Beauty is resistance — Daniel Pandiyan
The Jaguar is one of my favorite chapters in Sanctuary, and not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, it is beautiful, rich, and peaceful, a rest in the middle of a hard road. But that is not why I return to it. I return to it because it reaches in three directions at once, into the past, the present, and the future, and because it asks what we actually mean when we say the words culture, heritage, beauty, and goodness.
I did not want to write it from what I thought I knew. What I thought I knew was small. I have eaten in Guatemalan places around Albany Park and Irving Park in Chicago for years, and I have known Guatemalans, and like a lot of people I filed most of them under one word without thinking. Mexican. That is the flattening the country lives under here. The truth is much further away than that.
Guatemala is an outlier. It is the one country in Central America where indigenous people come close to being the majority. By the 2018 census, about forty-four percent of the population is indigenous, almost all of it Maya, and by older counts the Maya are the only indigenous people to form a majority of any Central American republic. They are not a single people. The government recognizes twenty-two Mayan languages. That number alone tells you why there was never one united front to stand behind. A person from one valley may not understand a person from the next. What they share is older than the border they live inside, older than the Spanish names many of them carry now.
Many did take Spanish names. What they kept is everything else, the language, the weaving, the food, the memory, and they kept it through a century that tried to take it. When I read about the Guatemalan civil war I had to stop and read it twice. More than two hundred thousand people were killed across thirty-six years, closer to a quarter million counting the disappeared, and the United Nations truth commission found that the state had committed acts of genocide against the Maya. Whole villages were cordoned off. The men were separated and killed. The survivors were hunted from helicopters. The worst of it fell on the Ixil Maya under a single regime in the early eighties. Land was taken. People were erased on purpose.
So when the family in this chapter says they have held their own land for only one generation, that they worked other people’s plantations before, that the father disappeared in the war and they are still here, none of that is decoration. That is the real arithmetic of survival in the Guatemalan highlands, and I wanted the reader to meet it as fact, not as flavor.
The thing that changed me most while writing this was the cloth. I had seen the huipiles before, the woven blouses, in Chicago, and I am not proud of how I first saw them. I measured them against what I already carried in my head. Bright. Busy. Strange. Not modern. I want to be honest about that, because it is the exact mistake the chapter is built to undo. When you look at a kind of clothing you do not understand and decide it is odd, that judgment is not in the cloth. It is in you. It is your own narrow eye calling itself a standard, and until you learn more you will keep mistaking your bias for a fact about the world.
Then I read about the weaving in detail, in many places, and it turned over completely. The patterns are not ornament. They are a record. The zigzag is the mountain. The diamond is corn. The small repeated shapes are birds. In many towns the style itself tells you where a person comes from, the community and the Maya group they belong to, written into the weave. The technique is a backstrap loom, the tension held by the weaver’s own body, the knowledge passed from mother to daughter for hundreds of years, through the century that tried to end it. They wanted us to stop wearing this, one grandmother said in the accounts I read, so we kept making it. That is not fashion. That is resistance that never raises its voice. Beauty, held onto on purpose, is its own kind of resistance. Once I understood that I could not unsee it, and neither can the boy in the book.
The chapter itself is quiet by design. Miles and the two who travel with him are caught in an afternoon storm and taken in by a K’iche’ family. They are given dry blankets, a thick warm corn drink, and later a cup of real cacao, the sacred kind, poured for guests. Miles watches the grandmother at the loom and fails, again and again, to weave a single clean row. He learns a few words of K’iche’. Maltiox, thank you. Juyub, mountain. He plays hide and seek with the children in the coffee rows until he is laughing from the belly, the way he has not since the world ended. For one morning he is not a migrant or a survivor. He is only a boy among children.
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This is where I put everything I believe about people. The civilized world, the one with systems and papers and officials, has given this boy traffickers and checkpoints and worse. This family, with almost nothing, gives him everything they have. They have so little, Lucía says. They shared it anyway, Miles answers. That is the whole argument of the book in two lines. We measure a culture by the wrong things, by comfort and machinery and how modern it looks, when the measure that matters is what a people value and how they treat a stranger at the door.
The name comes from the smallest thing in the room. The little boy is called B’alam, which is jaguar in K’iche’, and his grandfather carved him a wooden jaguar, a jaguar for the boy named jaguar. When the travelers leave, the children give it to Miles. So you don’t forget, the mother translates. He carries it the rest of the book, and touches it in his pocket when he needs to know there is that much good left in the world.
I almost called the chapter Sanctuary, because that is what it is, the one place on the road that feels like the thing he is walking toward. I chose The Jaguar instead. The sanctuary was never a place he could stay. It was something he was given, small enough to carry, and it went with him.
If you want to learn more
If the huipil has caught your eye the way it caught mine, these are good places to start.
- Huipil, on Wikipedia: the history of the garment, from before the Spanish conquest to today, and how its designs differ from region to region.
- What is a huipil?, from Intertwined
Originally published at https://danielpandiyan.com.
