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

Chol Settlements

The major urban settlements occupied by Chol speakers are indicated by the census figures cited previously: Tila, Tumbalá, Salto de Agua and Palenque; however, these are to some extent dominated by their Ladino (non-Indian) populations. Palenque is not only a major tourist destination because of the Classic ruins nearby, but the center of a coastal plain cattle industry, and its Chol population lives for the most part outside the urban center. Salto de Agua has a smaller ladino population, and has long been a major commercial center for lowland Chols. It is located strategically on the Tulijá River at the fall line, and handles cargo by boat from the Gulf and by rail via the Southeastern Railway (connecting Mérida to México City). Tila is the most conservative of these towns, both in its Ladino and its Indian cultures.

Tumbalá and Salto de Agua were centers of the nineteenth century foreign-dominated coffee industry, and have thus lost many of their traditional institutions. The center of a religious cult which continues a Pre-Columbian tradition (Pérez Chacón 1988), Tila is at once the most urban of the Chol settlements and the most conservative, retaining social institutions and customs long since lost by other centers (such as religious fraternities and symbolic public performances called "dances"). Tumbalá also retains some of these institutions (Meneses López 1986), but has undergone greater acculturation because of modern Catholic and Protestant missionization.

The great majority of Chols live outside these urban centers, in smaller agricultural settlements. The older of these are located in the municipios of Tila, Tumbalá, and Sabanilla. The designation of these settlements as colonias ’colonies’, reflects their status as political and economic satellites of the towns. More recent agricultural settlements are the result of land reform under the ejido ’collective farm’ system. The earliest ejidos are also located in the highlands surrounding Tila and Tumbalá, as well as along the adjacent stretches of the Tulijá River valley; many were the result of redistribution of foreign-held coffee plantation lands after the Mexican Revolution. Beginning about 1960, a new wave of ejidos carried Chols from the highlands to the unoccupied jungle lowlands further east, and hundreds of these communities have since carved out space for themselves as far as the Guatemalan border and up the Usumacinta River to the mouth of the Lacantún River.

Ejido settlements tend to be small, as the laws governing land reform specify exactly how many heads of family will have land rights, and restrict inheritance thereafter to only one son; land-poor younger sons are the major factor in the formation of new ejidos. As a consequence, these new ejido settlements also tend to be peculiar demographically, as they are founded by young generation mates and initially have few elders. By the same token, they are innovative socially, and little traditional life survives in the lowland ejidos. For instance, a great majority are dominated by Protestant sects, in contrast to the well-entrenched Catholicism of the highlands; Biblical place names like Jerusalén and Babilonia (Jerusalem and Babylon) are characteristic of Protestant ejidos, rather than saints’ names like Santa María and San Miguel (Saint Mary, Saint Michael) or Chol place names (Tiemopá, Joloniel). Though most ejidos have more than one church, and many include both Catholic and various Protestant groups, usually one church predominates in the social life of the settlement.

Previous Page  |  Table of Contents  |  Next Page

Return to top of page