For Maya in Southland, Worlds Collide

Flanked by village elders, the Maya priest makes his rounds. Clouds of copal incense, said to nourish the gods of creation, envelop his unhurried entourage.

He pauses to chat in his native Kanjobal with a group of weavers, exchanges greetings with a gathering of herbal healers, and stops by the workshop of an artisan fashioning a marimba. The celebrants kneel before a wooden cross, its four points representing the breadth of the universe.

The scene is right out of the Maya heartland of northern Guatemala and southern Mexico. But the setting of this pageant is a tattered dance hall in South-Central Los Angeles, not far from the drone of the Harbor Freeway.

Although preserving their heritage is important to all immigrant groups, the Maya here may feel that desire more acutely. Over and over, the Maya say, the loss of their culture would be a kind of death.

“A Maya may be smiling on the outside, but without his culture, he is crying inside,” said Virves Garcia, a musician and community activist.

About 20,000 descendants of the ancient Maya empire live in Southern California, concentrated in two of the city’s poorest, most crowded districts--South-Central, and the Pico-Union and Westlake neighborhoods.

Most arrived during the 1980s, fleeing Guatemala’s brutal civil war, a Cold War struggle that left scores of villages razed and tens of thousands of Indians dead or “disappeared.”

The Maya here stepped out of time--from a pre-industrial agricultural lifestyle based on the cycle of the milpa, or cornfield.

“The Maya in Los Angeles have gone from indigenous communities where people know each other all their lives and marry each other, to urban barrios where everything is driven by money and the clock,” said James Loucky, an anthropologist at Western Washington University who has worked with the Maya here.

For such a traditional people, the diverse and dizzying world of Southern California at first seemed incomprehensible. Few had more than a primary education. Many arrived illiterate; others spoke only limited Spanish.

In fact, although many lump them together with the mass of recent Latin American immigrants, Maya were often treated as outsiders at home and complain about fellow Latinos here who make fun of their accents and disparage them as indios and bumpkins.

The Maya are a people apart.

In Latin America, they have zealously guarded their culture and language through conquest, drought, earthquake and other calamities, human-made and natural. Today, civil strife is tearing apart the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, a Maya stronghold.

It is their people’s singularity--their language, traditional belief system, kinship ties--that elders say has saved the Maya despite centuries of repression and forced acculturation by Europeans and the mixed-raced ladino class that dominates Guatemala and southern Mexico.

“What is crucial for us is preserving for our children the importance of what it is to be Maya,” said Antonio Marcos, a community leader who helped organize the event.

However, in just a generation in the United States, the inexorable forces of assimilation are quickly eroding Maya identity--especially among the young.

Lorenzo Francisco, who played the priest in the recent pageant, said: “So many people come here with such high hopes and suffer a shock, lose their dignity, their culture. They forget what it means to be Maya.”

At 33, Francisco is among a group of younger men who serve as surrogate village elders in a patriarchal community largely lacking the older generation that plays such a crucial role in traditional Maya society.

A philosophical man with a keen sense of humor, he is an evangelist who proselytizes about the importance of cultural continuity. A student of Mayan languages who has traveled widely throughout the Maya world, he spends his days stitching Calvin Klein jeans at an apparel factory for near minimum wage.

Francisco and Garcia played central roles in the recent celebration that honors the patron saint of Santa Eulalia, their Guatemalan hometown--among the handful of highland townships that provide the bulk of the migrants who come here.

Immigrants from several other Maya towns also sponsor such fiestas, underscoring a broad commitment to fostering community ties, especially reaching out to the young. For the first time, the former townspeople of Santa Eulalia sponsored their own soccer tournament in Los Angeles. Both Catholic and evangelical Christians, the major religious groups in the highlands, have formed Maya church groups here, sometimes including Kanjobal-language choirs.

Garcia, an accomplished marimba player, is working to synthesize a kind of “Maya rock,” a fusion of contemporary and traditional sounds that he hopes will appeal to young Maya Americans.

Half a dozen or so volunteer groups serve as practical aid organizations, cultural custodians and fund-raisers for projects in distant hometowns--including a church rebuilt in Santa Eulalia after an arson fire during the civil war.

Of course, some dilution of Maya culture is inevitable in a place like Southern California, with its hybrid influences and the daily struggle to make a living.

Yet the fervent hope of many immigrants is that the essence of Maya-ness can be preserved in the next generation, just as Maya culture survived the trauma of the Spanish conquest and forced conversion to the Church of Rome.

The Maya have proved to be masters of adaptation.

“This is not just a simple process of cultural loss; it’s about how Maya culture is re-articulated in new ways in a different setting,” said Eric Popkin, a sociologist at Sarah Lawrence College in New York who has studied the people of Santa Eulalia. “There is a certain fluidity in Maya identity and the way it is transformed in a new context.”

Rich History, Modern Influences

Despite their humble economic station, both here and in Guatemala, the Maya are culturally rich: descendants of one of the hallowed civilizations of Mesoamerica--a culture that built monumental cities, pioneered studies of mathematics and astronomy, and developed a complex cosmology and writing system.

Visitors gape in awe at the majestic ruins of Palenque, Tikal and Chichen Itza, remnants of an empire that once dominated the Central American isthmus and beyond until its city-states were abandoned a thousand years ago for reasons still occluded by time.

This past grandeur remains an important component of the Maya identity, which combines pre-Columbian and post-conquest influences. The Maya priest, a kind of village spiritual advisor who predates the arrival of the Spaniards, is still an influential figure. The Maya in California must balance among three distinct worlds: their tradition-bound upbringing, the vibrant Latino spirit of contemporary Southern California, and the mainstream, predominantly English-speaking society of the United States.

Spanish, not English or Kanjobal, serves as their lingua franca, their language of survival--used in shops and on assembly lines, in schools and on the streets.

Many Maya links to mainstream U.S. culture are surprisingly limited. Marathon workdays and limited Spanish and English tend to insulate parents.

For many Maya, exposure to non-Latinos is largely restricted to fleeting contacts with African American neighbors or with the Asian entrepreneurs who own many sewing shops.

“We wonder, ‘Where are the Americans?’ ” asks Margarito Lopez, a Santa Eulalia native who lives in South-Central Los Angeles, still somewhat confused by the city’s patterns of residential and cultural separation.

Almost instinctively, Maya tend to keep a low profile amid larger Latino groups. Margarito Lopez’s 13-year-old son, Diego Ismael, has only been in the United States a year, but he has already noticed how Maya youths in his school refrain from speaking Kanjobal. They fear put-downs from Spanish-speaking peers.

“They’re afraid the others will laugh at them,” Diego says in Spanish as he sits in his family’s living room, a Mexican soap opera blaring away on the television.

Having spent his formative years in Guatemala, Diego speaks fluent Kanjobal. But many young Maya, particularly those born in the United States, don’t speak the native tongue, the most critical link in the chain of ethnic kinship. (Maya, the biggest Indian group in North America, speak about two dozen languages; Kanjobal is the principal one used in Los Angeles.)

When they visit families in Central America, many youngsters can’t even communicate with their grandparents.

“I feel our children here become very confused,” said Francisca Pedro, a Maya mother who lives in South-Central and who, like many Maya, uses what is usually a given name as her surname. “Many of us parents must work all day; we come home very late, and the children are alone a lot. Maybe that’s why some children go to gangs. They lack the kind of affection we can provide them back home.”

Youths crash some cultural barriers every day: in school, on the street, in the playground. Not surprisingly, many young Maya are more likely to savor rap or rock ‘n’ roll (musica loca, “crazy music,” as some elders say) than the bouncy tones of the marimba, a xylophone-like instrument. At the Santa Eulalia festival, the dance floor becomes jammed only when the marimba gives way to a disc jockey playing recorded salsa and other Latin tunes.

Among those in attendance is Jairo Juan, a 13-year-old who has spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He slides easily from English to Spanish and back but has trouble with the Mayan tongue. His memories of Guatemala are hazy: fragmented recollections of feast days and family gatherings. His grandparents, the keepers of cultural orthodoxy in the extended-family network of the highlands, are distant memories, pictures on the wall of his family’s apartment near downtown.

One Component of Larger Diaspora

The Maya are one of many ethnic groups from Latin America--including Mixtec, Zapotec and Purepecha Indians from Mexico--whose exploding presence is redefining the Indian makeup of the United States, where less than 1% of the overall population is officially categorized as American Indian. Census Bureau definitions are largely limited to those affiliated with recognized U.S.-based tribal groups. But that interpretation excludes the multitudes of recent immigrants who are wholly or largely of Indian ancestry.

“This emigration kind of shakes up the categories,” said Michael Kearney, an anthropologist at UC Riverside. “Indigenous people are on the move.”

The Maya of Los Angeles are part of a broader diaspora from Maya lands that took off as the protracted Guatemalan civil war escalated starting in the late 1970s. Like so many caught up in the historic surge of Central American and Mexican emigration, most Maya intended to save money and return home with a stake to their hardscrabble communities.

“I thought I’d stay for a year or two and then go back,” said Antonio Lopez, a former teacher who came north in 1977 from San Miguel Acatan, a Kanjobal-speaking town whose residents were among the first to come to the United States.

Back then, it was still relatively easy to enter Mexico illicitly, travel overland by bus and train to the U.S.-Mexico border and cross on foot with the swelling legions then penetrating the largely unfenced international boundary. Maya soon learned to disguise their accents and pretend to be Mexican, the better to avoid extortion-minded Mexican police--and, if captured on the U.S. side, avert being deported to Guatemala.

The spreading conflict in Guatemala quickly transformed what was a trickle of Maya migrants into a torrent. Tens of thousands of refugees fled to Mexico; many others continued further north. The military, viewing many Maya as guerrilla accomplices, adopted a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign that spread terror through the countryside.

Antonio Lopez returned to San Miguel in late 1980 to find his once-tranquil hometown a war zone.

“Everything had changed,” said Lopez, who added that he was fortunate to survive detention by guerrillas and government troops. Fearing for his family, Lopez led his wife and seven young children out of Guatemala in 1981, eventually to Los Angeles. Word of the escape route north spread to other Maya towns, including Santa Eulalia.

Soon, an embryonic Maya social structure was in place from Los Angeles to South Florida, the two major zones of settlement. The Maya gathered in extended family groups, typically in larger Latino neighborhoods. They often shared rented homes and apartments--smaller re-creations of their ancestral villages. When someone died, the expatriates passed the hat to send the remains to be buried in the native earth. They formed civic groups and began celebrations-in-exile of their hometown feast days, the most important time on rural calendars.

Today, however, almost a quarter-century after the Maya began moving north, many are still here illegally, or in immigration limbo.

Thousands won temporary work permits through a landmark federal court case alleging that the Reagan and Bush administrations illegally denied political asylum to people fleeing Washington-backed regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. Last year, Congress passed a new law that holds out the possibility of green cards--legal permanent residence status--for many who arrived by 1990. But, after years of waiting, skepticism is widespread. And many who came after the 1990 cutoff face speedy deportation if caught.

“The government in Guatemala doesn’t want us, and this government in Washington doesn’t seem to want us,” said Samuel Juan, a Santa Eulalia native. “Where will there be a place for us? On Mars?”

In recent years, Maya say, immigration has slowed considerably, in part because of a peace process in Guatemala that culminated with the signing of an accord ending the war in December 1996. More important, though, Maya cite a California job market glutted with immigrant labor and the intensified crackdown on illegal immigration by U.S. and Mexican authorities.

The Next Generation

Like indigenous immigrant groups from Mexico, the Maya tend to occupy the bottom rung of the job ladder: from the sweatshops of Los Angeles to the slaughterhouses of the Midwest to the restaurants of Houston to the fields of northern San Diego County, South Florida and the Pacific Northwest. More than 50,000 Maya now reside in the United States, according to rough academic estimates.

Although some Maya immigrants could never cope with being displaced--succumbing to alcohol, debilitating bouts of nostalgia or other problems--most Maya have managed to adjust, even achieve a measure of success and comfort.

“Here, we feel like we’re in our pueblo, not in the United States,” said Margarito Lopez, 37, a slight man who seems to have a perpetually pensive look on his face.

Although he supports a family of 10--eight children and his wife in Los Angeles--on a salary of about $7 an hour in a garment shop, Lopez was able to save enough for a down payment last year and bought a two-story house in South-Central for $130,000.

South-Central, sometimes viewed as emblematic of the nation’s inner-city woes, is generally seen by Maya as a step up from the crime-ridden Pico-Union and Westlake district west of downtown. In South-Central, many can afford houses with yards, that emblem of upward mobility.

Like other immigrants, the Maya emphasize opportunities for the next generation. “My children now have improved horizons; they can work in an office,” Lopez says, using the word “office” with reverence.

In Maya fashion, he reaches for the metaphorical, speaking of benches and chairs as a kind of symbol for his children’s hoped-for advancement:

“In Guatemala, we sat on benches or on the floor--that was all we had. But here my children sit on chairs. And they can move to grander chairs. They are not limited to benches here.”

His eldest, Ana, 17, who served for the past year as honorary “queen” of the Santa Eulalia contingent in Los Angeles, came to the United States at 12, after a traditional upbringing. (One younger sister remained in Guatemala to care for her grandparents, as is customary.) Ana keeps her traditional garments--the huipil, a loose-fitting blouse, and el corte, a long woven skirt--folded for use on special occasions, such as the annual hometown feast days. She wears her hair cut in modern fashion, not in the elegant trenzas, or braids, worn in the highlands.

Ana is set to graduate this year from high school, the first in her family to do so. She hopes to become an architect or policewoman, careers that would be unimaginable in her hometown. Early marriage, motherhood and life as a homemaker are still the typical future for young women in the highlands. For now, though, Ana plans to find a job as a receptionist or saleswoman at McDonald’s, to help support her family.

“My culture means a lot to me--it’s something very beautiful,” said Ana, who speaks Kanjobal and Spanish but struggles with English. “But my life is here now.”

Her father frets about a loss of Maya identity among his offspring. He speaks Kanjobal at home--his wife speaks only limited Spanish and no English--but he recognizes that other influences beyond his control or even understanding are shaping his family. He spends much of his limited free time shuttling his children and others to Maya social and cultural events.

“In material things, we don’t have much to leave to our children,” Lopez said. “But our culture is an inheritance we can leave them that no one can steal from them.”