This is the third book to come out of a 15-year diary by Ignacio, a Tzutujil Indian who lives in a small, all-Indian town on the shores of Lake Atitlán. It was written under the direction of guidance of anthropologist James D. Sexton. Its period, 1972-1987, corresponds to the period of violence suffered by the Maya in Guatemala, one reason the two previous books based on the diary (Son of Tecun Uman, 1981, and Campesino, 1985) continue to be popular. They are popular also because they promise insights of the sort delivered by Rigoberta Menchú, winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, who is also a Maya Indian and whose autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984), has become part of a new multicultural canon in such leading universities as Stanford and Duke. An additional appeal of these books is that they promise to provide an “authentic” Maya voice in a period when the voices of outsider anthropologists are increasingly questioned.
Ignacio’s writing is not at all like Rigoberta’s. Rigoberta played a major role in Guatemala’s insurgent movement of the 1970s and 1980s, so closely identified with the Maya of that country. Her book, edited by Elizabeth Burgos-Debray (anthropologist and former wife of revolutionary Regis Debray), is not an “innocent” work. It is passionate, committed, and deeply political. Ignacio, in contrast, is a wily plantation-labor contractor, conservative, and relatively wealthy from his shared royalties with Sexton. He is deeply impressed by gringo position and power in Guatemala. He works hard at coffee and vegetable farming, labor recruiting, breadmaking, and new artisanal projects (such as foot-loom weaving) underwritten by Sexton. He is a semitraditional town leader, heavily engaged in local factional politics. He frequently works as a social promoter for “modernization” projects led by gringos. While he follows national politics, his perspective is distinctly parochial. He is no more sympathetic to the people he calls “subversives” than he is to the army. If anything, he is somewhat more sympathetic to the army, whose oppression of Indians, in his view, can be dealt with by such “weapons of the weak” as clever dodging. His book may be more “culturally comprehensive” than Rigoberta’s (Sexton’s terms) and more closely aligned with indigenous popular sentiment about the guerrillas (my terms), but it is also much less cosmopolitan and inspiring than Rigoberta’s. It reads like the notes of a novice ethnographer, one who must be faulted for failing to “situate” his sources.
Sexton, who solicited as well as edited and translated the diary, can also be faulted for playing to the biases of the current North American audience without properly “situating” his source—and hence our basis of knowledge from this text. By presenting Ignacio as a “simple campesino,” he takes no responsibility for the reality that Ignacio has become a man of means, a local leader, and an influential cultural mediator—directly because of Sexton. Reading the diary, one watches the transformation of Ignacio from a “humble” peasant to an “authoritative” local voice with a certain fascination, somewhat appalled at what the gringo anthropologist has created. In his capacity as “voice” for the Tzutujil, Ignacio rails about the backwardness, barbarity, and ingratitude of his own people for wanting to throw out a gringo priest Ignacio supports (the cleric was later removed by the bishop for improper conduct). One reads with similar interest Ignacio’s discussion of his careful investment and diversification of funds obtained through Sexton. We anthropologists often play such a role in the lives of our assistants-informants— especially those of us who want to continue our personal relationship with people who assisted us for no personal gain. This reviewer certainly is no exception. But in this era of “reflexivity” and questioning of ethnographic authority—from which Sexton’s edition of Ignacio’s diaries clearly benefits—it is amazing to see so little reflexivity in the editor’s introduction to the work. Sexton treats the diary as if it were a totally “naive” native source, uncontaminated from its contact with outsiders (such as himself), a posture that is misleading in the extreme.
This particular volume of the diary contains interesting information on the organization of the indigenous civil patrols, local factionalism heightened by religious divisions (brought on by waves of Catholic and Protestant missionaries), family-gender relations, and economic conditions, including the expansion of smallholder coffee production in which Ignacio is heavily engaged. But what I would use it for as a text is to raise all the knotty issues of colonialism, native voices, and field ethics these diaries exacerbate rather than resolve.
