The Mam Mayan Christians of Guatemala’s Western Highlands regularly ascend sacred mountains to pray for the precarious migration journey across Mexico and into the United States. This paper describes and explicates the cultural logic connecting mountains, migration, and prayer through an analysis of linguistic practices across three domains: (1) the tacit and habitual reference to mountains in common Mam grammatical form classes, (2) the discourse patterns that link the precarities of migration to mountaintop prayer, and (3) the context for and structure of mountaintop prayer rituals. Taken together, the analysis of these three domains describes a Mam ontology of mountains that render mountaintop prayer the most important venue for facing the precarities of international migration. The paper closes by considering the habitus of Mam Maya Evangelical Christians as a source of Indigenous theological praxis.
Christian Espinosa Schatz (Thu,) studied this question.