San Pedro La Laguna, Week 5 (8/6-8/12)

Five weeks in San Pedro, I’m starting to feel like a local…the drunks mumble at me affectionately and the dogs let me pass with barely a whiff and a sidewards glance. Without overt attempts to interview or stick my nose into people’s business, I’ve started to make some good connections for my future work here. On Thursday, for instance, I accompanied a friend from the Corazon Maya Spanish School to Santiago Atitlan to meet with a very knowledgeable local named Dolores. My friend, Becca, a medical student at UCSF, has some grant money to investigate natural remedies that Guatemalans use to treat illnesses. She had found out about Dolores, an expert on various Tz’utujil traditions, from a guide book and some internet searches. We left from San Pedro La Laguna on Thursday afternoon after a full morning of classes. The weather was clear and the sun bright as we disembarked and walked up from the dock in Santiago Atitlan to the church that sits in the middle of town and is as much the community center as anything. I had already visited Santiago a few weeks prior and taken my share of photos of this very church. In fact, on that last visit I remembered meeting a guide in the church who was speaking English to some other tourists. She had been really helpful and kind to me during that short visit; I had hoped to meet her again. Lo and behold, the guide that I had randomly met before was the same Dolores who Becca had scheduled for a meeting. We recognized each other and noted the coincidence.

For the next hour Becca asked questions and Dolores answered them. A particularly interesting point that came up is that Dolores used to be Martin Prechtel’s wife. I had recently read Prechtel’s first book, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, and had indeed remembered reading about this very woman. And now we were discussing shamanism and healing practices in Santiago Atitlan! Serendipity has definitely graced my visit to Lake Atitlan more times and in more ways than I can count.

Serendipity seems to have intersected Martin Prechtel’s life as well. Raised among the Santo Domingo in New Mexico, Prechtel left the US in his early twenties and began bumming around Central America. In the mid-1970s, as he was walking through Santiago Atitlan on his first visit to the place, a local man grabbed him and told him he had been waiting for him for a long time. Prechtel, unsure what this was all about, decided to acquiesce to the old man’s entreaties. The man, Nicolas Chiviliu, turned out to be a powerful local shaman and began training Prechtel in the Tz’utujil traditions. Before long Prechtel had learned to speak Tz’utujil, had married Dolores, was training with his mentor, and was considered to be just another member of the Atiteco community. After many years living and working there, though, Prechtel decided to take his family away from La Violencia in the late 1980s. For some time, the family lived in a tipi outside of Taos, New Mexico. Eventually Prechtel befriended the famous poet, Robert Bly, who encouraged him to write about his experiences in Santiago Atitlan. With numerous books now published, Prechtel has become well known and gives regular seminars on various aspects of the spirituality he learned from Nicolas Chiviliu. While Prechtel has never returned to live in Santiago Atitlan, his ex-wife Dolores did return to her hometown.

Recently, I had the chance to read Prechtel’s very interesting book, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, as well as another rich and detailed account of Tz’utujil spirituality by Vincent Stanzione entitled Rituals of Sacrifice. In addition to these two works by Americans who came to spend a great deal of time in Santiago Atitlan, I also read the anthropologist Robert Carlsen’s excellent ethnography of Santiago Atitlan, The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town. My impression, after reading these three perceptive works, was that these authors were basically in agreement about the rapid disappearance of traditional ways in Santiago Atitlan. The rise of Protestantism, among many other influences, all but precluded the continuance of the spirituality that the Tz’utujil have practiced for centuries. The message, in short, was bleak: Mayan ways, especially traditional ideas about religion—mangled as they were from five centuries of Catholic influence—were now really about to disappear. What’s been interesting about my time here, short though it’s been, has been the increasingly confident impression I’ve developed that these authors are fundamentally wrong in their pessimism. After all, within a week of studying Tz’utujil I had already missed one Mayan ceremony that I had been invited to and attended yet another one which, at least it seemed to me, proceeded in much the same way it had probably been practiced for a very long time by a man most people call a sacerdote Maya, a Mayan priest. But it was Dolores’s statements that convinced me of the persistence of the “old ways.” She estimated there to be at least one hundred curanderos (healers) in Santiago Atitlan and perhaps fifty Mayan priests, including some young ones. She also knows many people who practice one form or another of evangelical Protestantism but in secret consult Mayan curanderos or priests from time to time. Moreover, my Tz’utujil teacher, Juan, knows of at least half a dozen Mayan priests in San Pedro, a decidedly less traditional community than Santiago Atitlan.

I think Prechtel, Stanzione, and Carlsen are correct in appreciating the loss of knowledge, an appalling process that has been happening since the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, in spite of the numerous threats to tradition, the Maya have always been masters of endurance and resiliency. In a time of militant Catholicism, the Maya liberally intermingled all sorts of Mayan beliefs within and among the Church that dominated all aspects of life here. And in spite of wealthy Protestant missions, hospitals, schools, and the threat of a worldwide movement of consumerism that burns all things unique out of every culture, I am confident that the Tz’utujil will continue to practice what they cannot preach.