Described as being one of the highlights of any visit to
Guatemala, the Thursday and Sunday market in the town of Chichicastenango is
the largest indigenous market in Central America, something that shouldn’t be
missed by anyone visiting the country . With my KE Adventure Travel tour ending
on Saturday morning and my having to go back west to Quetzaltenango to begin my
trek, the Sunday market fit well into my schedule. I had planned to go to
Chichi the night before but couldn’t find a shuttle van running on anything but
the market days. The alternative would be to take one of the chicken buses, the
converted North American school buses that are the primary form of public
transportation in Guatemala.

My 7:00 A.M. scheduled pickup arrived about half an hour
late, but I guess that’s expected as the vans spend half an hour circling
around Antigua picking people up at various hotels. I was the last one on, and
I suppose standing on the sidewalk for half an hour was more pleasant that
spending the time sitting in the cramped van. Chichicastenango is situated in a
hilly area a short distance north of the Pan-American Highway and north of Lake
Atitlan, so the ride took about two hours and got me into town at the height of
the market and also in time to observe some of the Mayan religious ceremonies .

Chichicastenango’s huge market is centered on the town’s
main square in front of the city hall and the Santo Tomas church, officially a
Catholic church but like many in the Mayan heartland effectively more of a
modern day Mayan temple that incorporates some Catholic beliefs and rituals
into traditional Mayan ones. What you see in these supposedly Catholic churches
in Mayaland you will see nowhere else in Catholic churches around the world, although
some of the rituals involving burning candles, use of incense, religious
processions, and parading images involve syncretic adaptations of Mayan rituals
to the demands of the Catholic Church.

Although the market is full of handicrafts designed to
appeal to tourists, I’m quite over collecting souvenirs from my travels and
rarely buy anything anymore. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had a house to
display them in, but I have so much in storage already and don’t know when I’ll
have a place of my own again . So while most of the tourists who mob
Chichicastenango have shopping on their minds, I found the ceremonies of the
Cofradias to be far more interesting. In Spanish countries cofradias are
religious brotherhoods that perform community services as well as parade on
religious feast days. There are apparently numerous cofradias in
Chichicastenango, but I saw only one on parade on the Sunday of my visit. I caught
up with them in the Church of Santo Tomas where I watched some of the tail end
of a ceremony involving the effigy of a saint in a box. The box with the saint
was then carried out of the church to a ceremony on the top of the church steps
involving dancing, fireworks, and a noisy blowtorch behind flames for
offerings. Mayans like lots of smoke and fire and noise! The cofradia then
paraded in a circuitous route through the market to a smaller chapel on the
opposite side of the market square where it repeated the ceremony in the
courtyard outside the church. They then continued the parade through the market
and around town . What does it all mean? I don’t know. The significance of what
was taking place wasn’t clear to me, and I wasn’t with a guide to explain it to
me.

After my time in the church of Santo Tomas I did some
reading in my guidebook to find a few more answers and didn’t really get them.
What I did, though, is that taking pictures in the church is forbidden, and
only the cofradias are allowed use the front door to the church and stand on
the top steps at the entrance to perform their ceremonies. These rules
apparently are similar to those Mayans used to have in their famous stone
temples in ruined ancient cities, and here non-priestly types are supposed to
use the church’s side entrance. Well, I guess I broke all the rules again. Bad
karma? I just followed along and did what other tourist types were doing.

Chichicastenango’s market is huge and spills well outside
the central market square into the streets for several blocks in each direction .
And despite the concessions to tourist tastes in certain goods, it’s primarily
a market for locals to buy and sell produce, livestock, and all the basic
necessities of life as well as catch up with people from other villages.
Apparently people from each village have a somewhat different traditional
costume, especially worn by women, but it’s hard for an outsider to tell the
difference. It’s just all very colorful. The closest thing I could compare it
to is the big market at Otavalo, Ecuador that is also overwhelmingly indigenous
people and also has a large crafts component for the tourists. Comparing the
two, though, I think Chichicastenango is significantly more traditional and
seemed to me to be especially crowded and chaotic. It’s not very different from
what you’d imagine ancient Mayan city’s market to be like.

I found it so crowded to be quite stifling, especially since
the tarps that are temporarily strung over the walkways between the stalls to
provide mostly shade in the market are in many places set low enough that I had
to duck down much of the time as I was walking through . The local Mayan people
are very short, some of the tiniest I’ve seen anywhere, with few exceeding five
feet and many of the women probably not much more than four feet tall. In
Guatemala I sometimes feel like I’m in Lilliput from Gulliver’s Travels. It
makes me wonder if small size is an evolutionary adaptation to frequent historical
famines and inadequate food supplies or reflects modern protein deficient diets
of current day Mayans. Do Mayan children grow up bigger if they’re fed a
western diet? I don’t know.

A few hours in the crowded market was plenty for me since I
wasn’t in the market for blankets and trinkets. I had lunch at a second floor restaurant
overlooking the mayhem and then found my way back to the area behind Hotel
Santo Tomas where the tourists vans were parked to recover my backpack and find
the van that was heading to my next destination at Quetzaltenango.