El Baile de la Conquista: The Tale the Conquered Are Allowed to Tell

This past weekend, Santiago Atitlán held its annual fair to commemorate Saint James (Santiago in Spanish), the community’s patron saint. It was a slightly under-illuminated affair, the pandemic exiling the carnival rides to an empty field well outside the city and cancelling the annual marimba concert altogether. Still, much went on as usual. The image of Saint James traveled the streets atop the shoulders of persevering bearers. The patron’s special brotherhood inaugurated his feast day with several rounds of sleep-depriving 4 AM rocket blasts. Feathered and masked young men danced for hours in a historical reenactment called “el Baile de la Conquista.” 

It was this last event that most captured my attention

The dance itself is less a simple set of movements than a full-scale theatrical production. The plot concerns the original Spanish conquest of the Mayan population. In the dance’s penultimate scene, the Spanish commander defeats the heroic Tecún Umán (a figure whose historical existence is dubious, but whose role as a mythological focal point is undeniable). The defeated Mayans, watching their leader’s downfall from the shadows, are left to bend the knee and take on the religion of their conquerors: Catholicism.

The dance is no modern invention. Combining age-old Mayan movements with Spanish narrative tropes (most notably those of el Baile de los Moros), el Baile de la Conquista originated in the conquered indigenous communities of colonial Guatemala. The Spanish friars encouraged its proliferation, confident its pro-Catholic conclusion could only benefit their cause. They had no reason to disapprove of a story glorifying their own triumph. 

When it comes to historical narratives, we’re used to hearing that the winners always get to tell the story. Here, however, we see something a bit more complex: the winners letting the losers tell the story, but in a way that the winners find satisfactory. Perhaps in the years after the conquest some Mayan dances told a different tale, one depicting the true price of Spanish brutality and the spiritual pain of forced conversion. If those dances did exist, they weren’t allowed to survive. It’s little wonder why.

Bright, Not Brilliant: Overcoming Trounced Notions of Orginality

 

It’s awfully fun to be young and creative. You wrap your limbs around a handful of new ideas, each of which seem to define the world in its entirety, and then you set about sprouting new ideas of your own. Each of these, you’re sure, could change the world of art, science, or social relations just as much as it changed your own perceptions. The people are silly, backward, or blind, but now a young genius has come along who will truly make them see.

One day, among the readings for a college class or in an old documentary, you happen upon an idea you thought was your own. The first time, it’s exhilarating. “Oh my God,” you think, giving yourself not so much a high five as an exuberant celebratory shaking. “I produced the same thought as X, so I must be just as brilliant!”

Then it happens again and again, and the initial euphoria at seeing yourself as a fellow traveler of the greats gives way to a growing sense of panic as all your grand theories, all the private breakthroughs that marked your superiority to your peers, fall claim to the thinkers of the past. Sure, you were clever enough to come up with some novel ideas, but they were only novel to you. What had seemed a blast of innovation was just a parochial lack of awareness.

This is an unsettling, demoralizing, and profoundly humbling realization. You’re not brilliant, but merely bright. You’ve created or changed nothing of note. As far as the arts and sciences are concerned, you might as well have never been born.

So what is one to do? Put down the pen, shred the library card, and commit oneself to the guiltless enjoyment of pop music? 

Or keep at it?

It’s the latter path I’ve decided to make my own. I find solace in the fact that countless greats, almost all thinkers, innovators, and enactors of true genius, must have passed through their own share of ultimately unoriginal innovations. They, too, saw their ideas suddenly appear among the flotsam of the past. And what did they do? They kept thinking, kept innovating, kept pushing the boundaries of what they were sure they already knew. And eventually, even if they didn’t realize it at the time, they came up with a philosophical formulation, artistic method, or scientific hypothesis that really was new. 

Looking at some of my past literary efforts can be cringe inducing (and I’m sure I’m not alone in that). What’s even worse is remembering how proud I was of each “innovation” at the time. 

Despite my shame at my hubristic past, the only solution is to keep pushing the limits, keep stretching beyond my own understanding in the hopes I’m stretching beyond the readership’s understanding as well. All it takes is a little bit of courage — the courage to look back, cringe, and still try again, knowing full well that my current endeavors might some day produce that same gnawing embarrassment.