Maya Resurgence in Guatemala:Q’Eqchi’ Experiences

Description

Across Guatemala, Mayan peoples are struggling to recover from decades of cataclysmic upheaval–religious conversions, civil war, displacement, military repression. Richard Wilson carried out long-term research with Q’eqchi’-speaking Mayas in the province of Alta Verapaz to ascertain how these events affected social organization and identity. He finds that their rituals of fertility and healing–abandoned in the 1970s during Catholic and Protestant evangelizations–have been reinvented by an ethnic revivalist movement led by Catholic lay activists, who seek to renovate the earth cult in order to create a new pan-Q’eqchi’ ethnic identity.