Green Wars by Ybarra Megan

Author:Ybarra, Megan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520968035
Publisher: University of California Press

LADINOS AS CULTURAL BROKERS

Mestizaje as a Weapon against Imperialism

Gringos such as myself not only tend to miss the fact that many finqueros were dispossessed in Guatemala’s revolutionary upheaval but may also be deaf to ladinos trying to explain why they dislike the term. (By way of comparison, much academic ink has been spilled over whether, when, and why Indigenous peoples are embracing the term Maya.) Some ladinos not only reject the name’s historical origins but also honestly believe that they do not have any cultural, political, or economic power over Indigenous people.

I spent most of 2008 conducting ethnography, and the U.S. elections were a major topic of conversation. When they tired of my questions about land and conservation, my ladino colleagues would warn me that the United States was far too racist to elect a black president. My landlord, of German descent, told me that he was on the Left but warned me that he was afraid Barack Obama’s campaign was actually a neoconservative conspiracy. Clearly, progressive U.S. citizens (including me) were being manipulated into voting for a black man so conservatives could order his assassination and plunge the country further into a security state. I protested that this seemed a bit far-fetched, but he reminded me of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Guatemalans’ downward social comparison with the United States is a common Latin American conceit, which I usually dealt with by explicitly acknowledging that we are still racist in the United States, but a majority of us might be civilized enough to vote for a black man if he happened to be the most qualified candidate (in this, I was intentionally reworking the meaning of civilized). At the same time, I acknowledged that the United States was one of four countries to vote against the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.

Unlike contemporary comparisons, I never mastered the historical ones. On so many occasions that I lost track of—in cabs, buses, and coffeehouses—ladinos would bitterly assert that Guatemala never developed20 because its Indigenous population survived, whereas the United States became a rich and powerful country because we systematically killed “ours” off. They expressed resentment at paternal responsibilities for a racial historic approach to dwindling racism and wishful gestures toward the classic naturalist white supremacy. Their often offensive questions point to a broader set of goals in settler colonialism. When I protested that Indigenous peoples survived and continue to exercise tribal sovereignty in the United States, ladinos were dismissive, claiming that their numbers were small enough that we could actually expect them to disappear—effectively, in this view, they had. It was left unsaid that one clear lesson from Guatemala’s genocide was that its Indigenous peoples were survivors, perhaps even comprising the majority of the country’s population. Likewise, ladino interlocutors were very interested in having me account for the ways that the Trail of Tears displacement led to U.S. economic development but not the ways that slavery accounts for U.

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