Linguists working in Guatemala in recent years have had the benefit of being able to work with an increasingly linguistically sophisticated, politically aware, and culturally concerned population. Mayas have been quite forthright about informing linguists about what they believe to be the proper sort of linguistics to do. In 1985, for instance, a group of Mayas participating in the VIII Mayan Linguistics Workshop in Antigua Guatemala called on linguists ‘not to contribute to the internal division of each Mayan language, not to promote or officialize Spanish borrowings in those languages, not to marginalize speakers of Mayan languages in the investigation of their own languages, and not to monopolize or reserve for themselves linguistic methodology and knowledge’ (Cojtí Cuxil 1990:3). It was perhaps a shock to some linguists, as it was to me, to realize that good will and good relations with the individual collaborators in our past research, a dedication to sound scientific principles of linguistic research, and even instruction in literacy and linguistics on the part of many of us were not enough to avoid rather severe criticism of our role in Mayan linguistics.