Mythologies of the Xinca Tribe
The Xinka, or Xinca, are a non-Mayan indigenous people of Mesoamerica, with communities in the southern portion of Guatemala, near its border with El Salvador, and in the mountainous region to the north. Their languages (the Xincan languages) are not known to be related to any other language family, although they have many loan words from Mayan languages. The Xinka may have been among the earliest inhabitants of southeastern Guatemala, predating the arrival of the Maya and the Pipil. In the 2018 National Census, a total of 264,167 individuals identified themselves as Xinka, representing 1.8% of the national population. After a revivalist movement led by the two main Xinka political organizations in Guatemala, self identified Xincas increased from 16,214 individuals in 2002 to 264,167 in 2018.
Xinca, Mesoamerican Indians of southeastern Guatemala. Xinca territory traditionally extended about 50 miles (80 km) along the Río Los Esclavos in Guatemala and extended to the El Salvador border. The Xinca first encountered Spanish conquistadors in 1523, when Pedro de Alvarado entered Xinca territory. Xinca and other indigenous peoples in the region were subdued by Pedro de Portocarrero in 1526. The Xinca were treated very harshly by the Spanish, whose methods for ensuring capitulation included branding and enslavement. The latter practice gave name to the river in Xinca territory (esclavos, “slaves”). Before Spanish colonization, Xinca people used relatively simple technologies and social organization, particularly when compared to neighbouring Mayan peoples. Traditional Xinca towns had wooden structures rather than stone buildings, and the people organized as a confederacy of tribes rather than adopting the Maya’s strong political centralization and social stratification. Because late-20th-century political unrest in Guatemala made census data difficult to gather and verify, estimates of the Xinca population range from 1,200 to upwards of 100,000 in the early 21st century.
Two decades ago, the 2002 Census reported that there were just 16 thousand people who self-identified as Xinka in Guatemala. 16 years later, in the most recent government count, that number shot up by 1,600 per cent to 270,000 people. There had obviously been a rebirth of identity, but not by happenstance. ‘There was a perception that there were no more Xinkas, but we worked very hard on strengthening our cultural identity,’ says Angélica Jiménez, president of the commission on women in the Xinka Parliament and a communal landholder in the village of Queada, Jutiapa. ‘There was an enormous need to recover our roots in order to defend our forests and rivers from megaprojects looking to enter our territory.’ Xinka land extends across parts of the eastern Guatemalan departments Jutiapa, Santa Rosa, Jalapa, and Escuintla. Academic Claudia Dary explains in her work on the history of the Xinka people that under the Spanish crown their territory was known as the Corregidor of Guazacapan and stretched between the rivers Michatoya and La Paz, just along the Salvadoran border.
Xinca (or Xinka, Szinca) is a small extinct family of Mesoamerican languages, formerly regarded as a single language isolate, once spoken by the indigenous Xinca people in southeastern Guatemala, much of El Salvador, and parts of Honduras. The Xincan languages have no demonstrated affiliations with other language families. Lehmann (1920) tried linking Xincan with Lencan, but the proposal was never demonstrated. An automated computational analysis (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) also found lexical similarities between Xincan and Lencan. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance. The Xincan languages were formerly regarded as one language isolate, but the most recent studies suggest they were indeed a language family.
Xinkan languages, Xinkan also spelled Xincan, a small family of four languages from southeastern Guatemala: Chiquimulilla Xinka, Guazacapán Xinka, Jumaytepeque Xinka, and Yupiltepeque Xinka. Extinct and poorly attested Jutiapa Xinka may have been a dialect of Yupiltepeque Xinka or possibly an additional distinct language. Chiquimulilla Xinka and Yupiltepeque Xinka are extinct. The last speaker of Chiquimulilla Xinka died in the late 1970s. There are one or two elderly semispeakers of Guazacapán Xinka and Jumaytepeque Xinka. A very active group of young people are endeavouring to learn and revitalize Xinka, basing themselves primarily on Guazacapán Xinka. Evidence from Xinkan place-names indicates that these languages formerly had a much-broader distribution. Since nearly all agricultural terms in Xinkan are loanwords from Mayan languages, with a few from Mixe-Zoquean languages, it is hypothesized that Xinkan speakers were not agriculturalists until they acquired knowledge of agriculture from their Mayan neighbours.
The Xinka people mostly live in southeastern Guatemala, in the municipalities of Santa Rosa, Jalapa, Jutiapa, and Escuintla. Since the time of Spanish colonization, the Xinka have fought to protect their land and culture. Today, they continue asserting their rights to self-determination, to fight for recognition from the Guatemalan government, and to resist transnational mining companies set on extracting large amounts of silver from their territory, which hosts one of the largest-known deposits in the world. The list of challenges they face — along with millions of other Guatemalans — is long. Already-high rates of malnutrition are climbing as food insecurity worsens. Public hospitals are collapsing under the weight of Covid-19. The national government is using the military to enforce a daily 4 pm country-wide curfew and criminalizing the many Guatemalans forced to break it in order to feed their families. And while all public transportation is still prohibited and food markets restricted, resource extraction has been deemed an essential service, putting at further risk the health of communities who have long fought to protect their lands from mining. Their tenacious organizing in their communities and in the courts is the only thing keeping resource extraction at bay, whose operations would otherwise go unhindered during this global health pandemic.
Information and language learning
materials from the Xinca Indian language.
materials from the Xinca Indian language.
Brief article about the Xinca culture
Video of Xinca girls dancing
to an indigenous flute song
to an indigenous flute song
Articles about traditional Xinca
religion in English and Spanish
religion in English and Spanish
Encyclopedia articles on the Xinca Indians
Information about the Native
American culture of Guatemala
American culture of Guatemala
Information about the Xincas in Spanish
The Xinca Indians are native people of Central America. Though there are more than 200,000 people of Xinca descent in Guatemala today and probably others in neighboring El Salvador, the Xinca language has not been spoken in their communities for 50 years. However, many recordings were made in the 20th century and some younger Xinca people are working to revive their ancestral language again. The name "Xinca" was probably borrowed from the Nahuatl word Tzinaka, meaning "bat." Bats were culturally and mythologically important to the people of Guatemala, and the neighboring Tzotzil tribe's name also means "bat" in Mayan. One complication for Xinca language revival is that the different Xincan dialects were very distinct from each other--so much so that many linguists believe they were actually independent languages (like the different Maya languages of Guatemala are,) Since there are no fluent speakers alive today, it remains to be seen whether Xinca language activists will try to revive a single dialect, multiple dialects, or combine them into an intermediate form for easier language learning. The four main Xincan languages are known as Jumaytepeque (or Jumay Xinka), Chiquimilla (or Chiguimuliya), Guazacapán, and Yupiltepeque, each of which is named after the region where it was spoken. "Xinca" is also spelled several different ways in some literature, including Xinka, Shinka, Shinkan, Xincan, Xinkan, Szinca, Zinca, Jinka, Sinka, and Sinacamecayo.
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