Chol Ritual Language
with Terrence Lee Folmar, Heidi Altman, Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, and Bernardo Pérez Martínez
©1996 J. Kathryn Josserand and Nicholas A. Hopkins

History and Cultural Relations

Cholan once occupied most of the lowland areas from the Grijalva River on the west to the Motagua River on the east, including the southern (riverine) half of the Yucatán Peninsula, a distribution virtually matched by that of Classic Maya monumental inscriptions. The urban centers of this civilization were abandoned with the still unexplained fall of the Classic Maya around the tenth century. Considerable population apparently survived in small agricultural settlements until the sixteenth century, when they were decimated by diseases and other results of Spanish colonialism.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Chol settlements were located along the Usumacinta River and its lowland tributaries, from northern Guatemala (Alta Verapaz, where the Eastern Cholan language, Choltí, was spoken) to the Gulf Coast (Tabasco, where the majority of Indian population was Chontal rather than Chol) (Thompson 1938). Chols were called by many local names, including Lacandón, a name taken from the Lacantún River and later applied to immigrant Yucatecans. These lowland Chol settlements resisted Spanish incursions, including missionary activity, and carried out raids on highland areas pacified and controlled by the Spanish crown. As a consequence, they were subjected to a 100-year military effort (1590-1690) that conquered and resettled Chols area by area, beginning with the lower Usumacinta and Tulijá River areas, and proceeding upriver in successive campaigns that concluded with the conquest of the Mopán and Itzá Maya, east of the Chols (de Vos 1980).

Chol populations that survived pacification were resettled among highland Maya Indians along the border of the conquered lowlands, including Palenque (founded by Fray Pedro Lorenzo de la Nada to house resettled Chols), Tila, Tumbalá, and Bachajón, in Chiapas, and Retalhuleu, in Guatemala. Of these, the only Chol populations to survive into the twentieth century were those that had been resettled in the Tila and Tumbalá areas. Chol speakers either assimilated or otherwise disappeared in all other areas, while distinct dialects of Chol began to develop in Tila and Tumbalá. While "Palenque Chol" is mentioned in the literature, all evidence indicates the language is that of Tumbalá immigrants, and no separate Palenque dialect has been attested. In the late Colonial period, Salto de Agua was founded by Chols who had colonized the Tulijá River valley from the highland towns, principally Tumbalá.

John Lloyd Stephens, an American explorer who passed through the Tumbalá area in 1840, remarked that the Indians there lived in essentially aboriginal conditions, with little sign of Spanish influence (Stephens 1841). But by the middle of the nineteenth century German and North American interests began to found coffee plantations in the northern Chiapas Highlands, and incorporated Chols in a system of debt peonage that effectively replaced traditional social organization outside of the towns of Tila and Tumbalá. This debt peonage system gradually disappeared after the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century, and Chols eventually gained control of many coffee plantations through land reform during the 1930s, under the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas (Villa Rojas 1969). These lands became the first dozen or so Chol ejidos (federally-sanctioned collective farms).

Despite its potential interest to Maya studies, especially the Classic Period hieroglyphic inscriptions, the Chol area was bypassed by the anthropological projects that have so extensively documented Tzotzil and Tzeltal cultures to the immediate south (Vogt 1969, 1976, 1994; McQuown and Pitt-Rivers 1970). A sketch of Chol ethnography for the Handbook of Middle American Indians (Villa Rojas 1969) filled only three pages, and could cite virtually no modern ethnographic sources, a situation that remains unchanged (Hopkins 1995).

About 1960, a major new development took place when the federal government authorized expansion of highland populations into lowland jungle areas left essentially unpopulated since the seventeenth century. Hundreds of new settlements have resulted, as groups organize and petition for lands under the ejido system, and the population expansion has taken Chols back to virtually all of the Mexican territory their ancestors occupied before the sixteenth century.

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