Ch’ul Mut: Sacred Bird Messengers of the Chamula Maya

Where does traditional knowledge hide from prying eyes and a hostile world? Maruch Méndez Pérez and Diane Rus give us an answer: in women’s speech.Tsotsil-speaking Maya people in highland Chiapas, Mexico, are probably the best-documented Indigenous groups in Latin America. From 1957 into the 1990s, anthropologists from the Harvard Chiapas Project (HCP) produced a flood of studies about their beliefs, rituals, and way of life. Directed by Professor Evon Z. Vogt Jr., HCP researchers focused on two Tsotsil-speaking townships, Zinacantán and Chamula, with dozens of settlements.Vogt focused on discovering the elements of precolonial Mayan culture that had persisted into the twentieth century. But he and his students never explained how this culture might survive for ten centuries, through the Spanish conquest and subsequent catastrophes. Instead, they simply worked backward, attributing much of what they saw in modern Chiapas to pre-Columbian origins. They found “idols behind the altars” everywhere.Diane Rus and her husband Jan were HCP’s last graduate researchers. In 1973, when they began fieldwork in Chamula, Maruch Méndez (María in Spanish) was seventeen. Once Rus learned Tsotsil (Méndez remains monolingual), they spent the next fifty years talking about life in Chamula. They wrote the book together based on Méndez’s wide-ranging narratives.Even by Chiapas’s hardscrabble standards, Méndez tells us, she had a tough childhood. Her father died young, leaving a wife and six hungry children. At first, Maruch picked up useful information from older girls who pastured their sheep with hers. Later, Rus writes, “she listened to healers and women elders . . . [and] learned some of the traditional ideas about the sacred powers and duties of birds” (xxx). Over the years, she built a “vast store of traditional knowledge” about their role as messengers from God, Mother Earth, and other “spiritual powers and controllers of the universe.” Specifically, they warn us to become “more aware, to focus our attention as to how we treated others, to what dangers might lie ahead, to how we should humble ourselves and ask for guidance and pardon of those deities so as to maintain a correct balance in life.”How was this tradition passed along? In the 1960s two exceptional ethnographers, Robert Laughlin and Gary Gossen, described the complex “male-managed sphere” of public ritual and its interpretation. What Méndez and Rus show us, as Gossen recently told me, is a parallel domestic sphere, “totally inaccessible to men,” with its own highly developed symbolism and knowledge. This domestic sphere was far less visible than male-managed practices and thus more protected from outside meddling or repression. “Through the centuries Chamula women generally have remained monolingual,” agrees anthropologist Brenda Rosenbaum (1993: xv), who also worked there. “They have become . . . bearers of the most traditional aspects of Chamula culture.”Since the 1920s, anthropologists have based their “idols behind the altars” theory on the unlikely idea that colonial missionaries really didn’t understand what Indigenous people were up to. Older beliefs became secretly fused with Catholic saints and the Trinity; pre-Columbian offerings were transmuted into votive candles; prayers to God were really prayers to the sun or other Mayan spirits. Yet repressing unorthodox beliefs in the New World remained a Spanish obsession for nearly three centuries. After the conquest, Native populations clustered within earshot of the mission bell. Did Dominican missionaries in Chiapas really lose control over Indigenous religious practice? Probably not.The domestic sphere briefly came to light in the early 1970s. Indigenous women in Chiapas traditionally wove complicated geometric patterns into their blouses. A young gringo, the late Walter (Chip) Morris, began buying their textiles for sale to foreign tourists. Eventually, they told him that every pattern had a name and a meaning: monkey, cornfield, and so on. Each huipil told a story. Many weaving patterns had convincing pre-Columbian analogues and their stories were known only to women. Men’s clothing was different. According to anthropologist Ricardo Pozas, it mirrored how Dominican missionaries dressed the patron saint of whatever mission these men were assigned to—like a uniform.To my knowledge, Ch’ul Mut is only the fourth book about Chiapas written from a woman’s perspective, alongside a groaning shelf of conventional ethnography. It’s a gift of many colors. It gives us an intimate account of Maruch Méndez’s extraordinary life. It provides a firsthand account of how traditional knowledge is acquired and transmitted—not someone’s field notes about what other people said. And in a remarkable set of notes and color plates, Rus makes a compelling case for the preconquest roots of these beliefs. The book thus shines new light on one of Mesoamerica’s enduring mysteries: how Indigenous people preserved and modified their unique worldview under fifteen generations of grinding Spanish rule. “Maya and other original Mesoamerican peoples have never stopped having their own Native view of the universe,” she says. “Maruch’s text demonstrates the continuity of this grand pan-Mayan intellectual tradition over time and space” (xxxvii).