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Whose Apocalypto?

By Daffodil Altan, New America Media

Dec 15, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- I’m not going to pretend that the remarkable thousand-year history of the Mayas did not involve its share of violence, sacrifice and territorial warfare. The absurd, sometimes laughable, violence in Mel Gibson’s new film is not what worries me. The blatant historical inaccuracies do worry me, but that’s Hollywood. What worries me most about Gibson’s depiction of a bloodthirsty, gluttonous, war-mongering Maya civilization on the verge of collapse is how his fictionalized narrative is being perceived by those of us, like myself, with mixed legacies, both Mayan and Spanish. My worry has to do with what I encountered in the lobby of the movie theater after the film was over.

“Those Maya sure were some motherf*****s!” said an older Salvadoran man in Spanish as we walked out. “That was life in the jungle, violent. And that’s what they were like,” he said to me. Nevermind his elongated indigenous nose, his soft, brown skin, his large almond-shaped eyes. It was obvious that he bought into Mel Gibson’s tale of a group of noble, good-hearted savages chased through the jungle by the blood-thirsty Mayans, bent on sacrifice and excess.

He wasn’t the only Latin American with a visibly mixed face who had stars in his eyes as we left the theater. Another moviegoer, a young guy from Mexico City was ecstatic. “It was a totally inspired film,” he said. “That was them.”

And that’s what I kept hearing, in Spanish, from other Latinos in the lobby: They. They. They. There seemed to be no sense of, hey, that’s us or our history, he’s talking about. I am not full Mayan. But there were moments in Gibson’s film where I felt pangs of embarrassment and grief for the way he was depicting, essentially, the people that I come from, in such stereotyped one-dimensional ways. His imagined tale, however beautifully filmed, did nothing to convey the sophistication and long history of non-violence that defined the indigenous Maya. The friend I was with, a U.S.-born Mexican American, felt the same way. And we half expected to find this same sentiment among other Latinos in the lobby. But what we found was an all-to-familiar distancing, something akin to my mother’s mixed pride and detachment when she would dress me up as a native Mayan for traditional portraits with my brother, but always insist that we were not native Mayans.

As a kid I was carefully and subtly cautioned against identifying as an “Indita” on my visits with my aunts and uncles back to Guatemala. Even while my mom dressed me in teeny woven skirts and Mayan headdress for the portraits, it was made clear to me that we were not “them.” But by wearing their cultural dress, we were somehow acknowledging our attachment to that history. There was an obvious conflict: a simultaneous accepting and denying of our mixed legacy.

The confusion isn’t a shocker: racism is just as alive and well in Guatemala, Mexico and throughout Central America as it is in the U.S. White European faces are still the preference, dominating telenovelas and magazine covers and the living Maya (in Guatemala, 23 Mayan languages are officially recognized and 40 percent of the population is pure indigenous Maya) are still marginalized and not-so-subtly looked down upon as the less sophisticated “other.” And that racism is carried right over the border into the U.S.

But that has changed with younger generations. Educated Latin Americans who would be classified as “Ladinos” or “mestizos” in Latin America (in Mexico and Guatemala, that’s 60 percent of the population) tend to comfortably identify with our mixed roots -- this being helped along by the Chicano movement and the advent of ethnic studies and other such university programs. But this is still not the norm in Latin America or among recent immigrants, where having the face of an Indian is still considered lesser-than.

In the lobby we heard a little boy ask his mom if the story we had just seen was real. I realized then that this film may well re-ignite a whole new era of racist stereotyping. I don't know how "Apocalypto" will be received when it opens next year in my parents' native Guatemala. I only know it will do nothing to untangle a confused mix of ancestral pride, denial and shame that persists among the many Central Americans with mixed Mayan and European ancestry.

See the Hispanic American Village blog for the Nation’s right on assessment: Mad Mel and the Maya