Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?: The Historical, Relational, and Contingent Interplay of Ch’orti Indigeneity by Brent E. Metz (review)

Reviewed by: Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?: The Historical, Relational, and Contingent Interplay of Ch’orti Indigeneity by Brent E. Metz Paul M. Worley Metz, Brent E. Where Did the Eastern Mayas Go?: The Historical, Relational, and Contingent Interplay of Ch’orti Indigeneity. UP of Colorado, 2022. 389 pp. ISBN: 978-1646422616. At a conference on Indigenous literatures that was held in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the late 2000s, I presented a paper (later published as my first article) on “Maya immigration” to the United States in an award-winning short story by the linguistic activist Felipe Castillo Tzec. Audience response was swift, with one senior scholar saying that he did not know who the “Maya agringado” author was, while assuring everyone present that the “real Maya” lived in their ancestral villages without electricity or running water and they most assuredly did not immigrate to the United States. And yet . . . I begin my review of Brent E. Metz’s new book with this scene as a way of underscoring both the importance of the work itself and how settlers received academic preconceptions all too often structure our relationships and even entire fields of knowledge where Indigenous Peoples are concerned. As suggested by the book’s title, Metz does not begin from the premise that Indigeneity is a fixed, timeless form of identity which one may or may not claim. Rather, echoing work like that of the (sometimes) Maya anthropologist Juan Ariel Castillo Cocom, Metz embraces the uncertainties and fissures of identities themselves to author what people will see by turns a cutting edge and a controversial work. Either way, it is the rare kind of book that merits multiple close readings and careful attention. In terms of approach, Metz outlines four broad notions of Indigenous identity, ranging from those which would be based on a timeless sense of authenticity (“anti-indigenous primordialism”) or even the notion that any such identity is fraught and a pawn of the state (“deconstructivism”), to ethnocentric perspectives that would [End Page 167] claim Indigenous cultures have originary aspects in need of revitalization (“pro-indigenous primordialism”) and what he refers to as “decolonizing scholarship,” in which “scholars are unwilling to give up the pursuit of accuracy, precision, and unfettered analysis for the sake of primordialism, but they nonetheless work with and on the behalf of the colonized” (5). “Engaged” scholars who participate in such a mode of scholarship “do not conflate ‘peoples’ with languages, traditions, and territories, they do not see indigenous identification, abandonment, suppression, latency, and re-adoption as disqualifying contradictions but as expected among populations suffering from dispossession and disadvantage” (6). Importantly, Metz is well aware that “decolonizing” here is not a simply a discursive move that calls for settler-scholars from the Global North to produce more nuanced scholarship that will in turn be consumed by other settler-scholars in the Global North. When the book turns from providing the reader with the historical background of Ch’orti’ communities in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, Metz’s role as a collaborator with Ch’orti’ activists takes center stage. While traditions and language tend to be at the forefront of their interactions with Ch’orti’s or people in the process of rearticulating a Ch’orti’ identity, one gets the feeling that finding evidence of Ch’orti’ identity is not the end itself. Ultimately, that would seem to be the recovery or restoration of Ch’orti’ lands. A chapter-by-chapter summary of the book’s ten chapters lies beyond the scope of this review. The first three chapters give the reader a solid understanding of Metz’s approach, as well as of a broader history of the “Ch’orti’ Area.” The following six chapters then craft careful explorations of Ch’orti’ identity across the three different nation-states that currently sit on Ch’orti’ land: Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Beyond the obvious similarities these groups would share despite artificial political borders, one of the book’s foremost virtues is its treatment of how each nation-state has shaped and continues to shape Ch’orti’ identities within its borders. In Ch’orti’-speaking municipios in Guatemala, for example...