Table Of ContentFRANK CANCIAN
THE DECLINE OF
COMMUNITY IN
ZINACANTAN
Public Life, and
Econom~
Social Stratification, 1960-1987
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
STANFORD CALIFORNIA
1
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 1992 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
Original printing 1992
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PREFACE
This is a study of Zinacantan, a municipio (town
ship) of Tzotzil-speaking Maya in the highlands of the Mexican state
of Chiapas. In the 198o's roughly 15,ooo people lived within the
boundaries of the municipio, but, of course, those boundaries did
not isolate the people of Zinacantan from the world, nor did they
homogenize internal relations. On one side, the regional, national,
and international economies in which Zinacantan was set are cru
cial to the story told below-for from them came many of the forces
that transformed Zinacantan between the early 196o's and the late
198o's. On the other side those same forces in combination with
some internal ones led the hamlets within Zinacantan to replace the
municipio as the principal arena for much of public life. Thus, by
the 198o's, units both bigger than and smaller than the municipio
were important in the everyday experience of Zinacantecosi their
worlds had become smaller as well as larger. I have tried to shift
across these system levels or units of analysis (call them what you
like) without much fuss-in part I suppose because it is not always
obvious why the analysis should go in one direction rather than
another.
My work in Zinacantan is embedded in the Harvard Chiapas Proj
ect. Since the project's fieldwork in Zinacantan began in 1957, its
director, Evon Z. Vogt, and his students and research colleagues have
produced dozens of monographs and articles (see Vogt 1978i Bricker
and Gossen 1989). Vogt's genius for nurturing scholars includes his
ability to promote independent worki and many (like me) who began
as students continued to work in Zinacantan years, even decades,
later. Thus, there is an extraordinary intensity and continuity in the
record since the late 195o's. The works of George Collier, Jane Col
lier, John Haviland, Robert Laughlin, Professor Vogt, and Robert
vi I Preface
Wasserstrom have been particularly useful in orienting this study.
My personal history in Zinacantan began in r96o, when I went
there to do fieldwork for my dissertation (Cancian 196 5 ), and contin
ued in the late 196o's with a study of corn farming (Cancian 1972).
By the summer of 1971, when I returned to finish a photo essay
(Cancian 1974b), I had worked in Zinacantan for more than 30
months. In the summer of 1980, after an absence of almost ten years
while my children were growing, I visited again. The fear of being
forgotten and unwelcome gave way to the excitement of finding that
I had old friends, and sometimes relations with their children and
grandchildren, who had now grown. Field research for this project,
which began in 1981 and stretched over six years, is described in
Appendix A.
Much of my recent fieldwork was done in Nachig, one of the older
and larger hamlets. I gathered information about every one of its
more than 300 households, recorded life histories of several men,
and attended public and some private events there. Since I will
sometimes take the people of Nachig to be representative of the
people of Zinacantan, I will say more about Nachig's special char
acteristics as the story develops.
Chapter r is devoted to the theoretical issues most directly im
portant to the study, but there are two other issues, history and
gender, about which something needs to be said-for they have
been central to much recent anthropological thinking. This study
became historical for a variety of reasons, including the intellectual
climate in anthropology. Despite emphasis on the 196o's and the
early 198o's, the two periods of my most intense fieldwork, this is
in no sense a restudy. The intervening period is documented in vari
ous ways, and the 197o's are crucial to the analysis. Recent empha
sis on gender is not reflected in what follows. This is a study of
men-in large part because of my long-term personal investment in
the study of the extra-household economy and public life, which
were dominated by men in Zinacantan (at least through the first
several layers of analysis). The limitations associated with this per
sonal investment made continuing my old focus more productive for
me than more extensive documentation of female perspectives on
these topics during these years. I hope someone will add them soon.
After I adjusted my wants to discoveries made along the way and
to the realities of fieldwork, I was able to collect most of the data
that I wanted. Thus, the "data" at once served an independently de
termined plan of analysis and determined that plan of analysis. Be
sides general information and case materials that shape the context
at every level of analysis, the data include national and state govern-
Preface I vii
ment economic and demographic statistics, censuses of the hamlet
of Nachig, autobiographical statements, Zinacanteco tax and public
service records, and accounts of public meetings. Some of the data
are from published public records, and references are given to the
sources; some are from interview notes that include information
given in confidence and are by convention not public. In addition
there are the data from the censuses of Nachig I made in 1967 and
1983, and updated in 1987 (Appendix C), and the data from cargo
waiting lists (Appendix D). These, when coded for quantitative anal
ysis, provide almost complete anonymity to individuals, so I have
prepared computer files in a format that will make the data easy to
use for various purposes, including alternatives to the analysis made
below. The files (the Nachig Data Set and the Lists Data Set) contain
all the variables used here and others that I have not used in my
analysis. They may be obtained (identified as the Zinacantan Data
Sets) from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social
Research (P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48ro6-1248), or from
me (Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine,
California 92 7 I7 ). Because these data will be available, I give less
detailed breakdowns in the text and appendixes.
The identities of the people mentioned in this study are not dis
guised. Most people are identified by shortened hispanicized names
(Vogt 1969: 144-45). Personal statements are used with the permis
sion of those who made them, and most events involving named
individuals were public. In a very few cases I have omitted descrip
tions of relevant illegal activity, or altered details to prevent the
identification of individuals.
The meaning of informed consent, or permission to use infor
mation provided to an anthropologist, is at best ambiguous in a
place like Zinacantan, where many people cannot read. Most people
helped me because of trust built up over many years, or because they
trusted a person who trusted me. Some of the men who worked with
me for the first time knew that others had worked with me and
seemed to want to see what it was all about. Zinacantecos who were
formally interviewed were first shown my publications in English
(Cancian 1965, 1972) and Spanish (Cancian 1976), and sometimes a
book of photographs (Cancian 1974b). They were told that my cur
rent work concerned changes, especially changes in work since my
visits to Zinacantan in the 196o's, and that what they said would be
. part of the new project. Thus, they were in a position to censor their
remarks to fit the situation. Nonetheless, most spoke very openly.
I have tried to be discrete with their confidences, both here and in
the field when I was talking with other Zinacantecos.
Guillermo Perez
Pablo Ramirez Mariano Martinez
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people and institutions have been generous in
their attention to my project. In Zinacantan, Guillermo (Yermo)
Perez, an elder statesman of the hamlet of Nachig, was my mentor.
He oriented me, took initiative to improve my knowledge, and
facilitated my contact with others who could help me. Mariano
Martinez, the senior official in Zinacantan's religious hierarchy in
1983, and Pablo Ramirez of San Cristobal de las Casas, for many
years a government and PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional)
party official concerned with Indian municipios in the area, also
gave in many ways from their extensive knowledge and personal
resources. All three made my work a rewarding personal experience.
Many others in Zinacantan contributed both knowledge and prac
tical help. I am especially grateful to Domingo Perez and Juan
Vazquez of Navenchauc, Juan de la Torre, Antonio de la Torre, and
Mariano Anselmo Perez of Hteldum, and Jose Hernandez of Apaz.
The r r Nachig men whose stories are told in Chapter 4 gave inter
views, as did Mariano Perez and Jose Sanchez of Hteklum, Lorenzo
Lopez and Mariano Perez of Paste, Jose Gonzales of Tierra Blanca,
and Marcos Perez and Manuel Hernandez of Vochojvo.
Padre Jose Luis Arguello, Patricia Armendariz, Maria Elena Fer- ·
nandez Galan, and Mario Toledo, all residents of San Cristobal de
las Casas at the time of the research, helped in various ways, as did
two anthropologists, Robert Laughlin and Robert Wasserstrom. The
staff of the Centro de Investigaciones Ecologicas del Sureste library
in San Cristobal was frequently helpful.
Funding for research trips from 1981 to 1983 came from the
Wenner-Gren Foundation, and from the Mexico/Chicano Program,
the Faculty Research Committee, and the School of Social Sciences
x I Acknowledgments
at the University of California, Irvine. A grant from the National
Science Foundation (BNS-8310676) supported extended fieldwork in
1984 and various research expenses before and after that, and are
lated NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates grant supported a
research assistant for a year.
For research help in the field and in libraries in Mexico City and
San Cristobal in 1984, I am indebted to Maria Ester Enriquez and
Hector Hugo Hernandez, students at different campuses of the Uni
versidad Aut6noma Metropolitana in Mexico City, and to their re
spective mentors, David Barkin and Claudio Lomnitz. I was lucky
to have Mimi Wan, Daniel Coble, and David Frossard as research
assistants at uc1 after the main fieldwork was done.
Among the many people who helped prepare the manuscript I am
especially grateful to Ziggy Bates, the late Wilma Laws, and Helen
Wildman for skillful word processing done in the midst of techno
logical change, and to Chase Langford and Cheryl Larsson for the
maps. Thanks for varied, often very timely, contributions are owed
to Kathy Alberti, Pete Brown, Debora Dunkle, Lauren Greenfield,
Shelby Haberman, Anita Iannucci, Cecilia Ramos, Kim Romney,
Raimundo Sanchez, Socorro Sarmiento, and Jesus Villatoro.
Finally, my special thanks go to Peggy Barlett, Carole Browner,
Steven Cancian, George Collier, Stuart Plattner, Art Rubel, and
Evon Vogt, who usually managed to be simultaneously kind, percep
tive, and frank in their responses to a preliminary draft of this book,
and to Francesca Cancian, who did all that and much more.
