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 unortho-dox 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.