Traje ’s Future: Gendered Paths in Guatemala

Abstract

Traje’s Future:Gendered Paths in Guatemala Joyce Bennett (bio) There are many young women who do not use traje anymore. And I think to myself, how can this be? —ANNA, RESIDENT OF SAN JUAN COMALAPA, CHIMALTENANGO, GUATEMALA ANNA LAMENTS what many scholars have feared since the late twentieth century: that Western clothing is slowly replacing the distinctive clothing of Guatemala’s highland Maya, known as traje. Traje is distinguished from Western clothing by design, production method, and motifs; it clearly marks the wearer as Indigenous (Maya), as opposed to Ladino, the ethno-racial group of mixed European and Indigenous descent.1 Given the immediacy with which traje marks its wearer as Indigenous, it has often been used to single out Indigenous people for discrimination. Such discrimination came to a climax during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year-long ethnocidal civil war (1960–1996) when thousands of Indigenous people were killed (Commission for Historical Clarification 1998). During the war and after the Peace Accords (1996), Indigenous rights activists focused their efforts on creating a multicultural nation with legal protections for Indigenous rights and practices, including traje use. While Indigenous rights activists were fighting for legal protections, the national government simultaneously engaged in neo-liberal economic policies that some scholars argued would open spaces for multicultural society (Hale 2002, 486). Many hoped that what was once a slow shift to Western clothing would stop and that traje would live again. Such has not been the case. Instead, the erosion of traje use has increased exponentially since the Peace Accords due to several key factors that I will discuss in this article. While the fears about traje’s future surround both men’s and women’s traje, such fears first centered on men as they began changing out of traje in large numbers in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, women’s traje use was still considered unremarkable, as a high percentage of Indigenous Guatemalan women continued to wear traje day-to-day. It was not until the turn of the twenty-first century that women began to adopt the use of Western clothing in large numbers. High-profile Indigenous women such as Irma Velázquez Nimatuj and Rigoberta Menchú have reported significant and recent cases [End Page 67] of discrimination against them based on traje use (Velásquez Nimatuj 2008, 2011; Connolly-Ahern and Castells i Talens 2010). Such cases highlighted some of the reasons for traje’s decline and helped bring the discussion of traje use for both men and women to the national stage. The percentage of the population that currently uses traje varies depending on the town. Previous literature does not provide use rates for the two towns included in this study: San Juan Comalapa and Santa Catarina Palopó. The results of this research indicate that in Comalapa, no men use traje while 97 percent of women do use traje.2 In Santa Catarina Palopó, 40 percent of men use the traje while 100 percent of women use it. The difference between Santa Catarina and Comalapa is striking upon arrival to either town. Walking the streets in Santa Catarina, it is rare to find women in pants. A few school-aged girls wear them, but local gossip purports that their families cannot afford traje. Comalapa is different, as many schoolgirls wear Western clothing without gossip spread about them. As for men, it is rare to find a man in Comalapa wearing traje, but several men over the age of fifty in Santa Catarina do. This gender disparity in traje use began in the late twentieth century during the civil war. Leading scholars on traje in the highlands such as Hendrickson (1995) predicted then that men’s traje would disappear from use while the future of women’s traje remained unclear. Based on ten months of research and 143 interviews conducted in San Juan Comalapa, Chimaltengo, and Santa Catarina Palopó, Sololá, this article first argues that men’s traje in the region has moved out of daily use and entered a “sleeping” state, but that women’s traje may survive well into the twenty-first century. “Sleeping” in this case parallels the meaning found in language revitalization, where languages...