The Birth of Indigenous Identity among the Ch’orti’ Maya of Honduras

In the late 1980s, during a severe outbreak of cholera, Honduran anthropologists traveled to a few peasant villages located in the mountains surrounding the Copán Valley in Western Honduras. Along with a few students, they hoped to contain the spread of the disease in the most affected communities. Unexpectedly, one of the anthropologists noticed that people in the communities they visited were practicing cultural traditions similar or the same as those in Maya communities in Guatemala. “These are the Ch’orti’ Maya” he said to one of his colleagues. For decades, the Ch’orti’ Maya went unrecognized as an ethnic group—labeled as mestizos (people of mixed ethnicity and race) by government officials or as campesino (peasants) by non-indigenous landowners. 

The Ch’orti’ Maya constitute one of 30 Mayan groups inhabiting the Mesoamerican region (from southern Mexico to Western Honduras and El Salvador). These contemporary groups are descendants of the ancient Maya civilization known for its sophisticated achievements in architecture, astronomy, mathematics, and the most complex and advanced writing system in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans (Sharer & Traxler, 1994; Houston et al., 2001). The region inhabited by the Ch’orti’ Maya of Honduras is home to the renowned Copán Archaeological Park, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

The activism work of the Ch’orti’ Maya was unprecedented in several ways, but the most salient element was their ability to successfully negotiate with the Honduran government for land transfers. Up until the 1990s, many Ch’orti’ Maya families still lived on lands owned by wealthy landowners and worked for them under highly exploitative systems.

Current research explores several events that made this possible. The Ch’orti’ Maya effectively staged protests by taking over the Archaeological Park of Copán which generates a great deal of revenue for the Honduran state. From then on, the Honduran state began to negotiate with rather than violently displace activists. Demands are never fully met, and the change of political administrations has precluded the existence of a constant line of support for the Ch’orti’ Maya. Political instability also means that the struggles of the Ch’orti’ Maya are far from over.

 Nevertheless, many indigenous families have benefited from a more autonomous way of life either practicing subsistence farming or engaging in tourism-related economies (e.g., creating handicrafts, offering tours of communities, serving as tour guides, participating in theater productions). Some communities have gradually begun to develop their own initiatives within the tourism industry (e.g., creating their own community tours) in order to generate some form of revenue for some of the poorest families (Mortensen, 2014; Rodríguez-Mejía, 2016). 

Tune in to hear more from Dr. Fredy Rodriguez on identity and activism of the Ch’orti’ Maya of Honduras during his Festival talk on Tuesday, September 21 at 5 p.m. on www.scifest.org.