Photographic Images of the Mayan Indian: Classic Times to the Zapatistas

Abstract

Introduction Here's the soldiers driving up the highway next to the Zapatista village. Ah, ha. He nods. Very interesting. next one is me behind some trees, taking pictures of the soldiers driving by. Wow. After each trip to Zapatista-controlled areas in Chiapas, southern Mexico, I brought back photographs. I show them to as many people as can be persuaded to sit and look. Each friend who has gone down there also has brought back pictures to pass around. Our photographs are of mundane village scenes, Mexican soldiers in their trucks, and fellow human rights observers. The majority of Zapatista supporters-North American, European, or Mexican-have not traveled to Chiapas. Most of us who have been there have not seen the confrontations, murders, and sad funerals, or had a chance to chat with Sub-Commandante Marcos. Photos, videos, newspaper articles, the Internet, and popular and academic books define the political issues for us. This article examines how photographs of Mayan Indians, contemporary and historic, have constructed our images and consequent expectations. The photographs discussed here were selected from the myriad of Classic Mayan archaeological texts, photographs, and postcards from the Mexican Revolution, ethnographic images, tourist postcards, and lastly, the multitude of posters, private photos, videos, newspaper photos, and film circulated among Zapatista supporters. Over the past four years, I have been enthralled, angered, bored, and saddened by the photographs coming from Chiapas. I have traveled to and lived in Zapatista villages and am familiar with Zapatista images. How did the conquering of the pyramids become the humble Indian in homespun clothing on the newest postcards in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas? How did Emiliano Zapata 's fire in his eye postcards and posters find themselves put in back of the new pile of quaint old Indian lady with a wrinkled face postcards? By what process did our expectations change from looking for a rebel Indian to searching for a sweet Mayan lady? Fortunately, we have a century of photographs, from the late 1800s to the present. I have selected a few representative works about the Maya with which to present and discuss these issues, exploring selected themes: the warrior, binary oppositions, feminization, and women's images from the earliest photographs to the present. Mayan history, for our purposes, is organized into five periods: (1) The Maya, the precolonial temple builders, (2) The Revolutionary Maya with Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, (3) The Peasant Maya when anthropologists arrive, (4) The Picturesque Maya with the coming of the tourists, and (5) The Rebel Maya, the Zapatista rebellion. Each period is briefly outlined and selected photographs described. The content of the pictures and their meaning are discussed. In conclusion, the questions posed above are considered. The Great Maya (250 AD - 900 AD) Six Centuries of Rule Crumbling colossal stone temples, stelae, pyramids, roadways, statues, and paintings, buried for almost a millennium, drew a small number of mid-nineteenth-century adventurous archaeologists to the humid southern Mexico jungle (Coe, Breaking 10). The conventionalized drawings, which accompanied most sculptures and reliefs, were always felt to be a true language, and the task was to painstakingly unravel the grammar. This was very difficult, particularly because the analyst first had to have a complete and correct text. Though drawings of the glyphs had been made and published, they were almost always incomplete or contained errors that frustrated decipherment. Finally, by the 1880s, as Michael D. Coe notes, Alfred Percival Maudslay used an immense wetplate camera; the plates had to be developed on the spot . . . in the rain and the heat, in regions bereft of all but the most rudimentary trails (Maya 110). …