Maya Guatemala and Us: Divergent Convergences

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

Shorter, gallery versions of these texts are available here.

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

Extended Exhibition Texts

Maya Guatemala and Us: Divergent Convergence”

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 exhibit 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.

Engage the exhibit freely. However, the exhibit has been organized, counter clockwise, according to an historical/thematic story presented both visually and in words. 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 (1000BCE to 1520CE) is consistently listed as one of the most significant of antiquity. It was located in an area that today comprises southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and portions of Honduras and El Salvador. For thousands of years the Maya peoples lived within a vibrant civilization enriched by trade and cultural exchanges. Its earliest roots were in the establishment of stable, integrated villages with an agricultural base. By the 8^th Century BCE it had developed dynamic cities with grand public architecture and art.

The heavens always fascinated the Maya. They created precise records of planetary and stellar movements from a series of observatories. Their observations were preserved by an elaborate system of writing that utilized both phonetic and pictorial characters. Using these data, they predicted the movements of celestial bodies with an extraordinary degree of accuracy. Their achievements in mathematics extended the practical value of their keen observational skills. Evidence indicates that Maya understanding of solar system planets and the Earth’s moon provided a foundation for their system of timekeeping. This led them to develop calendars that guided the timing of their farming and their religious rituals; calendars that are still used by many Maya descendants.

Their architecture was monumental and inspiring. Birds, feathers, maize adorn their art and are routinely incorporated in their vivid aesthetic. They wove art into the fabric of their lives and identities – brilliant colors, geometric-natural forms in a broad scope of applications. From stone sculptures to wood carvings, murals, ceramics, body decorations, stucco modeling, book manuscripts, and textiles, the Maya peoples brought beauty to life.

Perhaps one of their greatest achievements may have been to create a coherent civilization that, simultaneously, was pluralistic. Even today in Guatemala, Maya peoples speak 28 different languages or dialects. Maya cities were semi-autonomous. There were tensions and conflicts among them, yet a sense of cultural cohesion and identity remained vigorous and strong. Paradoxically, the decentralized character of their heritage that contributed directly to Maya vitality and achievements, also may have contributed to their being conquered when brutal power asserted itself.

Divergent Convergence: “Discovery” and Religion

From the beginning,1519, the convergence of Maya peoples and Spanish explorers was divisive more than integrative. Initial contacts resulted in a smallpox epidemic that devastated native populations. Cortes gave the Alvarado brothers a grant to conquer the land that is now Guatemala. They manipulated traditional tensions between two significant Maya rivals to defeat one and then betray the other, establishing a Spanish foothold in the region. The consolidation of territorial conquest, however, required scores of battles and 175 years.

Maya Guatemala was not seen as a new Spanish home to be systematically colonized, but land to be dominated for purposes of territorial control, extraction, and support for commercial ambitions in the Pacific. Guatemala, lacking rich sources of precious metals, was a less attractive immediate source of extracted wealth, but agrarian alternatives, heavily dependent on Maya labor, soon provided partial substitutes – indigo and coffee. And Guatemala’s strategic location of Atlantic access on the east and Pacific access on the west provided a valuable link for the Transpacific Manila Galleon connecting Spain to Asia via the Spanish Philippines.

If it was not to be home for Spanish settlers, Guatemala remained the home of Maya peoples. Conquered lands required conquered peoples. The Roman Catholic Church provided a mechanism for pacifying the “infidels.” Pope Alexander VI’s papal bull, “Inter Caetera,” issued on May 4, 1493, immediately on the heels of Columbus’ explorations, is commonly known as the “Doctrine of Discovery.” The papal bull asserts a religious justification for Christian military conquests and political possession and colonization of territory occupied and owned by non-Christians.

It assumed more than a difference of faith. It asserted a distinction among peoples – those who are superior, worthy, dominant, civil, and happen to be Christian, and those who are inferior, “barbarous,” “live under the yoke of Saracens” (pagan), go “unclothed,” do not “eat flesh,” and happen to be non-Christian. Further, the “unworthiness” of the latter peoples, cancelled their claims to possess “gold, spices, and very many other precious things.” It created a convergence of converted Christians, but they were to be ones of lesser value and compliant behavior – patterns that marked colonialism and European claims against native peoples. Interestingly, as early as 1823 and as recently as 2005, the Doctrine of Discovery was used to defend claims of conquest against indigenous people in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Divergent Convergence: Land and Economic Power

In March of 1847, Guatemala declared itself an independent republic. However, its independence was not a liberation for the Maya. Spanish elites ruled within a hierarchical alliance of church, state, and military authority. The Roman Catholic church, one of the largest land owners at that time, extended its property claims, the prerogatives of landowners over rural Maya farmers increased, governance was more and more militarized, and, soon, foreign interventions to protect economic interests became more prominent.

In 1898, President Manuel Cabrera became Guatemala’s first civilian head of state in over 50 years. He was intensely committed to the development of Guatemala’s infrastructure and the support for economic development he believed it would provide. To facilitate his ambitions, he made a deal with the United Fruit Company (UFCO) of the U.S.A. The 1904 agreement transferred significant amounts of land to UFCO, provided substantial tax exemptions, and gave them control of the only railroad on the Atlantic side of Guatemala. For Maya peoples, it meant more than the loss of lands they farmed, it meant sub-subsistence wages, harsh working conditions, and displacement from their own traditions of cultivation and husbandry.

The Great Depression and World War II regime led by Jorge Ubico extended Maya suffering. Selected as President in 1931, he was valued for his efficiency and cruelty as Governor of a state. He forced unpaid Maya labor for the building of roads, provided immunity for land owners to do anything to defend their property (described by many as “legalized murder”), and granted massive additional concessions to the United Fruit Company. These concessions included an additional 5.5 million acres of public lands with a condition that UFCO build a port, a condition that was quickly waived. These concessions also included exemptions from import duties and substantial tax exemptions.

Maya farmers were displaced on a large scale and converted into banana plantation workers. UFCO, now named Chiquita Brands International, controlled more land in Guatemala than any other individual or collective entity, the sole railroad, all of the electricity production capacity, and all Atlantic side ports. It operated by using the benefits of its abundant concessions, by using brutal labor conditions and, as early as the 1920s, by, repeatedly, soliciting the U.S. government to threaten various forms of coercive interventions. While there were a host of convergences, they resulted in little common ground; mostly mutual misperceptions and sufferings.

Divergent Convergence: Ideology and Political Power

The 42 years of Guatemala’s so-called “Civil War” (1954-1996), were, in fact, as much international as domestic. Domestically, there were conflicts between elites aligned with the interests of the church and military, elites supportive of reforms beneficial to Maya peasants, and mobilized Maya rebels. Internationally, there was the United States government, the CIA, the UFCO, and political leaders with close ties to UFCO such as John Foster Dulles.

The backdrop to the Civil War period was a period of reform led by Presidents Arevalo and Guzman. Arevalo was inspired by FDR’s “New Deal” and made advances in health care, education, and labor law while cracking down on communism. President Guzman’s 1952 Decree 900 represents a significant attempt at agrarian reform. It transferred uncultivated land to Maya peasants benefiting more than half a million people while limiting its impact on private land owners. Only 1710 of more than 350,000 land holders lost lands.

The U.S. government opposed these reforms as did UFCO now facing more accountability in its labor practices. In August, 1953, President Eisenhower charged the CIA to initiate “Operation PBSuccess” which funded, armed, and trained 480 men under the leadership of Carlos Armas. On June 18, 1954, Armas and his CIA troops invaded Guatemala. Guzman resigned and Armas replaced him as President. Armas immediately rescinded Decree 900.

Guatemala’s Civil War period was filled with significant in-fighting among leaders, assassinations, and cruelty to Maya peasants. Two aspects of this period merit specific attention: the continued and substantial financial and personnel interventions of the U.S. government to pursue its anti-communist ideology and to protect the economic interests of the UFCO, and the exceptional cruelty of the Rios Montt presidency.

For example, in the mid-1960s troops from the U.S. Army Special Forces were sent to Guatemala to train its military in counter-insurgency. The CIA’s Bay of Pigs plans incorporated the use of bases in Guatemala. And in the 1980’s the U.S. President praised Rios Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.” Yet, President Rios Montt’s regime was extreme even among military leaders – random and arbitrary torture, forced disappearances, rape, and scorched earth warfare targeting indigenous peoples. More than 200,000 people were massacred during the Civil War, mostly Maya. In 2001 formal charges of genocide were brought against Rios Montt for almost 31,000 documented cases of brutal murders for which he was responsible.

Divergent Convergence: Rejection and Hope

This exhibit began with migratory explorations and conquests of the past. It ends with images and thoughts related to migratory efforts in search of opportunity in the present. Today’s migratory stories pose challenges to our understanding. Both the rejection and the hope embedded in these stories can be bewildering and tormenting.

Migrations and immigrations do create unique, significant, and difficult issues to unravel and resolve. Few disagree. What is hard to understand is why a nation in which 98.4% of all of citizens are immigrants, descendants of immigrants, or enslaved migrants of the last 400 years, lack a greater readiness to address this complexity in a rigorous but compassionate spirit. And what is equally difficult to understand is the indifference of a nation to the pursuit of hopeful dreams by aspiring immigrants whose sufferings it directly, concretely, and substantially contributed.

Convergences abound. They can result in nothing more than two entities that meet, interact, and remain distinct. Or they can meet, interact, remain distinct, yet bond in arrangements of differentiated advantages and disadvantages. These are often divisive convergences that benefit one thread of convergence at the expense of the other thread. In various ways, this describes the convergences engaged in images and words relating to this exhibit.

Many of Guatemala’s people have sought haven in the USA not just hoping for jobs, higher income, and protection from the corruption that fosters violence, crime, discrimination, and drugs. In addition, they imagined that in the United States there may be a possibility for a converged union of separate identities that can be both different and one. A place where they can grow into new patterns and possibilities and still be able to preserve distinctive cultural traditions. A place where Cuban Americans, Tex/Mex, tofu, WASPs, Irish cops, yoga, pizza, and the immigrant first ladies of the President and Vice President have both unique private homes and a shared public home. A place that claims to live “E Pluribus Unum.”

Perhaps, naively, they assumed that a people who have been so involved in shaping their lives in Guatemala might have a place for them 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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