ABSTRACT
According to the "stationary cultures" model, as people of a particular place begin to move away from centers, they enter a realm of acculturation where they lose their holds on their "culture". These borders, though arising from bleeding hearts, are borders nonetheless. Maxims valorizing place and ancestry and lamenting travel are the kind of material that can rekindle a Redfieldian belief in the bounded and traditional "folk cultures". And this belief portrays images of sedentary and traditional Native Americans long fed to members of the author's generation from numerous sources. The "back-to-the-land" movement in the US, of which was once a part, was founded on like premises. Such under-theorized concepts of land tenure and native cultures, that arise from notions both apolitical and Utopian, and that even stem from beliefs in naturalized and "spiritual" connections to soil, resonate with images of Guatemalan indigenous farmers bent over hoes in their milpas in the highlands.
