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

Assessment of the Field Situation, 1995

The current situation in Tila and elsewhere in México has significant implications for the productivity and even the advisability of field research in the area at this time. Economic stress has strained the social fabric in México, and there is a general atmosphere of uncertainty and uncontrolled conflict. At the national level, a series of political events, including the assassination of high level politicians and government officials, has led to widely accepted accusations of murder, theft, and treason against the former president, whose chosen successor continues to govern.

Charges of corruption and election fraud have discredited virtually all political authority, and there is a general feeling that few if any government officials hold power legitimately, or even firmly. Violent official responses to political action and unrest have exacerbated this general atmosphere. Our overall impression throughout the summer of 1995 was that in some thirty years of field work in México–including the turbulent late 1960s–we had never felt the country to be so unsettled.

In the State of Chiapas, this general state of affairs is manifested in a special way. Since the winter of 1993, an armed insurrection has been taking place, sparked in part by changes in federal land reform laws that protect ejidos. Rebel Zapatista forces, largely composed of Mayan Indians from the ejidos, with support from the Indian communities at large, have periodically occupied numerous municipal centers, occasionally deposing local officials and destroying land and tax records. In response, federal troops have occupied strategic locations throughout the state, controlling the flow of people and goods from region to region. After two years, a resolution of this conflict is stalled in an extended series of talks.

The lack of recognized authority and the precedent of opposition to established rule have resulted in constant maneuvering for power by virtually all interest groups. In politics, factions within the ruling party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), are opposed to one another, while the party itself is opposed by several strong opposition parties—including one, the PRD (Partido Revolucionario Democratico), which is often openly allied with the Zapatista rebels.

The head of the Catholic church in Chiapas, Bishop Samuel Ruiz, is a champion of the Zapatista cause, and is reviled by the powerful Catholic (and Ladino) businessmen’s associations of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the seat of his bishopric. Over much of the state, local conflicts have pitted subsistence agriculturalists against cattlemen and other agricultural industrialists. For many, the conflict revives the ethnic conflict between Indian and Ladino (non-Indian, or Hispanic).

In Tila, as we learned during field work, the current conflict operates in a context of existing social divisions within the community. The city is divided into barrios, each associated with a prominent extended family, e.g., the Barrio San Sebastián, associated with the Pérez family (which in turn has an association with an outlying colony to the east of Tila). There are rivalries between barrios, and within barrios there may be long-standing feuds between segments of the same kin group.

Many local conflicts were once mitigated through symbolic or ceremonial activity, including ritual combat in the annual Bull-Jaguar "dance." In recent times, the federally-supported civil authority has gained in power with respect to the leaders of traditional society, the past and present cargo holders. Symbols of the traditional community have been diminished—the civil authority has gradually removed the "dances" from the center of town to a remote colony. Civil authority has been weakened in its turn; recently, a powerful Presidente Municipal (mayor) was driven from office after killing a citizen during a peaceful demonstration. With no clear locus of social control, small conflicts have tended to become more inflamed than at other times. There is more open conflict, it is less easily resolved, and it tends to become more serious. Political parties and other pressure groups use gangs of young men to harass their opponents.

We were able to carry out the research activities we had scheduled, and local conflicts rarely affected our field work to any notable extent. Nevertheless the potential for conflict was present. Inevitably, as we established relations with some local elements, we were drawn into potential conflicts with others. The stresses of the annual fair brought some conflicts to a head, in a series of street fights in the barrio we lived in, and we removed our field team from the area earlier than we had originally planned.

Within a week of our departure, government agents seized the parish priests from two towns adjacent to Tila and deported them overnight, with a minimum of judicial procedure, to Miami. One was an Argentine who had been priest at Sabanilla for several years; the other was a Mexican-American priest who had served Yajalón for 30 years. While locally popular, both were accused by the government of unduly influencing the Indians, and were deported, along with another foreign priest serving in Bishop Ruiz’ diocese, in a government move to appease the conservative Catholics in San Cristóbal who wanted to embarrass the bishop (who at that time was traveling in Europe in support of his candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize). The priest we had dealt with in Tila, accused like his deported friends of being a liberation theologist, could not be summarily deported, since he is a Mexican citizen. But local opinion held that the priest at Tila was being given a warning through the deportation of his fellow priests.

Our assessment of the situation that prevails in Tila and more generally in México does not invite an immediate return to the field. While circumstances may change momentarily, the combination of potential conflict in the field and withering federal research dollars in the United States argue for a period of analysis of materials already in hand rather than a return to the field. The National Endowment for the Humanities, a major funder for our research in the past, suspended grant reviews in 1995 for lack of funds, and the National Science Foundation, to which we had applied for support, also was irregularly funded, and is undergoing reorganization.

While prospects for the continuation of this pilot study are dim for the immediate future, we hope and expect that the situation will improve at some later time, and that we will be able to follow up on the preliminary results of this pilot project with more extensive direct elicitation and documentation of ritual performances through audio and video recordings.

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