Maya Guatemala and Us: Divergent Convergences

The Griffin Foundation Gallery: April 4 to July 27, 2025

Extended versions of these texts with additional information are available here.

Spanish language versions of these texts are available here. / Las versiones en español de estos textos están disponibles aquí.

Exhibition texts: ENGLISH

Introduction

Humans are migratory. From an origin core in east Africa, we have covered the Earth. The first generations of migrants faced adjustments to new geographies and climates. Subsequent generations often faced convergences with each other as well.

This exhibition offers a visual narrative of a particular convergence between Maya civilization and its peoples and peoples from Europe and North America. There are convergences: the development of similarities and shared cultural reference points. And there are divergences: displacement, subordination, dominance, and a multitude of ways in which power divides. The development of these similarities and differences can be read differently, but one claim cannot sustain validity – that we have nothing to do with each other.

Today, almost 90% of the Maya peoples live in Guatemala and 98% of the people of Guatemala are Maya or Mestizo – an ethno-racial mixture of indigenous American and European peoples. Telling the story of Guatemala through a Maya narrative or the story of Maya destiny through a Guatemalan narrative is inescapable. In this exhibition, vibrant images bring to life a tale of pre-convergence stability and achievement interrupted by unexpected conquest and spiritual displacement legitimized by a “Doctrine of Discovery” resulting in mass repressions, civil war, and distorted perceptions. Yet, unexpectedly, bridges were created – convergences – points of conflict and integration that, paradoxically, have given expression to grievances and birth to hopes.

Maya Life: Pre-Convergence

Maya civilization (1000 BCE – 1520 CE) is consistently listed as one of the most significant of antiquity. Encompassing present-day Guatemala, it also incorporated Belize and portions of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. It established stable, integrated villages that by the 8^th century BCE, had developed into dynamic cities.

They created precise records of planetary and stellar movements preserved by an elaborate system of writing and achieved with mathematical skill. They predicted the movements of celestial bodies and developed time keeping with great precision. Their architecture was monumental. Birds, feathers, maize adorn their art and are routinely incorporated in the brilliant colors of their vivid aesthetic.

The Maya built a coherent civilization that, simultaneously, was pluralistic. There were tensions and conflicts among Maya cities, yet a sense of cultural cohesion and identity remained vigorous and strong.

The art and artist

These paintings reflect and capture the spirit of Maya ancient civilization. The artist of these works, L. Alex Rodas, was born in Guatemala City and now is a U.S. citizen living in Colorado. He is a graduate of the Rocky Mountain College of Art, and has provided the aesthetic direction for this exhibition. Rodas portrays the intense intergenerational expressions of Maya peoples complemented by vivid colors, in intricate patterns, and adorned with familiar Maya symbols—birds, flowers, and maize—to capture a sense of the beauty Maya civilization brought to life. The vibrant splendor of Maya culture, notes Rodas, often masks its daily fragility. His use of duct tape framing is a reminder of Maya vulnerability.

Divergent Convergence: “Discovery” and Religion

Since 1519, the convergence of Maya peoples and Spanish explorers was divisive more than integrative. Initial contacts resulted in a smallpox epidemic. Soon the Alvarado brothers established a Spanish foothold in the region, but consolidation of conquest required 175 years.

Maya Guatemala was dominated for purposes of territorial control and support for Pacific commercial ambitions not primarily for colonization. Agrarian alternatives to precious metals, dependent on Maya labor, provided partial substitutes—indigo and coffee.

Pope Alexander VI’s, “Inter Caetera,” issued in May 1493 and known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” provided a justification for dominating the so-called “infidels.” It asserted a distinction among peoples—those who are superior and Christian, and those who are inferior and non-Christian. While a convergence with converted Christians was created, it attributed to the Maya lesser value and expectations of compliant behavior. Since 1823, and as recently as 2005, this doctrine has been used in the U.S. Supreme Court against native peoples.

The art and artist

In both of Guatemalan artist Job Paredes’s paintings, “First Supper” and “Conquistador,” the complexities of the convergence of Maya civilization with Christian Europe can be felt. Today, a symbiosis between Roman Catholicism and tradition Maya religion, especially related to rituals, agriculture, and ancestors, is most common. Paredes is renowned for capturing the essence of his country’s Indigenous Peoples. Not surprisingly, we find Tikal standing in the background, yet towering overhead, in “Conquistador.”

Divergent Convergence: Land and Economic Power

In 1847, Guatemala declared itself an independent republic. Spanish elites ruled within an alliance of church, state, and military authority. The church extended its property claims, the prerogatives of landowners increased, governance was militarized, and foreign economic interventions boomed.

The commitment to Guatemala’s economic development led President Manuel Estrada Cabrera (ruled 1898–1920) to negotiate with the United Fruit Company (UFCO), transferring significant amounts of land, and providing substantial tax exemptions. Maya peoples lost lands, traditions of cultivation and husbandry for sub-subsistence wages and harsh working conditions.

The Depression era regime of Jorge Ubico extended Maya suffering. He forced unpaid Maya labor to build roads, provided immunity for landowners in defense of their property, and granted massive additional concessions to the UFCO.

UFCO, now Chiquita Brands International, became Guatemala’s largest land owner. It used its abundant concessions to impose brutal labor conditions and, repeatedly, solicited the U.S. government to threaten coercive interventions. There were convergences, resulting mostly in mutual misperceptions and sufferings.

The art and artist

Job Paredes’ four works in this section can be disorienting. They are familiar, yet confusing; warmly settling, yet upsetting; affirming and comforting; yet rejecting and disorienting. Perhaps this is because Paredes uses Norman Rockwell-style images, which were often associated with a perceived innocence and wholesomeness of American life, to picture Americans as damaged and soiled. The symbolic thread throughout these images is the banana and its corrupting power in Guatemala at the hands of the United Fruit Company.

Divergent Convergence: Ideology and Political Power

The 42 years of Guatemala’s “Civil War” (1954–1996) were as much international as domestic. Domestically, there were elite conflicts—those aligned with the church and military, and those supportive of Maya peasants. Internationally, there was the United States government and the UFCO.

“New Deal” styled reforms were initiated by Presidents Arevalo and Guzman. The 1952 “Decree 900” transferred uncultivated land to Maya peasants with little loss to land holders. The U.S. government opposed these reforms and the greater accountability placed on UFCO. The CIA initiated the funding, arming, and training of 480 men under Carlos Armas. In June 1954, Armas and his troops invaded Guatemala, replaced Guzman as President, and rescinded Decree 900.

The war continued the substantial financial and personnel interventions of the U.S. pursuing its anti-communist ideology and protection of UFCO’s economic interests. It was also the time of President Montt’s exceptional cruelty—brutal torture, mass murders, rape, and warfare targeting indigenous peoples. More than 200,000 people were massacred during the “Civil War,” mostly Maya.

The art and artists

Job Parades used the trickery attributed to Thomas Hicks of placing Abraham Lincoln’s head on an earlier portrait of John Calhoun, an ardent successionist. Parades replaces Lincoln with the face of Rios Montt, a notorious war criminal. Guatemalan artist, Edgar Fuentes, a dedicated Guatemalan artist, offers charcoals and oil on canvas images of the dark suffering imposed by Montt and endured by Maya peoples throughout the so-called “Civil War.”

Divergent Convergence: Rejection and Hope

Migrations and immigrations create unique, significant, and difficult issues to unravel and resolve. But why a nation in which 98.4% are immigrants, descendants of immigrants, or enslaved migrants of the last 400 years, lacks a readiness to address these complexities in a rigorous but compassionate spirit is baffling. Equally difficult to understand: why is the pursuit of hopeful dreams by others set aside when we have contributed directly to the intensity of their suffering?

Many of Guatemala’s Maya peoples have sought opportunity and safety in the USA. They imagined that in the U.S. there exists a converged union of separate cultural identities that are both different and one. They saw the U.S. as a place where Cuban-Americans, Tex/Mex, tofu, rap, WASPs, Irish cops, pizza, and the immigrant first ladies of the President and Vice President have unique private homes and a shared public home. Further, they assumed that having significantly impacted their lives in Guatemala, the United States might have a place for them here.

The art and artist

For Maya artist Alvaro Tzaj Yotz, the four paintings in this section express Guatemalan hopes. He offers complex syncretistic images of Maya people and cultural artifacts embedded in Times Square, Hollywood, relating to the Statue of Liberty and participating in weaving the U.S. flag. Thematically similar work by Tzaj Yotz, imaging indigenous futures, has been exhibited in the United States.

SUPPORT

Support for this exhibition and related programming is provided by the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund, the FUNd Endowment at CSU, and the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, which works to enhance cultural development and the arts at Colorado State University. This fund benefits from the generous support of all those who love the arts. https://president.colostate.edu/lilla-b-morgan-endowment/.

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