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Show Largest Indian Market in World Is in Guatemala; Traders Are Gayly Costumed The plaza of Santo Tomas Chichi-castenango, Chichi-castenango, a village hidden far back in the mountains of Guatemala, Guate-mala, is the scene of the largest and most elaborately costumed Indian In-dian market in Central America. On Thursdays and Sundays it draws as many as 5,000 traders and farmers farm-ers from an area of several hundred hun-dred square miles. Mingling here on market days are Indians from scores of villages, each dressed in a different manner. To the stranger it is dreamlike and unreal. One has the feeling that this is the opening scene of a new opera; that presently a trumpet will blow, an orchestra will begin to play and all these earnest people will drop their bargaining to burst forth in full-throated song! Back of the gay trappings and the romancing of visitors, however, the workaday life of a simple but industrious in-dustrious people moves on. In long rows the women squat on the hard earth, their wares piled before them. Some are protected from the tropical sun by square cotton awn ings, but most of them sit in the open. Many plait straw for sombreros som-breros as they w.ait for buyers. Hand scales measure out yellow and blue corn, native copal incense, soap, peppers, dried shrimps, beans and herbs. It is difficult for an outsider to understand un-derstand the status of the Indian in a town like Chichicastenango. Unlike Un-like the half-naked aborigines of the jungle lowlands, or the itinerant tradesmen and servants of the cities, the Indians of the highlands of Guatemala have maintained a proud, semi-independence as farmers, farm-ers, weavers and pottery makers. Conquered but never assimilated, they are aristocrats among the native na-tive peoples of Central America, and they are sufficiently well organized to make mass petitions to the central cen-tral government when local conditions condi-tions demand it. They have had much less contact with other races than Indians elsewhere have had. Consequently, they have retained their self-respect and are neither subservient nor cringing. |