to allow for the dis-ruption,
of the “diffuse pedagogic action” by which “the body is thus constantly
mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces.” The appearance of “special-
ized agents or specific occasions” of pedagogy can, like writing, objectify
knowledge, freeing it with respect to the body (Bourdieu 1990:73).
In re-cognition of the ritual on the road, as in the catechist calling as such,
Elias performed as one of Bourdieu’s “specialized agents,” in this case
disrupting an everyday instance of costumbre’s “diffuse pedagogy.” The
––––––––––
36 Bourdieu actually cites Havelock (1963). Not entirely by coincidence, Goody (1977) also
acknowledges his considerable debt to Havelock who writes: “One is entitled to ask ...given
the immemorial grip of the oral method of preserving group tradition, how a self-
consciousness could have ever been created. If the educational system which transmitted
Hellenic mores had indeed relied on the perpetual stimulation of the young in a kind of hyp-
notic trance, to use Plato’s language [on mimesis], how did the Greeks ever wake up?
“The fundamental answer must lie in the changing technology of communication.
Refreshment of memory through written signs enabled a reader to dispense with most of the
emotional identification by which alone the acoustic record was sure of recall .... You could
as it were take a second look at [what had been written down]. And this separation of your-
self from the remembered word may in turn lie behind the growing use in the fifth century of
... the method of dialectic ...” (1963: 208).
142 Chapter Four
social significance of informal forced exchanges of pox in inter-personal

meetings such as this one is intensified when seen to mimic pedagogically the
formal obligatory exchanges embedded in communal rituals of costumbre.
Among the Tzotzil Maya, the maxpat rite is exemplary in this respect, not
least because beating made bearable by trago embodies “obligation” itself as
“political mythology.” That is, the incapacitated body, anesthesized by trago
and given over to beating while circumscribing the center on a prescribed
path overseen by ladino spectators, is ritually the obliged body of peonage.
But just as trago submerges consciousness in the body, the text and, by
identification, those who possess it, interpolate between the body and con-
37
sciousness, giving rise to reflexive inquiry. Within the critical space thus
opened, the autonomous human agent arises and the world becomes available
to critical scrutiny. Put another way, whereas traditional obligation entailed
involution and loss of control, the catechist’s criticism, directed at ritual
coercion, manifests freedom for autonomous, deliberated action in, and more,
on the world.
The catechists of Magdalenas asserted agency in this sense by refusing
those ritual performances – maxpat and cavilto – which delivered the body to
actions involving diminished consciousness, in these cases flagellation and
dance in trago-induced stupor. Their continuing and remarkably insistent
rejections of trago amount to declarations of consciousness rather than
(simply) conscience (though both are present in the unspoken fear of relapse
implied by their vehemence on the subject).
The interpretative symmetry that results begs notice. Reversing the spatial
techniques of colonialism, missionary reduction and then commercial disper-
sal, the catechists moved out from the center and gathered in new hamlets to
break through the constraints of costumbre on Maya action in the world.
They deliberately transferred their bodies to reclaim their (ancestral) land,
realizing consciousness – “to know where you stand,” as Elias puts it – in
their place in the world.
––––––––––
37 This is the point of Bourdieu’s borrowing from Havelock: The text -- like dialectical query –
separated the knower from the known to yield thought and, with it, the autonomous self,
these two inseparably paired in Plato. The crucial “discovery” of Plato’s Greece: “...self-
consciousness emancipated from the condition of an oral culture. The psyche which slowly
asserts itself in independence from the poetic tradition...had to be the reflective, thoughtful,
critical psyche, or it could be nothing. Along with the discovery of the soul, Greece in
Plato’s day and just before Plato had to discover something else – the activity of sheer think-
ing” (Havelock 1963: 198-200).
Coda: The Body of Christ

According to the deacon, as he signaled the ritual on the road, costumbre –
diminishing consciousness and dispersing bodies – displaced the Maya. The
practice of religion, on the other hand, conscienticized and convoked, their
revived consciousness taking the form of what the catechists call firmeza.
Ascribed to the individual body as it manifests tenacity and force of convic-
tion, through these embodiments firmeza engenders the social body.
In Tzotzil, Elías explains, firmeza is the same as slequil co’ontontik – “the
goodness/generosity of our hearts.” The expression is never invoked without
38
the plural possessive suffix -tik (FN 8.V.98; 25.VII.99; 5.I.02). So Elías
attributes the founding of Cotsil’nam to firmedad del cuerpo – bodily
strength and determination (FN 1.VIII.99), that is, bodily hexis signifying
consciousness in and of the individual body from and for the social body.39
As the first houses in the hamlet neared completion, in April, 1986, a
letter from “Ermita de Cotsinam [sic] Magdalenas” begged the Bishop of
San Cristóbal to allow the santissima, the most holy, as the catechists call the
consecrated eucharistic bread, to reside among them,
since our community finds itself in an anomalous state, and in this condition we
have considered that the santissima would accompany us [as we] move toward the
goal of the commitment God has given us ... (Catechists to Bishop Ruiz,
26.IV.1986)
Here the immediate referent for the community’s “anomalous state” is

distance from the santissima, until then reserved uniquely in the parish
church at San Andrés where the priest presided over liturgy each Sunday. Six
months later, catechists from “Centro de Magdalena, Municipio de Chen-
halho’” sent an identical letter to the bishop (2X1986).
Implicit in these requests is an altogether novel metric among Magdalen-
eros. Religion, not geography, measured the newly-recognized distance cited
by Catholic inhabitants of the once-empty, now-filled Maya places petition-
––––––––––
38 I am grateful to Antonio Gómez Gómez who explained the suffix –tik; to Jan Rus who noted
the crucial Tzotzil equation of goodness and generosity; and to Tzotzil linguist Robert
Laughlin who confirmed these observations.
39 Bourdieu on the notion of bodily hexis: “each technique of the body [is]a sort of pars totalis,
predisposed to ... evoke the whole system of which it is a part ....” Bourdieu also famously
asserts, “the principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness
and hence cannot be touched by voluntary deliberate transformation ... nothing seems more
ineffable... than the values made body by the transubstantiation ... of an implicit pedagogy,
capable of instilling a whole cosmology ...through injunctions as insignificant as ‘stand up
straight ....” (1977: 94) . This argument leaves little room for human agency except in so far
as it draws on the counter argument which (ironically) gives force to it, i.e., Havelock’s
gloss on the opposition in Plato between mimesis and dialectic.
144 Chapter Four
ing the presence of the “most holy.” Their attribution of anomaly to this
distance signals their communal re-incorporation, still a work in progress.
The santissima – the Body of Christ now celebrated regularly by Magdalen-
ero Catholics – cultivated consciousness as those who petitioned its presence
cultivated the land. It also warranted autonomy won through religious re-
conquest, the call for its closeness testifying to Maya persistence in Maya
place.
Working the Word 145
Chapter Five
Working the Word

Constructing a Tzotzil Maya Theology
Introduction
Among Catholic Magdaleneros la palabra de Dios – the Word of God –
signifies both scriptural text and ritual community, while the one as much as
the other also means (calls for) work. Maya Catholics are “el pueblo creyente
– believing people” in the ecclesial discourse of the Diocese of San Cristóbal,
1
and frequently referred to simply as “los católicos.” by those, ladino as well
as indigenous, who practice another or no religion. But with other highland
Tzotzil Maya Catholics, those in Magdalenas call themselves la palabra de
Dios to distinguish their religious practice from costumbre and from other,
mostly Protestant, religious groups.
“Work,” Tzotzil abtel/Spanish trabajo, in its multiple grammatical and
semantic variants2 focuses the ritual discourse of this practice, as well as
everyday conversation among Magdaleneros who embrace it. The latter is
hardly unexpected in the case of peasant agriculturalists whose modern
history, moveover, begins with their enslavement. But the word “work”
renders discursive service through more than bare contextual connection,
even while context remains analytically as relevant as it is obvious to under-
standing contemporary Maya religious practice.
In fact, “work” and its semantic relatives are ubiquitous in the homilies at
bi-weekly Catholic communion celebrations, becoming nearly normative in
Magdalenero interpretation of the Catholic lectionary that assigns scriptural
texts for each Sunday and holy day. These exegetical exercises led by cate-
chists – a principal preacher usually followed by a second to “correct” and
“complete” – always aim to elicit communal dialogue.
The catechists regularly invite the assembly to respond to their preaching
as they usually do, sometimes in the form of paraphrases, sometimes with
questions, and always, at minimum, with “lech oy” (okay, fine) to express
––––––––––
1 “Los católicos” might also refer to those who continue to attend mass celebrated by the
pastor removed from San Andrés at the catechists’ request. “La palabra de Dios” refers ex-
clusively to those who accept the leadership of catechists for the Diocese of San Cristóbal de
Las Casas.
2 The most common are the infinitive abtej and the plural abtele; also yabtel-e /-ale – the/your
work and kabteltik – our [collective] work; and abtelanel – to work it.
146 Chapter Five
understanding and/or agreement to a conclusion. These dialogic exercises

usually last over an hour, well beyond the time required to recite the Tzotzil
canon for communion services.3
Each homiletic exchange follows reading of the biblical text in Spanish
and its spontaneous translation into Tzotzil for the monolingual majority.4
The rotation of preachers and translators is decided at a “preparación” on the
evening before celebrations held on Sundays in mid-afternoon and on week-
days when all have returned from their milpas or cafetales (coffee fields). In
other words, the homilies communicate “work” through the simplest re-
quirements of their form.
But the salience of the dialectic of word and work (discursive topos as
well as contextual imperative) emerges particularly at these ritual gatherings
through recurrent thematic invocations. “Effort,” “force,” “power,” “atten-
tion, and the triad “listen-obey-carry out” are among the most frequent. In
practice, the gatherings as such respond to them and so enact the double
meaning Magdaleneros give the “word of God.” In short, naming their ritual
community for the text, they identify themselves through and in its celebra-
tion. Thus Jaime exhorts the assembly:
Now we must not return to doing everything we did before, now none of this ....
We see that everything is difficult. It’s difficult to stop doing things that aren’t so
good. But for this we ask God’s help. Let’s not stop half-way [por el medio
camino]. Let’s reflect ... about the things that aren’t good. This is what it [the
Word] says. This is our work, this is what the Virgin Mary did. This is gathering,
unity.... (FT 12 XII.93).5
The catechist specifies “everything we did before” quite precisely: “las viejas
costumbres – the old customs,” glossed in this case as “devoting our Sundays
to drunkenness, drinking pox and chicha (corn-based beer)” (ibid). The new
community of converts knows itself in “our work” in the primary sense of
gathering to “reflect” on the word of God: to gather is, first of all, to make an
“effort” to come together after long days of field labor; and then “work” to
––––––––––
3 The Diocese of San Cristóbal has translated this prayer into all five Maya languages within
it – Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolobal, C’hol, and Mam.
4 The Diocese of San Cristóbal distributes the Spanish lectionary each year in Advent. A
diocesan Tzotzil translation of the Bible is available but catechists prefer to translate from
the Spanish Biblia lationoamericana to accommodate limited Tzotzil reading skills and dia-
lectical differences among communities.
5 The text for the day was Luke 1, 39-48, recounting Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth. [FT
= field transcript, referring to transcribed tape recordings translated from Tzotzil to Spanish
by Antonio Gómez Gómez, Center for Humanistic Research, on Mesoamerica and the State
of Chiapas (CHIMECH) and Xalik Guzmán, Institute for Anthropological Consultation for
the Maya Region (INAREMAC) in San Cristóbal.
understand what the word says, literally the immediate labor of Spanish-
Tzotzil translation and then broader hermeneutic exertion.
In short, Magdaleneros “work” to become the religious-intellectual/
exegetical community that calls itself “the word of God.” So Rudolfo exhorts
the assembly:
...we must not stop gathering, we must listen to the word of God.... When we
gather together ... it means we are unifying our thoughts, we are working with it
[the word], it’s necessary to gather, men and women, to fulfill our duty, let’s not
take our books in vain, with the excuse that it’s very difficult, it’s a suffering, it’s
very profound, very hard (FT 14.XI.98).
Notwithstanding this litany of trials, the community heartily assents to the

deacon’s summation: “we must work the word of God...[for] the word of God
is for working it” (ibid.).
Magdaleneros perceive the word as task not only because newly-literate
peasants find the semantics of Hebrew and Christian scriptures “difficult” to
decipher linguistically, though linguistic ability remains an ever-present
preoccupation for them. As shown above, religion arrived in Magdalenas
with reappraisal of ritual, reversing the relationship between ritual and work
to place the former at the service of the latter. This reversal had material
causes and consequences. But more than simple cost-benefit analysis deter-
mined its logic.
Primary exhibit for this argument, their celebrations of the text exalt their
labor on the land as the newly-converted Catholics transfer critical-cognitive
entailments from the one sphere to the other. Tracing this transfer on the
ground unpacks the phrase that epitomizes, for Magdaleneros themselves,
their new religious practice: “working the Word.”
Initiation: “A Gift from God for Work”

The “work” of the catechists includes, among its polyvalent references,
presiding over the various sacramental and other rituals that initiate and
preserve Catholics in what Magdalneros call “religion.” While in basic
pattern these rites resemble Catholic liturgical celebrations everywhere, they
are not simple reiterations of canonical form.
To critically adapt the vocabulary of contemporary ritual theory, in this
case the self-referential (highland Maya) articulates with the canonical
(Roman Catholic) so as to render the ritual a substantiated indigenous form
6
(Rappaport 1999). As inflected and interpreted by Magdaleneros, Catholic
––––––––––
6 Other sources on ritual theory for this study are C. Bell 1992, 1997; Bloch 1977; and J.Z.
Smith 1978, 1987; Tambiah 1966, 1968.
148 Chapter Five
rituals incorporate la palabra de Dios as an historical project whose gravity

derives from religion’s contested origins and concrete consequences.
The performance of baptism in Magdalenas, for example, accords with
normative Catholic rubrics. But, in keeping with Latin American appropria-
tion of the Roman rite, highland Maya indigenous have also adopted the
custom of compadrazgo, usually choosing close relatives or friends to be
sponsors – compadres – to whom the baptized (and his/her parents) turn
when in need of advice or material assistance (Nutini and Bell 1980).
Through compadrazgo baptism ritually reinforces established kinship and
other social bonds, or occasionally creates new ones.
Within the community that calls itself la palabra de Dios, catechists have
become preferred compadres. Since family and friends compose the first
audience for their preaching, catechists share bonds of kinship and friendship
with many in the la palabra de Dios. Nonetheless, the extraordinary number
of ahijados (godchildren) some catechists have – the deacon Rudolfo claims
nearly thirty – and, further, the frequency of compadrazgo between non-kin
catechists suggests that Magdaleneros regard membership in la palabra de
Dios as a type of kinship.
The catechist Tacho’s understanding of the new status conferred on his
daughter by baptism shows that for Magdalenero Catholics, the sacrament
itself impresses a far deeper mark. It, too, reiterates the context of Tzotzil
conversion, now articulated theologically in terms absorbed through catechist
courses.
After the ceremony at which his brother-in-law, the deacon Elias, pre-
sided, Tacho explained that “before” the infant had been simply a “child of
humanity” who came into the world with “original sin, the sins of her par-
ents.” But now she had been baptized in “the three names,” each responsible
for one of three creations: the Father “the original, first creation;” the Son
“who shed his blood on the earth;” and the Holy Spirit “who came to the
apostles.”
“Everything changes with baptism,” Tacho asserted: the baby, Luz
Patricia, now belongs to, is known by, “the three names;” and, he quickly
7
added, she has received her “don – gift” (FN 9.X.94).
The Tzotzil Maya tradition of three creations is well-documented (Guit-
eras Holmes 1961: 153-157 and passim; Holland 1997: 71-73). One authority
notices a “resemblance” between the way the ancient Maya “mystically
regarded [multiple gods] as a single being” and Christian Trinitarian doctrine
(Thompson 1970: 346-47 and passim). Tacho’s reference to the “three
names” articulates this “resemblance” between ancient Maya and Christian
theology, but in an altogether new key.
––––––––––
7 Succeeding quotations of catechists on baptism are from this date.
His focus remains on the “don – gift” to his newly-baptized daughter

through which she is personally known and owned by the divine, a theologi-
cal idea altogether foreign to the ancient Maya. As he explained it, the “gift”
given at baptism is only revealed as the child matures. It determines what
kind of worker she will be and/or what kind of work she will do – a teacher, a
nurse, or a doctor, Tacho speculated.8
Presented with his brother-in-law’s theology of baptism, Elias agreed:
“Before,” the baby is “puro carne – just flesh;” in baptism, “she has been
handed over to God.” And, he added the critical gloss: “She received her gift
[don]. We don’t know what the gift is until she grows up. Everyone has a gift
from God, for work” (FN 9.X.94, emphasis added). Elias helpfully elaborated
on the theme. A “gift,” as such, cannot be taught; if a person does not have a
“gift” for carpentry, no amount of teaching can make him a carpenter.
The deacon then embarked on what seemed a conversational tangent,
recalling his compadre Salvador to explain what happens to the soul after
death. Though “his bones are in the cemetery,” Salvador remains alive to the
community through the memory of “his words and actions” which were, in
his case, immensely successful: “He worked all the time, he harvested coffee
during the day and shelled it at night.... He was a great worker, he had the gift
of [or for] work” (ibid).
Marvelling at the sounds of mechanized coffee shelling echoing at night
from his neighbor’s land in the valley below, Elias says he learned how to
work from Salvador. They had met soon after Elias entered la palabra de
Dios, and Salvador had entered the Catholic community through his
neighbor’s preaching. When one of his own children was baptized, Salvador
asked the deacon to be his compadre.
Salvador lives on as Elias recalls and emulates his “words and actions”
while going about his own work. This, for the deacon, is his compadre’s
“soul,” alive in his remembered “don de trabajar – gift for work.” And so,
Elias concludes, “Baptism is muy fuerte –very strong, intense, powerful).”
For the catechists of Magdalenas, then, the force of baptism owes signifi-
cantly to its endowment of the gift “for work.” This theme threads through
the deacon’s discourse from baptism to life after death and back to baptism.
There is, of course, the ambiguity that his compadre, presumably baptized as
a child, exhibited the “gift” for work before his conversion to la palabra de
Dios. But for Elias, the salient point is that Salvador’s “soul” lives in his “gift
for work” in so far as others, like Elias, emulate him.
In this respect, in particular, the “gift” is distinct from, though it inevita-
bly recalls, Weber’s notion of “vocation” (1991/1993: passim). Apart from an
––––––––––
8 Highland Maya women only rarely become teachers, fewer are nurses, and none physicians.
Tacho’s speculations reflected post-baptism exuberance and/or the widening social horizons.
150 Chapter Five
apparent similarity in their articulation of religion and work, the two cases
diverge on most significant counts, beginning most obviously with context.
Emerging from and analyzed within an ascendant urban bourgeoisie, Weber’s
Protestant “man of vocation” intent on “proving” and/or “certifying” his
salvation through “inner-worldly asceticism” resembles the Maya Catholic
peasant convert only in the sobriety they share.
Further, in Weber “an organic ethic of vocation” is articulated with the
notion of power-political hierarchy following from caste-like “natural differ-
ences among men” (ibid. 232-33). But for Catholic Maya like Tacho and
Elias, whose peasant life relativizes any but “inner-worldly” concerns and
renders “ascetic” orientations unimaginable, the “gift” conferred in baptism
in effect ‘certifies’ the character of their community and the recipient’s
belonging in it, rather than her individual rank and/or “other-worldly” salva-
tion.
Overlaying, if not replacing, the normative Christian understanding of
baptism as purification from sin, the catechists’ interpretation makes the
“gift, for work” as such intrinsic, if not equivalent, to salvation itself. In other
words, Catholic Magdaleneros regard themselves as “known by God” in
knowing their own capacity for work, reclaimed in and through their conver-
sion, that is, their replacement of costumbre with la palabra de Dios.
To cement and, equally important, maintain the community so con-
structed, catechists would inevitably be preferred compadres, and serve as
compadres to each other as well. For example, the catechist Lucas traveled
from the paraje Xuxchen to Cotsil nam’ so that Elias could be compadre for
the baptism of his twelfth child, while another catechist, Miguel, came from
the paraje Saclum to preside at the ceremony.
Lucas was among the first to buy land from Ladinos following the cargo
struggle in Magdalenas, leading to the reconstitution of Xuxchen with the
foundation of an ermita (chapel) by the new Catholic community that re-
9
named the settlement Tepeyac.” In the mid-1990s, he and his community
held more coffee land in Magdalenas than any other single person or group.
During the same period, the catechists had reconstructed the chapel in
Saclum after traditionals destroyed it in a rage against their new religious
practice.
In this case, then, the preference of catechists as compadres clarified
Elias’ epitome of baptism. It is fuerte (strong), that is, profoundly consequen-
tial for the new way of being in the world inaugurated with the contemporary
arrival of religion in Magdalenas. In other words, for Magdalenero Catholics,
––––––––––
9 Tepeyac is the site in Mexico City where Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared. Magdaleneros
show no particular devotion to Guadalupe, but the village name “Tepeyac” suggests aware-
ness of her stature as Mexico’s patroness.
baptism reconstitutes indigenous community through, and for, a new regime

of work.
Homiletic Labor: Constructing a Local Theology

In contemporary Catholic theology, eucharistic liturgies celebrate the repeat-
able sacrament of initiation. Though unacquainted with this thinking, Tzotzil
catechists insist on the importance of bi-weekly communion celebrations.
Indeed, their confidence in the “gift, for work” bestowed in baptism is war-
ranted by coming together to work the Word.
To repeat, for Magalenero Catholics exegetical labor is a communal
enterprise, beginning with the catechists’ evening “preparation” of the scrip-
ture to be read at the next day’s eucharistic celebration. Occasionally with the
assistance of a pastoral agent, but generally on their own, they read the
liturgically-prescribed text in Spanish and struggle to understand it, first in
purely linguistic terms and then with hermeneutic concern for the community
constructed in and through this labor.
In these sessions, as during the homilies that follow, the catechists fre-
quently disparage their own skill while expressing constant preoccupation
“que lo entienden la gente – that the people understand” and, as important,
that they actually “listen” to and stay awake during their preaching after a
day’s labor.
The “beatitudes” (Mt. 5:3-12) proved to be a particularly challenging text
in these respects. The unfolding of its exegesis exemplifies the intellectual
exertion displayed at each celebration of the word of God in Magdalenas (FT
10
19.VI.94).
The first verse caused considerable consternation:
We’re going to read what the book of St. Matthew says ....Blessed those who find
happiness ... and so our God speaks, my children, this is the word of God. Well,
these are two or three words that our Lord Jesus Christ mentioned, I don’t know if
you understand since I don’t very well. Our Lord Jesus said: that they are blessed,
those who are completely happy, those who find themselves happy, the Lord
speaks to them, since they are [his] children, it says. Sometimes we don’t under-
stand ... I haven’t managed to understand what this means either.
The catechist tried various approaches to his hermeneutic dilemma. He

suggested, first,
––––––––––
10 Following quotations are from this field transcript unless otherwise noted.
152 Chapter Five
when there is no happiness among us, the Lord doesn’t know us, doesn’t know if
we are really his children because we don’t want to understand, we don’t want to
put in our hearts that happiness is achievable (ibid.).
In this account, “happiness,” and thus “blessedness” (or, salvation itself), is

being known by the Lord precisely in understanding God’s word about
happiness: in other words, engaging the word of God. But the catechist was
not yet entirely convinced:
... it’s not pointless to think ... there could be peace the way we’ve discussed it, as
our Lord Jesus Christ says, for when there is peace and happiness then he will
know that they [sic] are his children, when they are gathered in happiness in a uni-
fied way.
This last move, asserting that happiness is specifically dependent upon, if not
synonymous with, the community’s “gathering,” offered the catechist new
exegetical leverage. Unhappiness results from the “hunger and thirst” that
prevails in the community, leading to quarrels and mutual offense “inside and
outside our houses.” We say, he continued, this is because we are lazy, sleep
late, in short, because “we are not working.” But Jesus was delivered into the
hands of enemies because his children were poor and his father in heaven
wants everyone to be equal.
What we want is that happiness would be for everyone, not for a certain group of
people ... and this is all I wanted to comment on these few words ... perhaps I
don’t understand everything that they mean, you [the assembly] can expand upon
it with ... what you understand.
The ensuing responses affirmed the liberationist understanding pastoral

agents and catechists alike projected onto the Zapatista uprising earlier that
year. But the semantics of class struggle – between those “eating water mixed
with chiles and see fleas swimming [in it]” and “those unjust men who have
too much to eat” – remained embedded within the discourse emerging from
the rise of la palabra de Dios in Magdalenas. Thus, the first voice from the
assembly declared the catechist “really right”:
...in those times I was not happy because I fought with my wife ... sometimes I
even beat [her] and this was because I didn’t know where the Lord was who gives
happiness and that [sic] gives the beatitudes ... there was no equality, only anger,
and so I didn’t know the Lord.
In other words, conversion enabled cognitive distinction between the present

and “those times” when “we lived in company with the devil.”
When the first catechist wavered in response, a second stepped in with
obvious confidence in his exegetical skill:
... this [reading] can be understood clearly; for example there is one [verse] that
says: happy those who work for peace because they will be recognized as sons of
God; from the beginning in [verse] six, it says: happy those who hunger and thirst
for justice because they will be satisfied, just as there are other verses that are very
clear, that those who look for happiness and liberty, those who work for it will
always reach happiness, and so it says happy those who work for peace....
Thematizing the notion “work for peace,” this catechist at once authorized
indigenous exegesis and articulated homiletic with everyday labor. He
admitted, “occasionally we don’t understand ... and comment [during homi-
lies] that we won’t reach [happiness]....” Following a litany of “sufferings”
attending la palabra de Dios – hunger, exhaustion, persecutions – he none-
theless asserted,
...we are not mistaken in the way ... we must understand well what the reading
says ... we must not confuse ourselves ... what we are doing is correct and it’s in-
correct when we don’t understand clearly what is said to us [by the reading] ... the
fruit is peace in our community.
An intervention arose from the assembly:
I agree but I don’t understand in what way to understand or apply the word ‘fruit,’
I don’t know what it means, but what I can understand is that we have to reach the
happiness and well-being of all.
The catechist’s initial response evoked the Zapatista uprising six months
earlier and employed its liberationist rhetoric: “The peace we’re seeking is
that we don’t want to be oppressed or relegated ... we want to be taken into
account.”
Yet, again, political discourse stands within what remains, for Magdalen-
ero Catholics, the primary discursive frame:
... we’ll see the fruit of our work, we will see achievements when we put up with
shame, criticism, prison, kidnapping,11 of all this we’ll see the fruit, just as when
––––––––––
11 Such human rights violations plagued the highlands well before the 1994 uprising rising;
see documents at www.frayba.org.mx.
154 Chapter Five
we go with our hoe to work in the field to sow something, after a good time we’ll
harvest the fruit of our work, so the word of God ... so we must be conscious of
the work that we are doing, we must not leave the things of God and if someone
asks us we must tell them that those who work for peace will bear fruit.
Analogy between the agricultural and the evangelical recalls, though not in a
directly derivative sense, the synoptic gospel parables,e.g., sower and the
seed; and the appeal of biblical literature generally among Maya peasants
certainly owes to similarities, material and figurative, between its context(s)
and their own.12 But the very request for explication of the word “fruit”
demonstrates that exegetical labor here draws on more than analogical
thinking and, further, that indigenous interlocutors recognize this to be the
case.
Striving for happiness and equality seem transparently worthy ends to the
questioner: the puzzle remains “how to apply ... know what [the word fruit]
means,” or how, in practical terms, to arrive at these ends. The catechist
proposes, in response, “be conscious of the work,” implying the alternative
possibility; and he adds the correlative requirement for Magdalenero Catho-
lics, “not leave the things of God,” again suggesting the possibility of choice.
The difference between alternatives relies on the identity in practice
between ‘being conscious of the work’ and ‘the things of God’ in Magdale-
nas. The one as much as the other describes the fundamental option entailed
in conversion from costumbre to la palabra de Dios in so far as the latter
warrants and intends productive labor. Conversion so described arises in and
then promotes the dialectic (and not simple analogy) between exegetical and
agricultural work that distinguishes la palabra de Dios as a matter of autono-
mous indigenous religious production in both spheres.
As if to further the point, still another catechist introduced a text Magda-
leneros privilege above all, the Letter of James.13 After reading the full peri-
cope (Jas. 3:13-18) in Spanish, this catechist glosses the final verses with a
Tzotzil paraphrase:
––––––––––
12 From myriad examples: Responding to the visitation narrative (Luke 1, 39-56 NRSV), some
wanted to know the exact kinship between Mary and Elizabeth and the precise distance be-
tween their respective villages. Magdaleneros walk long distances to their fields and often
several days to visit relatives. At the instruction to forgive “seven times seventy” (or “sev-
enty-seven times” – Mt. 18:22 NRSV) the assembly wanted a calculation and then loudly
responded that forgiving four hundred and ninety times was out of the question. One listener
asked “Does this mean I have to forgive someone whose horse trampled my milpa? It’s im-
possible! – !no se puede!”
13 Catechists readily cite, “... faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:15-17 NRSV). The
letter’s diatribe against the rich and the “double-minded” also resonates. Most compelling
for them is, “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers....” (1:22).
... the glory of God that comes from above brings rectitude, it is happiness, it
gives the grace of the sense of God and we understand the meaning if we pay at-
tention to all the things being said to us [in the reading], and the work will be hon-
est (recto) not only in thought but good things to do will come out of it, here is
where happiness is sown and it will give fruit, just like the artisan who has free-
dom, as it says in our language [emphasis added].
Here “happiness” is identified with “rectitude,” and the very “sense of God”
depends upon this virtue: God is “sensed” through acquisition of a disposi-
tion with the cognitive turn epitomizing Tzotzil conversion to Christianity,
“paying attention to all the things being said to us.” Rectitude so understood
is both engendered by and manifest in “honest” work in the dialectical sense
bestowed, according to the catechist, by “our language,” signifying linguisti-
cally Tzotzil and discursively the distinctive semantics of Catholic Magdale-
nas.
Communal religious history warrants the pivot on which this discourse
turns: work “in thought” yields “good things to do,” not least in milpa and
cafetales. In short, for la palabra de Dios, cognitive work yields “fruit” as
productive practice.
The catechist concluded his exegesis with metaphoric meta-commentary
on the Catholic community’s originating discovery in both domains. The
biblical text concludes: “Justice is sown in peace, and gives its fruit to the
artisans of peace (Jas. 3:18). Showing striking exegetical liberty, the cate-
chist’s textual labor devolved into a form of play, freely rendering the final
phrase, “just like the artisan who has his freedom.”
Theoretical Excursus
This turn of the text – “just like the artisan...” – typifies the productive power
of the Magdalenero hermeneutic, as a reading of M.M. Bakhtin ironically
suggests. From his own peripheral view (relative to the West), Bakhtin
argued “language is heteroglot from top to bottom,” proposing the [Russian]
“illiterate peasant” as an example (1981:273). Always immersed in “several
language systems” – ecclesial, festive, domestic, bureaucratic – Bakhtin’s
exemplary peasant experiences “a critical interanimation of languages” as
soon as he becomes conscious of their differences (ibid.: 295-96). But,
despite his own social and scholarly eccentricity, Bakhtin was apparently
unable to allow “peasants” one of the “socially significant world views” in
heteroglossic dialogue. Instead, he imagined them passing from “moribund
equilibrium” to “critical inter-animation” of languages (only) with migration
from the “unmoving” rural world to the city (ibid.).
But our case demonstrates a resolutely rural religious community in
highland Chiapas to be not unlike Bakhtin’s “socially significant” urban
156 Chapter Five
“circles, journals ... artistic works and individual persons....” Their dialogic
homilies show Magdaleneros to be fully
capable of attracting [a language’s] words and forms into their orbit by means of
their own characteristic intentions and accents... [as a] socially significant per-
formance...to infect [sic] with its own intention certain aspects of language that
had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on them spe-
cific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones.... (ibid.: 290).
Though sharing none of Bakhtin’s literary preoccupations, Magdalaneros

readily assented to the catechist’s textual play – “just like the artisan who has
his freedom” – and thus imposed on a favored piece of biblical literature the
“specific semantic nuances and axiological overtones” fitting the “character-
istic intentions and accents” of la palabra de Dios.
Its religious ritual (rather than literary aesthetic) “verbal performance”
(Bakhtin) freely imports biblical language into indigenous discourse (while
questioning the divide between language and action sometimes vexing
critical theory). Moreover, as they work with the text their ability to direct
their peasant labor is affirmed and enabled.
In short, in homiletic dialogue they claim and assert freedom from ritual
obligation and economic indenture, owning their labor by making the Bible
their own. It remains to demonstrate not only that they do so but to what
extent they have succeeded – in other words, to show how the Catholic
community of Magdalenas, “like the artisan who has his freedom,” finds
“fruit” or, “good things to do” in la palabra de Dios.
14
“What We Say is What We Know How to Do.”
A diocesan worksheet asked catechists to reflect on their contribution to
society. Their reply was unhesitating:
There’s nothing else we can say; really, what we say is what we know how to do,
what we know how to work [abtej/trabajar], clearing away the scrub brush, work-
ing in our milpa, because here’s how we get our food. Besides we know all kinds
of work, we know how to use what you [earlier speaker] mentioned, the machete,
hoe, we know how to work with all our energy [kipaltik/nuestra fuerza], our eager
desire [jtzatzaltik/afán]. The work that we carry out now is through our strength
––––––––––
14 This Magdalenero Catholic assertion echoes French post-structuralists: “For him [Marcel
Détienne], these tales, stories, poems, and treatises are already practices. They say exactly
what they do. They constitute and are what they intend to mean” (de Certeau 1984: 80, em-
phasis added). [Note: In what follows, quotations from Tzotzil transcriptions with Spanish
translation of key words appear within brackets.]
[kipaltik/nuestra fuerza]. But if only we had organized work, we would have bet-
ter support, if we really did our work well (FT 13.XI.93).
The transparency of this discourse is particularly compelling. Unfailingly,

Catholics of Magdalenas hold to their peasant position as they work the word
of God, tying their survival to their bodily exertions on the land:
In San Cristóbal, in Mexico [D.F.], those who work in the office, they only know
how to work with pencils, they don’t know how to use the machete, the hoe, they
don’t know how to plow the earth, they don’t know how to sow corn. Their
strength [yipal/fuerza] is in their fingers, that’s how they get their food. But if it
wasn’t for the corn, they couldn’t survive. Sure, they have their money, but they
don’t eat money. But we who are in the countryside, in the mountain scrublands,
we know everything ... (ibid.)
The catechists confer preeminent social value on strength, energy, determina-

tion, and desire. Their caricature of Mexican urbanites – knowing only one
tool, the pencil, and channeling all strength into “their fingers” – affirms
indigenous social worth and the primacy of agricultural over other forms of
labor. But “strength” in this account is more than simply brute bodily force,
and “knowing how” to deploy it an urgent preoccupation.
The catechist’s paean to peasants who “know everything” (metonymically
attested by the many tools they “know how to use,”) is critically tempered:
“If only we had organized work ... if we really did our work well.”
The word of God provokes and propels the catechists and Catholic
Magdalenas as a community to the possibility in this “if.” Just so, learning to
“manejarlo bien – handle it [scripture]” well is high praise in a community
that employs the Bible as a tool for organizing and doing work “well.” In this
sense, homiletic transcripts can be seen as the field of play for the tropes (in
Fernandez, ed. 1986, esp. Turner: 121-58) with which the community reflects
upon the “gift of God” and thus its own social formation, above all, “word”
15
and “work.” These tropes and their cognates thread through homiletic
discourse from one celebration to the next, if not seamlessly at least with
remarkable constancy. Picked up on any one occasion, they reverberate in
almost any other, whatever the scriptural text in hand.
––––––––––
15 One scholar proposes that religion is “a mode of thinking about social constructs,” and that
its rituals “creat[e] a space for play, experimentation, thoughtful meditation” on aspects of
social life including “the sense of belonging to a people,” “a group’s attitude toward the
land,” “experiencing the constraints of another’s view,” “marking...genealogical loyalties,”
“finding reasons for ... assignments of tasks,” and “the workings of gifts and obligations”
(Mack 2000: 287-91). Most all of these features of “social formation” are addressed in one
way or another in Magdalenero homiletic reflections. See J.Z. Smith 1982, 1987, 2004.
158 Chapter Five
“The Word of God is for Working It.”16

A homily on the Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30) proves an exemplary
exegetical platform from which to follow these tropic threads. According to
one catechist’s translation, a man distributes his “money” (tak’ine/dinero) to
each of three “workers” (abtele/trabjadores) in varying amounts. On his
return after a long absence, he finds two of them knew how to “work it” (ta
yabtelenel/trabajarlo), but the third buried his for fear of the master. The
master rewards the first two, welcoming them into “glory” and “light.” He
gives the third’s share to the first, and then casts the now-dispossessed
worker into “obscurity.”
The translator replaced the Spanish “talents” with the Tzotzil “money.”
But with deepening homiletic reflection, rhythmically marked by four repeti-
tions of the parable itself, this literal economic rendering dissolved into
others.
17
The translator himself offered something close to an accepted reading.
“The meaning is equal to the kingdom of God, the meaning is clear, we must
announce all that is heard to all [our] neighbors, just like working money.”
But, when the deacon Rudolfo becomes principal homilist, the meaning is
not, in a direct metaphorical sense, “just like working money.” Rather,
exegetical alteration of the terms of exchange rule out anything like straight-
forward economic accumulation:
Everything is a gift (matanal/regalo) from God that he gives through the sacra-
ment, a gift that he gives to you, because God sends his light over you to give you
strength (yipal/fuerza) and courage.
And, “the gift that is given to us, all these things have a meaning it is neces-
sary to decipher....” Again,
The gifts of God are not a simple present, so we shouldn’t spend it [sic] in vain ...
we must guard this commandment (matanal/mandamiento) with great care, we
must work the word of God (xkabtelantik ti sk’op Diose/debemos trabajar al
palabra de Dios), we must have a return on all that has been commended to us.
To trace the course of this exegetical sequence – from “talent” to “money” to

“everything;” then, more precisely, to “a gift from God” given in the sacra-
ment (baptism), which becomes “strength and courage;” and finally “the
––––––––––
16 FT 14.VI.93: All quotations in this subsection come from this transcript unless noted
otherwise.
17 E.G. “The time before the return of Jesus...must be used responsibly. ...Matthew warns
against those attitudes which will bring about exclusion from God’s kingdom” (Donahue
1988: 109).
word of God” – is, first of all, to revisit the double meaning of la palabra de
Dios in Magdalenas. That is, the “gift” that is “everything” amounts to the
(total) way of being in the world entailed in practicing – and more specifi-
cally, ‘deciphering’ and/or ‘working’ – the word of God.
In this exegetical account, recursive in both form and content, the word
as “gift” is “light,” “strength” and “courage,” enabling and, more, urging
“work.” In this and subsequent homiletic passages, the alternate rendering of
the Tzotzil matanal – now “gift,” in another place “commandment” – carries
on the lexical level the message embedded in the discourse as whole: the
word of God, “not a simple present,” intends a “return” in the form of a
disposition, personal and communal.
For Rudolfo, the “return” reflects “the gift” according to the axiological
discourse of Magdalenero conversion: “When we realize [the needs/suffering
of the people], then we will be working, we will have opened our eyes, but
this is a gift of God.”18 Here the pivotal referent is the catechist’s own con-
verting “illumination.” Thus, his next exegetical move:
Everything depends on one’s intelligence (sp’ijil/inteligencia), since each one [of

us] has a different capacity (jp’ijiltike/capacidad), but whatever it is, it’s neces-
sary to use it. ... When we are gathering, men and women, it means we are unify-
ing our thoughts, we are working with it (syak chij-abtejotike/estamos trabajando
con ello), it’s necessary to gather.... Though we don’t have much intelligence
(jp’ijiltike/inteligencia), well this means we have very little money to work, some
more, others a lot, others little, this is the capacity of our intelligence (tolol ti
jbilitike/capacidad de nuestra inteligencia)19 ...
Typical of all the other catechists,20 the modesty in this appraisal of intellec-
tual “capacity” belies its enormous significance. In Mexico generally and the
Maya highlands in particular, the ladino-indigenous ethnic divide traces to
the seminal colonial-missionary question: ‘are the Indians not men?’; signifi-
cantly rephrased at the Imperial Court by the Dominican Fray Montesinos:
‘do they not have rational souls?’ (Seed 1992: 629-52). Though the Court
––––––––––
18 Six months later, Rudolfo voiced a similar concern at his nephew’s baptism: “it will be too
sad if the community sleeps, it will suffer if it doesn’t hear the word of God” (FT 9.XII.93).
19 Tzotzil tolol = head, cranium, so the phrase might be translated literally “all [the intelli-
gence] that fits in our head.”
20 “We aren’t very efficient, really; before you and before our Lord Jesus Christ, we don’t
know how to speak, we don’t know how to make good commentaries” (FT, 24.IV.94); or,
“excuse my [catechist’s] errors, perhaps there were some correct things [in my homily] and
others maybe weren’t [correct], you [community] be the judge” (FT, 12.XII.93); and, “Par-
don me, don’t get angry, don’t get upset because I don’t know how to explain it [Parable of
the Talents]” (FT. 14.VI..93). Elected by their peers, catechists rarely impose themselves;
they also readily acknowledge their lack of education.
160 Chapter Five
decided in the affirmative, through the late-colonial period “in ecclesiastical

censuses and countless political documents” Spaniards in the Americas
described themselves as “gente de razón – people of reason” following a
socio-religious taxonomy constructed on denial of this ascription to indige-
nous peoples (ibid.: 649).
In Mexico, the “image of a dual society” – Indian/white, with mestizos as
an intermediary category – persisted even as “the national culture” navigated
the nineteenth century passage from caste to class (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 276
and passim). The late modern dual classification depended on the early
modern assumption about native “capacity,” for modernity in the former
case, for Christianity in the latter (ibid.).
A note on translation ironically reinforces the point. The primary transla-
tor for this study initially rendered the Tzotzil “sb’ijil” and “jb’ijiltike”
alternately “intelligence” and “capacity,” the same substitution that occurred
in early modern debate on the human status of Indians. In late-twentieth
century Magdalenas, catechists insist “jchu’nej mantalotic k’oplal”, literally,
21
“we obey the plan of the commandments.” Again echoing the early-colonial
contest that set Mexico’s ethnic fault line, our translator gives for this same
phrase “somos gente de razón, we are people of reason.”
But the point extends beyond these evocative lexical coincidences.
During the Conquest era, “capacity” for understanding Christian doctrine
became the test of human rationality among indigenous peoples in the
Americas, judgment, like the test itself, belonging to missionaries (Seed
1992). On the eve of a new millenium, Tzotzil Maya appropriated their
intelligence for themselves (in both senses), Magdalenero Catholics an
exemplary instance. For them, obedience to the commandments (jchu’nej
mantalotic) is precisely not submission to external judgment. Rather, it is
understanding, even more participating, in the (rational) “plan” (sk’oplal)
informing these commandments. In short, as our translator understood, for
Catholics in Magdalenas conversion itself warrants the claim, somos gente de
razón.
The claim entailed working the Word of God, as the catechists explain,
“yu’un abtenalal sk’an ti sk’op Diose – because the Word of God is for
working it.” In other words, Magdalenero perception of the Bible determined
their reception of it (and vice versa). Unlike the formulae of colonial cate-
chetical manuals, scripture as such is not, nor could it be, simply matter for
rote repetition or even memorization (though, to be sure, much of it is memo-
––––––––––
21 Ch’un = obey, believe, is from a semantic family including the Tzotzil adjective ch’ul =
sacred, divine, holy. It figures in nearly all words linked to this root idea: e.g., ch’ul-totik =
God the father; ch’ul = saint; ch’ul-el = soul; ch’ul-na = house of prayer, church; ch’ul- totil
= godfather; ch’u-onil = godson
rable). Rather, as the catechists say, it demands “deciphering.” They find in

scripture not a “test” of their intelligence but testimony to it, and just so
divine gift. The circularity entailed in any gift (bestowal completed by recep-
tion and ratified with eventual return) in this case at once validates and
describes the gift itself: “Working” the word of God – to read/translate and
engage in its exegesis – demonstrates “capacity” for it.
For Magdalenero Catholics, the gift in this sense – intelligence – is
realized in everyday practice. Finding themselves by disposition unable to
“say” anything but “what we do” and by conversion uniquely identified with
the word of God, these Tzotzil peasants “decipher” the biblical text through a
distinctive religious joining of semantics and pragmatics.
As the core instance of this amalgamation, “deciphering” through ritual
dialogue makes the text a tool for “unifying our thoughts,”a ritual objective
repeatedly voiced in Magdalenero homilies. Thus Rudolfo’s exegetical
summary of the Parable of the Talents:
We have to work this gift.... the power to work the word of God, [to] listen and
say what the pueblo has, the reality of the pueblo, what it is living now ... this is
the form of augmenting the work, to feel that the word of God grows... Jesus is
speaking of unity, of agreement [acuerdo], one has to read and say it to the com-
munity.
“Reading,” “listening,” and “saying,” la palabra de Dios comes to know

itself in religious construction of its world and so realizes its “gift,” its
intelligence, communally. To achieve “good interest” amounts to agreement
or acuerdo, the preeminent Tzotzil socio-political value, that the Catholic
community in fact “knows” in a triple sense: it knows its lived (social and
political-economic) reality; it knows that it knows this reality; and this self-
conscious knowing is a form of feeling (“to feel that the Word of God
grows”), what might be called “cultural intimacy ... the recognition of those
aspects of a cultural identity that provide...assurance of common sociality.”
(Herzfeld 1997: 3).
One catechist affirmed the community’s identification with the Bible
thus: “Everything we need to know is in the book” (FT 12.XII.93). But trust
in the book extends beyond knowledge of its contents to an integral sense of
well-being in its use. As manifest in exegetical practice, the converted peas-
ant community recognizes itself in “handling the book,” as catechists de-
scribe biblical literacy, by “working” it and just so becoming a distinctive
social body.
Viewed as a metonym, the locution “handling the book” assimilates (and
ultimately revalues) mastered agricultural skills – e.g. use of the machete and
162 Chapter Five
the hoe – to (and with) religiously (re)discovered intellectual dexterity, and

the other way around.
In Magdalenas, the Bible is the indispensable emblem of catechetical
office, virtual appendage(s) of its occupiers. Only in the rarest circumstance
does any Magdalenero stand before Catholics assembled in the templo
without the Bible, and catechetical visits to counsel the sick, grieving or
troubled always include prayer and/or reading from it. More to the point, like
the ever-present machete slung over peasant shoulders, and decidedly unlike
the stationary patronal icons ensconced behind locked cabinet doors in the
church, for Magdalenernos, the Bible is functional possession, never object
of worship or display.
On the way to celebrations or home visits, the Bible rests in the same
(kind of) red or handwoven net bag these agriculturalists stock with tortillas
and matz’/pozole (corn-based beverage) to nourish a day’s labor in milpa or
cafetal. Only those whose literacy enables them to “handle” a Bible own one.
And only the simplest protections – a homemade wood chest or plastic cover
– distinguish the status of this possession from the machetes, hoes, sledge
hammers, ropes and other rudimentary agricultural implements scattered
22
casually about rough adobe dwellings.
In short, unthinkable (and largely impossible) as it is for these peasants to
acquire any but those tools essential to their labor, the Bible has become one
of them for Magdalenero catechists. Mastery of the machete marks a pivotal
moment in a highland Maya youth’s coming of age as potential padre de
familia: he is said to ‘manejarlo bien – handle it well.’ Once removed from
the household, the Catholic community values the Bible analogously: the
leaders among them, the deacons, are distinguished by their ability to “ani-
mate” the community with it.
His father-in-law explained Elias’ selection for ordination without hesita-
tion: “porque él sabe – because he knows,” holding up his hands as if reading
and pointing to a word. The gesture indexes the implied gloss: ‘lo maneja
bien – he handles it [the Bible/Spanish] well,’ a skill exhibited at every
liturgical celebration over which the deacon presides.
Illiterate Magdaleneros, the majority in the pueblo, confront in the Bible
(for them) mute materiality, as resistant to human effort as any uncultivated
scrubland. But taken up as a tool, it gives life and nourishes in the communal
sphere as the machete does in the domestic. Catholics of Magdalenas bestow
authority on those whose biblical literacy motivates gathering and self-
––––––––––
22 “Cultural categories and economic goods are here defined in terms of one another: ...the
collection of different objects in the one space represents a commonality of cultural virtue....
It is a process of mutual valuation. What it implies is that economic value is Saussurean, it is
the differential standing of a given object in a system of meaningful relations. (Sahlins
1976:36)
recognition in “deciphering” the text. Bodily enacted and exhibited, the

“animating”23 effect is confirmed as socially-constitutive, and for Magdalen-
eros expressly “religious,” yield. The community “feel[s] that the Word of
God grows,” and knows the “glory” and “light” reserved for those who invest
their intelligence with la palabra de Dios.
“They Thought it Very Strange: What Power Human Beings Possess!”24

Returning to the idiom of our exemplary parable, the re-cognition with which
Catholic Magdaleneros thus reflexively identify, and so distinguish them-
selves as a religious community, counts as the first return on working the
word (and not burying it).
Their work with another biblical text, John 3:14-15, further glosses this
gain:
We have passed from death to life. We know because we love our brothers. He
who does not love his brother is already dead, he who hates his brother is an as-
sassin, and we, and you, know no assassin can have eternal life in his heart, broth-
ers and sisters. This is the word of God [emphasis added].
Though seemingly minor and quite apt to the text’s near-gnostic theology, a
slip in the catechist’s translation is telling: the biblical author assures his
audience “you know,” while the catechist assimilates the Magdalenero
assembly to this early Christian community with the addition “we.”
The ensuing dialogue amply warrants the translator’s textual amendment.
The homilist assures the assembly, “the written word is very good,” but
several confess to difficulty with it. From one, “I don’t understand well,” to
another, “I can’t comment well, I can’t remember it,” and yet another, “I
understand that the word is very important, but it seems we can’t understand
it very well,” comes the conclusion: “We don’t know how to think-reflect.”
Expressing the religious assembly’s preoccupation, these admissions
underwrite its identifying conviction:
They [the biblical writers] saw that the written word was very good.... It reaches
all power, the word of God that they said. It’s not like [just] any power. Perhaps
you don’t understand, you find another who doesn’t understand. But as they said
the word of God here, it is true, it is the true word, the word of God here [in the
Bible]. They saw that it is the true word when the people were gathered. They
––––––––––
23 The Magdalenero Catholic usage animar=animate recalls Weber on charisma: “The
charismatic hero derives his authority not from any established order ... He gains and retains
it solely by proving his powers in practice. ... his divine mission must prove itself by bring-
ing well-being to his faithful followers (1968: 1114-1115).
24 FT 4.XII.93. Quotations in this section are from this transcript unless otherwise noted.
164 Chapter Five
thought it very strange, what power man had.... You must see the scripture very
well, and this is why it is written in the book.
Evidence for the ‘goodness’ of the written word – as of its truth and, ulti-
mately, its power – comes “when the people were [are] gathered.” Read
recursively, this statement aptly describes the “very strange” power – attrac-
tion to and convocation by the word – the homilist (and, he presumes, the
scripture writer) finds in human being.
In the ensuing dialogue, lamenting “disorganizing” forces on the one hand
and extolling unity on the other, the “very strange” appears rhetorically
ritualized as socially formative for Catholic Magdalenas. The homilist ini-
tially proposed a distancing move: “In [biblical] times past ... people weren’t
united yet. No. Only a few heard the word of God....” Some “spoke evil”
against them, and those who commit calumny of this sort are murderers, “not
because they cut off heads” but because they “kill its [the group’s] power ...
disorganize the group.”
In this way, the catechist imagined the original scriptural community (and
read the text) by retrojecting an ever-present threat to his own. Again fusing a
possible present with textual past, he echoed what he knew his hearers say to
themselves, perhaps even at that moment:
I don’t understand the word very well, better I just sit, or better I leave the word of
God, perhaps he would say to the people.... But as he left it, he disorganized the
group. So, he’s a murderer.
Then came diagnosis of a lethal ‘disorganizing’ menace lurking within the

community as the homilist projected another imaginary interior monologue
onto those assembled before him:
I haven’t found anything good in the word of God, I have many needs, better I
look for work, better I go to the finca to look for work. It’s better still that I rest,
don’t take advantage or see....’
Here the written word proves its goodness and power in the rhetorical strat-
egy it provoked. Dramatization of a resonance between an imagined, authori-
tative past and known, ambiguous present shows the word to “work” as most
public ritual does, enabling the community to consider and renew its identity,
in this case in the face of disaggregating dangers.
The homilist plainly sought this ritual effect. The familiar tone of interior
monologues played back to hearers whose doubts he surely shares strikes
against the ominous epithet “murderer” in the text. With force gathered over
this rhetorical divide, the collision communicates the momentous stake in the
alternatives: “leave the word of God” or “take advantage and see.”
The homilist also manifestly intended a deliberative, rather than emotive,
response. The medium altogether suited the message framed by the familiar
contest between finca labor and la palabra de Dios and further thematized
with repeated versions of the religiously critical question for Magdaleneros:
“What is our work?”25 For the homilist, peasant values both perennial (utility
or “advantage”) and newly re-cognized (lucidity, to “see,”) dictate the con-
verted Catholic’s response: “we must think well.”
For Catholics in Magdalenas, the word of God possesses “strange power”
through the common work it demands and promotes, not least collaboration
between literate and illiterate. Mutual dependence is of course necessary in
this case, but insufficient for community cohesion. But a discursive shift
turned the community in a theological direction: “If we would think alike, we
would work alike: we would be united, we would be together,” the catechist
proposed.
In the next instant, he abruptly affirmed “nos salvó por su muerte por
nuestra salvación – he [Jesus] saved us by his death for our salvation,” and
then posed the crucial question: “What sign do you see now that we are
saved...?”
A response arose from the assembly:
In those times, as there was no single unity, really a part or a half ... they died of
hunger, they had no bread, there was no food, they had nothing to eat, they had
nothing to savor, they didn’t have clothes. Though there isn’t much more [of these
things] now, still there is unity, assembly, meeting. In common we will help each
other, in common we will look for our food, together we will look for what we
need.
“Those times” when “there was no single unity” describes the rejected
regime of finca labor and the empty center. Poverty endures in Magdalenas
but with what its inhabitants regard as a saving difference: “...the people are
united. If it is united it is because it wants to save itself, rapidly they [sic]
gain power.
The homilist assimilated one social diagnostic to the other in soteriologi-
cal summation:
––––––––––
25 In other places in this transcript we find, for example, “If we work badly, we will find
suffering...;” and “this [scripture] told us how we must work;” and again “this [calumny]
isn’t our work now.”
166 Chapter Five
It is the word of God that we share together among us. We share and we demon-
strate the true word of God when we are well unified, gathered together in the
word of God. This is what we can share among us, the word of God, we can only
gift each other with the word of God equally shared. We demonstrate with our
attitude the good way of our all-powerful Lord. It’s what we can share, the word
of God. On the contrary, clothes to dress with ... corn, beans, we can’t share.
Theologically, then, being in the word of God signifies a salvific state of

being in the world warranted by the egalitarian social unity it engenders. In
other words, for Magdaleneros the word of God is a medium of exchange
inaugurating novel – and for them, saving – power relations in the commu-
nity. Neither susceptible to simple accumulation nor suited to exclusive
possession, scriptural texts can in principle (if not in historical fact) be
“equally shared.” Distinctly manifesting this attribute, the Bible’s “strange
power” to convoke ramifies from templo and ermita to milpa and cafetal as a
uniquely fungible phenomenon Magdaleneros “demonstrate with [their]
26
attitude.”
The word of God is good to work and good for work as collective intel-
lectual enterprise: being “in the Word of God” is gathering together to “think
well,” that is, to perform (ritual-intellectual) work which informs (agricul-
tural) work. Put another way, the “strange power” of the unified community
to “save itself” in the word of God arises from social aggregation as entail-
ment of intellectual application – and the other way round. Alternative
translations make the point: “We demonstrate with our attitude the good
27
work (lekil xanbal) of the all-powerful God.” In short, salvation for Magda-
leneros amounts to realizing, in both senses, the “good way of the all-
powerful God” in shared work with God’s word. Thus oriented, everyday
labor, as God’s gift, saves.
“We Must Think Well....This Is How It Is, the Word of God.”28

The catechist epitomized the message of Luke 6, 43-49 his homily:
We must think very well ... we need to know very well what the reading says in
order to comment.... we must listen why and how so that we can do [the word of
God]. ... Then this is how it is, the word of God.
––––––––––
26 Tzotzil. ilel, rendered by Spanish actitud, can also be Sp. ver = to see.
27 The Tzotzil lekil xanbal = “good work” can also “good way;” also, xanbal = to walk,
essential to peasant labor in the highlands.
28 FT 8.IX.94. All citations in this section are from this transcript unless noted otherwise.
For Magdalenero Catholics as for the homilist, the word of God is something
done: “deciphered” in one domain, it is “carried out,” as they like to say, in
another.29 More specifically, in each case the “work” depends on an “atti-
tude,” as our translator puts it, the meaning so named unpacked by reference
to its English semantic cousin, “dispose,” to arrange or put in order, one’s
self and/or one’s world.
Dispositions refer to both states of mind and states of things, but notions
of habit and constraint associated with the static nominative do not cancel
deliberation entailed by the predicative, as Magdaleneros themselves tacitly
affirm:
The message we hear is very pretty, and though it is beautiful we must understand
it in two forms and interpret all that we need to realize so that we would go on
learning and can work in the surroundings in the coming days, we must think each
day as it is said, not each year (FT 8.IX.94; emphasis added).
Here “two forms” restates Luke: “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not
do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:43). The homiletic exegete further appropriates
the juxtaposition in the text to advance re-appropriation of context. Magda-
leneros are to dispose themselves (“interpret ... realize ... and go on learning”)
toward (re)ordering their world (“work in their surroundings”).30
The seemingly odd temporal addition – “in the coming days ... each day
... not each year” – urges the community to continually decide for conversion
and hence reflexively deepen the disposition it entails. Just so, to periodic
interruptions of production to honor tradition’s yearly fiesta round, la
palabra de Dios adds daily gatherings closing one day’s labor and announc-
ing the next. In this way, la palabra de Dios synchronizes ritual to agricul-
tural rhythm, and the other way round, disposing peasant and land alike to re-
cognize(d) production:
Everyone here, yes we listen to the commandment, that’s fine. But it’s better that
we believe and obey ... in the material ... not to lose heart, for everyone has to
think in what form he has to make an effort ... in working all that can grow in cul-
tivated fields [vosilalike/los terrenos].
With this injunction, the catechist tacitly reminds that in the current socio-
economic conjuncture land traditionally ordered to the demands of subsis-
––––––––––
29 The Spanish cumplir = carry out, fufill relative to a promise. For Magdaleneros, to call
someone “muy cumplido” is high praise.
30 The distinction between “forms” or categories of the “strange power” in the Word notably
arised in reference to gender differences: “Women also have power from God, but in the
form of thinking, of listening....” (FT 12.XII.93).
168 Chapter Five
tence and costumbre, that is, cultivated exclusively for milpa and sugar cane,
calls for calculation – “each one has to think” – suiting coffee and other cash
crops.31
Indeed, the globalizing turn “in the material” of highland Tzotzil life
rewards the kind of intellectual acuity, considered judgment, and personal
vigilance stimulated and nurtured by the structured dialogues of frequent
liturgical celebration.
Their regularity effectively ties ritual work to everyday production
through yet another striking result of Catholic ritual innovation as communal
dialogue shaping celebration in templo and ermita inevitably continues
afterward. Sometimes around the altar itself but always spilling out of the
worship space, following nearly every liturgy la palabra de Dios shifts in
focus (scriptural to agricultural), tone (hesitant to eager), number and gender
(exclusively male), but not in the participants’ alert and searching disposition.
Temporally enforced by daily ritual gatherings, the logic of this disposi-
tion is spatially manifest, in the first instance, by the altogether public charac-
ter of these post-ritual conversations. Costumbre’s public gatherings in
church and/or plaza are limited to obligatory ritual events or community-wide
assemblies. But every day in the post-ritual twilight, Catholic peasants in
Magdalenas bodily carve informal mini-plazas from the otherwise unoccu-
pied environs of the church. There they trade agricultural concerns – em-
phatically legitimated by la palabra de Dios – along with stories, jokes, and
gossip. Catholics emerge from their common prayer eager to discuss markets
and middle-men; fertilizers, prices and transport. Most importantly, they
seize the opportunity to solicit and/or offer help with field labor and, in the
case of cooperative holdings, jointly plan the next day’s work.
In short, these consultations perform the exhortation “think well.” Put
another way, more than inviting cognitive operations as such, “think well”
invokes the disposition inculcated by both exegetic ritual and post-ritual
verbal exchange interstitially located between church and field, domestic and
civic space, one day’s labor just ended and the next’s anticipated.
Indexing disposition, this homology between body, space-time, and
discourse realizes (in the strict sense) the new religious community’s recon-
structed local theology. Both ritual and agricultural work by Catholic Magda-
leneros elude the governance of tradition’s civic-religious authorities; neither
one nor the other renders obligatory and, for these converts, alienating
service to the saint(s).
––––––––––
31 Small producers of coffee must reckon with the three-year interval between planting and
commercially viable crop; consider costs and benefits of investment in coffee’s techniques
and technology; and negotiate a boom-and-bust global market through brokers known and
unknown. Those cultivating beans certified organic for the global market face further start-
up costs.
In fact, the exercise of agency in conversion to what they call “religion”

effectively transformed mythical mediating patrons into historical companion
exemplars. Ipso facto, their socio-political liberation from obligatory cargo
frees Catholics from costumbre’s formulaic relations with the divine.
In keeping with the saints’ demotion from divine to human status, post-
ritual Catholic socio-cultural geometry entails the worldliness and historicity
in the catechists’ incantation: “hay un solo Dios – there’s only one God.”
To paraphrase the deacon Elias, if God is one and everywhere the same,
and if work is God’s gift, then “everything matters.” The always-unfinished
tasks and uncertain outcomes of everyday life and production, no longer
subject to the fickle favor of the saints, demand the reverse of God’s gift, that
is, deliberate reflection. Catholic celebration of la palabra de Dios performs
this theology, not least by continually urging Magdalenero attention (“inter-
pret ... realize ... go on learning”) and critical (re)construction of their world
in all its pressing immediacy (“in the surroundings in the coming days”).
With a correlative moral move, the catechists liberate the sacred from its
confinement by costumbre to prescribed times and places, rhetorical forms
and ritual substances by assimilating themselves to the apostles (and other
biblical persons) and la palabra de Dios to the early Christian communities.
Catechist retrojective identification ascribes to their “first fathers and moth-
32
ers” in “religion” (FT 4.IV.94, 8.IV.94) virtues and values perennially
advantageous to peasants and so theologically re-invent them. Exalted in this
way, peasant labor mediates the power of God.
––––––––––
32 The ancestors in Magdalenero Tzotzil are ba’yi jtotik, jmetik = literally, “our first fathers
mothers.”
Decolonizing the Saints 171
Chapter Six
Decolonizing the Saints

From Myth to History
Introduction
Post-ritual Catholic socio-cultural geometry entails the worldliness and
historicity in the Tzotzil catechists’ declaration: “hay un solo Dios – there’s
only one God.” Their frequent repetition of this fundamental article of faith
epitomizes the dethronement of costumbre and its deified patron saints with
the coming of the Word of God to Magdalenas.
Saint cults originated among Mexico’s highland Maya, as they did
throughout Latin America, with the Conquest. Christian saints themselves
were imported and imposed by Spanish clerics who also organized the
cofradías, indigenous brotherhoods, to serve the saints and, not incidentally,
provide maintenance for the priests who presided over fiesta masses and
1
other rites in their honor. In Magdalenas, as elsewhere, cofradías became
entire villages which understood their well-being to depend on the favor of
what they regarded (and divinized) as patron saints (Farriss 1984: 266).
Interpretation of traditional Maya relationship to patron saints benefits
from Peter Brown’s brilliant attribution of the rise of saints’ cults in early
Christianity to a shift in religious imagination “congruent to” changes in
social relations in late-antiquity (Brown 1981: 21). For the ancients, the
protection afforded by gods, personal daimons, geniuses, and guardian angels
– “invisible companions” descending from God to man along neo-
Platonism’s intimately-linked chain of being – lay in “the shimmering pres-
ence of their bodiless power.” As fixed and dependable as the stars, they
served as emblems of “the tranquil structure of the universe” (ibid.: 51-57).
Christian baptism erased this influence on ancient personality by offer-
ing, instead, human protectors sanctified by martyrdom. Each of these saints
presented a bridge with a visage over the “cliff face” of heavenly beings that
separated human and divine in the ancient world (61). For Brown, this new
link bestowed the sense of intimacy with divine protectors anxious ancients
––––––––––
1 The extent of missionary extraction of Indian resources via the cofradías is variously
interpreted. Farriss argues, “we should not exaggerate” the income clergy acquired through
essentially Maya institutions” (1984: 326). But Wasserstrom nearly reduces cofradías to
instruments of clerical greed (1975: 27-28,71-74).
172 Chapter Six
craved. The Christian saints enjoyed the immense advantage of being “emi-
nently intelligible ... in terms of those human relationships which late-Roman
society had been most skilled at articulating,” namely, patron-client relation-
ships (62). The salient point:
For patronage and friendship derived their appeal from a proven ability to render
malleable seemingly inexorable processes and to bridge with the warm breath of
friendship the great distances of the late-Roman social world.... (65)
Thus, Brown suggests that the cult of the saints coheres with distant colo-
nists’ reliance on personal patrons in Rome. For early Christians, sites asso-
ciated with saints’ relics and tombs came to be holy places. In this way, the
protection of individual interests in the Empire via particular Roman patrons
was transferred for Christians from the (merely) private sphere to shared,
public spaces (Brown 1981: passim).
In early modern Spain, the birthplace of the adventurers who conquered
the Maya, the transference of saint patronage from individual to corporate
entities anchored the florescence of popular religiosity in peasant localities
burdened with the demands of Spanish imperial pursuits. According to the
principal study of this phenomenon (Christian 1981), in the later middle ages
lay devotion escaped ecclesiastical control as it was redirected from relics
guarded by bishops, abbots, and pastors in cathedrals, monasteries and parish
churches to mobile saint images (ibid.: 20-21). The resulting sacralization of
peripheral places inevitably challenged hierarchical control in the religious
sphere as it bolstered socio-political localism.
Ironically, Spanish priests who barely tolerated local saint cults in the
parishes to which they were assigned remained profoundly attached to the
saints beloved in their home villages (ibid). Thus they carried saint patrons
with them as missionaries to Mexico’s Maya highland pueblos.
Colonial constructions
The ancient Maya, too, counted on intermediary divine beings for protection.
They are the lesser gods of costumbre today and, according to Vogt, visual-
ized as ancestors (Vogt 1976: 16). These “protecting gods – totilme7iletik,
mothers and fathers – became assimilated to the Catholic saints in the high-
lands (Holland 1963: 110). Their traditional powers and purpose can be
2
discerned in indigenous understanding of cargo as “service to the saints.”
––––––––––
2 At the first cargo level, the mayordomo’s responsibility for clothing the village patron is, in
this respect, as important as the alferez’s duty to sponsor the fiesta honoring her; both re-
quired ritual offerings – candles, pox or soft drinks, and incense.
The ambiguities inhering in colonial “assimilation” of Christian saints to

Maya gods and costumbre’s “service” to them invite interpretation that shows
why and how contemporary catechists’ reject both.
Missionaries accompanying conquistadores in the Maya highlands
“reduced” its indigenous inhabitants to colonial settlements which they, in
turn, sacralized by assigning them to saint patrons. Holding Farriss’ position
that Maya understandings dominated in the ensuing “two-way exchange”
with missionaries that produced costumbre, John Watanabe places saints
within a trio of “historically relativized images” (as opposed to primordial
essences) linking Maya to their land and to each others – saints, ancestors,
3
and earth lords (Farriss 1984: 297; Watanabe 1990: 143).
Thus, the Maya collectively feast with the saints whom their forebears
“encapsulated” in local churches (Watanabe 1990: 136-38),4 transforming
imported images into symbols of village sociality. Further, compliance with
the ways of the ancestors, especially at the village saint’s fiesta, reaffirmed
the continuity of history, while appeasement of the earth lords with which
they were implicitly conflated secured the stability of the cosmos.
Within this interpretative frame, “cults of community” focused on the
saints affirm evolving local moral norms and political sovereignty along with
territorial boundaries. Reverence for the ancestors who mastered the saints by
housing them perpetuates costumbre as present historical “recapitulation” of
the past. Respect for the earth lords, likened both to Ladinos and the devil
himself, acknowledges the enduring resistance of the world to human will. In
the “ongoing reassortment” of these three symbols, the historically-alert
observer can read the continuous permutations of local concern (ibid.: 144).
This masterful portrayal of post-conquest traditional highland religion
demonstrates Maya agency in a dialectical struggle to achieve and maintain
control over a meaningful local social order. Yet local meaning and stability
are profoundly constrained by the (colonial) hegemony in which they are
embedded. Exemplary in this respect are the earth lords who “personify
inescapable encompassment by natural as well as human realities” (ibid.).
Their lingering colonial force appears in this portrait of the powerful Earth
Lord Yahval Balamil in Zinacantán, Chiapas:
––––––––––
3 Farriss argues that saints replaced ancient Maya tutelary gods in “a two-way exchange in
which the Maya system seems to have been dominant” during the early colonial period
(1984: 294-300).
4 The notion of “encapsulation” appears in both Christian’s account of “encapsulated devo-
tional charters” for Castilian saint cults (1981: 75) and in Vogt’s application of it to describe
the ability of the Zinacanteco social system to “maintain its cultural patterns” against Aztec,
Spanish, and Mexican states (1969: 582).
174 Chapter Six
He is pictured as a large, fat Ladino who possesses piles of money, herds of

horses, mules, and cows, and flocks of chickens. He also controls all of the water-
holes... the clouds... and all the products of the earth that Zinacantecos use....
Hence a Zinacanteco cannot use land or any of its products for any purpose,
whether to grow maize in a milpa or to construct a new house, without compen-
sating the Earth Lord with appropriate ceremonies and offerings (Vogt 1969:
383).
A portrait of earth lords called witz in Chimbal, Guatemala5 is remarkably

similar:
...witz brood inside solitary mountaintops, intervening in local life only when they,
not Chimaltecos, please, impervious to the moral suasion of reciprocity. Conse-
quently, witz become Ladinos not necessarily because Ladinos are naturally evil,
but because, like Ladino strangers, witz dwell outside the community, indifferent
– if not actually inimical – to the local sociality of Chimalteco life (Watanabe
1998a: 142).
Equally notable, the affiliations of the earth lords in both places extend in the
opposite direction as ancestors, original claimants of communal lands, are
variously associated with them. Chimalteco ancestors share with witz regen-
erative natural power (ibid.), while the typical Zincanteco ancestor, like the
Yahval Balamil, lives in the mountains in a well-supplied “house like a
Ladino house” (Vogt 1974: 384).
Precisely these ancestors, ambiguously situated in equally intractable
natural and ethnic spheres, created costumbre by “capturing” resistant saints
in the wild in Guatemala (Watanabe 1998a: 137-38). Yet, the saints them-
selves remain “willful,” “egoistic,” and “notably lacking in Christian vir-
tues,” eluding definitive Maya socialization (ibid.: 138; Farriss 1984: 324).
At each annual patron fiesta in highland Maya communities, mayordomos
fulfill their cargo by placing a new layer of the local woven traje (village
dress) on the plaster image of the saint. But the problematic result of their
original “capture” is visibly manifest in the failure of ritual re-clothing to
disguise their pale and finely chiseled European visages. What is more, their
unreliability as protectors imposes a regime of propitiation for their favor, the
numerous obligations of fiesta sponsorship the most onerous among them.
Every cargo on their behalf is, literally, “burden” (Farriss 1984: 348),
including, of course, the need to bear the saints on their excursions out of the
church at fiesta – just as, in the Chiapas highlands, Maya cargo-bearers from
––––––––––
5 Chiapas was part of Guatemala until its legislature voted to join Mexico in 1824, soon after
Independence.
the earliest colonial days bore every form of ladino load, including ladino
notables themselves.6
A linguistic note precisely situates the patron saints of costumbre within
the nexus of colonial power relations. In San Andrés, the patron saint “owns”
the church (Holland 1997: 83) by conceptual analogy with Kajvaltik/Nuestro
Dueno, “Our Owner,” a cosmological composite of Nuestro Santo Padre (the
sun/masculine) and Nuestro Santo Madre (the moon/feminine), the creator
and conserver of life (Ochai 1985: 50; Gossen 1974:30-31; 322-333).
In the neighboring settlements of San Andrés, Santa Maria Magdalenas,
and Santa Marta, nearly identical myths explain the origin of each commu-
nity’s respective location through a common pattern that legitimates, for
costumbre, the communal patron’s claim to the title, Nuestro Dueno. Thus, as
Magdaleneros tell the tale, their virgin patron set out in search of a place to
live and, after finding several sites wanting – too windy, rainy, rocky, small,
insect-ridden, etc. – settled on an ideal spot. Then, at her behest, logs moved
like snakes and stones traveled like sheep to be cemented with whites from
gigantic eggs by the prodigiously-skilled ancestors who constructed the
templo at the center of the community. In short, the saint became the village
founder by selecting its territory as her preferred homestead, and then domes-
ticating nature and securing indigenous labor to construct the dwelling it thus
7
“owns” (FN 13.XI.93)
The saint herself founds Magdalenas, while Chimaltecos entice, or better
force, their saint’s collaboration in establishing their village. Maya initiative
in the second case nonetheless proves to be as profoundly attenuated as it is
in the first. Indeed, the saint’s “captivity” implies its potential “escape,”8 just
as the permanent possibility of its vengeance requires preventive propitia-
tion.9
In Chiapas, the ritual form of this regime of obligation became dialecti-
cally transmuted into the material fact of tacit indenture, as Maya labor in
ladino enterprises financed the expenses of fiesta and other cargo costs. Thus,
the saint’s “ownership” of Maya community as its patron in the cosmic
sphere mirrors ladino “ownership” of Maya labor in the economic sphere.
––––––––––
6 Stunning images of Indians bearing Ladinos on their backs populate Mexican iconography.
Maya cargo-bearing, among the earliest forms of indigenous labor for the Spanish,
“boomed” with foreign investment the 1880s and 1890s (Rus 2003: 260).
7 An identical pattern shapes the foundation narratives for San Andrés (Ochai 1985: 53-58).
8 Santiago twice escaped “capture” and required great Chimalteco exertions to bear weight the
resisting saint deliberately added before finally housed in Chimbal (Watanabe 1998a:135-
38).
9 “[E]goistic saints” require constant feeding and “ongoing obeisance” to forestall their wrath
against transgression – “usually some real or supposed ritual neglect” (ibid.: 137).
176 Chapter Six
Ritual “service to the saints – beginning with church construction under order
of Spanish friars – inexorably demanded agricultural service to ladino fincas.
‘Inexorability,’ as Brown argues, was a defining characteristic of social
experience in late antiquity, the rise of the patronus explained by the urgent
need “to render inexorable processes more malleable” (Brown 1981: 65).
Whether a peasant in an actual colony or simply one of the mass in the
growing cities of the late Empire, the average Roman confronted vast socio-
economic and geographic distances. Their vastness figured “inexorability”
10
materialized by taxation that was impossible to negotiate except through the
favor of a patron (ibid.).
Whereas Brown links patronage to friendship, arguing that patron and
client might possibly share residence in the same locality, the undisguisable
“foreignness” of the saints obviated such friendship between patron saint and
community in the modern Maya highlands. In historical fact, Dominican
missionaries imported Mary Magdalen into pre-conquest Tanjoveltik when
they reduced surrounding Tzotzil settlements to this site. The colonial style of
her current “home” attests to their oversight on construction of the original
11
church there (Calnek 1961: 25). She remains one of many “decidedly local
Maya personages” that is, (merely) figuratively, rather than actually, Maya
persons (Watanabe 1998a:137, emphasis added).12
Thus she is unable to elicit any but “standardized” (J. Nash 1970: 207)
devotion, according to “the law of costumbre” whose observation is “utterly
impersonal” (Reina 1966: 163). In this respect the exactions of costumbre
mirror the extractions of colonialism, the one as much as the other “inexora-
ble processes” ultimately directed by foreigners. In socio-political order as in
ritual practice, the obligation characterizing costumbre mystifies its articula-
tion with ladino domination, just as the imported image constrains indigenous
cognition. Indeed, the icon’s foreign origins – figured by undiguisably
European features – obscures its intelligibility. In short, the communal patron
finally remains an implacable divinity imposing a propitiatory regime pro-
foundly alienating in both cognitive and social effect.
Local saint cults in Spain, as Christian explains, emerged with a shift in
religious “technology,” so to speak, that allowed their transfer to Spanish
––––––––––
10 “[The land tax] was inflexible and thoroughly ill-distributed. Nothing shows more clearly
the ineluctable victory of the twin unseen enemies of the Roman Empire – time and dis-
tance” (Brown 1971: 36).
th
11 A diocesan archivist thinks the convent shows remants of 16 century construction; Magda-
th
leneros believe the bell tower was re-constructed sometime in the late 19 century (FN
10.X.94).
12 In Chimbal, ritual celebration “presents Santiago as an active participant in... these devo-
tions,” and “Santiago has thus come to ... belong in the community like any Chimalteco,”
according to Watanabe (ibid.). But Chimalteco presentation of Santiago obviates the saint’s
true belonging
colonies. The replacement of stationary relics by portable images as devo-

tional media altered the geography of the sacred in Spain as in its conquered
lands, but according to reversed socio-political coordinates.
Whereas in Spain saint images propelled popular religiosity beyond
hierarchical socio-religious control, in the Maya highlands they subjected
indigenous devotion to costumbre’s colonial inversions. In Spain peripheral
communities proclaimed local autonomy under the aegis of saints whose
images they possessed. Maya communities, on the other hand, served patron
saints who “owned” their church and thus, by dint of ritual obligation, pos-
sessed them: “...the Virgin and the patron saint were viewed as proprietors of
a manor, whose manor house was the church ( Farriss 1984: 311).
As Brown shows, for antique Christians sainted martyrs worked to ame-
liorate inexorability in the cosmos just as Roman patrons did in political-
economy. But, in the Maya highlands, saint images came with missionary
reduction, the spatial expression of colonial encompassment that also forced
native cultural-religious in(tro)version.
Reduction, of course, restricted Maya mobility. But religious legitimation
of mission’s geographic boundaries further entailed disabling linguistic
limits. Farriss describes how the Yucatec Maya Christian saints (“carved and
painted in the pure European style”) were simply “deposited in the village
churches,” stripped, so to speak, of life histories, personalities or other
13
hagiographic detail. Utterly objectified in the strict sense, saints could be no
more than idols, unintelligible forms without substance.
In effect, missionary “deposit” of statues and other images in local
colonial churches was strategically coherent, as well as contemporaneous,
with near-total destruction of Maya codices and the gradual disappearance of
their literate priest interpreters at temple sites (Farriss 1984: 310-313).14
In this way, colonial mission deliberately disjoined the Maya from their
history while inviting them into Christian history via indecipherable alien
images. Its perverse accomplishment was a general decline in indigenous
literacy, and thus the loss of a crucial resource of Maya social-cultural, as
well as political, power (Farriss 1984: 313).
––––––––––
13 “Although through the centuries silver halos, silk robes and canopies, and other local
adornments were added...none of the later embellishments reveals any influence of local
styles or visual symbolism” (Farriss 1984: 310).
14 Spanish missionaries disallowed Maya literacy in multiple ways. Moreover, the introduction
of saints as much as the destruction of codices dismissed native intelligence as well as his-
tory.
178 Chapter Six
Catechist Decolonication of Costumbre’s Patron Saints

Traced backward in this way to costumbre’s colonial origins and to cargo’s
modern link to ladino economy, catechist critique of costumbre becomes
more than simple rejection of Maya tradition. In actual effect, it mobilized
Maya agency.
An historian celebrates Maya “innovation” in the oral tradition that
replaced written texts as carriers of sacred lore in the colonial period, result-
ing in a “creative synthesis” of Maya and Christian religious form (Farriss
1984: 313-318). An anthropologist insists that costumbre does not deserve
dismissal as mere false consciousness (Watanabe 1998a:131).
Yet, admission of the saints’ persistent rebelliousness15 is altogether
congruent with the religious motive ascribed to three major historically-
documented Maya uprisings, in 1610, 1712, and 1868, “to assert control over
the new cult rather than reject it” (Farriss 1984: 318). Alliance between
ecclesial and political highland elites consigned these attempts to the long list
of indigenous utopian adventures suppressed by military force.16
Precisely the “utopian” failure of these revolts begs the questions: how
was it that Maya indigenous sought “control” over a “creative synthesis” that
was a product of their own “innovation”? Could indigenous “control” in the
religious sphere be achieved by replacement of ladino by indigenous priests
as guardians of a “cult” whose underlying premise, patronage, legitimated the
various forms of alienation imposition of the saints entailed?
Contemporary Maya Catholic catechists in Magdalenas, and elsewhere in
the Diocese of San Cristóbal, respond in the negative by re-placing the cult
itself in more than one sense. Initiates in biblical and actual Christian history,
catechists recognize the saints as human beings inhabiting the intelligible past
rather than quasi-divine “others” fixed in opaque mystifications. They know
patron saint icons in village churches to be human representations, not divine
presences.
In other words, catechists have historically deconstructed the saints with
the instruments of literacy and their own mobility. They have (re)placed them
in the past as companions and followers of Jesus of Nazareth. In short,
Catholic Magdalenros have come to know the saints as historical models
inviting emulation rather than mythic intercessors demanding service.
––––––––––
15 “[V]illagers punishing the saint to make it ‘behave’ properly” and distinguishes the Maya’s
“more willful and worldly saints” from their Castilian versions (Watanabe 1998a: 138).
16 In 1610, two Maya in the Yucatec Tipu region proclaimed themselves pope and bishop and
ordained their own clergy. (Farris: 318). During the 1712 Tzeltal Revolt, Maya indigenous
similarly assumed the rights of clergy. The 1868-70 “Caste War” is also sometimes called
“Cuscat’s Rebellion” after the self-proclaimed priest, Pedro Díaz Cuscat, who led it (Bricker
1983, Rus 1983, Garcia de León 1984).
Catechist displacement of local myths with biblical history is of a piece

with recognition of their fathers’ misrecognition in the matter of cargo.
Indeed, by constructing their ecclesial cargo to serve a new religious commu-
nity, catechists engage an historical social reality made intelligible by their
new mode of insertion in it.
For Magalenero catechists, patrons are unnecessary to enter and make
“malleable” the world of power relations no longer distant, or “filled with
inexorable processes.” Rather, to these newly-literate and increasingly-
mobile men, this world appears negotiable and near. For them the world, like
themselves and their community. is amenable to transformation through the
Word of God.
Gathered in the church convent a month after Mary Magdalen’s fiesta, the
catechists “prepared” the Word of God they would “celebrate” at the next
day’s communion celebration. They moved together between Spanish and
Tzotzil, laboring over the scripture texts, wresting meanings from sometimes-
unfamiliar words, devising strategies to “explain” them to Magdaleneros who
would gather in the templo after returning from their milpa and cafetales in
the late afternoon. When asked about their task as catechists, they responded:
“We are responsible for encouraging and explaining to the people, like the
apostles; encourage them so they don’t quit, but move ahead” (FN 26.VIII.93
emphasis added).
So they marvel at Mary Magdalene who, they know from reading the
gospels, accompanied Jesus in his ministry and announced his resurrection to
the other apostles: ella se cumplió, they say – she carried out the word given
to her. Today, the catechists leave others to carry the icon of the virgin during
fiesta processions, charging themselves instead “to carry out” the word as
Mary Magdalene did, to be apostles (and saints) themselves.
The antique Christian saint’s bodily relic conferred sacrality on its resi-
dent place. These Tzotzil Maya catechists and the socio-religious body they
sacralize themselves by laboring for their (reclaimed) territory. For the ritual
repetitions mimicking the (relative) social homeostasis maintained by the
17
(oral) cult of colonial saints, they substitute dialogical exegesis of the Word
of God to “animar la gente para que ... se avanza – to encourage the people
so they move ahead.”
––––––––––
17 “[L]anguage is developed in intimate association with the experience of the community,
and it is learned by the individual in face-to-face contact with other members. What contin-
ues to be of social relevance is stored in the memory ...language – primarily vocabulary – is
the effective medium of this crucial process of social digestion and elimination ... analogous
to the homeostatic organization of the human body” (Goody and Watt 1963: 30-31). Of
course, homeostasis requires change: “the ‘choice’ in traditional societies is not between
verbatim reproduction and distortion, but between constant re-arrangement and oblivion”
(Boyer 1987: 60-62).
180 Chapter Six
Thus cult yields to homily as privileged religious practice in so far as the

intrinsically mobile and intellectually-digestible word, as opposed to the
stationary relic or the transportable image, animates the social body to pro-
duce, and precisely thus sacralize, its place. Scrupulous care for the image of
the patron Mary Magdalene – washing, clothing, censing, carrying, and in
general guarding her icon against any form of violation – figures the anxiety
of costumbre’s cargo holders’ about ancestral place not finally theirs. Just so,
the catechists’ disinterest in these rites signals insistence on making this place
wholly their own.
For them, the saint is no longer the inanimate “owner” to be served but
the living apostle anyone can become by carrying out (cumplir) the Word and
producing on their land, that is, “moving ahead” (avanzar). Fiesta, then,
becomes a matter of celebrating the Word, working it through, with, and thus
into the social body that, not incidentally, calls itself “la palabra de Dios –
the Word of God.” In short, they have traded the periodic fiesta processions
of the saint around the village for their own bi-weekly celebrations, imitating
rather than indulging the apostles Jesus chose, the original Christian saints.
Epilogue 181
Chapter Seven
Epilogue
Doing What the Apostles Did
Mary of Nazareth is for Catholics the virgin mother of God. Magdalenero

Catholics recognize and revere Mary as such, explicitly acknowledging the
role of the Holy Spirit in her conception of the child Jesus.
Yet their account of Mary’s “visitation” to her cousin Elizabeth (Luke
1:39-48) attends to this doctrinal point only in passing. Instead, it embellishes
what they regard as her apostolic initiative, or “work.” Thus, with typical
exegetical freedom, a catechist began by motivating Mary’s visit to Eliza-
beth:
It wasn’t just that they loved each other. No, they weren’t just wasting time in
vain, no. Their work/yabtelik received power/yipal from God. So it was that the
child grew with the help of the Holy Spirit. They [Mary and Elizabeth] raised and
cared for the little child .... women who came together. ... But she [Mary] became
the mother of the savior... They carried out the Word of our Lord Jesus Christ.
They carried out the Word of our Father God (FT 12.XII.93).
Here kinship’s affective tie matters most for its (re)productive potential. That
the two cousins jointly raised “the little child” adds a novelty to the narrative
unwarranted by the text but resonant with household alliances among the
Tzotzil, most common among kin though rarely extending to shared child-
rearing except in the case of orphans.
Insistence that “they carried out the word” together, the more telling
point, celebrates the practice of collective labor revitalized by the catechists.
This exegetical move affirms work by women just as it promotes sisterly
solidarity, in keeping with the catechist conviction that liberation means
gender equality and, in traditionally patriarchal Maya society, raising the
status of women.1
––––––––––
1 Catechist promotion of Maya Catholic women owes much to the women religious and lay
pastoral agents in the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas (Kovic 2003).
182 Chapter Seven
Venturing further beyond normative Catholic exegesis of the text,2 the

catechist theologically joined and elevated words frequently associated in
Magdalenero Catholic discourse – abtel = work and ju’el = power. ‘Work’
acquires soteriological significance with his assertion that Mary unreservedly
“carried out” (xchu’unbeik/spas/ta pasel = cumplir)3 God’s word – she did
her “work” – and just so “became the mother of the savior.” Catholic teach-
ing, of course, regards conception of Jesus as God’s, not Mary’s, “work.”
The catechist, inattentive to this doctrinal distinction, contradicted Catho-
lic dogma concerning Mary’s own sinless or “immaculate” conception as
well. He asserts, instead, “when she [Mary] conceived the child...she quit
doing bad things...all kinds of sin.”
In one case as much as the other, concern for orthopraxis eclipses atten-
tion to orthodoxy. Thus, the homilist pursued a dialectic of material context
and divine design that pivots on “effort,” a notion the catechists privilege:
She did everything with greatness of effort .... She obeyed with great effort in
[her] work, our mother Mary.... But for us now, for all men and women, for all
youth, this is our work (kabteltik) ... such as we learn from her we must it carry
out. We are like her.
In this way, Magdalenero local theology shifts Marian devotion from its
traditional Roman Catholic focus – Mary’s unique ontological status as
sinlessly-conceived mother of God – to her richly imagined moral life. While
clearly asserting “she is the mother of the redeemer,” the catechist expands
Mary’s exemplary history, only barely sketched by the gospel writers, to
include among her “great works” scripturally unattested conversion (“she
quit doing bad things”); care for neighbors as well as kin (“she supported her
companions/xchi’iltak”); and, not least, apostolic preaching:
...she also exhorted all men and women. She exhorted women of that time to take
good models. She explained everything that is right before God. This is what our
mother Mary did.
The logic of identification driving these textual interpolations makes Mary

the preeminent model Catholic Magdaleneros. Because “we are like her/
––––––––––
2 Elizabeth’s address to Mary as “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43) evinces “Mary’s divine
motherhood” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #495.
3 Tzotzil ch’unbeik = obey, pas = do, make, pasele = create; Spanish cumplir = carry out,
fulfill for the translator of this study.
Epilogue 183
no’ox jechotik je’uk,” we can live “just as” she lived. 4 Mary became the
mother of God through her “immense obedience,” manifest in her “grand
work(s) – muk’tik abtel;” and so, “we must make the effort to increase our
faith like Mary, to believe in the way Mary did.” This imperative, warranted
by narrative imagination rather than categorical thought, gives rise to contex-
tually apt moral directives:
We must quit everything bad, even in the small things here on earth ... drinking
alcohol, scolding each other, mistreatment between men and women ... jealousy
and hatred ... slander.
Power to overcome these vices is accessible by persistent appeal to Mary

herself:
... at dawn, at noon, in the evening, let us ask our holy mother Mary to give us
more of her power (s’juel) to be able to do good works just as she did when she
was in the world.
Identification with Mary and appeal to her arise alike from highly realistic
reading of la palabra de Dios. The “plain sense” of Christian scripture
privileged in Magdalenero exegetical practice invites free back-and-forth
movement between the biblical world and their own.5 Just so, the catechist’s
disclaimer – “we can’t know how great Mary is ... we can’t compare it to
what we are doing now, it’s not the same” – signals precisely the opposite in
practice.
Magdaleneros navigate the hermeneutic passage on a raft of imaginative
realism to place themselves alongside Mary: “she did everything that was
important... she obeyed with all her power in work.... But for us now, for all
women and men, this is our work...”
––––––––––
4 In other iterations, “we are like the virgin -- jo’otik xk’exolotik ti jme’tike;” and “all women
are like our mother Mary -- antzetik xkaltike xk’exol jemetic Maria.” The homily is replete
with moral injunctions to act “just as” Mary did.
5 Hans Frei calls attention to “the wide, though ... not unanimous, traditional consensus
among Christians in the West on the primacy of the literal reading of the Bible” (Frei 1986:
36): Privileging the “plain sense” of scripture, Frei argued “...the most fateful issue for
Christian self-description is ...regaining its autonomous vocation as a religion, after its de-
feat in its secondary vocation of providing ideological coherence ... to Western culture”
(ibid.: 74). Also, “[I] dentifying the plain sense of scripture with a narrative leaves open –
better forces open – the material specifications of a distinctively Christian way of life.... [it]
involves the constructive process of continually reinitiating a Christian self-understanding
by imaginatively repositioning the particulars of one’s own life within a story” (Tanner
1987: 74-75; and Tracy 1990: 35-68).
184 Chapter Seven
Ultimately, Magdalenero “exegetical ingenuity” (Tanner 1987:74) confers

divine power on “Mary’s work” and, by identification, their own. The exe-
getical premise – Mary “carried out” God’s word, she did her “work,” and
just so “became the mother of the savior” – leads to the essential postulate:
“...[God] takes into account all the efforts of human beings.... We must work
with all our effort, as much as we can do.” The subsistence agriculturalists’
inescapable earthly imperative – “we have to ... work while we live ... there is
no rest in all of life” – finally has heavenly consequences. Mary, bearer of the
6
Word to Elizabeth and thus first apostle, “is at the side [of], near to God
now” because she “carried out the Word of God” and did her “work.”
Catechist insistence on Mary’s present proximity to God reveals their
acquaintance with the Catholic doctrine of her bodily assumption to God’s
“side.” But theological formulation of Mary’s departure from this historical
world does not signal, for Magdaleneros, removal from their worldly circum-
stance. Rather, the imaginative realism that elicits identification with her
makes the “assumed” Mary all the more accessible to them.
When the first homilist ceded to a “complementing” second to preach on
Luke’s visitation text, he responded first to requests for clarification of
narrative detail. Mary went “to her aunt’s house” when Elizabeth was in her
“sixth month” of pregnancy. John the Baptist, “born three months later,” did
not die of illness but was “assassinated ... a soldier carried his head on a
7
plate.” Joseph, “a carpenter who worked with a saw,” lived in “Bethlehem,”
where Jesus “was born” and Mary “nursed him.” The child grew up in
“Nazareth.”
In the midst of this graphic embellishment of gospel details, the catechist,
unable to say exactly how long Mary lived after Jesus, nonetheless positively
affirmed,
Our mother Mary didn’t die in this world ... living she went [to heaven]... Now we
have said many times about Mary that she is in heaven. This means that there is a
woman alive there in heaven... She was carried [to heaven] by our great God.
This assertion went unquestioned by interlocutors eager for historical particu-

lars yet oddly incurious about an apparently supernatural intervention. But
––––––––––
6 The Acts of the Apostles puts Mary among them at Pentecost (Acts 1:14) and artistic
portraits of Pentecost do the same.
7 This striking portion of homiletic dialogue unmistakably recalls everyday life in Magdale-
nas: Homilist: – “His [the Baptist’s] head was on a plate. Assembly: – Ohhhh. H.: – So John
the Baptist died, he wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t under the blankets when they killed him, it
wasn’t because of fever or cough, it wasn’t because of vomiting or diarrhea, no brothers and
sisters” (cf. Mark 6-27-28). Also, in Luke, Elizabeth is simply Mary’s “kinswoman” or rela-
tive.
Epilogue 185
this oddity fits the reorientation of Magdalenero “theological imagination”

from the fickle power of local saint-deities demanding propitiation towards
the ever-present power of the one universal God discernible in human work.
This local theological frame, cemented in conversion’s conjuncture,
accounts for the way Magdaleneros, homilist(s) and assembly alike, embed
the supernatural in the historical. Indeed, the thesis guiding this homily in its
entirety arises from it. As Catholic Magdalenas understands it, Mary’s
present bodily existence in heaven – “there is a woman alive there in heaven”
– confirms the essential truth of her bodily life on earth: “[her] work received
power from God.”
Magdaleneros bury their dead and understand Mary to be an exception to
the rule of human mortality. To emphasize the privilege of her assumption in
this instance, the catechist noted that Elizabeth and Joseph are “souls,” not
living bodies, in heaven. The one “woman living there in heaven” is Mary,
premier apostle, who “did everything under the power of God, she carried out
her work with all her effort.”
The actual conditions of Mary’s life “in heaven” remain undescribed, nor
do Magdaleneros express any interest in them. Neither do they picnic at
gravesites or set food out in their homes for returning souls, rites widely
practiced in other parts of Mexico on the Day(s) of the Dead (Carmichael and
Sayer 1991). The catechists explain that the dead have no reason to return:
God gives them rest and satisfaction in heaven, so they aren’t hungry, and if
they’re in hell, they can’t get out. We know this from the Bible. We saw that food
rotted, flies swarmed all over it when we left it out for two days [for the Days of
the Dead] – so we decided we should just eat our food (FN 14.X.93). 8
In keeping with this highly pragmatic deconstruction, though Mary, unlike

other souls, has a body, she has no bodily needs as she enjoys the “rest and
satisfaction” of heavenly existence. In other words, the biological implica-
tions of Mary’s bodily life in heaven is of less interest to Magdaleneros than
its biographical iconicity. For these converted peasants, the body in heavenly
existence figures the salvific in human effort here on earth. Mary’s body
“living there in heaven” at once facilitates and motivates identification with
her – “we are like her” – precisely in terms of work. “She carried out her
work with all her effort ... this is our work.”
––––––––––
8 I learned this while questioning catechist as the Catholic community butchered two bulls for
the feast in October, 1993. Using a scale and a calculator, community leaders allotted each
family a measure of meat according to its size.
186 Chapter Seven
So, the homilist suggests,
We have the liberty to choose ... to put ourselves to think about all our works and
deeds ... So we can take into account how the virgin Mary is in the glory of God ...
together with the son of the father in heaven who also gives his blessing to us ...
he sends us his spirit, he is in us every day, every night.
Belief in the one God’s enduring availability – “in us every day, every night”
– directed Magdalenero Catholics’ to include recourse to Mary in their
revision of ritual practice: “At dawn, at noon, in the evening, let us ask our
holy mother Mary to give us more of her power (sjuel) ....,” above all to do
good work(s).
Here rhythmic cues – day and night; morning, noon and evening – rhet-
orically signal the critical religious point. For the catechists, Mary’s (scrip-
turally unmentioned) turn from vice to virtue, like their own, is something
other than simple exhibit of “works righteousness,” narrowly conceived.
Rather, the power they seek from her – sjuel – is a “kind of political power or
9
authority, to be able to do things,” on their own initiative as authoritative
agents of their everyday lives. Particularly manifest in the initiative Mary
displays in their homiletic portrait, this same power – sjuel – made her
mother of God, according to the catechist.
Magdalenero reading of Mary’s visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth, culmi-
nates with the exhortation to “take into account how the virgin Mary is in the
glory of God.” Working through the gospel narrative, la palabra de Dios
identifies with Mary’s life as labor, and so authorize their own.10 Put another
way, the Catholic community’s identification with the woman “living there in
heaven” denies costumbre’s divinization of her icon, residing in the pueblo’s
templo and requiring its worship. Instead, catechists divinize her apostolic
effort and assimilate their everyday peasant labor to it, glorifying its satisfac-
tions and its exertions alike.
As one of them explained, visits to San Cristóbal de Las Casas leave him
irritated: he takes greatest pleasure in a strenuous day’s work with machete
and hoe, sweating in the strong highland sun (FN 20.VI.97). Through their
exegetical labor the catechists make such “good work” resemble Mary’s, and
so make themselves “like the apostles” (26.VIII.93). With this ascription,
they at once authorize their new place on ancestral land and render their
cultivation of it salvific.
––––––––––
9 According to linguist John Beard Haviland on the Tzotzil root form ju (personal communi-
cation).
10 The Tzotzil sjuel warrants this emphasis on authorization, as opposed to legitimation.
Epilogue 187
Conclusion: “We are Doing What the Apostles Did.”

Present but invisible in the story of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, their expected
sons, Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist, figure together in another text
taken up by Magdalenero homilists. In this story the imprisoned Baptist sends
disciples to ask whether Jesus “is the one to come.” Jesus replies with a litany
of his miracles and then extols John to his own “twelve disciples” (Mt. 11:2-
15).
One verse particularly captured the catechists’ exegetical attention:
Truly, I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John
the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. (Mt.11:11).
For the homilist in this case, John’s greatness owed first to his practice of
baptizing, a (cargo) service shared by catechists. Then he noted, “Nobody has
received more strength for work than John had.” Though implicit in the story,
Jesus does not mention John’s baptizing. Nor does his “strength for work”
appear in Matthew’s narrative.
The only Hebrew prophet it names, Elijah, became for the homilist a
point of comparison. No one, neither Elijah nor Moses nor any other prophet,
is greater than John, he emphasized, expanding on Jesus’ esteem for the
Baptist.
The catechist continued:
... he who wants to believe, to learn what God in heaven wants ... can be very
great. He who confronts suffering, is hungry, is thirsty, is cold ... finds the glory of
God. Nobody looks well on him. But this person will possibly find salvation.
Matthew’s verse – “yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he
[John]” (Mt. 11:11a) – thus prompted a portrait of highland peasant life. The
homilist found the “possibility” of salvation within it through the next, more
controverted saying: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the
kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force”
(11:12) (FN 8.IX.93).11 As they prepared to preach this text, the catechists,
like other modern translators, struggled over the meaning of “violence” and
“force” (FT9.IX.93).12 The homilist concluded to an assenting assembly:
––––––––––
11 All quotations in this section are from this source unless otherwise noted.
12 “The meaning of this difficult saying is probably that the opponents of Jesus are trying to
prevent people from accepting the kingdom and to snatch it away from those who have re-
ceived it” (New American Bible). The Oxford Annotated NRSV has: “The violent [sic] are
the eager, ardent multitudes.” Luis Alonso Schökel offers a third alternative, “Some discuss
a violent proletariat among the followers of Jesus” (Biblia del peregrino: 199?).
188 Chapter Seven
The reign of God, how to find it, he/it [Jesus/text] said, is making an effort.... It is
the very strength of human beings. Strength, but only when I make an effort. Only
so can I enter the reign of God. He came to open the way to those who make an
effort....
A second, “complementing” catechist specified the desired effort with a

commentary on Jesus’ conclusion: “Let anyone with ears listen!”(Mt. 11:15):
We know that we have ears to hear. We have noses, we have mouths. It’s neces-
sary that we understand the commandment because the Lord gave us our head, our
ears so that we understand well the commandment of God, dear brothers. Chris-
tians, true Christians, prophets of Jesus, we must make an effort to do the good.
We must be strong like John the Baptist who was concerned about changing the
world. ... If we go to the cantina [to drink], it’s horrible. We must open our under-
standing, just as our Lord said.
As in the case of Mary and all others Magdalenero Catholics recognize as

apostles, identification with John the Baptist invokes “effort” in the distinctly
fungible mode that encapsulates Christian orthopraxis for them. On the one
hand, la palabra de Dios – community and text – strives to “open our under-
standing,” a laborious undertaking for newly literate catechists, more so for
the illiterate who strain to grasp their preaching.13 Such exertion is uniquely
resonant within a perennially marginated peasant existence:
...we have suffered so much poverty, cold, hunger, thirst; we don’t have clothes,
food, energy [yip] we live who knows how, we seem ... like a sheep without good
pasture.
Surviving extreme deprivation demands “effort” of a magnitude intuitively

recognizable in the Maya highlands. But with the arrival of la palabra de
Dios, Magdaleneros also adopt the Baptist’s concern – “changing the world.”
And, for these peasants, it is precisely la palabra de Dios itself – again,
community and text – that effectively transmutes this apparently utopian
desire into a realistic pursuit.
As the catechist asserted, “We Christians suffer a lot, it’s necessary that
we understand. We must discover what we are working for.”14 For Magdalen-
––––––––––
13 On this point, an elderly woman worried that she might not go to heaven: “It’s just so hard
to understand what they say in la hermita,” her daughter translated.
14 The interrogative – k’usi kabteltik – was translated in Spanish para que servimos = what
good are we. The question joins the notion of purpose and “our work – ablteltik”, as in,
“what are we here for, what are we working for?” In other words, what is the point of human
existence?
Epilogue 189
eros, the very formulation of this question attests to its ongoing accomplish-
ment: la palabra de Dios amounts to prophecy and fulfillment at one and the
same time in so far as the text engages peasant intellectual effort in the form
of translation, reading, listening, and, implicit in all these, imaginative
interpretation. In this instance, they ascribed greatness to John based on “his
effort to believe in God – ti yipal ta xch’unel ti Diose,” and so exalted their
own exegetical exertions to the same end. Even more, they identify this
process as the singular way to the reign of God already come on earth to be
fulfilled in heaven, in the Christian self-understanding Magdaleneros adopt as
their own.
The catechist’s theological conclusion – salvation as “strength, but only in
so far as I make an effort” – is ultimately attested in Jesus:
Our Lord Jesus Christ ... goes before us. So we shouldn’t think we are alone. ...
Even though we don’t see him physically, he is here, men and women. If it
weren’t so we wouldn’t understand anything, maybe we would throw ourselves
into some abyss.
This apparently tautological affirmation of salvation epitomizes what Magda-

lenero Catholics call “religion.” They trust the biblical narrative of Jesus’
resurrection and promise to be “with you always” (Matt. 28:20) precisely
because they “understand” it.
It is not just that literacy’s intrinsic empowerment validates the biblical
message of divine power. Still more, for Magdaleneros dialectical reading
makes the biblical text a tool for reconstruction of their context. More pre-
cisely, in learning to “handle” the Bible, they come to re-cognize and pur-
posefully re-position themselves in a conjuncture of socio-economic rupture.
Elsewhere described as “illumination,” in this instance the catechist attributed
this new situation, and their new self-consciousness in it, to the living Spirit
of Jesus.
Jesus, as Magdaleneros heard in his response to John’s disciples (Matt.
11:5), showed “power – sju’el – in his miracles: healing the sick, raising the
paralytics, curing the mute and the blind. So, the catechist concluded, he has
15
“power – ipal” – in heaven and on earth.” From a strictly linguistic stand-
point, in Tzotzil the “authority, capacity” to do things (root ju = power) is not
the same as the “force, energy” required to do them (root ip = strength).
Yet, in Magdalenero homiletic discourse, the terms are nearly, if not
entirely, interchangeable. More to the point, they apply each of them alter-
nately to gospel characters and to themselves. Identifying with the apostles in
––––––––––
15 Haviland explains that the root ju denotes power in a “more abstract” sense than does the
root ip (see above, n. 10).
190 Chapter Seven
this way, they locate and divinize “the very strength of human beings,” that is
the reflexive capacity to direct and so own their own labor.
In other words, as they imaginatively engage scriptural narrative, Magda-
lenero Catholics at once recover authority to initiate change, and strength to
effect it in local political-economy.
This result describes, as it derives from, the ongoing double dialectic that
turns on “effort” and propels what the catechists call “working the Word.” In
this religious practice, the effort of cognition demanded by la palabra de
Dios, text and community, both mimics and informs the exertion intrinsic to
everyday peasant labor. By ritual form and rhythm, through exegesis and
identification, Magdaleneros at once construct and sacralize a new way of
working the land of their ancestors in a new age of globalization. As the
catechists explained:
We were preaching how the apostles worked, lived. One by one people started
asking how to do what the apostles did in the Acts of the Apostles 2: 43-45. ... We
analyzed well how we could love one another: we have an agreement [acuerdo].
We saw people without clothes, shoes, nothing – we saw land as a way to
help....(26.VIII.93)
Thus, Magdalenero catechists and the community formed with their new
mode of Maya cargo rewrote the terms of exchange with both socio-
economic and sacred powers. They become indigenous apostles, religiously
empowered and self-consciously determined to change the world on their
own terms, in keeping with the Word of God.
Bibliography 191
Bibliography
Bible Translations
Biblia del Peregrino. L.A. Schökel (trans.). Ediciones Mansajero.
La Biblia Latinoamericana. Ediciones Paulinas.
New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press.
Documentary and Archival Sources

Archivo Diocesano, Diocesis de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas.
Archivo General Agraria, Secretaria de La Reforma Agraria, Mexico
Centro de Derechos Humanos, “Fray Bartolomé de las Casas,” San Cristóbal de Las
Casas, Chiapas, Mexico.
Conferencia Episcopal Latinoamericana (CELAM)
Medillín. (1968). Conclusiones.
Puebla. (1979). Document aprobado.
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Index of Names
Agnew, J., 94 Christian, Jr., W., 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19,
Alberigo, G., 52, 75 23, 37, 41, 45, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58,
Allende, S., 76 61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 87,
Amaladoss, M., 19, 54 109, 125, 147, 148, 150, 160, 163,
Andraos, M., 73, 94 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177,
Angrosino, M., 56 178, 179, 180, 183, 188, 189
Arias, J., 39, 138, 139 Clifford, J., 71
Arrupe, P., 54 Collier, G., 9, 74, 75, 115, 116, 119, 133
Aubry, A., 9 Comaroff, J., 18, 27, 41, 51, 88, 116
Bakhtin, M., 155, 156 Comaroff, J.L., 18, 27, 41, 51, 88, 116
Bamat, T., 54 Cornelius, J., 45
Baum, G., 72 Corripio Ahumada, E., 62, 91
Becker, M., 39 Cortés, B., 34
Beidelman, T., 41, 87, 88, 94 Costello, G., 64
Bell, B., 148 Crump, T., 34, 35
Bell, C., 71, 128, 147 Cuscat, P., 41, 77, 178
Benítez, F., 30 DeWalt, B., 31
Benjamin, T., 37, 38 Díaz, P., 34, 116, 178
Blancarte, R., 29, 58, 61, 62 Donahue, J.R. 158
Bloch, M., 147 Dorr, D., 95
Boulard, P., 52 Dumont, L., 19, 56, 57
Bourdieu, P., 17, 18, 19, 40, 64, 75, 79, Duquoc, C., 72
80, 82, 83, 85, 141, 142, 143 Eber, C., 34, 35, 36
Boyer, P., 18, 123, 179 Echeverria, L., 77
Brading, D., 60, 65 Ellacuria, I., 54
Braun, W., 139 Esponda, M., 38
Bricker, V., 41, 77, 178 Farriss, N., 16, 37, 41, 42, 171, 173, 174,
Brown, P., 171, 172, 176, 177 177, 178
Burdick, J., 74 Favre, H., 38
Burguete, A., 133 Fazio, C., 26, 28, 30, 53, 56, 91, 112
Burridge, K., 41, 87, 93 Ferguson, J., 94, 109
Calnek, E., 140, 176 Fernandez, J., 157
Cámara, F., 31 Fiorenza, F., 102
Camp, R., 58, 59, 88, 89, 91, 95 Floyd, C., 9
Cancian, F., 31, 115, 128, 133 Fox, V., 88
Cárdenas, L., 29, 32, 39, 40 Frazer, J., 35
Carmichael, E., 185 Frei, H., 183
Carrasco, P., 31 Freire, P., 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 99
Castillo, F., 56, 115 Fuentes, C., 58
Castro, F., 30 Galilea, S., 52
204 Index of Names
Gallagher, E., 41 Leyva Solano, X., 75

García de León, A., 80, 89 Loaeza-Lajous, S., 58, 59, 60
García Gonzalez, J., 59, 60, 62 Mack, B., 19, 123, 136, 157
Geertz, C., 83 Mallon, F., 80
Genovese, E., 45 Marcos, S., 73, 132
Gómez Cruz, P., 90 Mattiace, S., 115
Gómez Gómez, A., 143, 146 Mauss, M., 33
González Garrido, P., 90 McAllister, P., 108
Gossen, G., 175 McCauley, R., 18
Gramsci, A., 19, 92 McCutcheon, R., 139
Guiteras Holmes, C., 148 Mendieta y Nuñez, L., 118
Gupta, A., 94, 109 Meyer, J., 29, 89, 91
Gutiérrez, G., 21, 53 Mizruchi, S., 18
Guzmán, X., 146 Modiano, N., 40
Harvey, N., 38, 74, 78, 115, 131, 132, Montes, S.F., 40
133 Montesinos, A., 159
Havelock, E., 141, 142, 143 Moufee, C., 139
Haviland, J., 33, 186, 189 Muro González, V., 60
Hefner, R., 41 Murphy, T., 139
Helbig, K., 117 Nash, J., 17, 20, 35, 36, 176
Hernández, J., 40, 103 Nash, M., 30
Herzfeld, M., 161 Nutini, H., 148
Hobsbawm, E., 16 Ochai, 175
Holland, W., 148, 172, 175 Ong, W., 17, 19, 131
Horton, R., 41 Orozco, A., 28, 42, 96
Illich, I., 64 Paul VI, 42, 54, 64, 87, 95, 96
Irarrázaval, D., 54 Pieris, A., 56
Irribaren Pascal, P., 76, 82 Pineda, M., 38
James, W., 41, 154 Plato, 141, 142, 143
Jellinek, E., 35, 36 Poggi, G., 95
John XXIII, 52 Pomerleau, C., 59
Justin Martyr, 53 Prigione, G., 84, 90, 91
Kan, E., 66 Rafael, V., 113
Knight, A., 39 Rahner, K., 52
Komonchak, J., 52, 75 Rambo, L., 41, 138
Kovic, C., 9, 90, 181 Ranger, T., 16
Laclau, E., 72, 139 Rappaport, R., 132, 147
Lafaye, J., 65 Reich, P., 58
Larraín, M., 52 Reichel-Dolmatoff, G., 53
Las Casas, B., 9, 13, 15, 16, 20, 22, 26, Reina, R., 176
27, 34, 42, 51, 58, 63, 68, 77, 95, 96, Ruiz García, 9, 15, 26, 27, 29, 55, 57
133, 145, 181, 186 Rus, D., 117
Laughlin, R., 11, 143 Rus, D., 9, 25, 31, 32, 74, 100, 113, 115,
Lawson, E., 17, 18, 137 116, 117, 119, 133, 136, 140, 143,
Lefebvre, H., 135, 136 175, 178
Levinas, E., 71 Ruz, M., 115
Index of Names 205
Sahlins, M., 19, 162 Tanner, K., 9, 19, 183, 184

Salado, D., 64 Tax, S., 31
Salinas de Gortari, C., 119 Thompson, J., 148
Sánchez, M., 65 Todorov, T., 19, 109
Sanneh, L., 19, 45, 48 Torreblanca, L., 27, 63
Sayer, C., 185 Tracy, D., 183
Schineller, P., 54 Turner, T., 157
Schmidt, S., 118 Vasconcelos, J., 38, 60
Schökel, L., 187 Viquiera, J., 115
Schreiter, R., 9, 20, 54, 72 Vischer, L., 75
Scott, J., 19 Vogt, E., 172, 173, 174
Seed, P., 73, 159, 160 Warren, K., 34
Shorter, A., 53, 54, 87 Wasserstrom, R., 27, 31, 37, 38, 113,
Sigmund, P., 59 115, 116, 137, 171
Siller, C., 63 Watanabe, J., 9, 34, 36, 173, 174, 175,
Smith, J.Z., 9, 18, 19, 81, 84, 85, 176, 178
Smith, P., 60, 61, 62, 77, 118 Watt, I., 19, 47, 179
Sobrino, J., 54 Wijsen, F., 9, 20
Sonnleitner, W., 77 Williams, R., 19, 67, 69, 74
Sperber, D., 83 Wilmsen, E., 108
Stock, B., 49, 129 Wolf, E., 31
Stoler, L., 109 Womack, J., 92
Street, B., 47 Woytyla, K., 62
Suess, P., 56 Zedillo, E., 107

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INDIGENOUS APOSTLES

This is No. 46 of Studies in World Christianity and Interreligious Relations.

The Studies are published by the Foundation for Studies in World

The aim of the Studies is to publish scholarly works on Christianity and

Manuscripts for consideration can be sent to Frans Wijsen, Radboud

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Chapter 1: Contexts and Conversion

Chapter 2: Constructing Highland Mission

Chapter 3: Position and Place

Chapter 4: Proclaiming Religion, Reclaiming Land

Chapter 5: Working the Word

Chapter 6: Decolonizing the Saints

Index of Names 203

ancient Tzotzil Maya pueblo? Why did these profoundly impoverished

Finally, this account shows indigenous Catholic leaders to be powerful

today participate in local, national and international socio-political networks,

But for a cohort of young men in Magdalenas, repeated dislocations owed

Their wholly religious but expressly inner-worldly project replaces the

rationality as intrinsic to biblical faith. Their distinctive everyday religious

1989, 2003; Schreiter 1997). It contributes modestly to a series that takes up

Sites and Methods

away Presbyterians in 1986. But traditional practitioners of costumbre con-

Andrés, including Magdaleneros, enlisted in the indigenous army and others

Structure of the Study

The overall design of my argument reflects the dialectical character of

In Chapter Three, spatial discourse exemplifies frustrated missionary-

Contexts and Conversion

and subordination untouched by Mexico’s Independence and Revolution in

Chiapas: Ecclesial Challenge and Episcopal Renewal

Wasserstrom 1983:12-69). But studies of colonization have often overlooked

Born in 1924 in Irapuato, Guanajuato, hotbed of resistance to Mexico’s

But by the mid-1960s cargo was becoming increasingly unserviceable in the

The Cargo Hierarchy in Magdalenas, c. 1970

For example, in the municipio of Chamula on the southern border of Magda-

cargos. In fact, trago is the critical feature of cargo in contemporary ration-

Twentieth century capitalist development steadily integrated Chiapas into the

heat-as-life – ultimately bestowed and maintained by the gods – connotes

Open struggle was (literally) unthinkable against so powerful a foe as the

Modernization: Indigenismo vs. the Indigenous

Expansion of infrastructure in central Chiapas—indeed, the entire program of

This counterintuitive result had everything to do with ethnic relations, mani-

The Maya memoirist provides an apt trope – indigenous peasants carrying

tions in dining rooms, in dormitories, in the street, in the classroom, in relation to

Conversions and Continuities

Fathers and Sons – a Conversion Story

answers in an alternative community offering not just psychic relief but a

The Lure of Literacy

world. This access, historically forbidden to Indians, was conferred in the

(monotheistic) and ethical universalism to replace the contextually-specific

The catechist Rudolfo explained how it was that Catholics of Magdalenas

For these Magdaleneros, scripture’s communistic message was not restricted

the communities they formed decoded secular domination in and through

Constructing Highland Mission

Vatican II Mission: Inculturation Theology and its Limits

Episcopal Mutual Support – UMAE), initiated a series of meetings in Chia-

In this context, a presentation to the assembled churchmen by the Columbian

Divine revelation, on this account, is inevitably mediated by cultural particu-

reiterated, premises and structures of mediation that suggested domination in

addressed at both Melgar and Medellín by appeals for decentralization of the

Precisely as Dumont’s theory predicts, the bishops asserts that hierarchy