Resumen Patria del Criollo a Patria del Shumo.

This dissertation argues that interethnic relations in Guatemala should be understood within the frame of global racism and not only as a result of the Indian-Ladino dichotomy that depicts Ladinos as whites, leaving unquestioned the role tutelary relations and relations of servitude play in obstructing citizenship development and justifying authoritarianism and regressive modernization In the long history of servile relationships that has marked racial, social and gender differences and inequalities in Guatemala, to be a servant, or cholero, has been associated with being “Indian,” Indio aladinado, poor, and non-white. The perception of the higher social strata is that cholero, muco or shumo youths are uneducated and unemployed, are prone to crime because of their tendency to laziness, are malnourished and therefore not apt to benefit from school, much less from university. For many of these unemployed or underemployed young people the only options open are those of the “informal economy,” common crime, or joining any of the organized crime networks linked to the counterinsurgency organizations of the past. Muco, shumo and cholero are terms through which the racist and classist mentality is united. It emphasizes those terms to subjugate people for the way they look, dress, speak, wear their hair, for the music they prefer, the places where they gather and the foods they eat, or for their social condition. Muco, shumo or cholero are equivalent terms used to put down various forms of mestizo and working-class consumption and cultural exchange, which can be synthesized with all their contradictions into three factors that are fundamental to the dominant mentality: the cult of the “pure Indian” as obedient and dedicated servant, the portrayal of the mestizo Ladino as lazy and rebellious subordinate, and the racist, anti-indigenous and anti-mestizo sentiments in Ladinos, whites and Creoles fostered by both representations. Lower class Ladinos can be both subject to the anti-shumo, anti-cholero and anti-muco racism and still perpetuate racism toward Indians and that is why socio-racial interactions are so resistant to change in Guatemala. I propose an approach to Guatemalan racism that includes symbolic wars between gente decente and gente corriente, fueled by the anti-Indian and anti-mestizo sentiments and the prominence of the “respeto al canche”.Whiteness and anti-communism criminalized poverty, justified racial and cultural inequality and aggrandized the importance of being white and wealthy. Over many years, the Guatemalan elite behaved as a divine caste without any sense of political or moral obligation towards the less favoured members of society. That divine caste is facing now the erosion of the hegemonic representations, which, for many decades, established the place of everyone in society. This erosion is the result of new transnational dynamics propelled by the political actions of the Maya movement, the increasing numbers of plebeians Indians and Ladinos with access to English language, commodities and new technologies, and the public pressure for institutional democratization and social reform. In that respect the erosion of hegemonic representations is propitiating new forms of political alignment between Indians and mestizos or post-Ladinos stigmatized today as shumos. This dissertation offers a new approach to racism in Guatemala as a combination of anti-Indian and anti-mestizo sentiments that contribute to the reproduction of a socio-racial hierarchy that operates at national and global level and can hardly be explained through the Indian-Ladino dichotomy I claim that racism in Guatemala in many ways works as a form of hegemony grounded in representations from colonial and modern origin that are assumed by people from different classes and cultural backgrounds. Racism in Guatemala is the most important element for the reproduction of regressive modernization, tutelary relations and relations of servitude. Guatemalan racism needs to be framed within the dislocations resulting from the dismantling of revolutionary nationalism and the politics of Cold War associated with whiteness and anti-communism and not simply through the cultural polarities of ethnicity, constructed by anthropologists and critical observers. Guatemala exhibited from his early beginnings as a republic, profound contradictions between theory and practice of classic Liberalism addressed to nation-building, high concentration of land and income distribution in few hands, dictatorship and military regimes, geopolitical factors that during the twentieth century decided the dismantling of revolutionary nationalism, a ruling class unable to direct institutional development, strategic convergence among whiteness, anticommunism and racialization of inequality, weak development of its middle classes, militarization of territory, society and the State, the execution of a genocide, and the institutional reproduction of violence as mediator of social and individual interactions.

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