telling and being told

Telling and Being Told

Storytelling and Cultural Control
in Contemporary Yucatec Maya
Literatures

paul m. worley

tucson
The University of Arizona Press
© 2013 The Arizona Board of Regents
All rights reserved
www.uapress.arizona.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Worley, Paul M., 1976–
Telling and being told : storytelling and cultural control in contemporary Yucatec Maya
literatures / Paul M. Worley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8165-3026-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Maya literature—History and criticism. 2. Storytelling—Mexico—Yucatán (State).
I. Title.
PM3968.W67 2013
897’.42709—dc23
2012045685
Publication of this book is made possible in part by a subvention from the College of
Arts & Sciences, University of North Dakota.

Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

containing a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste and processed chlorine free.
18 17 16 15 14 13 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

1. Who Tells What to Whom and How: Orality, Literacy, and

Cultural Control 1

2. Writing THE Word: Storytellers, Cultural Brokers, and the

Shape of Indigenous Memory 30

3. Into the Archive: Cultural Brokers, Cultural Control, and Writing

Oral Maya Literature in the Twentieth Century 61

4. “I’ll tell you the story . . .” : Mariano Bonilla Caamal and

Storytelling as Cultural Control 95

5. Telling Maya Modernity: The Works of María Luisa Góngora Pacheco,

Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and Briceida Cuevas Cob 133

Appendix 1: “The Dwarf of Uxmal” as told by Luis Gonzaga

(José May) 161

Appendix 2: “The Dwarf of Uxmal” as told by Humberto

Bonilla Caamal 164

Appendix 3: “The Story of Juan Rabbit” as told by Mariano

Bonilla Caamal 168

Notes 175

Works Cited 181

Index 195
Illustrations

2.1. Map of Santa Elena, Yucatán, and Surrounding Area 47

5.1. Map of Yucatán with Authors’ Hometowns 138
5.2. Hurricane Gilbert Approaching Yucatán 143

vii
Acknowledgments

My interest in Latin American indigenous literatures began when I met

Mariano Bonilla Caamal as a student in UNC–Chapel Hill’s Yucatec
Maya program in the summer of 2004. I was assigned to spend several
hours each day in Bonilla Caamal’s home honing my language skills, and
part of this daily interaction was the stories Mario would tell over and
over until despite my newly acquired, limited vocabulary I would grasp
the contours of the narratives he spun. When I returned to Yucatán in the
summer of 2005 and to study at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in
2006–2007, I continued to grapple with the questions that had begun to
press on me during that first summer as I listened to Mariano recount the
stories he knew. Why are indigenous literatures consigned to represent
Latin America’s pre-Columbian beginnings in literary anthologies? Why,
save for contributions from “El Inca” Garcilaso, do these literatures usu-
ally then disappear from the literary landscape? Why, in studies that do
address works by indigenous authors, are these literatures frequently said
to represent something “new” or “a literary renaissance” when indigenous
storytellers have, in fact, maintained the vitality of these literary traditions
through their spoken words for more than five hundred years? Understood
as a practice, how does a vision of literature that privileges the written
over the oral, or even the oral over the written, contribute to the ongoing
marginalization of indigenous peoples in Latin America, the rest of the
Western Hemisphere, and beyond? To what extent are we in the academy
thus responsible for this ongoing neglect when, despite our stated political
and intellectual sympathies, we reinforce these notions through classes
that, implicitly or explicitly, construct a Latin America in whose great liter-
ary traditions indigenous peoples play little or no part?
I pondered these questions in earnest as I neared the completion of my
doctoral coursework in comparative literature and began to vet potential
dissertation topics with various professors on campus. The dissertation and

ix
 x • Acknowledgments

the present work would not have been possible without the support and
tempering of my dissertation committee chaired by Rosa Perelmuter. She
adopted my project when my original dissertation advisor became ill and
could not continue, doing so in the context of numerous frantic e-mails
I sent her while I was studying at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán
(UADY). With a strong hand she steered me toward focusing on the fig-
ure of the storyteller as the embodiment of Maya discursive agency, the
notion that is at the crux of this book. She remains my trusted advisor and
invaluable mentor. The rest of my committee was comprised of Gregory
Flaxmann, Emilio del Valle Escalante, David Mora Marín, and Jurgen
Buchenau. Gregg was the first person to whom I spoke about a potential
dissertation on Maya literatures, which he said “could eventually be an
excellent book.” I hope the present project has lived up to his early support.
Emilio has been a steadfast supporter of my work then and now, and agreed
to come on board the committee even though he had only recently arrived
at UNC when the committee was being formed. For his guidance and the
opportunities he has given me, I am sincerely thankful.
I met Jurgen Buchenau when I was a freshman at Wingate College,
now Wingate University, in 1995. Under the auspices of a DuPont Under-
graduate Research Grant, I spent a summer in Mexico City doing archival
research on one of his projects. From that time he and his wife Anabel have
been two of my closest and dearest friends, despite the fact that I spent that
entire summer bouncing from illness to illness from eating all of the street
food I could find. I also would like to recognize the friendship of Anabel’s
parents, Alfredo Aliaga and his wife, the late Ingrid Aliaga-Weber, and the
important role they played in my academic and intellectual life that sum-
mer. One night when we were in Oaxaca I expressed a desire to continue
on to Chiapas and maybe even go to Tikal in Guatemala. Who knows why,
but they decided that sounded like a great idea and, along with Jurgen,
went with me. That trip remains one of my most formative experiences and
I try to emulate their sense of spontaneity and joy in everything I do. Also,
for those who are interested, I will yet state that the taco stands outside of
Mexico City’s Auditorio Nacional serve some of the best, cheapest food in
the entire city.
I am also very grateful to the four academic institutions of which I have
been a part: Wingate College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, the UADY, and the University of North Dakota. While at UNC I
worked with a number of wonderful people who helped move the project
along and enable its success. At UNC, the Institute for the Study of the
Americas (ISA) was one of my strongest institutional backers, providing
 Acknowledgments • xi

me with much needed funds to pursue this research. Shelley Clarke, the
business manager, was always kind, helpful, and very patient with me as
I fumbled my way through the reimbursement process. Sharon Mújica,
now retired, was the director of the Maya Program when I was a student
there. Without her unrelenting advocacy for the program and its students,
I would have never gone to Yucatán, nor met the people with whom I have
formed many lasting relationships. And finally, Beatriz Riefkhol Muñiz
spent several weeks with me sharpening my application for the yearlong
Foreign Language Area Studies Grant (FLAS) that funded my year in
Mexico. In total, ISA supported this research through three separate FLAS
Awards and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship with a supplemental award
from the Federico Gil Dissertation Fund. Two of these grants supported
my enrollment in UNC’s Yucatec Maya program where I was fortunate
to study with Fidencio Briceño Chel and Miguel Güémez Pineda. I also
received a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from UNC’s Graduate
School. I would also like to thank Erich Fox Tree and Walter Mignolo,
whose classes were among the most formative and formidable that I took
as a graduate student.
As mentioned previously, I was able to spend a year studying Yucatec
Maya language and culture at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.
While funding on the US side took care of my expenditures, the professors
and students at the UADY made the year one of the most gratifying of my
graduate school experience. I took several classes on Maya and indigenous
literatures in the Americas from Cristina Leirana Alcocer, whose Licencia-
tura Thesis on contemporary Yucatec literature and authors remains a vital
touchstone for anyone doing work on the topic. I studied Maya language
with Hilaria Máas Collí, whose approach to oral literatures I used to model
my own. It goes without saying that this book would not have been possible
if not for the groundbreaking work done by these two women.
At the University of North Dakota, my work has been generously sup-
ported via a Faculty Seed Money, a Faculty Collaborative Seed Money
Grant, and an Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Award, all of which
originated from the Office of the Vice President of Research. Julie Solheim
and Jennifer Lessard in Office of Research, Development, and Compliance
have been excellent to work with on managing these monies, as has Jan
Bakken in Accounting. My colleagues in Spanish at UND, Debra Maury,
Claudia Routon, Jane Berne, and Gene DuBois, have been kind and sup-
portive mentors. My dear friends at UND, Caroline Campbell, Robin
Runge, Jeff Langstraat, Steve Morrison, Bill Caraher, and Joel Jonientz,
have all been instrumental in helping me stay grounded throughout my
 xii • Acknowledgments

first years as an assistant professor. Although not at UND, I thank Alicia

Estrada and Felipe Pérez for their friendship and intellectual daring. Their
LA-based, Mayacentric radio program Contacto Ancestral is an amazing
example of how academic knowledge can engage the world beyond the
academy, and it is truly humbling to count them among my friends, men-
tors, and colleagues.
Professionally I owe a number of debts to the men and women who
oversaw my transition from graduate student to assistant professor. In
particular, the members of the Southeastern Council on Latin American
Studies (SECOLAS) provided me with an excellent environment in which
a young person could engage in lively debates with more advanced profes-
sors in the field. I attended my first meeting as an undergraduate in the
mid-1990s and continue to be an active member. As a graduate student
searching for a dissertation topic, I first presented a paper on Yucatec Maya
literatures at SECOLAS. The energetic discussion that followed solidified
my resolve to advance the project. At the risk of leaving someone out,
I would like to extend sincere thanks to Kathleen Martín, Bruce Dean
Willis, Gregory Weeks, Isabel Brown, and Zoya Khan for their friendship,
guidance, and mentorship both in the past and at the present.
Many thanks to my parents, Tom and Nancy Worley, for having sup-
ported me in my studies over the years and to my sister, Kate Worley, for
being there for me during times good and bad. I also would like to thank
my wife, Melissa Birkhofer, for putting up with all of the travel, the writing,
and the long hours obsessing over work. She has always been and remains
my companion and a source of strength.
I would also like to extend a heartfelt thanks to Natasha Varner who in
her role as program coordinator with the First Peoples: New Directions in
Indigenous Studies initiative suggested that I send the manuscript to the
University of Arizona Press. At the University of Arizona Press, I was very
fortunate to have worked with Kristen Buckles as my acquiring editor. Her
patience and understanding in working with a first-time author were much
appreciated. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who
read the manuscript for their insightful comments and kind words. The
final product is much better because of their fine work. At their suggestion
I have included maps of Santa Elena and the surrounding area. Kevin Fox,
a PhD candidate at in the Department of Geography at UNC–Chapel Hill,
made these, and I thank him for his excellent work.
Even more than all of these people, I must finally extend my deepest
thanks and appreciation to the men and women of Santa Elena, Yucatán,
the town where I first learned to speak Maya. This book, in the end, is
 Acknowledgments • xiii

for them. These men and women have taken me into their homes and
their lives, and given me more than I could possibly hope to return. My
principal collaborator on the tsikbalichmaya.org project and the subject of
chapter 4, Mariano Bonilla Caamal, is a joy to work with. He and his wife
doña Fina, daughters Norma and Sara, son Carlos and daughter-in-law
Perla, brother Humberto, sister-in-law Margarita, and niece Rubí are all
dear friends without whom this work would have been impossible. Kristine
and Santiago at the Flycatcher Inn Bed and Breakfast also deserve a special
place for not only helping me and the other gringos with basic matters, but
also for going above and beyond by carrying messages back and forth to
Mariano and his family when the internet fails. They are true and trusted
friends. I also need to thank the proprietors of the Chac-Mool, Miguel Uc
and his wife Estela, as well as the staff, for their hospitality and warmth.
Beyond Santa Elena, I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of Yucatec
Maya authors and intellectuals with whom I have worked or whom I have
interviewed. I have worked closely with Felipe de Jesús Castillo Tzec for
a number of years, and his award-winning work was the subject of my first
academic article following graduation. He is doing amazing work both with
INDEMAYA and independently, and is a great friend. I am also indebted to
Genner Llanés Ortiz, who has opened up the world of Yucatec Maya lan-
guage on the internet to me, and with whom I hope to begin collaborating
on tsikbalichmaya.org and other projects in the near future. In no particular
order, I would also like to thank Miguel May May, Ana Patricia Martínez
Huchim, Armando Dzul Ek, and the countless men and women Mariano
and I have met and interviewed during the course of our work together.
telling and being told
 one

Who Tells What to Whom

and How
Orality, Literacy, and Cultural Control

The truth about stories is that’s all we are.

—thomas king, The Truth About Stories

After three days of recording oral stories, my collaborator Mariano Bonilla

Caamal and his family prepared a large meal in his house and invited many
of the people who had participated in the Tsikbal ich maya oral literature
project. Wanting to make myself useful, on hearing the radishes had run
out I volunteered to go buy some from a nearby store. Being gracious hosts,
Mariano and his wife Fina insisted that I not go alone and sent a young
boy, the son of one of the participants, Manuel Uc Can, to go with me.
After wrangling over who would drive the tri-ciclo to the store, a debate
that I won given that I was heaviest, the two of us set out. Once we were
a good distance from the house, the young man turned around and said,
“You know the man who told you the story of the dwarf of Uxmal? He
told it wrong. My friends and I know the real story.” He then proceeded to
relate his version as we drove to the store, pausing to go in for radishes and
making sure we took the long way back so he would have time to finish.
This anecdote encapsulates many of the broad themes and arguments
of the present book. First and foremost, I argue that the binary orality/
literacy generally and arbitrarily excludes oral literatures from literary stud-
ies and that oral literature must be included in contemporary analyses of
indigenous literary production. Second, I argue that the men and women

1
 2 • Chapter 1

who tell these literatures, the storytellers, do so in the context of performa-

tive traditions in which the past exists in a dialectical relationship with the
present, each of these constantly evolving as it is reevaluated and reinter-
preted in the light of the other. Third, in these performances storytellers
exercise and embody a form of discursive agency that we can analyze in
their unique articulations of these texts. Fourth and finally, I argue that the
men and women who write indigenous literature as tellings of stories do
so in order to destabilize the prestige of the written word and call readers’
attention to the vibrant realities of this other non-Western literary tradition.
As seen in this story about a story, there is no one version of “The Dwarf
of Uxmal.” On this particular occasion, the young man uses his and his
friends’ knowledge of the story to lay hold of the agency exercised by those
who tell stories and to relate his own version. The ability to tell stories
can be seen as a kind of symbolic capital, something he embodies and
mobilizes in gaining the ear of the gringo researcher, me. His performance
stages a generational conflict and a conflict of authority as he claims to
know the real story and details omitted by the older man he’d seen me
film. In doing so, he also indirectly challenges any attempt to present the
oral literature project Tsikbal ich maya as being the authoritative source for
these stories and the embodied knowledge they represent. There are always
stories untold, storytellers unrecorded, versions of stories that permutate
infinitely through time and history, while the recordings we made remain
representations of performances that are not the performances themselves.
His telling was an opportunity to demonstrate he knew something the old
men did not, that he, too, had something valuable, something we had
missed. He knew the “real story,” and his performance illustrated he was
correct in more ways than one.

Indigenous Literatures

In terms of how literature departments constitute their object of study and

how these departments are housed within academic institutions, literary
studies tend to focus on written texts that are printed in national languages.
Therefore, for many academics, literary criticism still entails the explication
of what are traditionally construed as literary texts, these being texts written
in national languages. The reasons for this state of affairs are as financial as
they are ideological, but they nonetheless hold serious consequences for
the study of indigenous literatures insofar as these literatures are seldom
composed in national languages and even more seldom widely available
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 3

in printed form. The study of these literatures has thus often fallen to the
disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, archeology, art history, and history,
and many of the most important works on indigenous literatures come
out of disciplines other than literature.1 If I may paraphrase the opening of
Rolena Adorno’s Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru,
the present work is an act of decolonization (3).
Certainly, a number of literary scholars have produced important works
on the indigenous literatures of Latin America. At present, however, these
works constitute a subfield within Latin American literary studies that is
not central to the field itself. Most anthologies of Latin American literature
and works of Latin American literary criticism do cite and/or include indig-
enous literatures as a pre-Columbian prelude to or influence on literatures
composed in the years after 1492. This form of silencing makes extant
works on indigenous literatures all the more important.2
Works dealing specifically with Yucatán and the Yucatec Maya will be
dealt with extensively later on, but for the moment there are several aca-
demic anthologies of Maya literatures that merit attention. Mercedes de
la Garza has published an important collection of Maya texts, Literatura
maya (1980), and one of the few editions of the Chilam Balam of Chu-
mayel, a Yucatec Maya text with pre-Hispanic and colonial origins, that
includes the illustrations found in the original manuscript. Alfredo Barrera
Vásquez and Silvia Rendón edited and published another very important
edition of the Chilam Balam texts that draws from all the extant copies
of the these manuscripts, El libro de los libros de Chilam Balam (1948).
Carlos Montemayor has played a pivotal role in the promoting of contem-
porary written Maya literary production as the editor of the series, Maya
Dziibo’ob Bejla’e (Contemporary Maya Letters), as well as Words of the
True Peoples (2005), an anthology of indigenous writing that he coedited
with Donald Frischman. In addition, he has also edited other works and
published two works of literary criticism on indigenous literatures, Arte y
plegaria en las lenguas indígenas de México (1999) and Arte y trama en el
cuento indígena (1998). One also thinks of the spectacular works by Den-
nis Tedlock such as his translation of the Popol wuj (1985), the volume
Breath on the Mirror (1993), and 2000 Years of Maya Literature (2010), and
of the numerous works by James Sexton, such the autobiographies of his
collaborator Pedro Cholotío Temó (Son of Tecún Umán 1981; Campesino
1985; Ignacio 1992; Joseño 2001), and volumes like his most recent The
Dog Who Spoke and More Maya Folktales (2010). Also deserving special
mention are Gary H. Gossen’s important anthologies containing analyses
of Maya oral literature from Chiapas, Chamulas in the World of the Sun
 4 • Chapter 1

(1974), Telling Maya Tales (1999), and the monumental Four Creations:
An Epic Story of the Chiapas Mayas (2002).
As invaluable as anthologies are, however, anthologies of indigenous
literature in and of themselves do not so much incorporate these litera-
tures into the field of Latin American literature as they begin comprising
a separate field altogether. This separateness allows the canons of Latin
American literature and the ideologies of integration through mestizaje
and hybridity they reflect to remain undisturbed. Given the importance of
Montemayor’s aforementioned Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e series, particularly
with regard to contemporary Maya letters in Yucatán, it can be analyzed
as a representative case. Noting that financing for this project came from
Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Inidgenista (National Indigenist Institute) and
the Secretaria de Desarrollo Social (Secretary for Social Development),
Francesc Ligorred Perramon finds that, despite its apparent goal of pro-
moting indigenous literature, the Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e series “refleja
algunas de las características de los programas culturales oficiales” (reflects
some of the characteristics of officialist cultural programs; Mayas 126).3
Among these are the preselection of at least a few authors, questions of
whether or not texts were originally composed in Maya or Spanish, litera-
ture cast as the mere transcription of orality, a picture of indigeneity that is
predominantly rural and premodern, and an integrationalist approach that
seeks to rescue or preserve these languages and these texts as the heritage of
the greater Mexican nation and not as the living culture of a distinct people
within that nation (Ligorred Perramon, Mayas 126).
Although I will contest some of Ligorred Perramon’s observations in
chapter 5, I share his stance with regard to the official ideology of the
overall project. For example, the first series builds on and republishes sev-
eral bilingual ethnographic texts originally published by Yucatec Maya
cultural promoters in the early 1980s.4 That is, these are not texts produced
for the series in Montemayor’s famous Maya literary workshops, but are
reproductions of earlier government-sponsored works. That these works
are ethnographic (as opposed to literary) would seem to frame the project
at least in part as facilitating the discovery of Mexico’s indigenous heritage
that is at the heart of twentieth-century indigenismo. Hand-in-hand with
this privileging of ethnographic information is the project’s apparent por-
trayal of a rural, premodern, oral Yucatec Maya world, a representation that
contrasts sharply with the linguistic and cultural priorities of many Maya
activists. In his essay on the 2003 Ley general de derechos lingüistícos de los
pueblos indígenas (Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples),
the Yucatec Maya linguist Fidencio Briceño Chel argues that for Yucatec
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 5

Maya and other indigenous languages to achieve equal footing with Span-
ish, efforts at linguistic promotion should focus on revitalization, reinforce-
ment, and revalorization (93). Directly addressing literature’s role in these
efforts, he states that “tenemos que pasar del simple proceso de plasmar en
el papel la forma hablada, de la literature oral” (we must move away from
the simple process of putting the spoken word, oral literature, on paper;
Ley general 92). As with Ligorred Perramon’s remarks, I shall address these
in more detail in chapter 5, but Briceño Chel’s point as it can be brought
to bear on the Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e project is well taken. The project
can be seen as forwarding visions of Yucatec Maya that do not threaten
non-Mayas’ preconceptions about Yucatec Maya language or culture, in
essence reinforcing these commonly held beliefs as opposed to Yucatec
Maya language and culture themselves.
Turning to literary criticism, one immediately thinks of Martín Lien-
hard’s expansive study La voz y su huella (1991), a work that takes up the
monumental task of treating Latin American indigenous and nonindig-
enous texts side by side and spans the colonial era to the present. Gordon
Brotherston’s Book of the Fourth World (1992) similarly examines indig-
enous texts as works of literature while focusing on the colonial period.
In her book Rain Forest Literatures (2004), Lucia Sá demonstrates the
intertextuality between indigenous and nonindigenous texts through her
probing examination of both indigenous and nonindigenous literary tradi-
tions. There is also the work by Amos Segala, Literatura nahuátl: Fuentes,
identidades, representaciones (1989), an important piece of literary criti-
cism on Nahuátl literary production. Finally, Emilio del Valle Escalante’s
Nacionalismos mayas y desafíos postcoloniales en Guatemala (2008)
includes several important chapters dealing with the pan-Maya movement
and the literary works of Maya writers from Guatemala.
These critical works are all the more important as each in its own way
breaks with a traditional model of canon formation that marginalizes
indigenous literatures as, more often than not, the effect of this separate
“canonicity” permits these literary works to go unstudied as literature. Rail-
ing against this form of literary practice in the United States, the Native
American scholar and critic Craig S. Womack reminds us that “tribal
literatures are the tree, the oldest literatures in the Americas, the most
American of American literatures. We are the canon. . . . Without Native
American literature, there is no American canon” (6–7; italics in origi-
nal). In a Latin American context, one can recall that, even while some
indigenous works such as the Popol wuj (c. 1700), Guaman Poma’s Nueva
corónica y buen gobierno (1615), and Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú’s
 6 • Chapter 1

Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la concuencia (1983), have

been lauded for their literary merits, academic interest in the languages
and literary production of indigenous peoples tends to focus on the his-
torical, anthropological, or ethnographic information found in these texts.
This relationship of power can reduce these and other indigenous literary
works to being merely a means through which nonindigenous academics
obtain information and does nothing to forward indigenous languages,
literatures, and cultures (Briceño Chel, “Los [nuevos]” 94).
Moreover, in limiting the field of literary study to written texts, critics
often ignore an important component of conquest and colonization in the
Americas, namely, the fact that Europeans consciously set out to destroy
indigenous writing systems. As noted by Walter Mignolo, in Latin America
“literacy became, in the second part of the sixteenth century, just one more
component in the total process of Westernizing the Amerindians in the
Jesuit missions [in the New World]” (55). It suffices to say that this pat-
tern of destruction made indigenous oral literary production an important
strategy in the continuity of indigenous cultures as knowledge previously
transmitted via indigenous writing systems was preserved and reproduced
in the minds of indigenous peoples as embodied knowledge. Rather than
a mark of backwardness or underdevelopment, oral literature serves to sus-
tain indigenous cultures and constitutes evidence of these cultures’ vitality
and continuity under colonial conditions.
The present book builds on the work of these critics and scholars insofar
as it recognizes that indigenous literary production must be thought of as
both written and oral, and focuses on the indigenous oral storyteller as a
recurring presence in Yucatec Maya oral and written texts. Analyzing the
storyteller as a symbol of indigenous embodied knowledge and indigenous
agency, this book highlights how representations of this figure in oral and
written Yucatec Maya literary texts play a vital role in imaginings of Maya
culture and its relationship with dominant Mexican and global cultures.
In privileging how non-Maya authors and Yucatec Maya authors and story-
tellers situate the indigenous storyteller within national and international
imaginaries, I argue that storytellers and the act of storytelling represent
important aspects of the struggle over indigenous representation within the
Mexican nation-state. On the one hand, “telling” a story implies not only
control over the present text, but also the authority to represent that text’s
history, culture, and worldview. On the other, telling a story, whether the
text is written, oral, or disseminated via mass media, also entails a “being
told.” That is, the audience receives the story and its underlying ideologies.
The emergence of a written Yucatec Maya literature in the late twentieth
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 7

century signifies that the Maya are now asserting their authority over their
stories in contexts that have historically excluded their participation. As
they have been told for more than five hundred years, both in the sense
that others have told their stories and have told them who they are, it is they
who are now doing the telling.
The remaining sections of this chapter focus on fleshing out the terms
that are the subject of this book. Who are the Maya, and how can one under-
stand the historical realities of indigenous oral and written literatures in the
context of their relationship with nonindigenous cultures? How does the
binary orality/literacy contribute to an international discourse (what I term
the discourse of the Indio) that preempts indigenous self-representation
even as it would claim to portray indigenous voices? Within such a context,
how do Yucatec Maya themselves conceive of storytelling, oral and writ-
ten literatures, and how do non-Maya representations mediate the voices
of Maya storytellers? And finally, to what extent do contemporary Maya
literatures in Yucatán participate in global projects of decolonization?

Maya, Mayas, and Mayaness: What Makes a

“Maya Literature”?

Before further delving into contemporary Maya literature, we must first ask
some basic questions: who are the “Maya” pointed to by the term Maya
literature? In addition, what is “literature,” and how is this defined in and
through the practices of contemporary scholarship? What are the conse-
quences of these definitions?
This work focuses specifically on Yucatec Maya literature as situated
within the broader context of Maya literatures in Mexico, Guatemala,
and elsewhere, as well as indigenous literary movements throughout the
Americas and the rest of the world. As many scholars have noted, the mean-
ing usually attributed to the term Maya glosses over complex, historically
determined interactions in at least two ways: internally among a diverse
grouping of indigenous peoples and externally between this group and
dominant Hispanic culture (Hervik 23–53; Restall, “Etnogénesis Maya”;
Castañeda). Yucatec Maya like the anthropologist Juan Castillo Cocom
even question the validity of the category Maya altogether, claiming that
“Maya” and “Mayaness” are “western invention[s]” created by “social sci-
entists who used four disciplines—History, Linguistics, Anthropology, and
Archeology—to create the notion of ‘the’ Maya culture” (“Maya Scenarios”
19; “El Quincux” 259–60).5 In another essay Castillo Cocom goes so far
 8 • Chapter 1

as to state that he prefers to identify himself as “post-Maya,” rather than

“Maya” (“Perdido” 124). Castillo Cocom’s point is well taken, and one
must recognize the plurality manifested by a group to which Western aca-
demics casually apply the homogenizing term Maya. Throughout Yucatán,
for example, brochures, tour guides, and even scholars commonly apply
the term Maya to a group of people that in many cases uses “Maya” to refer
to their ancestors and any number of other terms such as mestizo to refer
to themselves (Hervik xix). In doing so, these non-Maya outsiders insist on
reinscribing a vision of “Mayaness” based more on their own perceptions
than these people’s own terms of self-identification.
These observations do not negate the existence of Maya cultures. In a
more general vein, Maya activists note that there are common beliefs held
throughout the Maya area such as the colors associated with the four car-
dinal directions, commonalities that point to the presence of “pan-Maya”
beliefs across diverse manifestations of Maya cultures (Montejo 20). They
also use the findings of non-Maya researchers to buttress their claims of a
pan-Maya ethnicity (Warren 21). One finds this gesture, for example, in
the writings of the Jakaltek Maya intellectual Victor Montejo when he
cites archeologists and linguists in arguing that there exists “a shared or
base Maya culture on a macrocultural level” (17). Although this use of the
term Maya is perhaps more common in Guatemala than in Yucatán, more
and more Yucatec Mayas are using Maya as a term of self-identification.6
Throughout this book, Maya will refer to those who define themselves
as being involved in the daily reproduction of Maya culture in whichever
diverse forms this production may be manifest. This definition acknowl-
edges multiple, even contradictory (for Western academics) local manifes-
tations of Mayaness while accommodating all of them under the practice
of Maya identity.
What, then, is “literature”? A key component of this book’s underlying
argument is that “literature” must be understood as something more than
written expression, given that any definition of the field of literature that
excludes oral texts contributes to the nonrecognition of indigenous histo-
ries, cultures, and literary production. Indeed, most Western definitions of
literature place orality in opposition to literacy, the former being an evolu-
tionary precursor destined to give way to the technological advancement
of the latter. As noted previously, many indigenous cultures in the Ameri-
cas do not fit this ahistorical evolutionary model, as the oral transmission
of embodied knowledge was a strategic response to invading Europeans’
destruction of indigenous writing systems. In addition, within this historical
context this definition reinforces orality’s status as being fundamentally
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 9

different from, if not also prior to, literacy. This statement adequately sums
up Walter J. Ong’s position when, in his groundbreaking Orality and Lit-
eracy, he declares, “orality needs to produce and is destined to produce
writing. Literacy . . . is absolutely necessary for the development not only of
science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of litera-
ture and of any art, and indeed for the explication of language (including
oral speech) itself” (14–15). It should further be pointed out that in Ong’s
definition of literacy, script “does not consist of mere pictures, of repre-
sentations of things, but is a representation of an utterance, of words that
someone says or is imagined to say” (83; italics in original). The example
par excellence of a script is the phonetic alphabet, which Ong suggests has
a singular Semitic origin, tends to be democratizing insofar as it is easy to
use and, according to one study he cites, “favors left-hemisphere activity in
the brain, and thus on neurophysiological grounds fosters abstract, analytic
thought” (89). In sum, for Ong orality not only precedes literacy, but lit-
eracy is also orality’s destiny, orality in and of itself being nothing more than
a phase of evolutionary development. Although this definition of literacy
potentially encompasses a broad variety of sign systems, alphabetic script
nonetheless represents the highest form of writing and, if we take Ong’s
reference to the study on brain activity seriously, also produces the highest
forms of literacy and knowledge.
Under the guise of science, Ong’s conclusions reproduce one of the fun-
damental binaries through which disciplines in the humanities order their
objects of study: orality/literacy. However, using writing, and specifically
alphabetic writing, as a criteria for the development of “history, philosophy,
explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the
explication of language (including oral speech) itself” (Ong 14–15), simply
imposes a Western norm as a universal paradigm. Within this construct,
non-Western forms of history, philosophy, and other forms of knowledge
are rendered as nonknowledge or, at best, as precursors to more developed
Western ways of knowing, and it bears remembering that even one of the
twentieth century’s most radical thinkers, Michel Foucault, makes orality/
literacy the fundamental condition for the production of history (The Order
of Things 112). In many ways, the distinction between orality and literacy is
one of the most common sense distinctions of the contemporary world, and
yet, by recognizing the contingent nature of this construction and its very
real material consequences, one finds that orality/literacy does not so much
describe a meaningful distinction between cultures as it privileges Western
cultural products over those of non-Western others. In calling attention to
this fundamental mechanism of negation, this book therefore participates
 10 • Chapter 1

in a wider decolonial project that seeks to “expose the unthinking, taken-

for-granted quality of Eurocentrism as an unacknowledged current, a kind
of bad epistemic habit, both in mass-mediated culture and in intellectual
reflection on that culture” (Shohat and Stam 10).
The orality/literacy binary and its negation of indigenous knowledges, lit-
eratures, histories, and cultures are pervasive in both popular and academic
discourses about indigenous peoples in the Americas. As a representative
popular example here in the United States, Fire Point Trail Guide (2006)
to the Effigy Mounds National Monument in Harpers Ferry, Iowa, claims,
“The word prehistoric refers to a time before the invention of writing in
which history could be recorded. Anything prior to 1600 ad is generally
considered prehistoric in this area [northeastern Iowa]. Prehistoric North
America is not the same as prehistoric in Europe or Asia where written
records have been kept for centuries” (3; bold in original). To paraphrase
the title of Eric Wolf’s book, the trail guide represents Effigy Mounds
National Monument as an encounter between Europe and the people
without history. Although contemporaries spatially, the Native Americans
who built the mounds were not contemporaries of Europeans and Asians
historically. That is, the trail guide asserts that Europeans and Asians were
living in and, most importantly, recording history, while Native Americans
inhabited an ahistorical prehistory. Discursively, this denies Native Ameri-
cans what Johannes Fabian terms “coevalness” in time.7
As we have seen, the conceptual framework tying the production of his-
tory to alphabetic literacy is not a mere fantasy of the National Park Service,
and in many academic circles this ordering of things remains unchanged
if not also unchallenged. Wahpetunwan Dakota Angela Cavendar Wilson
recounts how, at a conference in the mid-1990s, one of the leading scholars
in the field of Native American studies dismissed the use of “nonverifiable”
oral accounts in the writing of Native histories (77–79). Such privileging of
the written over the oral perpetuates the supremacy of Western academic
knowledge by failing to recognize the legitimacy of oral tribal histories and
means the dismissal, in Cavender Wilson’s words, of “millions of Indig-
enous oral historical accounts because they might not be verifiable using
standard historical methods” (78). That is, oral histories are not history
unless they are corroborated by written histories. Conveniently enough,
indigenous peoples tend to tell the former while the academics that study
them write the latter. Academics can therefore construct histories without
the authorization or even participation of the people they study insofar
as history becomes a self-authorizing field of endeavor. Used as a way to
buttress an argument of what does or does not constitute history, the binary
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 11

orality/literacy configures indigenes as “peoples without history” and poten-

tially forecloses the very possibility of self-authored indigenous histories.
Here then we are confronted by the fundamental consequence of the
orality/literacy binary: it authorizes the active, literate West’s articulation of
the passive, illiterate non-Western other. As the object of literate Western
knowledge, this non-Western other is not self-sufficiently oral but rather
preliterate, illiterate, or nonliterate, in Ong’s words “destined to produce
writing.” In a similar vein, in his explication of Euripides’s The Bacchae,
Edward Said frames the relationship between Europe and Asia in the play
as one in which “Europe articulates the Orient; this articulation is the pre-
rogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving
power represents, animates, constitutes an otherwise silent and dangerous
space beyond familiar boundaries” (57; my italics). It is worth noting that,
although Said’s Orient does write, Western literacy (as articulated above by
Ong) fails to recognize scripts not based on Latin letters as writing. Literacy
therefore is the “genuine creator” of orality and oral cultures insofar as
hegemonic literate cultures assume the right and obligation to represent
oral cultures through writing. As Said observes, these representations and
discursive formations are not mere manipulations but original creations
that render “an otherwise silent and dangerous space” known according to
norms established by, within, and for hegemonic cultures, translating the
subaltern into dominant culture’s terms as the former cannot be said truly to
exist unless recognized, recorded, interpreted, indeed created by the latter.
Underscoring the unidirectional flow of this discourse, Said later observes,
“None of the Orientalists I write about seems ever to have intended an
Oriental as a reader. The discourse of Orientalism, its internal consistency,
and its rigorous procedures were all designed for readers and consumers in
a metropolitan West” (336). That is, others are objects of Western knowl-
edge, not subjects capable of producing or receiving knowledge.
Walter Mignolo illuminates the connection between colonization, lit-
eracy, and orality in a Latin American context in his The Darker Side of the
Renaissance (1995). Once again, literacy here is defined by the norms of
Western alphabetic script, a definition that serves to negate the existence
of other literacies and other ways of knowing. Of early Spanish attempts
to reduce Native American languages to alphabetic script, Mignolo says,
“Beyond the colonization of native languages or the implementation of a
linguistic politics for the expansion of the language of empire, the theory of
the letter also gave rise to a program for the interpretation of culture” (65).
The hierarchies this program of interpretation created played a fundamen-
tal role in the development of what Ángel Rama calls “the lettered city,”
 12 • Chapter 1

and it was the colonial administration who “elaboraron mensajes, y, sobre

todo, su especificad como diseñadores de modelos culturales, destinados a
la conformación de ideologías públicas” (elaborate[d] (rather than merely
transmit[ted]) ideological messages, [they were] the designers of cultural
models raised up for public conformity; Ciudad letrada, 30; Lettered City,
22). Rama goes on to note, “La capital razón de su supremacía se debió a la
paradoja de que . . . fueron los únicos ejercitantes de la letra en un medio
desguarnecido de letras, los dueños de le escritura en una sociedad analfa-
beta” (The principal explanation for the ascendency of the letrados . . . lay
in their ability to manipulate writing in largely illiterate societies; Ciudad
letrada 33; Lettered City 24). Literacy and learning to write according to
Western norms are thus part and parcel of the reproduction of broader
cultural hierarchies that subordinate oral, nonliterate cultures to literate
Western cultures.
One of the more famous examples of this logic and its consequences is
the work of the Spanish friar Diego de Landa (1524–1579). Describing the
necessity of the now-infamous auto-da-fé in Maní (1542), in his Relación de
las cosas de Yucatán (Yucatán Before and After the Conquest, 1566 [1978])
Landa recounts that the Maya did possess “ciertos caracteres o letras con
las cuales escribían en sus libros sus cosas antiguas y sus ciencias” (cer-
tain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about their
antiquities and their sciences; Relación 185; Before and After 82). However,
given that “no tenían cosa en que no hubiese superstición y falsedades del
Demonio” ([those books] contained nothing but superstitions and false-
hoods of the devil), Landa and his men “se los quemamos todos” (burned
them all; Relación 185; Before and After 82). As described by Mignolo and
practiced by men like Landa, Western literacy entails far more than cul-
tural imposition or negation. It produces “a program for the interpretation
of culture” that places these in a hierarchical context with Western cul-
tural in the position of a universal norm to which all other peoples should
adhere. This program justifies the eradication of material culture (Landa’s
books), seeks to erase cultural memory (in effect rendering the ancient
things and sciences of such cultures oral out of necessity), and authorizes
literate Western culture’s representations of these other cultures (Landa’s
own account). Western representations thus ultimately replace subaltern
cultures in and of themselves for both Westerners and non-Western others.
Further, Mignolo’s observation that the theory of the letter “gave rise to
a program for the interpretation of culture” can be equally applied to the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In fact, nationalist literacy campaigns
aimed at integrating indigenous peoples into American nations via their
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 13

exposure to national languages and cultures can be seen as continuing what

Mignolo refers to as the colony’s “massive operation in which the material-
ity and the ideology of Amerindian semiotic interactions were replaced by
the materiality and ideology of Western reading and writing cultures” (76).
Rather than being scientifically constituted objects of study, national litera-
tures effectively propagate and contribute to the standardization of national
languages, defining the linguistic terrain and political possibilities of the
citizen-subject. We may state that the ties between national literature and
a national consciousness occur in the context of what Benedict Anderson
calls the “imagined community” insofar as print-languages “created unified
fields of exchange and communication . . . and print-capitalism gave a new
fixity to language . . . creat[ing] languages-of-power of a kind different from
older administrative vernaculars” (44–45).8
As Rama suggests, these national “imaginings” do not exist beyond
ideology. Indeed, the word imagined fails to account for the material con-
sequences of such imaginings and the ideologies they reflect, and Pierre
Bourdieu makes several observations with regard to languages and power
that can be applied here. He states that “because any language that can
command attention is an ‘authorized language,’ invested with the author-
ity of a group, the things it designates are not simply expressed but also
authorized and legitimated” (Bourdieu 170). Within the territory of a
given nation-state, the national language commands such attention and
is invested with a twofold kind of group-based authority, that of the nation
(defined however loosely) and that of the state’s ideological apparatuses.9
Authorized and legitimate articulations of the national self and the national
citizen-subject are in turn limited to those expressed in and through the
national language. Bourdieu also argues that “in class societies, everything
takes place as if the struggle for the power to impose the legitimate mode of
thought and expression that is unceasingly waged in the field of the produc-
tion of symbolic goods tended to conceal . . . the contribution it makes to
the delimitation of the universe of discourse, that is to say, the universe of
the thinkable, and hence to the delimitation of the universe of the unthink-
able” (170). In other words, the very struggle over what constitutes a given
nationality reproduces many fundamental inequalities within the nation
itself insofar as this struggle assumes, for example, that there is a nation
that is expressed in and through a given language, a given history, a given
culture, and their symbols. Those who speak other languages, have other
histories, other cultures, and other symbols, are excluded from any such
struggle by definition as this struggle’s parameters preclude their participa-
tion or recognition as national subjects.
 14 • Chapter 1

Drawing on Anderson and Bourdieu, one finds that the representation

and ordering of subjects within national imaginaries provide national
citizen-subjects with ready-made discourses of nationality that allow ample
room for conflict and contradiction. With good reason, then, national lan-
guage has often been identified as one of the defining characteristics of
the nation insofar as this language, in Bourdieu’s words, literally sets the
limits of what is/is not thinkable for a nation’s members. Membership in
this national “imagined” community takes place in and through national
language, excluding a priori those who cannot express themselves in that
language. The hegemony enjoyed by a national language within a national
territory is thus self-authorizing and self-legitimating in the sense expressed
by Bourdieu, and both self-authorization and self-legitimation are rein-
forced by the coercive power running beneath the surface of Anderson’s
print-capital. In a Latin American context, Rama’s theorization of the “let-
tered city” takes for granted the fact that access to that “city” is predicated,
even before one’s mastery of learned Spanish and its genres, on a more
generalized mastery of the Spanish language itself. Spanish is the limit of
the national self. Indigenous languages—whether written or oral—tend to
remain excluded from spheres of power, with indigenous peoples having
little power to express themselves unless that expression occurs in Span-
ish. As such, formation as a national-citizen subject and proficiency in
Spanish are synonymous, an identification that has haunted Latin America
from the colonial period to the present (Aguirre Beltrán; Brice Heath),
and enables a situation through which, to paraphrase Luis Villoro, Latin
American national imaginaries order and constitute the indigene’s world
from outside (293).
The power dynamic implicit in the orality/literacy binary outlined above
has important consequences for the study of literature in general and the
study of indigenous literatures in particular. Again, Western knowledge
renders subaltern orality dependent on hegemonic literacy, the former
being an object of the latter. In this context, “folklore” is the name com-
monly given to orality when constituted as the object of literary study. In
the introduction to his Latin American Folktales (2002), John Bierhorst
writes that “Latin American folklore, or more precisely the recording of
oral tradition in Latin America, has a five-hundred-year history marked by
assiduous and highly skilled endeavor” (3; my italics). My wish here is not
to dismiss Bierhorst, his work, or the field of folklore, but rather to point
out the process through which literacy in this case is used to subalternize
indigenous cultures insofar as in this passage one finds traces of a Eurocen-
tric ideology that reproduces orality/literacy as a form of cultural common
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 15

sense. Folklore here is not defined as indigenous oral tradition but “the
recording of oral tradition.” Coincidentally, folklore’s “five-hundred-year
history” coincides roughly with the time elapsed since Columbus’s arrival
in 1492. The West thus brings indigenous peoples into history, and literacy
articulates orality, tasks “marked by assiduous and highly skilled endeavor,”
presumably on the part of nonindigenous members of hegemonic culture.
As stated above, within this paradigm orality needs literacy to be made
known, and the only way it can be known is in a mediated form, folklore.
Under such an interpretive program indigenous peoples are not, by defini-
tion, speaking subjects but rather objects whose speech must be recorded
and represented by nonindigenous researchers.
There must be, therefore, a distinction between folklore and oral lit-
erature. We can say that folklore is oral literature in a state of subalternity
while oral literature is any culture’s unwritten literary expression. Given
that subaltern cultures tend to have limited access to means of representa-
tion such as the Internet, mass media, and print for innumerable economic,
educational, cultural, and linguistic reasons, they are often excluded from
self-representation through these means. Whereas “folklore” interpellates,
in the sense expressed by Althusser,10 the subaltern as the domesticated
object of hegemonic knowledge, the term oral literature seeks to recognize
the existence of an other literature that exists independently of hegemonic
literary discourses. This other literature, oral literature, represents the
diverse, often antihegemonic manifestations of peoples in conditions of
subalternity.
With these definitions of Maya and literature in mind, what is Maya
literature? Unsurprisingly, the definition put forth here will differ radically
from how some other scholars use the term (Davis Terry; Morris), and is
more closely aligned with the work of Tedlock, Gossen, Sexton, and Garza
mentioned previously,11 and with the work of Allan F. Burns, David Bolles,
and Alejandra Kim de Bolles in the specific context of Yucatán. First,
oral, alphabetic, and glyphic Maya texts all constitute forms of literature.
This work focuses on Yucatec Maya literature during the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries, and so includes oral and alphabetic texts.
Second, Maya literature may include what others term folklore. It is not,
however, “folklore” as such but rather a written continuance of a culture
also expressed through oral tradition. Many Maya authors publish texts
easily recognizable as having been previously published in non-Maya
recompilations of Maya myths, legends, and tales. As will be made clear
in the next section on the storyteller and in more detail in later chapters,
the difference between these two types of publications lies in what the
 16 • Chapter 1

Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla calls “cultural control.”

Third, Maya literature is not a linguistic designation so much as it is a cul-
tural one. That is, the Maya of late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
compose and recount Maya literature in Spanish and English in addition
to Maya languages. Finally, Mayas tell and write Maya literature. That is,
indigenista writing that displays sympathy toward the Maya cannot be con-
fused with speaking/writing from a Maya subaltern locus of enunciation,
and it should be noted that indigenista representations of the Maya have
often come to be confused with Maya cultures themselves. Maya literature
originates from a Maya locus of enunciation, and as it emerges through
traditionally hegemonic modes of representation in print, on television,
and on the Internet, it ultimately seeks the revindication of Maya subjects.

Storytellers, Storytelling, and Cultural Control:

Indigenismo and the Discourse of the Indio

For more than five hundred years the rigid distinction between orality and
literacy has authorized Western representations of indigenous peoples as
“oral” peoples incapable of representing or speaking for themselves. If I may
paraphrase one of Said’s arguments in Orientalism, without examining these
representations “as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enor-
mously systematic discipline by which European cultures [have been] able
to manage—and even produce—[indigenous peoples] politically, sociologi-
cally, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” for over five
centuries (3). In a Latin American context one speaks of these representa-
tions of the indigenous other as examples of indigenismo, a term which one
can understand as both a historical mode of representation that begins with
the Spanish conquest and an ideological movement that takes hold in Latin
American nations in the wake of independence in the nineteenth century
(Favre 11). Limiting a discussion of Latin American indigenous literatures
to the context of indigenismo, however, treats such nonindigenous repre-
sentations of the indigenous world as if they were strictly a Latin American
phenomenon, which they are not.12 Moreover, using indigenismo to frame
such a discussion would also seem to preempt a broader discussion of how
international discourses about indigenous peoples manage and produce
them politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and
imaginatively, as well as ignore the fact the indigenous movements have,
in many ways, always sought to exceed or circumvent the control of the
respective nation-states in which indigenous peoples live.
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 17

What I will term “the discourse of the Indio” is a mode of organizing

knowledge employed by indigenistas in Latin America and by many of
those who have written about or otherwise represented indigenous peoples
in the United States and Europe. This discourse is not indigenismo as such
but rather Latin American indigenismo’s discursive mode. By recognizing
that Latin American indigenismo participates in a much larger Eurocentric
discourse about indigenous peoples, one can better grasp the full scope
of how and where this discourse appears. A discussion of the film 2012
and a given work by the Mexican indigenista Rosario Castellanos would
be incongruent within the context of Latin American indigenismo, given
that the former originates in Hollywood and the latter in Latin America.
Framing these as reproducing elements of the discourse of the Indio allows
one to draw connections between the methods employed by diverse pro-
ducers of images about the indigenous world. The term discourse of the
Indio also offers the advantage of not being easily confused with “indigen-
ism,” a primarily indigenous movement that Ronald Niezen describes as
“aspir[ing] to promote and protect the right of the world’s ‘first peoples’”
(4). “Indigenismo” and “indigenism” are thus the most false of cognates.
This book privileges storytelling (the authority to tell stories) and the
storyteller (the embodiment of this authority) as key aspects of the discourse
of the Indio and hegemonic cultures’ interpellation of indigenous peoples
as Indios, as well as potent symbols of cultural agency within contem-
porary Yucatec Maya literature. Through representations of indigenous
peoples telling their own stories, hegemonic culture preempts indigenous
self-representation, effectively assuming control of indigenous cultures.
By using the storyteller to represent indigenous cultures and knowledges,
these representations tell dominant culture about Indios and tell indig-
enous people who they are within that culture’s imaginary, appearing to do
so from an “Indio” locus of enunciation. As we shall see in later chapters,
storytelling continues to be a vital force within communities themselves,
and Yucatec authors frequently situate their written texts as stories told by
a storyteller to tap into this tradition and discursively resist the reduction of
their literary production to Western literary norms.
The discourse of the Indio thus relates directly to Guillermo Bonfil
Batalla’s notion of cultural control. The Mexican anthropologist states,
“cultural control is understood as the capacity to make decisions over cul-
tural elements” (79; italics in original). He goes on to note that these ele-
ments encompass every aspect of human life, including material culture,
forms of social organization, forms of knowledge, symbols, and emotions
(79–80). He then divides these elements into two categories, “propio”
 18 • Chapter 1

(one’s own) and “ajeno” (foreign), while subdividing the decisions made
in regards to these elements into four categories. In terms of “cultura pro-
pia,” over which a group exercises control, we find “cultura autónoma”
(autonomous culture) and “cultura apropiada” (appropriated external
culture). In regards to “cultura ajena,” we are presented with “cultura
enajenada” (alienated culture) and “culture impuesta” (imposed culture;
80). The importance of Bonfil Batalla’s distinctions lies in their recognition
of subaltern agency, specifically in the subaltern’s capacity to adapt to and
to appropriate foreign cultural elements and exercise control over them.
Despite the fact that the discourse of the Indio seeks to impose a unidirec-
tional vision of indigenous cultures in the form of “cultura enajenada,”
indigenous peoples are not mere passive consumers of such images. As
agents, they exist in a dialectical relationship with them, fully capable of
reappropriating previously alienated cultural elements, resignifying cul-
tural impositions, and appropriating elements of nonindigenous cultures
to their own ends.
Who or what, then, is a storyteller and what, exactly, are the texts he/she
creates through his/her performances? In a sense the two are inseparable.
Ong notes, “When an oft told story is not actually being told, all that exists
of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it” (11). In other words,
oral stories represent a form of knowledge embodied by “certain human
beings” who may or may not give voice to such knowledge through a par-
ticular performance. Ong’s emphasis on “certain human beings,” however,
would seem to place too much weight on individuals as opposed to general-
ized cultural traditions. After all, even though not all members of a culture
are recognized as superlative storytellers or asked to tell stories, this does not
mean that such nonstorytellers have no knowledge of or the ability to tell
stories. Listeners are fully aware of the stories and structures encompassed
by an oral tradition. As such, the stories are theirs as well,13 and one can
recall Walter Benjamin’s observation that “storytelling is always the art of
repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained,”
a definition of storytelling that implicates the listener and tradition as much
as the storyteller him/herself (91). As put forth by Albert B. Lord in his
groundbreaking The Singer of Tales, tradition here is best thought of as
“an organic habit of recreating what has been received and is handed on”
(xiii). Within the context of this understanding of tradition, Lord makes
the important point that there is relatively little conflict between tradition
and the oral storyteller insofar as the story’s oral performance is a matter
“of the preservation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it. The ideal
is a true story well and truly told” (29). This sense of constant re-creation
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 19

is not mechanical, as the abstract story or poem itself is best considered

as “a given text which changes from one singing to another,” given that
“[the storyteller’s] idea of stability, to which he is deeply devoted, does not
include the wording, which to him has never been fixed” (Lord 99).
Note that Lord emphasizes the stability of the performative tradition
while claiming stories themselves are never fixed. That is, the performance
of a well-known oral text allows ample room for creativity and agency on
the part of the person telling the story. Beyond the stories themselves, the
performances themselves transmit knowledge and, in the words of Diana
Taylor, constitute “an episteme, a way of knowing” (xvi). That is, the per-
formance of the story conveys knowledge as much if not more so than
the abstract story itself. As shall be discussed later, the agency found in
performance is seldom found in written recordings of oral literature, with
the written text often perpetrating a kind of violence that fails to recognize
this agency and seeks to project a recorded performance of a story as the
story itself.
In the context of such performances the abstract story is best thought of
as resembling something from Plato’s realm of ideal forms as opposed to a
thing in and of itself. A given articulation or occurrence of a story is nothing
more than a particular example of literature/tradition that must be under-
stood as one rendering of an abstract story. Whether written or oral, the
story re-creates this tradition and makes itself known in the minds of both
the listener/reader and the storyteller him/herself. Benjamin also states that
“memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from
generation to generation” (98; italics in original), and in this sense we can
assert that the story becomes a form of re-membering the past for both story-
teller and audience. The storyteller, by extension, performs from within a
given tradition and, through performance of the text, embodies it, becom-
ing the physical representation of this tradition, its memory, knowledge,
wisdom, histories, and experiences. By transmitting knowledge within the
community itself and textualizing its negotiations with dominant culture
through the production and reproduction of the community’s stories, story-
tellers have long served a social function similar to that of Gramsci’s organic
intellectuals, as the Italian thinker defines these as the group that “give[s]
the [community] homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not
only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” (5).
Whether considered symbolically or materially as the embodiment of
indigenous cultures, the storyteller emerges as a flashpoint in the control
over indigenous cultures. Given the historical realities of conquest and colo-
nialism, Enrique Florescano argues “que uno de los rasgos más constantes
 20 • Chapter 1

de la memoria indígena es su oralidad” (that one of the ubiquitous char-

acteristics of indigenous memory is its orality), such that the repetition of
stories that fortify indigenous identity reflects the fact that indigenous groups
“cultivaron la obsesión de narrarse su propia historia y exaltar los valores que
forjaron su identidad” (cultivated the obsession of narrating their own his-
tory and exalting the values that forged their identity; 322). This “cultivated
obsession” with one’s own history must be seen as derived, in part, from
seeing oneself (mis)represented within hegemonic culture and having lim-
ited agency within that culture’s mechanisms of representation. Describing
how the Maya are treated in popular literatures, Peter Hervik suggests we
consider these works as an “arena for the cultural production of the Maya”
in which the portrayals of Maya peoples “do not build on or make sense
in the world of the Maya themselves” (77; my italics). That is, these works
tell Maya culture and stage it primarily for the consumption of non-Mayas.
The Maya are not tellers of their own stories but are, literally, told by these
representations and told who they are. Mayas themselves must seek self-
representation by other means. Following Benedict Anderson’s definition
of the nation as “an imagined political community,” such cases of alienated
culture mark attempts to “imagine” Mayas and other indigenous peoples
into the body politic (6).
As a category of knowledge, the word story performs a similar opera-
tion of imagining Maya literatures according to Western ways of knowing.
Within Maya communities, two terms Yucatec Maya frequently use to des-
ignate an oral or written story are tsikbal and cuentoso’ob, the former being
a Maya word and the latter a Mayanized-version of the Spanish word for
story. Both refer to the performative phenomena of stories and storytelling
that are not captured by translating them to their respective English and
Spanish equivalents. Among other things, the Diccionario maya (1980)
defines the noun form of tsikbal as “conversación” (conversation), “plática”
(chat), “cuento” (story), and the verb form as “estar en conversación” (to
be in a conversation), and “decir cuentos o gracias” (to tell stories or jokes;
860–61).14 In addition, in his seminal work on the subject Allan F. Burns
himself states that Yucatec Maya conceive of these narrative forms “as a
type of conversation,” noting, “tzicbal or ‘conversation’ included several
ways of speaking, all characterized by dialogue” (19). Tsikbal by their
nature are dialogic, implying the participation of both storyteller/author
and listener/reader in the performative act. While Western literature could
be said to be no less performative in either its production or reception,
as a hegemonic norm its performative aspects often go unrecognized as
such. By comparison, the term tsikbal highlights that these are dialogic
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 21

performances whose artistry depends on all participating parties having

mastered the rules of Yucatec performative tradition.

Voices in Print: Representing the Storyteller and

Storytelling in Non-Maya Literatures

The participatory nature of such performances and the agency in them are
among the foremost things lost when these are translated into print. Per
Bierhorst’s observations cited earlier, folkloric examples of indigenous cul-
tural production go back more than five hundred years and are inextricably
bound up with the authority and power over indigenous cultural repre-
sentation, and in the American context in general assumptions of cultural
and linguistic superiority have often ridden just below the surface of hege-
monic culture’s control over these representations. The case of Francisco
de Montejo’s (1479–1553) incursion into Yucatán is a telling example.
Despite the importance of doña Marina to Hernán Cortés’s conquest of
Cem-Anáhuac (1521), Montejo, the peninsula’s would-be conqueror and a
former member of Cortés’s cohort, “provided himself with neither an inter-
preter, nor even with a basic Mayan vocabulary. It was an extraordinary
omission, and suggests that Spanish confidence in their destiny to master
Indians was so complete as to obviate the requirement to hold human con-
verse with them along the way” (Clendinnen 20). Montejo’s actions would
have one believe that one can represent and even conquer Indios without
ever needing to communicate with them. Absurd as the assertion seems,
whether discussing colonial accounts or more recent films, it reflects the
violence these representations can perpetrate, and even the well-meaning,
sympathetic accounts of nonindigenous anthropologists and ethnographers
are not necessarily immune. “The ventriloquism of the speaking subal-
tern,” in Gayatri Spivak’s damning formulation, “is the left intellectual’s
stock-in-trade” (255). At best we can identify such alienated representations
of indigenous peoples as indigenista as opposed to properly indigenous, the
principal distinction being that the latter originate from and are under the
control of indigenous groups while the former are neither. In order to tease
out how this discourse, the discourse of the Indio, manifests itself in diverse,
even ideologically opposed works of literature, let us turn to two examples,
the aforementioned Relación by Diego de Landa and the short story “La
tregua” (1960) by Mexican indigenista author Rosario Castellanos.
There are innumerable examples one could draw on from the colonial
period, the most monumental being Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas
 22 • Chapter 1

de Nueva España (1540–1585), originally written in transliterated Náhuatl

and translated into Spanish in the mid-sixteenth century. In keeping with
this book’s focus, however, Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yuca-
tán is a good deal more useful. In his account of Yucatán, Landa provides
the reader with detailed accounts of the peninsula as it is and as it was,
claiming to have received such knowledge from “algunos viejos de Yucatán
[que] dicen haber oído a sus [ante-] pasados” (Some old men from Yucatán
[who] say that they have heard from their ancestors; 92; Before and After
8). In this way Landa presents this knowledge as having come to him from
indistinct Indios as opposed to indigenous individuals who, unthinkable as
it may have been then or now, could have held him accountable for his
representation of Yucatec Maya culture. There is no single “source” and yet
there is undeniable “authenticity,” a distinct cultural broker (Landa) and
yet indistinct informants whose very outlines produce the domestication
of indigenous knowledge, the Indio as object, not subject. This silencing
of indigenous voices through their telling is nowhere more apparent than
in Landa’s failure to acknowledge any debt to the Yucatec Maya Gaspar
Antonio Chi. Historian Inga Clendinnen notes that “there can be no doubt
that Chi was a major informant on Indian ways . . .” and that “on the whole
question of informants Landa suffers from a curiously selective amnesia
. . . ,” as “he generously acknowledges his debt to Juan Nachi Cocom”
but fails to mention he eventually had Cocom’s corpse exhumed and
burned as part of the infamous auto-da-fé (119). Despite the fact that Landa
consciously presents the information in his Relación as being firsthand
knowledge from the mouths of indigenous informants, we find that Landa
also consciously constructs and manipulates the voices of these indigenous
storytellers. I would argue that he does not so much suffer from a “curi-
ously selective amnesia” as he employs a rhetorical strategy whose aim is to
turn indigenous individuals into Indios (generalized objects of knowledge)
and negate indigenous agency (his failure to mention Chi or the scope of
his relationship with Cocom). As we shall soon see, however, this strategy
cannot completely negate such agency even as it tries to generalize and
domesticate indigenous voices.
At first gloss, the work of the Mexican indigenista Rosario Castellanos
(1925–1974) would seem to have little in common with that of Landa.
Although both her activism and literary work are more sympathetic to
indigenous peoples than projects like Landa’s, one finds that in her work
she similarly recycles the discourse of the Indio. Castellanos, like Landa,
adopts the position of the cultural broker who ultimately assumes authority
over the representation of the indigenous world and its stories. Nowhere is
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 23

this more apparent than in her short story from the collection Ciudad real,
“La tregua,” which textualizes a tragic, gruesome encounter between a lost
tourist and the members of a small, rural Maya community in Chiapas.
I have selected this historical fiction from among Castellanos’s prolific
work because it is the only text that, to my knowledge, has been presented
to a Maya audience. The story itself is based on an event that occurred
while Castellanos was living in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Memory of the
event survives to this day in conflicting accounts in the town of San Juan
Chamula (Gossen, Telling 110). “[A] red-bearded German painter had
gotten lost in the forest near a Maya hamlet called Muken and the villagers,
mistaking him for the devil and having no common language in which to
communicate with the intruder, killed him” (Steele 89). Narrated from the
point of view of a non-Maya, omniscient third-person narrator, the action
in Castellanos’s story hinges on this inability to communicate. As for the
discourse of the Indio, although we are given the name of the woman who
first encounters the tourist, Rominka Pérez Taquibequet, and the town in
which the action takes place, Mukenjá, these gestures toward individual-
ization are undercut by repeated generalizations that emphasize Rominka’s
status as an India. Not only is Rominka described as a “Mujer como las
otras de su tribu, piedra sin edad” (A woman like all the others of her
tribe, an ageless stone), but the text also refers to members of this “tribe”
as “indios” (Ciudad real 29; City of Kings 29). Through these descriptions
Rominka emerges as a timeless, ahistorical archetype of Mayaness whose
story must be told for her. The need for this telling becomes apparent when
contrasted with the narrator’s description of the tourist. When the narrator
controls the story she refers to him as a “caxlán,” using a Maya word derived
from “castellano” (Castilian) that now connotes a light-skinned foreigner
or outsider. When reporting Rominka’s thoughts or speech, she refers to
the man as a “pukuj,” a “demon” or “devil.” In juxtaposing the Maya words
for “foreigner” and “devil” the narrator moves beyond the position of a
cultural broker and appropriates the Maya voice itself, effectively casting
her voice as that of a storyteller who, unlike the story’s Maya protagonists,
can distinguish between a devil and a tourist.
Although these texts by Landa and Castellanos appropriate the Maya
storyteller’s voice and recycle the discourse of the Indio in doing so, neither
fully succeeds in silencing the voices of Maya storytellers and the primary
audience of such stories, other Mayas. In other words, in both works we
find that Mayas seek to exercise a degree of cultural control over the texts
in question. Buried among his invaluable recordings of Maya glyphs, in
Landa’s Relación the Spaniard provides his readers with a sentence written
 24 • Chapter 1

in glyphs to give them an example of how the writing system functions.

It reads “ma in ka ti,” or “I do not want to” (186). The irony of Landa’s
informant providing him with such an example passes without comment
in the Relación but nonetheless subtly calls into question Landa’s status as
cultural broker. “Ma in ka ti” suggests other things unsaid, intentional mis-
speakings, deferments, and inventions on the part of Landa’s informants.
“Ma in ka ti” signifies the agency of the Maya storyteller even within the
heart of colonial hegemony, the refusal to be reduced to an Indio even
when one is only interpellated as such. Approximately four hundred years
later, the Maya response to Castellanos’s texts provides a similar if more
violent and unsettling example. When Castellanos presented a dramatized
version of the content of “La tregua” entitled “Petul y el diablo extranjero”
to the residents of San Juan Chamula, Chiapas, the Chamulas were so
offended they began to throw rocks at Castellanos and her theater troupe,
shouting, “We aren’t like the people from Mukem” (Steele 89). In other
words, the Chamulas refused to recognize themselves as the audience
interpellated by the play and refused to recognize Castellanos’s authority
as cultural broker. In short, they symbolically refused to be reduced to
Indios and asserted a right over their stories and how they are represented.

Indigenous Literatures and Decolonization

Such indigenous responses to hegemonic cultures are not new but rather
something that hegemonic cultures have perpetually sought to deny, co-opt,
or obfuscate. In a sense, an ahistorical privileging of the term contemporary
in the phrase “contemporary Maya literature” recycles the discourse of the
Indio as it fails to recognize how indigenous peoples have always sought to
maintain control over their cultures, even from within images controlled
by hegemonic culture itself. Second, although Yucatec Maya literature is
the specific focus of this book, one must also recognize that this literature
can be situated within broader global anticolonial, decolonial traditions.
Given the scope and sheer number of people involved in this work, my
intent here is not to be exhaustive but merely to provide representative
examples of these ongoing projects. Broadly, in the United States Native
American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Craig Womack, Vine
Deloria Jr., and countless others have rewritten the history of the United
States from diverse and even contradictory Native American perspectives,
calling into question popular and academic knowledge about indigenous
peoples, cultures, and histories. Martinican intellectual Frantz Fanon and
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 25

his monumental The Wretched of the Earth come to mind. We must also
include New Zealand Maori Linda Tuhiwai Smith, whose Decoloniz-
ing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples directly questions
the relationship between academic knowledge, subaltern peoples, and
the perpetuation of the hegemonic status quo. Nigerian author Chinua
Achebe and one of his harshest critics, Kenyan Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, are
both representative of this tradition despite their ideological differences.
So, where do Mayas fit within these decolonial projects? In elaborating
this participation I will highlight in particular those Maya authors and
intellectuals who focus on the use of Maya languages and Maya decon-
structions of Western literacy. Within the context of Guatemala’s pan-Maya
movement, one immediately thinks of works by authors and intellectuals
such as (Jakaltek) Victor Montejo, (K’iche’) Enrique Sam Colop, (Kaq-
chikel) Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil, (Kaqchikel) Estuardo Zapeta, (Q’anjob’al)
Gaspar Pedro González, (Kaqchikel) Luis de Lión, and Nobel laureate
(K’iche’) Rigoberta Menchú Tum.15 If the role of literature as a weapon of
decolonization and social visibility were still in question, Montejo himself
writes that “In the construction of a pan-Maya ethnic identity, the role of the
Maya media is fundamental” (32). It also bears mentioning that Menchú
Tum burst onto the national stage with the publication of her testimonio
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983) and that
this one work in particular has spawned countless articles and books such
as David Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans
(1999) and the Arturo Arias–edited response to Stoll’s work The Rigoberta
Menchú Controversy (2001). With regard to language use, in a later work
Menchú Tum says, “Nuestro idioma también es un patrimonio. Es nuestro
universo. Hay que protegerlo, desarrollarlo. Nuestros idiomas son pedazos
de cerebro de nuestras culturas” (Our language is also a patrimony. It is
our universe. One must protect it, develop it. Our languages are the brain
matter of our cultures; Menchú, Liano, and Miná 215).16
The most important Maya-authored work on Maya literature is per-
haps Kotz’ib: Nuestra literatura maya (Our Writing: Our Maya Literature;
1997) by Gaspar Pedro González, a writer whose La otra cara (A Mayan
Life; 1992) is often credited with being the first Maya novel.17 In Kotz’ib
González challenges the Western conception of literacy when, writing on
the question of oral literature, he argues, “Se llama literatura oral porque
es como una biblioteca en donde se encuentran guardados los conocimien-
tos, experiencias y sabiduría de las generaciones que dejan sus legados
a las generaciones futuras” (It is called oral literature because it is like
a library where the knowledge, experiences and wisdom that are left as
 26 • Chapter 1

a legacy to future generations are guarded; 108; my emphasis). Rather

than defining oral literature through its orality, González shifts emphasis
to oral literature’s literariness, hence the permanence and equal standing
with written literature that he attributes to oral texts. In appropriating the
archival permanence of the library through his use of the term literature
(“Se llama literatura oral porque es como una biblioteca . . .”), González
suggests there is no essential difference between orality and literacy and
that both are capable of transmitting knowledge across multiple genera-
tions. Similarly, Montejo has pointed out the importance language and
literature have played in the pan-Maya movement; as part of the process of
self-representation, Maya writers “concentrated on the use of language as
a means of ensuring that Maya culture and worldviews would be passed on
effectively from one generation to the next” (76). Montejo thus understands
language as more than a tool for human communication and interaction.
Language itself communicates a culture and worldview.
One finds a similar process of decolonization in works by Yucatec Maya
from Yucatán. Among the better known Maya writers from Yucatán are
Feliciano Sánchez Chan, Gerardo Can Pat, Domingo Dzul Poot, Miguel
May May, Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, Briceida Cuevas Cob, Jorge
Cocom Pech, Armando Dzul Ek, Marisol Ceh Moo, Felipe de Jesús Cas-
tillo Tzec, and María Luisa Góngora Pacheco.18 My intent here is not to
provide a history of contemporary Yucatec Maya literature or even expli-
cate the works of these authors. Rather, I will highlight how two of them
directly address issues of orality and literacy in ways that correspond to the
passages from González and Montejo cited above.
In an interview with Donald Frischman, Sánchez Chan observes that
written literature does not portend the demise of its oral counterpart. In
Sánchez Chan’s words, “Publishing a book is not the end, but just a way to
place Maya knowledge on an equal footing with modern forms of knowl-
edge” (quoted in Frischmann 19–20). Frischmann goes on to state that
for Sánchez Chan “orality and writing enter into a dynamic relationship
in which the latter serves to reinforce the former” (19). Drawing on these
observations we find that maintaining a strict separation between orality
and literacy in this context imposes Western literary norms on Maya culture
and fails to recognize this culture’s existence in and for itself according to
its own internal norms. Similarly, in the opening passage to Cocom Pech’s
Mukult’an in nool (My Grandfather’s Secrets; 2001), the author explains
that words are not dead letters and that the “rebirth” of Maya letters is a
“reencuentro del pasado con el presente; este volver de nuevo para nosotros
los mayas era y es sagrada concepción del tiempo, es un hecho que inicia
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 27

con las voces y testimonios de nuestros hermanos que hoy asumimos el

compromiso de dejar constancia de lo que pervivió en la tradición oral,
a través de textos literarios” (reencounter of the past with the present, the
sense of returning again being for us Mayas which was and is the sacred
conception of time, and begins with the voices and testimonios of those
of us that are now committed to documenting in the form of literary texts
what has survived through oral tradition; 24). One finds that this framing
of the interaction between oral and written texts as a “reencounter” of the
past with the present is not a reproduction of the Indio’s lacking written
words. On the contrary, Cocom Pech at once situates the voices of those
that participate in this contemporary literary rebirth as rising out of oral
tradition, which, as I stated earlier, preserves the historical memory of writ-
ten texts destroyed through conquest and colonization. Rather, the Maya
literary renaissance is both a “rebirth” and a “return.”
The thread that unites the comments of these Maya authors from Yuca-
tán and Guatemala is the shared emphasis on oral literature as a communal
body of knowledge. Seen from this angle, the storyteller cannot be seen as
a person who tells a story but a position of agency from which one person
performs a story and, in doing so, invokes the broader historical memory of
an entire community. The storyteller in Yucatec Maya, whether written or
oral, must be seen as drawing on this tradition and not simply identified as
a type of Western-style author or literary narrator. As such, the figure of the
storyteller can be said to represent a counterhegemonic continuity of indig-
enous cultures even as Yucatec Maya and other indigenous intellectuals
re-present this figure within hegemonic national imaginaries. Moreover,
the fact that they are “telling” these stories in their respective languages
reimagines Latin American nation-states as plurilingual, pluricultural
entities. In particular, by seizing the agency to tell their own stories and
employing the “traditional” figure of the storyteller to do so, Yucatec Maya
authors, intellectuals, and storytellers are literally inscribing themselves
into national imaginaries as indigenous citizen-subjects.

An Overview of Chapters 2–5

As can be seen from these statements, the Maya are subjects of history that
exercise their own forms of agency and not the passive, ahistorical figures
found within hegemonic national and international imaginaries. Chapter 2
examines the agency found in Yucatec Maya storytelling through different
versions of the story with which this chapter began, that of the dwarf of
 28 • Chapter 1

Uxmal. Comparing nineteenth-century versions of the text to each other

as well as with versions of the story as it is now told in the town of Santa
Elena, the chapter highlights how written articulations of a given story can
(mis)represent the story and the agency a storyteller can exercise in his or
her telling. To hone in on the cultural milieu of Yucatán, the following
chapter examines the work of several Yucatecan folklorists from Mexico,
Cuba, and the United States, paying particular attention to their mediations
of the storyteller’s voice and the rhetorical strategies they use to erase or
highlight the storyteller’s presence. In addition, this section develops the
terminology describing the interactions between the outsider, the native
informant, and the literary text that will serve as a point of departure for
the analysis of oral and written literature throughout the remainder of this
book. The fourth chapter draws on my own recordings of contemporary
Yucatec Maya oral stories and storytellers, particularly two stories told by
the storyteller Mariano Bonilla Caamal. The advantage of explicating these
texts, recorded during fieldwork in spring 2007 in and around Santa Elena,
Yucatán, is that they provide a window on how Yucatec Maya stories con-
tinue to survive and transmit knowledge in the twenty-first century. The
fifth chapter considers three works by female Maya authors, María Luisa
Góngora Pacheco, Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and Briceida Cuevas
Cob, honing in on their use of the traditional Maya storyteller as a frame for
their respective narratives. By using the figure of the traditional storyteller
to recount Maya stories in print, these stories seek the recognition of Maya
discursive agency within regional, national, and global contexts. Through
a comparison of oral and written Maya literatures with Mexican national
literature, this book provides a deeper understanding of how national dis-
courses represent indigenous peoples to the nation and how contemporary
Maya literature contests this representation and points to the vast amount
of work yet to be done on this topic.
This book deals with the stories for which, consciously or unconsciously,
willingly or unwillingly, I have taken a degree of responsibility during my
work on Yucatec Maya literatures. As I have elaborated throughout this
first chapter, storytelling and the retelling of stories are ethical positions
and ethical choices. One chooses to tell a story or not to tell it. One also
chooses how to tell it. I am responsible for these stories insofar as I retell
them and re-present them, for in doing so I place myself in the position of
cultural broker between you, the reader, and the storytellers and authors
who first introduced me to the stories presented here. For a variety of rea-
sons, many of these storytellers cannot reach, or, I would like to think,
have not yet been afforded the opportunity to reach, the global, globalized
 Who Tells What to Whom and How • 29

audience of a Mel Gibson, and so these re-presentations of their stories are

an important venue for making them available. The issues surrounding
the “speaking subaltern” will be dealt with later in this work, but for the
moment it suffices to say that the retelling of these stories constitutes a case
in which, to borrow Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, the subaltern “has spoken in
some way” (309; italics in original). If I have done these stories and these
literatures justice, by reading this “speaking in some way” you, reader, are
similarly responsible for their content. First Nations author Thomas King
describes the reader’s responsibility in such cases by explaining that each
story he tells “[is] yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Turn
it into a television movie. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that
you would have lived your life differently if you had only heard this story.
You’ve heard it now” (29). The reader thus has an ethical responsibility to
the story and to its culture. Having read these stories, the next time some-
one making polite conversation mentions the violent Maya of Apocalypto
or how the Maya came from spaceships, your decision to tell or not to tell,
and how to tell, will be laden with material and ethical consequences. That
is, the responsibility for these stories is now also yours.

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 two

Writing THE Word

Storytellers, Cultural Brokers, and the
Shape of Indigenous Memory

The situation possesses the trappings of an archetypal romance. Upon

being confronted by the ruins of a mysterious ancient city, a white explorer
turns to one of the natives for a bit of local knowledge. Setting the scene,
the narrator informs us: “The Indians regard these ruins with superstitious
reverence. They will not go near the place at night, and they have the old
story that immense treasure is hidden among them. Each of the buildings
has its name given to it by the Indians. This is called the Casa del Anano
[sic], or House of the Dwarf, and it is consecrated by a wild legend, which,
as I sat in the doorway, I received from the lips of an Indian, as follows:
. . .” (Stephens, Central America 423).1 Appealing to an authority based on
the author-narrator’s firsthand account of things, these words reflect the
attitudes and postures found in numerous works of ethnography, anthropol-
ogy, travel literature, and folklore. The author-narrator immediately estab-
lishes a safe distance between an “us,” the author-narrator and his implied
readership, and a “them,” the Indians, by saying they have a “superstitious
reverence” for the ruined buildings. Assumed to be beyond all such super-
stitious belief, we readers are reminded that we should not take the story too
seriously, and certainly not as seriously as the Indians take it.2 The Indians,
simply by virtue of being Indians, are incapable of knowing in the ways
that both reader and narrator know. They call the building the Casa del
Anano, but this name comes from a “wild legend.” Moreover, Stephens’s
use of the verb “call” suggests the structure’s real name and history are lost
to the Indians themselves. The authoritative voice of the author-narrator

30
 Writing THE Word • 31

reasserts the truth-value of the narrative that follows by stating that this
story, in all its superstition, in all its otherness, was told to him from the
very lips of an Indian as they were among those very ruins. The narrator
effectively steps back from his text and cedes narration to the anonymous
Indian storyteller rather than risk having any part of the text’s potentially
contaminating superstition being attributed to him. In doing so, the author-
narrator recycles the discourse of the Indio and articulates the storyteller
as a talking object who comes into being only through this layered act of
metanarration. The author-narrator, and through him the reader, are silent
listeners to the story “The Dwarf of Uxmal,” a story “hardly . . . more strange
than the structure to which it referred” (Stephens, Central America 425).
This chapter introduces the variegated relationship between storyteller
and the author-narrator as cultural broker in Yucatán by focusing on a single
story, “The Dwarf of Uxmal,” as iterated in the work by J. L. Stephens cited
above, in the works by his Mexican contemporaries, and as told among
contemporary Yucatec Maya storytellers in the bilingual town of Santa
Elena. With this background, the following chapter traces the evolution of
this relationship between cultural broker and storyteller as reflected across
several different volumes of twentieth-century broker-edited literature:
Antonio Mediz Bolio’s La tierra del faisán y del venado (Land of Pheasant
and Deer; 1922); the literary magazine Yikal Maya Than (1939–1955),
Luis Rosado Vega’s El alma misteriosa del mayab (Mysterious Soul of
the Mayab; 1934), and Ermilo Abreu Gómez’s Leyendas y consejas del
antiguo Yucatán (Tales and Legends of Ancient Yucatán; 1961); Manuel J.
Andrade and Hilaria Máas Collí’s two-volume Cuentos mayas yucatecos
(Yucatec Maya Stories; 1990, 2000); and Allan F. Burns’s An Epoch of
Miracles (1983). In my analysis I privilege the Mayaness of these texts in
order to gain a nuanced perspective on the fragmented and multilayered
nature of these representations and how cultural brokers constitute, shape,
situate, and mediate the figure of the Maya storyteller. These apparently
aesthetic decisions are far from being ideologically neutral, as changes in
how cultural brokers articulate the storyteller reflect changes in national,
nationalist, and global ideologies that seek to domesticate indigenous oth-
ers. By reading these texts against each other, we also observe the discursive
agency exercised by the storytellers represented in these texts, as well as the
mechanisms through which cultural brokers seek to blunt this agency. We
thus gain a broader perspective on the multifaceted relationship between
cultural broker and storyteller, and how the latter, despite the intentions
of the former, often appropriates the broker’s voice in an attempt to make
sure his own is heard.
 32 • Chapter 2

Trading in Culture: Folklore, the Cultural Broker,

and the Native Object

As we saw in chapter 1, the stakes of narrating indigenous memory are quite

high within the nation, around the world, and within indigenous com-
munities themselves. In this section I outline the nature of the texts under
consideration and the textual relationships between the cultural broker,
the author-narrator, and the storyteller in these works, and explore the
multilayered power dynamic that these relationships express.
This chapter and the one following it deal with many folkloric texts that
use the image of the storyteller to facilitate the integration of indigenous
memory into national and global imaginaries. These stories are written
representations of oral tellings, and these original tellings were done by
“authentic” Indios. These folkloric texts derive a large part of their signify-
ing power from this purported authenticity and, in a sense, share a good
deal in common with the testimonio. Beverley describes testimonio as a
genre in which members of the dominant reading public “are in effect
interpellated from the subaltern” (2; italics in original), such that these
readers recognize “the other’s sense of what is true and what is false” and
are ultimately implicated “in a relation of solidarity with the other” (7). As
such, I would assert that most of the texts treated here are not testimonio
for two reasons. First, and most important, while we can say that folklore
shares the air of legal witness Margaret Randall finds in the testimonio (33),
and although the author-narrators of these texts may even hold the values
Randall suggests are necessary attributes for one who records testimonio
(38), the ideology under which folklore is written frequently reduces
subaltern cultures to the terms of hegemonic cultures. To paraphrase the
citation from Beverley above, the reader is not interpellated from the sub-
altern, and there is little attempt to understand the subaltern other’s sense
of right and wrong. Even though these texts represent a kind of “speaking
subaltern,” this subaltern’s voice is deployed in a context that normalizes
the asymmetrical relationship between hegemonic author-narrator and
native, subaltern informant.
Randall cites an article by Salvador Bueno in which Bueno asks, per-
haps rhetorically, if “Los tlacuilos aztecas informantes de Bernardino de
Sahagún que le recitaban los poemas nahuatls conservados por transmisión
oral o le narraban sus terribles experiencias de la conquista, ¿no eran, a fin
de cuentas, testimoniales?” (Bernardino de Sahagún’s Aztec tlacuilo infor-
mants that recited poems for him or narrated for him their terrible experi-
ences of the conquest, were their [works] not, in the end, testimonial?;
 Writing THE Word • 33

quoted in Randall 34). On the surface Sahagún’s work meets all the criteria,
and the two are certainly related, but we must not forget why Sahagún was
interested in this material in the first place, nor how he intended other
Spaniards to use it. In the prologue to his Historia general de las cosas de
la Nueva España, Sahagún compares himself to a doctor who, in need-
ing to care for sick patients, must first familiarize himself with the broad
spectrum of possible diseases in order to make his diagnoses. He does not
collect information from native informants to facilitate the continuity of
indigenous memory under colonial rule but rather “para predicar contra
estas cosas” (to preach against these things; Sahagún 17).3 He thus envi-
sions that his work on indigenous cultures will enable his fellow priests to
notice when “en nuestra presencia hacen muchas cosas idolátricas sin que
lo entendamos” (in our presence they do many idolatrous things without
our understanding; Sahagún 17). None of this diminishes Sahagún’s work
or the legacy of the Colegio de Santa Cruz that he established as a center
of indigenous learning. Rather, in Sahagún we can see the violent colonial
ideology under which folklore operates (know in order to domesticate, or in
this case eradicate), and how the recording of folklore, while having some
of testimonio’s characteristics, cannot be considered a form of testimonio.
Second, I must also point out that folklore, unlike testimonio, ultimately
makes no pretense of solidarity with the subaltern as articulated by Bever-
ley. As Sahagún makes clear, the ultimate goal of his work is to facilitate the
eradication of indigenous cultural memory in the Americas by disseminat-
ing the very thing it seeks to extinguish. He makes these things “known” in
order for others to better recognize them and, having done so, do away with
them. Although not as infamous, he certainly shares a good bit in common
with Diego de Landa. This is not to say that, then or now, this text and
others like it cannot be reappropriated by indigenous peoples, but we must
keep in mind what these texts meant within their proper historical con-
text. Early colonial works like Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de la
Nueva España began shaping the parameters of the discourse of the Indio
that continues operating today. If this discourse did not so effectively pre-
empt indigenous self-representation and co-opt indigenous memory, such
reappropriations would be unnecessary. Whatever the merits or limitations
of testimonio, we must maintain that, at least on some level, the genre seeks
to provide subaltern witness to events in such a way that this witness effects
social, political, and/or cultural change. Testimonio, unlike folklore, does
not seek, explicitly or implicitly, the erasure of subaltern voices.
If modern methods of collecting stories from others differ greatly from
those of Bernardino de Sahagún or the American traveler, adventurer, and
 34 • Chapter 2

author John L. Stephens, whose Incidents of Travel in Central America,

Chiapas, and Yucatán (1841) I cited at the beginning of this chapter,
the constellations of power in which these texts are interpreted, ordered,
translated, and published has changed very little from the conquest to the
present. In exploring this dynamic I will focus on the relationship between
three figures that make an appearance in such texts: the cultural broker,
the author-narrator, and the storyteller.
The people traditionally charged with the interpretation, ordering, trans-
lation, and publication of these texts are cultural brokers, people who medi-
ate between subaltern cultures and hegemonic cultures. Cultural brokers
in the Americas are not exclusively indigenous or nonindigenous, but rather
individuals whose attributes enable them to represent indigenous cultures
within nonindigenous contexts. Margaret Connell-Szasz argues that for
such figures “borders have become pathways that link peoples rather than
barriers that separate them” (Introduction 3), and that they are “reposito-
ries of two or more cultures” who can move in an out of roles “at will, in
accordance with circumstances” (6). While recognizing that there do exist
the kinds of bicultural cultural brokers that Connell-Szasz describes, my
analysis of these figures is a good deal more ambivalent. Consciously or not,
as the cultural broker transcribes, documents, translates, and illuminates,
he also glosses, excises, misunderstands, misreads, and obscures. Remem-
ber, for example, the passage in which Stephens misspells the Spanish word
enano as “anano” cited at the beginning of this chapter. There are also
pressing questions with regard to cultural brokers and the role they play
within the intersections of race and power in the Americas. Are indigenous
cultural brokers ever truly allowed to enter the nonindigenous world as
equals, or do others see them, in the formulation from Fanon’s book, as
Indios who wear white masks? To what extent do the mediations of non-
indigenous cultural brokers cut across cultural boundaries and produce
knowledge that serves distinct cultural groups? These questions cannot be
answered with a simple affirmative or negative, but should be kept in mind
while we explore this topic.
Peter Hervik refers to the Yucatec Maya playwright, educator, and activist
Armando Dzul Ek as a cultural broker and remarks that Dzul Ek’s “primary
resources are his fluency in speaking Maya, his knowledge of local culture,
his familiarity with the broker’s role, and his ability to operate within the
national domain” (147). Surprisingly, Hervik does not specifically mention
Dzul Ek’s ability to speak Spanish, an omission that underscores the asym-
metrical relationship of power within the field in which cultural brokers
operate. Although Yucatec Maya is one of the resources that enables Dzul
 Writing THE Word • 35

Ek to perform the role of a cultural broker, Spanish is assumed to be the

language of cultural mediation and representation. Therefore, indigenous
cultural brokers are almost always bilingual while this may not be true of
their nonindigenous counterparts. The cultural broker mediates the rep-
resentation of subaltern cultures but, as the name implies, is nonetheless
subject to what we might go so far as to call “market forces.” Who consumes
the representations the broker produces? To what extent can these represen-
tations contradict or challenge what nonindigenous peoples expect to see
and remain viable? In the case of someone like Dzul Ek, these forces mean
that this cultural production, intended for the consumption of Mayas and
non-Mayas alike, is dialogic in its reception. Hervik notes that: “although
the performance of the Sac Nicté [Dzul Ek’s theater troupe] is considered
‘folklore’ within a national context, the formation of the group, its function
of improving political and cultural awareness within the Maya community,
and the voicing of political claims on behalf of the ethnic group, manifest
an inherent element in contemporary ethnic identity” (128). That is, as a
cultural broker who communicates with non-Maya, Dzul Ek is also, in the
Gramscian sense, an organic intellectual who plays an important part in the
reproduction of Maya culture within the broader community.
The dual nature of Dzul Ek’s role as Maya cultural broker and organic
intellectual comes into sharp relief when we contrast Dzul Ek with how
nonindigenous cultural brokers have traditionally represented themselves
in their own works. We can recall, for example, the passage from John
Bierhorst cited in chapter 1. He says that “Latin American folklore, or
more precisely the recording of oral tradition in Latin America, has a five-
hundred-year history marked by assiduous and highly skilled endeavor”
(Bierhorst, Introduction 3). As stated previously, this passage recycles an
entire discourse found in texts as diverse as those by Sahagún and Stephens
in which the work and aims of the cultural broker eclipse the culture that
the broker seeks to mediate for his audience. Whereas Sahagún sought to
eradicate, Stephens and Bierhorst seek to domesticate through a process
that is no less violent. If Dzul Ek’s work also serves as an instrument of
consciousness-raising within Maya communities and to voice Maya politi-
cal claims to the non-Maya world, we may ask whose political and cultural
awareness is raised by these texts? What political claims do they voice? How
do they configure contemporary ethnic identity for indigenous peoples and
nonindigenous peoples alike?
The indigenous world described by indigenist mediations is an affect
of the historical consciousness of individual writers and the moment in
time from which they write (Villoro 15). As evidenced in Bierhorst and
 36 • Chapter 2

elsewhere, and despite different brokers’ frequent claims as to the authen-

ticity of their representations of indigenous culture, in most cases the
nonindigenous broker never simply “tells it like it is” but always crafts
his representations according to prevailing hegemonic ideology so that
these representations will be easily recognized and consumed by a non-
indigenous public. Given that Bierhort’s book Latin American Folktales
is subtitled “Stories from Hispanic and Indian Traditions,” we find that
Bierhorst assumes the unity of a mestizo, pan–Latin American, and in
his words, “Latino,” subject. He says in the preface that “the stories in
this book represent the folktale tradition of Spanish-speaking America set
within a frame of American Indian lore. As the scheme suggests, Latino
folklore is two things at once” (Bierhorst xi). Here I take Bierhorst’s use of
the term Latino to mean something along the lines of pan–Latin Ameri-
can as opposed to how the term is commonly used. In this construction,
native “lore” frames Hispanic “tradition,” the former providing the latter
with roots that prevent it from being a mere repetition of folklore from
the Old World. This position recycles prevailing ideologies of mestizaje
and cultural assimilation common in most of “Latin America.” Indigenous
peoples are interpellated as “Latinos” or their ancestors, and the inclusion
of indigenous peoples under this term enables “Latino” identity itself to be
“two things at once.” Although the “Indian element” is the key component
in this assemblage, the “Western, European element” is privileged as the
active point of analysis that indigenous cultures frame.
Beyond the information that a given cultural broker may or may not
include as an accompaniment to a text in the form of prefaces, introduc-
tions, or conclusions, we must inquire about the role the broker plays in
the narration or authoring of text(s). That is, if the cultural broker is the
flesh-and-blood person who claims authorship of the work, the author-
narrator is that person as a function of the folkloric text. Gérard Genette’s
terminology is quite useful in understanding this function (212–62). Most
cultural brokers as author-narrators are extradiegetic insofar as they narrate
the story of the story in the first person and in the here and now of the
reader, as opposed to the here and now of the story (228–29). They directly
address us, the readers, about events that happened in the past. On another
narrative level these author-narrators are frequently homodiegetic, present
within the story itself insofar as they are narratees of stories told to them by
native informants (248–49). That is, they are narrators in the first degree
(speaking from outside the time of the story they tell, extradiegetic), who
tell their own story of how they heard the story (they are also protagonists
present in the story itself, homodiegetic). This is not the “story itself” but
 Writing THE Word • 37

a metanarrative, or “story about the story,” through which the story related
by the storyteller is introduced.
This layered distance between reader and story marks the point at which
the reduction of indigenous cultures to Western norms begins. In his
“What Is an Author?” Foucault identifies four features of the “author” as a
function of discourse: it gives the text a legal status as a form of property; it
cannot be thought of as a constant across cultures nor across time; it seeks
to construct the text as originating from a rational individual; there is no
one-to-one correspondence between the author and a historical individual,
but rather the author and a series of differentiated egos (124–31). Of par-
ticular relevance here is the overriding emphasis on a single individual that
is a function of the text. That is, although the works treated in this chap-
ter contain “authorless” folklore, each collection has an author to whom
Western society has given representational, legal authority over indigenous
texts. Cultural brokers as author-narrators construct these texts in an effort
to distill their power over them.
The author-narrator thus marks the presence of the cultural broker
within the text itself. The author-narrator (tending to be an extradiegetic-
homodiegetic narrator, in Genette’s terms) sets the text within the text,
structuring the reader’s perceptions of the text he embeds within his own
narration. As in the passage from Stephens cited at the beginning, does he
cede the page to the “verbatim” words of a native storyteller or does he self-
consciously renarrate the story himself? Does he go so far as to assume the
very mantle of the native storyteller and erase the informant all together?
How does the broker in the function of author-narrator order the work? To
whom does he attribute the texts in question? To himself? To an indistinct
Indio (as in Stephens) or to specific informant (something which Bierhorst
does at times)? Apart from any explicit attempt to guide our reading, to
what extent does the author-narrator situate these texts as part of a larger
indigenous, mestizo, national, or global tradition? It bears repeating that
these are not mere aesthetic choices. The author-narrator determines the
representation of oral literature, a priori, as subaltern folklore that would
not be intelligible were it not for the author-narrator’s intervention.
Given the complicated role of the cultural broker and his/her function
as author-narrator of the texts under consideration, we must recognize that
the storytellers constructed in these texts are similarly multilayered repre-
sentations. By comparison, the storyteller is an intradiegetic narrator whose
story is embedded in the larger narrative, and we will return to this topic in
a moment. As stated above, they are intradiegetic narrators whose stories are
enclosed by the larger narrative of the author-narrator, and either hetero- or
 38 • Chapter 2

homodiegetic depending on whether or not they narrate their own story.

Tzvetan Todorov refers to this technique as embedding, and he claims “the
embedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative. By telling the story of
another narrative, the first narrative achieves its fundamental theme and at
the same time is reflected in this image of itself” (72). We are confronted
with an image of hegemonic culture articulating subaltern culture, the
Indio as object of dominant discourse. As articulated by Todorov, such
tellings are not representative of indigenous cultures but rather objects on
which dominant discourse is itself reflected. As stated earlier, these stories
tend to represent what nonindigenous people expect to see.
We cannot deny, however, that in many cases there are in fact flesh-and-
blood storytellers behind these representations in the same way that there
are cultural brokers behind the author-narrators. First, we may begin by
saying that they are indigenous people who, at some point, were interpel-
lated as storytellers by cultural brokers. They were asked by someone to tell
a story. In most cases, we do not or cannot know what role these people
play within indigenous communities themselves. At the very least we can
say that the individuals so interpellated successfully reproduce indigenous
culture, knowledge, and memory insofar as, even in the most culturally
alienated settings, these stories can be and are reclaimed by indigenous
peoples. Second, if the author-narrator is a function of discourse, the story-
teller is no less so, as the author-narrator imposes himself between the read-
ing public and the storyteller, the storyteller of the text being constructed
by the author-narrator. Everything the storyteller says is mediated through
this other figure, a textual situation that has the effect of reproducing the
relations of power and dependency that haunt alienated representations
of indigenous peoples. The “authenticity” of these storytellers or their
representations is not so much at issue as are the ideological and material
consequences of how they are represented. As we shall see, these are multi-
fold. Third, we must realize that most tellings in which these storytellers
participate are a consequence of their being interpellated as storytellers
and not of an organic situation in which the storyteller decides to tell a
story. Again, this is not a matter of authenticity but of searching for how
the textualized storyteller becomes a site of manipulation on the part of
the cultural broker as author-narrator, and of agency on the part of the
indigenous person interpellated as a storyteller.
In other words, the cultural broker cannot fully impose his will on the
person whom he interpellates as a storyteller. The storyteller can actively
reinterpret the ground on which the storyteller and the broker meet, open-
ing up a space in which he can exercise a measured degree of agency
 Writing THE Word • 39

against the broker’s hegemonic intentions. This power is embedded within

the performative aspects of speech itself (Butler 161), which Yucatec Maya
storytelling takes full advantage of. However, with regard to the actual writ-
ten texts available to the reader, the broker may deem it unsavory to record
moments where the storyteller exercises this agency. If an “Indian” asks for
money in exchange for telling a story, the illusion of the broker’s insider
status is broken and he is reduced to being a simple consumer. The story-
teller may also tell an unsolicited or canonically incorrect story that the
cultural broker edits from his work. The “Indian” could hurry through a
story in such a way that the broker would not know the difference. He may
also invent a new story for consumption by the broker, passing it off in the
way that today there exists an international trade in fake Maya antiquities.
While processes of folklorization frequently mask this form of agency, we
can nonetheless catch glimpses of it by reading broker-authored texts in
conjunction with and against one another.

Incidents of Oral Literature in Yucatán:

“El Anano de Uxmal”

To provide a more substantial context for the discussion of folkloric Maya

texts in the following chapter, let us return to the example from J. L.
Stephens. By contrasting it with other textualizations of this same story we
are in a much better position to consider fully the ideological underpin-
nings of his “Anano de Uxmal” and explore how his text masks the agency
exercised by its storyteller. In his twin roles of cultural broker and author-
narrator, Stephens transcribes and translates the story for nonindigenous
English- and Spanish-speaking publics. These processes open up a Pando-
ra’s box of issues ranging from omission to mistranslation and, consciously
or not, blunt the agency exercised by the storyteller through his telling
of the tale.
Stephens’s version of the story is as follows: There was an old woman
living in a house opposite what is today known as the Governor’s House in
Uxmal. Having no children, she began to care for an egg in the corner of her
house until one day a baby hatched from it. Although the infant learned to
walk and talk quickly, within a year it stopped growing. Seeing that the child
was a dwarf, the old woman took this as a sign of great things to come. She
eventually tells the dwarf to challenge the king of Uxmal to a test of strength,
to which the dwarf reluctantly agrees. The first test the king proposes is
to lift a heavy stone weighing seventy-five pounds. Believing he has been
 40 • Chapter 2

defeated, the dwarf returns home. The old woman, however, instructs him
to go back and tell the king to lift the stone first, which he does. After the
king lifts the stone, the dwarf is able to do likewise. There are then several
other unnamed trials of strength that Stephens mentions but glosses over.
The king then tells the dwarf, under penalty of death, to build what will be
the largest house in Uxmal in a single night. Once again, believing himself
defeated the dwarf returns crying to his grandmother, who tells him not to
worry. The next morning the dwarf wakes up inside the “Casa del Anano,”
a structure that is indeed the highest in the city of Uxmal. Enraged, the king
issues the dwarf another challenge: each man will have a bundle of wood
broken over his head. Believing the king has finally beaten him, the dwarf
goes to his grandmother. She places a tortilla on his head and sends him
off. In front of the “great people of the city” the king breaks a load of wood
over the dwarf’s head but nothing happens. The dwarf kills the king with
the second blow of his bundle and ascends to the throne. The old woman
perishes soon after. However, the story has it that, together with a large
snake, she now keeps watch over the cenote in the town of Maní where she
will give passersby water from the cenote but only in exchange for a small
child for the snake to eat (Stephens, Central America 423–25).
Stephens’s articulation of this story differs considerably from those of his
Yucatecan contemporaries, and although we cannot know for certain the
reasons behind these differences they are nonetheless important. Writing
under the pen name “Un curioso,” the friar Estanislao Carrillo published
a version of the dwarf story as part of a story entitled “Dos días en Noh
Pat” (Two Days in Noh Pat) in the literary magazine Registro yucateco in
1845 (261–72). Eligio Ancona published an almost identical version in
his Historia de Yucatán in 1878 (76–80). I will focus on Carrillo’s textu-
alization of the story as opposed to Ancona’s, given that Carrillo’s version
was published first and only four years after the publication of Stephens’s
Incidents of Travel. Moreover, there is an organic relationship between the
two versions. Carrillo and Stephens were good friends (Barrera Vásquez
308–9), and the Yucatecan archeologist goes so far as to refer to the Ameri-
can Stephens as his “ilustre y sabio amigo” (illustrious and wise friend) in
the text of “Dos días en Noh Pat” (268).
Rather than by the majesty of the “Casa del enano,” Carrillo’s version
is occasioned by his search for the sak bej, or white road, that connects the
Maya cities of K’aba’ and Uxmal via Noh Pat. Carrillo makes no mention
of the dwarf being born from an egg, and says that the dwarf is the old
woman’s grandson. One day the dwarf notices that his grandmother seems
to be guarding something by the hearth and, in order to keep her away
 Writing THE Word • 41

from the house when she draws water, puts a small hole in her water jug.
While she is away he digs up two silver instruments: a tunkul (drum) and
a soot (rattle). He plays them, fulfilling the first part of a prophecy that
whoever finds and plays the instruments will be the next king of Uxmal.
The king demands to know who has played these instruments. When the
dwarf is brought before him, he challenges the dwarf to have a certain
number of coconuts broken on their heads, with the winner being crowned
king. In the days leading up to the event, the king also demands that a sak
bej be built (the road from K’aba’ to Uxmal sought by Carrillo) so that
the people will always remember the event. When the day arrives, the
coconuts are broken on the dwarf’s head but do not injure him. As with
Stephens’s version, this is due to the old woman’s machinations. Fearing
the worst, the king delays the hand of fate by asking the dwarf how many
leaves are on a ceiba tree standing nearby. The dwarf replies and gives the
correct number of leaves, claiming the bats had told him how many leaves
there were. He then pressures the king to have the coconuts broken on his
head, and the king dies with the third coconut. As new king, the dwarf sets
about building his own palace (“La casa del enano”) as well as a home for
his grandmother (“La casa de la vieja”). After she passes away, the dwarf
becomes enamored with his power and falls into idolatry. Abandoned by
the god the old woman had protecting him, he and the people attempt to
build an idol. Failing to build one of wood or of stone, they finally succeed
in building one of clay, becoming known as the kul kato’ob (worshippers
of clay). Having offended the gods with their creation, the dwarf and his
people are destroyed for their arrogance (Un curioso 261–72).
As stated above, the differences between these two stories are quite sig-
nificant. There are structural differences such as the question of the dwarf’s
origin, but of far more interest here are those variations that point toward
differences in ideology. In Stephens the dwarf challenges the king of Uxmal
to tests of strength, whereas in Carrillo the dwarf uncovers instruments that
prophesy his ascent to the throne. The former articulates the confrontation
between the dwarf and the king as one originating from the dwarf’s defi-
ance of the king’s authority. The latter approaches this same transition of
kingship through the cultural norm of Yucatec Maya prophetic tradition.
That is, in Carrillo’s version we observe that the situation is one where the
king fails to step aside when the instruments portending the installation of
a new king are heard. While he is still defeated by the dwarf, the king him-
self sets the stage for his undoing by not heeding the prophecy. Although
these works are “the same story,” they articulate two contrasting visions of
legitimate political authority, Stephens’s version basing the right to rule on
 42 • Chapter 2

strength and victory over one’s adversaries and Carrillo’s basing the right to
rule in larger cultural patterns. The two stories also have drastically differ-
ent endings. Stephens’s text ends with the death of the old woman while
Carrillo’s tells the tale of the dwarf’s eventual downfall. In Carrillo’s version
we once again find that a failure to conform to established cultural norms
leads to the destruction of those in power, a move that reflects that story’s
ideological stance with regard to the legitimate exercise of power observed
in the dwarf’s initial ascent to the throne.
In accounting for such differences, we must move from a discussion of
the story told by the author-narrator (the extradiegetic-homodiegetic nar-
rator) and focus on the storyteller (intradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator),
the persons within these texts (those written by Stephens and Carrillo)
who narrate the story to these cultural brokers. Through this juxtaposition
we can catch a glimpse of the interpretive agency present within Yucatec
Maya oral literary tradition, as well as begin to grasp the extent to which
transcriptions and translations of these stories can blunt this agency. Both
stories begin as meditations on Maya ruins. As cited at the beginning of
the chapter, Stephens finds himself sitting in a doorway near the top of the
“Casa del enano,” and claims that “each of the buildings has its name given
to it by the Indians” (Stephens, Central America 423). Although we do not
know if Stephens solicits the story from the storyteller or if the storyteller
uses this occasion as an excuse to tell the story, the storyteller employs the
story to narrate the history of the building on which they are standing.
Carrillo’s storyteller initiates his story in response to a query about whether
or not he is familiar with the sak bej that people say connects the cities of
K’aba’ and Uxmal, a road that Carrillo says “un sabio viajero amigo mío no
pudo encontrar” (a wise traveler friend of mine could not find; 263).4 As
with the storyteller from Stephens, this storyteller uses the story “El enano
de Uxmal” to narrate the history of a particular Maya structure, only this
time the story’s focus is an explanation of the construction and purpose of
the sak bej.
We are thus left with the question of whether the episode of the sak bej
is omitted by the storyteller in Stephens’s version as opposed to included or
invented for the version found in Carrillo. While we cannot answer such
a question, I would argue that this and other cases of omission, inclusion,
and invention mark instances in which the storyteller exercises the agency
found within performances from Yucatec Maya oral literary tradition.
Whatever the cases may have actually been, both storytellers shape the
story according to their audience in such a way that the story emphasizes
the specific object of that audience’s interest, the “Casa del enano” in the
 Writing THE Word • 43

case of Stephens and the mysterious sak bej in the case of Carrillo. “The
Dwarf of Uxmal” is not a static narrative transmitted across generations but
a narrative possibility one can adapt to the contingencies of one’s surround-
ings. That is, the same story can be performed to narrate multiple histories.
This is not to say that Stephens and Carrillo do not similarly omit, include,
and invent. However, while the written texts produced by cultural brokers
can be analyzed and broken down independently of each other, transcrip-
tion tends to fix the oral texts produced by storytellers and sever them from
the larger cultural context in which they originate. As a result, we lose sight
of the tradition of interpretive agency these texts reflect.
The fixation of such texts says nothing of how brokers such as Stephens
and Carrillo themselves articulate the storyteller in ways that further under-
cut this agency. Paradoxically, both men’s narrative authority arises from
the fact that they claim to receive these stories directly from “Indians”
themselves (Stephens, Central America 423; Un curioso 263), and yet they
are sure to establish a firm separation between themselves and the world
from which these storytellers speak. This operation points to a key moment
in indigenous representation in the modern world, a moment in which the
indigenous storyteller cedes or is coerced into ceding knowledge to a cul-
tural broker who serves as an intermediary between indigenous and non-
indigenous peoples. Who is the storyteller with whom the author-narrator
presents us? Both author-narrators recycle the discourse of the Indio to
construct him as a radically other, anonymous Indian. In Stephens’s text,
his people, that is, the Indians, “regard these ruins with superstitious rever-
ence,” and the building in question “the Casa del Anano, or House of the
Dwarf, . . . is consecrated by a wild legend” (Central America 423). Carrillo
employs a similar frame. Upon being asked about the sak bej, the storyteller
of Carrillo’s text not only claims to know where it is but also responds
“con cierta sonrisa maliciosa” (with a certain malicious smile; Un curioso
263). Carrillo goes on to comment that the story “lleva consigo todas las
inverosimilitudes de un cuento árabe” (contains all of the uncertainties of
an Arab fable), but that he nonetheless listened “con gusto” (with pleasure;
Un curioso 267). Apparently without irony, when the storyteller later on
tells him that there are other things he could relate but they deal with
things that “los blancos que llaman ilustrados . . . reputan por falso” (so-
called white men of letters . . . claim to be false), Carrillo encourages him
to go on, stating, “no vengo a burlarme de cosa alguna que me diga” (I
won’t laugh at anything you tell me; Un curioso 268). While not exactly
laughing, both Carrillo and Stephens make clear that they do not take such
stories seriously as a form of knowledge, and their words activate an entire
 44 • Chapter 2

representative schema with which readers of alienated representations of

Indios from 1492 to the present are already familiar. From this perspective
the Indians Stephens and Carrillo meet must naturally correspond to the
Indians we would expect to meet were we with them on top of Uxmal’s
Pyramid of the Magician or searching for a legendary lost road.
As can be inferred from these brokers’ own juxtapositions of the ruins
with their stories, we are to interpret the story itself as a ruin, something
the significance of which time and cultural distance render strange, impen-
etrable, and incomplete. Only the cultural broker can interpret these ruins
through the act of folklorization. The story has no organic life, is for all
intents and purposes dead, and comes to us as the debased fragment of a
culture and civilization whose moment has long since passed. Elsewhere
Stephens refers to those who bear such stories as being a “great race which,
changed, miserable, and degraded, still clings around their ruins” (Ste-
phens, Yucatán 168; italics in original). For Carrillo the ruins evidence that
“una nación ilustrada ocupaba esas ciudades, cuya opulencia debe buscarse
sin duda algunos siglos antes de la conquista” (a learned nation whose
peak must have occurred centuries before the conquest once occupied
these cities; 261). Carrillo notes the storyteller’s “noble aspecto” (noble
carriage), “apacibilidad” (mild manner), and “manera de decir con despojo
y gracia” (pleasant and deferential manner of speaking), but finds himself
drawn to these qualities because “no son en ellos [los Indios] communes,
y mucho menos en la gente del campo” (they are not common among the
Indians, and even less so among the people living in the countryside; Un
curioso 263).
Here both the American Stephens and the Yucatecan Carrillo employ
the discourse of the Indio in describing the relationship between the Maya
and the ruins that they themselves have come to investigate. While exalt-
ing the pre-Hispanic past, Stephens finds that contemporary Maya are
a “degraded race.” Carrillo similarly celebrates the achievement of the
“disappeared people” who built the ruins and asserts the exceptionality of
his Indio storyteller on the grounds that other members of his race, other
Indios, lack the storyteller’s positive qualities. For both cultural brokers,
contemporary Indios are something less than their ancient counterparts,
and certainly inferior to the brokers themselves. As such, the brokers in
turn become the only agents capable of “excavating” these objects and
their histories, tasks of which the Indio storytellers are, by definition, inca-
pable. Only the cultural brokers can make these artifacts “knowable” for
the general public and their frame for making these peoples “knowable” is
the discourse of the Indio outlined in the previous chapter.
 Writing THE Word • 45

As if there were any doubt as to the influence such texts can have on
national and international imaginaries, it bears mentioning that Stephens’s
first book on travel to the Maya area, the aforementioned Incidents of Travel
in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán enjoyed spectacular sales of
more than twenty thousand copies in the first three months following its
initial publication (Von Hagen 197). The book was reviewed by no less
a literary luminary than Edgar Allan Poe, who said, “The work is a mag-
nificent one—perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published”
(quoted in Von Hagen 198). The work remains widely in print and the
images drawn by Frederick Catherwood to accompany Stephens’s work on
Yucatán and the rest of the Maya area can be found for sale in tourist shops
in towns throughout Yucatán today.
Before discussing contemporary Yucatec Maya oral versions of this story,
it bears mentioning that Yucatecan intellectuals were themselves keenly
aware of how such representations portrayed their region. As mentioned
previously, Carrillo makes a specific reference to his relationship with Ste-
phens, a gesture that plays on the symbolic capital that knowing such a
foreign luminary would posses. Unsurprisingly, the pages of the Registro
yucateco, the literary anthology in which Carrillo’s text first appeared, are
littered with references to Stephens and his travels through the area. It
is no coincidence, then, that a few years later the Yucatecan intellectual
Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona cites at length from Stephens’s work in his
Historia antigua de Yucatán (1883). Indeed, the Historia antigua de Yuca-
tán contains several pages that come directly from Justo Sierra’s translation
of Stephens’s Incidents of Travel, including a near-complete reproduction of
the passage about Stephens’s trip to Uxmal.5 Missing, however, is Stephens’s
account of “The Dwarf of Uxmal,” which Carrillo y Ancona excises from its
spot in Stephens’s work and places at the end of his own chapter on Uxmal.
Although his version is largely the same as Stephens’s, his “Dwarf of
Uxmal” is not a Spanish-translation of Stephens’s, and later on he explicitly
asserts his authority to retell such a story since it is the kind of story that
those from the region know by heart (Carrillo y Ancona 557–58). In effect,
he appropriates Stephens’s text in order to retell the same story and issue
a scathing retort. As opposed to Stephens’s casual dismissal of the “wild
legend,” Carrillo y Ancona introduces the story by saying that “hay entre
los indios una fábula que por despreciable que sea en opinion de algunos,
merece consignarse y aun estudiarse” (among the Indians there is a fable
that, however unimportant it may be in the opinion of some, deserves to be
recorded if not also studied; 383). The story “no es puramente una conseja
cualquier, sino la historia misma encubierta bajo los velos de la fábula”
 46 • Chapter 2

(is not simply proscriptive, but rather history itself concealed beneath the
veil of a fable; 383). After relating the story of the dwarf, he proposes we
should read it as an allegory of the rise and fall of the city of Uxmal, the
lineage of the Yucatec Maya leader Tutul Xiu, and Yucatec Maya political
and cultural autonomy in the peninsula (387–89). Despite this astound-
ing revindication of Yucatec Maya oral literature as knowledge, Carrillo
y Ancona closes the chapter by saying the story yet pertains to “aquella
civilización especial que hubo de ceder el puesto a la raza actual yucateca
y a la civilización moderna” (that particular and distant civilization that
had to cede its place to the current race of Yucatecans and modern civiliza-
tion; 398). In other words, he recycles the discourse of the Indio through a
celebration of the past that avoids engagement with the present, revaloriz-
ing the knowledge of the story itself, but not the people with whom the
story originates. In doing so, his work anticipates the posturing of many
twentieth-century Yucatecan indigenistas whose work I explore in the fol-
lowing chapter.

Twice-Told Tales: Contemporary Oral Versions of

“The Dwarf of Uxmal”

In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of how cultural brokers

like Stephens and Carrillo modulate the voice of the storyteller, we’ll
now turn to two versions of the same story that were recorded in the town
of Santa Elena as part of the ongoing oral literature project “U tsikbalil
Yucatáan/Cuentos de Yucatán/Stories from Yucatán.”6 Developed in col-
laboration with the storyteller Mariano Bonilla Caamal, whose storytelling
is the subject of chapter 4, this project seeks to engage Yucatec Maya oral
literary production on its own terms and use the resources of the West-
ern Academy to facilitate Maya-language maintenance in the region. For
their participation storytellers received cash payments and a DVD copy of
their own recording. They will receive DVD copies of all of these stories,
subtitled in Spanish and English, when these become available. Select
stories have already been placed in the digital archive Tsikbal ich maya
(tsikbalichmaya.org). I am not arguing that these stories are somehow more
authentic, unmediated, or closer to “Maya reality” than the versions related
to Stephens, Carrillo, or anyone else. Rather, and as will become appar-
ent throughout the rest of this work, gestures that erase the contours of a
specific telling also erase aspects of the discursive agency found in Yucatec
Maya oral literatures. The mechanisms and ideologies behind this erasure
 USA

to M
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GU LF OF
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Archeological Site
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Figure 2.1 Map of Santa Elena, Yucatán, and surrounding area. Map by Kevin Fox.
 48 • Chapter 2

are the subject of the following chapter. For now, let us examine two similar
yet radically different textualizations of “The Dwarf of Uxmal.”
This first version is by Luis Gonzaga (locally known in Santa Elena by
the nickname “José May”).7 My words are in bold.

Well let me think a bit, I know some stories, my late father knew eighty.
Eighty stories?
I was young when I went to work in other places, that’s why I didn’t
hear them. But there are others, other stories. There is a story known in
Maya, a story dealing with the affairs of a king, the affairs of a king. . . .
The king of Uxmal and the king of K’aba’.
Well, the king of Uxmal and the king of K’aba’ had an agreement.
The king of Uxmal’s fish came from México, it arrived at the port of
Chetumal, I don’t know exactly what kind of transport they used back
then. It was carried to one station where a runner would take off carrying
the fish to the king, after a kilometer he’d give it to another, and he’d go
running, until the fish reached Uxmal.
The king’s fish was brought from Chetumal. At 11 AM the kings of
Uxmal and K’aba’ are dining. The sorceress is who brought the king of
Uxmal his fish. At 11 AM the king of Uxmal is eating, at 11 AM the king
of K’aba’ is eating. Well then at that time no one had beaten the king.
The sorceress had a grandson she cared for. When she’d go to Noh Paat,
there was a place called Labnaj were she’d go to get water. And she, since
she was a sorceress it didn’t take her long.
So her grandson the dwarf, well the dwarf, he stayed at home. . . .
One day he realized that where his grandmother kept her fire there was
a sacred instrument buried. So he began to dig, and dig. The old woman
never took long, she came and went, came and went, so he had put a
hole in the bottom of her water jug before she left.
So she filled her jug like this, she filled the jug like this, until she
realized it had a hole in it. She put the water in and it would almost fill
but then she sees that there’s nothing there. She went home, she gets
there and sees the dwarf has retrieved the sacred instrument. The dwarf
was playing it. The entire city felt confused because they couldn’t find
where the noise was coming from.
So the king gathered everyone, he gathered everyone, no one had it.
But then someone told him:
“Lord, the sacred instrument is being played in the sorceress’s house.”
“Well, OK.”
And then they went to look for the sorceress.
 Writing THE Word • 49

“Come here, the instrument being played in your house, you must
bring it to me.”
“Well lord, but there is no one in my house. Only, only one of my
grandchildren. He’s very small.”
“OK, well you have to bring your grandson. You have to bring the
sacred instrument he’s playing, too.”
And so the day came. The dwarf said:
“It’s not just bringing it to bring it, you know that the person who finds
the sacred instrument will be the new king.”
“Oh yeah, so can you defeat me for it? To win they are going to break
coconuts on your head.”
And so the dwarf began to cry and he left. When he arrived at his
grandmother’s house he was crying.
“Why are you crying?”
“Grandmother, the king has beaten me. I told him I wasn’t going to
bring him the sacred instrument. And he told me they are going to break
coconuts on my head. I’m going to die.”
“Well go tell him it won’t just be a few, but they’ll have to break eight
pounds of coconuts on your head.”
“OK, king, I’ve decided that it won’t be a few coconuts that they’ll
break on our head but eight pounds for me and eight pounds for you.”
“OK.”
So they signed the documents, and when the day arrived the dwarf
was brought by his grandmother. He was placed there: tub, tub, tub.
From about this height the coconuts were put on his head, and then it
was the king’s turn. When it came out here I went to see the movie, a
doctor made it. With the first on, “tak,” and he fell down dead. Then the
dwarf said, “Today I’ll be crowned.” There were priests dancing, doctors
were dancing, geese were dancing, ducks were dancing, everyone was
dancing. The dwarf danced with his grandmother. He was crowned,
that’s the story.
OK.
How was it?
It was good.
Yes, the sorceress of Uxmal. The sorceress of K’aba’ was murdered
by the sorceress of Uxmal, the sorceress of Uxmal was murdered by the
sorceress of Maní. So there only remained the sorceress in Maní, the rest
of them were dead. That’s all.
Really good.
It’s a very old story. (See appendix, page 161.)
 50 • Chapter 2

Humberto Bonilla Caamal, Mariano’s older brother, tells a second ver-

sion.8 Humberto is recognized as being an exceptional teller of this tale
and has some degree of proprietorship over it, at least with Mariano. I have
never heard Mariano tell “The Dwarf of Uxmal,” and when we were at the
beginning of our collaboration, he would often tell other storytellers that
“we already have that one” when they would begin to perform the story of
the dwarf.

This is my wife. We’ve been married for forty years but she gets mad a lot.
Sometimes she even wants to hit me. She asks for a lot of money. We have
five children, five. All right, go over there, I’m going to begin the story.
I’m going to tell you what happened to a sorceress, a sorceress from a
city called Noj Paat. Noj Paat is eight kilometers from Noj Káakab. Eight
kilometers from Noj Káakab is the city of Noj Paat.
Once upon a time in the city of Noj Paat, a X-Tabay, that is, a “sorcer-
ess” in Spanish, while she was walking she found an egg. So she found an
egg and took it like this and carried it to her house. There in her house
she put it next to the fire, and next to the fire the days began to pass, the
days passed.
When the egg hatched a child came out. When the child began to
grow, he didn’t grow, the child was a dwarf, he didn’t grow. So that’s
how the child came to see the sorceress as his grandmother. One day
the child realized his grandmother took great care of the fire, she almost
didn’t move from there. Every time she went near she stayed there a long
while, his grandmother almost never left the fire.
So then the little guy, what they called the dwarf, said, “Why does my
grandmother take such care of that place? I’ve got to find a way to get her
away from there so I can see what is hidden there.”
Then it occurred to the dwarf to make a hole in the bottom of his
grandmother’s water jug. He made the hole so that when she went to get
water it wouldn’t fill up quickly, and that way he’d be able to dig there
where he thought something was hidden.
So then he made the hole in the water jug, and when his grand-
mother went to get water, she began to fill it but the water jug did not
fill. So then the dwarf began to dig, he dug, and he finally found two
large things like this, that in Spanish are called “plates” or “flat objects”
that were made of gold.
So when the dwarf had dug them up like this, the dwarf played them
loudly, and the sound was heard by the king of Uxmal. When the king
heard the sound of those things, he told his soldiers or attendants:
 Writing THE Word • 51

“Go see that woman in Noj Paat, she has those things that are ours to
communicate with.”
So many of the warriors or those called “soldiers” in Spanish left to
bring the little guy or dwarf with his grandmother. They were brought to
Uxmal. When they got there they were asked, “Why did you take those?
Those belong to the king, they aren’t yours, you simply stole them. This
is why we are going to kill you tomorrow, both of you.”
To this the dwarf’s grandmother replied, “Give us a chance, don’t
kill us.”
So then all of the people from all of the great cities around Uxmal
were gathered, among them the cities of K’aba’, Sayil, Labnaj, K’óox
all of them, Noj Káakab, many cities. They said, “OK, we’ll give you a
chance, we won’t kill you right away.”
And the king said: “OK, but I want you to count all of the leaves on
the ya’ax ch’e over there, the tree known as the ceiba in Spanish, in a
single night. If you can count all of the leaves before sunrise we won’t
kill you.”
Like this, when the sun went down, the grandmother called the ants,
she told the ants, “Come here.” Like this the ants came near, and she said
to them, “You are going to count all of the leaves of the ceiba tonight. I
want you to have finished by 5:00 a.m. tomorrow, when the sun comes up
you should have already finished. If not, they are going to kill us tomor-
row. Help us!”
“OK.”
The ants began to climb the trunk of the tree, they went up and down,
up and down. When the sun rose they had finished counting the leaves
of the ceiba.
When the king arrived, once again with everyone else, with his atten-
dants, he asked, “Did you count them?”
“We counted them.”
“So, is it finished?”
“It is finished, here.”
That is what they said, but the king didn’t like it. He said he didn’t
believe it, so he said, “Well, my men will count it again.” Well they began
to count. It took three days. At the end they realized it was as the dwarf
and his grandmother had said, that’s how it was, they had finished exactly
as they said they had.
This unsettled the king. The king, that is Ajaw in Maya, so then the
Ajaw of Uxmal wasn’t happy because he wasn’t going to kill the dwarf
who had stolen the plates from him. So he said, “I want to give you
 52 • Chapter 2

another test. Or I am going to give you another túuntaj óol.” The word
for test in Maya is túuntaj óol.
“So, what do you want?” they asked.
“I want to break coconuts on the dwarf’s head. I want to break three
coconuts on the dwarf’s head. If he doesn’t die from the three coconuts,
I’ll give him, I’ll give him all of this, the palace or pyramid. That’s what
I’ll give him.”
So the dwarf or little guy replied, “OK, I’ll agree for you to break
three coconuts on my head. But if I don’t die after they break the three
coconuts on my head, I’ll break them on your head.”
To which the king said, “OK.”
The king thought that when they broke the three coconuts on the
dwarf’s head that he was going to die. So the grandmother looked for a
helmet to put on the dwarf’s head. No one knew about it, only her. She
put it on like this, and then a wig, she put on another layer.
So then at dawn they began to break coconuts on the dwarf’s head,
they broke one but nothing happened. Then they broke another one but
nothing happened. So the king said, “Now he’s going to die!”
And they broke another but nothing happened to him. So the king
got scared.
“Now it’s your turn, come sit down so they can break them on your
head,” the dwarf said to him.
So then they brought the king before the people from everywhere
around there, he sat down and they took a coconut, put it on his head,
and hit it. When they broke the coconut on the king’s head, he fell
down dead.
So that’s how the pyramid became known as “Ti ts’a na’atabi” in
Maya, meaning “Where the enchantment happened.” And there he
stayed, that’s how the dwarf came to live in Uxmal, they left Noj Paat.
That’s it. (See appendix 2, page 164.)

Memory, Ideology, Power: A Reading of

“The Dwarf of Uxmal”

With regard to their basic structure, these versions are more or less in line
with those of Stephens and Carrillo: there is a dwarf who defeats the king of
Uxmal in a test of strength, and as a result of his victory, the dwarf ascends
to Uxmal’s throne. Interestingly enough, however, both oral storytellers
situate the test of strength as originating with the dwarf’s uncovering an
 Writing THE Word • 53

instrument that, once sounded, portends a change in leadership. That is,

they draw on the same Maya prophetic tradition previously discussed with
regard to the version recorded by Carrillo in “Dos días en Noh Pat.” How-
ever, whereas Carrillo states that the dwarf unearths a tunkul and a soot, in
Gonzaga’s version he unearths an “elemento sagrado” (sacred object) and
in Bonilla Caamal’s, the dwarf finds objects that Bonilla Caamal says are
called “platos,” or “plates,” in Spanish. While neither man explicitly names
these “tunkul” and “soot” or has the dwarf unearth both instruments, they
nonetheless draw a direct connection between the objects the dwarf finds
and the musical instruments. When describing the dwarf’s playing the
“elemento sagrado,” Gonzaga gestures as though playing a flute or other
wind instrument.9 Although it appears that Gonzaga does not remember or
perhaps even know the word for “soot,” his gesture for the instrument effec-
tively communicates the kind of object to which he refers by the expression
“elemento sagrado.” Similarly, while Bonilla Caamal does not use the word
tunkul to name the instruments the dwarf uncovers in his story, he says that
the dwarf played the plates by banging them together. Like the tunkul, the
plates are percussion instruments, and as Bonilla Caamal narrates this seg-
ment he makes two fists and bangs them together in imitation of the dwarf
in the story.10 Even if one were to assert that these storytellers have lost the
original Maya words for these instruments, these yet exist in Maya cultural
memory through the physical gestures that indicate their being played.
The act of recounting this episode points to how the story itself repro-
duces multiple aspects of Maya cultural memory that pertain to cultural
inheritance, cultural and political sovereignty, and the right to rule. In
his introduction to Domingo Dzul Poot’s written account of the dwarf of
Uxmal entitled “El advino” (The Magician), Alfredo Barrera Rubio notes
that the tests that the dwarf must endure to defeat the king and gain the
throne recall the so-called “Zuyua t’aan,” or “Language of Zuyua,” found
in the Yucatec Maya books of Chilam Balam (21). Written in Yucatec
Maya using Latin letters, these colonial-era works mark a sustained effort
to continue Yucatec Maya epistemology under Spanish rule. There are
eight known versions that, for the most part, carry the name of the towns
in which they were “discovered” by outsiders, the most famous of these
being the Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Alfredo Barrera Vásquez and Silvia
Rendón divide their contents into eight distinct kinds of text: religious texts,
chronicles and historical texts, medical texts, chronological/astrological
texts, rituals, literary texts, and unclassified texts (9). As with the K’iche’
Popol wuj, scholars widely recognize that the books contain transpositions
of glyphic texts, and the authors of the books often hint as much.11
 54 • Chapter 2

As articulated in the books of the Chilam Balam, Zuyua t’aan itself

is a series of riddles or puzzles understood only by those who rightfully
deserve to exercise power (132). In response to a request for the sun with a
cross buried in its heart and a green jaguar drinking its blood, for example,
one well versed in Zuyua t’aan should produce a large fried egg that has
been blessed with the sign of the cross and topped with a green chili that
has begun to turn red (132). Those who fail this and similar tests “serán
aprehendidos, y tristeza y espanto caerá sobre sus casas . . . y en la casas
de los nobles entrará la muerte, no quedando ningún vivo” (will be appre-
hended, and fear and sadness will descend upon their houses . . . and
death will enter the houses of the nobility, and no one will be left alive;
135). Within the broader context of Yucatec Maya literary tradition, we do
not have to think of the coconuts in the story of the dwarf as being actual
coconuts, nor the demand that the dwarf count the number of leaves on
the ceiba to be a literal demand. Rooted in Zuyua t’aan, these challenges
are tests of legitimate kingship connected to the esoteric knowledge of
Maya texts. As to how Zuyua t’aan functioned in the colonial context,
Francesc Ligorred Perramon has observed that “Zuyua,” the mythical land
from which Zuyua t’aan takes its name, does not appear in any Yucatec
Maya colonial dictionaries (Mayas 70). Given this notable absence, Zuyua
t’aan constitutes a coded form of Yucatec Maya history and mythology
impenetrable to and often overlooked by outsiders (Ligorred Perramon,
Mayas 68).
Similarly, the scene in which the dwarf uncovers the instruments and
the tests he endures recall the account of the hero twins Hunahpu and
Xbalanque from the K’iche’ Popol wuj. As with the aforementioned books
of the Chilam Balam, the Popol wuj is a colonial-era Maya text that, in addi-
tion to royal lineages and historical chronicles, contains transpositions of
glyphic texts. The Popol wuj might even be better referred to as a recording
of a performance of such a text or texts (Tedlock, “Introduction” 30), as, for
example, at one point the authors themselves break the frame of the narra-
tive to propose that we “drink to the telling and accounting of the begetting
of Hunahpu and Xbalanque” (Popol Vuh 91). Like the dwarf, while in their
grandmother’s house the hero twins must uncover “inherited” objects that
pertain to their ultimate destiny, in their case the ball used by their father
in the Maya ball game. To gain enough time to get the ball, they distract
their mother and grandmother by asking them to get them a drink of water.
The twins then send a mosquito to make a hole in the grandmother’s water
jar so she will be unable to fill it. Taking advantage of their absence, the
twins obtain the ball with the aid of a friendly rat (Popol Vuh 111–12).
 Writing THE Word • 55

Later on in their confrontations with the Lords of Xibalbá the twins must
pass the “tests” of surviving the night in different houses of the underworld
(Popol Vuh 119–29). In the first house (The Dark House) they must keep
two cigars and a torch burning all night, a task they accomplish by placing
two fireflies on the tips of the cigars and the tail of a macaw on the torch
(Popol Vuh 119). Their solutions to this and other challenges would sug-
gest that, as with the Zuyua t’aan from the books of the Chilam Balam,
one is not necessarily expected to accomplish such tasks literally but rather
solve them according to the appropriate metaphorical norms associated
with the legitimate exercise of authority.
As intriguing as these narrative parallels are, it would be a speculative
overreach to claim that there is a direct evolutionary relationship between
the text of the Popol wuj and “The Dwarf of Uxmal.” Rather, I am more
interested in this intertextuality as evidence of a general preoccupation
with cultural inheritance as represented by the instruments in the case of
the dwarf and the ball in the case of the hero twins. That is, the scene itself
proves useful for the expression of certain preoccupations and has therefore
been adapted throughout the years in a variety of forms. Certainly, given
the Popol wuj’s proliferation throughout the Maya region, we can perhaps
conclude that its version is closer to being adapted from the “original” (or
perhaps is the original) version from which the scene in “The Dwarf of
Uxmal” is similarly adapted (adapted as opposed to derived). In essence, at
one moment the scene as told in a work like Popol wuj served as a narrative
precedent on which storytellers constructed a new story better suited to the
realities of Yucatán, turning questions of cultural inheritance faced by the
hero twins into those faced by the dwarf. An audience already familiar with
the ideology underlying the former is fully situated to capably interpret
the latter.
Using this question of cultural inheritance and the right to it as a
point of departure, in a contemporary context we can read “The Dwarf of
Uxmal” as an allegory of Yucatec Maya political and cultural sovereignty
in much the same vein as the reading proposed by Carrillo y Ancona in the
nineteenth century. Such a reading is buttressed by the story’s associations
with Zuyua t’aan as outlined above. The dwarf represents the Maya people
under colonial and neocolonial rule, and the instruments stand in for the
numerous cultural objects found in excavated, unexcavated, and pillaged
Maya archeological sites throughout the peninsula. As in the story, any-
one caught unearthing such objects is brought before the authorities that
exercise legal control over these objects and, by proxy, the culture these
objects represent. However, the very existence of these objects themselves
 56 • Chapter 2

undermines the authority of those who seek to possess them. The tunkul
and the soot sound the presence of another, more legitimate authority
within the peninsula just as archeological artifacts speak to the presence
of the vibrant, sovereign Maya polities that once exercised political con-
trol over the region. That the dwarf uncovers instruments that portend his
ascent to the throne implies that the Maya themselves may one day reclaim
the sovereignty they are currently denied, and that this power is not new
but based on prior right.
The challenges faced by the dwarf are tests of cultural legitimacy similar
to Zuyua t’aan in the books of Chilam Balam. Although the king uses
these tests as a means to contest the dwarf’s displacing him on the throne,
he exposes himself as an illegitimate authority in that he cannot pass the
same tests. By contrast, as the dwarf successfully completes these tasks, he
demonstrates his right to authority and attains the throne. Again, these
situations sustain the allegory of who has a right to control Maya culture
and suggest the illegitimacy of those who currently exercise this control.
Certainly, like the dwarf, the Maya people themselves would appear to
be ill prepared to face the challenges placed in their way by Yucatecan
officialdom. Materially speaking, illiteracy rates among contemporary
Yucatec Maya remain high, they tend to be economically disadvantaged
with regard to non-Mayas on the peninsula, and those who self-identify cul-
turally and linguistically as being “Maya” tend to be discriminated against
by members of the peninsula’s dominant cultures. The story makes clear
that, despite these apparent obstacles, the Maya yet have the capacity to
overcome them and reclaim what is rightfully theirs. While many may
lack the “formal” knowledge of a Western-style education, as heirs to the
civilization that produced cities like Uxmal, they nonetheless possess the
cultural knowledge necessary to rule the peninsula.

This Place, This History: Storytelling as Agency

As evidenced in the adaptation of the water jug scene from the Popol
wuj and the connections to Zuyua t’aan in these textualizations of “The
Dwarf of Uxmal,” storytelling provides the storyteller with a form of dis-
cursive agency. We find this agency embedded within the structure of
the stories themselves as outlined above. We also find this agency in how
the storyteller frames his or her tale, and it should be noted that cultural
brokers often excise storytellers’ framing in favor of their own. Although
this phenomenon will be dealt with at length in the following chapter,
 Writing THE Word • 57

Gonzaga and Bonilla Caamal’s respective representations of “The Dwarf

of Uxmal” deserve brief explication.
It goes without saying that both men’s versions of “The Dwarf of Uxmal”
break with versions from the beginning of the chapter that include the
grandmother’s death (Stephens, Carrillo, Ancona, Carrillo y Ancona) and
the dwarf’s eventual fall into decadence (Ancona, Carrillo). Indeed, the
versions told by Gonzaga and Bonilla Caamal both end with the dwarf’s
assumption of power over the city of Uxmal.12 Gonzaga adds the part about
the sorceress’s eventual murder but does so without mentioning that this
influences the dwarf’s later life. Although two stories recorded in a par-
ticular town cannot be said to represent an entire narrative tradition, the
intentional or unintentional omission of this episode is highly significant
with regard to the story and its underlying ideology. As argued above, the
versions told by Gonzaga and Bonilla Caamal can be read as allegories of
contemporary interethnic relations in Yucatán supporting greater Maya
political and cultural autonomy. The omission of the episode of the dwarf’s
demise underscores the viability of such a reading insofar as it turns the
story into a narrative of triumph and the fulfillment of destiny as opposed
to the rise and fall of Maya civilization (the reading proposed by Carrillo y
Ancona more than one hundred years ago).
This is not to say, however, that these contemporary versions demon-
strate the agency of the Yucatec Maya storyteller to a greater degree than
those texts discussed in the first half of the chapter. On the contrary, col-
lectively these two sets of texts illustrate the discursive agency exercised
by Maya storytellers through the telling of tales across the nineteenth,
twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. “The Dwarf of Uxmal” is a story that
textualizes the history and origins of the Maya ruins in Yucatán’s Puuc
region. Storytellers perform the story in ways that are intelligible to a Maya
audience familiar with this narrative tradition (and non-Maya audiences
that are not), but nonetheless shape it in accordance with their material
and ideological needs and those of the audience at the moment of its
telling. It would make sense, then, that the nineteenth-century versions
recorded by cultural brokers from Stephens to Ancona contain the rise and
fall of the city of Uxmal. These stories not only explain the origins of these
cities but also the reasons for their current uninhabited state, doing so in a
way that indirectly explains Mayas’ status as lesser citizens while avoiding
all direct mention of the Spanish conquest or the presence of whites and
mestizos in the peninsula. The story serves as a way to narrate Maya history
independent of contact with non-Mayas and functions just as well as an
allegory of Yucatec Maya realities in the nineteenth century as it does in
 58 • Chapter 2

the twentieth and twenty-first. Storytellers have, over time, adapted the
story accordingly.
The central characteristic of the diverse versions of “The Dwarf of
Uxmal” dealt with here is the relationship between the storytellers, the Maya
ruins of the Puuc region, and the audiences that receive these stories. With
each change in narrating situation, we have a corresponding, subtle shift in
emphasis. The version recorded by Stephens focuses on Uxmal’s “Temple
of the Magician,” the very place where Stephens claims to be when he
hears the story. Carrillo’s version, by contrast, does not so much describe
the origin of the “Temple of the Magician” as it does the construction of
the mythical sak bej, or “white road,” that runs between Uxmal and K’aba’.
While the story is essentially the same as that found in Stephens, the story-
teller emphasizes an object of interest to his intended audience. Carrillo’s
version is not a deviation from Stephens’s and prevents us from reading
Stephens’s previously published version as constituting “the” predominant
version of the story. When not being told, the story exists in the storyteller’s
mind as a means through which to narrate the history of these physical
objects, any of which can be placed at the center of the story depending on
the narrative situation. We find this demonstrated through the juxtaposition
of these two versions of the story.
It is not necessary to foreground a specific site, however, and this is the
case in the versions by Gonzaga and Bonilla Caamal. Nonetheless, in its
own way each of these versions weaves a narrative survey of the ruins into
the structure of the story itself. Gonzaga begins with a prologue about fish
being carried along a road that runs from K’aba’ and Uxmal to Chetumal,
an oblique reference to the ancient sak bej. The grandmother also goes to
collect water in Labnaj, site of a famous cistern in which the Maya who
once lived in the city gathered water. Bonilla Caamal claims that the sorcer-
ess lives in the Maya city of Noh Paat, located a few kilometers from the
town of Noj Káakab (Santa Elena) where I recorded him telling the story
(see the map in figure 2.1). When the king of Uxmal summons the dwarf
before him, Bonilla Caamal has him call together all of the people from the
towns of “K’aba’, then Sayil, then Labnaj, then Xkoox, and other towns like
Noj Káakab.” Bonilla also refers to places like Santa Elena and the Dwarf’s
House by their names in Maya, Noj Káakab and Ti’ na’atabi. Gonzaga and,
to an even greater extent, Bonilla Caamal situate the story of “The Dwarf of
Uxmal” in direct relation to the narrative present of their respective perfor-
mances of the story, creating narratives that encompass the entire history of
the Puuc region by using these places to draw multiple archeological sites
into the story and expand the action well beyond the precincts of Uxmal.
 Writing THE Word • 59

The story thus becomes a means through which each man lays discursive
claim to the geography itself, articulating a counterhegemonic narrative
to those found in Mexican popular culture or academic disciplines like
archeology and anthropology.
As with the structure of the story, the men use the occasion of the narra-
tive to exercise the discursive agency offered by storytelling, taking advan-
tage of the literary-anthropological frame my presence creates in order
to reframe the story on their own terms. When asked if he would like to
tell a story Gonzaga replies in the affirmative, saying that he is going to
tell a story he knows by heart but that his deceased father “knew eighty
stories.” He then apologizes for the fact that he does not know as many
as his father, this being due to the fact that he had to go to work when he
was very young. Before going into the story itself, he asserts that the story
he is about to tell (“The Dwarf of Uxmal”) is one “known to those of us
who speak Maya.” Bonilla Caamal takes a different approach to exercising
this same discursive agency, and I would argue that this is due in part
to his being intimately familiar with the protocols of US-based research-
ers through his many seasons working at archeological excavations in the
region. He eschews the interview portion of my research (I would record
him answering these questions later on) and explicitly stages the telling of
the story as a thing-in-itself. He begins by including his wife in the frame
of the camera, describes their family, and jokes that sometimes she wants
to hit him and asks for too much money.
Rather than being superfluous information external to the story itself,
these instances of reframing through performance demonstrate how story-
tellers marshal the story’s narrating situation in the service of this discursive
agency. That is, the narrating situation is no less a site for the exercise of
discursive agency. Gonzaga uses this to express his profound respect for his
father’s prodigious memory while Bonilla Caamal does so to joke with his
wife, those present at the moment of the recording, and those who will view
the recording in the future. Each case is one where the storyteller appropri-
ates the mode of communication offered by the foreign researcher and
turns the occasion of telling “The Dwarf of Uxmal” into an opportunity
to tell other things about his life, his world, and the culture in which he
lives. This information is not directly solicited by the interview itself and
rises entirely out of the storyteller’s desire to use his own frame to tell the
story. As shall be dealt with more extensively in the next chapter, in this
moment storytellers assert their own status as subjects in the “here and
now” of the cultural broker. As a result, many cultural brokers excise this
moment of discursive agency in their attempts to record oral literature and
 60 • Chapter 2

articulate their interview subjects as Indios. Indeed, we can say that cultural
brokers frequently and quite consciously reassert the validity of their own
archeological or anthropological frame as a means of denying indigenous
agency and thus fulfilling their own expectations and those of their largely
nonindigenous readership.

Conclusion

Focusing on the different iterations of a single story, this chapter has shown
how nineteenth-century cultural brokers from the United States and Mex-
ico use the voice of the Yucatec Maya storyteller to imbue their own works
with authenticity and cultural authority while negating the agency present
within that very storytelling tradition. As the juxtaposition of their written
texts demonstrates, once we begin to assemble the disparate pieces of that
tradition that exist in print, we can nonetheless catch glimpses of how these
storytellers exercised this agency through their own textualizations of these
stories. In other words, the cultural brokers’ negation of this agency is never
complete. This becomes more apparent when we contrast these previous
versions with how the story is currently told in the town of Santa Elena,
Yucatán. Despite changes in the story’s structure, one can argue that it still
functions as an allegory of contemporary Maya reality and that, through its
telling, storytellers continue to exercise the discursive agency hinted at in
texts published by non-Maya cultural brokers over one hundred years ago.

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 three

Into the Archive

Cultural Brokers, Cultural Control, and Writing
Oral Maya Literature in the Twentieth Century

The previous chapter focused on a particular story, loosely titled “The

Dwarf of Uxmal,” and how the different folklorizations of such an oral
text can have radically divergent meanings. These dissimilarities are even
more apparent when one contrasts these versions with how the same story
continues to be told within a given Yucatec Maya community. As has been
demonstrated, while the story in itself may be properly represented, these
representations and the cultural brokers who author them often obscure
the agency exercised by individual storytellers in the moment that they
perform a story.
We now turn to folkloric Maya literature written, recorded, transcribed,
edited, and translated by cultural brokers in the twentieth century. Once
again, in order to achieve a broader perspective on the cultural broker and
this type of work, the Mayaness of these texts will be privileged, and my
analysis includes collections by non-Mexican cultural brokers whose work,
constructed within a different set of ideological circumstances, throws into
sharper relief the ideological inner-workings of their Mexican counterparts.
My goal is not merely to point out that these Mexican texts operate under
the ideological signs of mestizaje and cultural assimilation, but to show
how the cultural brokers that author them stage processes of assimilation
by subtly manipulating the voice of the indigenous storyteller they purport
to represent. These folkloric representations of living indigenous memory
firmly ground the contemporary Mexican nation-state and Mexican
national identity within the historical “frame” of an indigenous ancestry

61
 62 • Chapter 3

and discursively establish the mestizo as an autochthonous being in the

Americas. Recycling the discourse of the Indio, they preempt indigenous
self-representation as indigenous peoples pertain to a national past and so
are by definition out of place in the national present.
Before examining these texts, a few words on mestizaje and Mexican
history are in order. With the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) the mes-
tizo, the mixed-race descendant of Spanish conquistadors and Indian
women, assumes the role of Mexico’s national protagonist. Long derided
as impure, tainted, or lazy, in postrevolutionary Mexico the mestizo sheds
the negative connotations that had defined his place in Mexican society
and culture since the beginning of the colonial period to embody the
nation’s present and glorious future. Whatever the merits of this ideologi-
cal shift, its proponents recognized that its success or failure depended on
the integration or forced assimilation of Mexico’s indigenous population,
a population ethnically, historically, and linguistically separated from the
rest of the country. With regard to how the “Indian problem” was to be
overcome, Manuel Gamio’s Forjando patria (Forging the Nation; 1916)
and José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race; 1925 [1979])
are of particular importance for their ideological and material influence
on the emerging mestizo Mexican national imaginary and its positioning
of indigenous peoples and cultures. While the works we will be discuss-
ing engage with notions of mestizo cultural identity, they do so under the
influence of these two works.
Writing during the fervor of the revolution itself, Gamio laments that
in Mexico, as in most Latin American countries, “se desconocieron y se
desconocen, oficial y particularmente, la naturaleza y las necesidades de la
respectivas poblaciones, por lo que su evolución ha sido siempre anormal”
(officially and particularly, the nature and necessities of [the population]
have been unknown and remain unknown, meaning their evolution has
always been abnormal; Forjando 15). The solution to this “abnormality” is
not merely ideological, but lies in a material reencounter of the national
self with its indigenous “past.” As such, Gamio proposes that anthropologi-
cal practice become an official part of government policy, even going so
far as to claim that anthropology “debe ser el conocimiento básico para el
desempeño del buen gobierno” (is fundamental knowledge for the exercise
of good governance; Forjando 15). Within this proposal, the goal of this and
other social sciences is to domesticate the nation, to make it known, and
it is no coincidence that the excavation of Teotihuacán (1921) and an in-
depth anthropological study of the indigenous peoples living in the Valley
of Mexico are among Gamio’s foremost contributions to the reimaging of
 Into the Archive • 63

the Mexican self. Through these activities, indigenous memory and indig-
enous peoples are integrated (symbolically if not actually) into the nation.
The notion of indigenous populations as distinct, independent entities
becomes a problem insofar as, constructed as symbols of a glorious past,
they are obstacles to national unity and Western progress in the present.
A “national literature” is the natural product of a nation as, “es lógico
afirmar que la literatura nacional aparecerá automáticamente cuando la
población alcance a unificarse racial, cultural, y lingüísticamente. . . . La
literatura nacional presentará diversos orígenes pero un solo cuerpo de
exposición” (it is logical to affirm that a national literature will appear auto-
matically when the population manages to unify itself racially, culturally,
and linguistically. . . . A national literature will represent diverse origins
but be a single body; Forjando 117). From “diverse origins,” there emerges
a “national literature” that reflects a population that is “racially, culturally,
and linguistically” unified. Broadly considered, by constructing mestizaje
as a homogenizing process, Gamio’s reencounter with indigeniety erases
the indigenous voice it seeks to make known to the Mexican nation. In
order to drive home the point about how indigenous peoples are articulated
within such a regime of representation, one of Gamio’s later works on
the subject appeared under the telling title Consideraciones sobre el prob-
lema indígena (On the Indian Problem; 1948). Gamio was not alone in
such statements, and no less a luminary than Nobel Prize winner Miguel
Ángel Asturias employed the same discourse twenty years earlier in titling
his 1923 master’s thesis “Sociología guatemalteca: El problema social del
indio” (Guatemalan Sociology: The Social Problem of the Indian).
In La raza cósmica, Vasconcelos puts forth the claims that the mestizo
promises the redemption of the country’s inferior races and can serve as
a bulwark against US imperialist projects. This new race, which Vascon-
celos identifies as a final race, the cosmic race, “tiene todavía por delante
esta misión de descubrir nuevas zonas en el espíritu, ahora que todas las
tierra están exploradas” (still has ahead of it this mission of discovering
new regions of the spirit, now that all lands have already been explored;
The Cosmic Race 79, 38). As with Gamio’s marriage of anthropology and
governance, Vasconcelos’s assertion of the universal equality of Mexican
citizens through racial mixing seeks to resolve lingering issues of class,
ethnicity, and culture held over from the country’s colonial past. If the
Mexican citizen-subject is, by definition, a celebration of hybridity and
a superior being in the Darwinian sense, one can return to and embrace
the country’s Spanish colonial history. Vasconcelos himself justifies such
a return by juxtaposing English and Spanish colonization, claiming that
 64 • Chapter 3

those Mexicans who are “Spanish by blood or by culture” erred in “deny-

ing our tradition” at the moment of independence (The Cosmic Race
54, 14).
The full restoration of Spanish tradition and its place in Mexico’s
national imaginary requires Vasconcelos to recast the historical roles of
Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon colonization in the Americas. Vasconcelos
eloquently accomplishes this task in his Breve historia de México (A Brief
History of Mexico; 1956) when, as if to sweep away the so-called Leyenda
negra, or “Black Legend,” he argues, “Nada destruyó España, porque nada
existía digno de conservarse cuando ella llegó a estos territorios” (Spain
destroyed nothing, because there was nothing worth preserving when she
arrived in these lands; Breve 17). Similarly, in La raza cósmica he states
that the Aztec and Inca empires were unworthy of the originary, superior
culture from which they were descended, that of Atlantis (The Cosmic
Race 49, 9). The triumph of Spain’s colonial mission lies in the fusion,
via mestizaje, of Old and New Worlds, a fusion which has the effect of
redeeming them both. Turning the Leyenda negra on its head, Vasconce-
los goes on to say that, by comparison, “El ingles siguió cruzándose sólo
con el blanco y exterminó al indígena; lo sigue exterminando en la sorda
lucha económica, más eficaz que la conquista armada” (The English kept
on mixing only with whites and annihilated the natives. Even today, they
continue to annihilate them in a sordid economic fight which is even more
efficient than armed conquest; The Cosmic Race 58, 18).
Through La raza cósmica Vasconcelos lays the groundwork for mak-
ing Mexican citizenship synonymous with membership in the Mexican
race, constructing the Mexican nation as a national family. Resorting to a
celebration of mestizaje to resolve the repercussions of the country’s colo-
nial legacy, however, Vasconcelos privileges this family’s Spanish roots. He
states several times that, racially speaking, the Indian has already accom-
plished his historical mission and is doomed to disappear. The redemption
of the country’s inferior elements falls to the country’s white citizens while
“el Indio no tiene otra puerta hacia el porvenir que la puerta de la cultura
moderna, ni otro camino que el camino ya desbrozado de la civilización
latina” (the Indian has no other door to the future but the door of modern
culture, nor any other road but the road already cleared by Latin civiliza-
tion; The Cosmic Race 56, 16). Within this national family the Indian is
little more than genetic stock awaiting assimilation through Hispanization.
Lauding the Indian’s positive qualities, Vasconcelos claims, “El Indio es
buen puente de mestizaje” (The Indian is a good bridge for racial mixing;
The Cosmic Race 66, 26).
 Into the Archive • 65

The Revolution Will Be Archeological: Mediz Bolio’s

La tierra de faisán y del venado

Published in the years between these works by Gamio and Vasconcelos,

Antonio Mediz Bolio’s La tierra del faisán y del venado (Land of the Pheas-
ant and the Deer; 1922) is situated in an epoch when Mexican identity
seeks a reencounter with itself, a reencounter in which the nation’s con-
flicts of race, culture, and language are reconciled materially through
projects like Gamio’s excavations at Teotihuacán and discursively through
literary efforts like that of Mediz Bolio. Gamio’s own comments on the
development of a Mexican national literature cited above underscore the
multifaceted nature of this project of national identity, as well as the role
that literature plays in projecting a unified sense of nationality.
One can imagine the appeal such projects would have had for Mediz
Bolio (1884–1957), who as a young man was one of the cofounders of
the famous Ateneo de la Juventúd (1909) and later served in Mexico’s
diplomatic corps throughout Europe and Latin America. Proudly Mexi-
can but nonetheless profoundly Yucatecan, Mediz Bolio also authored an
important translation of one of the Yucatec Maya books of the Chilam
Balam, El libro de Chilam Balam de Chumayel (1930), and numerous
other works dealing with Maya culture in the Yucatán Peninsula. On the
whole these are an extension of official government policy as well as a
Yucatecan response to that policy. That is, while illuminating aspects of
Mexico’s national past, Mediz Bolio’s work claims the distinctiveness of
Yucatán in the face of centralist cultural projects that privilege the Aztecs.1
Within this context, how does Mediz Bolio, who claims to have written
the work in Spanish while thinking it in Maya, assume the role of cultural
broker to exercise authority over the retelling of these stories? How does
Mediz Bolio as cultural broker stage the kind of reencounter prescribed
by Gamio? How does the text’s author-narrator translate, transcribe, inter-
pret, and edit these stories? Where does the text situate the voice of the
indigenous storyteller and how is this storyteller constructed? What are the
ideological assumptions of these positions and how do they contribute to
the silencing or liberation of subaltern indigenous voices?
As a cultural broker, Mediz Bolio seeks to incorporate indigenous mem-
ory into the Mexican national imaginary, and so his project is historical
as much as it is literary. The ultimate goal here, as Arturo Arias observes
in the work of Mediz Bolio’s contemporary Miguel Ángel Asturias, is to
use indigenous cultures as symbolic icons for national identity, whether
the particular case of Mediz Bolio be construed as Mexican or Yucatecan
 66 • Chapter 3

(Taking 55). What, however, is the specific role of the cultural broker in
framing La tierra del faisán y del venado, and how does the cultural bro-
ker construct these symbolic icons? In his prologue to Mediz Bolio’s text,
Alfonso Reyes makes a telling comparison between the work in question
and his own “Visión de Anáhuac [1519]” (1915) (“Prólogo” ii). On the last
page of this other essay, Reyes refers to Mexico’s indigenous heritage by
saying that “si esa tradición nos fuere ajena, está como quiera en nuestras
manos, y sólo nosotros disponemos de ella” (even if this tradition were
foreign to us, it is yet in our hands, at our exclusive disposal; Visión 30).
The cultural broker thus assumes sole and exclusive responsibility for the
representation of indigenous cultures, rendering “indigenous” tradition
“our” tradition by constructing the former as part of the unspoken cultural
common sense of the latter.
One finds this movement concretized in how Mediz Bolio’s text col-
lapses the distance between the categories of cultural broker and author-
narrator in order to place these traditions “at his exclusive disposal.”
Indeed, the author-narrator refers to himself as a Maya “baltzam,” a move
that essentially declares the work’s status as a contemporary version of the
books of the Chilam Balam (Lienhard 255). Within Genette’s terminology,
the author-narrator of text is extradiegetic-heterodiegetic insofar as he tells
these stories in the first person while not situating himself as a protagonist
in them. As mentioned earlier, in a letter to the aforementioned Reyes,
Mediz Bolio claims he “thought this book in Maya and wrote it in Span-
ish,” saying “I have felt and written as might an Indian poet of today, who
would express these ideas in his own special manner” (Land of the Pheas-
ant 13).2 Mediz Bolio is fully conscious of his role as cultural broker as
he “thinks the book in Maya” while “writing it in Spanish,” but also sees
himself, in his role as author-narrator, as “feeling and writing as might an
Indian poet of today.” That is, Mediz Bolio the cultural broker sees himself
as the “baltzam” who is the work’s author-narrator. As cultural broker he
does not articulate himself as an outsider who, in his separate function of
author-narrator, narrates the reencounter with the Mexican national self.
On the contrary, he is a cultural broker who narrates from within Maya
culture. Hence the stories he includes are not embedded texts that he
retells but texts that he tells himself. As a “cultural insider,” Mediz Bolio
has Maya culture legitimately at his “exclusive disposal.”
This self-identification with an “Indian” voice legitimates the text’s
authenticity and Mediz Bolio’s conversion of indigenous traditions into
Mexican symbolic capital. The act of narration, that of telling these stories,
claims the Indio, his knowledge, and his history for the nation. But how
 Into the Archive • 67

does Mediz Bolio the cultural broker/author-narrator place these “at his
disposal” within the narrative? It is certainly no coincidence that the pub-
lication of Mediz Bolio’s text in 1922 coincides with a surge in interest in
pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history as evidenced by the beginning of
Gamio’s excavation of Teotihuacán in 1921 and Sylvanus Morley’s excava-
tion of Chichén Itzá in 1923. In keeping with this period’s material interest
in Mesoamerican cultures, we can say that Mediz Bolio’s narrative tech-
nique is primarily archeological in its structuring of indigenous memory.
Sara Castro-Klarén has noted how “the study of archeology stretches the
timeline of the nation and creates immemorial ‘ancestors’ for the post-
colonial nation,” such that, “archeology allows a mapping of the nation
that reconfigures territory by privileging forgotten or even forbidden sites
of memory” (164). Coincidentally, five of the seven books in Mediz Bolio’s
text bear the names of Maya cities/archeological sites: Itzamal, Chichén
Itzá, Zací (Valladolid), Uxmal, and Maní. The use of physical cities/
archeological sites to structure the narrative arc of the stories in La tierra
del faisán y del venado situates indigenous memory as part of the national
timeline, its protagonists as “immemorial ancestors.” As a work of narrative
archeology, the work “restores” the mysterious ruins of Maya history by
relating them to the physical ruins and cities. Properly speaking, there is
no Maya present outside of Mediz Bolio’s text. The mute Indio, like the
stones of the ancient cities themselves, becomes the object of national
history without ever being its subject.
In a sense, the “Indio” of Mediz Bolio’s text is not so much ahistorical
as he is a relic from the past to be unearthed. The cultural broker/author-
narrator founds his ordering of the text on the Indio’s contemporary silence,
a silence that only he as “baltzam” can break. This silence intensifies the
cultural broker/author-narrator’s control over the text, and we find that this
figure, having “exclusive control” over Maya culture, mutes indigenous
voices and denies them any cultural agency. Despite what the work would
suggest, it is interesting to note that many of Mediz Bolio’s sources are not
oral as, for example, his “The Dwarf of Uxmal” is taken from the version
by Eligio Ancona mentioned in chapter 2, and elsewhere he draws on
colonial chronicles (Lienhard 255). This differentiation is further reflected
in the fact that, apart from the voice of the “baltzam,” there are no “Indio
storytellers” present within the text. Instead of presenting us with a layered
narration à la Stephens, the cultural broker/author-narrator makes no pre-
tense of including indigenous voices and presents himself as speaking from
within Maya culture. The power of this narrative style comes through in
the first lines of the first chapter when he states that “nadie pudiera saber ni
 68 • Chapter 3

repetir lo que fue antes de que hubiera ojos para verlo y orejas para oirlo, si
los que en su tiempo lo supieron no lo hubieron enseñado, y así, del padre
al hijo, vino bajando la sabiduría” (No one now would be able to know or
to repeat what happened before there were eyes to see and ears to hear,
if those who in their own day knew it had not taught it to their children.
Thus, from father to son, has come down wisdom; La tierra 29; Land of
the Pheasant 31). The cultural broker/author-narrator who now “knows”
and “repeats” what follows derives his authority from within this tradition
itself. As a “repetition,” the text assumes a kind of cultural transparency that
configures the Mexican national subject as the sole and legitimate heir to
these stories and indigenous memory.
If the text does, at moments, acknowledge an Indio other, this other’s
passive muteness reauthorizes the cultural broker/author-narrator’s active
voice. We are told that “nadie le ha enseñado a ver ni a oír ni a entender
éstas cosas misteriosas y grandes, pero él sabe. Sabe, y no dice nada. El
indio habla solamente con las sombras . . . está hablando con aquellos que
le escuchan y está escuchando a aquellos que lo hablan. Cuando despierta,
sabe más que antes y calla más que antes” (no one has taught him to see or
hear or understand these mighty and mysterious things, but he knows. He
knows and he says nothing. The Indio speaks only with the shadows . . . he
is speaking with those who are listening, and listening to those who speak.
When he awakes, he knows more than before, and more than before he
is silent; La tierra 16; Land of the Pheasant 21). This muteness is due, in
part, to the fact that the codices have been lost. “Lost” is not a mere euphe-
mism for Landa’s auto-da-fé, however, which would mean articulating the
Indio as a historical actor. The Indio himself is to blame for the loss of the
codices, as they disappeared “cuando los hombres ya no merecieron poseer
los Libros de sus padres” (when men were no longer worthy of owning the
Books of their fathers; La tierra 22; Land of the Pheasant 24). That is, they
are no longer worthy possessors of their own history, knowledge, or culture.
Before men were “pure and sweet to Him that is lovingly omnipresent,”
but in the present only the old and the young are uncontaminated and
so capable of knowing the Truth, “the spirit of our fathers” living in them
(Land of the Pheasant 22–23).
Reflecting the awesome violence of this silencing, the stories he tells
paradoxically outline the precolonial history of the Indios of the “Mayab”
and yet fail to locate these same people within a contemporary histori-
cal context. There are no narratives of the conquest, no narratives of
colonial Yucatán, no narratives of the social upheaval during the region’s
 Into the Archive • 69

epic henequen boom, and no narratives of the Caste War. Historically

speaking, the “Indio” is temporally out of place, an archeological object
to be uncovered, examined, studied, and interpreted, the storyteller being
dependent on the broker’s written word for self-expression. To affect this
domestication, the text falls back on a generalized Indio whose knowledge,
rather than being particular and historical, is transcendent, woven into the
landscape itself. “Sin que nadie se las haya dicho, el indio sabe muchas
cosas” (Many things the Indian knows, that no one has ever told him;
La tierra 15; Land of the Pheasant 21). The condition of being an Indio
implies a preexisting kind of genetic knowledge divorced from historical
processes and unbound by the contingencies of time, place, or history.
As the cultural broker/author-narrator is both, ideologically speaking,
“us” and “them,” he opens up the possibility of appropriating the Indio’s
great historic past without having to acknowledge the Indio’s present. As
pointed out by Martín Lienhard, the erasure of the historical record that
led to this present leaves no doubt as to who now controls Maya culture
while also exculpating the peninsula’s mestizo and criollo populations
from the legacies of conquest and colonization (257). The cultural broker/
author-narrator narrates the work and presents himself as a storyteller who
orders the texts as a quasi-historical narrative that reimagines Maya his-
torical memory as Mexican history. The first of these books, “The Book
of Itzamal and of the most ancient things,” deals with the origins of Maya
history, and the last, “The Book of Maní, which means ‘it is passed,’” deals
with the moment when the great cities are abandoned. Rather than basing
the latter on archeological or historical knowledge, the author-narrator says
that the Maya abandoned the cities after the appearance of a hand stamped
in blood on the cities’ walls. Certainly, one can still see such a handprint
in the entranceway to the Nunnery in Uxmal. He tells us:

Los indios viejos a quienes interrogas, se callan, y bajan la cabeza y no

te dicen nada.
Quizás ellos lo saben, ero no lo dicen.
Si alguno hablara de ello, el diría que esa mano de hombre no fué puesta
allí por ningún hombre. Y tal vez quien esto diga, diga algo de la
verdad. (La tierra 227)

The old men whom thou dost question shake their heads and remain
silent, and tell thee nothing.
Perchance they know, but do not speak.
 70 • Chapter 3

If one of them should talk of it, he would tell thee that the hand of blood
was placed there by no mortal man. And perhaps he who says this,
says something of the truth. (Land of the Pheasant 140)

We are confronted by an Indio who may or may not know the details of his
own history, a human enigma, and an author-narrator who, by contrast,
is capable of piercing the mysteries of that history. This Indio is no less
a ruin than Stephens’s storyteller, and his entrance into Western history
requires the cultural broker/author-narrator’s archeological intervention if
not outright invention. The author-narrator thus assumes the mantle of
Gamio’s archeologist, excavating the Indio’s ancient past glories so as to
better grasp a mestizo national present.
Mediz Bolio’s text therefore does not so much describe the living Maya
as it recycles the discourse of the Indio as a means to activate a discreet set
of schema for the interpretation of Maya culture that is common to both
the reader and the cultural broker/author-narrator, and the text’s implied
readership seeks to realize Gamio’s ambition of a reencounter with a pre-
Hispanic national self. Although the text is set in Yucatán, the text’s Indio is
not entirely unlike the Indios found in the rest of the Americas. Representa-
tive of two distinct worlds, the Indio and the Mexican meet as ahistorical
object and historical reading subject through the medium of the text.

Fairytales for the Mestizo Nation: Yucatec Storytelling

after La raza cósmica

I have hesitated in saying that Mediz Bolio’s La tierra del faisán y del venado
articulates a mestizo national citizen-subject because his text precedes
Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica by several years. Although Mediz Bolio’s
text celebrates a certain type of mestizo subjectivity, it does so much more
in the sense of Gamio’s reencounter with the Mexican national self than
that of Vasconcelos’s cosmic race. The texts to which we will now turn,
however, more clearly bear the mark of a Mexican national imaginary
configured under Vasconcelos’s ideology of racial mixing. Interestingly
enough, while the functions of cultural broker and author-narrator are
collapsed into one another in Mediz Bolio, in these texts we find that
they reemerge as separate entities. The literary magazine Yikal Maya Than
(1939–1955), Luis Rosado Vega’s El alma misteriosa del Mayab (Mysterious
Soul of the Mayab; 1934), and Ermilo Abreu Gómez’s Leyendas y consejos
del antiguo Yucatán (Tales and Legends of Ancient Yucatán; 1961) reflect
 Into the Archive • 71

a Vasconcelian approach to narrating indigeneity that explicitly states

its desire to appropriate the Indio’s knowledge through the voice of the
indigenous storyteller. Although these brokers still mediate the storyteller’s
voice in terms of the text and its material production, in their function as
author-narrators they recount stories that often take place within a defined
context. The story and its words are not “theirs” per se, but originate with
the Maya storyteller. They present us with the storyteller as other. How does
the cultural broker interpellate this other? How is this change in ideology
(from Gamio to Vasconcelos) reflected in the reassertion of the cultural
broker and author-narrator as separate entities? Who are the Indio storytell-
ers and how are they used to resituate indigenous cultural memory within
the mestizo nation?
Yikal Maya Than is of particular note in this regard as, chronologically
and ideologically, it covers the period during which the authors in this
chapter were active, and many of the leading scholars and intellectuals
writing on Maya culture at the time were among the magazine’s contribu-
tors. Indeed, in addition to Mediz Bolio, the magazine included pieces by
notable researchers and intellectuals like Alfredo Barrera Vásquez, Alfonso
Villa Rojas, and Justo Sierra (Ligorred, Consideraciones 46). Led by the
professor Paulino Novelo Eroso, it is a uniquely Yucatecan project that
responds to centralizing narratives of Mexican national identity that privilege
Aztec history and contests, in the words of Hilaria Máas Collí, “la política
gubernamental sobre el proyecto de la desindianización de los pueblos
mesoamericanos” (government policies concerning the de-Indianization
of Mesoamerican peoples; Prólogo 9). As with many nonindigenous rep-
resentations of indigenous peoples since the conquest, these stories are rife
with contradictions. On the one hand, people collected and published these
stories “[para] demostrar que la lengua maya y la cultura en general de los
mayas de Yucatán no es un idioma ni una cultura muerta; sino viva y por
tanto es necesario que las nuevas generaciones conozcan, amen y conserven
su propia cultura” (to demonstrate that Yucatec Maya language and Yucatec
Maya culture in general are not dead but alive, and therefore necessary
knowledge for future generations; Máas Collí, Prólogo 9).
Yet at the same time, “la mayoría de las leyendas fueron publicadas en
español, aunque los autores incluyeron frases y en algunos casos párrafos
en maya y algunos fueron publicados en forma bilingüe y escritos con el
sistema de escritura colonial” (the majority of the legends were published
in Spanish, although the authors included phrases and in some cases para-
graphs in Maya, and some were published bilingually following colonial
orthography; Máas Collí, Prólogo 10). Later on I will discuss Máas Collí,
 72 • Chapter 3

who is herself Yucatec Maya, and the role she plays in the resignification
of what we might call alienated Maya texts. For now, I should state that
I agree with Cristina Leirana Alcocer’s overall assessment of the project
insofar as she says that despite the ideals cited by Máas Collí, Yikal Maya
Than projects a romanticized Mayanist (as opposed to Maya) vision of
Maya culture for a nonindigenous readership (Conjurando 26–28). That
is, far from seeking to construct an intercultural vision of the peninsula,
“Las leyendas . . . fueron escritas por profesionales y dirigidas a un público
que trabaja en las escuelas y a investigadores de Estados Unidos interesados
en el estudio de la cultura maya” (The legends . . . were written by profes-
sionals and directed at an audience made up of teachers and researchers
from the United States interested in the study of Maya culture; Máas Collí,
Prólogo 14).
Throughout these stories power still rests with the cultural broker who
reports the storyteller to his audience. While the overarching relation-
ship between broker and storyteller would seem to flatten out in terms
of the former’s power over the latter, such is not the case. As we saw with
Mediz Bolio, who himself published in the magazine, within the pages of
Yikal Maya Than there are instance where the cultural brokers as author-
narrators gloss over the origins of the stories they tell and present them-
selves as storytellers in order to weave a seamless tapestry of Yucatecan
culture. There are also several author-narrators who, in the narration of
their stories, borrow structures from actual oral Maya literature. Zouza
Novelo Narciso’s “Xyich K’iin” begins with the evocation, “Se cuenta a
través de las generaciones aborígenes del Mayab . . .” (Down through the
native generations of the Mayab it is said that . . .) and begins bringing the
story to a close with “Dice la leyenda que . . .” (The legend says that . . . ;
30, 37). Similarly, in Homero Lizama Escoffie’s “El cenote de Samahil”
(The Cenote of Samahil) we are told that “cuentan que en las inmedi-
aciones de Samahil existe un cenote . . .” (they say that in the area around
Samahil there is a cenote . . . ), and the story ends in much the same way
as Narciso’s text (122). Marcos de Chimay’s “Las criptas de Kawa” (The
Crypts at Kawa) begins with the author-narrator’s asking the chords of his
guitar if they remember the musical accompaniment of the tale he’s going
to tell (83).3 The important difference between this narrative style and that
of Mediz Bolio is that while Mediz Bolio evokes the tradition of a specific
tale, intending to put it into writing, these texts evoke both the tradition
of the tale and the tradition of performance that has taken shape around
the tale itself. The resultant intertextuality between written and oral texts
breaks the framework of the written text as the written self-consciously cites
 Into the Archive • 73

oral precedents. In doing so these gestures hint at the agency exercised by

storytellers in the context of a living Yucatec Maya oral literary tradition.
One must also admit that, as most of the texts were written in Spanish,
the position of their author-narrators intends the assimilation of indigenous
memory via mestizaje, and it bears reiterating that Yikal Maya Than’s
intended audience is non-Maya. Although these texts intend to portray
a living Maya culture, they do so in order to mobilize that culture as
symbolic capital in the service of a project that establishes regional dif-
ference between the Yucatán and the rest of México. This does not deny
the real existence of a symbolic network shared by nonindigenous and
Maya cultures in the peninsula, as mestizaje as a racial, social, and cultural
phenomenon is undeniable. Rather, mestizo identity is no more or less
constructed than any other, and the ground upon which Maya and mestizo
cultures share this network does not reside outside the ideologies of power
that structure Yucatán’s racial and social relations.
We must then ask who are the Indio storytellers whose cultural memory
these stories represent? The most striking answer to this question can be
found toward the end of Eusebio Falcón’s story “The aak’ab ts’iib,” when
the author-narrator asks, “¿Habrá algo de cierto en esta historia que me
contaba mi nodriza y que había llegado hasta ella por cuentos de sus ante-
pasados?” (Is there any truth to this story that my wet nurse told me and that
came down to her through her ancestors’ stories?; 44). With this phrase we
recognize that, in some sense, the story has been embedded, told by the
heretofore silenced wet nurse as an intradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator.
Falcón as author-narrator narrates the story in what is perhaps her voice,
pulling back the curtain with this final gesture. While speaking to the
existence of the symbolic network shared by Maya and non-Maya alike, this
passage lays bare the ideology flowing through this network. The author-
narrator gives casual credit to the storyteller, whose existence we learn of
only in passing and only at the story’s end. Related with some ambivalence,
this genealogical relationship is not that of storyteller to author but of wet
nurse in the role of storyteller to author. In his role as cultural broker, the
author-narrator puts the story to paper but the stories come from her ances-
tors. This is the literal and figurative image of subaltern culture nursing
dominant culture and an apt metaphor for the relationship between the
two commonly articulated as mestizaje. What is important about the wet
nurse is her ancestors, not her progeny. As she nurses dominant culture’s
child, he, the author-narrator, becomes her progeny and ultimate cultural
heir. Within projects of Yucatecan regional identity, the argument here is
that Yucatecan culture is unique because its children grew up, literally,
 74 • Chapter 3

imbibing Maya as opposed to Aztec culture. More so than racial mestizaje,

however, we have an image of cultural mestizaje that circumvents any
hint of racial mixing, making the peninsula’s current residents the heirs
of Maya culture regardless of race or ethnicity. It is at their “exclusive dis-
posal” and the wet nurse, as far as we know, has no biological children of
her own.
Published five years before the first issue of Yikal Maya Than, Luis
Rosado Vega’s El alma misteriosa del Mayab displays a unique marriage of
the ideologies expressed by Gamio and Vasconcelos. As a cultural broker,
Rosado Vega (1873–1958) was a renowned anthropologist who organized
and directed the Museum of History and Archeology in Mérida, the capi-
tal of Yucatán state. He was also an accomplished poet and a prominent
indigenista intellectual. Portraying this confluence of interests, in the
work’s “Motivos” Rosado Vega states that the boom in Maya archeology
during the first half of the twentieth century makes the production of a
work like El alma misteriosa “timely” and “necessary” (10). He explicitly
notes that his position with the then-burgeoning museum meant that he
had to travel frequently to the state’s interior, and that these trips enabled
him “ir recogiendo de boca en boca, especialmente de aquellas gentes
ancianas a quienes exprofesamente buscaba para el caso, las narrciones
que aquí transcribo” (to go about collecting the narratives that I transcribe
here from the very mouths of people, especially those ancient ones whom
I professedly sought out for the purpose; 9).
Turning from the generalized storyteller found in Mediz Bolio and later
in many stories in Yikal Maya Than, in his function as cultural broker
Rosado Vega claims to bring us the very words of storytellers to whom he lis-
tened beside old wells, at archeological sites, in Maya kitchens, while walk-
ing down jungle paths, at town festivals, and even in Mérida itself (9–10).
Despite the good will and open admiration for the Maya and the Mayab
he shares with them, he is quick to establish a suitable distance between
himself and this Maya other. Coupled with his Gamian quest to render the
Maya knowable to the Mexican reading public are Vasconcelian rumina-
tions on the contemporary Maya. Here we are dealing with a people who
“si no fenecidos sí de los que parecen haber cumplido su misión histórica,
entonces puede decirse que esas narraciones son el punto de partida desde
el cual solamente puede llegarse a entender al grupo humano cuyos restos
sigue la ciencia a través de todos los caminos posibles” (if they are not
already deceased, then they pertain to those [races] who seem to have
completed their historical mission, so one can say that those narratives are
the only point of departure from which one can come to an understanding
 Into the Archive • 75

of the human group whose remnants science seeks down all possible roads;
6). In essence, these stories provide the human backstory to the otherwise
now-silent ruins of Maya civilization, a vehicle through which “science”
can shed light on an otherwise “mysterious” culture. One finds this claim
reflected in the very title of the work as it states that the contents are “the
mysterious Maya soul.”
We gain a more nuanced understanding of Rosado Vega’s indigen-
ismo and his role as cultural broker by recalling that in Mediz Bolio’s
La tierra del faisán y del venado the author-narrator makes no mention
of his direct communication with the Indio. Although he refers to Indios
and even invites the reader to speak with them, the stories themselves are
narrated as if originating from the perspective of the “baltzam” author-
narrator. At best, the stories and the indigenous memory they represent
thus appear to be “shared” equally between the cultural broker and the
Indio. By comparison, Rosado Vega embeds the texts of his storytellers
and derives his authority over their texts from his own firsthand experi-
ence among the peninsula’s Maya populations. That is, in keeping with
the indigenista ethos, Rosado Vega quite consciously articulates the work
as a speaking for the Maya, a speaking for that entails a call for political
action as he makes repeated condemnations of the material conditions in
which Yucatán’s indigenous population finds itself. The Indio bears these
things silently, smiling because “piensa entonces en que fue dominado,
pero nunca conquistado. . . . Dió su cuerpo, pero su alma permanece
intacta oculta en los pliegues del Tiempo y en la naturaleza que lo rodea”
(he thinks [to himself] that he was dominated but never conquered. . . . He
gave his body, but his soul remains intact, hidden in the folds of Time and
Nature which surrounds him; 30). Buttressed by his personal experience,
and hence his expert knowledge of the Maya, here Rosado Vega’s author-
narrator explicates the Indio’s psyche based on this hidden smile, placing
the indigenista’s own reading of interracial relations in the very mind of
the Indio himself. Seen previously in Mediz Bolio, this gesture situates the
cultural broker’s intervention as a necessary step in making the otherwise
silent Indio known to the reading public. An expert in reading the Indio’s
secrets, the cultural broker as author-narrator presents the popular mystery
of the Maya with the expressed intention of wiping away this very mystery,
domesticating the Maya by rendering the psychological history of a race
that appears to be abandoned by history.
This image of the Indio storyteller, then, is as much a figure through
which the author-narrator can project his psychologizing as it is a trope
for the authenticity of the stories themselves, a kind of narrative proof the
 76 • Chapter 3

cultural broker has brought back from the field. Despite the marked differ-
ences in ideological orientation between Mediz Bolio and Rosado Vega,
both texts recycle the discourse of the Indio: as an object he is unknown,
mysterious, and dark. While the text itself may speak to a certain sharing
of the peninsula’s symbolic network instead of an outright possession of it,
there remains something other about that network’s Maya articulations.
As opposed to Mediz Bolio’s text, in which the author-narrator assumes
the position of a storyteller speaking from within a unified vision of Yuca-
tán’s symbolic network, here the narrative distance established by the
author-narrator’s articulation of the storyteller more strongly breaks the
frame of the text itself to signal the contemporary existence of a Maya
culture independent of this textualization. In the story “El Indio y los
animales” (The Indio and the Animals), for example, the author-narrator
cedes the page to an “anciano indígena que hubo de narrármela aquella
tarde, frente a la plaza de un humilde pueblo del Oriente Yucateco. Y sus
ojos parecían velados de tristeza, y su voz temblaba como si dejo amargo
la saturase” (ancient indigene who told [the story] to me that afternoon,
before the plaza of a humble town of Eastern Yucatán. And his eyes seemed
veiled with sadness, and his voice trembled as if saturated with bitterness;
Rosado Vega 33). The narration that follows belongs to the “anciano indí-
gena,” and not to the author-narrator.
Although the cultural broker/author-narrator maintains control over the
text on most levels, ordering, editing, writing, and publishing the work, he
does not claim authorship of the narratives. Rather, he bases the authorial
privilege of his locus of enunciation on his ability to fulfill the role of cul-
tural broker between Maya and non-Maya (albeit in one direction). That
is, the author-narrator/cultural broker does not so much speak from within
a shared symbolic network (Mediz Bolio) as he consciously engages in its
production. In doing so, he creates a binary opposition with the illiterate,
mysterious, predominantly rural, Maya storyteller at one pole and the liter-
ate, open, predominantly urban, mestizo/criollo readership at the other.
These two meet via the text produced by the indigenista cultural broker
Rosado Vega. For the reader, this Maya other’s textualization realizes the
production of the mestizo’s symbolic network by repositioning the reader
and the storyteller as contemporaries occupying different positions within
the same cultural landscape. However, as stated by Rosado Vega himself,
this Maya other and his race have already completed their historical mis-
sion, a way of knowing Maya culture that, as seen with previous texts,
ultimately leaves that culture and its historical memory at the “exclusive
disposal” of the work’s implied mestizo/criollo readership.
 Into the Archive • 77

The Indio storyteller thus becomes a trope for the translation of Maya
knowledge and memory into non-Maya settings as this figure’s use bridges
distances of culture, time, and geography. As previously stated, Rosado
Vega’s representation of Maya knowledge through the storyteller produces
the symbolic network the mestizo peninsula supposedly shares. Material
and practical cultural differences are deemphasized in favor of difference
based on the spaces where culture is produced, age, race, education, and
economic class. To return to the example cited above, the cultural broker
meets the “ancient indigene” in a “humble” plaza in Eastern Yucatán.4
The Indio storyteller’s eyes are “veiled with sadness,” and his voice is “bit-
ter.” None of these descriptions, one would imagine, could be used to
describe the cultural broker or his implied readership.
The Indio storyteller also explains away the Indio’s recalcitrant contem-
poraneity with his mestizo counterpart. As already noted, Rosado Vega refers
to the Maya as belonging to a race that has completed its historical mission,
and the storytellers’ texts would seem to confirm this as the stories themselves
are largely ahistorical narratives that treat the time before the conquest or
contemporary Maya relationships with nature. The nameless storytellers
speak in the present but only of the past or of their timeless relationship
with the peninsula’s flora and fauna. They are, almost literally, a part of
the landscape. The storyteller is with the mestizo contemporary within the
peninsula’s cultural landscape, but the two are not contemporaneous with
regards to development and modernity. Although Rosado Vega claims some
of the tales were told to him in Mérida, the text’s storytellers tend to be
rural with the text painting a vivid picture of the Yucatecan countryside
itself, illuminating and claiming its traditions, people, and places for the
lettered city. By bringing the storyteller into the city in this way, the broker as
author-narrator uses the storyteller to reaffirm the privileging of urban space
and its articulations of cultural knowledge. Textually configured as a rural,
ahistorical actor, the storyteller, and by extension the Maya he represents,
is incapable of articulating a counterhegemonic response. Ideologically
speaking, we are presented with a subaltern that, while it may be “bitter”
about its marginalized condition, is nonetheless resigned to it.
Published almost thirty years after the appearance of Rosado Vega’s El
alma misteriosa del Mayab, Ermilo Abreu Gómez’s (1894–1971) Leyendas
y consejas del antiguo Yucatán would seem to mark, in retrospect, a final
indigenista attempt to contain the Maya other through its repositioning
of the cultural broker, author-narrator, and Indio storyteller, anticipating
the burgeoning of Maya literary activism in the 1970s. The text owes a
great deal to those that came before it, repeating stories from other literary
 78 • Chapter 3

sources while seeking to place Maya culture in Yucatán within the larger
context of Maya history and society as a whole. There is a chapter on the
pre-Hispanic Zamná as well as chapters dealing with the burning of Maya
codices at Maní and the mixed-race Maya rebel leader Jacinto Canek. In
addition to unmistakably Yucatecan tales that the text shares with the vol-
umes by Mediz Bolio and Rosado Vega, Leyendas y consejas also includes
excerpts from the K’iche’ Maya Popol wuj.
Abreu Gómez’s work derives a narrative urgency from the sense of indi-
genista historical revisionism found in his Leyendas y consejas del antiguo
Yucatán and his other works. Lienhard places his approach to narrating
Maya culture at an extreme opposite end of the spectrum from that of
Mediz Bolio, noting that Abreu Gómez’s work does not shy away from
the historical and ongoing racial strife between Mayas and non-Mayas in
the peninsula (257). His best-known works include a long narrative poem
entitled Canek (1940), the same story on which the chapter in Leyendas
y consejas is based, and La conjura de Xinum (The Xinum Conspiracy;
1958). Each of these works revises the literature on events in the peninsula’s
history while denouncing the exploitation and abuse visited on the Maya
from the conquest down through the twentieth century, and Abreu Gómez
highlights his role as an indigenista cultural broker in his attempts to repre-
sent the subaltern voice of the Indio storyteller. For example, in the dedica-
tory passage, he explains the origins of the stories in Leyendas y consejas by
saying that “unas me las contaron indios de mi tierra y otras leí en crónicas
de diferente época . . . me he limitado a reunir las que me parecieron más
bellas y más significativas y a reescribirlas como Dios me dio a entender, es
decir, con sencillez, decoro, y un poquitín de inocencia” (some were told to
me by the Indians of my land and I read others in chronicles from another
time . . . I have limited myself to collecting those stories which seemed to
me to be the most beautiful and meaningful, and to rewrite them as God
has shown me: that is, with simplicity, elegance, and a little innocence;
Leyendas n.p.; Tales and Legends, n.p.).
In analyzing this passage, we should remember that Abreu Gómez, like
Rosado Vega, derives his authority as cultural broker more from a sense that
“Indios told me some of these stories” than from his position as a lettered
intellectual. Indeed, his most famous work, Canek, represents a narrative
working out of the stories he heard from Mayas while traveling with his
father and versions of these same stories he read in school (Terry 283). As a
cultural broker, he sees himself bridging the gap between oral Maya tradi-
tion and the lettered archive and, as opposed to Mediz Bolio, he explicitly
states that both are represented in Leyendas y consejas. As opposed to
 Into the Archive • 79

his counterparts from earlier in the chapter who focused exclusively on

reducing the oral to writing, Abreu Gómez consciously marries lettered
knowledge (chronicles I read) with oral stories (stories Indios told me),
constructing himself and his work as the axis on which the contradictions
between these two are to be resolved. The cultural broker “reads,” Indios
“tell” him stories, and he is the agent who selects texts for publication based
on which ones he finds to be the most beautiful and the most significant.
While the last two-thirds of the book, “Leyendas y consejas” and “Las
leyendas del Popol Vuh,” are concerned with the folklorization found in
other works, the work’s most significant discursive contribution lies in the
first section, “Heroes Mayas,” and its fictional appropriation of the Maya sto-
ryteller’s voice. That is, it collapses the function of the author-narrator into
that of a fictionalized Indio storyteller and mobilizes this voice in the service
of a historical fiction. Here we have an extradiegetic-homodiegetic Maya
narrator who narrates the story to us and is himself present in the action of
the story he tells. Given the prevalence of Landa and the auto-da-fé of Maní
in chapter 1, I will focus on the story “Nachí Cocom,” which provides a
fictionalized Maya account of the auto and its aftermath that are narrated in
the first person from a “Maya” perspective. “Me llamo Pedro Che y soy indio
natural del pueblo de Maní” (My name is Pedro Che and I am an Indian
from the village of Maní; Leyendas 20; Tales and Legends 17). Unlike Mediz
Bolio, who assumes the mantel of an anonymous storyteller without really
becoming indigenous, or Rosado Vega, who makes the reader privy to the
very conversations in which he heard these tales recounted, Abreu Gómez
bypasses prior literary constructions and consciously fictionalizes the Maya
voice itself as though the text were a colonial account. The author-narrator
is a particular, named Indio storyteller.
By contrast, the other two stories in this section, “Zamná” and “Canek,”
are narrated in the third person, and the stories found in the “Leyendas y
consejas” section are listed by title and then recounted as folklore. “Nachi
Cocóm” thus marks a significant moment in how Yucatecan and Mexican
literatures treat the figure of the Indio storyteller, as here he appears to
enter literature for the first time as an actor capable of narrating his own
story, and that of Maya historical memory, from a Maya perspective. More-
over, he does so in such a way that he ruptures the frame of the written story
and its prior textualizations in historical sources like Landa’s Relación de
las cosas de Yucatán, asserting a continuity and resistance of Maya peoples
and cultures.
Writing years after Landa’s infamous auto-da-fé, Che admits that his
memory may fail him in some details but that “no creo que por eso sufra la
 80 • Chapter 3

razón y el orden de los eventos principales” (I do not believe that this will
affect the sense and order of the principle events of those days; Leyendas
20; Tales and Legends 17). The account of events that follows places Che
at the center of the well-known happenings surrounding the origin of the
auto-da-fé in Maní. In this version, Che is the person whom the two Maya
youths first told about the idols in the cave, and he witnesses the ensuing
horrors of the auto. As an author-narrator of his own story, he recounts the
crucial, albeit apocryphal, moment when Nachi Cocóm arrives in Mani’s
town square at the height of the auto. As with members of the histori-
cal Xiu lineage, the historical Nachi Cocóm of Sotuta was a familiar of
Diego de Landa’s. Ironically, he was also directly responsible for the Maya
reception of Christianity in his native territory, meaning that one could
surmise that his methods of nonviolent cultural resistance, which sought to
integrate Christian knowledge into a Maya worldview, indirectly lead to the
auto itself (Clendinnen 185–89). In Abreu Gómez/Pedro Che’s account,
Cocóm arrives in Maní in order to halt the auto. Historically this contrasts
sharply with the actual prolonged battle in colonial courts that succeeded
in stopping the auto only after the passage of several months (Clendinnen
72–111).
At this moment Che steps back from the texts and asserts his narrative
authority as cultural broker by claiming that Nachi Cocóm “dijo lo que
aquí pongo en lengua de los blancos” (said what I will translate here in
the language of the white men; Abreu Gómez, Leyendas 40; Tales and
Legends 32). Although Mediz Bolio commented that he thought the text
in Maya, the cultural brokers and author-narrators of other texts and the
storytellers they construct never present language as an issue and endeavor
to make communication between Maya and non-Maya uncomplicatedly
transparent. The figure of Pedro Che thus assumes the position of cultural
broker with regard to a readership he acknowledges to be “white,” or at the
very least Spanish speaking.
Cocóm’s very words prefigure those of many contemporary Maya activ-
ists as he uses the informal “tú” to address Landa and exclaims:

Oyeme, tú. Estas palabras no podrás quemar nunca. Esta voz que es mi
voz y la voz de los indios, traspasará tus orejas y no podrás olvidarla nunca.
Esto que está en mi lengua no podrá repetirlo tu lengua sin caer cernada.
Esto que vuela sobre la tortura y el fuego y la muerte es la verdad y la
razón de la vida de los hombres de esta tierra que tú pisas. Esto que ahora
digo quedará alzado delante de tus ojos y tus ojos morirán contemplando
el espanto del dolor que causaste. (Abreu Gómez, Leyendas 40)
 Into the Archive • 81

Listen to me, you. You will not be able to burn these words. This voice
is mine and that of the Indians. It will go beyond your ears and you will
never be able to forget it. What is spoken in my language you will not
ever repeat in your own without being felled to the ground. Truth and
the way of life of the men of this land that you trample on soar above the
torture, fire and death that you inflict. What I say now will be held up
before your eyes forever and you will die contemplating the horror and
pain you have caused. (Tales and Legends 32)

Che informs the reader that the rest of Cocóm’s words, the words which
are to be unforgettable and fly above the carnage, are lost in a whirlwind
of ash which causes everyone else to flee and leaves the plaza filled “con
el nombre y la presencia de Nachi Cocóm” (with the name and presence
of Nachi Cocóm), and these are the story’s final words (Leyendas 40; Tales
and Legends 32).
The reader is left, then, with a series of questions like those that haunt
later testimonial literature. Did Che really not hear? Did he (un)intention-
ally omit something through a failure of memory? What is important is the
fact that the text seeks to reintroduce the Maya into the national imaginary
as historical agents capable of narrating their own history. Unlike previously
examined texts, here we have the illusion of the Indio storyteller providing
us with an unmediated version of his story. This “unmediated” representa-
tion is not, however, free from the ideological consequences discussed in
relation to other texts, and there is a distinct irony in the fictional Cocóm
declaring that his voice “is his and that of the Indians” via Pedro Che’s
fictional author-narrator. Moreover, while this perspective seems to endow
the usually ahistorical Indio with a historical consciousness, we must recog-
nize that this consciousness speaks to us from the past and not the present.
This temporal distance places the mestizo reader at a safe distance from
a Maya voice capable of articulating counterhegemonic demands in the
present as these demands, if they are to be articulated, are still done so by
the lettered voice of Abreu Gómez the cultural broker.
To provide another example from Leyendas y consejas, in his translations
of the Popol wuj Abreu Gómez omits the anonymous authors’ own histori-
cal references to the fact that they write “amid the preaching of God, in
Christendom, now” (Popol Vuh 63; see Abreu Gómez, Leyendas 121–271).
As he tells us in a footnote, his interpretation of the Popol wuj appeals to
a kind of universal truth in these stories as “[lo que] he realizado es la
expresión sencilla y coherente de [las] leyendas básicas o fundamentales
[del Popol wuj]. He querido tan sólo facilitar la convivencia del espíritu
 82 • Chapter 3

humano y poético de tan maravilloso libro” ([what] I have produced is

the simple and coherent expression of the basic or fundamental legends
[of the Popol wuj]. I have only wanted to facilitate a coexistence of the
human and poetic spirit of this marvelous book; Leyendas 271; not
included in the Shrimpton translation). Like the fictional historical situ-
ation of Pedro Che, this transcendental appeal avoids confrontation with
actual Mayas and ultimately recycles the discourse of the Indio by situ-
ating contemporary indigenous peoples as ahistorical nonagents. Although
fictional Che was a historical agent, his story is at the “exclusive disposal”
of the mestizo nation and no comparable contemporary voice confronts
the reader.

Archive of Silence: The Oral Recordings of

Manuel J. Andrade and Allan F. Burns

On the whole, these approaches to recording Yucatec Maya oral literature

draw on the idea that the peninsula’s literate mestizo population shares a
symbolic network with the peninsula’s Maya populace. The retextualiza-
tion of Maya culture via these stories domesticates that culture and renders
it safely within the context of that shared network. To underscore how the
ideology of mestizaje functions in these works, as well as how it appropri-
ates, via the Indio storyteller, indigenous historical memory for the mestizo
nation, it bears mentioning that a collection of works by Mediz Bolio,
Abreu Gómez, and Andrés Henestrosa appeared in 1942 under the title
Literatura indígena moderna (Modern Indigenous Literature; Martínez).
In other words, the voices of the cultural broker and his author-narrator
come to efface the existence of Maya culture itself.
The extent to which they co-opt and shape the storyteller’s voice in
the name of a homogenizing ideology (mestizaje) becomes apparent if
we examine the practice of Maya literature during these same years, from
1922 to 1961. To this end I will use two texts from the latter half of the
twentieth century, the two volumes of Cuentos mayas yucatecos (1990;
2000), edited by Hilaria Máas Collí and recorded, for the most part, by
Manuel J. Andrade; and Allan F. Burns’s An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Lit-
erature of the Yucatec Maya (1983). I have selected these two works in
particular because, in the case of Andrade, the recordings were made dur-
ing the period when previously analyzed cultural brokers were active; and,
in the case of Burns, because the collection includes narratives about that
very same time period. There thus exists an organic connection between
 Into the Archive • 83

these collections and those from the first part of the chapter.5 By reading
these against the folkloric canon and the cultural broker/native informant
relationship established in Mediz Bolio, Rosado Vega, the magazine Yikal
Maya Than, and Abreu Gómez, we can better grasp the silences present in
these previously analyzed texts. How does the establishment of a folkloric
canon silence other Maya historical memories? How do/did the people
interpellated as storytellers seek to appropriate the voice of the cultural bro-
ker even as this personage seeks to appropriate and reduce the indigenous
voice? These questions will guide the rest of the chapter.
I argue that through this reading two distinct patterns emerge, both of
which point directly back to a project that seeks to incorporate the Maya
into regional and national cultures. The first pattern, upon which I have
briefly commented, is one of significant overlap between the written texts
themselves. While some stories certainly have remained popular across
time and space even among the Maya, one cannot discount the fact that
multiple printed iterations of the same stories point to the formation of a
canonical Maya oral literature among regional, national, and international
reading publics. Although the symbolic network and its iconography may
be shared, the power over popular representations of this network is not. As
if responding to this sense of inequality, while the works studied to this point
were written almost entirely in Spanish, the volumes edited by Máas Collí
are bilingual, and Burns’s book contains several stories in Maya and English.
Related to this first pattern, the second pattern one finds outlines the
existence of stories that are told but not represented. That is, cultural bro-
kers (Mediz Bolio, etc.) as author-narrators select, edit, alter, and order the
stories they include while at the same time excluding others. As I have stated
previously, the individual works of these cultural brokers tend to assemble
an ahistorical picture of Maya oral literature by presenting storytellers who
perform pre-Hispanic texts, colonial texts, and mythic or legendary texts
with roots in the Maya past. This emphasis on the past underscores the
paradoxical existence of the “outdated Maya” in the “modern” twentieth
century. Their living culture enters the symbolic network as reified folklore
and the canon that forms as a consequence of such repetition comes to
stand in for oral literary tradition itself.
The ahistoricity of these texts, their storytellers, and the extent to which
these reflect Yucatecan and Mexican ideologies become all the more
apparent when one compares them to the recordings of the Cuban-born,
US-based linguist Manuel J. Andrade (1885–1941). A member of the
famous Carnegie Project that included Robert Redfield, Redfield’s wife
Margaret Park Redfield, and Alfonso Villa Rojas, Andrade recorded a
 84 • Chapter 3

number of stories in Chichén Itzá, Pisté, and Chan Kom. As is the fate of
many indigenous texts that challenge popular and academic conceptions
of indigenous being, almost fifty years passed before Andrade’s recordings
were taken seriously as an object of study. In 1984 Hilaria Máas Collí and
Miguel Güémez Pineda, both of whom are Yucatec Maya, began tran-
scribing and translating some of the stories for publication (Prólogo 15).6
Today the two volumes of Cuentos mayas yucatecos that contain some
of Andrade’s stories and a handful of stories recorded by Máas Collí in
the 1980s are among the best-selling books published by the Universidad
Autónoma de Yucatán (“Nuestros Egresados” 12). The mere fact of these
stories’ publication in the 1990s reflects a shift in how the Maya relate to
dominant Yucatecan and Mexican cultures insofar as two Maya were in
charge of the project and the books are published in bilingual editions.7
Given that these texts were recorded during the same period in which
Mediz Bolio, Rosado Vega, and Abreu Gómez compiled their own collec-
tions of Maya stories, these texts represent a version of Maya culture silenced
by popular textualizations. I do not mean to suggest that this selection of
Andrade’s texts, taken collectively, can be seen as representing a totalizing
set of oral Maya literature, nor assert that these texts are somehow more
authentic, nor that Andrade’s project somehow transcends the asymmetri-
cal relationship of power between researcher and informant. By including
a broad range of the texts Andrade acquired, these volumes contextualize
the pre-Hispanic texts, colonial texts, and mythic or legendary texts treated
in other works by presenting these works within the larger repertoire of oral
Maya literature as a whole. Indices at the beginning of the two volumes
also attribute individual texts to individual storytellers, underscoring the
particularity inherent in each story’s retelling.
In her introduction to volume 1, Máas Collí points out that storytelling’s
generic conventions determine any given story’s social function. “El cuento,
la leyenda, el mito, la poesía, el relato histórico, la fábula, las adivinanzas
y los proverbios son distintos modos de expresión y manifestación de la
tradición oral” (The story, the legend, the myth, poetry, the historical tale,
the fable, riddles, and proverbs are distinct modes of expression and mani-
festations of oral tradition; Introducción 19). Each genre serves its purpose
as “un agente del proceso de educación y socialización. Como tal, es pre-
ciso pensar en su papel pedagógico, moral, e ideologizador” (an agent of
educational and socializing processes. As such, one must consider the roles
they play pedagogically, morally, and ideologically; Introducción 19). As a
cultural broker Máas Collí radically shifts the ground on which one reads,
studies, and interprets theses texts by illuminating their social function in a
 Into the Archive • 85

Yucatec Maya context. In previously examined works Maya stories became

the ahistorical foundation from which one could articulate contemporary
regional and national mestizo identities, but here Máas Collí presents these
same stories within the context of the ongoing transmission of Maya knowl-
edge. They are not relics but are instead the school books through which
one learns the sociocultural logic of being Maya.
At this point I would like to focus on two stories, “Huntuul Paal
K’aaba’ta’ab H èes” (A Boy Called Hées) and “Hbaatab Kaaswelah” (The
Batab Cazuela), both of which were told to Andrade by Lázaro Poot in
Chichén Itzá and are found in the second volume of Cuentos mayas.8 I have
chosen them because, out of all the stories in the two volumes, these best
illustrate the dangers inherent in the subtle exercises in canon formation
engaged in by Mediz Bolio, the authors of Yikal Maya Than, Rosado Vega,
and Abreu Gómez. As these two texts demonstrate, these other cultural
brokers use the figure of a generalized Indio to write a story that intends
to be the story, both in the sense that subsequent iterations of the story
must adhere to this prior version and insofar as their versions seek to be
representative of individual stories in Maya oral tradition as a whole. The
intertext between their individual works produces a popular canon of Maya
oral literature in print that by its very nature stifles oral tradition as later
retellings become inaccurate vis-à-vis the written word of dominant culture.
Students of Yucatec Maya literature will immediately recognize “Hunt-
uul Paal K’aaba’ta’ab H èes” as being related to “The Dwarf of Uxmal” from
the previous chapter. Andrade’s recording of Lázaro Poot’s version, for the
most part, corresponds to the popular versions seen previously. Instead of
building the pyramid found at Uxmal, at the end of the story H èes goes on
an ill-fated search for his grandfather, his predecessor, who outlined a road
by planting ceiba trees. H èes follows him by turning the path into a sak
bej, or white road. None of the cultural brokers or storytellers mentioned
previously gives the dwarf a proper name. Beyond the structural similari-
ties to which I will return, it should first be noted that the Maya storyteller
Domingo Dzul Poot indirectly draws a connection between these versions
of the story in his own version of the dwarf story, “El adivino” (The Magi-
cian). He states that “La abuela le puso por nombre H-Es al niño” (his
grandmother gave him the name H-es), noting that the name is a compli-
cated play on the Yucatec words for “egg” and “open,” “je’” (27). As in that
story, the boy here is also born from an egg. The name “H èes” succinctly
expresses both the dwarf’s origin in the egg and the act of springing from it.
It should also be said that Dzul Poot traces the genealogy of his version to
his mother, Carmela Poot May, who told it to him in 1938 in the town of
 86 • Chapter 3

Becal. She, in turn, had heard it from a ninety-five-year-old man who told
stories in the caves where people gathered to make palapa hats (Barrera
Rubio 20). Becal, in Campeche, is situated near Uxmal, where Stephens
heard his version, and near Santa Elena, where Bonilla Caamal and I did
our recording. The geographical locale for these performances is several
hours away from the geographic location of Andrade’s storyteller, Lázaro
Poot, who resided in Chichén Itzá.
These differences in physical location are of prime importance. As can-
onized in Yucatecan literature, the action occurs in Uxmal, but Lázaro Poot
begins his version by stating that “Yanhih tu káahil chi’e’en íitsahe’ ka’atúul
ko’olel hach uts bisukaba’o’ob” (There lived in the town of Chichén Itzá
two women who were very good friends; Andrade and Máas Collí 2:203).
Although one would expect to find differences of plot, narration, charac-
terization, and description among different versions of the same story, one
seldom encounters conflicting accounts of where a story takes place. From
the previous chapter we have already seen that the story of the dwarf is
more than 150 years old, and thus had more than enough time to establish
itself, so this radical change in location, from Uxmal to Chichén Itzá, if it
is a change at all, must mean something within the contextualized perfor-
mance of the story. Indeed, indigenous perspectives on identity formation
have so far been absent from this discussion, and we must consider the fact
that the story of the dwarf, even as told to Stephens in the mid-nineteenth
century, is itself an iteration of a story limited by time and space. Returning
to Máas Collí’s observation of oral tradition’s role in the formation of Maya
subjectivity, although the story of the dwarf has its mythical aspects, as
with the storytellers Luis Gonzaga and Humberto Bonilla Caamal in the
previous chapter, here Lázaro Poot’s performance of the story transmits
a history of the ruins for the local population and claims them for oral
Maya history.
As seen previously, the building of a sak bej does occur in other itera-
tions of the dwarf story. By using the material world as a reference point,
Lázaro Poot’s performance of the text explains the origin of the sak bej
between Chichén Itzá and Cobá in the same way that the other Uxmal
dwarf stories explain the building of the great pyramid or the origin of the
sak bej between Uxmal and K’aba’. As with the other dwarf stories, Poot
performs a form of cultural control over the ruins and their history through
his version of the story.
Poot’s performance of “Hbaatab Kaaswelah” demonstrates similar pro-
cesses, and there are few stories like it in the canon of brokered Yucatec
Maya folklore. At first glance, the plot line itself could be a twentieth-century
 Into the Archive • 87

reinterpretation of the Quetzalcóatl/Kukulkán narrative. The protagonist,

the leader Cazuela, who holds the Maya position of batab, or “village
chief” in Chichén Itzá, endures a series of trials in which his daughters
marry foreigners who try to steal from the Maya. Defeated but not con-
quered, the batab retires to another town where he will not have to witness
the atrocities visited on his people. He promises to return one day, at the
end of the world, “kéen suunahkene’ ts’o’ok u seen ya’abtal in koh” (when
the number of his teeth has increased; Andrade and Máas Collí 2:286).
As if there were any doubt as to the meaning of this metaphor and the
consequences of the batab’s return, the storyteller ends the story by explain-
ing that “Ba’ale’ tu ya’alah yuum báatabe’ bíin u xu’ul ti’ le ts’uulo’ob
hóok’es tu kahil chi’ch’e’eno’” (The Batab said he would exterminate the
white people who had caused him to leave the town of Chichén; Andrade
and Máas Collí 2:288; my italics). In Yucatec Maya the storyteller per-
forms this last part using the prophetic tense marker bíin, turning the story
itself into a tale of things to come and linking this performance with the
larger tradition of Maya prophecy as seen in texts like the books of the
Chilam Balam.
Thus the storyteller Lázaro Poot actively engages in the interpretation
of the Maya past, present, and future in ways not considered in other
texts, and the recorded story “Hbaatab Kaaswelah” breaks with the con-
ventions of the popular canonization of Maya oral traditions even more
than “Huntuul Paal K’aaba’ta’ab H èes,” as its Maya storyteller is an agent
with an explicit historical consciousness. The prophetic statement that the
batab will return to “bíin u xu’uls ti’ le ts’uulo’ob” (exterminate the white
people) conjures images of Yucatán’s disastrous Caste War (1848–1900s),
at the beginning of which an army of Maya literally almost succeeded in
driving all the white people from the peninsula. One can therefore see why
such a story would be silenced in processes of the popular canonization
of Maya oral traditions. Regardless of whether or not Mediz Bolio, Rosado
Vega, Abreu Gómez, or anyone else ever witnessed the performance of this
particular story or a story like it, the fact that none of these brokers includes
a single narrative relating to the Caste War or a Maya commentary that
interprets social, cultural, and economic conditions in the peninsula is
telling. Resonating with dominant culture’s terrifying historical memories,
“Hbaatab Kaaswelah” cuts directly against the grain of how these cultural
brokers, and hegemonic culture in general, imagine their relationships
to the Maya and to Maya culture. Ideologically speaking, the Indio is
no longer underdeveloped and ahistorical but a social agent capable of
subversive, antihegemonic speech and outright bloody revolt. Here the
 88 • Chapter 3

peninsula’s shared symbolic network is reinterpreted as theft as Cazuela’s

sons-in-law come to demand things, specifically a magic ring, that do not
pertain to non-Maya. The Maya element of this ideological construction
emerges as independent of mestizaje which, by its very definition, is always
in some form dependent on indigenous cultures. This is represented by the
inheritance sought but not given, the ring.
As such, the story itself enacts the form of cultural control it narrates. In
telling the story of the batab Cazuela, who struggles against foreigners and
foreign domination, the storyteller himself reproduces the batab’s struggle.
Ending with the prophecy of the batab’s return, the storyteller frames the
literary present as an interlude separating two periods of Maya cultural,
economic, and political independence. Moreover, as with “Huntuul Paal
K’aaba’ta’ab H èes” and the versions of the dwarf story in chapter 1, the
story reinterprets the Mayas’ relationship to an archeological site, in this
case the area around Chichén Itzá. By situating the narrative in the town,
the storyteller narrates the history of the ruins within a Maya context, in
effect claiming them for a decolonized Maya history. His foretelling of the
batab’s return similarly claims them for the future via prophecy.9 The tacit
argument here undercuts the legitimacy of non-Maya ownership of the
ruins and the Maya cultural artifacts found there as the story asserts that
Mayas were once and will be again owners of the land.
It also would seem to issue a stark threat to the non-Maya researcher,
Andrade, and we cannot ignore the fact that this story was recorded during
the golden age of archeology in the region, when many priceless artifacts
were excavated and taken abroad for further study. The alienation from and
need to reconnect with these monuments is real, and one only need think
of the recent controversy surrounding the presence of walking vendors in
the archeological site to find a current example of these processes. During
the campaign in which Chichén Itzá’s Castillo was voted one of the Seven
Wonders of the World, the Yucatecan press lamented the presence of these
vendors, claiming that they had no right to be there, annoyed tourists, and
sullied the country’s good name with their sales tactics. For example, in
an article entitled “A Sick Wonder,” the Diario de Yucatán cited one local
official who claimed the vendors “dan pie a problemas de drogadicción,
prostitución y alcoholismo en la zona,” (give rise to problems like drug
addiction, prostitution, and alcoholism at the archeological site), as well as
the manager of the Hotel Dolores del Alba, who said “Mis clientes siempre
se quejan de los vendedores ambulantes que hay ahí, es necesario aplicar
mano dura contra estos” (My patrons always complain about the vendors
there, it’s necessary to deal with them harshly; “Una maravilla enferma”).
 Into the Archive • 89

These articles seldom mention that many of these vendors are Yucatec
Maya from surrounding towns, descendants of the very people who built
this international symbol of Mexican pride in the first place (see Rodríguez
Galaz, whose article on the topic is a notable exception). Among them, we
can perhaps speculate, were the descendents of Lázaro Poot.
As Andrade’s recordings can be used to illuminate the vast differences
between canonized folklore and the performance of oral literature,
American researcher and university professor Allan F. Burns’s An Epoch of
Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya stages the problematic rela-
tionship between the broker and the informant, providing us with a more
nuanced understanding of how the Maya interpret this asymmetrical rela-
tionship within oral literature itself. Although the title of the work repeats
the canonizing gesture of previous authors by projecting stories collected
in two towns, Ticul in Yucatán and Señor in Quintana Roo, as representa-
tive of Yucatec Maya oral literature as a whole, Burns the cultural broker
revels in the irreducible particularity of the stories he collects. Stories are
often preceded by paragraphs explaining the context in which a story is
told, a few stories are published bilingually in Maya and English, and in
his transcriptions Burns makes an effort to have the printed words mimic
the spoken through a complicated combination of punctuation, capital
letters, and line breaks. I acknowledge Robert Dale Parker’s reservations
about what he calls “the social ideology of genre” insofar as in such cases
one runs the risk of turning oral literature into a Western genre, in this
case verse (84). However, one can also recognize that through these efforts
Burns as author-narrator never allows Burns the cultural broker to recede
into the background. In other words, he does not feign any sort of absolute,
scientific objectivity but constantly reminds us of his own position with
regard to the texts he records. Instead of just framing the texts, he is also
framed by them as the storytellers he records contest the very nature of the
broker/informant relationship.
In this regard there are two stories in the collection of singular impor-
tance, both narrated by Paulino Yamá in the town of Señor. The first of
these stories, “The First Thing I Said to Dr. Morley,” describes an encoun-
ter between the narrator, Yamá, and the North American archeologist
Sylvanus Morley that took place in 1934. Burns reminds us that the same
encounter, told from Morley’s perspective, is recorded in Brunhouse’s Syl-
vanus G. Morley and the World of the Ancient Mayas (Burns 78; Brunhouse
260–69). Again, we find ourselves in Yucatán at the height of its archeologi-
cal boom. In the textual present, Burns informs the reader that this story
was told during a conversation in which Yamá asked the anthropologist if
 90 • Chapter 3

he knew Morley (79). The performance of the story itself thus involves the
active contestation of the cultural broker/informant relationship and the
interpretation of Maya history on several levels. The storyteller Paulino
Yamá is not only named, but in Burns’s text he is also a social agent capable
of making demands of the cultural broker and of all the texts treated to this
point; this is the first time we find that the storyteller solicits information
from the broker instead of vice versa. By asking Burns if he knew Morley,
Yamá creates a pretext from which he can perform the story he wants to
perform independent of the anthropologist’s wishes or intentions. The
assertion of the storyteller as social agent is further underscored in the first
lines of the story.

HELLO, DR. SYLVANUS MORLEY,

we came to talk to you in person here
at ‘Chhe’en Kuha’
so you can give us some ADVICE, some SATISFACTION.
We’ve already talked with you, MISTER, with satisfaction. (Burns 79)

Again, instead of the broker, in this case Morley, interpellating the Maya as
informants, the Maya interpellate Morley as an archeologist who has ceded
to their demands in the past and whom could reasonably be expected to
do so once again. That is to say, they configure the field of power in which
they interact with the North American by defining his role within it, dis-
cursively inverting the relationship between the cultural broker and the
native storyteller.
This act of interpellating the cultural broker is neither casual nor arbi-
trary, and once again it demonstrates the vast silences that mark previ-
ously treated texts. If the Yucatec Maya in 1934 are capable of fixing the
North American Morley’s role within their sphere of social interaction,
they would have been no less capable of similarly situating Mediz Bolio,
Rosado Vega, or Abreu Gómez. Morley’s position as a foreign cultural bro-
ker differentiates him from these others, but nonetheless, given what these
Maya requested of Morley, this deafening silence opens up the tantalizing,
presently unanswerable question of what, exactly, these “Indios” sought in
return for their stories. In Morley’s case, both historically and within the
present story, the Maya seek to use him as a means to continue their war
with the Mexican government and obtain political, social, and cultural
independence. As Paul Sullivan describes in his book, the Maya of the state
of Quintana Roo are descended from the last holdouts of Yucatán’s Caste
War, and although in places like X-cacal they maintain a militia to this day,
 Into the Archive • 91

the function of this contemporary Maya military is more symbolic than not
(181–99). Yamá’s attempt to use Morley to obtain supplies and political
alliances similarly has roots in the Caste War, as during this period Maya
in the eastern portion of the peninsula sustained their war efforts via trade
with the British in what was then British Honduras. This interpellation
of Morley, then, reflects historical precedence and continues a tradition
in which Mayas make use of foreigners as resources who can be used to
advance their own Maya agenda.
The current story is all the more interesting, as in this discussion with
Morley, Yamá claims the Maya leader Concepción Cituk has misrepre-
sented Maya interests to the North American, and Yamá seeks to reassert
the needs of the people. According to Burns, this arises because Morley
and his people misinterpreted Cituk’s role in the overall social hierarchy
by seeing him as a “chief” (79). Yamá’s calling directly on Morely displaces
Cituk’s role in these prior encounters and indirectly acknowledges that
Morley has not met Mayas’ expectations of him. Displeasure with Cituk
mitigates Morley’s shortcomings as Yamá attributes these faults to Cituk
instead of Morley.

Every time we come, every time we come, every time we come here,
well, you don’t say anything to us.
We don’t say anything either.
Well, NOW then, Señor,
I’m taking account, Señor. (Burns 80)

We should note again that in this address the storyteller Yamá is making
demands of the cultural broker, Morley. The storyteller fixes Morley and
himself in the discussion, going on to restate the problems of the people
which, following Sullivan’s account of events, would have by then been
well known to the archeologist. Yamá states:

The land, our nation, what is

the reason it is called “Mexico”?
It is SO FAR AWAY.
They say it’s the same land
but I don’t believe it’s TRUE:
because this land
is separate.
This land of the Territory is separate:
Nohoch Cah Santa Cruz Balam Nah Kampocolce nation. (Burns 80)
 92 • Chapter 3

In reperforming this prior speech act, however, the intended audience

goes beyond the historical figure of Sylvanus Morley and becomes both
the reader and Burns. Via Yamá’s initial interpellation of Burns, what on
the surface is a historical narrative turns into renewed assertion of Maya
independence and a justification of Mayas’ place in world history in
the present.
The second story, “The Story of Venancio Puc,” “shows some of the
conflict and factionalism of Mayan political history—Venancio Puc led
the Maya in the 1850s at the time when the Speaking Cross came into
being”—and “examine[s] present day interpretations of the Caste War”
(Burns 82). Despite this story’s historical grounding, what is far more inter-
esting is how Yamá chooses to tell it. A narrative about Maya political
history becomes a commentary on contemporary politics as Yamá begins
the story by asking Burns who is president of the United States. Upon being
told Richard Nixon is president, Yamá says:

Nixon, ahah.
MR. PRESIDENT NIXON, you are the United States.
You have the power within you.
Your town was marked by the Beautiful True God.
Not in time will you come apart;
Not in time will you lose. (Burns 82)

Strange as this greeting would seem, within the context of the previous
story it makes sense as part of the story’s larger frame. Yamá usurps the
voice of Burns, the anthropologist, to address Richard Nixon in much the
same way he had previously created the pretext to narrate his encounter
with Morley and, in doing so, assert Maya independence. By presuming to
call on the president of the United States, Yamá asserts his role as a Maya
leader and Nixon’s political equal.
Yamá goes on to narrate the fall of the leader Puc in the way described
by Burns but closes the story by once again inserting contemporary politics
into his narration of the past. Mixing the language of the declarations of the
Caste War’s talking cross with new prophecy, Yamá exclaims:

There you will get whatever the things you need, there with those who
are called English,
with those who are called Americans, red-red men.
They are my servants;
they are my sacred people.
 Into the Archive • 93

I am Juan de la Cruz,
I am the Noh Cah Santa Cruz Balam Nah.
There isn’t anyone else! (Burns 85; italics in the original)

Given that the addressee of this story is Richard Nixon, the appearance
of Americans at the end of the story as the Maya’s prophesied allies and
sacred servants of the talking cross is a subtle attempt to establish an actual
political alliance. Others have commented on the connection Mayas in the
1930s made between the “red-red men” of old history and the Americans
who had come to excavate the ruins, a connection that “explained and
justified” Mayas’ acceptance of these outsiders (Redfield 144). By drawing
the United States into Maya historiography and its prophetic traditions, the
storyteller seeks to make the story a self-fulfilling prophecy. He succeeds,
at least in part, as Burns returns to the United States and publishes his col-
lection, a collection in which one finds that Yamá the storyteller effectively
appropriates the anthropologist’s voice and presents his political agenda
to the wider world. Although Nixon is long out of office by 1983, the year
the book is published, in some sense Yamá successfully crosses linguistic,
cultural, political, and ethnic borders to deliver his message.

Conclusion

In this chapter we have seen how the representation of the relationship

between the cultural broker and the Maya storyteller, a relationship shaped
by the broker’s function as author-narrator, has changed over the course of
the twentieth century. We have also seen how, given these changes, we can
read contemporary oral texts against earlier ones in order to gain some per-
spective on the silences created by oral literature’s transposition as folklore.
My intention is not to diminish the importance of Antonio Mediz Bolio, the
writers involved in Yikal Maya Than, Luis Rosado Vega, or Ermilo Abreu
Gómez or their work, but rather to show how these cultural brokers par-
ticipate in the ideological reimagining of the mestizo nation through their
respective treatments of the Yucatec Maya storyteller and his voice. Each
recycles the discourse of the Indio and consequently maintains the Maya in
a position of subalternity. By considering the stories told by Maya storytellers
during the same time period (Andrade) and those of later storytellers told
about that same period of time (Burns), one can surmise that storytellers
have always sought to contest the terrain on which they tell their stories
to outsiders. Evidence of this agency has been excised in the texts treated
 94 • Chapter 3

in the first two sections of this chapter as they operate under an ideology,
mestizaje, which seeks to assimilate the Indio as the mestizo’s ancestor.
This silence, however, does not mean that such texts are wholly non-
Maya. Hilaria Máas Collí, for example, in her publication of Cuentos
mayas and the anthology of stories from Yikal Maya Than called Leyendas
yucatecas actively resignifies these stories for both twenty-first-century Maya
and the twenty-first-century Mexican nation-state, effectively reclaiming
alienated cultural texts. We are left, however, with nagging questions about
these Maya storytellers and about how they, themselves, saw and continue
to see their relationships with outsiders, and can catch glimpses of the
agency found in storytelling by placing these back with the larger tradition
of Yucatec Maya performance. Contemporary performances of this oral
tradition are the subject of the following chapter.

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 four

“I’ll tell you the story . . .”

Mariano Bonilla Caamal and Storytelling
as Cultural Control

In addition to being where Landa held his 1562 auto-da-fé, the town of
Maní is also famous for a number of other things. It is the former seat of the
Maya Xiu dynasty, home to the bilingual school Doroteo Arango that was
formerly run by the Maya activist and playwright Armando Dzul Ek, and
home to the sorceress mentioned in José May’s version of “The Dwarf of
Uxmal.” As the story goes, the sorceress lives in a cenote near the center of
town, and when the end times have arrived, there will be no water on the
face of the earth save in the cenote where she lives. She will not dispense
the water freely and will give you a gourdful in exchange for a small child
to feed to her feathered serpent (Kukulkan).1
Mariano Bonilla Caamal and I had been through Maní various times on
our trips to find storytellers in other parts of Yucatán, and on a certain occa-
sion we stopped to see the cenote. Having taken a brief tour provided by
some children who lived in the town, as we left, Maní Bonilla Caamal said,
“You know, this has already come to pass. Do you want to hear about it?”
He then gave the following interpretation of the text: Once people could
freely draw water from cenotes and other wells throughout the region.
However, after a certain hurricane (he didn’t say which one) the groundwa-
ter became polluted and people were forced to buy water, something that
they still must do today. According to Bonilla Caamal, in paying for a daily
necessity, water, people must sacrifice their children insofar as they spend
money that could otherwise be used to pay for things like schooling. That
is, their children’s futures are “sacrificed” for the sake of current expedien-
cies. The old woman represents the townspeople who benefit from this

95
 96 • Chapter 4

trade, that is, local storeowners. Those who benefit most, however, are the
multinational corporations who receive the lion’s share of the profits from
bottling and distributing life-giving water in the countryside, and who also
have a vested interest in not cleaning up the cenotes. They are the ones
who figuratively consume the children one has to pay for the water.
When he was finished, Bonilla Caamal turned to me and stated, “See,
it’s like with the Bible, you can’t be so literal about these things.” When
people ask me about the “end of the Maya calendar” or even the relevance
of Maya oral literatures, I think back to Bonilla Caamal’s exegesis of this
well-known oral text, its connection with the “end times,” and how it has
become a powerful way through which to read and interpret contempo-
rary reality. If the Western mania surrounding 2012 focused less on wild
interpretations of the Maya calendar and more on contemporary Maya
oral literature concerning the end times and what they would be like, one
wonders if talk of Maya prophecies would sell nearly as well. Indeed, this
is perhaps the point of this dynamic in the global village, as the supposed
prophecies of the ancient Maya are based far more in Western apocalyptic
obsessions than anything one might identify as being “Maya” (Restall and
Solari). Moreover, esoteric knowledge is a far more enticing consumer
product than the story of the vengeful batab Cazuela in the previous chap-
ter, or the story concerning the sorceress of Maní and her child-eating
serpent above.2

Performance as a Way of Knowing

This anecdote also succinctly demonstrates this chapter’s central argu-

ment, namely that Yucatec Maya oral storytelling or Yucatec Mayas’ oral
performance of stories must be approached as a way of knowing. Many, if
not most, of the cultural brokers in the previous two chapters translated and
reduced these performances to Western ways of knowing such that Yucatec
Maya storytellers and the knowledge they embody were domesticated
according to the norms of a Westernized reading public. By construct-
ing their Indios as illiterate oral storytellers who are inherently mute with
regard to the lettered world, these cultural brokers employ the discourse
of the Indio to legitimate their own authority over indigenous cultures and
claim that, at the very least, their texts represent the only form in which
these cultures are rendered knowable. In the absence of indigenous voices,
cultural brokers are thus authorized to speak for indigenous peoples, their
“speaking for” standing in place of and silencing indigenous utterance
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 97

itself. In effect, by reproducing the discourse of the Indio and its relation-
ships of power, many of these cultural brokers reinforce the notion that
indigenous people are ultimately incapable of speaking for themselves.
They are objects to be spoken for, not subjects capable of speech.
Contrast their approach to oral performance with that presented by
Bonilla Caamal above. The story about the sorceress of Maní is common
knowledge and the version written down by Alonzo Gonzales Mó and
published by Alan F. Burns in 1983 can be used to provide us with some
context (Burns 37–38). As for this story’s status as prophecy, in the tsikbal
“Big Things” the storyteller alludes to it in the context of “how the well will
go dry how this generation will end there” (Burns 36), and ends the actual
story “The Old Lady of Maní” with the prophetic “These things are coming
to pass. / The day is growing closer too” (Burns 38). Coming out of this
tradition, Bonilla Caamal’s explication reinforces storytelling’s status as a
way of knowing the world. As compared to Mó, Bonilla Caamal situates the
text as constituting a prophecy fulfilled as opposed to a prophecy of things
yet to come. In doing so, he upholds the power of Maya prophetic tradition
as something through which one can indeed foresee future events. He
asserts that the story is an allegory not to be taken literally, and by arguing
that people commonly read texts like the Bible in the same fashion subtly
aligns this story and his storyteller’s interpretation of it with this other,
more recognized mode of textual analysis. This assertion in turn calls into
question the fairly literal interpretations commonly found in Western texts
concerning 2012 and the end of the world. Finally, and most importantly
with regard to this chapter, he situates this text as being a meaningful
way through which one can articulate Mayas’ experiences of the modern
world. That is, while the story itself many come under the chapter heading
“Ancient Conversations” in Burns’s book, the story is simultaneously fully
contemporary, a viable way of interpreting contemporary Maya realities.
This chapter focuses on oral literature that Bonilla Caamal and I
recorded during the spring and fall of 2007 in the bilingual Yucatec Maya
town of Santa Elena. We made these recordings as part of the ongoing
trilingual storytelling project Tsikbal ich maya. To date, we have recorded
numerous storytellers in Santa Elena and elsewhere, and subtitled versions
of select stories are available at tsikbalichmaya.org. Building on the work of
Burns, Máas Collí, and others, I argue that storytelling is an episteme that
reflects a specific kind of discursive agency. Old stories can be brought to
bear on contemporary realities and the structures, techniques, and tropes of
oral storytelling can be used to narrativize current events in performances
that are expressly pro-Maya in their ideological orientation. After providing
 98 • Chapter 4

a brief background on the agency found in the tradition of Maya oral per-
formance, my analysis centers on two stories in particular, both of which
were told to me by Bonilla Caamal. When juxtaposed, these two succinctly
illustrate this form of discursive agency.
The first story I will discuss is one of the most canonical of all Yucatec
Maya stories, “The Story of Juan Rabbit.” As a literary text this story in
particular demonstrates the difficulty one encounters when working with
oral literature, as unlike the published works of non-Maya authors, the story
of Juan Rabbit can be regarded as a kind of intellectual property common
to the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Allowing for a variety of modifications
in the order, structure, and moral of Juan Rabbit’s adventures, we can
confidently assert that his various appearances are aliases rather than cases
of genealogical relation. Among both African-American and Caucasian
cultures in the southern United States Juan goes by the name Brer Rab-
bit, in many Native American cultures he is Uncle Coyote, throughout
contemporary Latin America he is often referred to as Tío Conejo, and
in West Africa he has endured as Anansi the Spider. I will deal with the
implications and significance of this story’s globalization later on. For the
moment I offer the intercontinental scope of the Rabbit’s travels as proof of
the story’s antiquity and cross-cultural appeal. Without necessarily referring
to published works of folklore, we can confidently assert that the story of
Juan Rabbit in the abstract is, in any sense one wishes to define the word,
“traditional.”
The second story I will be dealing with is radically nontraditional by the
standards usually associated with folklore insofar as it deals with an actual
event that occurred a few years ago at a hotel near Santa Elena. For clarity,
I will label this story “The Waiter and the Gringo.” As we shall see, how-
ever, this story is not simply a tale about something that happened to one
of Bonilla Caamal’s friends. Through his performance of the story, Bonilla
Caamal makes the event a work of oral literature that draws directly on
the discursive traditions of Yucatec Maya storytelling. Given its contempo-
rary setting and noncanonical status, this story draws our attention to how
our Western notions of tradition and modernity are frustrated in much of
Yucatec storytelling. We can thus observe how traditional stories provide a
framework through which the storyteller structures a narrative of contem-
porary events as well as better understand how even the most “traditional”
of stories are not, in the moment of their telling, told from an ahistorical
past but rather from a specific present. That is, as “traditional” stories are
retold, they accrue new meanings that have nothing to do with “tradition”
per se, as they are, in the fullest sense of the word, also “modern.”
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 99

Storytelling and Tradition in Time: The Old

Is New, the New Is Old

Noting this relationship between past and present, the “traditional” and
the “modern,” we find that storytelling is an active interpretive principle
in the daily life of Maya communities, the storyteller being the person
who narrates and interprets events in accordance with local values and
customs. The act of storytelling thus pertains to a tradition of literary inter-
pretation, or to the tradition of a generalized interpretive mode, rather
than to the “tradition” often referred to by cultural brokers and folklorists
within the academy. As outlined in the first chapter, the Mexican historian
Enrique Florescano states that a number of indigenous groups in Mexico
“cultivaron la obsesión de narrarse su propia historia y exaltar los valores
de su identidad” (cultivated the obsession of narrating their own history
and exalting the values that forged their identity; 322). We can relate Flor-
escano’s comments back to a more specifically Yucatec context by reading
them in the light of what Nancy Farris terms Yucatec Mayas’ “collective
enterprise of survival.” Describing how Yucatec Maya society has managed
to endure from the conquest to the present, Farris defines this concept as a
process through which the Maya preserved “a central core of concepts and
principles” that enabled Spanish influences to be interpreted and shaped
“along Maya lines and in accordance with Maya principles” (9). As cited in
the previous chapter, Hilaria Máas Collí argues for the broad educational
role that stories play within Yucatec communities (“Introducción” 19), and
in her work among the Maya of the Chiapas Highlands, Victoria Bricker
has noted the role that ritual humor may play in social control through its
“contrast between normative and deviant behavior” (219). As a collective
tradition, storytelling—the obsession with narrating one’s own history in
accordance with one’s own values—transmits the “central core of concepts
and principles” that guide the dynamic reproduction of Maya culture over
time, shaping Maya culture’s relationship with and interpretation of the
hegemonic cultures of Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States.
As also described in the first chapter, whether referring to stories them-
selves or to the dialogic act of giving a performance, tsikbal implies dialogue
and conversation between a speaker and others. As outlined by Burns, as
Yucatec Maya performances, tsikbal presumes the direct participation of a
listener, “lemaac uyohel nuucic lethaano’ob” (the person who knows how
to answer the speech), with additional persons being “tunyu’ubil lecuento
tumen lemaaco’ob” (the story is being listened to by those people; Burns
22).3 Beyond these performative aspects, however, what do I mean when I
 100 • Chapter 4

refer to the structures or formulae of oral Yucatec Maya literature? These

formulae are linguistic markers that distinguish literary speech from every-
day speech. One can speak of these as being Yucatec Maya (as opposed
to universal) because, within the current context, repetition has sustained
their use across time and space in the Yucatán Peninsula. Further, Burns
states that several Yucatec Maya oral conventions have no Western equiva-
lent (17). Their continual use and reuse across different stories and genres
makes them an integral part of storytelling for both the storyteller and
his audience. These formulae are not so much a part of the abstract story
per se, but constitute a vital part of an individual storyteller’s artistic repre-
sentation of that story.
I will not attempt to reproduce an exhaustive list of these formulae but
rather will defer to two important works on the subject by the Yucatec
Maya writer Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim and the Spanish critic Fran-
cesc Ligorred Perramon. In her thesis “K-maaya tsikbal” (1996), Martínez
Huchim draws on the categories from the work of William Labov in her
examination of how storytellers use formulae to structure stories in the
town of Xocén (94–106). The categories she uses are: the compendium
that summarizes the story at its beginning; orientation, which places the
story and its protagonists in a certain time and space; the evaluation of the
events told; the action itself; the consequences of the action; and the coda,
which ends the story. While these categories are not exclusively Maya, in
her analysis Martínez Huchim explores the different expressions that story-
tellers use to textualize these structures. For example, she notes both the
common occurrence of the phrase “ka máanene’” (when I went by) at the
end of stories and nineteen different ways of ending a story with variations
of a phrase best translated as “That’s it.” Ligorred Perramon focuses more
on poetic structures (alliteration, etc.) present in stories (Consideraciones
129–48). Of relevance here is his observation that storytellers themselves
will often refer to Yucatec Maya oral tradition in their performances, con-
sciously articulating their current performance in relation to a broader
tradition (Consideraciones 133–34). Considered as an oral formula in itself,
this type of self-reflexive gesture breaks the frame of the narrative present
to refer back to previous narratives and an infinite number of prior tell-
ings. These oral formulae thus structure Yucatec narratives internally with
regard to a specific telling and externally with regard to the corpus of oral
literature. As the raw material used to structure the particular performance
of a story, they serve both to move the narrative along in the present and to
situate that narrative within the broader tradition of Yucatec Maya storytell-
ing for storyteller, respondent, and audience.
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 101

Given that this is a fully modern oral literature, one must approach
oral Yucatec Maya literature by situating individual storytellers within a
specific place and time. As argued by Johannes Fabian, the fundamental
contradiction in our knowledge of the other is that, “on the one hand
we dogmatically insist that anthropology rests on ethnographic research
involving personal, prolonged interaction with the other. But then we
pronounce upon the knowledge gained from such research a discourse
which construes the other in terms of distance, spatial and temporal” (xi).
We should also remember that, as Fabian says later, “there is no knowledge
of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, a political act” (1).
As seen in previous chapters, for many cultural brokers the journey from
the center to the periphery, from the city to the countryside, also entailed
a passage from civilized, lettered, developed, and authoritative culture to
a space occupied by an oral, undeveloped, and hence lesser, if not savage,
culture. “They,” the Yucatec Maya, inhabit the undeveloped space of pre-
modern tradition, while “we,” whoever we are, inhabit the developed space
of modernity in the present. However, Yucatec Maya do not tell stories
within or originating from a context of temporal or spatial difference. On
the contrary, they inhabit the same modernity we do, albeit in a state of
subalternity. The storytellers that Bonilla Caamal and I recorded are not
parrots of a dying tradition but rather men and women who produce and
reproduce, in our shared present, the fullness of Maya culture.
We are confronted, then, by an other literary practice. Beyond possess-
ing its own genres, gestures, tropes, and themes, this literary practice also
possesses its own mode of literary analysis and interpretation insofar as
storytellers, in the retelling of their stories, reinterpret the Maya past in
terms of the Maya present, and the Maya present in terms of the Maya
past. If, in the act of storytelling, the storyteller occupies a specific time
and place, then we must also recognize that, through the act of performing
a story, the storyteller offers us a specific interpretation of contemporary
world events. Whether a given story is told in the home, the milpa (tradi-
tional farming plot), or on the street, the story does not necessarily have the
same meaning twice. Given this context, there are three particular points
I would like to make with regard to Yucatec Maya storytelling. First, that
the Maya storyteller is the living embodiment of someone who transmits
“the central core of concepts and principals” described above by Nancy
Farris. This transmission does not imply mechanical reproduction but an
ongoing, fluid negotiation. Second, as the embodiment of this knowledge
and the person charged with its transmission, the storyteller uses these
“core concepts and principles” to structure his/her narratives. Finally, we
 102 • Chapter 4

can therefore say that the storyteller exercises a particular kind of discursive
agency through the act of storytelling. In the performance of a story the
storyteller structures the past in terms of the present and the present in
terms of the past, meaning that storytelling represents an act of discursive
agency through which Yucatec Mayas understand, interpret, and exercise
discursive cultural control over the world in their own terms.
To demonstrate how this discursive agency has been exercised over time,
a few examples are in order. Although scholars and academics often prize
the K’iche’ Maya Popol wuj for the insight it gives us into pre-Colombian
Maya culture, the Popol wuj is, in many ways, an act of cultural appropria-
tion and resistance par excellence, one in which anonymous Mayas use the
tools of oppression in order to ensure the continuity of Maya culture. As the
authors of the K’iche’ book of council transcribe the oral performance of
a glyphic text in Latin letters they say they do so “now amid the preaching
of God, in Christendom now. We shall bring it about because there is no
longer a place to see it” (Popol Vuh 63). That is, the people performing the
text situate this performance within a specific time and place, “in Chris-
tendom now,” meaning that the Popol wuj must be read as a colonial work
as much as a pre-Columbian one. In doing so, they place “Christendom
now” as a continuance of previous epochs in K’iche’ history and the work
ends, interestingly enough, with a genealogy of K’iche’ rulers. They there-
fore realign “Christendom” as part of K’iche’ history while realigning the
K’iche’ Christian present with the immemorial past. Similarly, in a chron-
icle from near modern Chixulub, Yucatán, the Yucatec noble Ah Nakuk
Pech asserts the legitimacy of his social position based in the fact that he is
“descendiente de los antiguos hidalgos conquistadores de esta tierra, en la
región de Maxtunil” (a descendent of the first noble conquistadors of this
land, in the region of Maxtunil; 19).4 In the space of a few words written in
Latin script, he appropriates the Spanish words and categories of hidalgo
and conquistador to strip the Spanish conquest of its primacy and claim
the historical precedence of other, non-Spanish nobles. That is, hidalgo
(noble) becomes a term that refers equally to preconquest Maya nobility
and to the Spanish, and conquistador points to an entire Maya history of
military conquest that predates the arrival of the Europeans.
Here we can recall Frederic Jameson’s statement “that history is not a
text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is
inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to
the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativ-
ization in the political unconsciousness” (The Political 35). Explaining the
relationship between ideology and texts with regard to interpretation, he
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 103

later goes on to say that “the aesthetic act itself is ideological, and the pro-
duction of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in
its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’
to unresolvable social contradictions” (79). As such, rather than interpret-
ing these texts as examples of hybridity or cultural mestizaje that ultimately
point us in the direction of a decline in or the loss of Maya culture, we
should ask ourselves why these authors appropriate these foreign cultural
elements in their decisions to write “in Christendom” or as a descendent
of the “first noble conquerors”? Although these phrases represent cases
of mixing, these authors do not construct themselves as mixed or hybrid-
ized subjects, and the ideology within these texts is eminently pro-Maya.
The passages cited above can be seen as what Bonfil Batalla refers to as
cultura apropiada, as these non-Maya cultural elements are mobilized in
the reproduction of Maya culture, as opposed to a culture that is thought
of as hybrid or mestizo. To recall Farris’s terms, these elements of appropri-
ated culture are placed at the service of “a central core of concepts and
principals,” which remain undeniably Maya and determine the reception
of non-Maya cultural elements.
However, I feel that we can delve deeper into the ideological ramifica-
tions of the production of Maya texts in the light of Jameson’s comments.
The Pech text, for example, is more than a hybridized flight of fancy com-
posed by an educated Maya. If we agree with Ángel Rama’s assertion that
the power of Latin American letrados derives from a tradition in which
“[writing] consolidated order through its capacity to rigorously express this
at a cultural level,” then we must view Pech’s text, written in imitation of
the colonial genre of the “probanza,” as directly addressing colonial power
in Maya terms (Lettered City 9). Instead of lamenting apparent contradic-
tions, Pech draws attention to them, claiming that he is a descendent of
the land’s “first noble conquerors.” The text thus situates Mayas as subjects
of their own other history even as he writes this history in the terms of a
non-Maya “rigorously elaborated cultural expression.” As I have stated,
however, the Pech document is intended for imperial or colonial eyes, and
therefore differs in a sense from the Popol wuj and the oral texts that will
be the focus of the remainder of this chapter. While the Pech document
may have been read by colonial functionaries and literate Mayas, we can
firmly assert that the Popol wuj and oral literature are texts composed for
Maya communities.
As a written performance, the text of the Popol wuj constitutes a similar
aesthetic solution. The claim its performers make about writing and per-
forming “in Christendom, now” preempts the obvious contradiction that
 104 • Chapter 4

arises between the covert maintenance of Maya beliefs and the outward
expression of being a good Christian. More so than just appropriating
another way of counting time and reconciling Maya history with current
events, it normalizes this sense of duality and represents a form of what
W. E. B. DuBois calls “double consciousness” (5). The Popol wuj resolves
contradictions between Christian versus Maya histories, cultures, and
worldviews by framing them as a matter of both-and as opposed to a binary
either-or. Again, given that this document is for the Maya, we are mere
interlocutors to the text’s performance. We are not invited to interpret, to
understand, or even to acknowledge it. To approach it, we must attempt
to do so in Maya terms that, even while appropriating non-Maya cultural
elements, nonetheless reject the notion that such appropriation constitutes
hybridity or metsizaje.
The other side of recording indigenous knowledge in Latin letters was
and has remained the memory and reproduction of that knowledge in its
oral form. We must remember that the Maya, for example, like the Aztecs
and the Inca, had developed their own systems of writing prior to having
their lands invaded by Europeans. Echoing Florescano, Micaela Morales
López reminds us that, in addition to transposing these texts into Latin
script, “La creación literaria india se refugió en la oralidad, hecho posi-
tivo que contribuyó a preservar relatos, mitos y costumbres prehispánicos”
(Indigenous literary creation took refuge in orality, a positive act that con-
tributed to the preservation of prehispanic stories, myths, and customs; 20).
The development and maintenance of oral literature therefore constitutes
an act of ethnogenesis whose precedents stretch back to the beginning of
European hegemony in the Americas. By continuing this tradition in the
present, the oral storyteller points to the ongoing existence of this other tra-
dition. Ideologically, oral literature is therefore no less counterhegemonic
than texts like the Historia y crónica de Chac Xulub Chen or the Popol
wuj as the storyteller, in his/her retextualization of stories, resolves current
social contradictions in Maya terms and for Maya people.

The African Relatives of a Maya Trickster

If one were to imagine Yucatec Maya culture in a vacuum, the conceit of an

outsider interpellating a Maya to tell a story might strike one as inauthentic
or contrived. However, outsiders’ imaginings of an authentic Maya culture
are themselves contrivances that often betray a desire to maintain the Maya
as a domesticated other. Given that the Maya have been in contact with
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 105

the “West” since Columbus hijacked a Maya trading vessel in the Carib-
bean, we must recognize that moments of cultural exchange and mutual
(mis)understanding between the Maya and foreigners have been ongoing
for more than five hundred years.5 We can once again recall the iconic
image of John Lloyd Stephens resting atop Uxmal, asking his guide for a
local history lesson, as proof that such moments have been part of a process
of mutual observation and interpretation. Although a text like Stephens’s
would turn such tsikbal or “dialogues” into monologues in which the supe-
riority of Western culture is taken for granted, looking past this position we
see that the Yucatec Maya are the subjects of their own history with their
own thoughts and opinions with regard to these interactions. Drawing on
the title of Paul Sullivan’s book on Yucatec Maya foreign relations in the
early twentieth century, we can say that these contacts, across time and
space, resemble a series of “unfinished conversations.”
“The Story of Juan Rabbit” marks the crossroads of several such con-
versations, and the geographical dissemination of this story adds to its
cultural and sociopolitical significance. Culturally speaking, its origins are
interwoven with slavery, conquest, and the earliest days of European colo-
nialism in the Americas. In his book on a similar tradition of rabbit stories
in Columbia, Javier Tafur González claims that, “el conejo no era un
animal representativo para los aborígenes de la región antes de la llegada
de los negros y españoles” (before the arrival of Africans and Spaniards, the
rabbit was not a representative animal for the region’s indigenous peoples;
64). This connection between the story and the colonial period tells us a
great deal about the persistence of culture and the conditions of cultural
exchange across time and space, and I feel that one should emphasize the
fact of the story’s transmission under colonial conditions as opposed to
trying to attribute the story to a single cultural group. For example, from
indigenous sources like Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica
y buen gobierno (New Chronicle and Good Government; 1619) we know
that the Spanish consciously set Africans and indigenous peoples against
each other, as in Guaman Poma’s illustration in which an African slave
whips an Andean subordinate (810).
The transmission of this historical memory persists down to the pres-
ent in places like Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico.6 There the
story of the Negro cimarrón, or Escaped Slave, a murderous abductor of
Maya women, continues to be told and speaks to the racial fears that the
Spanish cultivated. Representing these fears today, in the introduction to
his El negro cimarrón: Ya’Yejal J-Ik’al (The Escaped Slave: Ya’Yejal J-Ik’al;
2000) the Tzotzil Maya Antonio Gómez Gómez invites us to imagine,
 106 • Chapter 4

“a un negro al que nada más se le ven los ojos y los dientes blancos en la
oscuridad, haciendo gestos espantosos, berrinches, utilizando un lenguaje
extraño, saltando y aventando piedras a la única vereda transitable, la cual
está cubierta de árboles” (a black man of whom we see nothing more than
his eyes and white teeth in the darkness making frightful, wild gestures,
speaking in a strange language, jumping and throwing rocks along the
only open path, which is covered by trees; 2). Sarah Blaffer convincingly
suggests that this image of a “black man” in Chiapas can be related to the
Maya bat god and black African slaves brought to Chiapas by the Spanish
(37), stating that “perhaps Spanish black men, or ‘Moors,’ were singled out
as items of special interest because they resembled a black creature already
widely feared by the Maya” (53). As with the story from the beginning of
this chapter, we are once again confronted by a case in which the Maya
past may well have been used as a means to interpret the Maya present.
Peoples of African descent and examples of African cultural influence
can be found throughout the Americas, and the occurrence of the story of
Juan Rabbit throughout the Americas demonstrates the profound roots of
the African diaspora in the Western hemisphere. It also highlights how cul-
turally, racially, and linguistically distinct subaltern groups, in this specific
case enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples, subverted colonial hierar-
chies and forged common bonds despite prevailing colonial ideologies that
set them against each other. At a conference in spring 2008 at Norfolk State
University, the Afro–Costa Rican intellectual and writer Quince Duncan
told me that the rabbit stories in the Americas come from the African
stories of Anansi the Spider, a trickster with whom the rabbit shares many
exploits in common. Most notably, he said, both the Rabbit and Anansi
confront a trap in the form of a sticky man. In addition, Jonathan Brennan’s
edited volume When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote (2003) focuses on the con-
vergence of these indigenous and African tales. Rather then seeing this idea
as a rejection of Tafur González’s statement about the origin of the rabbit
tale, however, Duncan’s and Tafur González’s observations tie in easily
with my larger thesis. If any given story must reflect the environment in
which it is told, the progression from spider to rabbit would coincide with
a change in physical and cultural environment. The change in protagonist
reflects a desire to preserve one’s culture as well as to explain that culture
to an other, in effect continuing that culture’s development under some of
the most oppressive conditions imaginable. As such, rather than separating
out different parts of the Rabbit story in search of the story’s ultimate origin,
one should think of the contemporary story as having been forged within
the crucible of colonialism itself.
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 107

Before moving on to the story of Juan Rabbit as told to me by Bonilla

Caamal, I would also like to point out the story’s contemporary sociopo-
litical relevance among non-Maya. Here I am not so much concerned
with theorizations on or about the story as I am with how this story and
others can be and has been used as a starting point for contemporary Latin
American identities. As discussed in the previous chapter, when rewritten
as folklore, oral literature normalizes social, political, and cultural hierar-
chies, domesticates a threatening other, and extends the timeline of the
modern nation. In short, folklore textualizes the “immemorial past” of the
contemporary nation. Quince Duncan, for example, explained to me at
the aforementioned conference how works of “folklore” like the story of
Juan Rabbit can be used to construct an argument for the existence of a
Pan-Hemispheric African-American consciousness and experience. I also
know of two books, Los cuentos de Tío Coyote y Tío Conejo (Stories of Uncle
Coyote and Uncle Rabbit; 1957) by Pablo Antonio Cuadra and Simpáticas
aventuras de Tío Conejo y Tío Coyote (The Delightful Adventures of Uncle
Rabbit and Uncle Coyote; 1995) by Alejandro Barahona Romero, that deal
explicitly with this type of construction and this story in particular, as both
claim the rabbit story as foundational to and the exclusive property of these
authors’ countries of origin.7
At present, I do not know of a Yucatec Maya author or oral storyteller
who has constructed a similar project of Maya national identity based on
the figure of Juan T’u’ul (Juan Rabbit). Rather, I would assert that con-
sciously or not the Rabbit is a trickster figure that reflects a hermeneutic
principle of agency and negotiation with power through which a good deal
of contemporary Maya Yucatec oral and written literatures can be analyzed.
As such, my reading of this figure is similar to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s inter-
pretation of the Signifying Monkey in the tradition of African American
literature in the United States. Although Gates’s concern is more the use of
black vernacular rhetorical strategies in written literature, his theorization
of these strategies as having originated from African American vernacular
demonstrates how “the vernacular informs and becomes the foundation for
formal black literature” (xxii). I would claim that oral stories and agency
embodied through their performance are similarly “foundational” for the
written texts produced by the Yucatec Maya writers studied in the next
chapter, and I am in complete agreement with Gates’s assertion that “each
literary tradition, at least implicitly, contains within it an argument for
how it can be read” (xix–xx). That is, Maya literatures must be approached
from within the traditions of Maya literatures. As a story like Juan Rabbit
reminds us, such an approach does not seek to claim an essentialist cultural
 108 • Chapter 4

purity but rather recognizes that a given literary tradition itself is the site
of intercultural tension and negotiation as authors and storytellers exercise
discursive forms of cultural control.

U tsikbalil Juan T’u’ul yéetel Ma Chiich:

Juan Rabbit and Old Grandmother

In his El cuento maya popular: Una introducción (Popular Maya Literature:

An Introduction; 1996), Fernando Peñalosa recounts thirty-eight different
versions of the rabbit story among nineteen different Maya language groups.
He also includes a chart that indexes these versions according to nine dif-
ferent possible episodes that a storyteller may or may not include, and these
in their totality comprise the story cycle. He labels these the episode of the
watermelon, the doll, the iron, the stone, the fruit, the cocoyoles, the cheese,
the pot, and the hay (39). Although Peñalosa’s Yucatec version only includes
three of these episodes (the stone, the iron, and the hay, in that order), the
version Bonilla Caamal told me has elements of at least five (the doll, the
iron, the stone, the pot, the hay), with at least one episode that is not included
in Peñalosa’s chart. Mariano Bonilla Caamal’s version is as follows:8

me: I want you to tell me the story of Juan Rabbit.

bonilla caamal: OK, I’m going to tell you the story of Juan Rabbit
and Old Grandmother. I’ll tell you the story of Old Grandmother.
One day Grandmother went to plant beans, she planted them and
watered them with water from a cistern, with that water.
So one day Old Grandmother went to see the beans she had planted.
When she got there, she went around her garden and realized that the
beans had sprouted but they had been eaten by Juan Rabbit. Her beans
had been eaten by Juan. Old Grandmother was worried, she said, “What
am I going to do? The beans I planted are for my sustenance.”
So she began to talk about her beans being eaten. She received help,
advice from other people about what she should do. The older people
told her what she should do. They told her, “Make a person out of bees-
wax, a man out of wax.”
So she began to look for the beeswax. She mixed it like this and began
to shape him, she began to shape a man, she made his head, his face,
his feet, every part of the man. When she was done she put him like this
in the path where Juan came in, that’s where she put him, she put him
there like this.
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 109

So Juan, when night came, Juan Rabbit came to eat. He came to eat
the beans. When he arrived he saw that there was a man standing on the
path. He didn’t know him because it was the wax man, so he began to say
to him, “Get out of my way, I’ve come to make my living. This is where
I take a dump, this is where I take a leak,” that’s what he said.
But the man didn’t reply to him because he’s made of wax! So Juan
told him: “Get out of my way. If not, I’m going to kick you,” said Juan
Rabbit.
The man didn’t answer him, so Juan kicked him. When he kicked
him his foot became stuck, because the wax was sticky, it got stuck.
After he got stuck, he said, “Let go of my foot! If not, I’ll kick you with
my other foot.”
He kicked him like this with his other foot, and he got stuck, so he
said, “Let go of me. If not, I’m going to slap you.”
So then he slapped him, and his hand became stuck in the wax. “Let
go of me so I can go eat, I came to find food!” Juan was just talking. “If
you don’t let go of me, I’ll slap you again.” He slapped him again and
Juan was stuck, stuck like this. So Juan Rabbit said, “Let go of me or I’ll
hit you with my belly!”
And he hit him with his belly like this, and his belly was stuck in the
wax. That’s how he became trapped in the wax. He couldn’t leave, Juan
was stuck.
So dawn came and Old Grandmother went to the beans she had
planted in her garden. When she went to see Juan, he was trapped, Juan
had gotten stuck in the wax.
“You, Juan, you fell for it. You could have escaped but you fell for
it,” she said.
“Yeah, Old Grandmother, you got me,” he replied.
So she took Juan out of the wax and carried him away.
“Well, Old Grandmother, you caught me. Are you going to eat me?”
“I am going to eat you, I’ll eat you with pipian sauce. I’m going to
make pipian rabbit, pipian Juan, it’ll be great, it’s been a while since I’ve
had that.”
“OK, Old Grandmother, OK,” he replied.
Well, she locked him in the chicken coop, that’s where he was held.
Her grandchildren came to look at him. That’s where Juan was, pacing,
locked up in the chicken coop, and she said to him, “Well, I’m going to
eat you, Juan. How good you’ll be in pipian sauce!”
“OK, Grandmother,” he said, “you’re going to eat me. But give me
one last thing, a chance before you eat me.”
 110 • Chapter 4

“OK, OK, Juan,” she replied. “And what’s your final wish?”
“Well, I really dance well. If you saw how I danced, Old Grand-
mother, you’d really like it. Then you could eat me.”
“OK, Juan.”
It was getting late about now when they told Juan he could come out,
“You won’t escape, Juan?”
“I won’t run away, I won’t run away,” he replied.
“You won’t escape, Juan?”
“I won’t run away, Grandmother, I won’t run away.”
“OK.”
When they opened the chicken coop, the children saw him and he
began to dance. Juan Rabbit was dancing. He danced like this, that’s how
he danced, he shook his butt. Juan jumped around and danced. And
Old Grandmother laughed: “Hahaha, hahaha, hahaha, hahaha.” She
laughed so much she peed herself, she peed herself with laughter from
seeing Juan. He went this way and came back, he jumped around. Old
Grandmother clapped, she loved seeing Juan dance.
Then he went and didn’t come back. He escaped, he escaped! When
Juan left they looked for him but they didn’t find him, he’d gone.
So Old Grandmother began to cry, “Juan tricked me, he tricked me,
he said he wouldn’t escape. Well, what do we do now, children?”
“Well, he’s gone, he’s not coming back.”
Old Grandmother began to cry again, she cried. So Juan left, he ran
far away.
Well, Juan had a friend, a puma, he was with the puma and he said
to him, “I’ve got a game that I’ve found.”
“What kind of game?”
“Let’s go so you can see it.”
Juan and his friend the puma went to the chicken coop where Juan
was locked up, he went in with the puma. When he went in he said,
“You don’t know what a great game I’ve found.”
“Really?”
“It’s great, you’re going to see.”
“Well, how does it go?”
“Well, you have to tell the door to the chicken coop: close the door,
open the door, close the door, open the door, what do you think? That’s
what I do, I go in and out. Go in.”
Since they’d put hot water on to boil Juan, but he’d then escaped,
there was water warming over the fire. So the puma began to say, “Open
the door, close the door.”
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 111

“What do you think? It’s a great game, no?”

“It is great, Juan.”
“Well, I’ll be right back,” Juan said.
He left the puma and ran away. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
“OK.”
So he left, and the puma went in and out. “Open the door, close the
door.” Eventually the puma forgot, “Close the door, close the door, close
the door.” And the door closed shut.
When Old Grandmother’s children went by, they said, “Grand-
mother, Juan’s back! He’s in the chicken coop, let’s go see, he looks
like Juan.”
So she went to see him and said, “Children, that’s not Juan, it’s a mon-
ster! It’s something else, it’s not Juan. Bring the hot water to throw on it.”
So they went to get the water that was on the fire to throw it on the
animal. They poured it on his back, and he left running, he broke the
chicken coop, he escaped. He ran out of there with his back burned. “I am
going to catch that Juan and eat him,” he said, “he tricked me, he tricked
me, it’s his fault they threw hot water down my back.”
And so he left.
“I’m going to eat you, Juan.”
“Why are you going to eat me if we’re friends? We’re pals, we get
along, you shouldn’t eat me.”
“I should eat you because you really tricked me. You told me to tell
the door to the chicken coop: open the door, close the door. When I
said, ‘close the door,’ it wouldn’t open back up. Then Old Grandmother
came and threw hot water on me, look at what happened to me. I’m
going to eat you.”
“Hmmm, but if you’d come see the game I’ve found . . . it’s great,
down in that cave. What do you think? The cave is nice. Come on in so
you can see.” Juan held up the cave like this. “Come in so you can see,
come in so you can see. I’m holding up the sky. If you let it go it’ll fall.”
“Is that right?”
“Yep. There’s also a little toy over here,” he said, “a little toy.”
There inside the cave were various wasp nests, there in the cave there
were wasp nests full of wasps. So he said, “This is a game.”
“Are you sure, Juan?”
“It is. If it takes me a while and I don’t come back, hit this little toy,
it’s like a bell,” he said.
“OK,” he replied.
“But I won’t be long, I’ll be right back.”
 112 • Chapter 4

He let go of the ceiling so the puma could hold it up and he escaped.

Juan ran away to hide again. When the puma got tired and the cave was
about to fall, he said to himself, “I’m going to hit that bell.”
But it wasn’t a bell, it was a wasp nest. When he moved the wasp nest,
they came out and stung the puma. He took off running and the cave
fell in. The puma ran away. “I’m going to eat Juan. He tricked me again,
that Juan lied to me again.”
Then he saw Juan again, “What are you doing, Juan?”
“I’m carrying hay,” he replied, “I’m carrying hay.”
“What are you doing with the hay?”
“I’m going to build my house. Help me carry it.”
“No, I’m going to eat you.”
“No, carry this load of hay for me.”
So then he tied a load of hay to the puma’s back. “I’m already tired,
help me,” he said.
After he tied the hay on the puma’s back they began to walk. While
they walked, Juan lit fire to it. He lit fire to the hay on the puma’s back
and the puma got burned again. Juan took off running and didn’t get
caught. Time passed and he eventually found him again. When the
puma found him he said, “Today I’m really going to eat you, Juan.”
“You’re not going to eat me.”
“Why not if you’d lied to me like you have?”
“No, I found a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“It’s over here, come see.”
It’s a palm tree, a tall palm tree. “Come see, look how I do it,” he
said. “I play here every day. Around now I go up to play, look.” He went
up the tree like this, he went up and up and came back down, he went
up and down.
“This is the new game?”
“Hmmm, it’s great, you’ll see.”
“OK,” he said.
He went up and he said to the tree, “Stretch, tree, stretch, tree.”
The tree stretched like this, the tree stretched out. “Stretch, tree.” The
tree stretched out. “Shrink, tree.” The tree shrank. “Stretch, tree.” The
tree stretched. “Shrink, tree.” The tree went up and down.
“What do you think? It’s great, right? Why don’t you come up?
Go up!”
“Do you think I can learn it?”
“Yeah, go on up!”
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 113

And he climbed up. As he climbed Juan began to say, that is the puma
began to say, “Stretch, tree, shrink, tree.”
While he said this, the tree began to stretch, the tree stretched out.
And now what? The puma forgot what to say to make the tree shrink.
It took him a long while to remember. So he finally said, “Shrink, tree,
shrink, tree.” Little by little the tree began to shrink, it shrank, until it
shrank and the puma could jump down. And he said, “When I find Juan,
I’m going to eat him.”
So one day Juan was found by the puma and eaten, the puma ate him.
So that’s how the story of Old Grandmother, Juan, and the puma ends.
The puma ate Juan. So we see that’s how it ends for Old Grandmother
and Juan. (See appendix 3, page 168.)

The Rabbit and Agency

My analysis of the story intertwines an examination of its structural attri-

butes, that is, those that make it what most would label “traditional,”
with a commentary on how the story lays the groundwork for the kind of
counterhegemonic agency found in the following story, “The Waiter and
the Gringo.” On the recording itself, when I ask Bonilla Caamal to tell
me the story, he complies with the generic opening, “Ma’alob, nika’ajen
tsikbaltech u tsikbalil Juan T’u’ul yéetel Ma Chiich” (OK, I’ll tell you the
story of Juan Rabbit and Ma Chiich). This formula brackets the words of
the story proper from those of everyday speech and constitutes a locution-
ary act insofar as the use of such formulae is also to begin the telling of
the story itself. Keeping in mind that stories are fluid and that the ideal is
a well-told story, note that Bonilla Caamal’s performance deviates from
Peñalosa’s rubric outlined above. The first of the episodes that Bonilla
Caamal recounts is that of Juan T’u’ul and Ma Chiich (Old Grandmother),
a story which Peñalosa labels the story of the doll and which exists in the
southern United States as the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby. When
the scalded puma later breaks the cage and goes in search of Juan to get
his revenge, his scars mark this episode as the equivalent of Peñalosa’s iron
episode. The following episode of when Juan is in the cave combines ele-
ments of the episodes Peñalosa refers to as the episodes of the pot and the
stone. The final episode where Juan ascends and descends the tree is not in
the Peñalosa.9 With this final game, however, Juan meets his end as, having
had enough of tree climbing, the puma goes in search of Juan and finally
manages to eat him. In closing, Bonilla Caamal’s says, “Tik k-ilik túune’
 114 • Chapter 4

ka’j ts’o’ok le Ma Chiich yéetel Juano’” (So we see that’s how it ends for
Ma Chiich and Juan). As with the opening formulae, this phrase marks the
end of the story proper, separating the literary speech of the performance
from that of the everyday world.
It merits pointing out that the ideology functioning in Bonilla Caamal’s
performance seems to differ from the story recounted by Peñalosa. In
Peñalosa’s chart he places the episodes of the watermelon, doll, and iron
as generally opening the cycle and as occurring in this order. Rather than
being a simple variation, the difference between the cycle as constructed
in Peñalosa’s chart and Bonilla Caamal’s telling is quite significant. The
watermelon episode, which corresponds to Juan’s eating the beans in
Bonilla Caamal’s version, “empieza con el conejo comiendo unas sandías
por dentro, les mete su excremento, y luego las tapa. El dueño del sandial
le regala una sandía a un cura o un amigo. Se enoja éste, y el dueño pone
un muñeco de cera . . . en el camino para atrapar al ladrón” (begins with
the rabbit eating some watermelons until they are hollow, filling them
with his excrement, and resealing them. The owner of the watermelon
patch gives a watermelon to a priest or a friend. The latter gets mad, and
the owner puts a wax doll in the path to catch the thief; Peñalosa 38). In
Peñalosa, then, the action is set into motion by the rabbit’s prank of refilling
the hollow watermelons with excrement, which results in the owner of the
patch building the man of wax. In Bonilla Caamal’s telling the rabbit, in
his own words and as he explains to the wax man, “kaxt in kuxtal” ([he’s]
come to make [his] living). Whereas the situation in Peñalosa’s formula-
tion corresponds roughly to our notions of crime and punishment, Bonilla
Caamal’s version erases any question of the rabbit’s original crime. As with
Ma Chiich, who comments that the beans in the ravaged bean patch are
also “tia’al in kaxtik in kuxtal” (are mine for my sustenance), Juan eats the
beans to sustain himself. They are not his, strictly speaking, but one cannot
fault him for, in his words, “making his living.” We are thus confronted by
a non-Western sense of morality, a concept of right and wrong tied more to
natural processes of life than to constructed moral hierarchies of authority.
We find this sense of right and wrong reflected in Juan Rabbit’s con-
frontation with the wax man. Rather than being a physical threat or a com-
petitor for food, the wax man represents an obstacle in the road that the
rabbit must circumvent in order to continue his pattern of daily life. Juan
textualizes his presence in the bean patch in terms of biological processes,
saying, “¡Tséelabaj tin beel! Tumen tene’ nikin kaxt in kuxtal. Wey yaan
u muul in ta’e’, we yaan u muul in wiixe’” (Get out of my way, because
I’ve come to make my living. This is where I take a dump, this is where I
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 115

take a leak). The other side of Juan’s assertion that “this is where I take a
dump, this is where I take a leak,” would be to ask where the wax man takes
a dump, where he takes a leak. Juan belongs in the bean patch because
his biological processes bind him to it while the wax man is out of place
because he has no such ties.
The rest of the story privileges the discursive agency Juan exercises to
overcome his adversaries, and yet this initial episode suggests the limits of
that agency. If we consider them to represent those in positions of hege-
monic authority, Ma Chiich and the puma represent power’s capacity to
interpellate subalterns as such. Discursively resignifying the terms of their
power, the rabbit subverts the hierarchies they seek to establish. By con-
trast, the power represented by the wax man cannot be overcome because it
operates as a response to subalternity, doubling resistance back onto itself.
A mute object incapable of speech, the wax man cannot be subverted
through ambiguity, revision, or repetition because he can neither initiate
a discourse that can be subverted nor give a response that can be undercut.
The wax man is an absence, a silence, a mirror that turns the Rabbit’s
power of subversion inside out. Instead of the Rabbit repeating others’
speech, in this episode he must repeat his own, a repetition which almost
leads to his undoing. The wax man’s muteness even gives way to Juan’s
only outburst of violence in the entire story. In Bonilla Caamal’s words, “Le
máako’ ma’ táan u núukik, [Juane’] ka’aj tu kóojchajtaj” (The man didn’t
answer, so Juan hit him). Limb by limb Juan becomes stuck until he hits
the wax man with his belly. Unable to subvert the man through language,
the rabbit finds himself trapped by his own attempt to overcome the wax
man through physical violence.
The story thus forwards a kind of subaltern resistance based on discur-
sive, as opposed to material, interventions, and one should not lose sight of
the fact that this is done through oral preformance. For example, after the
episode with the wax man, Ma Chiich locks Juan up and plans to eat him.
He asks for a last wish, however, telling her that he’s a great dancer and that
she will love his performance. She asks him several times whether or not he
will escape and he finally responds, “Ma’ tin púuts’ul chiich, ma’ táan” (I
won’t run away, Grandmother, never). As part of his dance, however, “Ku
bin paachnaj beya’, ku ka’aj suut, ku bin paachnaj beya’, ku ka’aj suut. Tu
síit Juan” (He goes over there, then he comes back, he runs over there,
then he comes back, Juan’s jumping around). That is, as part of the dance
Juan repeatedly disappears and reappears, escapes and returns, establishing
a pattern that sets the stage for subsequent episodes with the puma. As
we will see, Juan T’u’ul’s dance reflects the repetition and ambiguity of
 116 • Chapter 4

language on which he preys. For the time being, the dance enables him to
escape Ma Chiich and run off into the woods.
True to his word, Juan eventually “returns.” Having escaped, Juan runs
into his friend, a puma, whom he tells, “Yaan jump’éel chan báaxal in
kaxtmaj” (I have a game to show you), and the remainder of the story cen-
ters on the relationship between Juan and the puma and how the former
uses language to overcome the latter. The series of baaxalo’ob (games)
referenced by Juan both are and are not games. On the one hand, they are
games in the sense that Juan “plays” on the puma’s willingness to believe
that the rabbit possesses knowledge of games that the puma wants him to
reveal. Thus the activities Juan shows the puma are taken, at face value,
to be games. On the other, they are not games in the sense that Juan pro-
poses these activities as a way to escape the puma and live another day, the
games becoming subterfuges through which the rabbit exercises control
over those who could literally devour him. The first of these games leads
us back to the cage at the house of Ma Chiich and, like Juan’s dance,
centers on repetition. Entering the cage, Juan turns to the puma and tells
him, “Eske lela’, yaan a in a wa’alik ti’ le so’oya’, ka wa’alik ti’e’: ¡Kalabasoy,
je’abasoy! ¡Kalabasoy, je’abasoy! ¿Bix a wilik?” (All right, so then, you have
to take to cage door, you close the door, you open the door, you close the
door, you open the door. What do you think?) The puma, of course, locks
himself in, and Ma Chiich’s grandchildren, initially mistaking him for
Juan, ironically proclaim the rabbit’s forthrightness and his return. Coming
out to see the rabbit, Ma Chiich screams, “¡Paalele’ex ma’ Juani’! Juntúul,
juntúul ba’aba’al, jutntuul ba’abaal yaani’, ma’ Juani’” (Children, that’s
not Juan, that’s a monster! A monster is in there, it’s not Juan!), and tells
them to throw hot water on the helpless puma. Scalded, the puma breaks
the cage and runs into the forest. Through his “promise” to return and his
subsequent “game” with the puma, Juan successfully uses two potentially
deadly forces against one another. Not only does he use Ma Chiich to
wound the puma, but the puma also breaks the cage, ending any possibility
that Juan could be recaptured, held, and later cooked.
The puma later finds Juan, who denies that he is the rabbit in question
and tells the puma, “Jach ma’alob k-éet a bisikbaj. Ma’ unaj a jaantikeni’”
(We’re really good friends. You aren’t going to eat me). He repeats the
puma’s stated intention, “I am going to eat you,” in order to negate it, “You
aren’t going to eat me.” This repetition mirrors the original game in which
the puma opened and closed the cage. Without acknowledging that he is
the Juan Rabbit the puma wants, Juan strategically shifts control over the
dialogue from the puma and to himself. He contrasts eating with talking,
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 117

substituting discourse for physical violence and moving the puma onto his
terrain. After the puma restates his intentions of taking his revenge on the
rabbit, Juan says, “¡Jum! . . . ¿Wáa ka’aj a wil jump’éel chan báaxal ts’o’ok in
kaxtike? ¡Jats uts!” (Hmmm . . . or I could show you a great game I found),
this being the moment in which he assumes control over the puma. Again,
the “game” saves Juan’s life. He leads the puma to a cave where Juan shows
the puma how to hold up the roof and how to play music with the cave’s
little “bells.” Juan runs off and the puma, growing restless, rings the “bells”
only to find that they are wasps’ nests.
When he finds Juan again they engage in the same dance-game of rep-
etition that we have already seen. This time Juan says he is gathering hay
to build a house. After the puma reiterates his intentions to eat Juan, Juan
responds, “Ma’, ma’. Jáan kuchej le su’uka’” (No, you aren’t going to eat
me, help me gather hay), and he places a bundle of hay on the puma’s
back. Once they are on their way, Juan manages to get behind the puma
and set fire to the hay, burning the puma and giving Juan another oppor-
tunity to escape into the woods. In the final episode the puma finds Juan
and Juan manages to convince the puma not to eat him one final time.
The game hinges on going up and down a tree. The puma starts playing
and Juan runs off. However, when the puma gets down, he goes in search
of the rabbit, and Juan, “janta’ab tumen koh. Beeytúun ts’o’okik ti’ le koho’,
Ma Chiich, yéetel Juan. Janta’ab tumen koh” (gets eaten by the puma. And
so it ends for the puma, Ma Chiich, and Juan, who’s eaten by the puma).
The abrupt ending conforms to Yucatec literary tradition, and the simplest
if not also the most common way of ending a story is to state, “Ts’o’okij”
(It’s over).
I would argue that the tsikbal about Juan Rabbit can be seen as an
interpretive principle through which we can analyze the discursive agency
of Yucatec Maya storytelling. The rabbit himself is a trope for the exercise
of such agency in the face of power, and his game of repetition points
toward the repetition of telling and retelling, performing and reperform-
ing stories. “If you’ll let me dance” and “let me show you a game” are
pretexts to buy time and stay the hand of power. As repeated throughout
the story, the main charge against Juan is that he has lied to Ma Chiich
and the puma, not that he has harmed them. And yet many of the “lies”
he tells are not strictly speaking lies. As Slovoj Žižek notes with regard to
what he calls “Two Hegelian Jokes,” here Juan, “through his deception . . .
has kept his word” (65). He does return to Ma Chiich, but it is in order
to put the puma in his place. He does show the puma a series of “games,”
but for Juan these are opportunities to escape. By dancing back and forth,
 118 • Chapter 4

replacing “I am going to eat you” with “you don’t want to eat me” and
perpetrating other similar substitutions like the puma for the rabbit and the
“game” for the game, through his use of doublings and repetitions, Juan
exploits the liminal area between signifier and signified. Another game
for the puma means another escape for Juan. Hence Juan’s story points to
how hegemonic discourse can be turned back on itself and the terms of
subjugation resignified by those in states of subalternity. Juan could even
be said to represent Yucatec discursive agency insofar as storytelling is, at
its heart, always a dynamic form of repetition.
This reading is reinforced when we return to Juan Rabbit’s encounter
with the wax man at the very beginning of the story. As I have already
suggested, the wax man represents the limits of subaltern agency as his
very muteness precludes any sort of subversion. The rabbit falls into the
trap because the wax man will not respond. The rabbit’s only option is
brute force, and this results in his capture. Put another way, the lesson of
Juan T’u’ul is that one cannot confront power with power but must instead
look to shift the terms through which power establishes its hierarchies. We
will now turn to another trickster story, the story of “The Waiter and the
Gringo,” to illustrate how Bonilla Caamal uses the trickster template to
structure a story based on contemporary Yucatec Maya reality.

Maya Modernity: The Setting of “The Waiter

and the Gringo”

Although they use different language, both Peter Hervik and Quetzil Casta-
ñeda argue for the existence of a “Maya modernity” that confounds non-
Maya preconceptions about what constitutes cultural, economic, political,
and social development in the early twenty-first century (Hervik 163–89;
Castañeda 21). In other words, the Maya are not in need of moderniza-
tion but are subjects who occupy the same space/time and modernity as
non-Mayas. The notion of a “Maya modernity” brings us back to Nancy
Farris’s “central core of concepts and principles” insofar as the evolution
of what we can call an other modernity reflects a drive to privilege one’s
own cultural values in one’s reception and interpretation of modern hege-
monic culture. To paraphrase Partha Chatterjee, this is a process in which
Mayas are indeed producers of their own modernity despite the fact that
no one in the global village sees them as such. The notion of a “Maya
modernity” therefore enables us to better understand the nuanced agency
of Yucatec Maya cultural practices like storytelling. Indeed, storytellers use
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 119

the “central core of concepts and principles” to structure their textualiza-

tions of contemporary reality, thereby demonstrating a pro-Maya ideology
that, as I demonstrated in the introduction to this chapter, has character-
ized Maya texts from the colonial era to the present. The “Story of Juan
T’u’ul” partakes of this ideology on two distinct levels, first in its Yucatec
Maya re-narrativization of a shared Maya and African historical memory,
and second in its underlying message of discursive resistance to hegemonic
forms of power. If Juan T’u’ul represents the tradition of such agency in
oral literary texts, how can we then use this figure to interpret cases of
Yucatec Maya agency in the present? How does such a “tradition” speak to
the existence of and contribute to the production of a “Maya modernity”?
These questions will be my focus in my examination of the story “The
Waiter and the Gringo.”
Before entering into the story, however, there a few points I should make
with regard to this story and its material context. The town of Santa Elena,
where this story was recorded, is located at a key position in the Yucatán
Peninsula between the ruins of Uxmal and other, slightly less famous ruins
on the circuit of the Puuc Route. As such, residents living in the town have
more access to jobs in the tourist trade and at archeological excavations
than do Maya living in many other parts of the peninsula. This access does
not mean, however, that they are free from intense economic pressures,
as these jobs seldom pay significantly more than the minimum wage in
Mexico. Rooms in the Hotel Hacienda Uxmal, the setting for this story,
range from 69 to 375 US dollars a night in the off-season, with those prices
being more during the high season from November to January.10 The men
and women who work in these settings have daily experiences in which
they come into contact with Mexican and non-Mexican others under con-
ditions of extreme economic, cultural, and racial inequality. “The Waiter
and the Gringo” offers a reflection on and an interpretation of how one can
manage such situations. In addition, rather than being simply “true,” this
story is one which, in Lord’s words, is certainly “told well and thus truly
told” (29). The story’s protagonist, whom I have met and whose name I
have redacted from recordings, is a friend of Bonilla Caamal’s who lives in
Santa Elena. Due to the events of this story, he is something of a local leg-
end. In conversation he has told me that the story’s plot, as retold here, is for
the most part true though somewhat “exagerado” (exaggerated). However,
and I must reiterate, factual information such as whether or not we believe
the story is secondary to the telling of the tale. As Bonilla Caamal suggests,
this is not simply an entertaining story in which the waiter takes up the
mantle of a trickster such as Juan Rabbit. Rather, the story textualizes the
 120 • Chapter 4

struggle for and the actualization of Yucatec Maya agency in a world rife
with asymmetrical relations of power. Via this performance Bonilla Caamal
as storyteller actualizes the power of this agency for his audience.

Service with a Smile: The Waiter and the Gringo

Bonilla Caamal and I made this recording early on in our collaboration.

Wanting to use it in the classroom immediately on my return to the United
States, I requested that we record it in Spanish. As hinted at in the English
translation, we nonetheless began the recording in Maya for reasons dis-
cussed later on. More so than with Juan Rabbit, you will notice this story
captures the spirit of the story as tsikbal, this owing to my being much more
proficient in Spanish than Maya.

me: I want you to tell me the story about the man working at Uxmal.
bonilla caamal: All right. In Maya? In Spanish?
me: First in Spanish.
bonilla caamal: In Spanish. OK, I want to tell you what happened
in our workplace. Because I worked at the Hotel Hacienda Uxmal. It’s
the hotel located right at the entrance of the ruins of Uxmal, the archeo-
logical site, I don’t know if you’ve been there.
So, at the time I was working there as a waiter. When I was there, I
learned carpentry, painting, waiting in the restaurant, and so I was work-
ing with a waiter named [name redacted]. So I was working with that
friend of mine, well, he told me what happened the day before because
I had had the day off.
So, he was working there and the next day told me what happened
because sometimes “Hey, how did it go? How, how was yesterday? What
happened? Were there any problems?” and “No, everything was fine,
just this happened.”
“And what happened?” and we started talking about what had hap-
pened at work.
“Well, I had this disaster,” he tells me. “This one disaster . . .”
“So, what was it?”
“Well, I am going to explain it to you, tell you what happened yester-
day here at work. A group of thirty people arrived, thirty gringos, from the
US, and they want to eat, their food was served, we gave them everything,
and one of them asked for some coffee. So, one of the gringos asked
for a coffee.”
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 121

“So I,” the guy tells me, that is my friend from work, he tells me,
“well, what I did is I made the coffee, like always. So, I served the entire
group, but this guy, I took him his coffee, I served it to him, ‘Sir, here is
your coffee.’”
“So, I went back to take away the plates . . .”
But this guy takes his cup and drinks. But, when he drinks it, he tells
the waiter, “Excuse me, Mr. Waiter, I ordered coffee. What you brought
me is cold. No,” he started speaking English even, “It’s not hot, not hot,”
he says, “Not hot,” he says, “Not hot.”
“Hotter,” he says to the waiter.
Well, so the waiter says, “OK, sorry, sir, I’ll heat it up right away.”
So that’s what he did, my friend, he took it, he heated it up some
more. He heated up to twice of what he normally did, he put it back in
the cup, and served it again to the tourist.
So, this guy tries the coffee again, he tries it again. He says, “Oh, not
hot, not hot, not hot, not hot,” he says. “It’s not hot,” he says.
“Oh, man, what am I going to do,” says the waiter, “if the coffee is
already hot? What do I do, what do I do? If I don’t get it right, the tourist
will complain. Then, they’ll fire me. What do I do? Ah, I’ve got it! I’ll
do this . . .”
And he takes it again, and the cup, he pours the coffee out of the cup,
he turns it upside down on the burner on the stove, and heats it up. He
heats it for like five minutes, until the lip of the cup turned red. And then
the coffee, he heated that up, too, yeah, he put it on to boil. And the
cup was even red. And he poured the coffee into the cup and took it to
the tourist.
“Sorry, sir, here is your coffee.”
“Oh, thank you” says the tourist, says the gringo.
He puts it up to his mouth to see if it is actually hot, see, this is already
the third time, “This isn’t a game anymore” is what the tourist would say.
So, what do you think happened?
me: I don’t know. Tell me.
bonilla caamal: Well, what happened is, on putting the cup to
his lips, from here to here all the flesh of his lips burned onto the rim
of the cup.
And then the gringo says, “Oh, hot, hot, hot, hot,” that is “hot, hot,”
well, it should be heated to the point that he burns himself like that. But
he said, “Hot, hot, hot.” That is to say hot, really hot.
Well, he didn’t complain because he was the only one to blame.
Because the coffee was reheated two times and he kept saying, “not hot,
 122 • Chapter 4

not hot,” and then even the cup was reheated and his lips got burned.
What do you think?
me: Well, the waiter had no other choice.
bonilla caamal: The waiter, well, he had to do that. There was no
other choice, right? That’s what happens where we work. In the hotels,
it’s what happens in the restaurants. All these things, well, they happened
to us, or to my friend who told me “what happened yesterday, how did
it go?”
Well, he told me this funny story, about what happened to the Ameri-
can. Well, this happens. It’s better not to demand things, right?
me: That’s right.
bonilla caamal: It’s the truth.
me: To demand too much.
bonilla caamal: Yeah, too much, oh, so what is going to happen?
me: Exactly.
bonilla caamal: Well, one of these days the same thing could hap-
pen to us. Well, we shouldn’t be so demanding, yeah? If something isn’t
served right, just “It’s OK” and that’s it. Keep cool so that what happened
to that one, the tourist, doesn’t happen to us. That’s it.
Well, that’s what we learned one of the days we were working at the
Hotel Hacienda Uxmal, Pablo.
me: Ma’alob.11

Making a Modern Tradition: Storytelling the

Twenty-First Century

So, how does this story textualize Maya discursive agency in the context of
a trickster like Juan Rabbit? Interestingly enough, one finds that Bonilla
Caamal exercises this agency from the outset of the recording. As men-
tioned earlier, when I told him that I wanted to do a recording of the story
in Spanish to use in my classes in the United States, he told me that we had
to record at least part of it in Maya. According to Bonilla Caamal, otherwise
no one would believe that he was Maya and this would reinforce the belief
that contemporary Mayas are not “real Mayas” in the sense that they lack
a language, culture, etc. So, we begin the recording in Maya by my asking
him to tell the story, he asks if we should do it in Maya or Spanish, and he
agrees to tell the tale in Spanish.
As with the longer story of Juan Rabbit, “The Waiter and the Gringo”
has characteristics of metanarrative, though in this case these are a bit more
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 123

self-conscious. Instead of beginning the story in medias res, Bonilla Caamal

begins the story by saying, “quiero comentarle lo que pasó en el centro de
trabajo” (I want to tell you what happened where we work), giving us the
story’s geographical and social background and saying that the story he’s
about to tell comes out of the stories that the workers at the Hotel Hacienda
Uxmal exchange after work. Thus, although the story may not be traditional
in the same sense as the story of Juan Rabbit, Bonilla Caamal takes pains
to relate the story back to a tradition of Maya storytelling. As to the origin of
the story itself, Bonilla Caamal claims that the waiter “estuvo allí trabajando
y al día siguiente me platicó lo que le pasó porque a veces ‘Oye, ¿cómo le
fue, qué, qué tal ayer? ¿Qué pasó? ¿Hubo problema?’ y ‘No, hubo tranquilo,
nada más me pasó eso . . .’” (was working there and the next day told me
what happened because sometimes “Hey, how did it go? How, how was yes-
terday? What happened? Were there any problems?” and “No, everything
was fine, just this happened . . .”).12 The waiter who is the storyteller within
the story supplies a moment of back-and-forth suspense, and finally states,
“Pues, te lo voy a relatar, voy a comentar lo que me pasó ayer en el centro
de trabajo” (Well, I am going to explain it to you, tell you what happened
yesterday here at work). In doing so, Bonilla Caamal the storyteller quite
literally assumes the waiter’s voice by having the waiter as storyteller repeat
a version of the same opening formula that he, Bonilla Caamal, used to
open the recorded performance. That is, Bonilla Caamal is once again self-
consciously referring to this story as a story within a story, part of a pattern
and tradition of tellings and retellings. For the sake of readability and given
this intersection of voices, I will refer to Bonilla Caamal as the storyteller
throughout, even as he is telling the story of the waiter’s telling of the story.
The metatext deals with the interactions that the waiter has with “un
grupo de treinta personas, treinta gringos, vinieron de EEUU” (a group
of thirty people, thirty gringos, who had come from the United States).
They eat, and after the meal the waiter serves one of them coffee. Bonilla
Caamal’s physical gestures at this point in the recording emphasize the
efficient formality with which people working in the international tourist
trade are expected to execute such tasks. Having worked at the Hotel Haci-
enda Uxmal himself, Bonilla Caamal is well schooled in this sort of role
playing. The problems begin when this same man calls the waiter aside
and requests another coffee, explaining that “‘pues te pedí café. Lo que
me trajiste está helado. No,’ empezó a decir hasta inglés, ‘It’s not hot, not
hot,’ dice, ‘No caliente’ dice, ‘No caliente’” (‘I ordered coffee. What you
brought me is cold. No,’ he started speaking English even, ‘It’s not hot, not
hot,’ he says, ‘Not hot,’ he says, ‘Not hot’). As retold by Bonilla Caamal, this
 124 • Chapter 4

exchange between the waiter and the gringo is particularly telling given
that many indigenous peoples in the Americas must out of necessity be able
to communicate effectively in and across multiple languages. The waiter,
a Yucatec Maya hailing from a small town in Yucatán, Mexico, must
speak Spanish and a little English just to hold down a relatively unskilled
job as waiter.
However, we are not remiss in asking what, exactly, the repetition of this
multilingualism does in the current context. Bonilla Caamal says, in Span-
ish, that the gringo complains that the coffee is “not hot,” then switches
to English to emphasize the gringo’s frustration, and then translates the
gringo’s complaint back into Spanish. His virtuoso reenactment of this
scene places him in the same language community as the protagonist, the
waiter. That is, he demonstrates that he, too, possesses at least a working
knowledge of rudimentary English. We must, however, also see this in
terms of the performance at the beginning of the video in which Bonilla
Caamal self-consciously uses Yucatec Maya as a way to signify his Maya-
ness. This back and forth thus subtly recognizes a multilingual audience
while also translating these phrases, in real time, for monolingual listeners.
Without prompting, through the act of storytelling Bonilla Caamal thus
steps into the role of cultural broker. This dance back and forth between
languages recalls Juan T’u’ul’s original gambit to get out of his cage, sug-
gesting a confusion of not just tongues but also of signs. In turn, this confu-
sion opens up a space for exercise of Maya discursive agency.
However, we should first make an explicit outline of the power dynamic
at work in the story. Altogether the waiter brings three different cups of cof-
fee to the table, the initial cup and two others, each being hotter than the
last. In short, the tourist requests another cup of coffee, one that is “hotter”
to some degree than the previous ones and the waiter must comply. The
protagonist makes the stakes of these requests clear when, as he ponders
what to do next, he says, “Ah, chispa, ¿qué hago? . . . pues si está caliente
esa cosa y ¿qué hago, y qué hago? Si no, se va a quejar el turista. Pues me
van a sacar del trabajo. ¿Y qué hago?” (Oh, man, what am I going to do . . .
if the coffee is already hot? What do I do, what do I do? If I don’t get it right
the tourist will complain. Then, they’ll fire me. What do I do?). In other
words, his employment depends on his ability to please the tourists who are
guests at the hotel, in this case the gringo. Despite the fact that the coffee,
in the waiter’s estimation, is already hot, he must find a way to comply with
the gringo’s request. Otherwise he, quite literally, stands to lose his job.
The waiter retrieves the first cup of coffee and takes it back to the
kitchen where “Lo calentó más, el doble de lo normal, lo volvió a poner
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 125

en la taza, y lo volvió a servir al turista” (He heated it up to twice of what is

normal, put it back in the cup, and served it to the tourist again). Having
tried the new cup, the tourist responds, “‘Oh, not hot, not hot, not hot, no
caliente,’ dice. ‘Sr., no caliente,’ dice.” Again, we have the same back-and-
forth language game as before, but with a marked difference. Whereas
before Bonilla Caamal cited the gringo’s speech as prefaced with niceties
(“Sr., disculpe”) and a request for “hotter” coffee, here his performance
of the gringo’s speech appropriates the gringo’s language, reproducing it
and ridiculing the request. We, the audience, already know that the coffee
is twice as hot as it should be, but Bonilla Caamal’s physical, vigorously
comic disapproval of the coffee and the inflections in his speech lend force
to his emphatic claim, stated in English, that the coffee is “not hot, not
hot, not hot, not hot.” This repetition, in effect, claims the speech for
Maya discourse by casting the gringo’s discourse in an ironic light. Bonilla
Caamal the storyteller, I the listener in the video, and in addition whoever
might be watching the video, all know the coffee to be hot, far hotter than
normal, in fact. Bonilla Caamal’s use of irony here is, in Wayne Booth’s
words, “inherently shareable” (17). As such, it places all of us in an ethical
position from which we recognize the absurdity if not outright injustice of
the repeated requests for hotter and hotter coffee.
For the waiter in the story, however, future employment depends on his
compliance. Like Juan Rabbit in his verbal combat with Ma Chiich and
the puma, he must think on his feet and “fool” the tourist. Having already
heated the second cup to twice what it should be normally, he repeatedly
asks himself “What do I do? What do I do?” The solution, of course, is to
make the coffee very, very hot. The waiter “quitó el café de la taza, y la
taza así, lo embrocó en la lumbre de la estufa, entonces ya calentó la taza.
Como cinco minutos la calentó, quedó hasta rojo alrededor de la taza. Y
luego el café, lo puso a calentar también, ya pues el café hirviendo” (took
it again, and the cup, he poured the coffee out of the cup, he turned it
upside down on the burner on the stove, and heated it up. He heated it
for like five minutes, until the rim of the cup turned red. And then the
coffee, he heated that up, too, yeah, he put it on to boil). Again, regardless
of their actuality, the waiter’s actions fit the dramatic arc of the story as if
corresponding in a sense to Newton’s Third Law of Motion. The gringo’s
claim that a cup of coffee that has been heated up to twice its normal
temperature is not hot can only be balanced out with a solution that is
equally ridiculous and yet, at the same time, fits the story’s larger logic. In
turning the cup into a glowing crucible, the waiter appropriates the gringo’s
words hot and caliente and resignifies them with an entirely new meaning.
 126 • Chapter 4

Whereas the previous two cups were deemed insufficiently “hot,” the third
will leave no room for doubt.
Given that Bonilla Caamal the storyteller has situated us as members in
an ironic interpretive community, he pauses the story at the very moment
the gringo tourist brings the heated cup to his lips. Bonilla Caamal states
that, “‘ya no es juego eso,’ dirá el turista” (“this isn’t a game anymore,” is
what the tourist will say) to underscore the seriousness of the situation and
then turns to me, asking, “¿Qué crees que pasó?” (So, what do you think
happened?). At this moment we in the audience have no idea whether
Bonilla Caamal the storyteller or the waiter, the storyteller within the tale,
is speaking. On the video Bonilla Caamal makes this dramatic pause in
the action to once again poke fun at the tourist and put an ironic spin
on his words. Having already shown us the tourist’s displeasure, he now
reminds us of that displeasure and its potentially serious consequences by
stating that, in the same pause, the tourist would be thinking “this isn’t a
game anymore.” However, as members of this ironic community we know
just the opposite to be true. That is, in heating the cup up to the point
that it was glowing red, the waiter is giving the tourist exactly what he
has demanded but not what he has been expecting. We can recall, for
example, Juan T’u’ul’s promise to return and the fact that he returns only
to put the puma in his place. Thus the moment before the gringo gets his
due, Bonilla Caamal pauses as if to laugh at the inevitable consequences
of the tourist’s demands before these have played out. As members of this
ironic community, we already get the joke, and we are, in a certain sense,
in league with the waiter. The question “¿Qué crees que pasó?” is more
rhetorical than actual, as we have been party to the action all along. More-
over, as I had personally heard the story several times prior to this particular
performance, I had no doubt about what was to happen next.
Inevitably, “pues lo que pasó, al poner eso a sus labios, toda la carne de
los labios de aquí se quedó en la borde de la taza” (well, what happened
is, on putting the cup to his lips, from here to here all the flesh of his lips
burned onto the rim of the cup). In textualizing the gringo’s immediate
reaction, Bonilla Caamal quickly resituates his apparent surprise within the
context of the gringo’s ongoing demand and the slippage in the meanings
of the words hot and caliente. “Y al decir el gringo así ‘Oh, hot, hot, hot,
hot’ pues ‘caliente, caliente,’ pues no va a calentar hasta toda la carne se
quemó el Sr. Pero dijo, ‘Hot, hot, hot.’ Quiere decir que está caliente,
calientísimo” (And then the gringo says, “Oh, hot, hot, hot, hot,” that is
“hot, hot,” well, it shouldn’t be heated to the point that he burns himself
like that. But he said, “Hot, hot, hot.” That is to say hot, extremely hot).
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 127

The cup should not be heated up like it was, and Bonilla Caamal states
this explicitly. However, the nature of the gringo’s demand and its poten-
tially dire consequences for the waiter mean that this demand must be met
unquestioningly and as quickly as possible. Bonilla Caamal reiterates, “he
said ‘hot, hot, hot,’” translating this demand back into Spanish as “caliente,
calientísimo” or “hot, extremely hot.” In other words, the gringo asked for
exactly what he received: an exceedingly hot cup of coffee.

Looking at Literature Looking at the World

Bringing the story to an end, Bonilla Caamal claims that, “no se quejó el
turista porque a él vino la culpa. Porque dos veces a recalentar y dice que,
‘not hot, not hot,’ y luego a recalentar hasta la taza y se le quemó todos sus
labios” (well, he didn’t complain because he was the only one to blame.
Because the coffee was reheated two times and he kept saying “not hot,
not hot,” and then even the cup was reheated and his lips got burned). In
this passage we see that as Bonilla Caamal begins to shift from the “story
itself” as told by the waiter to his own storyteller’s interpretation of it, he
deftly asserts that the gringo acknowledges, through his silence, that he
was in the wrong. In doing so, he again ironizes the position of power that
the gringo tourist enjoys over the waiter. Indeed, the threat of the tourist’s
complaining is the very thing that drives the waiter to reheat the coffee
and ultimately to burn the tourist. However, burning the lips off of the
hotel’s guest is certainly more of an offense than bringing that same guest
cold coffee, and yet the tourist is literally silenced and does not complain.
Rather, “he didn’t complain because he was the only one to blame.” This
bit of narrative speculation on the reason for the tourist’s lack of complaint
marks the key moment in my interpretation of the text and represents
a moment of mutual recognition and undoing of the dynamic between
hegemonic and subaltern.
Through Bonilla Caamal’s performance the story becomes a narrative
about how power can spring back on itself as in the episode with the wax
man in the previous story. The gringo’s repeated request for hot coffee is
less a demand for service than it is a demand for the waiter’s unquestioning
complicity and subjugation to the relationship of power that exists between
those who participate in the international tourist trade. That is, the gringo
seeks to fix the waiter in a relationship in which the waiter, without con-
scious thought and certainly without questioning, executes the gringo’s
demands. By executing the actions demanded by the gringo, the waiter via
 128 • Chapter 4

the performance of his duties opens up a space for his exercise of agency.
Although “hot” and “caliente” are spoken by the tourist, the waiter’s repeti-
tion of them co-opts them and open up a space for him to exercise agency.
We could perhaps reframe his response by using an oft-employed formula,
saying, “If the gringo wants hot coffee then the waiter will give him hot
coffee.” In other words, by complying with the literal letter of the demands,
the waiter challenges his subaltern status and exercises agency.
When Bonilla Caamal asks me what I think of the story, and I respond
that the waiter had no other choice, Bonilla Caamal reinserts himself into
the story, saying

El Sr., pues, tiene que hacer así. ¿No queda otra, no? Es lo que está
pasando en los centros de trabajo. En los hoteles, es lo que pasa en los
restaurants. Todas las cosas pues, a nosotros nos pasó, o al compañero, me
platicó y “¿qué tal de ayer, cómo le fue?” Pues me platicó su chiste, lo que
pasó al americano. Pues, eso pasa. Mejor es no exigir, ¿no?

The waiter, well, he had to do that. There was no other choice, right?
That’s what happens where we work. In the hotels, it’s what happens
in the restaurants. All these things, well, they happened to us, or to my
friend who told me “what happened yesterday, how did it go?” Well, he
told me this funny story, about what happened to the American. Well,
this happens. It’s better not to demand, right?

These words bring us back to the posture from the beginning of the story as
Bonilla Caamal claims personal knowledge of the events and situates the
story as having originated from within a tradition of tellings and retellings
among workers in the tourist trade. He turns my previous comment that
the waiter “had no other choice” into the rhetorical question, “There was
no other choice, right?” and then proceeds to turn this apparent lack of
choice into a lesson on the exercise of power.
In other words, having just resignified and ironized the words of his
interlocutor, in this case me, he then theorizes a role reversal among
those who demand and those who serve. He says, “Un día de esos nos
puede pasar también a nosotros” (Well, one of these days the same thing
could happen to us). This statement is not so much a value judgment
condemning the gringo and exalting the Maya as it represents the recogni-
tion of the consequences of a demand for absolute obedience. In saying
that we should remember “the same thing could happen to us,” Bonilla
Caamal imagines us into the position of the gringo. Tied in with the story’s
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 129

emphasis on repetition and the conditioned parroting of subaltern subjects

that hegemony demands, we are reminded that we should not repeat the
error that the gringo commits. “Pues si no sirve algo bien, pues ‘está bien,
gracias’ y es todo. Pues tranquilo para que no pase como a aquel, al turista”
(If something isn’t served right, just “That’s fine, thank you” and that’s all.
Keep cool so that what happened to that one, the tourist, doesn’t happen
to us). In other words, given the pressures already exerted on subaltern
subjects, in this case the possibility that the waiter could lose his job over
a cold cup of coffee, those in positions of power should let things slide
and opt instead for understanding and mutual respect. Otherwise one’s
demands can double back on one because of their absurdity. That is, a
repeated demand for a cup of hot coffee will eventually be fulfilled with a
hot cup of hot coffee.
Closing the story, Bonilla Caamal says, “Entonces es lo que aprendimos
en un día de esos trabajos en Hotel Hacienda Uxmal, Pablo” (Well, that’s
what we learned one of the days we were working at the Hotel Hacienda
Uxmal, Pablo). The “we” referred to here is, as above, inclusive of Bonilla
Caamal and the Maya community as well as myself, those who may view
the video, and even you, the reader of this text. This advice is for “us” all,
and this is a lesson “we” all can learn from this story, and contained within
this ending are several points that bear directly on arguments about oral
literature from previous chapters. Most importantly, through this closing
Bonilla Caamal asserts oral literature’s function as a carrier of knowledge,
and he situates this function as being pertinent to contemporary reality in
two ways. First, as Bonilla Caamal has self-consciously tied the story to a
living Yucatec Maya literary tradition, the act of recounting the story recasts
that tradition in the present. As the storyteller embodies oral tradition and
transmits its knowledge, he brings that tradition in its entirety to bear on the
present. The renarration of the waiter’s experience at the hotel becomes
something from which everyone can learn. Second, as the textualization of
events from a Maya perspective, oral literature also textualizes the possibil-
ity of Maya interpretive agency in the face of hegemonic culture. Although
a subaltern perspective, the knowledge it conveys is dialogic in nature and
contains lessons for those who exercise power and those who lack it. That
is, rather than casting the waiter as the trickster who burns the gringo and
simply laughs at his expense, Bonilla Caamal textualizes these events as
an ironic, almost zenlike lesson on how people should deal with situations
of extreme inequality.
As I have referred to throughout this section, Bonilla Caamal’s textu-
alization of “The Waiter and the Gringo” self-consciously refers back to
 130 • Chapter 4

Yucatec oral tradition in general. I have also stated that a subtext of this ref-
erentiality is an understated relationship between the protagonist and other
Yucatec Maya tricksters like Juan Rabbit. There is nothing “natural” about
this relationship insofar as we must consider it to be an effect of Bonilla
Caamal’s literary textualization of the story. In other words, in his retelling
of the story, Bonilla Caamal avails himself of the figure of the trickster
from previous stories in order to provide himself with a template for the
waiter’s actions. As Juan Rabbit’s tricks and deviance arise from a need to
escape the grasp of power, so do the waiter’s. We are not confronted by an
amoral world devoid of ethical boundaries but rather a world in which right
and wrong are openly acknowledged as an effect of relationships between
people. Given that both Ma Chiich and the puma want to eat Juan, we
can hardly stand in judgment of Juan’s actions. His goal is self-preservation.
Similarly, since the waiter confronts the loss of his livelihood over a cup
of coffee, we cannot condemn him for giving the gringo exactly what the
gringo wants. The character of the waiter in the story must be read in rela-
tion to and as constituting the continuance of Yucatec literary tradition. It is
the type of story that reconstitutes that tradition in the present and, in doing
so, constitutes one way that Yucatec Mayas produce a Maya modernity.
Bonilla Caamal’s telling of “The Waiter and the Gringo” highlights the
production of this modernity as well as how Yucatec Mayas, in textualizing
a discourse about their material reality, use the “core principles and values”
found in their literary tradition in order to exercise cultural control over their
relations with non-Mayas. In using the figure of the trickster as a herme-
neutic principle, Bonilla Caamal’s telling of “The Waiter and the Gringo”
makes sense of these inequalities and its protagonist’s attempt to deal with
them in Maya terms. One can imagine that the tourist has a far different ver-
sion of events, but in Bonilla Caamal’s story the fact that the tourist does not
complain implies a tacit acknowledgement of his own guilt. That, the story
tells us, is what the tourist thinks. This acknowledgment necessarily entails
a buttressing of the worldview expressed in the story, an ideological posi-
tion that Bonilla Caamal discursively inserts into the thoughts of the tourist
himself. The repeated use of porque (because) in the statement, “Pues, no
se quejó el turista. Porque a él vino la culpa. Porque dos veces a recalentar”
(Well, he didn’t complain because he was the only one to blame. Because
the coffee was reheated two times) signals the presence of what Bakhtin
calls pseudo-objective motivation, “one of the manifold ways of concealing
another’s speech in hybrid constructions” (305). In other words, the logic
of the sentence is that if the tourist did not complain it was because he felt
guilty about his repeated demand and came to realize its absurdity.
 “I’ll tell you the story . . .” • 131

Ultimately, the story thus reasserts the value of Maya worldviews in the
context of the contemporary world. I stress a plurality of such worldviews
given that Bonilla Caamal himself is a single man who yet embodies a
generalized and generalizable Maya performative tradition. The gringo, the
global symbol par excellence of progress and industry, is shown not to pos-
sess all of the proper qualities of global living, becoming an object lesson in
how not to treat others. As a story within a larger Yucatec performative tradi-
tion, the story serves a function similar to modes of ritual humor analyzed
by Victoria Bricker in which “Indians ridicule Ladino values and Ladino
claims to superiority” (163). By giving the story this frame, essentially using
this story to dramatize the struggle for cultural control, Bonilla Caamal
rejects the logic of the system the gringo represents and substitutes his
own perspective. The story reassesses any justification that power may have
while implying the existence of possible Maya alternatives to such hierar-
chies. The story itself is not Bonilla Caamal’s but, as he states more than
once, a story told to him by the waiter, and stories just like this one are told
and retold among the men and women who work at the Hotel Hacienda
Uxmal. Tellingly, although the gringo arrives with a group, he is the only
member of that group that participates in the story’s action. We thus have
the many juxtaposed against the one, a communal voice and a representa-
tive communal story set against a singular voice and a singular demand.
The key to undoing such a situation, as suggested by Bonilla Caamal, lies
in the acknowledgement of the other’s humanity, recognizing the pressures
such people are under to comply with every whim and demand of their
superiors, and finally having a kind of solidarity them. If things are not
properly served, those of us in a position of power should yet be grateful
for the service we receive and let things go. After all, the decentering of
such hierarchies is in our own best interests as rigid insistence on their
maintenance means that we run the risk of our power doubling back on
us. In Bonilla Caamal’s words, what happened to the gringo is a lesson and
we should not forget that “Pues, un día de esos nos puede pasar también
a nosotros” (Well, one of these days the same thing could happen to us).

Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates how two stories told by Mariano Bonilla Caamal,
a Yucatec Maya storyteller living in Santa Elena, contribute to the Maya col-
lective enterprise of survival. Through a comparative analysis of the “Story
of Juan Rabbit” and “The Waiter and the Gringo,” we have seen how Maya
 132 • Chapter 4

storytellers use storytelling as a mode of cultural control and thus a form

of subaltern interpretive agency, something that has been seen from the
colonial period to the present. First, I have shown how two distinct cultural
groups, enslaved Africans and conquered Yucatec Mayas, used storytelling
as a way of establishing a transcultural dialogue. The results of this dialogue
and its subversive message resound with every retelling of the story in the
twenty-first century. We then saw how storytellers employ the tradition of
tricksters like Juan Rabbit in their textualizations of contemporary Maya
literature like “The Waiter and the Gringo.” The storyteller brings Yucatec
Maya traditions to bear on the present in such a way that, even in extreme
situations like the hotel in “The Waiter and the Gringo,” Mayas are able to
successfully interpret their relationships with the non-Maya world on equal
terms. In other words, storytellers can use their stories to contest their rela-
tionship with hegemonic culture and exercise a degree of agency over how
their interactions with that culture are interpreted within Yucatec Maya
communities.
Storytelling is living tradition in Yucatec Maya communities. More-
over, storytelling continues a tradition of Yucatec Maya discursive agency
through which Mayas interpret their relationships with the non-Maya
worlds according to Maya values. We can state unequivocally that when
contemporary Yucatec Maya authors frame their texts as being told, that
is, spoken by a storyteller, they are not representing a residual orality or
contemporary folklore. Rather, they are appealing to an ongoing tradition
of interpretation and agency through which Yucatec Mayas have sustained
their culture for more than five hundred years. Having already examined
the storyteller in folkloric and contemporary oral texts, we are now pre-
pared to explore how these authors use the storyteller in their own works.
How do the storytellers in their written works participate in this oral tradi-
tion? How do they deviate from it? Most important, to what extent do these
written texts participate in the same counterhegemonic mode of Yucatec
Maya interpretation found in the performance of oral texts? These ques-
tions will guide our discussion of works by contemporary female Yucatec
Maya authors in the next chapter.

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 five

Telling Maya Modernity

The Works of María Luisa Góngora Pacheco,
Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and
Briceida Cuevas Cob

As outlined in the previous chapter, Yucatec Maya storytelling must be con-

sidered an episteme, and stories such as “The Story of Juan Rabbit” contain
the formulae, tropes, and narrative structures that serve as a basis from which
to articulate performances of new stories like “The Waiter and the Gringo.”
Overemphasis on the word tradition in the expression “oral tradition” thus
occludes the fact that this tradition remains a viable mechanism through
which Yucatec Maya and other indigenous communities understand the
modernity we all share. It should come as no surprise, then, that many
Yucatec Maya authors have adopted the position of the storyteller or empha-
sized acts of storytelling to construct their own written literary works. I argue
that works that exhibit these tendencies do so in order to mobilize Latin
letters in the service of Yucatec Maya oral performance, essentially claiming
the space of the written page for this Maya episteme and the articulation
of what Castañeda and Hervik have labeled “Maya modernity” (Hervik
163–89; Castañeda 21). Recognizing that indigenous women have often
been portrayed as repositories of indigenous traditions, this chapter focuses
on the works of three Yucatec Maya women: María Luisa Góngora Pacheco,
Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and Briceida Cuevas Cob, in order to dem-
onstrate how these women harness the storyteller’s voice to position Yucatec
Maya female subjects at the center of how modernity is constructed and
interpreted within Yucatec Maya communities.1
Moreover, it should be noted that these female writers write from a posi-
tion of triple marginalization. Xóchitl Gálvez, an Hñahñu (Otomí) speaker
from Mexico, describes this state as “being poor, being a woman, and being

133
 134 • Chapter 5

indigenous” (quoted in Kellogg 174). Indigenous movements themselves

are not devoid of these tensions (Warren 241, n14), and examples from oral
literature even show how physical abuse against women is ideologically
normalized at the local level.2 As recently demonstrated by Diana Gómez
Correal, even sacred indigenous texts are not necessarily immune from
normalizing unequal gender relations within indigenous communities.
Yucatec women writers in particular often take a critical stance with regard
to their own culture. Despite the “renaissance” Maya culture in Yucatán has
experienced since the mid-1990s, these women have advocated that an end
to their marginalization within the larger Maya community should accom-
pany this more general rebirth (Leirana Alcocer, “La literatura” 67–68).

Folklore and Storytelling in Writing

Two of the authors that will be examined here, María Luisa Góngora
Pacheco and Briceida Cuevas Cob, are associated with the Montemayor-
led workshops and the literature series known as Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e,
or “Contemporary Maya Writing.” As such, the criticism leveled at this
project provides ample background for issues of representation surrounding
indigenous cultures as well as an appropriate segue into these works and the
storytellers represented in them. The most thorough of these comes from
the Cataluñan scholar Francesc Ligorred Perramon, who finds the project

[demuestra] un espíritu controlado de rescate y de preservación lingüís-

tica y literaria de lo indígena como fundamento para la integración de
una sola Nación Mexicana; una impresión-presentación populista; un
indigenismo apegado al ámbito rural y alejado de la modernidad; una
transcripción de la oralidad; un bilingüismo dudoso, ya que en unas oca-
siones, el texto originario pareciera estar escrito en castellano o, al menos,
recreado a partir de esta lengua ¿reaparece el fantasma de la traducción,
lingüística y/o cultural?; un cierto mensaje-indirecto-mexicanista integra-
dor; unos autores, más o menos, preseleccionados; un uso del maya y del
castellano que llega a ser simultáneo en los llamados talleres literarios;
etc. . . . En fin, como decíamos en la Introducción, se trata de presentar
una ‘literatura mexicana escrita en lengua maya.’ (Mayas y coloniales
126; italics in original)

[shows] a controlled spirit of rescue, of literary and linguistic preservation

of what is indigenous as the basis for integration into a unified Mexican
 Telling Maya Modernity • 135

Nation; a populist impression-presentation; an indigenism stuck to rural

environs and distanced from modernity; a transcription of orality; a dubi-
ous bilingualism where on some occasions the originary text appears
to have been written in Castilian or, at least, re-created from that lan-
guage, so does there not appear the phantom of linguistic and/or cultural
translation?; a certain-indirect-integrationist, Mexicanist message; some
authors, more or less, who were preselected; a use of Maya and Castilian
that comes to be simultaneous in so-called literary workshops; etc. . . . In
conclusion, as we said in the “Introduction,” this deals with the presenta-
tion of a “Mexican literature written in the Maya language.”

These points are well taken, and could very well be applied to the work of
many of the cultural brokers dealt with in chapters 2 and 3. For Ligorred
Perramon the project as a whole would seem to betray the integrationist
tendencies typical of indigenista policies throughout the twentieth century
and recycle all of the hallmarks of the discourse of the Indio through the
representation of subjects who are premodern, rural, etc. Moreover, the
works are linguistically impure as evidenced by his references to their being
a mere “transcription of orality,” to their translation, and to their “dubious
bilingualism,” all of which would seem to support the accusation that this
is, in the main, an officialist project aimed at preservation and rescue rather
than literary development. In this context, Yucatec Maya linguist Fiden-
cio Briceño Chel’s plea that “tenemos que pasar del simple proceso de
plasmar en el papel la forma hablada, de la literature oral” (we must move
away from the simple process of putting the spoken word, oral literature,
on paper; “Los [nuevos]” 92) buttresses the argument for a Yucatec Maya
literature oriented toward Maya communities and linguistic development
rather than calcified notions of preservation.
I would argue, however, that these comments take Mayas’ subaltern
locus of enunciation lightly and overlook the discursive agency exercised
by Maya authors, in particular with regard to their articulations of the
storyteller. As compared to Western writers, Yucatec Maya writers must
engage in translation to the point that writing in Maya naturally entails
the translation of one’s work into Spanish (Rosado Aviles and Ortega
Arango n.p.). This asymmetry between Maya and Spanish reflects Mayas’
ongoing linguistic, ethnic, and cultural subalternization in Yucatán, and
literary translation must be recognized as a pragmatic step in fomenting
intercultural relations in the peninsula and the rest of Mexico. Cristina
Leirana has outlined the process of translation that took place during the
workshops from which the first series was produced (“La literatura maya”
 136 • Chapter 5

70), and Rosado Aviles and Ortega Arango have criticized this approach
while drawing primarily on Leirana’s work, honing in on the workshop
participants’ apparent preference for translations of texts from Spanish
into Maya that were “clear, simple, and precise” (n.p.). By comparison,
Yucatec Maya writer and workshop participant Miguel May May writes
that he, Montemayor, and the Yucatec Maya writer Santiago Domínguez
Aké designed more than forty translation exercises in order to confront
and analyze the difficulties involved in translating between these two lan-
guages (192–95). He also notes that one of the comments that came out
of the workshop was that if one wanted something to sound appropriate in
Maya, it must first be thought in Maya as opposed to Spanish (May May,
“Los talleres” 194). Setting aside the epistemic violence inherent in all
processes of translation, it must be recognized that the writers involved
in the workshop harnessed translation as necessary to their “speaking in
some way” with the rest of Mexico. In this sense clarity, simplicity, and
precision are the marks of a good translator, and as May May suggests, at
least some workshop participants yet reaffirmed the primacy of originary
literary composition in Yucatec Maya.
Similarly, I would state that these works do not represent a folkloric
transcription of orality on the part of their authors so much as these authors’
respective attempts to represent the episteme of Maya oral performance
in print. There is no denying that from a Eurocentric perspective texts
written as though they were oral performances appear to continue in the
well-mined vein of folklore. Moreover, one cannot dismiss that the first
generation of Yucatec Maya authors, who were trained as cultural pro-
moters and charged with compiling stories, were undoubtedly influenced
by their earlier state-sponsored work. Approaching these as Western texts,
however, would be to miss the point entirely and tacitly affirm that all
texts are reducible to Western literary norms. Although entered into the
Mexican nation-state’s circuitry of representation, they nonetheless reflect
this Maya way of knowing. While “rescuing the past,” these works could
be said also to reproduce this tradition in the present, pointing to the
ongoing performances in Maya communities as corollaries of the written
word (Rosado Aviles and Ortega Arango n.p.). As seen in a story like “The
Waiter and the Gringo” in the previous chapter, Maya storytelling is fully
capable of articulating Mayas’ experiences of modernity and proposing
Maya alternatives to Western value systems. The storyteller embodies this
agency within Maya communities, such that when Maya writers draw on
this figure in their own works, this is much better analyzed as evidence of
the continuance of this Maya way of knowing rather than folklorization.
 Telling Maya Modernity • 137

Little Whirlwind, Modern Earthquake:

Góngora Pacheco’s “Chan moson”

María Luisa Góngora Pacheco’s short story “Chan moson” must be situated
within the larger context of her sociopolitical commitment to the Yucatec
Maya language. Hailing from Oxkutzkab, she pertains to a group of Maya
intellectuals who, having been trained as cultural promoters by the Dirección
de Culturas Populares in the early 1980s, published a series of monographs,
many of them bilingual, on everything from the ethnography of small Maya
towns to traditional medicine. Her own contributions to this project are
Monografía de Oxkutzkab (Monograph of Oxkutzkab)3 and Jop’el baxalo’ob
(Five Games; 1984). She later participated in the workshops for indigenous
writers run by Carlos Montemayor and produced several works that appeared
as part of the aforementioned Montemayor-edited series Maya Dziibo’ob
Bejla’e. With regard to the first series she compiled the stories found in
U tzikbalilo’ob Oxkutzkab yéetel Maní (Stories from Oxkutzkab and Maní;
1994) and is listed as a contributor to the volume U yum santísima kruuz
tuunil Xocén (Xocén’s Holy Stone Cross). This section deals with a story from
her contribution to the third series, “Chan moson” (Little Whirlwind; 1998).
Given this work’s focus on storytelling, Góngora Pacheco’s orientation
toward this topic in U tzikbalilo’ob Oxkutzkab yéetel Maní merits attention,
as in this earlier work, she consciously assumes the position of cultural
broker. As a cultural promoter, this was essentially her job, and she notes
that the position, “paachaj in tzikbaal yéetel ya’abkach nukuch wíiniko’ob
ti’ u kaajilo’ob Yucataan, máaxo’ob beeto’ob u páajtal u jóok’ol dzíibta’anil
le tzikbalo’oba’” (allowed me to speak with a lot of elderly people in Yucate-
can towns and these people have enabled the publication of these stories;
U tzikbalilo’ob 11–12). Unlike many of the brokers seen previously, Gón-
gora Pacheco defers ultimate authority to the storytellers themselves, and
she states it is they, and not she, who “have enabled the publication of these
stories.” The stories parallel the authorial stance taken in the prologue, as
each one begins by attributing the written texts to an individual storyteller.
For example, the volume’s first story, “X-ootzilil” (The Poor Old Lady),
begins “Yum Aureliano Zumarragae’ ku tzikbaltike’ . . .” (Mr. Aurelio
Zumárraga says . . .; U tsikbalilo’ob 15). Here we have a clear separation
between the cultural broker as author-narrator and the storyteller within
the text, as Góngora Pacheco in her function as author-narrator claims
to be reporting the speech of a different storyteller in each story, in this
instance Aurelio Zumárraga.4 The author-narrator positions her act of writ-
ing the stories, made possible by these “elderly people,” as a continuance of
 N

GULF OF
MEXICO Tizimín

Mérida Valladolid
Pisté
Chichén Itzá

Uxmal Oxkutzcab
Archeological Site
Calkiní Santa Elena Town

0 12.5 25 50 Miles

Figure 5.1 Map of Yucatán with authors’ hometowns. Map by Kevin Fox.
 Telling Maya Modernity • 139

oral tradition in written form, given that these stories themselves reflect “le
úuchben tzikbalo’ob ku beeta’alo’ob yo’olal k-úuchben ch’ilakabilo’obo’”
(the old stories that were made by our ancient ancestors; Góngora Pacheco,
U tsikbalilo’ob 11). That is, these stories are not authored in the Western
sense but “beeta’al’o’ob” (were made) first by others and then passed down
over time.
So, how is Góngora Pacheco’s “Chan moson” made? The titular story
of volume 11 in the third series of Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e, “Chan moson”
tells the story of a family of whirlwinds who live in a cave on the Yucatán
Peninsula. One by one the whirlwinds leave their cave and inadvertently
wreak havoc on the peninsula’s inhabitants, first the father, then the
mother, and finally the son. The mother and son are identified in the text
as being hurricanes Gilda and Gilberto, which struck the peninsula in
1955 and 1988, respectively. The young and mischievous Gilberto, the
chan moson of the work’s title, grows to be the largest and most dangerous
of the three as he steals the Lord of the Rain’s gourd for bringing the rains
and a piece of the Lord of the Wind. Having known the chan moson as
a trickster who played tricks on hunters when they entered his cave, the
Maya people seek the counsel of a h-men, or Maya priest. On the h-men’s
advice, they offer prayers and food to hurricane Gilberto, convincing him
to return to his home in the cave and enabling the Lords of the Wind and
of the Rain to recover their stolen articles. The story ends with the image
of the contented chan moson snoring in his cave.
At first gloss “Chan moson” shares a good deal in common with the
folkloric texts of cultural brokers analyzed in previous chapters. As with
the other six stories found in the same volume, “Chan moson” could even
be said to resemble the transcription of an oral tale as Góngora Pacheco’s
narrator directly assumes the position and authority of the storyteller in
the text. Particularly within the context of a story like “The Waiter and the
Gringo,” we can consider the storyteller’s position as one in which story-
tellers employ oral literary precedents in novel ways to exercise discursive
agency over contemporary realities. The figure of the storyteller in the text
thus marks the presence of this discursive agency and this tradition in writ-
ten form. As the authors of the Popol wuj wrote their text as the recording
of a performance, Gónogora Pacheco’s text places writing at the service
of Maya performance as a way of knowing. Following Jameson’s assertion
that in third-world texts “the story of the private individual destiny is always
an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and
society” (“Third-World” 69; italics in original), my analysis of this text situ-
ates the written storyteller as a site of negotiation through which the story
 140 • Chapter 5

allegorizes the “embattled situation” of Maya culture and articulates the

kind of Maya modernity referenced above by Hervik and Castañeda. We
will first examine how the storyteller appears within the text before moving
toward an analysis of the agency this figure employs in her textualization
of these historical events.
The reader recognizes that he/she is in the presence of a storyteller
though the work’s use of oral formulae. The text begins with the phrase,
“Anchaj jun teenake’ ooxtúul mosono’ob” (Once upon a time there were
three whirlwinds; Góngora Pacheco, “Chan moson” 13, 49).5 As seen in
several of the texts examined elsewhere, the narrator assumes the cultural
authority of the storyteller as opposed to merely configuring herself as the
author-narrator who yields her voice to a storyteller. In other words, instead
of hearing a story that has been mediated, we are now directly in the pres-
ence of a storyteller’s performance itself. She is not, however, an outside
cultural broker seeking to appropriate the storyteller’s authority to “tell”
and translate Maya stories to a non-Maya audience. Rather, she claims the
site of the written word as a space from which one can enunciate as a Maya
from a Maya epistemology for both Mayas and non-Mayas alike. Unlike
folktales edited, ordered, and arranged by cultural brokers in their role as
author-narrators, the story here is not reported speech but the unmediated
words of the storyteller. This position becomes even clearer at the end of
the story when the storyteller claims personal knowledge of these events
through the formula “Je ka’aj máanen tu jool le áaktun tu’ux yaano’ ti ku
joros nóok’i’’ (When I passed by the mouth of the cave where he is, he was
in there snoring loudly; Góngora Pacheco, “Chan moson” 16, 52). Such
claims of firsthand knowledge of the story’s last scene are a stock way to end
an oral story (Burns 17). As is the case in the context of oral storytelling,
with this gesture the storyteller brings the narrative into the real time of the
reader to whom the story is told, blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
As opposed to the sense of legal possession entailed by Western notions
of authorship, these structures and techniques are best thought of as com-
munal property. Commenting on the structure of nineteenth-century Maya
knowledge, historian Terry Rugeley refers to stories as comprising “a kind of
oral compendium, a hodgepodge of wisdoms, techniques, and tidbits that
everyone should learn and repeat” (1). Textualizing the storyteller through
these oral formulae recalls this Maya “oral compendium” in written form
and uses its precedents to interpret contemporary historical events and
Mayas’ role in them. That is, although this particular story is not, perhaps,
well-known communal property, its underlying formulae and their use are.
By re-presenting these in written form, “Chan moson” as a whole represents
 Telling Maya Modernity • 141

the praxis of a Maya modernity that exists beyond Western-imposed inter-

pretations of stories that focus on a dichotomy between Maya tradition and
a non-Maya Western modernity.
Common in Yucatec Maya oral literature and a good deal of Yucatec
Maya written literature, these gestures have several implications. As argued
in the first chapter, we cannot simply attribute the presence of this and
other formulae to a kind of residual orality that is destined to fade away.
If oral performance constitutes a way of knowing, then the written textu-
alization of an oral story claims a space for orality within the realm of the
written word. Given the agency found within such performances, it is no
coincidence that many of the folkloric tales from previous chapters excise
these formulae and, in doing so, the voices of the texts’ original tellers. The
omission of such phrases fortifies the Indio’s construction as an ahistorical
object of Western knowledge. Moreover, the storyteller’s personal knowl-
edge of the cave does not so much mimic or transpose the voice of the
traditional storyteller as it asserts the authority of this voice by reconfiguring
the book and its contents as moments in an ongoing, broader intercul-
tural conversation. We are thus confronted by the assertion of the story as a
tsikbal or discussion. As these formulae mark oral stories as different from
everyday speech, they no less mark the text as distinct from everyday writ-
ing, reminding the reader that this story is not a “short story,” but a Maya
tsikbal that draws on its own non-Western conventions of genre, style, and
narration. We must also acknowledge that Yucatec Maya have engaged in
such definitions of “person, place, and time,” orally and in writing, since
the colonial era if not before. Linguistic anthropologist William F. Hanks
observes that “Sixteenth-century official Maya genres embody a specific
kind of public address by a collective speaker before witnesses, located in
a carefully constructed ‘here’ and ‘now’” (151). The story, whether written
or oral, is a similar type of “public address,” and the storyteller, we should
recall, is the embodiment of indigenous memory, in a sense a “collective
speaker.” The closing formula completes the last part of the equation, situat-
ing both reader and storyteller in the “here” and “now” of the text as a writ-
ten performance and in the “here” and “now” of the late twentieth century.
The voice of this “traditional” Maya storyteller thus exercises cultural
control over the written letter by employing formal aspects of oral tales.
From this position the voice melds the aesthetics of oral performances
with references from the contemporary, everyday modern world. These
do not exist in contradiction with one another but point to the storyteller
as an agent that articulates Maya modernity. On the level of traditional
storytelling, the three personified whirlwinds live in a cave and comprise
 142 • Chapter 5

a family unit, and the father whirlwind’s initial departure is responsible for
the later departures of the mother and the baby hurricanes. This chain of
events links these elements of “Chan moson” to longer quest narratives
dealing with parental and/or cultural identity. Although personified, all
three whirlwinds are more forces of nature than figures that correspond to
Western categories of good and evil. The father simply blows over a few
trees, but the mother’s winds “u kíinsik máako’obe’” (kill a lot of people;
Góngora Pacheco, “Chan moson” 15, 51). In addition to the aforemen-
tioned thefts from the gods, the little whirlwind playfully steals a woman’s
slip; her huipil, or Maya dress; and her husband’s pants. Taken together
the hurricanes’ actions, some stark and some scandalous, recall the figures
and narratives of tricksterlike characters from Juan Rabbit to the Popol
wuj’s Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and these pranks add a bit
of comic relief to a story that otherwise deals with natural phenomena
associated with death and destruction. As readers we are invited to see the
“lighter side” of such phenomena. Moreover, these pranks enable the little
whirlwind, the most powerful of the three storms, to remain the “little”
whirlwind in both size and temperament. If Juan Rabbit’s theft is cast as
part of natural processes, the little whirlwind’s growth and the ensuing
destruction he brings about are the unintended results of his playfulness.
Despite the disastrous consequences, he remains the chan moson.
The storyteller’s use of the word moson to describe the hurricane fur-
ther reflects the discursive agency found in oral tales and points to the
storyteller’s construction of a Maya modernity, with the word moson being
interpreted as representing a kind of appropriated culture. According to
the Diccionario maya popular, which focuses on contemporary Yucatec
usage, moson means “torbellino, remolino de viento” (twister, whirlwind;
166). The more authoritative Cordomex Dictionary, recently republished
by Editorial Porrúa as Diccionario maya, lists six Maya words for the Span-
ish huracán: chak ik’, keh ik’, ma’lay ik’, moson, xawal ik’, and xaway (197).
All of these words have strong connotations of storm and wind but, as in
the Diccionario maya popular, the Diccionario maya centers its defini-
tion of moson as being more related to whirlwinds and tornados than to
hurricanes (79). Both dictionaries draw a stronger relationship between
chak ik and hurricane than between moson and hurricane. As with the oral
storytellers from previous chapters, the storyteller here is keenly aware of
language games and these linguistic differences, at one moment pointing
out that Gilda and Gilberto are what the hurricanes are called “Ichil le
kastlan t’aano’” (in Spanish; Góngora Pacheco “Chan moson” 14–15, 51).
What, then, is the significance of the storyteller’s referring to “hurricanes”
 Telling Maya Modernity • 143

Figure 5.2 Hurricane Gilbert approaching Yucatán. Courtesy of the National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Gilda and Gilberto as being moson as opposed to chak ik,’ a distinction

reinforced in the story’s Spanish translation through the use of the word
remolino? As opposed to chak ik’ or red wind, I would argue that moson or
whirlwind perhaps better reflects how people experience such phenomena
given that twentieth-century satellite technology projects pictures of hur-
ricanes in which they resemble large whirlwinds. This is readily apparent
in figure 5.2, a satellite photo of Hurricane Gilbert, the chan moson, as it
approaches the Yucatán Peninsula. By referring to the family of storms as
moson instead of chak ik’, Góngora Pacheco’s storyteller reconfigures the
popular imaginary by applying the Maya term for whirlwind to twentieth-
century satellite pictures of hurricanes. Moson appropriates this technology
and seamlessly folds it into preexisting Maya categories.
 144 • Chapter 5

The hurricane as moson thus represents the articulation of Maya

modernity and highlights storytelling as a position of agency from which
one can produce such representations. Rugeley suggests that the construc-
tion of the aforementioned “compendium” of popular oral knowledge in
the nineteenth century “reflected certain important social values, certain
common historical experiences, as well as a shared vision of supernatu-
ral forces as undergirding human experience” (5). In the late twentieth
century “Chan moson” reflects such a “common historical experience”
yet does so while upholding this “vision of supernatural forces,” which,
in turn, implies a very specific relationship to two sets of “social values”
whose apparent contradictions are resolved in the narrative. Although for
a Western reader the presence of the h-men and the ceremonies that he
recommends to restore natural order are the stuff of fairy tales and legends,
the fact of the hurricanes’ historical existence means that we can no more
dismiss the figure of the h-men or the actions of the Maya than we could
deny that these hurricanes took place. We can say, then, that the story
interprets the hurricanes in light of Maya historical knowledge and Maya
agency. By portraying such keepers of “traditional” Maya knowledge and
positioning them as active protagonists in twentieth-century history, the
story asserts that this tradition is fully modern within the Maya imaginary.
Moreover, through the notion of moson as the adaption of satellite
technology into the Maya imaginary, the story allegorizes the situation
of Maya culture in the late twentieth century. From this association with
satellite technology, the hurricanes can be read as representing the forces
of globalization and its consequences as seen in everything from Cancún,
television, neoliberalism, NAFTA, and immigration to the United States.
As with an actual hurricane, at first gloss it may appear that the Maya are
helpless to confront such forces. As the story suggests, however, Maya ways
of knowing represent the possibility of agency in the face of the realities
these forces present. The h-men consulted by the Maya people are the
embodiment of Maya knowledge in the text. Literally meaning “doer” or
“one who does,” under the word (ah)men the Dicionario maya defines
h-men as “el que hace o entiende algo, curandero o yerbatero, diestro en
cualquier arte y profesión” (one who does or understands something, a
curer or herbalist, one adroit in any art or profession; 520). That is, they
are knowledgeable servants of the community who perform a number of
functions. For outsiders, the most famous of these is perhaps the cha chak,
or rain ceremony, which deserves mention here if only to provide evidence
that the office of h-men is indeed concerned with a wide range of com-
munity problems and happenings from snakebites to the weather. As the
 Telling Maya Modernity • 145

h-men possess a knowledge of rituals that will convince the chan moson
to return to his cave, so too are Maya culture and Maya ways of knowing
capable of dealing with the cultural impositions of contemporary realities
in ways that ultimately reaffirm the value of Mayaness.
Considered as the continuation of Maya oral performance as an episteme,
written storytelling constitutes a similar way in which the world is known
and interpreted. Only with great risk, then, can we dismiss “officialist” litera-
ture, as through this gesture Maya authors can yet subvert the intentions of
such projects. As we have seen, “Chan moson” demonstrates the efficacy of
Maya knowledge within the modern world. The story constructs the voice
of its storyteller through the use of traditional techniques and formulae that
recall an entire written and oral Maya literary tradition. In addition, its story-
teller reconfigures satellite imagery from the international imaginaries to
show the importance of Maya culture, memory, and historical knowledge
to the rest of the world, and only the Maya h-men have the knowledge
necessary to convince the chan moson to go back to his cave. Ideologically,
Góngora Pacheco’s storyteller inscribes the Maya subject as a protagonist
within the Mexican nation and the rest of the world without this reinscrip-
tion being an act of assimilation or integration as these terms are commonly
understood. The use of “traditional” structures of Maya storytelling provides
a historical foundation for Mayas’ interpretation of and relationship with the
supposedly more “modern” world, producing a re-presentation of Maya-
ness that asserts the viability and legitimacy of Maya identity in the late
twentieth century. This analysis of Góngora Pacheco’s story does not pit the
terms traditional and modern against each other but rather recognizes that
these terms are not mutually exclusive. The story itself represents a Maya
literary modernity well within the confines of Maya literary tradition. That
is, using the agency associated with storytellers and the act of storytelling,
Góngora Pacheco’s storyteller forges a narrative that is not “distanced from
modernity” but constitutes modernity itself.

Storytelling as Testimonio: Martínez Huchim’s

“Chen konel”

From the town of Tizimín, Ana Patricia Martinez Huchim displays a similar
obsession with stories and storytelling in her work and professional trajec-
tory. To complete her studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán,
she wrote her licenciatura thesis “K-maaya tsikbal. Jaajil T’aan” (Our Maya
Literature. True Words; 1996) on contemporary oral storytelling in Xocén,
 146 • Chapter 5

Yucatán. In addition to Cuentos enraizados (Rooted Stories; 1999), a bilin-

gual book of stories she transcribed from her parents, she has also published
U tsikbalo’ob mejen paalal/Cuentos de niños (Children’s Stories; 1997), a
bilingual book of stories by Maya children from Xocén. As evidenced by
these publications, past projects such as the Internet magazine on Maya
literature entitled K’aaylay (Song of Memory), and her establishing the
cultural organization Popolnah Máximo Huchim, Martínez Huchim’s
body of academic and literary work situates the storyteller as the axis around
which past and future take shape in the present. This section focuses on her
story “Chen konel” (Uselessness), which won the Universidad Autónoma
de Yucatán’s Alfredo Barrera Vásquez Award for Yucatec Maya narrative
in 2005, exploring how the performance of Martinez Huchim’s “modern”
storyteller critiques gender inequalities within Maya communities while
seizing the storyteller’s agency to make the voices of Maya women heard. As
will be apparent, this story is no less allegorical of Maya women, their situ-
ations and destinies in their communities and beyond insofar as it explicitly
generalizes the situation of the story’s protagonist, Esperanza (Hope).
The story itself textualizes the life of Esperanza Batum Ku. As her name
suggests, she represents the family’s hope for a better future, and both of
her parents do what they can to empower the young woman. Her father
Floreano sells his gun to buy her school supplies and her mother Refu-
gio constantly repeats the melancholy story of her own decision to elope
with Floreano. Romanced by her boyfriend, Herculano Och, one night
Esperanza escapes from the house and runs away with him. Claiming she
recently passed by the house of Esperanza’s parents, the storyteller relates
Esperanza’s fate through the voices of a group of women she encounters
near the house. While they gossip that the young woman still wears the
clothes she ran away in and only yesterday appeared with a black eye, the
storyteller informs us that Esperanza’s story represents various facets of these
women’s stories as each in her own way has been subject to the same cycle
of poverty and abuse.
Structurally the story consists of five sections. The first and last sections,
“Ku tsikbata’al” (They say) and “Ka’aj máanen” (When I passed by) pres-
ent the reader the figure of the storyteller who provides the implied reader/
listener the background for the tale in the first section and editorializes on
the events of the story in the last.6 The middle three sections recount the
moment Esperanza deceives her parents and runs off with her boyfriend from
her father’s perspective, her mother’s perspective, and finally Esperanza’s own
perspective. The formal structure of the story thus plays with the structure of
a traditional Maya story and the construction of the traditional storyteller as
 Telling Maya Modernity • 147

the first and last sections bracket the story proper, repeating formulae found
in Maya oral literature and serving as a commentary on the fate of the story’s
protagonist. Placing the story within the context of common knowledge and
everyday experience, the storyteller appeals to the presence of a living Maya
culture, and this storyteller, both didactic and distanced, intimately Maya and
yet providing critical observations on Maya culture, refuses to be reduced to
Western conceptions of literature and the printed page.
The story’s opening and closing formulae are recognizable from stories
seen in previous chapters and indicate we are in the presence of a story-
teller giving a performance of the text in question. The opening line states,
“Ku tsikbata’al ya’abkach x-ch’úupalalo’ob mantats’ tun k’a’asaj yiliko’obe’
ba’ax ku yúuchul ti’ x-ch’úupal ku tsáayal tu paach jun túul xiib” (They say
that young women are always told to watch what happens to a girl who runs
away with a boy), introducing us to a field of assumed knowledge and every-
day assumptions through the common opening statement “Ku tsikbata’al”
(They say; Martínez Huchim, “Chen konel” 53, 73). The storyteller thus
appeals to universal aspects of Maya culture contained in the text about to
be recounted. Conversely, the story ends with the no less common “Ka’an
máanen míin balak’ k’iine’ t’u’ux yaan u naj u taata X-Lansa” (The other
day when I passed by Esperanza’s parents’ house), which presents the story-
teller, as in “Chan moson,” as having personal knowledge of the story, its
events, and its consequences as though the written storyteller were a flesh
and blood person and the story an actual occurrence (Martínez Huchim,
“Chen konel” 67, 87). Indeed, when we consider Maya performance as an
episteme, it should be noted that in many ways this story is no more or less
fictional than either Góngora Pacheco’s “Chan moson” or the story “The
Waiter and the Gringo” from chapter 3. It is, rather, a way of understanding
and interpreting reality. Relating this written story back to oral precedents,
Martínez Huchim claims that it draws on the stories of countless Maya
women she has met and interviewed throughout the peninsula and so con-
siders “Chen konel” to be a testimonio (Martínez Huchim personal inter-
view). As the synthesis of the voices of multiple Maya women in a single
work of written Maya literature, here the storyteller once again represents
a “collective speaker before witnesses” as expressed by Hanks.
This collective speaker, however, does not speak for Maya culture as a
whole but for Maya women, including Maya men among its addressees.
As a testimonio that bears witness to the realities confronted by many Maya
women, the text destabilizes the romantic notions of indigenous women
found in texts as diverse as tourist brochures and works of indigenous litera-
ture and formulates a damning critique of the subject positions modernity
 148 • Chapter 5

seemingly offers them. In many respects, the story articulates a vision of

Maya modernity in which Maya communities themselves reproduce the
inequalities to which they fall victim, continuing cycles of poverty and
abuse that continue across multiple generations. Through her voice, how-
ever, the storyteller embodies the fact that Maya women are agents capable
of self-reflexive critique, of telling their own stories, and of effecting change
within their communities and beyond.
While the nameless storyteller represents the actualization of such proj-
ects in the international imaginary, Esperanza and her mother Refugio
represent the realities and limitations many Maya women face in their day-
to-day lives, realities and limitations critiqued through the figure of Flo-
reano. When Esperanza is born, her father, upon being told his daughter
looks like him, responds, “¡Ba’ax kisin kun chén chíikpaja’an ti’ teen, tene’
xiiben!” (The Hell she looks like me, I’m a man; Martínez Huchim, “Chen
konel” 56, 75). He then spits and goes out, ruminating that he’d wanted a
boy who could help him in the milpa (56, 76). As a display of machismo,
Floreano’s reaction to hearing the newborn looks like him arises from dis-
courses with which the reader is no doubt familiar. Tellingly, however, his
preference for a boy is tied to traditional gender norms in Maya communi-
ties as he sees a son as being an extra set of hands to help him in the fields.
A daughter, by comparison, would be more likely to stay at home and help
her mother grind corn, make tortillas, and tend the domestic animals in
the family compound. Despite these initial feelings, Esperanza eventually
becomes his hope for a better life. This is expressed through his calling her
his tuunich keeje, or “deer stone” (Martínez Huchim, “Chen konel” 57,
76). In Yucatec oral literary tradition this amulet brings its bearer good luck
in hunting deer. Completing this transformation, Floreano Batum sells his
rifle, the firearm being the symbol of masculine prowess par excellence,
for money to buy what the young Esperanza needs to attend school. In
Floreano’s mind, schooling offers the possibility of social mobility, and he
dreams of her one day being “X Ts’aj Xook, X-Liik, wa Íijiniera” (a teecher
[sic], a lawyer, or an ingineer [sic]; Martínez Huchim, “Chen konel” 57,
77). That is, he envisions a future for her that exists outside the traditional
paradigm of Maya women who work in the home and Maya men who tend
their fields. In a sense, Esperanza represents the hope that Maya women
can enter into the contemporary world on an equal footing with Maya men
and non-Maya men and women alike, recognized as centers of agency who
control their own destinies.
Floreano’s attitude toward Esperanza’s mother, Refugio, provides a sharp
contrast. Not only did Floreano never buy Refugio anything or provide her
 Telling Maya Modernity • 149

with money for household expenses from the time they were married, but
the morning after they ran away together Floreano, “Maache waajo’ ka xi’ik
ch’iinta’abi yóok’ol lu’um” (Took the tortillas she had made and threw them
on the floor because she, a new wife, did not know how to make tortillas and
so had burned them; Martínez Huchim, “Chen konel” 60, 80). As readers
we find that Floreano, the proud father whose prowess as a hunter is will-
ingly sacrificed for the promise of his daughter’s education, is paradoxically
incapable of recognizing similar promise in the wife he abuses.
While Floreano’s hopes for Esperanza center on her education and
financial advancement, Refugio, whose name literally means “refuge,”
sees in Esperanza an altogether different kind of hope, frequently warning
her daughter about the dangers of eloping with a young man and using
her own life as an example. Her name suggests the solidarity between
mother and daughter, with the former being a refuge from the outside
world. Moreover, through the voice of the storyteller Refugio enters the
narrative as a self-reflexive agent. That is, she does not correspond to the
passive Maya woman fatalistically trapped in poverty but actively tells her
own story.7 Although trapped in poverty by a bad marriage, she nonetheless
sees herself as an agent who made her own decisions and must stress to her
daughter that she will one day be confronted with similar choices. Her
voice, therefore, is similar to that of the storyteller in that she makes sure
her daughter knows her own story.
Herculano Och, the young man with whom Esperanza falls in love,
corresponds much more to how Floreano has treated his wife rather than
to Floreano’s hopes for his daughter. The sexual relations between the
eloping couple are even described using animals and violence as points of
comparison. When Esperanza and her lover Herculano Och consummate
their relationship, the storyteller pulls back, saying that at that moment an
opossum “tu t’uu’aj la chan kaaxe’, ts’o’okole ka tu u beejil u k’u’ tu’ux
yaan u láaj ch’i’ibal Och” (plucked the little chicken’s feathers, and then
took it to its nest where the rest of the Oches, his mother and sisters, lived;
Martínez Huchim, “Chen konel” 64, 85). The very name Herculano Och
seems to anticipate such violence, masculine strength, and Esperanza’s
fate. “Herculano” is a reference to the mythological Greek hero known for
his strength and prowess, and “Och” is both a Maya last name and a veiled
reference to the Maya words for “opossum” (box ooch) and “womanizer”
(och keep). He is, figuratively, a predator who has crept into the Ku house-
hold, wounded one of the household’s chickens, and taken it back to the
nest where the rest of the opossums live. This sexual violence prefigures the
domestic violence we are informed of at the end of the story.
 150 • Chapter 5

Finally, this critique of gender roles is extended in such a way that the
broader community is itself implicated in reproducing if not also normal-
izing these abusive relationships. Compared to the refuge offered by the
protagonist’s mother, the story’s final section consists of women’s gossip
the storyteller hears while passing by Esperanza’s parents’ house. Not only
are the women’s various remarks on Maya gender relations graphically
recounted, but the storyteller also adds ironic comments to each woman’s
remarks, rendering them a double-voiced commentary on Esperanza’s life
and their own. The most damning of these, perhaps, is that of the last inter-
locutor, who says, “Yaan u ts’áik le ba’al ti’o . . . wa ma’e’, ku p’aatal, bey
le xiibo’ob—tu ya’alaj jun túul ko’olel púust’ul xaan” (She had to give it to
him . . . if not, he would have gone after another, that’s how men are—said
a woman who had also run away; Martínez Huchim, “Chen konel” 68,
88). As stated earlier, from these women we also receive news of Esper-
anza’s being abused as one of the women notes that “jo’olje’ake’ tin wilaj
éek’yube’en u yich” (yesterday I saw her with a black eye; Martínez Huchim,
“Chen konel’ 67, 87). We already know that this was what happened to her
mother, but this sense of repetition reaches back linearly through time
and horizontally through the rest of the community as we learn that “tu
ch’i’ibalo’obe’ tuláakal ko’olel láaj púuts’ ku beetko’ob: u chiich, u na’e’
¡beooráa’ leti’!—tu ya’alaj tun jun túul ko’olel p’aata’an tumen u yíicham”
(so in that family all of the women have eloped: the grandmother, the
mother, and now her!—said a woman who had been abandoned by her
husband; Martínez Huchim, “Chen Konel” 67, 87). Rather than breaking
the cycle of violence, these women repeat Esperanza’s story, a story that is
also the story of their own lives. These are not the potentially empowering
narratives of the storyteller or Refugio, but commentaries that ultimately
normalize domestic violence and a male-dominated society.
The story constructs a similarly stark picture of Maya relationships with
Mexico’s larger economic structures. Certainly, Floreano dreams of a better
life for his daughter and supports the education that would seemingly make
such economic mobility possible. Under closer examination, the language
Floreano uses to express these hopes casts doubt on whether or not his
musings are realistic. As cited earlier, he imagines his daughter could even-
tually be a “X Ts’aj Xook, X-Liik, wa Íijiniera” (a teecher [sic], a lawyer, or
an ingineer [sic]; Martínez Huchim, “Chen konel” 57, 77). As I’ve tried
to represent here in English, in the story’s Spanish-language translation
maestra (teacher) is misspelled “maistra” and ingeniero (engineer) is written
“ijiniera.” In addition, both words appear in quotation marks (Martínez
Huchim, “Chen konel” 77). On one level, these words represent Floreano’s
 Telling Maya Modernity • 151

discursive attempt to claim these professions for his daughter, and they rep-
resent subject positions within larger society to which Mayas can aspire. His
accent Mayanizes these terms drawn from imposed culture and suggests
that these can be changed and adapted to meet the needs of Maya people.
Despite the agency this accenting suggests, however, Floreano’s words
are ultimately mispronunciations. While Maya women such as Floreano’s
daughter can and do attain these positions, their opportunities for doing
so are often limited. From an economic standpoint, recall, for example,
Floreano’s initial preference for a male child and that he must later on sell
his gun in order to provide for his daughter’s education. Again, as much as
these are related to Latin American machismo, the story articulates these as
also being directly related to economic concerns and providing for the fam-
ily unit. That is, a son would help in the milpa and with the rifle Floreano
could obtain meat for his family. As his tuunich keeje, Esperanza thus repre-
sents the possibility of providing for the family via other means through her
insertion into Mexico’s pool of professionalized labor. Floreano’s dreams
are mispronounced in the sense that he does not necessarily have such a
progressive perspective with regard to his own wife or women in general.
As happens in many families, Esperanza does not achieve these aspirations
but falls into the familiar pattern of elopement set through the examples of
her mother, grandmother, and the women at the end of the story. As stated
by one of those women, the wife of an alcoholic, “Le x ch’úupal tuklabe’
yaan u ka’anataj u xook, bejla’e’ sáansamal u k’óochmaj u juuch’ ti’ jun
p’éel ch’óoy te’ ku bin ¡x ma’ xanabi’!” (The girl who was going somewhere
in school now has to carry nixtamal in a bucket on her head everyday to
the mill, she doesn’t even have shoes!; Martínez Huchim, “Chen Konel”
67, 87). That is, her elopement forecloses her further schooling and fixes
her within the sphere of domestic work and, as symbolized by her lacking
shoes to wear, poverty.
The story itself thus serves as an ambivalent allegory of Maya modernity.
Despite the fact that the Mexican national imaginary presents education as
a path to economic empowerment for many Maya women, Maya men and
even Maya women may undercut such possibilities. Marginalizing young
women for having sexual relations outside of wedlock, essentially leading to
elopements such as Esperanza’s, the social structure portrayed in the story
reproduces binary gender relations such as those outlined by Octavio Paz
in his El laberinto de la soledad (1950), but nonetheless represents Maya
women as agents who at times participate in their own marginalization.
Despite the common wisdom expressed by the storyteller and the pres-
ence of her mother as an example of such dicta, Esperanza foregoes her
 152 • Chapter 5

education and chooses to elope with Herculano. Moreover, the presence

of the women at the end of the story emphasizes the tacit universality of
such experiences. Each woman condemns or laughs at Esperanza and her
plight, but the storyteller points out that each lives out the consequences
of similar decisions. In other words, although these share the embodied
wisdom about young women who elope and, one would assume, share the
knowledge of each others’ predicaments, they would seem to lack the class
consciousness that would lead to the kind of solidarity necessary to foment
change on a broad scale.
Within the context of these limitations, however, we are yet presented
with the voice of a storyteller who makes these voices and the experiences
of these Yucatec Maya women known. Significantly, there are very few
instances in which cultural brokers, whether they are indigenous or non-
indigenous, portray women as telling stories.8 In the field of literature, the
number of female Maya writers, as well as female indigenous writers or
female writers in Latin America in general, is far exceeded by the number
of male writers, owing to numerous social, economic, and gender issues.
As evidenced by Refugio, however, Maya women tell stories as a way of
transmitting knowledge and interpreting reality as much as their male
counterparts. The story’s articulation of a Maya female storytelling voice
claims the written word as a space for the performance of storytelling while
doing so from a locus of enunciation that often goes unnoticed or outright
ignored by outsiders. Even in her narration of one young woman’s failure
to overcome poverty, the storyteller’s utterance, oral and written, enacts the
agency of indigenous women within the national imaginary. While this may
not represent the direct voice of the subaltern subject, it represents a case in
which, to paraphrase Spivak, the subaltern has spoken “in some way” (309).
As such, Martínez Huchim’s storyteller offers a strong counterpoint
to the failure symbolized by Esperanza. While the latter’s hopes for the
future are mispronounced, the former self-consciously references these as
mispronunciations, her knowledge that these are mispronounced implying
that the storyteller knows how to properly pronounce them. This female
storyteller thus represents a subject position where Maya women can truly
be teachers, lawyers, and engineers, and actualizes the hope symbolized by
Esperanza. Although we cannot know if she also ran away with her lover or
became an engineer, we do know that as a storyteller she occupies a space
of agency within her community. Despite the embattled, if not ultimately
fallen, status of Esperanza, the individual destiny of the storyteller is that
of one who can and does speak to other Maya women, Maya men, and
non-Mayas outside of Maya communities. As much as the formulaic saying
 Telling Maya Modernity • 153

about what happens to young women in the story is proscriptive and comes
out of oral tradition, the story itself is an exercise in consciousness raising
insofar as it encourages the very solidarity that would seem to be lacking
among the women at the end of the story. While Esperanza stands in for
the limitations faced by Maya women, the storyteller equally represents
their potential for overcoming such obstacles and advocating for change
within Maya communities and beyond. This simultaneous presence of
such limitations and limitless potential are thus an important facet of Maya
modernity.

Je’ bix k’in: Briceida Cuevas Cob’s Lives of

Yucatec Maya Women

Briceida Cuevas Cob is one of the most accomplished contemporary

Yucatec Maya poets.9 In addition to having had her work included in
numerous anthologies, to date Cuevas Cob has authored three volumes
of poetry, U yok’ol auat pek’ tí u kuxtal pek’ (A Dog Laments Its Existence;
1995), Je’ bix k’in (Like the Sun; 1998), and Ti’ u billil in nook’ (From the
Folds of My Clothes; 2008).10 This section focuses on two poems from
Je’ bix k’in, a collection that was originally published as the first volume
in the third series of Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e.11 As with the other works
analyzed in this section, these poems, “Yaan a bin xook” (You Will Go to
School) and “U yalmaj xikín na’ x-Tuel ti’ x-Tude” (Doña Teodora’s Advice
to Gertrudis) present orality as a way of knowing among Maya women and
articulate a Maya modernity through their representations of orality and
oral storytelling as ways of understanding the contemporary world.
The penultimate poem in Je’ bix k’in’s first section, “Yaan a bin xook”
describes the future that awaits a female child on entering school in terms
that reaffirm Mayaness and Yucatec Maya women through juxtapositions
of school, home, and the knowledges these represent. The poem is the
address of a poetic “I,” perhaps a new mother, to a young child, the poetic
“I” assuming a position of authority. In a poetic gesture similar to the story-
teller found in the story by Martínez Huchim, the poem begins with a brief
italicized section drawn from common wisdom about how ants celebrate
the births of boys who drop bits of ground corn for them to eat in the milpa,
and lament the births of girls who throw hot water on them when they go
into the kitchen. As a commonplace, this outlines the normalized gender
dynamic that the poem itself responds to and contests. Breaking with these,
the poetic “I” states,
 154 • Chapter 5

Teche yan a bin xook.

Ma’ tun p’atakech poluech.
Yan a tadzmansik u paakbil u najil taj muk’ólal
tiólal a uoko ta uotoch
ma’ tan a k’opik jolnaj.
Le ken a paktabaj tu ich a laak’
bin a uil ti’ a maatzab
boox jul ch’íikil tu puksík’al luum,
ku tal a yémel a juntadz ol
ti’ xan ku bin u náakal u nojil a ch’íibal. (Cuevas Cob, Je’ bix 9, 41)

You will go to school.

You won’t be a hollowhead.
You will cross the threshold of your imagination
until you enter your own house
without having to knock on the door.
And contemplating yourself in the face of one like yourself
you’ll find that from your eyelashes,
dark arrows lit in the heart of the earth,
your innocence diminishes
as the grandeur of your race ascends.

Despite the straightforward appearance of the first line “Teche’ yan a bin
xook,” literally “You will go to class” or “You have to go to class,” it expresses
not so much a command (the command of “to go” is “xen” in Maya) as a
sense of obligation or a description of the future, what things will or must
be like. As such, there is no causal relationship between learning in the
formal academic setting of the school and the knowledge the young girl
gains. Instead, she comes into her own house, a place created through the
power of her own mind and imagination, wherein she discovers that her
“innocence” gives way to “the grandeur of [her] race” through the face
of another Maya woman. That is, through her acquisition of knowledge
the young woman passes into adolescence and adulthood, an intellectual
inheritor of the greatness of the race of which she is a part. Finally, she
comes to this knowledge within the context of the home, and learning from
another woman “with a face like [her own],” a juxtaposition that recalls
the fact that many indigenous peoples experience formal schooling as the
degradation of their forms of knowledge at the hands of one whose face is
not at all like theirs. In the poem this marks an attempt “to hold on to vital
knowledge that mere schooling does not admit” (Franco 464).
 Telling Maya Modernity • 155

The juxtaposition of these forms of knowledge continues throughout

the poem.

Teche ya a bin tu nahil xook

bin a chuk u poojol u chun u nak’ u ko’lelí a ch’íibal (Cuevas Cob,
Je’ bix 9, 41).

You will go to school

and hold in the palm of your understanding the afterbirth of the women
of your race.

Repetition of the phrase “yaan a bin” (You will go; compulsive future) is
contrasted with “bin a chuk” (You will hold; remote future) suggesting a
difference in the way these actions are construed by the speaker. Together
with the following stanzas, these lines can be read as though the young
woman becomes a midwife or otherwise participates in the birth of siblings
or cousins, holding the afterbirth of Maya mothers in hands taught by other
Maya women, or as a metaphor for her position as these women’s intel-
lectual inheritor. In either reading, it should be noted that among many
Yucatec Maya, how one disposes of the placenta influences both the des-
tiny of the newly born baby and the future fertility of the mother (Güémez
Pineda n.p.). Whether literal or metaphorical, the young woman’s holding
the afterbirth in her hands is akin to her holding the future and exercising
agency over it.
Moreover, learning to read Latin letters is secondary to knowledge that
facilitates the young woman’s exercising agency in this process.

Ti’ a tunkuy12
bin a na’na’jo’ot u uoj dzíib mamaiki luum,
síis yétel k’in.
U nukuch yich a chaan ólal
bin u chant u yim sáatal u yol
u dzókol u uekik kuxtal yok’ol kab. (Cuevas Cob, Je’ bix 10, 42)

From their heels

you will decipher the glyphs written by the dust,
the cold and the sun.
Your eyes will be wide with admiration
as they contemplate their fallen breasts
after they’ve spilled life upon the earth.
 156 • Chapter 5

The passage describes a visceral knowledge obtained through this pro-

cess of watching women after they have given birth insofar as the young
woman learns to “read” the glyphs written by the dust, the sun, and the
humidity. This difference between reading in the formal sense and reading
in the sense expressed here destabilizes the verb “xook” (to read) in the
poem’s title. Indeed, which system of knowledge is denoted by “xook,”
that espoused by formal schooling or that learned “at the heels of these
women”? We know that young woman learns to read the glyphs written by
the dust, the sun, and the cold, but we never know what the young woman
reads at school, an omission that challenges this form of schooling and
questions its knowledge.
Driving this point home, the last part of the poem begins,

Teche yan a bin tu najil xook

baale yan a sut ta taamaj,
ta yalanaj (Cuevas Cob, Je’ bix 10, 42).

You will go to school

but you will return home,
to your kitchen.

Again, the “home” to which she returns is both the physical space of the
house as well as the space the young woman creates through her imagina-
tion in the poem’s opening and, as in the rest of the poem, the return from
school to the home becomes a discovery of the self. The young woman
returns to the kitchen to tend the fire of its hearth,

Tumén k’oben u taakmaj junp’el neen tu chun a nak’.

Junp’el neen tuux dzalal a pixán.
Junp’el neen ku yauat paytikech yétel u jum u t’an u leedz jul. (Cuevas
Cob, Je bix 10, 42).

Because the hearth guards a mirror inside itself.

A mirror on which your soul is stamped.
A mirror that invokes you through its glowing voice.

As others have noted, the Maya three-stone hearth constitutes “[a] sym-
bol of domesticity . . . [that] gives meaning to numerous aspects of Maya
womanhood,” as well as possesses powerful connections to childbirth
(Gutiérrez Chong, “The Maya” n.p.).13 As schooling possesses the power
to “de-Indianize” indigenous peoples and facilitate their introduction into
 Telling Maya Modernity • 157

the national whole, actions such as tending the hearth actualize aspects of
Yucatec Maya womanhood across generations, hence the flame’s power
to “invoke” the young girl “through the voice of its splendor.” Moreover,
as anyone who has been to Yucatán can attest, the Yucatec Maya kitchen
itself is a social space where, in addition to cooking, women also teach,
learn, and tell stories.14 As much as the young woman keeps the kitchen’s
flame alive so too is she produced by it, her subjectivity as a Maya woman
formed through this creative act of tending the flame that connects her
with previous generations of Maya women.
The section’s final poem, “U yalmaj xikín na’ x-Tuel ti’ x-Tude,” similarly
poeticizes the Yucatec Maya woman’s speech and returns to the theme of
orally transmitting knowledge across generations, in this case from doña
Teodora to Gertrudis. As with the voices found in “Yan a bin xook,” the poem
takes shape as the words spoken by a mother to her daughter. She invites her
daughter to come, sit at her feet, and listen to her advice. In poetic language
she states that she has noticed that a young man, Susano, has taken an
interest in Gertrudis. Teodora warns her that, despite Susano’s good looks,

j-Suuse,
ma’ tan u p’isik k’in jeex Yum K’in
ma’ tan ub bo’tal u kanantik k’iuik
mix tu bo’tal ikil u chpaik u naktal beek bulk’in tu puuch. (Cuevas Cob,
Je’ bix 22, 55)

Susano,
he doesn’t measure the day with the Sun,
he doesn’t receive a salary for guarding the plaza,
he doesn’t get paid for sustaining the oak tree on his back all day.

Imploring her daughter to heed her words, Teodora ends the poem with
the melancholy realization that

yáamae u ki’ makmaj a xikín

je’ bix tu makajil uchak in xikín
le k’in tu jaapakab u chi’ a chiich
je’ bix u jaapakab in chi’ ualkila’. (Cuevas Cob, Je bix 27, 60)

love has closed your ears

as it once closed mine
when I watched your grandmother’s lips opening and closing
the way mine are opening and closing now.
 158 • Chapter 5

In addition to the mother (Teodora) and daughter (Gertrudis), the

poem represents a multiplicity of Yucatec Maya female subjects through
Saturnina, the old maid whose voice is her only progeny (Cuevas Cob, Je’
bix 25, 57), and the dissipated Felipa, a woman Teodora claims is drowning
in perversion (Cuevas Cob, Je’ bix 26, 59). As Teodora’s council suggests,
Gertrudis should not follow the examples set by either of these women
but rather find a suitable, stable partner. In a preceding section, Teodora
makes clear the fact that Gertrudis has any number of such desirable suitors
among the town’s young men, namely Nicolás the mason, Alberto the
cobbler, and Arnulfo the butcher (Cuevas Cob, Je’ bix 23–24, 56–57). All
of these young men must deal with Gertrudis’s indifference toward them.
Indeed, Teodora’s overriding fear is that Gertrudis will follow her own
example: not heeding the words of her mother and running off to marry a
man who lacks a profession and hence the means to provide for his family.
The significance of the potential repetition of this life history is that it
indirectly points toward discord within the current family. The only male
figures within the poem are the suitors and the father/husband, the latter
of whom is defined by his absence and the fact that Teodora draws a paral-
lel between Gertrude’s situation and her own as a young woman in the
lines above. In addition, her foreshadowing that Gertrude will elope with
Susano hints that this, too, will be a repetition of her own actions (Cuevas
Cob, Je’ bix 27, 60). This parallelism between mother and daughter, the
father and Susano, hints at the problems currently endured by the family
itself and the mother’s disillusionment with the young man who eventually
became the absent father/husband of the poem. We can assume that the
father, like Susano, “does not measure the day with the Sun,” a euphe-
mism for a dissipated lifestyle if not alcoholism, whereas the lines about
not receiving a salary for guarding the plaza or leaning on the oak tree
allude to the fact that he lacks a profession and spends his days and nights
in the plaza. Although the young man Susano wears fashionable clothes
and sports an earring, the former are his father’s restitched work clothes,
the latter hanging from an ear

ti’ ku k’atman tak tu dzu’ u laak’ u xikin u tzol xikín u na’. (Cuevas Cob,
Je’ bix 23, 56)

into which his mother’s words enter, only to pass out the other side.

Given Susano’s connection to Gertrudis’s father, these speak indirectly to

the family’s economic hardships as well as to a father figure who refuses
 Telling Maya Modernity • 159

to listen to the women in his life. Recognizing the innocence of youth,

Teodora acknowledges that her own advice to Gertrudis will likely go
unheeded in much the same way.
These male refusals to listen stand in stark contrast to the discursive
agency exercised by Yucatec Maya women in the poem. Teodora’s act of
giving Gertrudis council emphasizes both women’s status as agents, that
of Teodora as an authority capable of bestowing such advice and that of
Gertrudis as a woman who must decide what course of action she will take.
Teodora’s own authority (and her conclusion) has precedence in the fact
that her own mother gave her similar advice when she was Gertrudis’s age.
The intimate power of this conversational tone is all the more apparent
when contrasted with the image of Saturnina, the woman whose song is her
progeny. Here and elsewhere in this collection, from mother to daughter
these words become part of a thread through which these women connect
the past, present, and future. It bears stating that this is the very dynamic at
the heart of Yucatec Maya storytelling. By listening, if not also heeding, the
daughter embodies the counsel and wisdom that her mother passes down
to her. Although there is a kind of discursive agency found in Saturnina’s
song, her voice itself, something that is ephemeral unless taken up and
remembered by others, becomes her only legacy. That is, in the absence
of connections, the voice and the knowledge it conveys are disembodied
and have an uncertain future.
By comparison, near the end of the poem Teodora expresses the physi-
cality of the connection she shares with Gertrudis, stating,

Le tu’ne k’in bin peknak a uok u tial a bin

u jolnajil naj,
bey xan u jolnajil in puksík’al
pipijek’aboob u tial u paatechoob je baaxak k’in bin anak a sut. (Cuevas
Cob, Je bix 27, 60)

From the day you decide to go

the door of this house,
as well as the door of my heart
will always be open if some day you return.

The literal door of the house is thus connected to the metaphoric door of
the mother’s heart. Although pessimistic, these words yet express a sense of
solidarity between mother and daughter, the kind of solidarity that the story-
teller in Martínez Huchim’s short story seeks to foment in broader terms.
 160 • Chapter 5

On the whole, the Maya modernity articulated in these poems is no less

ambivalent than that found in Martínez Huchim. Nonetheless, the women
in Cuevas Cob’s poems are agents that employ Maya oral performance as a
way of knowing and articulating their relationships with the modern world.
Indeed, in its direct contrast between formal schooling and the informal
schoolhouse of the home, the first poem argues that questions of epistemol-
ogy are at the core of Mayas’ relationships with the non-Maya world. This
position does not mean that Mayas, and Maya women in particular, should
eschew formal schooling but that they should engage with this while also
valuing Maya embodied knowledge transmitted orally in the home and
elsewhere. The sense of both-and that the poem concretizes locates its
Maya subjects as being wholly modern and wholly traditional. With regard
to the practice and value of this knowledge, the second poem provides a
melancholy commentary on gender relations that resonates with Martínez
Huchim’s story. Despite the accumulated oral wisdom and remonstrations
from their own mothers, Maya young women yet choose to run away and
elope with their boyfriends. They are nonetheless agents who make their
own decisions, and there yet exists solidarity between mother and daughter
that neither poverty nor abusive relationships can break.

Conclusion

Storytelling constitutes a Maya way of knowing in both oral and written lit-
eratures. Rather than transcribing orality, each of these authors in her own
way writes oral storytellers in order to mobilize the tradition and agency
this figure embodies and assert the viability of this way of knowing. In
doing so, they turn the written page into a site for the articulation of oral
Maya performances, articulating a vision of Maya modernity that, far from
privileging print culture, places it at the service of Maya performance. Not
all Yucatec Maya writers, male or female, compose their written texts from
the locus of an oral storyteller, and it remains to be seen how Maya written
literature will evolve during the rest of the twenty-first century. As this
literature continues to develop, outsiders must approach it on its own terms
rather than mechanically apply Western paradigms to what are, essentially,
non-Western texts. As I have shown here, these written texts are also told,
performed, in addition to their life on the printed page. Reducing them
to Western norms denies the agency of storytellers, these authors, and the
vitality of Maya ways of knowing the modernity we all share.

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Appendix 1
“The Dwarf of Uxmal” as told by
Luis Gonzaga (José May)

Transcription in Maya and Translation into English:

Felipe de Jesús Castillo Tzec, Mariano Bonilla Caamal,
Genner Llanes-Ortiz, Paul Worley
(See pages 48–49 for the English translation.)

Ich maaya
Pues pa’atik a wilik tene’ yaan algunos cuentos tin memoria, in kíimil
papaile’ yaan 80 cuentos yojel.
80 cuentos?
Jaaj pero tene’ ma’ seen nojocheni’, ka’aj jo’op’ in bin meyaj táanxelil,
ka’aj paatike’ pues ma’ tin wuyaje’, pero yaan uláak’, yaan uláak’, este kweento
wáa. Yaan jump’éel kweento óoli’ mayan t’aan, u asunto reey, u asunto reeye’
este . . . u reeyil Uxmáale’ yéetel u reeyil K’aba’.
Aaa bueno.
U reeyil Uxmáale’ yéetel u reeyil K’aba’e’ yaan acuerdo ti’ob. U reeyil
Uxmáale’ México ku taal u yo’och kay. Te’ Chetumal ku jóok’ol u ba’alil
taasik, ma’ k -ojel wáa embarcación le tieempo ku ya’aliko’. Le kan ts’a’abak
ti’ u juntúul . . . le kan ts’a’abak ti’ juntúul aapostado, le u yo’och kay le
reeyo’, ku ts’íitil yáalkabe’ u bisej. Jump’éel kilometroe’, ku k’ubik ti’e’, ku
ts’íitil yáalkabe’ uláak’ le aapostado. Ku ts’a’abal ti’ lelo’, ku ts’íitil yáalkab,
hasta ken k’uchuko’ob Uxmáal.
Chetumal ku ch’a’abal yo’och kay reeye’. Las 11 k’iine’ táan u janal u
reeyil Uxmáal, táan u janal u reeyil K’aba’. U eechiserail Uxamáale’, leti’
bisik yo’och reey. Las 11 táan u janal u reeyil Uxmáal, las 11 táan u janal u
reeyil K’aba’ . . . Entonsese’, ma’ ganarta’ak le reey le eepoca ku ya’aliko’.
Le túun le eechiserao’ yaan juntúul u chan áabile’ ka’aj p’áat tu poder. Le
káan xi’ik yaan te’ xan Noj Paata’ yaan jump’éel lugaare Labnaj ti’ ku bin u

161
 162 • Appendix 1

ch’a’ik ja’il, ti’ ku bin u ch’aik ja’il. Ku . . . esté . . . ku bin. Ku ya’alik tech,
como túun eechiserai’ beora ku bina’, beora ku suuta’.
Yaan juntúul u yáabil túune’ le enano. Le enanoo’ pues este, pues este,
chéen tu juun tu p’áataj te’ naj. Juntéene’, ka’aj tu yojeltej te’ yaanal tu’ux
ku t’abik u k’áak’ u chiicho’, ti’ yaan le elemento sagradoo’. Ka’aj jo’op’u
páanik, táan u páanik. Ma’ táan u xáantal tu bin u chiich, tu suut u chiiche’.
Ka’aj tu jolaj u foondo u p’uul u chiiche’, ka’aj bin u chiich.
Táan u chupik le p’uule’ beya’, táan u chupik, táan u chupkin. Ka’aj tu
ts’a’aj kwentai’, joolol le p’uulo. Le káan u chuka’an u chupule’, ku p’áatal
mina’an. Ja’alibe’, como eechisera, ka’aj xúuchakine’, ka’aj taalij. Le ka’aj
taale’, ts’o’ok u jóok’sa’al le elemento sagradoo’. Pero le enanoo’ túun ku
paxik le instrumento. Le siudaado’ ma’ ku konfundirtik, ma’ táan u na’ata’al
tu’uxi’.
Tu sitartaj tuláakal le jeenteo’, tu sitartaj tuláakal le jeenteo’, ma’ . . . estén
. . . mix máak ti’ yaan. Ka’aj yanjij máax, ku a’alike’:
—Si señor reey le u naj le eechisera ku pa’axal le instrumentoo’.
—Ajam, ma’alob.
Ka’aj t’a’an eechisera.
—Ko’oten weye’. Le instrumento ku pa’axal tanaj techo’, yaan a taasik
weye’.
—Pues señor si tene’ keen xi’iken ka tusik in beel beyo’ mix máak ku
p’áatal tanaj ten. Chéen estén . . .chéen leti’e’ . . . chéen juntúul in chan
áabile’, chichan.
—Jaaj, pues táan u taal a wáabil. Le sagrado elemento ka paxiko’ yaan
a taasik.
Como túun ts’o’ok u k’uchul u yorail u tia’al u kaliartuba’obo’, ala’ab
ti’e’ tumen le enanoi’:
—Ma’ chéen ka’aj in taasik. ¿Ma’ a wojel le máax kaxt le sagraado
elementoo’ leti’e’ u jeel reey?
—Aaah pues, pendejo, ¿a k’áat wáa túun de ke ka gaanartalen? U tia’al
ka gaanartalene’, jump’éel kwuarta kokoyol ku pa’abil ta sieen.
Ka’aj túub yok’ole’, ka’aj luk’ij. Ka’aj binij, ka’aj k’uch yiknal u abuelai’
táan u yuk’ol.
¿Ba’ax ka wok’oltik?
Abuela le reeyo’ ts’o’ok u gaanartiken. Tin wa’alaj ti’e’ le sagrado elementoo’
tin kaxtaj, ma’ tin k’ubikti’. Ka’aj tu ya’alaj tene’, jump’éel kwaartaj tuk’, ku
pa’abil tin pool. Kin wa’alike’, tene’ je’el in kíimile’.
—Xeen a wa’alik ti’e’, ma’ jump’éel kwaarta’i’. Junmuut ku pa’abil ta
pooli’, junmuut kun u pa’abil tu pooli’. Xeen a wa’alik ti’e’.
 “The Dwarf of Uxmal” by May • 163

—Ma’alob—ka’aj u ya’alah ti’: Yuum reey, bejla’e’ ts’o’ok in decidirtikinba’i’,

ma’ jump’éel kwaarta kokoyol ku pa’abil tin pooli’, junmuut. Junmuut xan
techi’.
—Ma’alob.
—Ja’alibe’ meenta’ak u ju’unil
Ka’aj meeta’ab u eskriturail. Le ka’aj oorachaje’, ka’aj bisa’ab enano
tumen u abuela. Ka’aj chikunta’abe’:
—Tub, tub, tub.
Buka’aj ka tuklik u neek’ u kokoyolil u joola’. Ka’aj ts’o’ok túune’: “A
ver reey.” (Le ka’aj estrenarta’ab te’ela’, binen in cha’ant u peliculai’, estén
juntúul doctor filmarmaji’) Chéen jump’éel tuk’e’: “tak.” Chen tu sats’aj u
yooke’, tu p’ataji’. Entonces le enanoe’ ka’aj tu ya’alaje’: “Bejla’e’ nuka’aj
koronartbil.” Óok’otnaj padreo’ob, óok’otnaj licenciado’ob, óok’otnaj le
gansoso’ob, óok’otnaj patoso’ob, óok’otnaj tuláakal. Ts’o’kole’, ka’aj óok’otnaj
enano yéetel u aabuela. Ti’ yaan tu coronae’. Leti’e je’elo’.
Ma’alob.
¿Bix ta wu’uyik?
Jats’uts.
Jaaaj, u eechiserail le Uxmáale’ . . . u eechiserai’ K’aaba’e’ kíinsa’abe’
tumen u eechiserai’ Uxmáal, u hechicerai’ Uxamáale’ kíinsa’abe’ tumen
u eechiserai’ Mani’, entonces chéen u eechicerai’ Mani’ p’áatal. Yéetel u
eechiserail lela’, láaj kimentako’ob, leti’e’ beyo’.
Seen uts, seen uts.
Jach úuchben le tsikbalo’.

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Appendix 2
“The Dwarf of Uxmal” as told by
Humberto Bonilla Caamal

Transcription in Maya and Translation into English:

Felipe de Jesús Castillo Tzec, Mariano Bonilla Caamal,
Genner Llanes-Ortiz, Paul Worley
(See pages 50–52 for the English translation.)

Ich maaya
Lela’ in watan. Ts’o’ok 40 ja’ab ts’o’kok in beel yéetel. Chéen ba’axe’ ya’ab
u k’uuxil, yaan ora ku yóotik u loxen. Ya’ab u k’áatik taak’in. Leti’e’ je’elo’,
yaan jo’otúul paalalo’ob yaanto’on, jo’otúul. Je’elo’ ma’alob juts’abaj, je’el
in kajik le tsikbala’.
Ninka’aj in tsikbalte’ex u kweentoil ba’ax úuch ti’ brujai’, ti’ jump’éel noj
kaaj ku k’aaba’tik Noj Paat. Noj Paat ti’ yaan ka’ap’éel lúub ti’ Noj Káakab,
ka’a lúub yan ti’ Noj Káakabe’ ti’ yaan u kaajil Noj Paat.
Te’ tu kaajil Noj Paato’ juntéen ku ya’akile’ jump’éel xtáabay, wáa ich
españole’ le ku ya’al ti’ eechicera. Táan u máane’, ka’aj tu kaxtaj jump’éel
je’. Tu kaxtaj túun jump’éel je’ beyo’, ka’aj tu machaje’, ka’aj tu bisaj tu
yotoch. Te’ tu yotocho’, ka’aj tu ts’áaj chi’ k’aak’. Te’ chi’ k’áako’, ka’aj jo’op’
u máan k’iin, ka’aj jo’op’ u máan k’iin.
Ka’aj tóop’ le je’o’, juntúul chan paal ku tóop’ik. Ka’aj jo’op’ u bin u líik’il le
chan paal beyo’, ba’axe’ ma’ nojojchaji’. Ka’aj p’áat beyo’ chan enano le paalo’.
Ma’ nojochchaji’. Le paal túuno’, tu k’ajóoltaj beyo’ le eechicerao’ beey u
chiiche’. Juntéen ku ya’akili’ túune’, le paalo’ ku yilik u chiicho’ jach ya’ab u
kanáantik te’ chi’ k’áako’. Ma’ táan u luk’ul casi te’ chi’ k’áak’ beyo’. Caadail
ku taale’ ku p’áatali’, ma’ táan u luk’ul casi te’ chi’ k’áak’o’ le u chiicho’.
Ka’aj tu ya’alaj túun le kabal ooko’, wáa le ku ya’alal enanoo’, ka’aj tu
ya’alaje’:

164
 “The Dwarf of Uxmal” by Bonilla Caamal • 165

—¿Ba’axten in chiich, leti’e’ jach ku kanáantik te’ela’? Yaan in wilik bix

ku náachtal te’ela’, ka’aj páatchajake’ in wilike’ ba’ax u ta’akmaj te’ela’.
Juntéen, ku ya’alik túuna ka’aj taal tu tuukul bey le chan kabal ooko’, ka’aj
tu jolaj, tu jolaj u yiit u p’uul u chiich. Le káan xi’ik ch’a’a ja’il tu yo’olal
beyo’ ma’ u séeb chu’upul le p’úul yéetel le ja’o’. Ka’aj páatake’ u beeytal u
páanik le tu’ux ku tukultik u páanik tu’ux ta’aka’an wáa ba’axo’ .
Juntéen, ku ya’alik túun beyo’, ka’aj tu jolaj le p’uulo’, ka’aj bin u chiich
cha’a ja’. Como tu t’ojik le ja’o’, tu t’ojik le ja’o’, ma tu chu’upul le p’uulo’, le
kabal ook túuno’ tu ja’ats’ik, tu ja’ats’ik, tu jats’ike’, ka’aj tu kaxtaja ka’ap’éel
ba’alo’ob bey beeytaka’, ku ya’alal ich españole plato wáa jaajay k’ato’ob,
chéen ba’axe’ meeta’an de oro.
Le enano ka’aj tu jats’aj le ka’ap’éel ba’al beya’, ka’aj juumnajij. Le ka’aj
juumnaje’, ka’aj u’uya’ab tumen le reey te’ Uxmáal. Le ka’aj tu yu’ubaj le
reey te’ Uxmáal u juum le ba’al beya’, ka’aj tu ya’alaj ti’ u soldados, wáa
leti’e’ máaxo’ob áantik beyo’:
—¡Xeen a wile’ex le ko’olel te’ Noj Paato’! Leti’ ch’a’amaj ten le ba’alo’ob
ku meyaj to’ono’ u tia’al u t’anikuba’obo’.
Ka’aj bin ya’abach ba’atel máako’ob, le ku ya’ala’al ich español
soldadoso’obo’. Bino’obe’. Ka’aj ch’a’ab le chan kaabal ook, wáa le enano
yéetel u chiicho’, ka’aj bisa’abo’ob Uxmáal. Ku k’usa’alo’ob Uxmáale’, ka’aj
a’alabti’obe’:
—¿Ba’axten ta ch’a’aje’ex le ba’al je’ela’? Lela’ u tia’al reey, ma’ a tiale’exi’.
Chéen ta wookolajte’ex ti’ teen. Le o’olale’, te’exe’ yaan a kíinsa’ale’ex sáamal
tu ka’atúulale’ex.
Ka’aj túun tu ya’alaj le u chiich le enano.
—Ts’a’e’ex to’on jump’éel oportunidad. Ma’ a kíinsko’one’ex.
Ka’aj láaj juntarta’ab u láak’ le nukuch kaajo’ob tu bak’paach Uxmáal. Ti’
yaan K’abaji’, ti’ yaan Sayili’, ti’ yaan Labnaj, ti’ yaan K’oox, uláak . . . Noj
Káakab, ba’alo’ob kaajilo’ob beyo’. Ka’aj tu ya’alajo’obe’:
—Ma’alob ts’a’abil ti’ob jump’éel vez tia’al ma’ u jáan kiinsalo’ob.
Ka’aj túun tu ya’alaj le reeyo’:
—Chéen ba’axe,’in k’áate’ jump’éel áak’abe’ yaan a láaj xokike’ex u le’
jump’éel ya’ax che’ yaan te’elo’. K’ajóola’an ich españole’ “Ceibo”. Le káan
sáasak, wáa táan a láaj a’ale’ex jayp’éel u lei’, ma’ táan a kinsa’ale’ex.
Je’elo’ ka’aj túun áak’abchaj beyo’, le u chiich le enanoo’ ka’aj tu t’anaj
le síiniko’obo’, ka’aj tu t’anaj le mejen síiniko’obo’:
—Ko’otene’ex weye’.
Ka’aj tu láaj nats’aj le mejen síiniko’obo’ beyo’, ka’aj tu ya’alaj ti’ le mejen
síiniko’obo’:
 166 • Appendix 2

—Yaan a láaj xokike’ex ten u le’ le ya’ax che’ ti’ le áak’aba’. In k’áate’ le
kéen u ya’al las 5 de la mañanae’ ts’o’ok a láaj xokike’ex. Tu taal u sáastale’
a láaj xokme’ex u le’, tumen wa ma’e’ yaan k-kinsa’al to’on. ¡Áanto’onexi’!
—Ma’alob.
Le síiniko’obo’ ka’aj jo’op’ u na’akalo’ob tu k’ab le che’o’, tu na’akalo’ob,
tu yéemelo’ob, tu na’akalo’ob tu yéemelo’ob. Le ka’aj sáaschaje’, ts’o’ok u
láaj xokiko’ob u le’ le ya’ax che’o’.
Ka’aj taal le reeye’ ka’aj tu láaj juntartaj tu ka’atéen, tuláakal le máako’ob
yaan u yéet meyajo’. Ka’aj a’alab ti’e’:
—¿Ta xoke’ex?
—T-xokaj.
—Je’elo’, ¿chuka’an wáa túun?
—Chuka’an. Je’ela’.
Ka’aj a’alab ti’. Pero ma’ uts tu t’aan le reey beyo’, ku ya’alike’ ma’ tu
kréextik. Ka’aj tu ya’alaje’:
—Jel xookbil tumen le máako’obo’.
Ka’aj jo’op’ u xokol, u xokol. Tu bisaj óoxp’éel k’iin ti’ob ka’aj tu láaj
xokajo’ob. Ka’aj tu yilajo’obe’ de que jach je’ex xo’okiko’, bey úuchiko’.
Chuka’an je’el bix jayp’éel le’ tu ya’alajo’obo’.
Le reey túuno’, ma’ ki’imak u yóoli’. (Le reey, kin wa’alika’ ich maayae’,
ku ya’ala ti’ ajáaw) Je’elo’, le ajáawil túun te’e le Uxmáalo’, ma’ ki’imak u
yóoli’. Tumen beey, ma’ túun u kíinsik le enanoo’ ookolt le ba’al ti’o’.
Ka’aj túun tu ya’alaj le reeyo’:
—In k’aat ka’aj ts’a’e’ex uláak’ prueba ti’. (Wáa ka’aj túunta’ak u yóol tu
ka’atéen. Tumen paalabra pruebae’ ich maayae’ ku ya’alal ti’ túutaj óolal)
—¿Ba’ax túun a k’áat?—ku ya’alal ti’.
—In k’áate’ le ka’aj k pa’aj tuk’ tu pool. Óoxp’éel tuk’ in k’áat in pa’ tu
pool. Wáaj ma’ kíim yéetel le óoxp’éel tuk’o’, kin k’ubik ti’ tuláakal le ba’ax
je’ela’, kin kubik ti’, le piraamide wáa le paalacio, kin k’ubik ti’.
Ka’aj tu núukaj túun le enanoo’ wáa le kabal ooko’:
—Ma’alob, uts tin t’aan ka’aj pa’ óoxp’éel tuk’ tin pool. Ba’ale’, wáa ku
ts’o’okol u pa’abal le óoxp’éel tuk’ tin pool, ma’ u kíimeno’ob, kin pa’ik ta
pooli’.
Ka’aj tu ya’alaj le reeyo’:
—Ma’alob.
Le reeyo’ u tukulmaj beyo’: le keen pa’abak le óoxp’eel tuko’ yaan u kíimil.
Je’elo’ ka’aj bin túun u chiich le enanoo’ ka’aj tu kaxtaj jump’éel casco beya’
ka’aj tu ts’áaj tu pool. Ma’ ojéela’ani’. Chéen leti’ u yojel. Tu ts’aaj beya’,
ka’aj tu ts’áaj jump’éel peluuca, wáa u ts’aaj u yáalal u láak’ u tso’otsel u pool.
 “The Dwarf of Uxmal” by Bonilla Caamal • 167

Ka’aj sáaschaj beyo’, ka’aj jo’op’ u pa’abal túun le tuk’ tu poolo’. Ja’ats’
jump’éel tuk’ beya’ mix ba’al úuch ti’. U ts’o’okole’, ka’aj ka’a ja’ats’ uláak’
jump’éel tuk’, mixba’al úuch ti’. Ku ya’alik le reey túuno’:
—Bejla’ ku kíimile’.
Ka’aj ja’ats’ uláak’ ti’e’, mixba’al úuch ti’. Ka’aj ja’ak’ u yóol.
—Je’elo’, beora máanen. Kulen teech. Ti’ teech ku jats’bil beora ta
poola’—ku ya’alal ti’.
Ka’aj máansa’ab túun le reey beyo’, tu táanil tuláakal le kaajo’obo’
bak’paacho’. Ka’aj kulaj le reeyo’. Ka’aj ma’ache’, ka’aj ts’a’ab tu pool le
tuk’o’, ka’aj ja’ats’ij. Le ka’aj ja’ats’ le tuk’ tu pool le reeyo’, ka’aj lúube’ kimen.
Ku ya’alike’ le túune’ núuxi’ múul bey p’áatajo’, ka’aj tu k’aabata’al
adivino, wáa u k’áat u ya’al ich maaya “ti’ na’atabi’.” Bey p’áatik túuno’,
ka’aj p’áat túune’, le enanoo’ ti’ p’áat kajtal tu kaajil Uxmáal ka’aj tu p’átajo’
Noj Paat. Ts’o’okij.

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Appendix 3
“The Story of Juan Rabbit” as told by
Mariano Bonilla Caamal

Transcription in Maya and Translation into English:

Felipe de Jesús Castillo Tzec, Mariano Bonilla Caamal,
Genner Llanes-Ortiz, Paul Worley
(See pages 108–13 for the English translation.)

Ich maaya
In k’áat ka’aj a t’aan ti’ teen u tsikbal Juan T’u’ul.
Ma’alob, ninka’ajen in tsikbaltech u tsikbalil Juan t’u’ul yéetel Ma Chiich.
Leti’e’ je’elo’ ninka’ajen in tsikbal túun tech yo’olal le Ma Chiicho’.
Juntéen ku ya’aliki’ le Ma Chiicho’ bin u pak’ bu’ul. Tu pak’aj le bu’ulo’
ka’aj jo’op’ u jóoyabtik yéetel u ja’il jaltun. Ku jóoyabtik le bu’ulo’.
Ja’alibe’, jump’éel k’iin ti’ le je’elo’, Ma’ Chiicho’ ka’aj binij te’ tu paach
u pak’al bu’ul. Le ka’aj k’uche’, ka u máan u xíimbalt u pak’al, u paach u
paak’al bu’ul, ka’aj tu yilike’ le bu’ulo’ ts’o’ok u láaj jóok’la’al, ba’ale’ tu
jaanta’al tumen Juan T’u’ul . Tu jaanta’al le bu’ulo’ tumen le Juano’.
Ka’aj jo’op’ u tukultik Ma Chiich, ka’aj jo’op’ u ya’aik Ma Chiiche’:
—¿Bix ken in beetij? Le bu’ula’ in pak’maje’ tia’al in kaxtik in kuxtal.
Ka’aj jo’op’u tsikbaltike’ tu jaanta’al u pak’al bu’ul. Ta ts’a’ab túun áantaj
ti’ wáa consejo tumen u láak’ máako’ob ba’ax unaj u beetik le Ma Chiicho’.
Ja’alibe’, le Ma Chiich túuno’, ts’o’ok u tso’olol ti’ tumen le jala’acho’obo’
ba’ax unaj u u beetik. Ka’aj a’alab ti’e’ ku beete’ juntúul máak, pero de lokok.
Juntúul máak de lokok wáa de kib.
Ka’aj tu kaxtaj kib, lokok, tu xa’ak’taj beya’. Ka’aj jo’op’ u patik, u patik
juntúul máak, tu beetaj u k’ab, tu beetaj pool, yich, yook, tuláakal juntúul
máak. Ka’aj bine’, ka’aj tu wa’alkuntaj le máak beya’, tu beel tu’ux ku taal
le Juan T’u’ulo’. Ka’aj tu ts’áaji’ tu wa’alkunt le máak beyo’.

168
 “The Story of Juan Rabbit” • 169

Ja’alibe’ Juane’ . . . Juan T’u’ule’ ka’aj jo’op’ u taal. Tu yáak’abtale, ka’aj

jo’op’ u taal janal, ook janal bu’ul. Le ka’aj k’uche’, ku yilike’ wa’akbal
juntúul maaki’. Leti’e’ ma’ tu k’ajóoltaj le Juan Tu’ulo’ wáa le máako’ de
kib. Ka’aj jo’op’ u ya’alik ti’e’ máako’:
—¡Tséelabaj tin beel! Tumen tene’ nikin kaxt in kuxtal! Wey yaan u muul
in ta’e’, wey yaan u muul in wiixe’—ku ya’alik Juan Tu’ul.
Ja’alibe’, ma’ tu núukaj ti’ tumen le máako’, pues tumen el máako’, ¡de
kib! Ku ya’alik ti’ le máako’:
—¡Tséelabaj tin beel! Tumen wáa ma’ ta luk’ul tin beele’ kin koojchak
tech—ku ya’alik le Juan Tu’ulo’.
Le máako’ ma’ táan u núukik, ka’aj tu kóojchajtaj. Ka’aj kóojchakta’abe’
ti’ taak’ yook Juan Tu’uli’, como táataak’kil le ki’bo’, taak’ij.
Ts’o’ok u taak’al beyo’, ku ya’alike’:
—¡Cha’ in wook! Tumen wáa ma’e’, kin kóochakeche’ yéetel u láak’ u
ts’íit in wook.
Tu kóojchaktaj beya’ yéetel u láak’ u ts’íit u yook. Ti’ taak’ij. Ku ya’alike’:
—¡Cha’eni’! Tumen, wáa ma’e’, kin láajikech.
Ka’aj tu láajaj le máako’, ti’ taak’ u k’abi’ tumen de kib.
—¡Cha’eni’! Ka’aj xi’iken janal, tumen tene’ ninka’aj in kaxt in kuxtal.
Chéen tu t’aan Juan.
—Wáa ma’ ta cha’ikene’ kin láajikech.
Ka’aj tu láajaje’, ka’aj taak’ Juan T’u’ul, bey yanila’. Ku ya’alik Juan T’u’ule’:
—¡Cha’aeni’! Wáa ma’e’ kin t’éesnak’tikech.
Ka’aj tu t’éesnak’taj beya’, ka’aj taak’ u nak’ ti le kibo’. Chu’uk tumen bey
le ki’bo’. Ma’ u páajtal u bini’, ti’ taak’ le Juano’.
Ts’o’ok u sáastale’, ka’aj bin Ma Chiich u xíimbal tu paach u paak’al
bu’ul. Le ka’aj k’uch te’ tu paach u paak’al bu’ulo’, ka’aj bin yilaj le Juane’:
¡Lúubij! Le Juano taak’al ti’ le kibo’:
—Teech Juan, ¡lúubech! In púuts’ileche’ Juan, ¡lúubech!—ku ya’alik.
—Ja’alibe’, Ma’ Chiich, ma’alob. Ts’o’ok a chukiken, ma’alob—ku ya’alik.
Ka’aj éensa’ab Juan te’ kibo’, ka’aj bisa’abij.
—Ba’ale’ Ma’ Chiich—ku ya’alik.— pues ts’o’ok in lúubul. ¿Yaan a
jaantiken?
—Yaan in jaantikech. Óonsikilil Juan kin in beetej. Óonsikil t’u’ul ken
in beetej, óonsikilil Juan. Táaj ki’, úuch in jaantej.
—Ma’alob Ma Chiich, ma’alob—ku ya’alik.
Ja’alibe’ ka’aj k’ala’ab so’oy, k’a’al tu so’oy Juan beyo’. Láaj orail ku bin
cha’antbil tumen la áabiltsilo’obo’. Ti’ yaan Juani’, ti’ ku suutikubaj Juani’,
k’ala’an so’oy. Ku ya’alaj ti’e’:
 170 • Appendix 3

—Yaan túun in jantikech Juan. ¡Buka’aj ki’il a wóonsikilil wale’!

—Jaaj. Ma’alob Ma Chiich—ku ya’alik. Ma’alob yaan a jantiken—ku
ya’alik. Pero ts’áaten u ts’ook u páajtalil wáa oportunidad antes a jaantiken.
—Ma’alob, ma’alob Juan—ku ya’alik. ¿Ba’ax túun u ts’ook a oportunidad?
—Eske tene’, jats’uts in wóok’ot. Wáa ka’aj a wilik in wóok’ote’ Ma Chiich,
jum, yaan a ki’imaktal a wool. Ts’o’okole’, ka jaantiken.
—Je’elo’ ma’alob Juan.
Ku xíimbal le k’iin walkila’, ka’aj a’alab ti’ Juane’, ka’aj jóok’ok:
—¿Ma’ ta púuts’ul Juan?
—Ma’ tin púuts’ul, ma’ tin puutsul—ku ya’alik. Ts’o’okole’, ka jaantiken.
Si ti’ kin óok’ot te’ela’.
—¿Ma’ ta púuts’ul Juan?
—Ma’ tin púuts’ul chiich, ma’ táan.
—Je’elo’ ma’alob.
Ka’aj je’eb le so’oyo’, ka’aj taal le paalalo’obo’, Juane’ ka’aj jo’op’ u yóok’ot.
Tu yóok’ot le Juan T’u’ulo’. Tu yóok’ot beya’, tu yóok’ot Juan, tu p’íit le
Juano’, tu yóok’ot. Le Ma Chiicho’ tu che’ej:
—Jáajaja’, jáajaja’, jáajajaj’, jáajaja’—tu che’ej.
Hasta tu wixikubaj Ma Chiich. Tu wixikubaj Ma Chiich, ikil u cha’antik
ku yóok’ot Juan. Ku bin paachnaj beya’, ku ka’aj suut, ku bin paachnaj
beya’, ku ka’aj suut. Tu síit’ Juan. Ma’ Chiiche’ tu papaxk’ab, ki’imak u yóol
ku cha’antik u yóok’ot Juan T’u’ul. Le ka’aj bin paachnaj beya’, ma’ ka’aj
suunaji’. ¡Púuts’ij, púuts’’ij! Le ka’aj bin Juan, ka’aj jo’op’ u máan kaxtbile’,
mina’an. Binij.
Ka’aj jo’op’ u yok’ol ma Chiich:
—Tu tusajen le Juana’, tu tusajen. Tu ya’alaj tene’, ma’ tu púuts’ul. ¿Bix
túun ken k meetej paalale’ex?
—Pues p’uuts’ij, ma’ tu suut.
Ka’aj jo’op’ u yo’k’ol Ma Chiich, tu yok’ol Ma Chiich. Ja’alibe’, Juane’
binij, náachchaji.
Pero Juane’, u amigo juntúul koj. U amigo juntúul koj. Ku ya’allik ti’ le
kojo’.
—Yaan jump’éel chan báaxal in kaxtmaj.
—¿Ba’an báaxalil?
—Ko’ox, kin we’esiktech.
Ka’aj bin le Juano’ yéetel u amigo koj te’ so’oy tu’ux k’alab le Juano’, ti’
ook yéetel le kojo’. Ka’aj ook yéetel le koj túuno’ le ku ya’alik ti’e’.
—¿Ma’ túun a wojeli’? Jats’uts le chan báaxal je’el in kaxtmaja’.
—¿Bix a wa’alik?
 “The Story of Juan Rabbit” • 171

—Jats’uts.
—Ja’alibe’. ¿Bixtúun?
—Eske lela’, yaan a wa’alik ti’ le so’oya’, ka wa’alik ti’e’: ¡K’alabaj so’oy,
je’abaj so’oy! ¡K’alabaj so’oy, je’abaj so’oy! ¿Bix a wilik? Tene’ beey in beetiko’,
tene’ kin wokoli’ kin jóok’oli’. ¡Óokeni’!
Ba’axe’ como ts’a’an le ja’ look túun ti’al u jóoychokoj-ja’ataj le Juan, ka’aj
púuts’o’, pues le ja’o’ p’a’atal tu look.
Ja’alibe’ le kojo’ ka’aj jo’op’ u ya’alik beyo:
—¡K’alabaj so’oy, je’abaj so’oy!
—¿Bix a wilik? ¿Jats’uts le báaxalo’ masa’?
—Jats’uts Juan.
—Je’elo’, beora kin jáan suuta’—ku ya’alik.
Ka’aj tu p’aataj le kojo’. Ka’aj bin leti’.
—Beora kin suuta’—ku ya’alik.
—Ma’alob.
Ka’aj binij. Le kojo’, ka’aj ku yokol, tu jóok’ol :
—¡K’alabaj so’oy, je’abaj so’oy!
Ma’ ka’aj tu’ubti’ le kojo’ ku ya’alike’:
—¡K’alabaj so’oy, k’alabaj so’oy, k’alabaj so’oy!
Ka’aj k’aal le so’oy tu jaajilo’.
Le ka’aj máan le paalalo’ob u yáabil le Chiicho’, le chan x-Chiicho’, ku
ya’aliko’obe’:
—¡Chiich! ¡Le Juane’, ts’o’ok u suut! Ti’ yaan ti’ le so’oyo’. ¡Ko’oten a
wilej! Jach beey Juane’.
Ka’aj bin Ma Chiich, ku ya’alike’:
—¡Paalale’ex ma’ Juani’! ¡Juntúul, juntúul ba’aba’al!—ku ya’alik—
¡Juntúul ba’aba’al yaani’, ma’ Juani! ¡Taase’ex le chokoj ja’o’ wáaj jóoychokoj
ja’ate’ex!—ku ya’alik.
Je’el túun ku ch’úuyaj le ja’ túun look tia’al u jóoychokoj-ja’ataj le Juano’,
ka’aj láala’ab yóok’ol koj. Jóok’ yaalkab koj tu káachaktaj le so’oyo’ ka’aj
púuts’ij. Joots’ol yook koj, tu bin yáalkab:
—Yaan in chukik le chan Juana’, kin jaantik—ku ya’alik. Tumen tu
tusajen—ku ya’alik.Tu tusajen. Je’ela’, ts’o’ok in jóoychokoj-ja’ata’al.
Ka’aj bini’.
Ja’alibe’ ka’aj jo’op’ u máan kaxantbil, tu máan kaxantbil Juan. Ma’ tu
kaxtaj. Ka’aj ilabil, ka’aj ilabe’ ku ya’alik ti’e’.
—Juan, yaan in jantikech.
—¿Ba’axten ka jaantiken, ma’ amigo’oni’? A wojel k-éet bisbai. Jach
ma’alob k-éet bisikbaj. Ma’ unaj a jaantikeni’.
 172 • Appendix 3

—Unaj in jaantikech tumen teche’ jach ya’ab ta tusilen. Ta wa’alaj ten

le so’oy, “je’abaj so’oy, k’alabaj so’oy.” Tene’ ka’aj tin wa’alaj k’alaba’e’ ka’aj
k’aaleni’. Ka’aj taal Ma Chiiche’, ka’aj tu jóoychokoj-ja’aten. Je’elo’ ilej
joots’olen. Yaan in jaantikech.
—¡Jum! ¿Wáa ka’aj a wil jump’éel chan báaxal ts’o’ok in kaxtike’? ¡Jats’uts!
Yaanal sajkab, yaanal sajkabe’, ¿bix a wilik? Weye’ ilej, ¡jats’uts le sajkaba’!
Ooken a wilej.
U machmaj le sajkab Juan beya’:
—Ooken a wilej, ooken a wilej. Lela’, leti’e’ ka’ana’ in láat’maj le ka’an
beya’. Wáa ka cha’aik le sajkaba’ ku júutul le ka’ana’.
—¿Bix a wa’alik?
—Beyo’. Ts’o’okole’, yaan jump’éel chan báaxal xan te’ela’—ku ya’alik.
Jump’éel chan báaaxal.
Te’ ichil le sajkabo’ túuno’, yaan leti’e’, yaan le xuuxo’ob ch’úuyen ch’uuy
ich sajkab. Te’ ichil le sajkabo’ yaan le xuuxo’ob beya’, pero yaan yiik’el
túun. Ku ya’alike’:
—Lela’ jump’éel chan báaxal xan.
—¿Bix a wa’alik Juan?
—Leti’. Wáa ka wilik tin xáantal, ma’ tin suute’, ka k’olik le chan báaxala’
beey jump’éel chan campanae’—ku ya’alik.
—Ma’alob—ku ya’alik.
—Pero ma’ tin xáantal beora tin suuta’.
Ma’ ka’aj tu cha’ak’ataj, ka’aj p’áat le kojo’ u láat’ le’ sajkabo’. Ka’aj puuts’
Juan. Bin Juan. U ta’akubaj tu ka’atéen. Yaake’, ku yu’ubik le kojo’ ts’o’ok u
ka’anal, nuka’aj júutul le sajkabo’. Ka’aj tu ya’alaje’ :
—Pa’atik in péeksik le chan campana’—ku ya’alike’.
Ma’ chan campanai’, juntúul xuux. Ka’aj tu péeksaj le xuux beya’, ka’aj
chi’ichiba’ab le kojo’. Jóok’ yáalkab, ka’aj juut sajakabe’ je’el túun ku bin
le kojo’:
—Yaan in jaantik Juan. Ts’o’ok u tusiken, ts’o’ok u ka’a tusiken le Juana’.
Ka’aj tu ka’a yilaj:
—¿Ba’ax ka beetik Juan?
—Ninka’aj in bis su’uk—ku ya’alik. Ninka’aj in bis su’uk.
—¿Ba’ax ti’a’altech su’uk?
—U tia’al in beetik in wotoch. Jáan kuchej.
—Ma’, yaan in jaantikech.
—Ma’, ma’. Jáan kuchej le su’uka’.
Ma’ ka’aj tu k’axaj junkúuch su’uk tu pu’uch le kojo’, ka’aj jo’op’ u bino’ob.
—Ts’o’ok in ka’anal, áanteni’—ku ya’alik.
 “The Story of Juan Rabbit” • 173

Ka’aj tu k’axaj tu pu’uch le kojo’, ka’aj jo’op’ u bino’ob. Entre tu bino’obe’

ka’aj tu t’abaj. T’aba’ab le su’uk ti le kojo’. Ka’aj chu’uj le koj tu ka’atéeno’.
¡Ja!, Áalkabnaj Juane’, ma’ jaanta’abi’.
Úujchaj bey tu máan kaxtbilo’, tak ka’aj kaxta’abi’. Ku ya’alal ti’e’:
—Bejlae’ túun yaan in jantikech Juan.
—Ma’ jaantiken.
—¿Ba’ax ma’ in jaantikech? Ts’o’ok a seen tusiken.
—Ma’. Yaan jump’éel chan báaxal ts’o’ok in kaxtik.
—¿Ba’ax báaxalil?
—Ma je’ela’, ko’oten a wilej.
Jumkúul maata xa’an túun beya’ ka’anal le xa’ano’:
—Ilawilej. Ilawila’ bix kin in beetik—ku ya’alik. Tene’, weey kin báaxal
sáansamal. Walkila’ tin na’akal te báaxala’. Ilawila’il.
Ku na’akal te k’ab le xa’an beya’. Ku na’akali’. Ku ka’antale’, ku ka’a éemel,
ku na’akale’, ku ka’a éemel.
—¿Letie’, wáa túun le báaxalo’?
—Juum. ¡Jats’uts ba’al! Beora ken a wila’.
—Ma’alob—ku ya’alik.
Ku na’akal túun beya’, ku ya’alik ti’e’:
—¡Sats’ajbaj xa’an! ¡Sats’ajbaj xa’an!
Ku sats’ikubaj le xa’an beya’, ku sats’ikubaj le xa’ano’.
—¡Sats’abaj xa’an!
Ku ka’a sats’ikubaj.
—¡Mots’ajbaj xa’an!
Ku ka’a motsikubaj le xa’ano’.
—¡Sats’abaj xa’an!
Ku ka’a sats’ikubaj.
—¡Mots’abaj xa’an!
Ku na’akal tu yéemel le xa’an beya’.
—¿Bix a wilik? ¿Masa’ jats’uts? ¿Kuxtúun ka’aj na’akakechi’? ¡Na’akeni’!
—¿Je’el wáa in kanike’?
—Je’ele’, na’akeni’.
Le ka’aj na’ak Juan, le ka’aj na’ak Juane’ ka’aj jo’op’ u ya’alik xan, osea
ka’aj jo’op’ u ya’alik koj beyo’:
—¡Sats’abaj xa’an! ¡Motsajbaj xa’an!
Mientras tu ya’alik beyo’, ka’aj leti’e’, ka’aj jo’op’u sats’ikubaj le xa’ano’, tu
sats’ikubaj le xa’ano’ . . . ¿Beora bix túun? Tu’ub ti’ koje’ bix ken un ya’ale’
ka’aj u mots’ubaj le xa’ano’. Xáanjij ka’aj k’a’aj ti’. Ka’aj tu ya’alaj ti’e’:
—¡Motsabaj xa’an! ¡Motsajbaj xa’an.
 174 • Appendix 3

Jujump’íitile’ ka’aj jo’op’ u bin u motsikubaj, tu motsikubai’, hasta ka’aj

tu motsikubai le xa’ano’, ka’aj tu pulubaj koj. Ku ya’alike’:
—Yaan in jaantik le Juan kan in kaxtej.
Hasta ka’aj kaxta’ab túun le Juano’, ka’aj jaanta’ab tumen koj. Beeytúun
ts’o’okik ti’ le kojo’, Ma’ Chiich yéetel Juan. Jaanta’ab tumen koj. Tik k-ilik
túune’ ka’aj ts’o’ok le, le Ma Chiich yéetel le Juano’.

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Notes

Chapter 1
1. For example, one of the most indispensible works on Aztec and Mixtec codi-
ces, Stories in Red and Black (2000), was written by Elizabeth Hill Boone, an art
historian. The equally important Maya Cosmos (1993), a work of archeoastronomy
that deals extensively with the Popol wuj, was authored by David Freidel, Linda
Schele, and Joy Parker, the latter of whom are an archeologist and an art historian,
respectively. Finally, I feel I should also mention Maya Conquistador (1998), a
work by the historian Matthew Restall that examines Yucatec Maya accounts of
the conquest.
2. Some of the best-known works on indigenous literatures from Mexico are
Ángel María Garibay Kintana’s two-volume Historia de la literatura náhuatl,
which first appeared in 1953 and 1954. Garibay’s one-time student, Miguel León-
Portilla, has published many anthologies over his long and distinguished career,
among them Visión de los vencidos (1959) and El reverso de la conquista (1964),
both of which focus on texts from the colonial period. A more recent effort of
León-Portilla’s, published in collaboration with the American Earl Shorris, In the
Language of Kings (2001), provides a broader overview of these literatures as its
texts span the pre-Colombian era to the present.
3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own.
4. See, for example, U tzikbalil Yum Santísima Cruz Tun (1982) by Benito
Aban May and Aniversario del fusilamiento de Felipe Carrillo Puerto en Muxupip,
Yucatán (1982) by Santiago Domínguez Aké. Both works are originally composed
as ethnographic monographs under the direction of the Secretaria de Educación
Pública, among other institutions. Both also reappear in the Letras Mayas series.
5. Literature is conspicuously absent from Castillo Cocom’s assertion!
6. I am thinking, for example, of the works of the writer Felipe de Jesús Castillo
Tzec or INDEMAYA’s recent “Weyano’one’” (We are here) campaign, both of
which make strategic, pointed use of the word Maya.
7. Fabian observes that “Neither Space nor Time are natural resources. They
are ideologically constructed instruments of power” (Fabian 144).

175
 176 • Notes to Pages 13–42

8. The word imagined here refers to the fact that “the members of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even
hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communication”
(Anderson 6).
9. Although Althusser is not explicitly concerned with language, most of the
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) he lists are articulated in and through a given
national language (96). From religion to education to the legal system to politics,
the privileging of one language and the exclusion of others reinforces the legitimacy
of the dominant language. To paraphrase Althusser, language itself can thus for-
ward the reproduction of the conditions of production of certain kinds of national
citizen-subjects.
10. Ibid., 115–26.
11. I am thinking in particular of Garza’s edition of the Chilam Balam, which
include the original illustrations, and Tedlock’s 2000 Years of Maya Literature, a text
that similarly seeks not to reduce Maya script to the norms of alphabetic literacy.
12. See, for example, Gollnick. Although not dealing with indigenismo per se,
this work is an excellent discussion of representations of the Chiapas’s Lacandón
jungle and covers the production of numerous Mexican and non-Mexican writers,
filmmakers, and intellectuals.
13. In a conversation I had with the Yucatec Maya anthropologist Genner
Llanes-Ortiz, he described how during interviews with storytellers his mother was
much better than he at responding to the rhetorical formulae they used, which
required an expected response from the listeners. I go into detail about this later
in the chapter.
14. As a similar example of the difficulty of translating epistemological cat-
egories, the Maya word ts’ib means both writing/to write and painting/to paint
(Diccionario maya 882).
15. Refer to the works cited section for representative works by these writers and
intellectuals. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.
16. This passage does not appear in the Wright translation, Crossing Borders.
It should be on page 155.
17. Another contender would be Lión’s El tiempo principia en Xibalbá, pub-
lished in 1985.
18. Again, refer to the works cited for representative works by these authors. For
a thorough bibliography, please see Leirana Alcocer’s Catálogo de textos mayas.

Chapter 2
1. I will address Stephens’s misspelling of the word enano later in the chapter.
2. Ironically, adventurers such as Stephens almost always took natives’ talk of
buried treasure very seriously, but that is beside the point.
3. This prologue does not appear to be in the Bandalier translation.
4. Interestingly, he could be referring to Stephens.
 Notes to Pages 45–72 • 177

5. Carrillo y Ancona makes the attribution himself in a footnote (76).

6. Given that the focus of this chapter is on how brokers shape the voice of
the oral storyteller, I will not discuss the written version of this story contained
in Leyendsas y tradiciones históricas mayas (Historical Legends and Traditions
of the Maya; 1987) by the Yucatec Maya writer and intellectual Domingo Dzul
Poot under the title “El adivino” (The Magician). There is another version under
the title “El enano de Uxmal” that appeared in Yikal Maya Than and has been
republished in Máas Collí’s Leyendas Yucatecas (Yucatec Legends; 2003; 182–84).
As mentioned previously, La tierra del faisán y del venado (Land of Pheasant and
Deer; 1922) by the Yucatecan Antonio Mediz Bolio, also contains a version of this
story and is one of the subjects of the following chapter. There is another version
recorded by Francesc Ligorred Perramon in Consideraciones sobre la literatura oral
de los mayas modernos (On Modern Maya Oral Literature; 1990). The Spanish
translation of the story is titled “El rey Tzek y Huitzilopochtli” (King Tzek and
Huitzilopochtli; 111–13), and another story, “Kukicán y la vendedora de agua”
(Kukicán and the Water Seller; 109–10), bears a strong resemblance to the end
of several dwarf narratives. There is also a version by Ermilo Abreu Gómez that
appears in his Leyendas y consejas del antiguo Yucatán (69–72).
7. Both versions of “The Dwarf of Uxmal,” as well as several other Maya-language
recordings, translations, and transcriptions are available at http://tsikbalichmaya
.org. Citations from stories here follow the subtitled version of the stories found on
the website, and the English-language version here have been modified with an
eye toward making them easier to read. A Maya-language transcriptions of stories
appears as appendix 1.
8. A Maya-language version of this story appears as appendix 2.
9. At 3:40 in the video.
10. At 3:12 in the video.
11. For example, when describing a ritual associated with lordship and Zuyua
t’aan, the authors of the Chilam Balam refer to Maya painted codices saying “esto
es lo que muestra la pintura” (this is what the painting shows; Barrera Vásquez
and Rendón 135).
12. Also see the version published by the Yucatec Maya author Domingo Dzul
Poot (25–45). As with these contemporary storytellers, Dzul Poot likewise does not
include the episode about the dwarf’s demise.

Chapter 3
1. It is worth mentioning that Gamio himself commented on Yucatán’s status
as a “pequeña patria” within the Mexican nation (Forjando 12–13).
2. This letter is not included in my edition of La tierra. It does, however, appear
in the Perkins translation.
3. Note that Marcos de Chimay is the pen name of Manuel Rejón García,
author of Supersticiones y leyendas mayas (Maya Legends and Superstitions).
 178 • Notes to Pages 77–107

4. It is unclear if Rosado Vega is here referring to the eastern part of the state
of Yucatán or to the eastern part of the peninsula in what is now the state of
Quintana Roo.
5. As such, I have excluded the excellent three-volume Relatos del centro del
mundo/U tsikbalo’obi chuumuk lu’um (Stories from the Center of the Earth; 1992),
and the stories included in Ligorred Perramon’s Consideraciones sobre la literature
oral de los mayas modernos (1990).
6. Stories from the Andrade collection have also been published by Refugio
Vermont Salas (Andrade and Vermont Salas; 1971) and David Bolles and Alejandra
Kim de Bolles (2001).
7. As described in Bolles and Kim de Bolles, the story of Andrade’s record-
ings themselves is quite interesting. Andrade’s earliest recordings were apparently
transcribed by hand as they were being told, and they cite one man from the area
as claiming Andrade’s command of spoken Maya was never that great (261–62).
8. For an expanded analysis of “Hbaatab Kaaswelah,” please see Worley, “Why
All the Excitement?,” found in the works cited.
9. Redfield and Villa Rojas record a story, “Told by Eustaquio Ceme,” that also
deals with a prophecy about the return of a Maya king to Chichén and the Mayas’
return to power (331–32; see also Sullivan 163).

Chapter 4
1. For a version of this story, see “The Old Lady of Maní” (Burns 37–38).
2. A version of these opening paragraphs appeared on the blog www
.tsikbalichmaya.org.
3. As noted earlier, this relationship between listener and storyteller has been
confirmed for me by Genner Llanes Ortiz.
4. See Restall, Maya Conquistador, pages 104–28, for more on the text. The
text was originally composed in Yucatec Maya, and the important words I cite in
this passage in the original document read: “yax hidalgo concixtador” (109).
5. See the account of this “encounter” in Historia del almirante by Columbus’s
son, Fernando (Colon 291–95). As described in a more recent work on Columbus’s
fourth and final voyage, this is a case in which the explorer “gave in to his more
base impulses” (Dugard 152).
6. For representative works, see Peña Vicenteño, Lozada Toledo, and Blaffer
in the works cited.
7. Cuadra states that “los cuentos de tío Coyote y tío Conejo son nicaragüenses,
o traidos aquí por las antiguas tribus que poblaron la región del Pacífico de Nica-
ragua” (the stories of Uncle Coyote and Uncle Rabbit are Nicaraguan, or brought
here by the ancient tribes that populated Nicaragua’s Pacific region), and titles
one subchapter, “No son de origen español ni origen negro” (They are neither of
Spanish nor African origin; Cuadra 12, 15). Similarly, Barahona Romero claims Tío
Conejo as a symbol of Honduran national character (76). He even ends his book by
 Notes to Pages 108–137 • 179

drawing a connection between the obstacles facing contemporary Hondurans and

those confronted by the Rabbit, saying, “Sin temor al futuro que los conejos hom-
bres buenos de hoy y de mañana, labran solidarios, convencidos de las urgencias de
conformar, juntos, un gran país, en HONDURAS” (Without fear of the future, the
good rabbit/men of today and tomorrow work together, convinced of the urgency
of making HONDURAS a great country; Barahona Romero 80, caps in original).
8. A Maya transcription is available in the appendices. The full video appears
on the website www.tsikbalichmaya.org. For other versions of this story, please see
“John Rabbit and the Big Male Puma,” “Little Rabbit in the Cave,” and “Little
Rabbit and the Shit Rollers” (Bolles and Kim de Bolles 271–87), and “A Cuento
of Juan Conejo” (Park Redfield 35).
9. The three versions of the Juan Rabbit story recorded or written down by
David Bolles and Alejandra Kim de Bolles noted above also deviate from Peñalosa’s
rubric and include the episode of the expanding/shrinking tree.
10. Prices reflect an internet search performed on the hotel’s website on
July 16, 2012.
11. Please refer to www.tsikbalichmaya.org for a video of the original Spanish.
12. Bonilla Caamal thus embeds the story within the story of how he first heard
it, positioning himself as an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator. The waiter, the
storyteller within the story, is intradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator.

Chapter 5
1. Though a good deal of work remains to be done of the topic, there are
two excellent articles that outline the origins of Yucatán’s Yucatec Maya–language
literary movement: del Valle Escalante’s “Ambivalence and Contradiction in Con-
temporary Maya Literature from Yucatan: Jorge Cocom Pech’s Muk’ult’an in Nool
[Grandfather’s Secrets]” and Rosado Aviles and Ortega Arango’s “Los labios del
silencio: la literatura femenina maya actual.” Also, Leirana’s recent Catálogo de
textos mayas is an important touchstone for those seeking a bibliography of Yucatec
works published from 1990 until 2009.
2. I am thinking, specifically, of a story I recorded in which a farmer finds
himself alone after his wife has left him. His dog tells him to go ask the rooster for
advice on how to deal with women, noting how many chickens, or “wives,” the
rooster has. The rooster explains that he “teaches them,” and the storyteller accom-
panies this statement with a forceful clap as if to suggest that physical violence plays
a part in this “education.”
3. I know of this text but, to date, have not been able to locate a copy. Although
I do not know its date of publication, the Diccionario de escritores de Yucatán lists
it as having been published before Jop’el baxalo’ob (Peniche Barrera and Gómez
Chacón 63).
4. In Genette’s terminology, we are in the presence of an extradiegetic-
homodiegetic author-narrator insofar as the author-narrator who addresses us both
 180 • Notes to Pages 140–157

narrates in the first degree (extradiegetic) and is in a sense present as the audi-
ence of the story told by Zumárraga (homodiegetic). Zumárraga the storyteller
can be classified as intradiegetic-heterodiegetic, as he is a narrator in the second
degree (intradiegetic) who is not a protagonist in the story he tells (heterodiegetic)
(Genette 227–52). Given that these are bilingual texts, here and elsewhere in
this section citations will include pages numbers for the accompanying Spanish
translation.
5. Whereas her earlier narrative mode in Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e was a hybrid
of the extradiegetic-homodiegetic and intradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrators, here
the narrator exists solely at the extradiegetic-homodiegetic level.
6. This storyteller is an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator.
7. See also the Yucatec Maya poet Briceida Cuevas Cob’s “U yalmaj xikín na’
x-Tuel ti’ x-Tude” (Doña Teodora’s Advice to Gertrude) for a poetic rendering of a
strikingly similar scene (Je’bix 21–27)
8. A notable exception is Margaret Park Redfield’s The Folk Literature of a
Yucatecan Town.
9. This section draws on my in-progress article, “U páajtalil maaya ko’olel:
Briceida Cuevas Cob’s Je’ Bix K’in and the Rights of Maya Women.”
10. For a brief biographical and bibliographic sketch, see Montemayor and
Frischmann 2:181.
11. Many of the poems in Je’ bix k’in were republished in Ti’ u bilil in nook’.
There are differences in the orthography, edition, and translation of poems between
these two editions. Here I cite the texts as they appear in Je’ bix k’in.
12. This appears to be a typo and should read “u” for “their” instead of “a,”
“your.” The Spanish translation supports this, reading, “De su calcañal” (Cuevas
Cob, Je’ bix 42). In addition, Ti’ u bilil in nook’ (From the Folds of My Clothes)
has the line as “Ti’ u tuunkuy” (From their heels; Cuevas Cob, Del dobladillo 32).
13. Gutiérrez Chong has published a similar article in Spanish listed in the
works cited as “Nacionalismos y etnocentrismos.”
14. See also, for example, Lisa Brooks’s comments about the Abenaki kitchen
as a gathering place “where stories are made” (231).

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Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
Index
Page numbers in italics represent
illustrations.
Abreu Gómez, Ermilo, 31, 70–71,
77–82, 85
Africans, influence of, 105–6
agency, 17–18, 113; denying indigenous,
22, 67; in Maya interactions with out-
siders, 119–22, 124–30, 132; in Maya
modernity, 118–19, 139; of Maya
women, 148, 151, 155, 159; stories
asserting Maya, 87, 129; storytell-
ers’, 2, 27, 31, 38–39, 42–43, 90–91;
storytellers’ blunted, 39, 46, 56,
59–60, 141; storytellers’ discursive,
59, 101–2, 115–18; storytelling as, 19,
38–39, 56, 72–73, 97–98; subaltern,
107, 115, 118
Anderson, Benedict, 14, 20
Andrade, Manuel J., 31, 81–85
archeology, 67, 74, 88–89
Arias, Arturo, 25, 65
assimilation, 62, 64, 73
Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 63, 65
audience, 29, 76–77, 86, 102–3; nonin-
digenous, 74, 96; participation by, 99,
125–26; storytellers shaping story for,
42–43, 58, 96
authenticity, 32, 36, 43, 66, 75–76
authority, 13; of author-narrators, 30–31,
43; of cultural brokers, 75, 78, 81,
96–97; to rule, 41–44, 53–56; over
stories, 6–7, 45; of storytellers, 2,
137, 140; subversion of hegemonic,
115–18
author-narrators: creating distance,
30–31, 43; cultural brokers as, 31,
37–44, 66, 72–73, 76, 83, 93; cultural
brokers vs., 36–37, 70–71; storytellers
and, 31, 37–38, 75–76, 137
Barrera Vásquez, Alfredo, 3, 53, 71
Benjamin, Walter, 18–19
Bierhorst, John, 14–15, 35–36
Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 16–18, 103
Bonilla Caamal, Humberto, 50–53,
57–59
Bonilla Caamal, Mariano, 28, 46, 95,
97, 124; stories by, 107–13, 119–31
Bourdieu, Pierre, 13–14
Briceño Chel, Fidencio, 4–5, 135
Bricker, Victoria, 99, 131
Burns, Allan F., 15, 20, 31, 82, 89–93, 97
Carrillo, Estanislao, 40–45, 53, 58
Carrillo y Ancona, Crescencio, 45–46,
57–59
Castellanos, Rosario, 17, 21–24
Castillo Cocom, Juan, 7–8
“Chan moson” (Góngora Pacheco),
137–45
“Chen konel” (Martínez Huchim),
146–53
Chilam Balam, 3, 53–56, 65
Cocom Pech, Jorge, 26–27, 102–3
colonialism, 6, 8, 19–20, 63–64, 105–6
conquest, 68–69, 87–88
conversations, stories as, 20–21, 99, 141
Cuentos mayas yucatecos (Andrade and
Máas Collí), 31, 82–85
195
 196
Cuevas Cob, Briceida, 133–34, 153–60
cultural brokers, 24, 65–70, 78–79,
84–85, 137; agency of storytellers and,
31, 38–39, 56, 59–60, 90–91; author-
ity of, 78, 81, 96–97; author-narrators
and, 31, 36–44, 66, 70–73, 76, 83, 93;
indigenous, 34–35; informants and,
90–92; interpretations by, 34, 44, 96;
representations by, 22–23, 31, 152;
Rosado Vega as, 74–77; storytell-
ers and, 31, 38, 60, 71, 74, 83, 93;
storytellers as, 28, 124
cultural control, 16–18, 21, 55–56, 69,
76; Maya asserting, 23–24, 86, 88,
130–32, 141
culture, 105, 118; appropriation of
hegemonic, 102–4; Aztec, 65, 71;
indigenous, 6, 33, 35, 64, 66; indig-
enous in national identity, 65, 83, 88;
indigenous responses to hegemonic,
24, 119, 129, 132; subaltern and
dominant, 11–13, 73
culture, Maya, 7–8, 67–68, 72, 78, 82,
102, 134; contemporary, 83, 101,
143–45, 147; domestic abuse in,
149–50; gender in, 134, 146–49,
153, 157–59; perceptions vs. reality,
5, 104; silencing of, 83–84; stories
published to prove aliveness of, 71,
73; transmitted through storytelling,
99, 101, 132; women as keepers of,
154–57
discourse of the Indio, 17–18, 22–23, 33,
46; author-narrators recycling, 43, 76;
cultural brokers and, 96–97
Duncan, Quince, 106–7
“The Dwarf of Uxmal,” 1–2, 27–28,
54–55; as allegory, 55–58; author-
narrator’s distance in telling, 30–31;
Carrillo’s version of, 45–46; com-
parison of versions of, 41–44, 52–53,
57–59, 85–86; contemporary versions
of, 46–52; Gonzaga’s version of,
48–53; Stephens’s version of, 39–41
Dzul Ek, Armando, 34–35
Dzul Poot, Domingo, 53, 85–86
• Index
Farris, Nancy, 99, 118
“The First Thing I Said to Dr. Morley”
(Yamá), 89–92
Florescano, Enrique, 19–20, 99
folklore, 44, 79–80, 83, 141; oral litera-
ture vs., 15, 37, 107, 136; recording
of orality called, 14–15; silences in,
93–94; testimonio vs., 32–33
Gamio, Manuel, 62–63, 65, 67, 70
Góngora Pacheco, María Luisa, 133–34,
137–45
Gonzaga, Luis, 48–49, 53, 57–59
González, Gaspar Pedro, 25–26
“Hbaatab Kaaswelah” (Poot), 85–88
Hervik, Peter, 20, 34–35, 118
history, 67, 69–70, 78; Maya narrat-
ing own, 81, 86–88, 105; orality vs.
literacy in, 9–11; of ruins, 86, 88;
stories as, 42, 46; textualization of,
57–58, 102–3
“Huntuul Paal K’aaba’ta’ab H èes”
(Poot), 85
identity, 20, 62, 73–74, 85, 145
ideology, 41–44, 102–3, 114, 118–19
indigenismo, 16–17
indigenous people, 70; efforts to inte-
grate into nation, 62–63; located in
past, not in present, 68–69, 74–75, 77;
as objects of knowledge, 22, 75–76,
96–97; silencing of, 67–68, 96–97
Je bix K’in (Cuevas Cob), 153–60
knowledge, 26, 43, 101; indigenous,
10–11, 22, 71, 77; oral literature as
communal body of, 27, 46; schooling
vs. indigenous, 154–56, 159; stories
transmitting, 19, 42, 84–85, 99, 129,
140, 157; storytelling as way of know-
ing, 96–97, 133, 147, 153, 159
Landa, Diego de, 12, 21–24, 33, 79–81
languages, 4–5, 14, 53, 83, 104;
cultural brokers and, 34–35; Maya
 Index
as patrimony, 25–27, 46, 71; Maya
in stories, 120, 122–24; national, 2,
12–14; in published stories, 71–72;
for recording of “The Waiter and the
Gringo,” 120, 124; subalternization
of, 14, 135; subversion of authority
through, 115–17; translation from
Maya into Spanish, 71–72, 135–36; of
written down oral literature, 83, 104
La raza cósmica (Vasconcelos), 62–64
La tierra del faisán y del venado (Mediz
Bolio), 31, 65–67, 70
“La Tregua” (Castellano), 21–24
Lienhard, Martín, 5, 69, 78
Ligorred Perramon, Francesc, 4–5, 54,
100, 134–35
literacy. See orality vs. literacy
literary activism, Maya, 77–79
literature, 20, 79; indigenous, 2–5,
24; Maya, 3–4, 6–7, 15–16, 25, 28,
95–96, 159; national, 13, 28, 63;
orality vs. literacy in, 8–10. See also
oral literature
Máas Collí, Hilaria, 31, 71–72, 82,
84–86, 99
Maní, story of sorceress of, 95, 97
Martínez Huchim, Ana Patricia, 100,
133, 145–53
material conditions, of Maya, 56, 75,
119, 130, 150–51, 157–58
Maya, definition of, 7–8
Maya Dziib’ob Bejla’e (ed. Mon-
temayor), 3–5, 134–37, 153
Mediz Bolio, Antonio, 31, 65–70, 72,
74–76, 82, 85
memory: cultural, 53; indigenous, 33,
61–63, 65
Menchú Tum, Rigoberta, 5–6, 25
mestizaje, 62–64, 73–74, 88
mestizo, 62–63, 69–70, 76, 81–82
Mexico, 6, 61–62, 73, 90–91. See also
national identity
Mignolo, Walter, 6, 11–12
modernity, Maya, 118–19, 130, 148,
153; ambivalence of, 151–53, 160;
storytelling in, 133, 136, 139–44
• 197
Montejo, Francisco de, 21, 26
Montejo, Victor, 8
Montemayor, Carlos, 3–5, 134, 136–37
Morley, Sylvanus, 67, 89–92
“Nachí Cocom” (Abreu Gómez),
79–81
national identity, Mexican, 71; efforts
to reconcile conflicts in, 65, 70;
indigenous people in, 61–63, 65
national imaginaries, Mexican, 64;
indigenous people in, 14, 27, 65, 81,
151–52; racial mixing in, 62, 70
Ong, Walter J., 9, 11, 18
orality vs. literacy, 8–12, 16, 21, 78–79;
intertextuality between, 72–73; oral
literature in, 25–26; power dynamic
in, 14–15
oral literature, 1, 25–26, 33–34, 79,
106; canon of, 83, 85, 87, 98; as
communal property, 27, 46, 140;
contemporary interpretations of,
95–98; folklore vs., 15, 37, 107;
formulae of, 100, 113, 117, 129,
133, 140–41, 146–47; importance of
locations in, 86, 123; Maya terms for,
20–21; motives for publishing, 71–73;
multiple versions of, 83, 85; record-
ings of, 82–93, 97; responsibility for,
28–29; roles of, 6, 99, 104; traditional
vs. modern, 98–99
pan-Maya movement, 25–26
past, 101–2, 106, 118; indigenous people
as symbol of, 62–63, 67; indigenous
people located in, not in present,
68–69, 74–75, 77
Peñalos, Fernando, 108, 113–14
Poot, Lázaro, 85–88
Poot May, Carmela, 85–86
Popol wuj, 3, 5, 102–4; compared to
“The Dwarf of Uxmal,” 54–55; in
Leyendas y consejas del antiguo
Yucatán, 78, 81–82
prophecy, in stories, 87–88, 92–93,
95–97
 198
race: ideology of mixing, 63–64, 70;
relations among, 75, 78, 105–6
Rama, Ángel, 14, 103
recordings, 82–93, 97, 119–20
Rendón, Silvia, 3, 53
representations, 45, 62; by cultural
brokers, 22–23; of indigenous people,
6, 28, 44, 66, 75–76; of storytellers,
37–39, 75–76
Rosado Vega, Luis, 31, 70–71, 74–77, 85
Rugeley, Terry, 140, 144
ruins, 30–31, 44, 58, 70, 86, 88
Sahagún, Bernardino de, 21–22, 33–34
Sánchez Chan, Feliciano, 26, 58
Santa Elena, 58, 119; map of region, 47;
oral literature project in, 46, 97
self-representations, 16–17, 20, 26, 33
Sierra, Justo, 45, 71
Stephens, John L., 34, 105; “The Dwarf
of Uxmal” told by, 30–31, 39–45,
57–58
“The Story of Juan Rabbit” (Bonilla
Caamal), 105–19
storytellers, 18–19, 28, 76, 118–19, 146,
152; agency in shaping stories, 42–43,
57; agency of, 2, 27, 31, 38–39,
59, 101–2, 139, 141–44; agency
of blunted, 46, 56, 59–60, 141;
appropriation of hegemonic culture,
102–4; appropriation of Maya culture
through, 71, 82; authority of, 60, 100,
137, 140; author-narrators and, 17,
31, 37; cultural brokers and, 31, 56,
59–60, 83, 93, 137; metanarratives of,
122–23; as other, 71, 74; performative
traditions of, 2, 59; representations
of, 19, 31, 37–39, 79; as symbol of
indigenous knowledge, 2, 6, 17, 77
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• Index
storytelling, 17, 28; agency in
performance of, 18–19, 38–39, 56,
72–73, 97–99; as conversations,
20–21, 99, 105, 141; functions
of, 84–85, 92–93, 99, 129, 131,
152–53; listeners’ participation in,
20–21, 99; Maya culture transmitted
through, 99, 101; as performance,
18–19, 20–21, 101–2, 131, 136, 139;
repetition in, 115–18, 124–29; as
testimonio, 145–53; traditions of, 123,
128–32; as way of knowing, 96–97,
133, 147, 153, 159; written forms of,
133–34, 136, 139
subjectivity, Maya, 86, 157
symbolic network, of Maya and nonin-
digenous people, 73, 76, 82, 88
testimonio, 32–33, 147–53
Vasconcelos, José, 62–64, 70
“The Waiter and the Gringo” (Bonilla
Camaal), 98, 113, 119–31
women, Maya: agency of, 148, 151, 155,
159; gender inequities and, 146–50;
as keepers of traditions, 133, 154–57;
limited possibilities for, 150–53; triple
marginalization of, 133–34
writing: capturing oral performance in,
43, 133–34, 136, 139; indigenous, 6,
8, 12, 104
Yamá, Paulino, 89–92
Yikal Maya Than, 31, 70–74, 85
Yucatán, 22; distinctiveness of, 65, 73;
Maya authors from, 26, 138
Žižek, Slovoj, 115–18
About the Author

Currently at the University of North Dakota, Paul Worley received his PhD
in comparative literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill in 2009. Recent publications have appeared in Romance Notes and
The Latinamericanist, and an article is forthcoming in Chasqui, as is a
chapter in Diana Taylor’s Resistant Strategies, an upcoming edited volume
on Maya performance from Duke University Press. Beyond continuing
research on Yucatec Maya oral performance and Maya written literatures,
his interests include postcolonial and decolonial theories, subaltern stud-
ies, contemporary and colonial Latin American literatures, Mexican and
Central American literatures, and Latino/a studies.
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