Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas

Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series

by Christine Kovic

In the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of Mayas were expelled, often violently, from their homes in San Juan Chamula and other highland communities in Chiapas, Mexico, by fellow Mayas allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). State and federal authorities generally turned a blind eye to these human rights abuses, downplaying them as local conflicts over religious conversion and defense of cultural traditions. The expelled have organized themselves to fight not only for religious rights, but also for political and economic justice based on a broad understanding of human rights. This pioneering ethnography tells the intertwined stories of the new communities formed by the Mayan exiles and their ongoing efforts to define and defend their human rights. Focusing on a community of Mayan Catholics, the book describes the process by which the progressive Diocese of San Cristóbal and Bishop Samuel Ruiz García became powerful allies for indigenous people in the promotion and defense of human rights. Drawing on the words and insights of displaced Mayas she interviewed throughout the 1990s, Christine Kovic reveals how the exiles have created new communities and lifeways based on a shared sense of faith (even between Catholics and Protestants) and their own concept of human rights and dignity. She also uncovers the underlying political and economic factors that drove the expulsions and shows how the Mayas who were expelled for not being "traditional" enough are in fact basing their new communities on traditional values of duty and reciprocity.

Genres: Anthropology

238 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2005

Reviews

[Drick · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I have read lots of liberation theology, this book shows LT in action with indigenous Mayan Roman Catholics in the Chiapas region of southern Mexico. For 3-4 years the author lived with and interviewed members of the Guadeloupe community of displaced indigenous persons in San Cristobal. While at times the detail of her reporting of events and conversations is overwhelming, she does a good job of placing the situation in the broader context of Mexican politics and international neoliberal economics. What I appreciate most is to see the faith of the Mayans plays itself in the day to day struggle to assert the rights and dignity as persons in a context that continually dehumanizes them. While liberation theology is often portrayed as a Marxist plot to disrupt society, this book shows that liberation theology is faith in action in the everyday life of very ordinary, if oppressed, people

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ethnography is about the exile of religious converts from the indigenous communities surrounding San Cristobal. But this rural to urban migration has very fundementally shaped San Cristobal in the past decade or more. So it is very helpful for anyone spending time in the city today. I'm particularly interested both because it is anthropology and because the neighborhoods surrounding Barbara's bodega where I stayed in San Cristobal during language training are almost exclusively made up of these religious migrants.