Americas: Central (Anthropology)

As Table 1 shows, Central America consists of one very large country, Mexico, with some 75 per cent of the total land area and nearly 80 per cent of the total population; and six much smaller countries, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, which form a long and mostly narrow strip of land separating the Caribbean Sea from the Pacific Ocean. (An eighth country, Belize, is treated as part of the Caribbean region.)

Mexico shares a long northern frontier, approximately 3,000 km in length, with the United States, to which, following the Mexican War of 1847—8, it lost a very considerable amount of territory, consisting of the present American states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. These all still contain very sizeable and steadily increasing Central American ethnic minorities.

Following the creation of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) in 1993, the involvement with the United States is only likely to increase. At grass roots this means an increased stream of migration, legal and illegal, permanent and temporary, across the frontier. This already reaches the six smaller republics, which since the late 1940s have been linked to Mexico by the Inter-American Highway.

Historically, the whole of Central America was once part of the Spanish Empire. The result, today, is that Spanish is the official language of the whole region, but this has not prevented the six small republics pursuing quite independent lines of development since freedom from Spanish rule was won at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In all of them economic development has been extremely retarded, with exports being largely confined to the products of tropical plantation agriculture. The plantations themselves were largely developed by foreign capital, mainly German in the case of coffee in El Salvador, Guatemala and the adjacent area of Mexico, and American in the case of bananas in Guatemala and Honduras, or cotton in Nicaragua. Panama is something of a separate case because of the Panama Canal, but even here, in a process whose social and cultural dimensions are described by Gudeman, traditional subsistence economies are being supplanted by plantation economies focused on export to the United States. This process has led to the slow eclipse of the traditional ‘belief in the saints, with the many ramifying meanings it carries and functions it performs’ (Gudeman 1978: 160).

Mexico is a substantially different case, even though plantations remain important — particularly in the areas furthest from the United States. With an internal market of more than 80 million people, an advanced communications infrastructure, comprehensive education, strong industrial and financial sectors, and the world’s largest capital city, many, if not the majority of Mexicans, enjoy the characteristic, mainly urban life of a modern industrial economy. In this sense the country is a sort of poor relation of the United States, the role implicit in the NAFTA agreement of 1993.

Table 1 Central America: basic statistics

Anthropological backwaters

The tens of millions of modern and relatively affluent Mexicans may interest investors, but anthropologists have largely disregarded them. Their focus of interest has been on the ‘other’ Mexico, which may still constitute more than half the population. Traditionally, the home of the historically dispossessed has been in what Aguirre-Beltran (1967) has designated regiones de refugio, a term equally apt for substantial parts of the smaller republics. Although Aguirre-Beltran’s main interest is in rural Indian populations, largely engaged in the subsistence cultivation of maize, with methods going back to before the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, his concept can be extended to apply to Spanish-speaking mestizo populations in remote rural areas.

The underlying principle is that, by reason of poor communications, adverse geophysical factors, and, in certain important areas, relatively high concentrations of population, these regiones de refugio were left largely undisturbed by the colonial development of Central America. With the help of land reform in the twentieth century, this has made possible the survival, until the present day, of any number of Indian communities, preserving their own language and culture, in which the focus of life is the local centre. Gossen (1974: 16) presents a map drawn by a Chamula informant, in which the outside world (including the rest of Mexico) is consigned to a distant and largely unknown periphery.

Chamula enjoys, in common with the other districts of the highlands of Chiapas in Southern Mexico, a modern Maya culture, but the classic regio de refugio is to be found on the other side of the frontier with Guatemala, where the different Indian communities of the western highlands display countless variants of the same basic culture. The whole region is mountainous, with many active volcanoes, and a climate allowing for intensive agriculture, based primarily on maize. Here the new economic opportunities following from the opening of the Inter-American Highway have been offset by the suppression of local attempts at self-development by the Guatemalan Army, whose appalling human rights record has left its mark on Indian communities throughout the area.

Historically the western highland area was always something more than a disjointed collection of isolated subsistence economies, each maintaining its distinctive local culture. Each local economy had its own distinctive contribution to the national market network, focused on the gigantic market place of the capital city, and market studies are the basis of many familiar ethnographic texts. Tax introduced the now familiar term, ‘Penny Capitalism’, to describe ‘a society which is ‘capitalist’ on a microscopic scale’ (Tax 1963: ix).

The society described was that of Panajachel on the shore of Lake Atitlan, where the Indian inhabitants grow onions which they transport far afield for sale on the national market. Tax noted: a striking peculiarity … the combination of a childish, magical or ‘primitive’ world view with institutions reminiscent of the Great Society. In most ‘primitive’ societies about which anthropologists write, people behave in our terms irrationally, since they try by devices strange to us to maximize different, hence curious satisfactions. This happens not to be the case in the part of Guatemala about which I write, where the social institutions and cosmology, strange as they may be to us, are as separated from the processes of making a living as are our own … the Panajachel economy is like ours.

The dichotomy pointed out by Tax is fundamental to Central American anthropology: the character of any one study is determined by which side the author chooses to describe. Cha-mula also has an ‘economy . like ours’ in the form of an extremely successful cottage industry devoted to the illegal production of rum (Crump 1987). On the other hand, Gossen’s (1974) study of oral tradition and cosmology in the same municipio portrays a world far from mainstream Mexico.

Church and ‘fiestas’

Although, from the sparsely populated deserts of northern Mexico to the densely populated highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala, the Indian communities studied by anthropologists vary greatly in climate, topography and demography, certain themes occur almost everywhere. One of the most important is the historical impact of Catholicism on indigenous religious forms. This is summed up by the title of Ricard (1966), The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico.

The mission of the Catholic church extended to the remotest areas of Central America, as witnessed today any number of dilapidated churches and monasteries. The social policy of the church, known as reduction, was to concentrate Indian settlement round the parish church. In the less remote areas, with Spanish-speaking mestizo populations, this policy led to the foundation of many of the towns which flourish today. In the areas left to the Indians it failed, if only because it conflicted with established settlement patterns related to traditional subsistence agriculture. The churches were certainly built, but generally the municipal centres attracted no permanent populations, save for a handful of mestizo officials and shopkeepers. At the same time, the church as an institution lost most of the wealth accumulated in the first centuries of Spanish colonization, and in Mexico, following the revolutionary years, 1910-20, it was almost completely suppressed.

The result was that local populations were left free to use church buildings for their own religious purposes, with only marginal support from any Catholic clergy (who were never Indians) that survived the revolutionary terror. Today government policy tolerates a revived clergy, throughout Central America consisting largely of expatriate missionaries, but the main religious action is not only controlled by the local population, but also forms the focus of its own political autonomy. The main events in the religious year are the fiestas, each of which is in the charge of an elaborate hierarchy of lay officials,elected anew every year in a process described in detail by Cancian (1965: 126f).

The importance of the system lies in:the way which fiestas … promote order and social control, although they seem to provide a break from ordinary routine and can even appear formless and chaotic. Practically by definition, fiestas provide respites from the constraints and rules of everyday life. Paradoxically, however, they serve to reinforce the power relationships, moral guidelines, and informal sanctioning mechanisms by which people regulate their daily behavior.

Brandes describes the fiesta system of Tzint-zuntzan, not far from Mexico City, but he notes that ‘everywhere from the state of Sonora in the northwest . to Chiapas in the southeast . we find that ethnic identity is affirmed through religious cosmologies and ceremonials’ (1988: 3). The same rule applies in the rest of Central America.

The world outside

Compadrazgo is one particular institution established and maintained by the major sacramental occasions of baptism, confirmation, first communion and marriage, for which the assistance of a priest is required. The key rite is baptism, where the compadre, as godfather to the child, is recognized as a key figure in the natural parents’ network of fictive or ritual kinship. The relationship, being essentially hierarchical, can provide the means of access to political support and patronage, but Nash, in her study of Amatenango, a traditional Mayan community of Chiapas, suggests (1970: 124) that ‘its greatest importance is still based on creating or reinforcing group solidarity’.

Medicine is also a field shared between the lore of the outside world and that of the local community. The people of Pichataro, in the highlands of west-central Mexico, clearly accept the commonly recognized distinction between local remedios caseros and trained doctors’ remedios medicos (Young 1981: 102). The former supports different types of practitioners, or curanderos, a term familiar throughout all Central America, who are consulted over particular types of sickness. They can also counteract illnesses recognized as caused by witchcraft (1981: 113).

Finally, the barrios of the great cities, with vast populations, often recent migrants from over-populated rural areas, are also critical in the anthropology of Central America. Oscar Lewis’s (1961) study of one single family is the classic text for establishing a distinctive culture of poverty, in which every individual must make their own way in life, against a chaotic and unstable background characterized by alcoholism, endless petty crime, prostitution and violence. In a region where birthrates substantially above the world average (for which see Table 1) lead to a doubling of the population with every generation, the poor barrios of the large cities will be the home of a steadily increasing proportion of the total population. At the same time, demographic pressure, exhaustion of land traditionally used for subsistence cultivation, and continued extension of the communications infrastructure combine to reduce the capacity of the regiones de refugio to support their original populations, and so exacerbate the near insoluble social problems of the large cities.