Chuj Erotic

The Chuj are a Maya people of the far northwest of Guatemala, concentrated in three municipalities of Huehuetenango: San Mateo Ixtatán, San Sebastián Coatán, and Nentón. This is the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, the highest non-volcanic range in Central America, where San Mateo sits above 2,500 meters in pine and cloud and the land falls away northward into hot lowland country along the Mexican border. Their language, also called Chuj, belongs to the Mayan family, and its closest relative is not a Guatemalan neighbor but Tojolab'al, spoken across the line in Chiapas. That pairing says something about the region: a tight cluster of related tongues wedged into one corner of the Maya world, set apart from the K'iche'an languages that dominate the highlands to the south. Tens of thousands speak Chuj, in two clearly distinct varieties centered on the two main towns. San Mateo Ixtatán takes the second half of its name from Nahuatl, place of salt, and the saline springs below the town have been worked for centuries. The black salt they yield is traded through the highlands and valued as much for medicine and ritual as for cooking.

On the ridge above San Mateo lie the stone platforms of Wajxaklajun, a late pre-Columbian site where Chuj prayer-makers still burn candles and copal. That is a fair picture of how religion works here: Catholicism, evangelical churches of more recent vintage, and older Maya practice are not sealed off from each other but handled by the same people in the same week. The early 1980s fell hard on this country. Army sweeps during the counterinsurgency destroyed villages across Huehuetenango, and the killings at Finca San Francisco in Nentón in July 1982 took some three hundred Chuj lives in a day. Thousands crossed into Chiapas. Many came home under the return accords of the 1990s; others stayed, and their descendants are Mexican now. The newer departure is northward to the United States, and remittance money is legible in San Mateo's concrete and rebar. Women's weaving has held better than men's dress: the San Mateo huipil, white cotton carrying huge radiating rosettes in purple, red and green, is still ordinary daily wear, while the men's wool capixay has retreated to older men and to ceremony.