AGENCY AT THE FRONTIER AND THE BUILDING OF TERRITORIALITY IN THE NARANJO-CEIBO CORRIDOR, PETEN, GUATEMALA By LUIS ALFREDO ARRIOLA A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2005 Copyright 2005 by Luis Alfredo Arriola To my beloved family, in appreciation of all they have endured. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The sheer magnitude of a dissertation necessarily engages multiple collaborations. In consequence I render proper credit to the people and institutions who partook of this endeavor. My everlasting gratitude goes, first and foremost, to the people of Naranjo and Ceibo who taught more than I could ever learn from them. Intellectual support was always there when needed from committee members, namely Professors Allan Burns, Marianne Schmink, Michael Heckenberger, and Murdo MacLeod. They challenged my intellect in many positive, creative ways. My dissertation mutual support group is recognized for invaluable contributions to my refining of the manuscript’s content and form at several stages of its development. The insightful feedback from Alex Rodlach, Maxine Downs, Deborah Rodman, Paige Lado, and Fatma Soud helped me through difficult times. My editors, Martha Jeanne Weismantel, Tara Boonstra and Mark Minho, have but my highest regards. Other people who accompanied me in this intellectual journey and who deserve mentioning include Norman Schwartz, Victor Hugo Ramos, Edgar Calderón, Roberto Barrios, Kevin Gould, Georg Grumberg, Julio Cano and Werner Ramírez. Diverse kinds of support came from Tom Ankersen, Hugo Guillen, Bruce Ferguson, Richard Phillips, Paul Losch, Marie-Claire Paiz, Abimael Reinoso, Jorge Soza, Amilcar Corzo, Mario Mancilla and Luis A. Estrada. I am indebted to a number of institutions for making possible the completion of this graduate degree. Generous endowments from the John D. and Catherine MacArthur iv Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the Organization of American States supported the first two years of doctoral studies. Sandra Cervera (New York) and María Teresa San Roman (Mexico City) from the International Institute of Education deserve special thanks for the moral support that they always offered when needed. Initial field research was made possible through aid from The Center for Latin American Studies, and the Program for Studies in Tropical Conservation, both at the University of Florida. The World Wildlife Fund/Central America office provided the funding for extended field work in 2002. While in the field I was privileged to procure the collaboration of the Assistant Mayors from Naranjo and Ceibo, Defensores de la Naturaleza, the town hall of La Libertad, CONAP’s Petén office, and FONTIERRAS. During the write-up stage critical support came forth from The Tropical Conservation and Development Program, the Department of Anthropology, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, all at the University of Florida. v PREFACE I began collecting data for this dissertation in June 2000 two weeks after the inauguration of a 60-kilometer paved road from Tenosique, Tabasco, in Mexico, to the border with Petén, Guatemala. Both the international border and the settlement on the Guatemalan side are known as Ceibo. At the time there was no settlement of any size on the Mexican side. The building of the road would quickly trigger the latest advance of collective agency to occur in this frontier locality. A few months after the opening of the road an increasing number of ventursome merchants from distant Quiché province in the Guatemalan highlands had begun to set up make-shift booths with merchandise of all kinds. As I watched over the next two years, Ceibo changed from an isolated, scantly- populated hamlet into a growing settlement, one bursting with economic activity. Ceibo’s changing conditions were embedded in processes connected to the occupation of space that involved both the local population and the Guatemalan state. Ceibo lays about 20 kms. west of the town of Naranjo, a place in this part of northwestern Petén I had visited before. A battered trail separated Naranjo from Ceibo, so the best way to travel between the two settlments was by river. One of the objectives of the 2000 trip was to determine my research headquarters for future research. Naranjo was chosen for a number of reasons to be explained later. As I collected information via interviews, life-histories, and archival work I realized that Ceibo was experiencing the same process that Naranjo had gone through two decades before. vi This study of the stretch of land between both settlements,what I refer to as the Naranjo-Ceibo corridor, sheds light on the way local populations find ways to deal with the state as their relationship with it changes through the process of building their own socio-cultural place. The central idea proposed here is that Naranjo and Ceibo inhabitants had engaged multiple strategies to adapt, to resist, and fight back external agents and driving forces acting upon them and on their agenda for attaining social control of space in reaction to the particular circumstances of each period. The external, or the outside, refers in this work to the non-local. Ethnographic work allows one to examine the specificity of agency and its range of possibilities. It is this micro-perspective where anthropological insight contributes to the study of agency(ies) at locales such as frontiers and borders, by looking at 1) the level and success to affect bring about via agency, 2) the way agency develops from a connection to, as a result of, or in reaction to state intervention or encroachment, as when it promotes colonization –in a frontier, or controls its boundaries –at its borders, and 3) the way this interplay gets culturally mediated in the process. Social control of space passed through a long period of frontier expansion before evolving into territoriality, or a permanent way of establishing social power (Sack 1986). Territoriality proper culminated with the titling of the land. External driving forces that had complicated the progression of the frontier and territoriality included the existence of illegal practices, political conflict, and the designation of the research site as a protected area for conservation purposes. The significance of studying agency in this locale is twofold. First, there is a dearth of empirical data that explains the way members of local society in Guatemala’s border vii and frontier areas deal with the state, and conversely, how the state engages, or fails to engage, its marginal fringes in Guatemala. The study of state issues in this country has been done in relation to the structure of government (e.g., Silvert 1954; Adams 1970), within an ethnic relations perspective (e.g., Smith 1990), in connection to social movements (see Galvez 1994), or from a perspective of “state terror” (see Delli 1996; Figueroa 1991). The reference to fringes follows the paradigm known as Dependency Theory (Frank 1967; Cardoso and Faletto 1979). This paradigm looks at relationships between the core of a political or economic system and its margins or periphery. The main idea is that power (social, economic, political) is concentrated in the center of the system, and places the fringes at a disadvantage. Periphery is understood here as situational. For instance, the shanty towns of many capital cities of the third world are the marginal loci inside the core. By contrast, the border area of the Naranjo-Ceibo corridor is an example of a situational periphery, for reasons that will become clear later, in a rural context. Secondly, the role of agency acquires an enhanced centrality when considering that borders, state symbols of control, are taking on new signified importance in the context of an expanding global political economy. Theoretically, political economy frames the study of social phenomena within a comprehensive historical scope and emphasizes the asymmetrical and disparate connections across different levels –e.g., the local and the global, and within diverse realms, including but not limited to culture, politics and economics. Among others, William Roseberry (1988, 1990) has laid out the approach in anthropological terms, and Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History constitutes a prime example of this kind of work. In this line of thought, transnational viii activities at the Naranjo-Ceibo corridor make this location one among multiple world nodes in globalization. Transnationalism, defined by Kearney (1995: 547) as the movement of information, symbols, capitals, and people in spaces and places transcending national boundaries, is rapidly changing the nature of borders as markers of state power. Less and less, borders pose effective state barriers to the flow of ideas and people from one nation-state to another. Behind the alleged erosion of borders (e.g., Ohmae 1994) is the professed demise of the nation-state as the “pre-eminent political structure of modernity” (Wilson and Donnan 1998: 1). Although outside the scope of the dissertation, this last point cannot be totally disregarded given that the diminished significance of the state results from economic globalization and a de-territorialization of political spaces (Steinmetz 1999: 10). International borders, withering away or not, are arenas where cultural and symbolic dimensions of the state are still constantly re- constituted and re-formulated. In such contested spheres border people are active players of a dynamics that at one point in time may develop slowly, yet at another may change abruptly. This study illustrates how people dealt with, tackled, and engaged change, through personal and collective strategies, at the Mexico-Guatemala northern border over the course of the twentieth century. The dissertation contains six chapters. Chapter 1 sets forth the theory informing research findings, with an emphasis on the connection between agency and the state. In particular, a political economy approach grounds my theoretical insights, covering also a conceptual understanding of the main aspects influencing on territoriality at the research site.