Meeting Chona and San Pedro
US researcher Barbara Rogoff became family' with revered Mayan midwife Chona Pérez, beginning with Barbara's research interviews with Chona, the town's prominent expert on childrearing. The chapter traces the basis of their relationship and its context within the Mayan, Spanish, and Guatemalan history of the Mayan town of San Pedro, in the Highlands of Guatemala. Chona speaks the local Mayan language Tz'utujil, which is unrelated except through borrowed words to the national language, Spanish. Both continuities and changes are evident in the everyday occupations and practices of San Pedro women and men across Chona's lifetime and Barbara's decades of research in San Pedro. These descriptions of the course of San Pedro life are developed in describing the story that Chona created to explain how Barbara is her daughter.
Keywords: Mayan, Spanish, Tz'utujil, language, history, weaving, tortillas, Guatemala
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .