Tzotzil of San Bartolomé de los Llanos

ETHNONYMS: Indians of Venustiano Carranza, San Bartoleños, Totiketik, Totiques, Tzotziles

Orientation

Identification and Location. San Bartolomé de los Llanos is the capital of the municipio of Venustiano Carranza, near the center of the Mexican state of Chiapas. The population of the town, which is also called San Bartolomé Venustiano Carranza, is half Tzotzil and half Ladino (Spanish speakers of mixed Indian, Spanish, and African ancestry). More than half the remainder of the population of the municipio is non-Indian. The Tzeltal-speaking Indian community of Aguacatenango occupies a corner of the municipio lands, but maintains a separate identity. The municipio also includes a large sugar-mill community at Pujiltic, and several Ladino towns.

The town is built on a side ridge of an extinct volcano, about 800 meters in elevation; the lower end of the town is in the temperate climatic zone. Most of the other lands of the municipio are in the plains (los llanos ) — hence the community name—immediately north of the Río Grijalva. The average elevation in the plains is less than 500 meters, fully within the hot tropical climatic zone.

Demography. There were approximately 7,500 Tzotzil in the municipio in 1960, about 5,000 of whom had their principal residence in the town center. In 1990 there were between 8,000 and 10,000 Tzotzil living in the town center and in a new settlement next to it, and perhaps another 8,000 to 10,000 living in the rest of the municipio. Official census figures are not reliable, and numbers cited here are estimates by anthropological field workers and knowledgeable residents.

Linguistic Affiliation. Tzotzil is a major language of the Maya Family, which is spoken by more than 150,000 Indians in Chiapas. Its closest linguistic relative is Tzeltal, spoken by about the same number of people in adjacent parts of Chiapas. San Bartolomé Tzotzil is unique among Highland Chiapas dialects in possessing phonemic tones. It is the language of the home and the first language learned by the Indians of San Bartolomé, but all adults can also speak Spanish. Indian women are usually more at ease speaking Spanish than are Indian men, contrasting sharply with the pattern in most Chiapas Indian communities.

History and Cultural Relations

Tzotzil speakers entered the Chiapas Highlands around a.d. 1000. After the Conquest, the Spanish implemented a policy of reducción, moving the scattered population into towns built on a standard model. San Bartolomé appears in historical records of the late 1500s. It has been continuously occupied ever since. All regional censuses, beginning in 1572, have listed substantial numbers of both Ladinos and Indians in the town center. Colonial censuses also list "mulattos" and "Negroes" as residents, but the terms are not used in post-1821 census records. The basic relations between Ladinos and Indians were those of dominance and subordination from the town's founding until the 1970s.

From Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 through 1932, the town of San Bartolomé had two parallel governing bodies: the official town council and municipal officers, who were all Ladinos, and a separate, officially tolerated Indian government. The Indian political system was intimately linked with a structure of religious offices connected with the celebration of religious fiestas.

The Indian governing structure was suppressed by the state government in 1932. At the same time, public celebrations of religious fiestas were prohibited, and new names were given to all towns formerly named after Catholic saints. Both the town and the municipio of San Bartolomé de los Llanos were renamed Venustiano Carranza; however, when speaking Spanish, Indians continued to call themselves San Bartoleños. The separate Indian political system was maintained but not publicly or legally recognized. Lay prayer leaders continued religious services, and saints' days were commemorated, but churches were padlocked and there were no public celebrations of religious fiestas.

Churches were reopened and fiesta celebration recommenced with the change of government in 1940, but there was no resident priest between 1932 and 1954. National emphasis on agrarian reform led to the creation of a series of ejido communities within the municipio in the 1930s. Most members of these new communities were Indians of San Bartolomé, but they also included some landless, poor Ladinos. The land base of the new ejidos was taken from lands claimed by the traditional Indian community. Ejido members moved away from the town center to new towns in their newly granted lands, but their Indian majorities recognized a spiritual connection to their former home. When town fiestas were reinstated, Indian ejido members participated and held religious offices.

Completion of a hydroelectric dam across the Río Grijalva in the early 1970s displaced several of the major ejido communities. Resettlement was undertaken by several agencies of government, with little coordination among them. The allocation of lands to the resettled communities was confused, and neighboring towns often made competing claims to the same lands. Ominously, some of the monetary compensation to the displaced communities went to purchasing weapons from international sources.

Disputes over access to land led to repeated armed conflict between opposing Indian groups beginning in 1976 and continuing ever since. As these groups gained armed strength, they also began taking back lands from Ladino ranchers. The largest group, successors to the traditional Indian community of the town center, took credit for the assassination of a well-known, politically powerful Ladino rancher in 1976. Others received death threats, and several Ladino leaders fled the town.

Traditionally, the Indian community looked inward, and Indians of other communities were not seen as having common interests. In the 1970s internal factions began to seek outside allies among other Indians. At the urging of political activists from Mexico City in the mid-1970s, three militant peasant organizations founded in Venustiano Carranza expanded to other towns. This led to increasing solidarity among Indian communities across Chiapas. Intracommunity relationships in recent years are also reflected in greater political participation at the national level.

The January 1994 uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) intensified pan-Indian interaction both in support of official national policy and in opposition to it. Political openings arising from the Zapatista rebellion have been exploited by multicommunity peasant organizations, and San Bartoleños have played a prominent role. Ladinos have openly organized in resistance to Indian demands, and they have been raising private armies to intimidate Indian communities. The presence of about half of the entire Mexican army in Chiapas has complicated all of these conflicts.

By 1995 large areas within the municipio had gone out of production because of uncertainties about who would end up controlling them. Thousands of hectares of arable land changed hands in 1994, often because of extralegal seizures. Every month during 1994 groups of Indians occupied land as squatters, locally called "invaders." For a time, government agencies responded by paying landowners for the occupied lands, and then granting them to landless peasants, not necessarily the squatters who began the process. After the August 1994 elections, this program stopped. Private armies, organized by Ladino landholders, frequently were used to eject squatters. Just before planting time in 1995, a large group representing the San Bartolomé community attempted to occupy communal lands to which legal title had recently been reconfirmed. They were met by the army and state police. There were five deaths.

Settlements

San Bartolomé was founded as a nucleated town center that was the year-round place of residence for its inhabitants. By around 1900, most Indians resided on scattered estates held by Ladinos, returning to town for fiestas and other ceremonies. During the active phases of the Mexican Revolution (1915-1922 in this area), nearly all Indians returned to living in the town center. In the 1920s illegal land seizures by Ladinos forced most Indians into reliance on communal lands 16 kilometers or farther away from the town center.

The response was a new and unusual residence pattern. Women and children maintained the family's primary residence in the town, while men typically walked out to their distant maize fields on Mondays, slept there in rude shelters, and did not return to the town until Friday or Saturday. Most of the town-based Indians followed this pattern of periodic male absence until the 1980s, when improved roads and increasing Indian truck ownership made daily commuting feasible.

Two mid-sized colonies and a number of smaller settlements near the Río Grijalva were abandoned in the 1970s because of rising waters behind the new hydroelectric dam. Elsewhere in the municipio, rising population since the 1960s has led to the establishment of many new settlements.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The primary source of economic support in San Bartolomé is shifting cultivation of maize, beans, and squashes. Other cash crops are planted to a lesser degree. Most men with access to land produce much more than is consumed by their immediate families; the excess is sold for cash. In the late twentieth century, however, population pressure on land resources has left many younger men with nowhere to plant their own crops. Some work as agricultural laborers; their employers may be other Indians of the community, local Ladinos, or distant plantations. The Chiapas oil boom provided the opportunity for highly paid laboring jobs in the 1970s. Some of those who worked in the oil fields used their earnings to buy cargo trucks, either as individuals or as members of cooperatives. Indian truck owners began to displace Ladino middlemen in the purchase, transport, and resale of surplus Indian crops. They now provide alternative employment to drivers, loaders, and maintenance workers. Since the start of the Zapatista uprising, numbers of government programs have provided new job opportunities throughout the municipio. Nonetheless, unemployment and underemployment are increasing problems.

Although women do very hard work for very long hours in San Bartolomé, their work usually consists of unpaid household tasks. Women add to family cash income by planting gardens at their house sites, weaving for hire, selling in the market or door to door, or by paid domestic service in Ladino homes. Some are part-time curers and midwives, occupations that have been declining in importance since the establishment of a large public hospital at the edge of town. Except for those in domestic service, women usually are not fully self-supporting. Exceptions include small clusters of related women working in weavers' cooperatives and a small number of full-time tortilla makers.

Industrial Arts. The only traditional craft recently practiced by men was the weaving of straw hats in a shape and pattern unique to the community. Only four or five men continue to make hats today. Although Indian men work as laborers in craft shops managed by Ladinos, custom and discrimination exclude them from the practice of skilled crafts. A few men work part-time as adobe brick makers; this is seen as more of a laborer's job than as a valued skill. Until the latter half of the twentieth century, most San Bartolomé women learned to be skilled weavers on the backstrap loom. They were also expected to be good at embroidery. The materials produced once were used to make shirts, blouses, men's trousers, and belts of the distinctive local costume. Since the mid-1960s, most men and many women of the community have begun to wear mass-produced clothing, except on special occasions. Women who continue to weave and embroider produce primarily for the national and tourist craft market.

Land Tenure. Individuals may legally own private plots of arable land, and houses and house lots are individually owned. Most of the agricultural land base of the community is communally owned. Title to the core of this land is traceable to land grants of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ejidos that were formed in the 1930s received land carved from original holdings of the Indian community. New ejidos established since 1970 usually received land that was purchased by the government from private holdings, or lands of disputed ownership. Until 1992, ownership of both traditional communal lands and the land base of ejido communities was regarded as inalienable. Nonetheless, large areas of communal lands were effectively transferred into private holdings continuously from the 1920s onward. The seized lands were taken illegally and held by private armed force. Much of this force was applied on behalf of Ladino cattle ranchers, but armed groups of Indians also seized land for themselves out of lands belonging either to the traditional community or to various ejidos.

Kinship

Kin Groups and Descent. Kinship in San Bartolomé is formally bilateral, but there is a slight bias toward patrilineality in practice. Family names are transmitted patrilineally; they take a binomial form in which the first surname is in Spanish, the second in Tzotzil. Each Tzotzil surname is linked to one and only one Spanish surname, but most Spanish surnames in local use are tied to more than one Tzotzil surname. There are no corporate social groups based on family names, but rules of exogamy prohibit marriage between two individuals with the same Tzotzil patronymic. Codescendants of the same grandparents may not marry.

Ritual kinship (compadrazgo ) is established by the sponsorship of ceremonies, particularly child baptism. Primary relatives do not become compadres. After the ceremony, all the ancestors of a child being baptized and the current spouses of those ancestors still alive are regarded as compadres of the ritual sponsor and all of the sponsor's ancestors. Compadrazgo thus establishes an explicitly bounded corporate group, and the living members of the group have social functions as a group.

Kinship Terminology. The cross-generational principle of age relative to Ego affects all terms for consanguineal relatives. For example, father's brother, brother, and brother's son are all called by the same term if they are older than Ego. Another term is used for younger brother and other collateral relatives younger than Ego, even if those relatives are in an ascending generation. Kinship terms and accompanying behavior emphasize the inequality between elder and younger consanguineal relatives. Affinal terms, on the other hand, are reciprocal and reflect status equality for those of the same generation relative to the couple whose marriage established the affinal relationship. Kinship is recognized bilaterally. Lineal relatives older than Ego are distinguished from collateral relatives. The line blurs among relatives younger than Ego, particularly in the second descending generation.

Although most terms are shared, the terminological system used by men is not the same as that used by women; differences include both the delineation of classes of relatives and individual lexical items. For example, men's terms for collateral relatives distinguish males from females when these are younger than Ego, whereas women use a single term for younger collaterals of both sexes. The women's term is not phonetically similar to either of the terms used by men.

In the case of ritual kinship, only the terms for ritual kin are used, even though compadres might also be related by birth or by marriage. Where there is neither ritual, nor consanguineal, nor affinal kinship, kinship terms for collateral relatives are extended to all members of the community on the basis of relative age. Kinship terminology used in this extended sense marks senior/junior status inequality. Only compadres and same-generation affinals are seen as equals.

Marriage and Family

Marriage. Marriages are strictly monogamous, but marriage is not regarded as a permanent, lifelong relationship. Separation or divorce followed by a long-term relationship with a new partner is extremely common. For first marriages, marriage in San Bartolomé traditionally was arranged by a ritual exchange of visits and gifts between the parents of the bride and the groom. Girls usually were 14 or 15 at the time of an arranged marriage; boys married at 18 or later. Traditional arranged marriage is now rare, and marriages occur later. Marriage today includes civil marriage before municipal authorities, and church marriage, which by law requires civil marriage first. The relationship of a man and a woman who live together openly without any marriage ceremony is legally and socially equivalent to marriage with regard to the property and inheritance rights of both the couple and their children, as well as in the establishment of affinal links. If such a couple later separates, the rights of their children to support and inheritance from both biological parents continue. Despite Catholic doctrine, divorce and remarriage are as common for couples married in church as for anyone else.

At first marriage, newlyweds move in with an established domestic group, almost always that of a close relative of the bride or the groom. Preference is given to virilocal residence, but other arrangements are possible. Residence with relatives usually is for a limited time only, and most couples move to their own separate residence after the birth of their second child. For second and succeeding marriages, residence is usually neolocal.

Domestic Unit. The basic domestic and economic unit in San Bartolomé society is the household. A household usually contains a married couple at its center, together with their never-married children. Other spouseless adult relatives of the central couple may also function as members. Some households do not include adult men, but every man belongs to a household that includes an adult or nearly adult woman. When more than one married couple resides in a single house, they form separate households. Two coresident households under the same roof cook and eat separately and control their own funds and stored maize.

Inheritance. All children, male and female, of a deceased property owner are regarded as being entitled to equal shares in inheriting land, houses, and personal property. The spouse is usually excluded from inheritance as such, but title to jointly owned property remains exclusively with the surviving spouse. The spouse's children by another marriage, even if they were living with or being supported by the deceased at the time of death, are not entitled to a share of the estate. Older individuals may convey real estate or major possessions to individual heirs while alive, but both custom and legal practice hold that other heirs are entitled to equivalent shares of property when the owner dies. The anticipatory heir may keep the property without division if the transfer was in payment for services rendered.

Socialization. At about the age of 3, or when their next younger siblings are born, children are given over to the care of siblings aged 5 or 6 or more. When newlyweds move in with relatives, children of other coresident households are available for child care when the time comes. Neolocal residence is sought when a couple's first child is old enough to care for a younger sibling. Deference to one's elders is fundamental in all social interaction. At all ages, younger people are not supposed to initiate interaction with their elders, or ask questions unless conveying the request of an older person. Discipline usually is by scolding or ridicule, but physical punishment is sometimes used.

Children are expected to learn new tasks by observing others and by following instructions and orders from their elders. Boys are taken to the maize fields beginning at age 10 or 11, where they work under their fathers' direction. Under virilocal residence, a mother-in-law is a disciplinarian to her coresident daughter-in-law, but also is responsible for teaching her the fine points of weaving and other domestic skills. In the late twentieth century most Indian children have been expected to attend formal school at least through sixth grade. School classes are conducted in Spanish, and most teachers do not speak Tzotzil.

Sociopolitical Organization

Until 1932, Indian San Bartolomé had a typically Mesoamerican system of a civil-religious hierarchy. Political groups were territorially based; recruitment to leadership was through ceremonial organizations.

The significant unit of interaction in the territorial system was the sitio, a group composed of all households living on a single bounded house site. The owner of the sitio, if male, or the owner's husband, if the owner was a woman, was effectively the leader of the group. Contiguous sitios formed neighborhoods; the centers of these neighborhoods were known to all, but their peripheries were only vaguely distinguished. Neighborhoods were potential support groups behind individual leaders. Neighborhoods in the Indian areas of the town were divided into five barrios, larger areas with explicit boundaries. Each barrio recognized a legitimated group of leaders. Finally, the Indian community as a whole was divided into two endogamous moieties: the "upper" section, consisting of the barrios of Calvario, San Sebastián, and Convento, and the "lower" section, those of Señor del Pozo and San Pedro. "Upper" and "lower" referred to elevation on the mountainside, not to status.

Ceremonial groups were organized in a single status hierarchy. Each of the five barrios had a ceremonial organization to celebrate its annual fiesta. Similar organizations at the community level were dedicated to saints and the celebration of their fiestas. Each fiesta group had four ranked officers, the mayordomos. Higher status groups had additional upper-level officers, alcaldes and alféreces. Many groups also enlisted temporary participants for their annual fiesta day.

Men accrued status and power through periodic service in named offices at rising levels in the fiesta groups. Officeholding required a man to be joined by his wife or a relative able to provide equivalent services. Officeholders paid all the expenses of monthly public ceremonies and the annual fiesta; their wives prepared food for participants and onlookers. Each successive level of service required larger expenditures; the highest office, alférez of San Bartolomé, cost the equivalent of several years' income.

Men were required to serve up to four times as mayordomos as they accumulated enough surplus to pay the cost. Prayer leaders and ritual musicians were permanently exempt from mayordomo service, and those who accepted public ritual roles for the day of a major fiesta were exempt from other service that year. Once a man had been mayordomo four times, he became a pasado, one who had passed through. He did not have to serve again. Pasados with certain Tzotzil surnames had hereditary eligibility to take on higher ceremonial offices if they chose, but they could not be required to do so. A pasado who served in three higher offices became a principal, a legitimated leader entitled to both decision-making power and ritual deference.

San Bartolomé had a town council of six regidores and an alcalde; these named political offices were alternated annually between moieties. These offices conferred no decision-making power; any communitywide decisions were made by the principales. Internal disputes at the community level were adjudicated by principales; they also controlled interchanges with outsiders. They had the power to arrest and jail Indians, to assess fines and penalties, and to expel community members. Each barrio was led by a council consisting of all principales of the barrio. They exercised similar power within the barrio.

Specific portions of communal lands were assigned to each barrio and controlled by barrio principales. Members of other barrios within the same moiety were granted usufruct without payment, but men from the other moiety had to pay for the right to use barrio lands. In rare cases in which a man wanted to marry across moiety lines, he had to get permission of the principales of his potential spouse's moiety.

Traditional recruitment to the rank of principal ended in 1932 when fiestas were banned and the Indian government was suppressed. In the final years of the old system, a young Indian who was literate in Spanish was hired by the Indian government to serve as communal scribe. He used his control of paperwork to insert himself as cultural broker between the Indian community and the outside world. The scribe was not a principal, but the links he set up with principales from all five barrios gave him a unique support base, which he converted into effective political power. His example and his day-to-day political maneuvering encouraged others to seek power by nontraditional means.

New-style leaders accumulated power through multiplying dyadic links of several kinds. The core of their support came from control of a sitio group and from close consanguineal kin. From this base, leaders recruited supporters by managing strategic marriages to gain the support of new affines. They solicited ritual kinship to bind others to the support group. Emerging leaders made special efforts to link up with close neighbors, and with traditional-style principales. Leaders also encouraged possible followers to work fields close to their own. The initial labor investment in clearing a field would only be repaid if the same field were planted several years in a row. Shared tasks and close association in the milpas over the years led to particularly solid relationships. Of course, every man had many individual ties to birth, affinal, and ritual kin, as well as to neighbors both in town and in the fields. What marked the new style of leader was the conscious doubling and tripling of such links by means such as inviting work companions to become compadres, marrying a daughter to a neighbor, and encouraging close kin to join a work group in the fields. Those bound to a rising leader through multiple links became his solid support group and the source of his power.

When open celebrations of fiestas returned in 1940, they were organized by the new-style leaders, and old-style principales took a secondary role. It was no longer possible to jail or fine men for refusing to take ceremonial offices. Instead, expenses of fiestas were paid by public contributions, barrio by barrio.

Organized by the new leaders, all the barrio principales went in a body from house to house collecting payments for the fiestas. Since acting mayordomos no longer faced large cash outlays, men were willing to serve voluntarily. The major barrio fiestas are still celebrated, but some other fiestas are extinct, and the remainder have not had mayordomos for many years.

Gradually, the new-style leaders took over control from the traditional principales in landholding organizations as well as in the fiestas. Indeed, they came to be called principales even though none of them had completed the requisite service. They continued to show ritual deference to the old-style principales, and were not themselves shown the same kind of deference. Still, the new-style principales became the recognized leaders of the community. The five barrios continue as significant political subunits. The barrios of each moiety of the past continue as allies against the barrios of the opposite moiety.

Beginning in the 1970s, competing groups of new-style principales have sought support from competing national organizations. Affiliates of the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC), essentially a subunit of the reigning Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), formed "La Casa del Pueblo." With help from CNC organizers, they seized control of the main communal lands and ejected those who did not accept the leadership of CNC-linked principales. Others broke away, joining established ejido with support from the National Institute of Agrarian Reform in taking over other communal land. Other leaders took their followers into militant statewide peasant groups, "invading" both Indian and Ladino landholdings. These invasions at times led to transfer of land titles to members of the occupying group; sometimes such a group holds control by armed force without legal title. Struggles over land are now the principal arena of San Bartolomé politics.

Religion and Expressive Culture

San Bartoleños are Catholics. Resident priests lead Catholic services, perform church weddings, and teach Catholic doctrine. Folk Catholicism is practiced alongside the Catholicism of the priests, often without their approval. Protestant converts and families who became Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1940s were promptly denied access to communal lands and ejected from their homes in the Indian barrios.

The cult of San Miguel Arcángel illustrates syncretistic folk Catholicism. San Miguel has two feast days, one in early May, the other in late September, bracketing the local rainy season. Each fiesta is marked by a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain above Venustiano Carranza, a climb that takes more than an hour. Three large wooden crosses mark the place of celebration. The mountaintop rituals are led by Indians; priests do not attend. Tojolab'al speakers walk about 100 kilometers to participate, praying to San Miguel for rain. There are frequent explosions of ceremonial mortars and skyrockets, reputedly "to call the thunder." San Miguel clearly represents a rain god. Other saints and holy images also show syncretism, and Tzotzil prayers dedicated to them use the names and attributes of pre-Hispanic Maya deities.

Church-centered fiestas also have syncretistic elements. Riders wearing costumes recalling eighteenthcentury Spanish dress run ritual races at three fiestas. The beginning of Lent is marked by a costumed dance-drama reenacting the conquest of Chiapas by Spain. Saints' images are dressed in Indian clothes on their feast days. More private rites, such as the dedication of a new house, may include prayers led by a priest at one point and the sacrifice and ritual burial of a chicken after the priest leaves.

Religio-medical beliefs affect much of what San Bartoleños do. According to those beliefs, every illness and misfortune has two simultaneous causes: those visible in the normal world and those coming from supernatural actions. Visible causes call for mundane remedies, such as treatment in a modern hospital. Supernatural causes (evil eye, witchcraft, magical fright, or soul loss) require supernatural treatment by ritual specialists and traditional healers. Much of ritual behavior is connected to beliefs about supernatural effects of interpersonal relationships.

Envy causes disease directly and is the most common pernicious supernatural force in society. Involuntary evil eye may indirectly bewitch a person. Anyone who has good fortune or who exhibits wealth publicly is a natural target for envy. In consequence, San Bartoleños are reluctant to take political or ceremonial office. Publicly visible individuals who suffer no ill show by that fact that they have strong spirits and enough power to defend themselves against supernatural attack. People believe that defensive power only comes from the power to cause misfortune to others; therefore, the visible person who survives envy must have witchcraft power. Witches who do not correct or legitimate their behavior are shunned and may be killed. Becoming a principal shows great supernatural power, contained by legitimization. Nonetheless, principales are individually feared.

Bibliography

Morales Avendano, Segundo Juan Maria (1977). Evolución y tenencia de la tierra en San Bartolomé de los Llanos. Venustiano Carranza: Editorial Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.

Morales Avendano, Segundo Juan Maria (1986). San Bartolomé de los Llanos en la historia de Chiapas. Tuxtla Gutiérrez: Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas.

Moscoso Pastrana, Prudencio (1992). Rebeliones indígenas en los altos de Chiapas. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Investigaciones Humanísticas de Mesoamerica y del Estado de Chiapas.

Salovesh, Michael (1971). "The Political System of a Highland Maya Community: A Study in the Methodology of Political Analysis." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.

Wasserstrom, Robert (1983). Class and Society in Central Chiapas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

MICHAEL SALOVESH