ABSTRACT

Nations are imagined and constructed, not transhistorical and given in the nature of things, as Anderson (1983) established for Latin America. In the process of nation building, as with the formation of ethnic groups (Barth et al. 1969), distinction and sometimes opposition are accentuated between those within and those outside the nation, thus separating people by geographical and identity borders. In the case of indigenous national identities, an oft-used colonial strategy has been to divide and conquer by imposing such borders on groups. Whether this was intentional for the Ch’orti’ Maya or not, the results of separating the group into the three provinces of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador during the colonial period and corresponding nation-states thereafter served to break any unity that might have existed before. Moreover, various postcolonial ethnocidal practices such as land privatization and invasion, prejudicial education, military campaigns, and everyday discrimination has dissolved much distinctive Ch’orti’ identity and culture. However, after five corrosive centuries, “the Ch’orti’ Maya” are now reemerging as part of a transnational indigenous identity movement with the potential to (re)unite people long divided by nation-state borders.