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16 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY NUMBER 23
only child it was a struggle learning to play with his
peers, but he won 160 marbles. Many school days
were spent in the woods with a slingshot. For four
years he served as an assistant to the ensign-bearers'
musicians during fiestas. In the afternoons when
school let out he received crackers from a strange
man. He learned it was his father.
Aged 12, Romin watched his corn crop fail. He
volunteered for the coffee plantations down on the
coast, but the recruiter did not let him go until his
head was shaved. For two months he worked with
seven fellow townsmen on thirteen plantations. He
saw his first movie. He shook with malaria, grew
homesick, had his savings stolen on the train.
Returning home, Romin was appointed sacristan;
a post he served for four years while he earned
money doing roadwork on the side. Then he became
a puppeteer and agent of the National Indian Institute.
At the age of 26, after one rejection and a lengthy
courtship, Romin was married to a girl of high social
standing within the community. Their first child, a
daughter, died in infancy. The three sons and two
daughters who followed have been more fortunate.
Shortly after his marriage Romin became the selfstyled
"interpreter of anthropology for Harvard
University." For many years he was the principal
informant of the Harvard Chiapas Project, serving as
typist, transcriber, and translator of hundreds of
native texts. Together with 7Anselmo Peres he collaborated
in the compilation of The Great Tzotzil
Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantdn. This task took
Romin to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1963, and to
Washington, D.C., in 1967. His eyes were assailed
with new sights: the Pacific and Atlantic oceans,
snow, blacks, subways, television, the assassination
of a president, a football game, the march on the
Pentagon.
Between these two journeys abroad Romin spent a
year in office as Senior Steward of the Holy Sacrament.
Just now he has completed his year as Ensignbearer
of St. Anthony.
Romin is a worried man. Once, though fearfully
busy, he was provoked when the stewards visited
their harpist before him and he remarked, "I'm like
any whore who is anxious for the next one to come
even though she's still busy." Romin worries about
his debts, but he pays them. Romin worries about the
cost of major enterprises, but he carries them out. He
calculates and recalculates the expenditures; he always
falls short. When he built his house he found to
his chagrin that he needed more beams. He remembered
how painful it was dragging logs from the
mountaintops. One dark night he and his friend, Rey
Komis, crept out behind the old courthouse where
the lumber for a new courthouse was piled. They
hoisted the heavy beams onto their shoulders and
transported them to an empty hut for safekeeping.
Romin told me he would have to remove the finish,
but a week later he admitted sheepishly that his heart
could not be at rest with those beams in his roof. He
would just have to chop them up for firewood.
Romin's "friends" and "enemies" change roles with
lightning speed, you never know who's who. Yet in
a pinch Romin is a loyal friend. Romin worries about
his enemies, sure that everyone resents his new
wealth and his American associations. He is fearful
of being seen in public with anthropologists. Romin
dreams that his anthropologist employer has left him
to work in the belltower on a ledge too narrow to sit
on, with the parting words, "And write only in
Tzotzil." He asks if he can be the godfather of his
employer's daughter. He always invites his American
friends to the important rituals in his public and
family life. With a sad smile sliding across his face,
he drunkenly accuses them of abandoning him "as if
he were an aging whore." He is exuberantly boyish,
running around his yard carrying his dog and exclaiming
"My son! My son!"
Romin is deeply religious and conservative. He
carried out his stewardship with such an attention to
the fine details of ritual that his colleagues met to ask
him to relax his high standards. During his stewardship
he carried on an affair with an American artist,
and, according to his wife and his enemies, was so
befuddled that he could not respond effectively to
the most minor demands of his office. He prays with
the deepest conviction every night at bedtime. He
prays with mock seriousness under the most absurd
circumstances, collapsing all in laughter. He walks
past the hundreds of mounds in the jungle at the
fringe of Palenque and asks with wonder, "Where
have all the souls gone?" When questioned about the
date of the annual rain ceremony in Zinacantan he
replies, "If it rains early, the ceremony is early,
otherwise it is held late for then the rain is sure to
come soon!"
He is an affectionate father, scrupulously filling his
shoulder bag with fruit for his children whenever he
goes to market. He even capitulated to his son's
pleas, put him in a net and carried him on his back
for the two hour walk to market. And yet, when he
hears his son crying in the house, he knocks on the
door and shouts, "I will sell you to the Ladinos in
San Cristobal, I am the baby-eater." He feeds his
drunken compadre's children for days on end without
complaint. He taunts his compadre mercilessly
for his irresponsibility.
Romin may now have cirrhosis, his month-long
binges have turned him a brilliant yellow. I once saw