ABSTRACT
The importance of ritual itself as a way to organize a community is incontestable. In Indiantown, organizing fiestas is the most available way to obtain the kind of authority, power, and credibility that the Mayas will accept. The ritual events provide the legitimation and the ambience of expectation that allow for the ordering of disparate objects, symbols and ideas. This clearly includes the incorporation into ritual of the key experiences of violent conflict, massacre of family and community, flight, and exile in a strange land. Part of the impetus and some of the models for the use of pre-conquest symbols to effect unity come from the transnational Mayan renewal movement, integrated recently into the world-wide indigenous rights movement. The global scope of the indigenous identity movement and the ties into this movement of many of the Indiantown leaders was apparent in Indiantown.
