ABSTRACT
In 1982, a Jacalteco Maya man named Victor Montejo arrived in Pittsboro, North Carolina, a small Southern mill town near Chapel Hill where he lived at the time. While it is true that the Maya and other colonized indigenous groups, as Wolf shows, have used barriers of various types intentionally to delineate places for their survival, one cannot assume that the barriers contain or delimit the identities of the people themselves. Nevertheless, the Jacaltenango municipio boundaries, part of which were established during the colonial period, have long served to represent the Jacalteco people in a variety of literatures, from tourist brochures to anthropology dissertations, and continue even today. The presumption behind these maps seems to be that one can trace, using lines, the boundaries where Guatemalan languages and traditions persist, where an indigenous group is to be found geographically. Indeed, a Maya person had first come to the town in North Carolina, rather than the opposite.
