Scene I: Ruq'ij Ala', San Antonio Aguas Calientes, March 1997

Tomás and Alejandra invited me to celebrate their son's ninth birthday, a gathering attended by numerous members of their family. As is customary, pepián (roasted chile and tomato sauce for meat) was served with rice and tortillas. For dessert we ate white cake and drank Coca-Cola. Afterward, the adults discussed family, work, and me while the children played in the courtyard.

We compared the land and rent prices in San Antonio Aguas Calientes and Chicago, as well as other cultural differences between our towns. They were curious to know if the children of Spanish speakers spoke Spanish in Chicago. Was bilingual schooling promoted? Were children embarrassed to speak Spanish? Tomás's mother commented that the public school in San Antonio was giving lessons in Kaqchikel. "It's good that the children are learning it in school, but the lessons aren't very good because the teachers don't speak Kaqchikel."

Her sister laughed, "And you don't know Kaqchikel either. You use a lot of Spanish words when you speak." They all laughed, and someone commented that it is important to know Kaqchikel. In the courtyard the children yelled at each other in Spanish.

"It's really good that you speak our language," Alejandra told me.

"You don't use any Spanish words," commented another relative.

Tomás said to me, "We saw you the other day when we were walking in the Central Plaza in Antigua. You are an indígena the same as us."

"Thanks," I answered, "but why?"

Tomás explained, "Because you speak our language well. You like our food. Also, the Ladinos treat you badly."

I replied that I did not understand what he meant.

Alejandra continued, "When we passed through the plaza, we saw that you were with some vendors from Santa Catarina [Palopó]. The Ladinos said foul words to you and spit at you. You are indígena like us."

Seizing the moment to talk about identity issues, I asked them what they thought about the debates going on in the newspapers about Maya and Ladino identity. Several of them said that they had seen the editorial columns, but they do not read them anymore. "They only write because they like to talk a lot. We know who we are," one of them commented.

Then someone changed the subject, "In England there is a problem. A lot of cows have been killed because of a bad disease."

"That's true," another said, "because they are mad cows."

We did not return to identity issues.

Scene II: Compañía de Jesús Artisan Marketplace, Antigua Guatemala, May 1997

On my way into the Compañía de Jesús Artisan Marketplace, Delmi waves me over. Her small típica tienda (store selling handicraft goods) is on the northeast corner of the marketplace. "Where are you hurrying now?" she asks me in Kaqchikel.

"I have to do an interview inside the marketplace," I answer.

"Wait! It's not good to rush by and not talk to us for a few minutes," she says, motioning me to sit down.

As I squat down to talk, she comments, "You haven't passed by here in many days."

"That's because I moved and then I went to Comalapa," I respond as a group of tourists walks up to her display of textiles, dolls, and key chains.

One asks slowly in Spanish with an American accent, "Where is the post office?"

Delmi tells them and then says in Kaqchikel, "I have to sell maps. If I sell them for Q1 (US$0.17), I would make a lot of money."

We notice that a few elderly women, dressed in threadbare blusas (machine-made blouses) and cortes (wraparound skirts), have paused and are listening to us converse. One asks Delmi, "Does he know lengua [literally "tongue," but used as a synonym for "language"]?"

"No," Delmi answers. "He knows Kaqchikel."

The women look perplexed, and then the oldest one asks me, "Do you know lengua?"

"Only a little Kaqchikel," I reply.

"Thanks and praise the Lord that you speak lengua." she says, patting me on the shoulder.

Delmi interrupts, "He doesn't speak lengua; he speaks Kaqchikel."

"What is Kaqchikel?" the woman asks.

"Qach'ab'äl [Our language]," Delmi informs her. "What is your language?"

"Lengua," she replies.

"No. There is no language named lengua," Delmi says. "I speak Kaqchikel because I am from San Antonio Aguas Calientes. Where are you from?"

"Salcaja," she answers.

"Do you speak the same as those from Santa Cruz del Quiché?" Delmi inquires.

"Yes, the same," she answers.

"Then, you speak K'iche'," Delmi tells her.

"I don't know," the woman says. She turns and speaks to the other women with her. When she turns back to Delmi and me, she says, "We speak lengua." Then, she asked me, "Do you know a lot [of lengua]?"

"A little," I say before Delmi interrupts and says, "He is fluent in Kaqchikel. He is teaching my daughter how to speak it."

The women laugh and one asks (in K'iche') the girl next to Delmi if it's true, but she says in Spanish, "I don't speak Kaqchikel. I only understand a little."

The women laugh and continue in the direction of the Central Plaza.

Tourism, Social Relations, and Identity in Guatemala

Kaqchikel Maya handicraft vendors work and live in places that are situated within a range of local, state, and global political and economic forces. The scenes above illustrate concerns they have about identity, language, and social relations among themselves and with Ladinos and tourists. This book focuses on how Kaqchikel Maya handicraft vendors strategically use different identity constructions for political and economic reasons to help maintain their livelihoods.

In Guatemala, a country that comprises over twenty different ethnolinguistic groups and has a history of discriminatory practices against the Maya and political violence, it is important to understand the types of social relations that exist between different groups of people and then know how the people involved in these relations position themselves socially, politically, and economically vis-à-vis others. In this book, I am less concerned with discussing specific categories of identity, such as ethnic, national, cultural, gender, or class identities, than I am with examining the ways that Mayas, specifically Kaqchikel Mayas, strategically make and use these categories within the contexts of national and international tourism. In other words, instead of pursuing identity categories and identity as an attribute that Mayas have, I treat identity as a process.

Additionally, the two examples of conversations reveal some of the interrelated social and economic issues that have concerned Kaqchikel Mayas since the 1990s, such as crime, language retention, money, tourism, and inequalities (social, political, and economic) between Ladinos and Mayas, among other interests. Tourism is one of the more important institutions around which Kaqchikel and K'iche' Mayas organize their economic lives in Guatemala. Típica vendors, those who sell handwoven textiles and handmade crafts, have been a common fixture in Guatemala since at least the 1930s. Although there were significant numbers of them until the early 1980s, when violence against Mayas—a direct result of the conflict between the Guatemalan military and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union (Unidad Nacional Revolucionaria Guatemalteca, UNRG)—contributed to a decline in number of tourists, tourism dramatically increased in the postwar 1990s. In turn, the number of vendors selling handicrafts increased for multiple reasons: more tourists (averaging over 500,000 per year since 1990, which represent larger numbers than for any year prior to the violence), resulting in a greater demand for handicrafts; easier within-country travel as the conflict ended; high levels of unemployment and underemployment (46 percent or higher); poor or low wages in the countryside (US$2/day for ten hours' labor); land shortages as a result of population growth in some towns (e.g., San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Santa Catarina Palopó); and low capital investment to enter típica sales (a backstrap loom costs around US$1.50, and one need only bring bracelets and some used clothing to get started). Because of changes in politics (the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 between the government and revolutionaries) and in the infrastructure (building and improving roads has been a priority of recent presidential administrations), Kaqchikel Maya vendors have become commuters. They travel regularly, sometimes daily, between their hometowns and their workplaces in tourism marketplaces.

It is primarily Mayas who create and sell the handicrafts that tourists buy. They also clean rooms and tend gardens in hotels and wash dishes and bus tables in restaurants. The garden produce (tomatoes, peppers, carrots, squash) and commercial crops (maize, beans, broccoli) they grow end up on the tables of hotels, restaurants, and Ladino families that host foreign students studying Spanish. They build the hotels, restaurants, and sites that tourists use. Típica vendors, however, have intense connections to tourism because they interact directly with tourists in the marketplace. Other Mayas' relationships to tourism are indirect (in the case of farmers and construction workers) or mediated through their mainly Ladino employers (for hotel and restaurant employees).

How Maya típica vendors participate in tourism gives rise to two interrelated problems. First, not only do the interests and practices of foreign tourists affect the ways that Kaqchikel Maya vendors present themselves in the marketplace and in their hometowns, but vendors' participation in these tourism marketplaces has also led to changes in the performance of some gender roles in their households and in how they participate in hometown social and political activities. Furthermore, international tourism contributes to their thoughts about and practice of language and identity among themselves in their hometowns and households.

The second problem relates to how Mayas construct and maintain their identity within a globally oriented tourism market. I argue that one of the more significant components of identity construction for Mayas is their ongoing social relations, but maintaining social relations with others is no simple matter. That Kaqchikel Maya típica vendors commute to tourism sites such as Antigua and Panajachel from their hometowns presents both theoretical and methodological problems with regard to how vendors are economically and socially connected to their hometowns and to global markets through international tourism. Hence, the social relations in which they participate span three overlapping social spheres: those with persons from their hometowns; those with other vendors, middlepersons, and craftspersons in the handicraft market; and those with consumers—usually foreign tourists but also Ladinos and occasionally other Mayas.

That international tourists and tourism institutions affect Maya handicraft vendors' lives will be apparent in the coming chapters. However, this is not a study about the impact of international tourism on Mayas. The Mayas described in this book do not have to enter the tourism business. They choose to participate and in the process use various kinds of identity in calculated ways. They work to maintain social relations with residents from their hometowns and other handicraft market participants. These concerns distinguish this study from impact studies outlined by Cristóbal Kay (1989) related to underdevelopment research, and by June Nash (1981) related to world systems analysis. Instead of focusing on the impact of international tourism, this book concentrates on how Maya handicraft vendors participate in this global economy and construct and use dynamic and flexible cultural identities to provide livelihoods for themselves.

Anthropological Studies of Globalization

There are ethnographic and theoretical gaps related to studies of globalization, international tourism, and locality (or place). Recent anthropological studies of globalism and transnationalism and their relation to locality, such as Arjun Appadurai's (1996) Modernity at Large, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson's (1997) Culture, Power, Place, and Michael Kearney's (1996) Reconceptualizing the Peasantry, have staked out a theoretical ground that does not always focus on the day-to-day practices of the people they discuss. They are mainly concerned with diasporic peoples who maintain connections with and get news about their compatriots through e-mail, the Internet, and various forms of mass media. In favorable economic and political climates, these peoples may return periodically to their homelands and hometowns. Research of this type has focused primarily on boundary crossing, on how members of dispersed social groups stay in contact with each other, and on classifying or describing observable features of these peoples' global and transnational interactions.

Instead of working in their hometowns, workers move between their "hometowns" and places of employment in other cities and even other countries. With these labor practices, meanings of nation, community, and identity are changing for those who migrate for work because they are in regular, intense contact with cultural Others. Increasingly, the subjects of anthropological interest do not fit traditional academic categories, such as primitive and peasant (Kearney 1996). Furthermore, as Nash (1993b: 20) points out, people from different cultural traditions are linked through commodities, as when "consuming elite" travelers "search for identity through consumerism" and form strange alliances with "producing communities" that lead to new forms of handicrafts that are still perceived as "traditional." Thus, community for Mexican/Zapotec migrant laborers to the United States (Kearney 1996) and for Mesoamerican producers of handicrafts to tourists (Nash 1993a) is linked in concrete ways to both local and global economic interests.

According to Appadurai (2000: 1-3), globalization is a "source of anxiety" for social scientists, activists, and the poor that is reflected in a "double apartheid." One aspect of this is the separation between academic debates and "vernacular discourses about the global" that attempt to maintain local and national cultural and economic autonomy. The other aspect of it is that the poor are removed from both "nationalist discourses about globalization" and global discourses "surrounding trade, labor, environment, disease, and warfare." Appadurai (2000: 3) argues that new social organizations, "grassroots globalizations," are emerging that "contest, interrogate, and reverse these developments."

There is nothing unique or profound in this statement. Earlier, Stuart Hall (1997a, 1997b) made a similar observation that people in today's world feel forced to go global but sometimes react by going local—creating new strategies for creating locality and identity. The question should not be Does globalization homogenize or differentiate people and social groups?—a theme also addressed in Identities on the Move: Transnational Processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin (Goldín 1999). Instead, globalization studies need to focus on the particular ways that people live in the world, how they work, and how they reproduce their collective identities. Depending on the social, economic, and political contexts and the goals of the persons in question, globalization can be both homogenizing and differentiating. Compared to Appadurai and Hall, Nash and Christine Kovic (1997) offer a concrete ethnographic example using the Zapatista National Liberation Army's uprising to illustrate political resistance to the Mexican government's promotion of global trade and finance. And Marc Edelman (1999) shows how "peasant" can be a political identity and practice for Costa Ricans that also contests globalization. One of the conditions of living and working within the world today is dealing with globalization in specific ways, as the Zapatista revolutionaries in Mexico, the peasants in Costa Rica, and the Maya handicraft vendors in Guatemala are doing.

Rather than map global labor, commodity, and other flows, I describe ethnographically how Kaqchikel Maya vendors who are not displaced from the places where they were born and raised are nonetheless tied to the ways that "global" and "local" converge in the places where they live and work. In thinking about this convergence, I endeavor to fuse Appadurai's theories on the production of locality with John Watanabe's (1990, 1992) theories on Maya practices of community construction to show how Mayas incorporate themselves into the global while continuing to reinscribe significance in the local.

Tourism as a Global Process

In contrast to most of the research done on globalization and transnationalism, this book looks at the mundane practices of vendors, attending to such things as how they sell to tourists; what foods they eat; how they refer to themselves and others in conversation; and who takes care of children, cooking, and cleaning. In these ordinary practices, one can find evidence of how global processes are part of household organization and local identity concepts. International tourism has contributed a larger palette and more colors from which Maya vendors can construct, maintain, and reflect on their identities as vendors, Mayas, and indígenas. I illustrate how these processes are embedded in the daily lives of vendors in their households by paying attention to existential practices.

Furthermore, I have concentrated on the perspectives of people who are the subjects of international tourism and participants in other global processes. This may seem an obvious goal, but with respect to research on tourism, this tends not to be the case. The majority of tourism research is about tourists—their behavior and attitudes—and the sociocultural construction of tourism sites, persons, and objects by outsiders. Castañeda's (1996) research on the tourism/archaeology site Chichén Itzá in Mexico is an important contribution to these issues. A survey of the last five years of the Annals of Tourism Research also demonstrates this trend, as do other anthropologically oriented studies, including Pierre van den Berghe's (1994, 1995) research on tourism in Chiapas, James Urry's (1990, 1992) research on touristic gazes, Edward Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's (1994) research on the Maasai, and edited volumes by Marie-Françoise Lanfant, John B. Allcock, and Bruner (1995), International Tourism: Identity and Change, and by M. Thea Sinclair (1997a), Gender, Work, and Tourism.

Sinclair (1997b) explains that although tourism research has focused on the cultural, economic, status, and power divisions between tourists and persons working in the tourism sector, few studies have focused on the divisions between workers themselves, especially with regard to gender and race. As she notes, the volumes by Vivian Kinnaird and Derek Hall (1994) and Margaret Swain (1995) and miscellaneous articles on sex/prostitution tourism are the exceptions. This research, including the volume edited by Sinclair (1997a), focuses on women's roles, largely positing that women's work is an extension of the domestic sphere and subject to patriarchal relations and traditional cultural gender roles. These studies do not look at the relationships between men and women within tourism, but rather reduce gender to a category pertaining to women only.

Cynthia Cone (1995), Lynn Meisch (1995), and Margaret Swain (1993) offer examples of this gendered research on tourism workers in Mexico, Ecuador, and Panama, but they do not look at the specific ethnographic interactions of female and male tourism workers either. Cone's research compares two different strategies used by Maya women for economic success. Meisch looks at the sexual relations between men from Otavalo and foreign female tourists that is only sanctioned if the tourist conforms to local norms and standards. Swain analyzes the work of Cuna female artisans whose economic success can improve their power within their households, but not in the larger Panamanian society. In contrast to this research, I offer an ethnographic case that illustrates how Maya men and women interact within the tourism industry and how traditional gender roles for men and women are changing in Maya households, contributing to women's economic and political power beyond the realm of the household.

An example of ethnographic research that considers male-female relations within tourism is Nash's (1993c) "Maya Household Production in the World Market: The Potters of Amatenango del Valle, Chiapas, Mexico," which looks at specific ways that global economic forces, of which tourism is one, change local economic and social practices in terms of gender relations and roles. I build on her research by looking at the gender relations of female and male Maya handicraft vendors.

Community in the Global Context

The focus on the existential practices and the opinions of vendors makes it possible to gain insight into the ways that global forces act on them, as well as to demonstrate how localities (places) come to be what they are and how they are used and interpreted. My research fits into an emerging trend in anthropology—represented by works such as Bruner (1999), Nash (1993c), Ortner (1997), and Stoller (1997)—that is trying to bring more detailed ethnographic data into studies of global and transnational processes. This research takes issue with how "community" has been studied anthropologically as a largely self-contained whole, and it calls for a reformation of the concept. As Bruner (1999: 475) remarks of the Batak village where he did research but is equally applicable to other places, it "remains a fixed, bounded locality, but the ways of the outside world now reside within the village and within the minds of the villagers."

Nash (1993c) describes how Maya women's pottery production in Amatenango has become part of a global tourism economy, but women themselves have indirect or limited contact with tourists. The town itself is not a tourism site, though that is changing. Bruner (1999) describes how Balinese villagers participate in tourism by meeting tourists in "touristic borderzones." The borderzone is a performative space, but Balinese persons and tourists do not live in it. Paul Stoller (1997) describes how West African vendors from different ethnic groups migrate to a transnational locality, New York City, and form occupational groups. Kaqchikel vendors, described here, are embedded in global, transnational, as well as Guatemalan national tourism in different ways than the people these ethnographers describe.

Unlike Mayas from Amatenango, the Maya vendors in Guatemala are in direct contact with tourists, tourism guides, and tourism places, such as hotels, restaurants, and sites, that are part of the Ruta Maya tourism system that includes Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Tourism is concentrated in just a few areas in Guatemala, particularly Antigua, Lake Atitlán, Chichicastenango, and Tikal. The most-traveled tourism routes are located firmly within Kaqchikel Maya regions of Guatemala. If, on average, only 500,000 tourists visit Guatemala in a year, they pass through at least one of these four places. Furthermore, the vendors that received the most attention from tourism organizations and tourists are from two towns, San Antonio Aguas Calientes and Santa Catarina Palopó, that have been fully incorporated into the main tourism routes in Guatemala for seventy or more years. For these Mayas, it is difficult to get out of the touristic borderzone, and people living in these towns have grown up in this performative space. Some have even made their homes and domestic spaces performance areas. Similar to West Africans in New York City, persons from different Maya ethnolinguistic groups come together in the tourism marketplace in Antigua and constitute an occupational group that lives in a transnational space. Unlike the West Africans, however, they are not separated from their hometowns for long periods of time, and their homes are also part of the transnational space.

The ethnographic context in which Kaqchikel Maya vendors are located allowed me to gain insights into how they conceive of, construct, maintain, and use identity. Sol Tax's (1937) theories about Maya identities being situated at the level of the municipio (cultural and political community) and how participation in marketplaces heightens awareness of ethnic differences still hold true today in most cases. Mayas continue to use identities that are based on the municipio, and marketplaces can still be arenas where these identities are reaffirmed. Mayas today are more conscious of their identities, as well as the political and economic ramifications of using them (see Warren 1998a, 1998b). They use different identities in self-conscious ways that Tax did not explain or anticipate. It is significant to note, however, that community remains as one form of collective identity expression, despite dramatic changes in the economic and political contexts of contemporary Guatemala.

Identity Construction through Social Relations

Tax (1941) explains how, historically, Mayas of one town are well aware of other towns' differences and have maintained distinctions among themselves. These distinctions are not preserved by physical isolation, but, according to Tax, by a "system of impersonal relations." Or in Fredrik Barth's (1969: 9) terms, ethnic "boundaries persist despite a flow of personnel across them" and a significant amount of knowledge about others. Although it is not currently fashionable to use Tax's and Barth's theories on identity construction, they are appropriate for positioning some of the theoretical arguments in this book and for framing a theory of identity construction through social relations. The research informing this book draws on Tax's and Barth's theories of how ethnic identity emerges through a dialectic of self-identification and ascription by others, but it moves beyond them to look at how identity concepts in general emerge from the interactions of people within the same group (Kaqchikel vendors and people from their hometowns). The data also show that how identity is used, signified, and negotiated within a group depends on an interplay of factors, including local collective notions of tradition, belonging, work, and beliefs, as they relate to broader national and global contexts.

Tax's and Barth's work on identity construction is not far removed from contemporary and more fashionable discussions of identity as cultural difference that are formulated by Appadurai (1996: 12-16) and cultural theorist Homi Bhabha (1994: 1-2,162-164). Appadurai's and Bhabha's formulations of cultural difference treat identity as a process. For Appadurai (1996: 14), this means that identity construction "takes the conscious and imaginative construction and mobilization of differences as its core." For Bhabha (1994: 2), "collective experiences . . . are negotiated" within spaces of difference and lead to identities that are more than "the sum of the 'parts' of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)."

Cultural difference is key to understanding Tax's (1937, 1941) descriptions of Guatemalan marketplaces and interethnic relations in the 1930s, as well as the handicraft marketplaces of 1990s Guatemala. Difference becomes manifest through economic and social participation in the marketplace. It is a place where difference is tied to unequal relations of power—economic and political—between social groups. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (1992: 52-54) note this about ethnic relations in general where differentiation occurs. Identity relations of social groups today are different than during the period when Tax conducted fieldwork because of the globalization of society, politics, and the economy. This has led to the formation of new ethnicities (Hall 1996a, 1996b), creative uses of cultural identity and difference—in the case of Maya political activists in Guatemala (Warren 1998a)—and the increased internal differentiation of once autonomous sociocultural groups (Kearney 1996; G. Smith 1989). The common thread running through these discussions of identity construction is that it is processual and related to specific power relations rather than lists of traits. For Mayas, identity as a process emerges in part from within "the company of particularly Maya neighbors" (Watanabe 1992: 16). In the contexts of selling in the handicraft marketplace and commuting between the home and the marketplace, Maya vendors especially rely on specific kinds of social relations with particular types of people to maintain, modify, and differentiate their cultural identities.

Few Maya vendors thought about how their economic, social, and political practices were embedded within forms of globalization that structure the marketplaces where they work and communities where they sleep, worship, work, and play. Of greater concern to them was the continuity of social relations that they had with other people and the fostering of new, potentially long-term social relations. Vendors live within different, overlapping fields of social interaction, including family, community, marketplace, and the Guatemalan state. In each of these fields, vendors present themselves to the other people (à la Goffman 1959) and engage them through numerous types of social relations.

Kaqchikel vendors evoked concepts of identity in self-conscious ways, depending on the social context and the social relation in which they were embedded. The multiple identity concepts they used could not simply be explained in terms of boundaries or a dialectic of self-identification and attribution by others (Barth 1969). Certainly, these conditions are important to identity construction, but for vendors involved in numerous social interactive arenas and engaged with different types of social actors, the boundaries are gray because there are so many of them, all overlapping each other. Barth's dialectic is ambiguous, because Kaqchikel Maya vendors, for instance, interact with different categories of people: foreign and national tourists, vendors, middlepersons, police officers, garbage collectors, tax collectors, fellow Mayas from their hometowns, and others. Exactly what is significant and the degree of its significance relates to the time, place, and people involved. Mayas live in a social universe where they are, at the same time, members of families, households, towns, markets, and the Guatemala state. In each of these social contexts, global processes (tourism in the case of these Kaqchikeles) both subjectify and objectify them in observable ways. Identity constructions, hence, are structured around the overlapping constellations of social relations embedded in local, regional, national, and global spaces.

My contribution to identity studies in general, and Maya studies in particular, lies in the recognition that a significant component of Maya identity construction and maintenance is embedded in particular types of social relations. This is quite different from research that has been done on identity concepts within and outside of Maya studies. By referring to social relations, I'm not talking about the ascribed-assumed dichotomy that Tax (1937, 1941) effectively described and Barth (1969) popularized nor identity as cultural difference that was outlined earlier. Other anthropologists have taken up these positions as well as the Weberian-inspired debate over the primordial versus constructed aspects of identity (Fischer 1996a, 1999).

With regard to studying ethnicity or cultural identity, it is too easy to merely look at relations of power and social relations between subordinate (or subaltern or marginalized) groups of people and those who have political, social, and economic control. It is also important to understand local, within-group meanings and uses of identity. As part of their research with Mayas in Guatemala, Hendrickson (1995), Warren (1989, 1992), and Watanabe (1992) have focused on locally conceived and practiced identity. Both Watanabe's and Warren's research also calls attention to the importance of place in the construction of Maya identities.

Their findings are not contradicted here. However, Maya vendors had different relationships with the places they considered home and the other places where they worked and lived. Specifically, I am interested in what happens to Maya identity construction when Mayas spend a substantial amount of time outside their communities and with other groups of people (foreigners, Ladinos, and other Mayas). Although the place called home is the most important locality to vendors, their identities in relation to that place are maintained primarily through ongoing social relations with people from their hometown and regular trips home to participate in highly visible activities. It mattered less that vendors were actually in their towns all the time than that they participated in these ongoing social relations. Similarly, political activists, migratory laborers, and cooperative officials, all of whom work away from their hometowns, also maintain such social relations (Kearney 1996; Nash 2001; G. Smith 1989; Warren 1998a). If an individual did not foster these relations, then vendors and people in the hometown did not recognize that person's claim of community identity. In other words, being Maya is not only about always living in a specific type of locality and doing specific types of Maya practices (Watanabe 1990); it is about interacting socially with others from one's town (for community identity), with others from one's linguistic group (for linguistic identity), and with other Mayas (for Maya and indígena identities) on a regular basis. This is not to create the impression that the identities of Mayas are detached from material, historical, and ideological bases. Such conditions would probably create unstable subjectivities, where Mayas would not be sure of who they are. Maya vendors quite clearly know who they are. Simply put, they were not having "identity crises."

Identity Use as Strategy

Maya identities, as will be seen in the coming chapters, are also related to practices of difference, as Tax recognized long ago. Today, however, Mayas are constructing broader collective identities than Tax predicted. This, of course, relates to changes in Guatemalan national politics, mass media, and the global economy. Kay Warren and Jean Jackson (2002b), like Charles Hale (1997), suggest that indigenous activism is tied to identity politics in Latin America. Mayas, like other indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, have organized and spoken about political, economic, and social issues in terms of identity. Indigenous activists and mass media representatives have used each other—indigenous leaders to get their respective causes heard, and the media to sell images of exotic others, much as National Geographic has (Hervik 1998; Lutz and Collins 1993). The problem facing Maya political and social activists, as Watanabe (1995: 39) noted early, is that they "need first to persuade other Maya to recognise their lead."

Maya vendors share with Maya activists and other participants in the Maya movement (see Esquit and Gálvez 1997, Fischer and Brown 1996b, and Warren 1998a and 1998b for descriptions of this political movement) the practice of using identity in strategic ways to further their respective causes. Leaders of the Maya movement, such as Cojtí Cuxil (1995, 1997), have emphasized cultural education and specific cultural values (language, dress, cosmology) over economic and material concerns. At the same time, Maya handicraft vendors reject the calculated use of identity for cultural goals, using it instead for economically oriented purposes, though they do draw on some Pan-Mayanist constructions of language, as illustrated in the vignettes opening this introduction. I address the vendors' critique of the Maya movement elsewhere (Little 1998, n.d.; also see Esquit and Gálvez 1997 for an autocritique of the movement), but their main problem with it is that it is not based on the material conditions that are relevant to Maya handicraft vendors or, for that matter, Mayas working in agriculture, factories, or handicraft fabrication.

Maya vendors use identity deliberately in ways that are similar to the indigenous people and workers described in (post)peasant studies such as those by Marc Edelman (1999) for Costa Rica; Michael Kearney (1996) for Oaxaca, Mexico; and Gavin Smith (1989) for Peru, although these anthropologists differ in their views as to what constitutes the "peasant" in contemporary Latin America. Identity is also similarly used in political contexts by Maya activists (Warren 1998a) and other indigenous activists (Warren and Jackson 2002a). Although the link between identity construction and social relations is not part of these authors' discussions, it is not a leap to suggest that social relations play a prominent role in the maintenance and establishment of certain key identity concepts used by the subjects of their books. Costa Rican coffee workers, Mixtec and Zapotec transnational laborers in Mexico, huasicanchino laborers in Peru, and Maya handicraft vendors all use identity in intentional ways that are related to the particular conditions in which they maintain their livelihoods. Although cultural perspectives certainly play an important part in how these groups of people use their identities for economic and political gain, they do not use their identities only for narrow cultural goals.

Increasingly, Mayas perform cultural practices before tourists' inquisitive eyes and in anticipation of tourists watching them. In other words, Mayas involved with tourists—and probably others too, especially those involved with the Maya political movement—are self-conscious about their cultural practices and identities. In essence, this means that identity is both a concept held and used by them as well as an explanation of social and political relations.

Shifting Subjectivities of an Anthropologist

Like other anthropologists' field experiences, my fieldwork was shaped by the intersubjective experiences I had with people who live in and visit Guatemala. My first trip to Guatemala was in July 1987. I went as a tourist with mediocre Spanish skills, accompanied by two friends, one of whom is Honduran. She helped us out of trouble by repairing our major linguistic blunders, but on occasion she allowed us to humiliate ourselves with our faux pas. Like other first-time tourists to Guatemala, I was consumed by the institution of tourism but had little direct contact with Mayas. The structures that direct and guide tourists to designated sites are so obvious and so well organized that it is difficult for tourists to have experiences with people and places that are not on the tourism route. Our trip itinerary began with a stop at the Catholic cathedral in Esquipulas, continued with stops in Guatemala City, Antigua, San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Panajachel, Chichicastenango, and ended in Antigua and Guatemala City. Despite the population being more than half Maya (according to some estimates, three-fourths or more [Tzian 1994]), we had little contact with Mayas, except in the one place that was not promoted for its traditional handicrafts and indigenous population: Antigua.

While in Antigua, I met vendors who helped reshape my personal perspectives about the town as only a Spanish colonial city. From that time forward, it became increasingly Maya for me, as these vendors introduced me to other Maya vendors and middlepersons during subsequent trips as a tourist (December 1987 through January 1988 and December 1988 through February 1989).

My subjectivity shifted dramatically in the summer of 1992 with my first trip as an anthropologist. My small field project was to work as a guide for a tour company in order to learn how U.S. tourists interacted with Mayas and conceived of Guatemala. This project ended in 1994 after another summer of fieldwork in Guatemala, but this time I paid more attention to Mayas' reactions to tourists. The results of this research are described in an essay informed by ethnographic and library research (Little 1995). During the 1992 fieldwork, my subject position was viewed negatively by my Maya friends. They considered my role as guide to be linked to Ladino society. The only exchanges we—the tour group and I—had with Mayas were purely economic.

I worked to undo my subjectivity as a tour guide among my Maya friends and associates in the summer of 1994. This coincided with my beginning Kaqchikel studies and an association with the Oxlajuj Aj Kaqchikel Maya Language and Culture course offered by Tulane University in Guatemala. It also marks the formal start of my research with Kaqchikel Maya típica vendors.

My association with the Kaqchikel language course produced an ambiguous and controversial subject position in relation to Kaqchikel vendors, especially after my fourth year of participation, when I went from a student and research assistant to one of the course's co-directors. Although my vendor friends congratulated me on getting a position that they considered prestigious and culturally valuable (I was, after all, promoting their language and culture), it caused some problems. For my intensive continuous fieldwork, from June 1996 through August 1998, vendors had my undivided attention, except during the six weeks of the Kaqchikel course. My duties then were so demanding that I could not maintain regular social relations with my vendor friends. They also knew that one of my roles in the course was as employer of Kaqchikel Maya teachers. The first year I assumed co-directorship many vendors pressured me to hire their kin. However, few had the skills or academic credentials to be teachers. Over consecutive summers since 1997, vendors became more aware of my roles in the course and of the necessary qualifications of the teachers.

Despite the sometimes strained relationships with vendors that resulted from my post in the Kaqchikel course, the course introduced me to other Kaqchikel persons, especially those who have chosen academic and political careers. The teachers offered additional perspectives on Kaqchikel life, opened their homes to me when I needed a break from tourists and vendors in Antigua, and taught me about Kaqchikel customs by tolerating and even encouraging my questions. Learning the basics of planting, weaving, church rituals, curing ceremonies, and other customs from the Kaqchikel teachers helped improve my relationships with Kaqchikel vendors and their extended families because they knew that I would behave appropriately and ask questions at appropriate times.

Though my subjectivity has been remade several times over the years, some vendors insisted on acknowledging me in singular ways. For a few, I was never more than a tourist. For most, I was a scholar studying their lives. For many, I was their friend, with a family of my own. My subject position as a father solidified with my daughter's annual (now nine) two-month visits. Her friendships with the children of vendor families helped strengthen my social connections with them, associated me with particular hearth groups, and integrated me into Kaqchikel towns.

Locations of Field Research

George Marcus (1995) describes two different types of ethnographic research that emerged in the mid-1980s. The most common focuses on a single site, a traditional ethnographic approach, where ethnographers are increasingly concerned with the place of these sites within the world system of capitalist political economy. The other type of ethnographic research is "self-consciously embedded in a world system . . . [and] moves out from the single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space" (Marcus 1995: 96). In other words, ethnographic research in this design takes ethnographers to multiple sites.

Not all ethnographic research requires anthropologists to travel. However, in my case, it would have been impossible to learn how Kaqchikel Maya típica vendors participated in international tourism and conceived of the collective forms of identity they used and manipulated had I chosen just one fieldsite. Had I been rooted in any one site, I would have missed the important socioeconomic ways that Mayas organize, and are organized by, their families, households, community relations, and marketplaces.

Understanding how identity and labor are practiced in Guatemala necessitates—almost demands—that anthropologists get out of the "little community." This is because not just vendors but also construction workers, schoolteachers, hotel service employees, waiters and waitresses, and other job holders commute between their hometowns and their places of employment. Vendors are part of a commuter culture that emerged in the late 1980s as the war in Guatemala calmed, wages in the countryside continued to decline relative to cost of living, roads and transportation improved, and some job and educational opportunities opened in large cities and tourism sites. Kearney (1996: 122-123) argues that migrants "share structural features with 'commuters' who each day jam expressways, trains, and buses, although such 'migrants' differ from 'commuters' in that they travel farther and stay in their destinations longer."

In Guatemala, vendors do not just "share structural features" with "commuters." They are commuters. A big difference between the people that Kearney refers to and the vendors that I worked with is the frequency of travel between their hometowns and jobs. Several have traveled to the United States and Europe, and a small number of vendors, when business is good, have traveled to, and have business connections in, other countries. This is not commuting, though, and those who have family members living in other countries do not consider their relatives' annual or biannual trips home to be commuting. Commuters, in contrast, maintain regular social and economic connections with at least two localities. They literally have lives in more than one place. This changes how Mayas interact with and live in their hometowns.

My research base and the hub from which I studied Kaqchikel Maya típica vendor social relations and identity was Antigua Guatemala. Mayas, mainly from nearby towns, have provided labor and food to the city for nearly five hundred years (Lutz 1994). It has been a popular tourist destination for more than a century and, since the 1940s, one of the places where the wealthy from all over the world come to live and to vacation and buy homes. It is also a place where tourists, Ladinos, and sometimes even Mayas expect that Mayas should act like "Indians" in order to fit into the touristic scheme of the city. Antigua has become a place for both foreign and national tourists to play and relax but one where Mayas work. The types of jobs they do determine the ways they do or do not demonstrate their Mayanness.

In Antigua I worked mainly with vendors in the Compañía de Jesús Artisan Marketplace and with peddlers. I also regularly visited other vending locations. The Kaqchikel, K'iche', and other Maya ethnolinguistic groups who sell típica in Antigua are not from Antigua. As I became more involved with their lives, it was evident that Antigua, with its many típica retail outlets, was an insufficient context for studying vendors' lives and identities. Much of their social, political, and economic lives were still embedded in their hometowns.

My research took me mainly to the Kaqchikel towns of San Antonio Aguas Calientes and Santa Catarina Palopó. The advantages of choosing these sites over others were multiple. First, they had been studied previously by other anthropologists. Sheldon Annis (1987) conducted research in San Antonio, and Sol Tax (1946) conducted research in Santa Catarina. These in-depth community studies provided a base from which to measure vendors' interactions with fellow community members. Second, these towns have been connected to international tourism at least since the 1930s. Kaqchikel Mayas who live in these two towns continue to produce souvenirs and handicrafts for tourists. Third, San Antonio and Santa Catarina are relatively well incorporated into the Guatemalan nation-state. Residents of San Antonio have been well connected to Guatemala's administrative and economic centers, and residents of Santa Catarina, until the late 1970s, were dependent on migratory wage labor in the coastal cotton and sugar cane plantations, as well as the surrounding coffee plantations. How they have historically been tied to the Guatemalan nation-state contributes to their interactions with Ladinos and tourists in Antigua.

Methodology

My research methodology took shape because of the intersubjective experiences that I have had with Kaqchikeles over the sixteen years that I have been an anthropologist or tourist in Guatemala. The subject positions that they assigned to me and let me assume allowed me to conduct my research in specific ways. I used common anthropological strategies, but my data collection was also tactical when common fieldwork strategies failed.

This book is primarily based on continuous research from June 1996 through August 1998. Earlier, in the summer of 1992, I studied tourism networks and conducted fieldwork as a guide. In June 1994, I initiated conversations with several vendors in the Compañía de Jesús Artisan Marketplace and other marketplaces in Antigua. I slowly integrated myself into the marketplace, where I could observe the socioeconomic exchanges between vendors and tourists and among vendors themselves. By November 1996, I was well known among the Maya típica vendors selling in Antigua, and the Compañía de Jesús Artisan Association (Asociación de Artesanos de la Compañía de Jesús) officially recognized me.

Marketplace and Community

For the period I conducted continuous research, I divided my time between tourism/típica marketplaces in Antigua and vendors' hometowns. During the first year, I spent more time in Antigua in the marketplaces. In the second year, I spent the majority of my time in the hometowns of Kaqchikel vendors.

Even though all vendors spoke Spanish, and many spoke some English (two of the Kaqchikel vendors were fluent enough that they asked me to interview them in English), developing rapport, participating in vendor society, and comprehending their social relations demanded that I converse in Kaqchikel. By June 1996, all my conversations and interviews with Kaqchikel speakers were in Kaqchikel.

During my first artisan association meeting with Compañía de Jesús vendors, they agreed that I had to work for them. My responsibilities included interviewing tourists, assisting with language interpreting (help that most of them did not need), and coordinating a commercial book project by them about their lives. The book project died when vendors argued about how to represent themselves. Most vendors doubted their writing abilities, which contributed to their doubts about what interests tourists. Each month, I reported to them what I learned from conversations with and observations of tourists.

Although I frequently visited San Antonio Aguas Calientes and Santa Catarina Palopó, participating in community functions and learning about the respective people and places, this research should not be construed as a community-based ethnographic study. My main goals were to learn how vendors remained integrated with their hometowns, despite the fact that they spent more time in Antigua, and to observe family life and household activities, paying attention to references to tourism and marketplace.

Anthropological Strategies

My research methodology included a number of well-tested anthropological strategies. First, using fieldnotes, audiotape recordings, and videotape recordings, I recorded my observations of the vendors, tourists, and others who entered tourism/típica marketplaces throughout Antigua. During the busiest hours of the day, I pretended to be a customer, blending in with the tourists visiting the marketplaces, unless a vendor wanted me to explain something or interpret for her. Castañeda (1996) describes how he was considered a spy by the vendors in Pisté because he was recording his observations of them. In my case, I was a spy too, but vendors employed me to spy on tourists. However, when I talked to tourists, I explained why I was in Guatemala.

Second, I interviewed vendors in all 205 marketplace stalls in the Compañía de Jesús Artisan Marketplace, as well as dozens of street peddlers and vendors in other marketplaces. The interview/survey that I used was based on questions from John Swetnam (1975) and Linda Asturias de Barrios (1994; see Appendix). Although the survey helped me get information about vendors, I used the interview items more as a context for us to talk. Vendors did not just answer the questions, they discussed them with me. If a question in the interview caused vendors to talk about something tangential to my immediate interests, I encouraged them. The interviewing/surveying that I did with them and with tourists was also academic work with which they were familiar. Merely spending the day with them, conversing and observing, seemed too much as if I were goofing off.

Third, I initiated some long, ongoing conversations and was invited to participate in other continuing discussions with several different vendors and their extended families. Most of my data come from these talks. Early in my fieldwork, I overzealously asked a lot of questions. Vendors typically resisted this interrogation, never directly refusing to talk to me, but never answering my questions. The only reason vendors answered my questions in the interview/survey was that they had agreed to it in the association meeting. Several vendors during my early fieldwork said, "Tawoyob'ej (Wait), Walter. Stay long enough and you will learn what you want to know." By participating in conversations that were reciprocal and demonstrated a long-term social relation, I was able to learn about the economic and social concerns of vendors, how they used identity concepts in strategic and tactical ways, and how tourism (and other transnational forces) was affecting them.

Fourth, I participated in vendor society as much as they permitted me. The two main social arenas that I was part of were the marketplace and the vendors' hometown. Marketplace participation involved helping them set up and arrange their vending locales in the morning and take down and store their merchandise in the evening, which included carrying some of bultos (large bags/bundles of merchandise) to the warehouses. I learned basic selling techniques and watched vendor stalls when vendors had errands outside of the marketplace. Most of the time my participation was similar to that of other males in the marketplace. I ran errands for female vendors by going to the bank to exchange money, buying food and construction materials in the municipal marketplace, and delivering messages to family members outside of the marketplace. I also helped watch vendors' children.

In vendors' homes, I participated in a number of different ways, performing some "male" and some "female" activities. My objective was to learn as much about Maya life as possible through involvement. I undertook gender-specific tasks related to cooking, in part, because they are of personal interest to me. Vendors were curious about my interests, and fixing meals became a form of cross-cultural comparison for us. I learned how to prepare and cook several dishes served in Maya homes, such as (chile and tomato sauce for meat), ichaj (greens), tamales, chuchitos (a form of tamale), and pulik (chicken stew thickened with cornmeal). I learned how to make tortillas. In turn, I taught people how to make pizza, the dish that was most requested. I also took weaving lessons in two towns, San Antonio Aguas Calientes and San Juan de Comalapa. In the former town, I learned some traditional designs, such as the kumatzin and rupam läq, and finished a small throw cloth. In the latter town, I worked on a traditional huipil panel but never completed it. These lessons resulted in my being teased by some, which is explained in Chapter 5. In Santa Catarina Palopó, I learned how to make pulseras, commonly known as friendship bracelets. In addition, to these supposedly female activities, I learned and performed several activities associated with men's work, such as preparing the milpa (maize field), chopping firewood, or building construction. As one who grew up on a Midwestern farm and roofed during summer breaks in college, these roles were not far from my own background. My log-splitting skills earned me the respect of male Mayas and helped offset their chides about my weaving.

My final strategy was reading the newspapers and discussing the contents with vendors. Initially, I had hoped that such discussions would stimulate their opinions about the Maya movement that received daily attention in the press at that time. They had little to say about this movement. However, since they read newspapers on a regular basis, I learned that there were other topics that interested them, particularly crime and the manner in which the media represented it. They used the information about crime to try to predict how many tourists would visit Guatemala. Newspaper articles also provided neutral conversation topics and information about the United States, about which vendors often questioned me.

Anthropological Tactics

Some of my fieldwork was tactical in nature, as I was forced to continually renegotiate my relationships with vendors. This had to do somewhat with the shifting subjectivities that vendors ascribed to me: anthropologist, guide, tourist, Kaqchikel language course co-director, friend, and so on. Depending on what they wanted to get from me, they would ascribe a particular subjectivity to me. I could not begin my day thinking that I was simply an anthropologist.

Typical anthropological practices of making observations, writing them down, and interviewing were disrupted when vendors decided to use me as a translator or culture broker between them and tourists. As Kaqchikel course co-director, they regarded me as a potential employer, tour guide, and, even, tourist. Basically, vendors were interested in reaping some sort of economic benefit from their association with me, either directly by selling merchandise to me or indirectly by using me to convince tourists and Kaqchikel students to buy their merchandise. Because I could not afford (nor did I desire) to purchase items from all vendors with whom I worked, I usually waited until a situation arose in which we could mutually benefit from the exchange.

My relationships with vendors were economic as well as social. Unlike the exchanges between vendors and tourists, which usually ended with the purchase, anthropologists cannot afford to have such limited relationships. With several families, I entered into complicated gift and favor exchanges. This helped me avoid becoming an economic patron to vendors. It also alleviated some of the competition between vendors for my economic resources.

Another related tactic arose when I first began fieldwork, especially from vendors from San Antonio Aguas Calientes and Santa Catarina Barahona. Some had worked with Sheldon Annis (1987) and Robert McKenna Brown (1991, 1998). They knew something about anthropological work and competed to provide services for me, such as shelter, meals, laundry, and transportation. I kindly declined all of these offers. To have hired people to perform these services would have affiliated me with only a few families; the others would have shut me out of their homes and lives.

Instead, I rented a room, then later a small apartment in Antigua, which vendors could visit any time they wanted. At the same time, a couple of my Kaqchikel teachers, one from San Antonio Aguas Calientes and one from Santa Catarina Barahona, invited me to their homes and to various social functions. Our friendships strengthened, and they provided me with guidance on social mores and language. Vendors, however, soon learned that these fellow townspeople were not charging me for food or a place to stay when I visited. Additionally, they learned that these Kaqchikeles and other Kaqchikel teachers would visit me in Antigua. When they realized this, vendors stopped trying to sell me services and instead began competing for me to visit them and started to visit my apartment. In return, I never refused a guest and I tried not to refuse invitations. The end result of this tactic was that I was able to work with a number of vendors and their extended families, even those who were feuding with each other. Although most vendors viewed me as an impartial listener who would not spread rumors or personal information about them, they freely gossiped about each other. Having a place of my own in a neutral location allowed me to reciprocate the hospitality that was extended to me, which also served as a good way to build rapport.

Organization of the Book

Guatemalan society, similar to other complex societies, is composed of different stratified socioeconomic classes, as well as different ethnic and cultural groups. Guatemalans are well aware of these differences. Tourists and anthropologists who are new to the country quickly recognize the overt signs that differentiate these social groups from each other. Many Mayas, especially women, still distinguish themselves from non-Mayas by the type of clothing they wear. With a little effort, a visitor to Guatemala can learn the major social and economic hierarchies that are present. The social categories of people, language, and occupation—for example, Maya, Ladino, Kaqchikel, K'iche', vendor, farmer, factory worker, and others (which sometimes overlap each other)—are meaningful to the members of Guatemalan society and are used strategically by them.

Because of where they sell and who they sell to, típica vendors have greater access to information coming from tourism, the Guatemalan government, the Maya movement, and their hometowns about different concepts of who Mayas are and what constitutes Mayanness than do most Mayas living in Guatemala today. Vendors use these concepts for social and economic gain. Although these vendors participate in the tourism system and deal with the Guatemalan government, their identity choices are limited by and are not detached from local concerns. Kaqchikel Maya típica vendors navigate between these different concepts of what it means to be Maya by grounding themselves in pragmatic social and economic concerns. They avoid committing to rigid, monodimensional concepts of identity. When asked explicitly what their identities are, they answered, "We know who we are." As argued in this book, their answer suggests that they know how to use identity concepts and what the political and economic implications of that use are for them.

Social difference and hierarchy have been among the topics most studied by anthropologists working in Guatemala, beginning with Sol Tax's (1937) article, "The Municipios of the Midwestern Highlands of Guatemala." This tradition continues with recent ethnographies by Robert Carlsen (1997), Edward Fischer (2001), Diane Nelson (1999), and Kay Warren (1998a). To contribute to this body of work, I draw inspiration from Watanabe's (1992) ethnography to recontextualize difference and hierarchy in Guatemala by looking primarily at the existential social and economic practices of Kaqchikel Maya típica vendors who sell in Antigua Guatemala to show how the practices and identities of Kaqchikel Mayas have modified because of the international and transnational tourism setting in which they work.

Tourism reconstructs difference in concrete, observable ways. Both tourists and their Others mutually participate in this construction. The convergence of observers and observed, consumers and producers, spectators and performers has created new sociocultural and socioeconomic spaces of interaction that are part of local and transnational communities but are increasingly less limited by nation-states. This contributes to the new ways that Mayas live in and conceptualize the world. Vendors are still embedded in the nation in the ways they are subjected to political violence and co-opted to promote tourism. Nation, however, gets in their way. Because their economic connections are with their respective hometowns and with foreign tourists and businesspersons, they treat local-level to national-level institutions as obstacles to their economic and social autonomy. In contrast to Pan-Maya activists who are concerned with remaking the state and reconceptualizing the nation, handicraft vendors want to cut out the state and do away with the concept of nation, using community- and transnational-based identities, among others, rather than national identity.

As is illustrated in this book, international tourism (tourists, policies, institutions, etc.) affects how Kaqchikel Maya vendors organize and practice their lives. In relation to this, the following chapters deal with three major themes: (1) global and transnational flows of people and commodities, with particular attention to the conflation of global/local distinctions in some socioeconomic contexts; (2) tourism marketplaces and tourism routes as borderzones, where national and international, developed and underdeveloped, indigenous and nonindigenous come together; and (3) marketing to tourists as a significant socioeconomic practice that contributes to changing social roles, relationships, and identity in nonmarketplace contexts. As can be seen in the opening examples of this chapter, these themes relate to real concerns of Maya típica vendors.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide overviews of Maya típica vendors' practices and show how vendors are located within transnational economic spaces, international tourism structures, and debates about who Mayas are. Chapter 1 focuses on tourism structures and disjunctures between tourists and Mayas. Chapter 2 looks in greater detail at touristic constructions of Antigua and típica marketplaces and the contradictions between these constructs and actually living in the city.

Chapters 3 and 4 look at the handicraft market that is aimed primarily at foreign tourists who visit Antigua. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the market, the various places típica is sold throughout the city, and who is selling it. Chapter 4 concentrates on the Compañía de Jesús Artisan Marketplace, the largest típica marketplace in Antigua, by discussing the historical and political contexts in which these vendors are embedded.

Chapters 5 through 8 look at the connections between the marketplaces in Antigua and the hometowns of the vendors. Chapter 5 discusses how vendors' concepts of identity and ideologies about gender roles are shaped by the social relations and particular activities in which they partake in the marketplace. Chapter 6 explains why community origins are of continuing significance to vendors who spend more of their time away from their hometowns. Chapter 7 describes how steep competition for customers among vendors has led to new selling strategies that directly incorporate households into global touristic processes. These economic strategies, among others (such as the formation of cooperative marketing groups [Grimes and Milgram 2000; Nash 1993a]), are used by handicraft makers and vendors selling in the global market. Chapter 8 examines how tourism can increase women's economic opportunities, which in turn contribute to greater prestige when they reinvest their earnings in community traditions.

Tourism takes the social, economic, and political concerns of some Mayas and places them into transnational and global arenas that, in certain instances, effectively circumvent the Guatemalan nation-state. The context of tourism in Guatemala is global and transnational, but the activities of the nation-state, both good and bad, temper how Mayas participate in tourism and how international tourists regard Guatemala as a destination for trips. This book focuses on the contradictions that arise when vendors negotiate economic transactions and social relationships within the marketplace, with their hometowns, with foreign tourists and businesspersons, and with the local and national governments. For Maya típica vendors in Guatemala, work and cultural identity are intertwined and set within these political, social, and national/transnational economic spaces.