Religious Conflict, Ritual Embodiment, and Music in the Twentieth-Century Guatemalan Highlands

When Maryknoll missionaries arrived in rural highland Guatemala in the 1940s, they were baffled by local justifications for syncretic and unorthodox religious practices. Locals cited their own small libraries of religious and liturgical music manuscripts—compiled locally in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—in arguing that their practice was theologically sound and that it was instead the missionaries who were spreading heretical practices. Based on research at the Maryknoll Missionary Archive, I trace twentieth-century musical and religious practices drawing from these colonial-era music books, and I examine the precarity of Indigenous ownership over culturally hybrid practices and how embodiment intersects with notions of hybridity.