Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Mexican and Yukatek Maya Texts

Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Mexican and Yukatek Maya Texts Paul Marcus Worley A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: Dr. Rosa Perelmuter Dr. Emilio del Valle Escalante Dr. Gregory Flaxman Dr. David Mora-Marín Dr. Jurgen Buchenau Abstract Paul Worley Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Mexican and Yukatek Maya Texts (Under the director of Rosa Perelmuter) All across Latin America, from the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico to the presidential election of Evo Morales, an Aymara, in Bolivia, indigenous peoples are successfully rearticulating their roles as political actors within their respective states. The reconfiguration of these relationships involves massive social, cultural, and historical projects as well, as indigenous peoples seek to contest stereotypes that have been integral to the region’s popular imagination for over five hundred years. This dissertation examines the image of the indigenous storyteller in contemporary Mexican and Yukatek Maya literatures. Within such a context, Yukatek Maya literature means and must be understood to encompass written and oral texts. The opening chapter provides a theoretical framework for my discussion of the storyteller in Mexican and Yukatek Maya literatures. Chapter 2 undertakes a comparison between the Mexican feminist Laura Esquivel’s novel Malinche and the Yukatek Maya Armando Dzul Ek’s play “How it happened that the people of Maní paid for their sins in the year 1562” to see how each writer employs the figure of the storyteller to rewrite histories of Mexico’s conquest. The following chapter addresses the storyteller’s function in foklore, juxtaposing a number of works in order to show the full scope of oral literary traditions. The fourth chapter examines how traditional storytelling structures the narration of contemporary events as seen in two stories I recorded in Santa Elena, Yucatán, in 2007, as told by the ii Yukatek Maya Mariano Bonilla Caamal. In the fifth chapter I analyze the use of the figure of the storyteller in one text each by female Yukatek Maya authors, María Luisa Góngora Pacheco and Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and show how these authors use this traditional figure to construct a Maya modernity. The appendices include transcriptions of oral stories and interview excerpts. The Maya have used oral literature and Maya language to maintain their culture since the conquest, and this dissertation focuses on the figure of the storyteller to demonstrate the complex relationship between oral and written texts in 21 st -century Yukatek Maya literature. iii Table of Contents List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………..………...……v Chapter I. Who Tells What to Whom and How: The Storyteller, Representation, and Agency within National Imaginaries………………………………….……………………1 Contemporary Maya Literatures…………………………..………..……………..3 Storytellers, Storytelling, and Cultural Control: The Discourse of the Indio……19 An Overview of Chapters Two through Six…………..…………………..……..37 II. My Mother Told Me a Story…: Indigenous Memory and Writing the Mexican Nation………………………………………………………………39 Malinalli and Mesoamerican Myth……………………………..………………..46 Malinalli and Conquest………………………………………………………..…51 Malinalli, Malinche, and the Mexican Imaginary………………………...……...56 Our Mother, Our Memory, Our Land: Dzul Ek and what happened at Maní……65 The Xpul ya’a and Myth as Prophetic History…………………………………..68 The Xpul ya’a and the Ambivalent Conquest………………………………..…..76 Conclusion………………………………………………………………..……...82 III. Writing THE Word: Storytellers, Cultural Brokers, and the Shape of Indigenous Memory………………………………………………..………….84 Trading in Culture: Folklore, the Cultural Broker, and the Native Object………86 The Revolution will be Archeological: La tierra de faisán y del venado……..…98 Fairytales for the Mestizo Nation: Yucatec storytelling after the Raza Cósmica…………………………………………………..……………………..109 iv Archive of Silence: The Oral Recordings of Manuel J. Andrade and Allan F. Burns…………………….………………………………………..125 Conclusion…………………………………………………………..……….…141 IV. “I’ll tell you what…”: Mariano Bonilla Caamal and Storytelling as Cultural Control……………………...……………………………………...143 Storytelling and Testimonio…………………………………………………….148 Storytelling and Tradition in Time: the Old is New the New is Old………...…153 Sound and Fury Signifyin(g) Everything: The Story of Juan Rabbit……..……160 The Global Goes Local: Eligio and the Gringo………………………..……….174 Looking at Literature Looking at the World………………………..………..…183 Conclusion…………………………………………………………..………….189 V. Telling Maya Modernity: The Works of María Luisa Góngora Pacheco and Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim……………………………………..……..191 Imagining the Maya Woman………………………………………..………….193 Little Whirlwind, Modern Earthquake: Góngora Pacheco’s “Chan moson”…………………………………………………………………..202 Storytelling as Testimonio: Martínez Huchim’s “Chen konel”…………..…….215 Conclusion…………………………………………..………………………….225 VI. Conclusion………………………………………………………………..…….227 Appendix One: The Story of Juan Rabbit…………………………..…………..233 Appendix Two: Eligio and the Gringo………………………………………….243 Appendix Three: Selected Interview Quotations……………………………….246 Works Cited…….……………………………………………………..………..247 v List of Illustrations Figure 5.1 NWA World Vacations……………………………………………...….195 5.2 Herdez…………………………………………………...……………...197 5.3 Herdez……………………………………………………...…………...197 5.4 Whole Planet Foundation……………………………………………….198 5.5 Whole Planet Foundation ……………………………………………....198 5.6 Hurricane Gilbert…………………………………………………...…..213 vi Chapter 1 Who Tells What to Whom and How: The Storyteller, Representation, and Agency within National Imaginaries The truth about stories is that’s all we are. Thomas King, The Truth About Stories There are few phrases more apt to end polite conversations in non-academic circles than the words, “I am studying for my doctorate in…” The claim to esoteric knowledge is powerful claim that implies unassailable expertise in an area about which most people know little if anything. Surprisingly, Maya cultures and indigenous cultures in general do not fall into this category. Despite the air of mystery with which outsiders approach Maya culture (a Google search for “Maya mystery” produces over eleven million results), popular and scholarly literatures have turned Maya culture into one of Native America’s most studied, most well-known entities even as these same literatures re-inscribe the very mysteries they supposedly unravel. As someone who studies Maya languages as cultures, I have been asked, in no certain order, questions such as whether or not I knew that the Maya were descended from aliens, why I studied dead Native American languages, why the Maya disappeared, and whether or not I knew that the Maya calendar prophecies the end of the world. Many of the Maya I know are amused by such questions, but these innocent, seemingly benign questions gloss over the fact that the popular discourse of the Maya, on a global scale, resides beyond the control of the Maya themselves. From movies like Apocalypto and The Ruins to books like the academic classic Maya Cosmos and the fictional La cruz maya , the story of the Maya is always already being told regardless of the participation of actual Maya people. There is or should be, then, a sense of accountability in the telling of these stories as such retelling reproduces constellations of power that inscribe and reinscribe Maya culture in non-Maya settings. As damaging, if not even more so, is that some of these retellings, the most famous being Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto , re-present a deformed picture of Maya culture both popularly and to Mayas themselves, telling the world about the Maya and telling the Maya who they “are.” This dissertation is about the stories for which, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, I have taken a degree of responsibility during my graduate work on Yukatek Maya and Mexican literatures. As I will develop throughout this introductory 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 re-tell 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 who first introduced me to the stories I discuss in the dissertation. For a variety of reasons many of these storytellers cannot reach, or I would like to think have not yet been afforded the opportunity to reach, the global, globalized audience of a Mel Gibson or a Linda Schele, and so these re- presentations of their stories in the dissertation are an important venue for making them available. The issues surrounding the “speaking subaltern” will be dealt with later in this chapter, but for the moment it suffices to say that the re-telling of these stories constitutes a case in which, to borrow Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, the subaltern “ has spoken in some way” (309; itals in original). If I have done these stories justice, by reading these stories “spoken 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.

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