Rooted/Uprooted: Identity in Chiapas Mayan and Mexican- American Literature by Sean S

ROOTED/UPROOTED: IDENTITY IN CHIAPAS MAYAN AND

MEXICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE

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A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

San Diego State University

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In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

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Sean S. Sell

Fall 2012

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Sean S. Sell

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to my parents Dr. Stewart Sell and Dr. Patricia K. Sell, who have always kept me rooted while encouraging me to branch out.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

Rooted/Uprooted: Identity in Chiapas Mayan and Mexican- American Literature by Sean S. Sell Master of Arts in English San Diego State University, 2012

This study examines literature from the Mayan communities of Chiapas, with some discussion of Chicana/o literature in the United States provided for comparison. Through the analysis I will show how connection to place has given the Mayan Chiapan literature a firmer sense of identity, while displacement has contributed to the ever-searching nature of the Mexican-American identity. My first chapter considers available folklore representing the most traditional literature from each of the two cultures. Chapter Two looks at literature reflecting the changing society, whether as an observational reaction or as a voice in the process to make change happen. The third chapter considers the direct and indirect effects on literature of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas as compared to the Chicano movement in the United States. In exploring how the modern Mayans remain connected to their roots, largely by virtue of remaining in the same general geographical location for over a thousand years, I examine how this sense of connectedness comes through, from their origin stories that emphasize the importance of the cultivation of corn, to recent literature demonstrating resistance to the forces of globalization that threaten to take away their land. By contrast, Chicano literature tends to focus on a longing for roots, a sense that part of their identity is lost, and they must now find a place where they can reconnect the past with the present. Issues addressed include the communal nature of the indigenous cosmovision, as well as the Mayan tendency to accept fantastical notions as another level of reality. I also consider how Mayan women specifically have used literature to challenge some aspects of tradition while validating others. The thesis includes many sources for indigenous literature, some of the chief ones being the Cuentos y relatos indígenas series of folk stories, the “Incantations” of Taller Leñateros, and the plays of Sna Jtz’ibajom and La FOMMA. For Chicano literature I rely more on critics, including José E. Limón on corridos, Juan Bruce-Novoa on Chicano movement literature, Gloria Anzuldúa on feminist themes, and Yolanda Broyles-González on theater.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ABSTRACT ...... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1 The Mayans of Chiapas: Ancient Roots Finding Expression in Today’s World ...... 2 Mexican-Americans: Making Their Place and their Culture in the United States ...... 8 2 TRADITIONAL LITERATURE ...... 13 Mayan Oral Literature ...... 13 Stories Looking Inward...... 18 Tension with the Dominant Culture ...... 22 3 MAYAN LITERATURE OF THE 20TH CENTURY ...... 33 Stories Acknowledging Change ...... 33 The Alternative Cosmovision of Mayan Women ...... 37 Incantations Showing the Mayan Women’s Viewpoint ...... 40 Mayan Women’s Narratives ...... 43 Sna Jtz’ibajom: Mayan Community Theater ...... 47 4 A LITERARY UPRISING ...... 55 Inspiration in Zapatismo ...... 55 Confronting Intolerable Traditions: The Women’s Movement within the Movement ...... 63 Keeping Rooted While Branching Out ...... 72 5 CONCLUSION ...... 89 WORKS CITED ...... 91

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I will start by thanking Peter Brown and the Schools for Chiapas organization, whose presence in San Diego first brought the culture of the indigenous people of Chiapas to my attention. When I participated in two Schools for Chiapas caravans to Chiapas over ten years ago, I had no idea the experience would someday be the inspiration for my graduate studies. My gratitude also goes out to the many professors at San Diego State University who encouraged my interest and research, specifically, Dr. Eda Saynes-Vazquez who introduced me to the study of indigenous language history in Mexico, and Professor Phillip Serrato, who helped me see the connection between the indigenous struggles in Mexico and Chicano struggles in the U.S. Professor Serrato also offered consistent encouragement and helpful resources as my thesis committee chair. Thank you to my other committee members: Professor Jane Robinett, whose championing of literature from all over the world helped me take this journey, and who came up with the idea for my title, and Professor José Mario Martin-Flores, whose conversations with me about Mexican literature made me wish I had had the opportunity to take his classes. To my old neighbor Professor June Cummins-Lewis, thank you for helping to guide me through the MA program and finding a way to make my set of interests fit the requirements. I must also acknowledge the help of archaeologist Jon Spenard, sent by some cosmic force to provide much-needed guidance. He led me to connect with the experts: Karen Bassie, Robert M. Laughlin, and Jan Rus, all of whose help was invaluable and unexpected. Particular thanks to go Jan Rus, who graciously answered my email questions with treasure troves of information and encouragement. Finally, I thank all the indigenous storytellers, singers, writers and performers proclaiming their indigenous identity in Chiapas, and the Mexican-American literary voices seeking to make a home in the United States. You help me believe we have a place for many worlds.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The examination of literature from the indigenous Mayan communities of Chiapas, as compared with Chicano literature from the United States, shows the importance of place in connection to minority identity. For Chicanos, the loss or lack of land is fundamental to their search for identity, while for the indigenous Mexican, identity is fundamentally connected to the land where they still live. The two groups share a goal of maintaining their identities in the face of what can be a hostile dominant society, but the role of place has affected how their identities are expressed. Mexican-American literature, starting from the name – Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, Mexican-American – continually struggles to define its identity. The question of how and where to fit in U.S. society is pervasive. Whether it is in a corrido about the honest man who becomes an outlaw because the law is unfair, a novel about a family trying to keep its land in the face of a new, hostile government, a poem using English and Spanish to express personal hyphenation, or a play that examines a particular conflict in its greater historical or cultural context, the awareness of not fully belonging to the dominant society, of being out of place, is always present, and is part of the overall conversation of the American identity. The literature that has come from indigenous voices in the Mexican state of Chiapas in recent decades does not seek to define an identity or find a place, literally or figuratively, in the greater Mexican nation – defend yes, define no. Though the issue of where they fit in with the rest of Mexico, and the world, is certainly present, the issues of who they are and where they belong are not overt concerns. They have a geographical place, they have a culture, and both have endured from before the Spanish Conquest. Of course they have changed, as any group will change over 500 years, and there has been influence from outside; but the language, the beliefs, the way of life have largely come down from the past. If there is a primary concern in Chiapan literature, it is the preservation and promotion of their community's traditional identity in the modern world, rather than a struggle to establish what their identity is.

I will review the historical and cultural background for both of these cultures to show the importance of place to the Chiapans and displacement to the Chicanos. I will then begin to examine literature from both cultures to see how place affects the expressions of identity that literature makes possible. My focus will be on the works from Chiapas in order to help bring these lesser known voices into greater prominence. Examination of Chicano literature will provide points of comparison.

THE MAYANS OF CHIAPAS: ANCIENT ROOTS FINDING EXPRESSION IN TODAY’S WORLD In this section I will review the history of Chiapas to show how the culture of today has come down from before the Spanish arrived and how place has been key to their identity throughout this history. The ancient Mayan civilization reached its peak, known as the Classic period, during the years 300 to 900. As Kevin Gosner explains, After A.D. 400 new waves of Maya immigrants arrived . . . . The Tojolabal moved into the valley east of Comitán, while the Tzeltal spread throughout the highlands from the higher reaches west of Ocosingo to the valley southeast of San Cristobal. During this dispersal the Tzotzil language emerged among the inhabitants of the central zone of the plateau as a language distinct from Tzeltal. (17) These remote locations away from major trade routes appear to have kept the communities comparatively isolated from the larger Mayan culture and “beyond the political ambitions of the powerful Mayan kings in the lowlands” (17). Thus the decline that affected the Mayan empire in the Late Classic period of 700 to 900 did not at first reach the highlands. “However, by the mid thirteenth century, decline had set in here as well. The reasons for it are no more clear than they are for the lowland centers, but the symptoms were similar” (19). Artifacts became cruder, urban settlements were abandoned. As the Aztec empire came to prominence, in Chiapas the non-Mayan Chiapaneco who lived in the Central Depression between the eastern highlands and the Sierra Madre mountains benefited from the trade route that went along the Grijalva river there. “When the Spanish arrived, the chiapanecos were making a bid to extend their jurisdiction into the highlands” (Gosner 25). Advantage turned to disadvantage, as their favorable location led them into direct conflict with the newcomers. With help from some native enemies of the

Chiapaneco, the Spanish prevailed. They would soon defeat the rest of Central America as well, but maintaining authority over the diverse peoples was more difficult. In the sixteenth century the Spanish would attempt to create a regional economy in the highlands, with its nexus at Ciudad Real [now San Cristobal] by forcing Tzotzil and Tzeltal laborers to migrate seasonally to plantations in the Grijalva Valley and even, for a time, to [the coastal region of] Soconusco . . . . By the end of the seventeenth century, these efforts had failed, and most Spaniards abandoned hope of building a new economy in the highlands . . . . By the early nineteenth century, the chiapaneco had ceased to exist . . . but the Tzeltal and Tzotzil survived, in place, in the central highlands. (26-27) Thus location has been key not just to the Chiapas Mayans' identity, but to their survival. Remaining in place did not mean the natives remained unchanged due to the Spaniards’ arrival, nor free from ongoing exploitation. The epidemics that devastated indigenous communities reached the highlands before the Spanish did and continued in waves during the ensuing century, but the population loss was less in highland Chiapas than in other areas, and recovery came sooner (Gosner 70). The land of the central plateau, though fertile, was difficult to farm and did not have resources especially profitable to the Spanish, so it was not colonized as other areas were. “Consequently, southern Mexico would remain much more ‘Indian’ in character than Central Mexico . . . . The social transformations associated with the early transition to capitalism, especially wage labor and private landholding, developed comparatively late" (26). The Spanish used the tributary system to extract benefit from the land's production. This involved designating native caciques who worked with the colonial government to bring in the tributes. However, due likely to the “relative poverty of the region and the low level of political consolidation at the time of initial contact,” Gosner points out that “in the highlands, only Ixtapa, a Tzotzil town west of Ciudad Real, seems to have retained a cacique into the eighteenth century without interruption” (75). The poverty and remoteness meant that the area did not merit the full focus of colonial government attention. The dominance of the colonial Church was also limited by the remoteness of highland Chiapas, as well as by the natives' ongoing attachment to their traditions. The Spanish friars' mission of religious conversion did not completely drive out indigenous beliefs. The Mayans attach “a sacred dimension to virtually all aspects of the physical world . . . . Mountains are the homes of the ancestors, caves the entrance to those homes” (Gosner 112). Many caciques

4 in Chiapas cooperated with the friars and seemed to accept the new faith, but the rapid spread of Christian influence only went so far. In a period when European priests had neither mastered indigenous dialects nor won the respect and obedience of native peoples, converted caciques and principales paved the way for the remarkably quick propagation of the faith. Because friars would remain in short supply and because the linguistic skills of later generations did not always match the accomplishments of the first, Indian collaborators continued to be necessary. (83) The reliance on native practitioners meant greater influence for native practices. “Public feasts, ritual dancing, and solemn processions incorporated symbols and ceremonial practices that had special meaning for the Maya even though they were carried out under the suspicious eyes of the parish priests” (86). The panoply of Catholic saints provided a spiritual connection that Indians could accept because “veneration of the saints meshed well with the Maya views of the reciprocal relationship between human beings and their gods and greatly facilitated a new articulation of the moral economy” (Gosner 109). Some of the stories recast Catholic saints as indigenous leaders and blur the distinction between the saint and his or her sculpted image. Though the church endorsed the idea of miraculous manifestations in religious imagery, it was skeptical of any native people’s reports of such miracles. Gosner, in his examination of the events leading to the Tzeltal Revolt of 1712, relates several accounts of natives who claimed to have seen miracles in images of the Virgin Mary or one of the saints, and who suffered investigation and severe punishment as a result. The key triggering event of the revolt appears to have been 13-year-old María López’ claim that the Virgin Mary appeared to and spoke with her. The local priest punished both María, who stood by her story, and her father Agustín, with 40 lashes, but the townspeople rallied to their support. The church’s continued efforts to suppress María's influence led to the revolt, but other factors contributed. Agustín and the leaders of the uprising had been important civil officeholders and, according to his testimony, “in this time and occasion they were poor; myself and the others could scarcely put our hands on a simple manta” (124). Thus it appears the revolt arose through a combination of religious differences and economic hardship. Despite these conflicts, the church has not been entirely antagonistic toward the indigenous in Chiapas. The revered Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas helped limit the abusive practices of Spanish landowners in the 16th century. The Church's endorsement of the

Virgin of Guadalupe may be viewed as both an effort to coopt and thereby control indigenous beliefs and a concession to the power of indigenous customs. In the late 20th century, Archbishop Samuel Ruiz of Chiapas became a powerful advocate for indigenous rights, including support for Zapatismo. The Church also helped preserve indigenous languages, though not for the same reasons that motivate modern linguists. Many priests learned the languages and developed systems of writing that adapted Latin letters to the native tongues. The goal was to promote religious education, but one of the results was the preservation of a record that would later be available for study when linguists began taking interest in these different languages. The Spanish crown vacillated between encouraging priests to use native languages, if that was what it took to spread the faith, and promoting Spanish only, deeming native languages insufficient for spiritual instruction. Of course the clergy, working an ocean away, in areas widespread through a large territory, did not necessarily practice strict adherence to every edict from Madrid. (A detailed account of language policies and practices during this period can be found in chapters 2 and 3 of Shirley Brice Heath’s Telling Tongues: Language Policy in Mexico). If the royal goal was to get all Mexicans to speak Spanish, it was not a success. At the time of independence, more Mexicans still spoke primarily indigenous languages (Cifuentes and Ros). Ironically, independence led to a greater loss of indigenous language than the colonial period had. The independent Mexican government sought to unify the country with one national identity, part of which was the Spanish language. The egalitarian ideal was that all could be equal citizens. This devalued the indigenous identities, suggesting they were something to be abandoned so Mexico could modernize.1 The process of castellanización included instruction in Spanish at all schools (Heath 93). So in contrast to priests instructing in native languages for religious purposes, but with the positive effect of validating and preserving native language, government-supported teachers instructed in Castilian Spanish for a democratic purpose, but with the negative effect of alienating native identity. Indigenous children growing up in this system faced a dilemma – embrace the Mexican

1 As during colonial times, language policy was not consistent, but what I describe here was the trend that developed during the 1800s and reached its peak after the Revolution of 1910.

6 identity in order to have greater (though still limited) opportunities under the dominant system, or resist in favor of the family and community not valued by their nation. This recalls the Chicano/Mexican-American dilemma expressed in Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’ influential poem I Am Joaquín: And now! I must choose between the paradox of victory of the spirit, despite physical hunger, or to exist in the grasp of American social neurosis, sterilization of the soul and a full stomach. (Gonzales 16) The variety of literature on both sides of the border since 1970 shows that Chicanos in the U.S. and indigenous people in Mexico both began to resist being limited to these two choices. Perspectives on indigenous cultures changed in Mexico during the 20th Century. The nationalist idea of negation in order to promote equality gave way to an indigenista perspective. In 1951 the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) sought to incorporate native populations into the national culture, but on the dominant culture’s terms. In the words of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, the INI’s first director in Chiapas, “Indigenista policy is not what the Indians formulate in terms of their own community concerns, but how the nation contemplates the treatment that it should give to those groups called indigenous in terms of national interests and values.” (Gollnick 131). Similarly, indigenista literature meant the work of Ladino writers engaging with the indigenous communities (“Ladino” being the term the Indians use to describe mainstream Mexicans), but not representing the indigenous through their own voices. For example, Carlos Antonio Castro’s 1959 novel Los hombres verdaderos (The True Men) has a first- person Mayan narrator, but concludes with this character’s hope “that the new teachers and doctors will be coming soon . . . The ones sent by the government, that wants ignorance to disappear in the lands of the true men” (Gollnick 30-31). Rosario Castellanos’ 1962 novel Oficia de tinieblas (published in English as The Book of Lamentations) has a less optimistic view toward government efforts to help the Indians, but it also fails to show any positive political movement coming from the indigenous population themselves. The government is promoting land reform, but the sincere, uncorrupted government agent cannot overcome the entrenched power of the landowners. The Indians, believing in the government’s plan, launch an uprising, but it fails due largely to their ignorance and superstitions. Ultimately,

7 the government, however ineffective it may be, “retains its role as the primary social force for promoting change” (131). María Lombardo de Caso’s 1962 novel La culebra tapó el río (The Snake Blocked the River) tells of a Mayan boy who considers leaving his village to seek his fortune. This boy’s father died working outside the village, and the boy eventually decides he should not stray. While the story favors the indigenous community, it also emphasizes its isolation, leaving, in Gollnick’s words, “little space for a positive political identity to arise from within native culture” (132). As Micaela Morales Lópes states, “La literatura que se produce en este periodo habla de los indios, pero no son ellos los creadores” (“The literature produced in this period speaks of the Indians, but they are not its creators”; 76). The dominant culture is still imposing its values on the minority, but perhaps the increased attention helped prompt indigenous writers to begin to speak for themselves, or more significantly, to write for themselves. Native languages were primarily oral, and while many scholars emphasize the literary value of oral language, it is still necessary to write in order to have an audience that is meaningful beyond a local level. In 1960 the Mexican Secretary of Education accepted the idea, promoted by linguists and anthropologists, of education in native languages, not as a step toward castellanización but for the linguistic and cultural development of each indigenous community. Finding teachers qualified to teach in native languages – in a program that actually functions to promote the indigenous culture – has been a challenge, particularly among the many smaller language populations, but the idea helped shape a new view that the indigenous peoples are worthy, that Mexico’s identity is richer because of its linguistic diversity. The ideas of Liberation Theology also came into play during the 1960s, valorizing the indigenous cultures, encouraging clergy such as Archbishop Ruiz of Chiapas to build “on the belief systems of native cultures to renew Catholic ritual life” (Gollnick 133). In 1974 Ruiz helped organize a conference of indigenous people to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the birth of Bartolomé de las Casas. At this conference the four major indigenous groups of Chiapas – Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal and Ch’ol – came together for the first time to formally discuss their affairs and propose solutions. Thus the political, academic and religious spheres all contributed to a climate where native voices began to speak up. The consequences have been many, including the Zapatista

8 uprising in 1994, the removal of the PRI from power in 2000, and the passage in 2003 of the Ley General de los Derechos Lingüísticos de las Pueblos Indígenas, a law which recognizes that speakers of indigenous languages have a right to government services, including education, in their native tongues. Realizing the law’s ideals has not been easy, and most indigenous languages remain in threatened status. Conflict remains between dominant and minority lifestyles, but now more indigenous Mexicans can view their language and culture with greater sense of pride, as something to be nurtured and celebrated rather than overcome and abandoned.

MEXICAN-AMERICANS: MAKING THEIR PLACE AND THEIR CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES As indigenous language speakers from Chiapas in the last few decades have produced literature to proclaim their identity and value, to themselves and to the world, Mexican- American writers began in the 1960's producing literature meant to proclaim and promote a Chicano identity. The key difference is in the way they define their identity. Chicanos wrestle with and debate it, while Chiapas Mayans know theirs but want to make sure it survives. The enemy to Chicano cultural survival is as much those Mexican-Americans who give in, or “sell out,” to Anglo America as it is Anglo America itself. Chicanos could cease to exist even as the numbers of Mexican Americans increase, if they do not make an effort to maintain their language and culture in the U.S. But there is certainly no fear that Mexicans or the Spanish language will disappear from the Earth. Those dangers are ever present for indigenous Mexican languages. Many have disappeared, and more inevitably will, but some will survive if nourished enough. This seems to be the realization that drives the highland Chiapas communities both to demand autonomy politically and to promote their cultural heritage in writing. For the Mexican American, 1848 is the beginning of the identity problem, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the U.S.-Mexico War turned the Mexican northwest into the American southwest. Under the treaty, Mexicans living in this region were given full U.S. citizenship, but in reality they often suffered persecution and prejudice from the Anglo majority. Especially as the Gold Rush of 1849 brought millions of new white settlers to the West, protecting the rights of the Mexicans-turned-Americans was not a

9 priority at any level of U.S. government. As Gloria Anzuldúa states, "The land established by the treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled away from its owners. The treaty was never honored and restitution, to this day, has never been made" (29). However, the vast majority of Mexican-Americans today are not descended from the Mexicans who lived in the U.S. in 1848. The connection to the rupture created by Guadalupe Hidalgo may be more invocational than authentic. Being deterritorialized, the Chicano may review history for claims to a cultural heritage. The legendary kingdom of Aztlán was located north of today’s Mexico, so perhaps that is where Chicanos now live. The land used to be part of Mexico, so Mexicans may still claim it, as the saying goes: “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo led to injustice, such as with the legendary bandit Joaquín Murrieta (perhaps), so Chicanos are now fighting to restore justice. Such claims may be effective, perhaps even necessary, for the creation of a sense of identity and commonality for the Mexican-American population, but they may also be subject to challenge, and perhaps even verifiably untrue. If the Aztecs once lived in the American southwest before settling in central Mexico, does that make any Mexican today, of Aztec descent or not, entitled to return? By that argument, Mestizos could also have a right to return to Spain. Does the fact that land where Indians first lived was claimed by Spain, then Mexico, then the U.S., confer some right to immigrate upon Mexicans? Do the injustices of the 1800’s have relevance today? In the case of Joaquín Murrieta, though little is known for certain, the harshly compelling claims of gringo injustice – his brother was lynched, his wife was raped – can be traced to a novel rather than any documented evidence. In Searching for Joaquín: Myth, Murieta and History in California, Bruce Thornton examines the historical record. Newspaper accounts show that the group of men to which Murrieta supposedly belonged was accused of raiding several mining camps and killing many men – Mexicans, Anglos and Chinese – in the process. After the bandits were killed in 1853, a head, said to be that of Murrieta, was put on display. But Thornton finds the journalistic record so inconsistent and inconclusive as to place everything in doubt. “All the details of this story, however, from the crimes Murieta presumably committed to the true identity of the head, can be doubted or disbelieved because of conflicting, contradictory, fraudulent or uncertain evidence” (Thornton 30).

While skeptical as to how many of these actions really did happen, Thornton is more confident regarding two actions he believes did not happen: “no reports have been found” in newspapers from the time “documenting the lynching of Joaquín’s brother or the rape of his wife” (90). Instead, Thornton explains that John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit appears to be the origin of these parts of the story.2 Though Thornton notes the likelihood that Murrieta may have suffered “some insult or indignity at the hands of Americans, as did many of his countrymen,” he states that as for verifiable evidence, “there is no historical basis for attributing his crimes to anything other than greed and a penchant for violence” (91). The legend of Joaquín Murrieta is the central metaphor for I Am Joaquín, Rodolfo Corky Gonzales’ powerful poem of Chicano pride, which helped inspire the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 70s. If key parts of this legend can be refuted, does that diminish the poem’s effect and call into question some of Chicanismo’s key tenets? This is an issue that faces a minority in search of an identity. If they claim affirmation from available legends, the factual record may come around to challenge the claim.3 Perhaps Gonzales should have chosen a different legend. On the other hand, the success of his poem at inspiring a movement cannot be denied. The point of invoking a myth is not to know the literal truth, but to have a shared way to make meaning of the world. When studying the Mayan myths, the question is not whether they are literally true, but to understand what they say about the Mayan worldview and how they shape the actions of today’s Mayans. One need not believe in the Mayan Earth Lord to realize that he represents a respect for the earth that is important. But the Chicano movement in the 1960s faced another obstacle because it consisted of such a varied group of people. It spread across the American southwest, with pockets in other states. Though it had a background in the Spanish language, it included people who spoke only English, only Spanish, only some indigenous language, or some combination, or some mixture, or some hybrid “Spanglish.” Anzuldúa describes it:

2 Thornton uses the spelling “Murieta”, so I use that when quoting him. 3 Of course, it is not just minority cultures that can face an upbraiding from history. Consider how recent historians have challenged dominant U.S. narratives toward such figures as Columbus, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

Chicano Spanish sprang out of Chicanos’ need to identify ourselves as a distinct people. We needed a language with which we could communicate with ourselves, a secret language. For some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest -- for many Chicanos today live in the Midwest and the East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are: 1. Standard English 2. Working class and slang English 3. Standard Spanish 4. Standard Mexican Spanish 5. North Mexican Spanish dialect 6. Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have regional variations) 7. Tex-Mex 8. Pachuco (called caló) (77) Anzaldúa then discusses how the version she speaks depends on where and with whom she is speaking, and how she sometimes has difficulty communicating with Chicanos who favor a different version. Thus it seems these language variations may succeed at creating distinctions from dominant English or Spanish, but not be so effective if the goal is a unified identity. In addition to language, Chicanos in the 1960s had other differences. Some had lived in the U.S. for generations, some arrived recently. Some considered the U.S. home, some hoped to return to Mexico. They were traditionally Catholic, but this was a time of questioning allegiances, when even the Catholic Church was being pulled in different directions. Most were migrants by definition, separated from their roots, now part of a group with varied roots. Many continued to migrate, going where they could find work. Movement leaders did what they could to draw members of this disparate group into unity, and they had some success, but it was by necessity more a crafting than a cultivating, or in Juan Bruce-Novoa’s terms, a forging rather than a finding (134). The Mayans of Chiapas are not a monolithic group either, with at least four different languages and somewhat different historical experiences and religious beliefs. Until recently the main identity was by community rather than language or any pan-Mayan consciousness. Religiously, they too have had conflicts in recent years between tradition and innovation. Conflicts between Catholics and Protestants turned violent in the 1970s and 80s. But they have in common the place of their roots, literally and figuratively. Branches may go in

12 different directions, but the connection remains. It took the right conditions to unite these people in a movement, and the idea that they are Zapatistas is a recent innovation not embraced by all, but they were culturally intact. My examination of literature will focus on that of Chiapas in three stages. Chapter one addresses the most traditional stories, the first to be recorded by academics in the 1970s and 80s when the main interest was in preserving folklore that had come down through the generations as a way to make sense of their world. Most show little sense of conflict with the outside world, though some show the tense mixture of ancient Mayan views with Christianity. Chapter Two looks at folklore that reflects changing times, beginning with some stories I call observational rather than activist – they may present a message about the changes, but they don’t seem to be consciously created to challenge how things are. Second will be prayers and stories from Mayan women that show a different set of views and beliefs from the men, and suggesting a nascent activism. The third section will begin looking at the plays of the Mayan theater troupe Sna ‘Jtzibajom, which went from observational to activist in a short time and started to address literarily some of the issues the Zapatistas would address politically. In Chapter Three I will then look directly at the Zapatista movement and literature associated with it, in which the Mayans used their traditional worldviews to confront the larger world. The second section will look at the parallels between women’s issues in the Zapatista movement and the issues in the plays of the all-female theatrical troupe FOMMA. I will conclude Chapter Three with some of the most recent available literature to see how Mayans view themselves in relation to ongoing changes in Mexico and beyond. In each case I will compare literature from Mexican-American writers as they address similar concerns. Through the analysis I will show how connection to place has given the Mayan Chiapan literature a firmer sense of identity, while displacement has contributed to the ever-searching nature of the Mexican-American identity.

CHAPTER 2

TRADITIONAL LITERATURE

MAYAN ORAL LITERATURE Historically in Mexico, Spanish speakers had dismissed native languages as “dialectos”,4 something less than full languages like those from Europe, but in the mid-20th century, linguists and anthropologists became interested in the languages and cultures of indigenous people. Perhaps inevitably, some indigenous who worked with the foreign academics began to take new interest in their own cultures. “You have awakened our interest in our culture,” the informants told the scientists. “You have published many studies, but always in other countries where we never see the results. . . . We would like at least to put on paper our customs for the sake of our children and grandchildren” (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 3). This desire to preserve the culture in writing was a key motivating force for the publishing of many stories from indigenous voices. A problem was that literacy in native languages was almost unknown in the mid- twentieth century (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 173). Methods to write in Mayan had existed for centuries. The ancient Mayans had developed a glyphic form of writing, “but archaeologists think maybe only 2 percent could write” (Wilson x). In 1562, Friar Diego de Landa burned 27 Mayan books, and noted that this caused the Indians “great affliction” (x). In order to teach the natives Christian doctrine, the friars taught them to use Latin letters. “These Maya began at once to employ the new alphabet to save the old knowledge before it was lost” (xii). So both glyphic and alphabetic versions of Mayan had existed, but there wasn’t an agreed-upon alphabetic system that ordinary Mayans could learn.

4 It appears the English word "dialect" and the Spanish “dialecto” have not always been used in the same way. In “Past and Present Writing in Indigenous Languages”, Carlos Montemayor criticizes the commonly held but incorrect “belief that languages can be differentiated by degrees of development and that developed languages are the ‘real’ languages whereas the others are just ‘dialects’” (Montemayor 2). His essay appears in English and Spanish (9), so he uses both versions of the word, but I am not familiar with any use of the English word “dialect” to mean anything other than “the regional use of a language,” which Montemayor says is the correct meaning for dialect/dialecto (2).

To some extent there is still not agreement on how to write the indigenous Chiapas languages. In Four Creations, Gossen states, “There are two common modern notions: [one that] is closer to the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet, [and one that] acquiesces to the realities of available typeface” (xlii). Even when available typeface was the clear choice, according to “The Taller Tzotzil of Chiapas, Mexico: A Native Language Publishing Project, 1985-2002” (Jan and Diane L. Rus), there was still a concern in the 1980s between a version favored by government and secular groups and another preferred by Protestant missionaries. Furthermore, Jan Rus notes that although “Tz” has been the standard spelling for the languages Tzotzil and Tzeltal (and the many words that start with the same sound), the indigenous youth of Chiapas tend to prefer “Ts,” at least partly as a way “to mark their distinction from the former control of the languages’ artistic production – in ‘tz’ – by non-native speakers.” They use the “Ts” form in their “artistic, musical and literary expression . . . aimed at people beyond their local communities,” a phenomenon Jan Rus says “is very new. It dates from the 1970s at the earliest, was given a huge boost by the 1994 rebellion, and has grown explosively in the 2000s” (4/11/12 email correspondence). Despite the variations, by the 1980s there was enough agreement about letters that groups like Sna Jtz’ibajom, EZLN and FOMMA, all of which will be addressed in more detail later, could make native literacy classes a priority. For indigenous people who learned to write their languages, it seems their first impulse was to write on behalf of the community, which fits, considering what Carlos Lenkersdorf calls the “Mayan Cosmovision.” These modern Mayans have, as part of their cultural heritage, a communal perspective at odds with the more individualistic nature of Western society. In his first interactions with the Tzeltal, Lenkersdorf identified in their speech the repeated use of their word “teek”: There was not a single speaker who did not use in each contribution the very same word, saying it over and over again. It went like this: ‘teek lalala teek lalala teek’. I was wondering what it might mean. . . . Finally I had the opportunity to ask someone. . . . Here is his explanation. “Teek is the word most frequently used in Tzeltal. But in addition it represents the basis of Tzeltal social life. The whole society is to be understood and built upon teek. It means we.” (101-02) When Lenkersdorf later was teaching a class of Tojolabal students and gave them a test, they immediately joined together to try to solve the problems. Upon being told they were supposed to work individually, they responded:

Brother Carlos, you know our communities. If there’s a problem, we don’t go each one to his home to resolve it alone. On the contrary, we get together to resolve the problem because, look, here we are 25 students. You tell us, who thinks better? One head or 25 heads? And here, each one of us has two eyes that makes 50 for all of us. Tell us again: which one has a clearer vision: two eyes or fifty? (105) The communal mentality appears in literature as well. Though stories may be attributed to the person who first put a particular version in writing, they come from the community and are rooted in accepted community beliefs. As Carlos Montemayor states, “It is not always possible to speak of fiction writing, since all narrative writing is based on traditional information and is therefore of historical and social value: in other words, nonfiction” (Montemayor, “Past and Present” 6). Furthermore, these stories which come from the community often have fantastic, mythical elements to them, but the indigenous community would not consider them untrue. Events that a Western receptor would term “magical” fit perfectly within the indigenous concept of everyday reality; this reality is characterized by the coexistence of planes or levels of reality; that of human beings and that of the ancient and contemporary deities, both pre-Hispanic and Catholic. (Words 1) So rather than individuals using their imagination to create stories they then present to an audience, these writers use their talent to record stories that a good part of their potential audience already knows, in one form or another, to help preserve the cultural consciousness. The desire to preserve the culture through language is not new. Since few could read the glyphic version of ancient times, those who could were held in high esteem. The term “ajaw,” common to all living Mayan languages, denoting a leader such as a governor or noble, would literally translate as “one who shouts.” According to Donald Frischmann, “These titles refer to leaders’ fundamental role in public oral reading . . . . Oral expression enjoyed a sacred, ritual status in ancient Mesoamerica, where those who ruled defined themselves as their gods’ earthly representatives and spokespersons” (Words 9). Frischmann goes on to describe how public readings continued after the conquest. He quotes Miguel León-Portilla: With few exceptions, the oral tradition became the only vehicle for that which had been preserved and continued to be conceived within the boundaries of the community. The native word lived on only in the hearts of those who viewed it as a treasure. Thus survived deep-rooted forms of narrative, including some concerning ancient beliefs; chants that were generally intoned in public; and

varied forms of acting with dance and music, some of which may qualify as drama. (21) Frischmann refers to the term escrituralidad to denote the type of oral language used in these public occasions, language that approaches writing in its complexity and formality. The escritural language has passed ceremonially through the generations, preserving a style that is now available for writing in Latin letters. The short stories I will address come from several different books. In 1986 a group of organizations began working with bilingual indigenous authors to collect and preserve literature that had survived orally through the years. The result was Cuentos y relatos indígenas, seven volumes of stories written in Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chol and Zoque, alongside Spanish translations, published 1989 to 1998. These works overlap with some others. Words of the True Peoples (2004), edited by Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, is a collection of stories in several indigenous languages (not just from Chiapas), with translations in English and Spanish and some background on each indigenous contributor. Montemayor is also the editor of La voz profunda (2004), a collection of stories, poems and essays in indigenous languages and Spanish. Gary H. Gossen's Four Creations (2002) is a collection of 79 texts gathered between 1965 and 1980 from six Tzotzil men of the San Juan Chamula community, with Gossen's English translations. The People of the Bat records tales from the Tzotzil community of Zinacantán, edited by Carol Karasik, with an introduction and notes by Robert Laughlin. When quoting from Spanish texts, the translations are mine. All of the stories from these five books demonstrate the desire to speak for the community and help preserve community values. The emphasis on community in the highlands of Chiapas does not mean that the area is one big unified community. In addition to the different language groups, different communities within each language may have different beliefs and traditions. For example, the Chamula tales in Four Creations present a different worldview from the Zinacantán tales in Bat, even though both speak Tzotzil. We even see variations within a community, as the six contributors to Four Creations often tell similar stories with different details. As Laughlin states in the introduction to Bat: Lévi-Strauss recognized the futility of searching for the “true” or the “earlier” version: “There is no single ‘true’ version of which all the others are but copies or distortions. Every version belongs to the myth” (Lévi-Strauss, 1963:218). After

poring through texts collected in Zinacantán by other students in recent years, I am more impressed than ever by the depth of the reservior of mythical and legendary material. “Pure” tales are as rare as “pure” cultures. (15) Thus while none of the stories here may be entirely representative of indigenous Chiapan beliefs today, recurring themes appear that suggest some general values and perspectives. They also suggest sufficient commonality to show the sense of established identity that the Chicano movement aspired to, that helped the Zapatistas unite people from different groups (though many indigenous remain outside the movement), a commonality rooted in the land where they remain. Finding “pure” tales to represent Mexican-American folklore may be even harder. It seems a safe bet that no academics were conducting research on the folklore of what is now the American Southwest during the time that it belonged to Mexico. The oldest available folklore comes from years after the border change, so it was already influenced by decades of ongoing U.S. control. Its roots may go back farther, but not to before the arrival of Europeans. Jovita González gathered folk stories from her Tejano community, and these are collected in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. The collection was published in 2000, well after González’ 1983 death, but most of the stories were published in journals during her life. Like the storytellers from Chiapas, González wanted “to preserve the customs and traditions that identified her people by honoring them through writing, for they would perish in oral form, given the transformations of social life occurring rapidly in the Southwest as Anglo dominance increased,” according to Sergio Reyna’s Introduction (xvii). But transformations were underway before the Anglos came, and the customs and traditions were already hybrid. The first story in González’ collection is “The Mocking Bird”, and it opens with this claim: “There was a time when all the creatures of Nature talked a common language. This language was Spanish” (2). First published in 1927, this story presents a challenge to the mainstream U.S. notion that English was the nation’s common language, and superior to Spanish. Spanish was there first, the story declares. But of course Spanish had not been there very long before, and it had come just as far to get there as had English. Whatever heritage González was promoting, it could not have been as old or as rooted as those from Chiapas. Both the mockingbird and the Mayan are indigenous to the New World. Why should either one have Spanish as a first language? Like the culture that produced them,

González’ Tejano stories, along with the corridos that flourished in the (newly) American Southwest, are Mestizo rather than indigenous, with significant European influence.

STORIES LOOKING INWARD

In this section I will examine stories relatively contained within the Mayan communities, though probably none remain completely unaffected by outside influence. I will then examine stories with a clear “Ladino” influence. In some cases this influence appears in religious beliefs and routines that mix Christian and Mayan traditions; in other cases stories feature Ladino characters in conflict with Indians, thus showing the adversarial, though generally not directly confrontational, nature of this longstanding relationship. In Chapter Two I will consider some stories that show the indigenous perspective adapting to changes in recent years, including the emergence of female voices that sometimes complement and sometimes challenge those of men. This will lead to a discussion of the Sna Jtz’ibajom theatrical troupe, which began consciously modifying traditional stories, for reasons both philosophical and practical, as they prepared them for stage performance. The stage will then be set for the final chapter, with the entrance of Zapatismo and the massive changes it brought on. At each step I will make comparisons to issues in Mexican-American literature, to highlight similarities and differences and show the importance of having a place. One story which illustrates the impulse to preserve traditional culture through narrative is “A Tale from Our Grandfathers and Great-Great-Grandfathers”.5 It is included in Words with María Roselia Jiménez as the credited author, but “As told by Señora Trinidad Pérez García” (151), who is a cultural promoter, coordinator of the Tojolabal Cultural Center near Comitán, Chiapas (149). While these two women were instrumental in getting the story recorded so it would be included in a book (and discussed in this paper), they did not create it, and there is seemingly no one person who did. The story tells of a mountain where the grandfathers would obtain fruits to share with their fellow workers in the fields. “That mountain possessed a treasure that could only be enjoyed by those gifted with wisdom and

5 I do not know if the titles are used by the indigenous or created by the academic(s) who helped publish the stories. In Four Creations, Gossen states that since the Chamulas do not give their stories titles, he chose titles that “derive from extracts from the texts themselves” (xxxix). The other works provide no explanation of the origins of titles.

19 special powers” (The story fits entirely on Words 151). When other men followed to find the secret cave on the mountain, they “entered but never found anything.” The story identifies the mountain as “Ixk’inib’, located in Lomantam,” but keeps the location of the cave a secret. Although the grandfathers died, many say they are not dead, and they continue providing for the community, just as the mountain is still there, a two-hour climb from Comitán. The story ends: “Along the way, the hiker encounters exuberant vegetation and a cool flowing stream.” The land is identified as the source of the community’s treasure, and respect for the land means respecting the community’s traditions. The story is told so today’s Tojolabal can appreciate this treasure, their land, their heritage. Another story emphasizing respect for Earth is “K’ox and the Lord of Water”, as written by Tzotzil Enrique Pérez López from San Pedro Chenalhó, a founding member of the Maya-Zoques Writers Group and an active proponent of indigenous culture in several organizations. The character of K’ox appears in many Tzotzil and Tzeltal narratives, always as the youngest child, often as a child-god (Words 241). In this story, he is a human child, but he makes a connection to the supernatural. It is the dry season, and K’ox and his mother go to the river for water. Seeing children and animals swimming, he wishes he could swim too. That night in his dreams he goes back to the river. An old man emerges from the water. He tells K’ox he enjoys allowing children to swim if they respect him. I am pleased if they respect me, if they take care of the things I have here in my house, if they do not kill them on me. . . . Sometimes my legs or arms pass through the big cities, and all they do is fill me with trash; at times I have vanished or I stink and smell. My suffering has become great; that is why at times I can no longer endure it, and I no longer pass by. (107) K’ox explains that his parents taught him to respect the water: We respect and fear you; we hold a fiesta for you every year; we praise and implore you; we pray and make offerings to you in your house, in your dwelling, whether on a hill or at a sacred site; on your surface, on your face, they kneel and humble themselves. We beg the great Creator and Shaper on your behalf so that you may still walk, circulate, trickle, as you climb and descend, delivering life so that we do not die of thirst along with our crops and plants; so that everything that exists upon the earth may continue to live. (108) Because K’ox is so respectful, the Water Lord tells him the secret of swimming. The next day K’ox returns and is able to swim. In these two stories the outside world is an issue, but not an immediate presence. “Grandfathers” speaks of the “other men” who could not find the secret. This suggests the

20 possibility that outsiders may try to take advantage of the treasure, but the narrator seems unconcerned that they could ever find it. In “K’ox”, the Water Lord’s complaint about the cities is a more explicit acknowledgment. The story shows not just the importance of respect for the Earth in the Tzotzil region, but also an awareness that such respect is lacking in much of the world beyond. So both stories indicate that outsiders have different, inferior values, but in both the focus is within the community. Even in stories where land is not the subject, it is still an important feature. Two similar stories from Cuentos volume 4 are "El hombre que visitó el más allá" ("The man who visited the beyond", Marcos Ruiz Vásquez, Tzotzil) and "La mujer de los seis amantes" ("The woman with six lovers", Antonio Gómez Hernández, Tojolabal). Both deal in fantastical and vulgar ways with the consequences of adultery. In both a woman cheats on her husband. In "seis amantes", no explanation is provided for the particular number of lovers. The stories seem less interested in the details of the infidelity than in the results. In both cases the lover or lovers help provide the wife with food and goods for the house, and the husband does not question where these items come from. In both cases the wife soon dies as a punishment for her sins, and the husband is heartbroken, though in “seis amantes” he seems more upset that he now doesn't know how to provide for himself and his son. A messenger arrives in each story to offer to take each husband to see his departed wife. I will focus first on the details of “más allá”, followed by a comparison with “seis amantes”. The husband in “más allá” goes to the other world and meets the king, who tells him how he can reunite with his wife. He must go to a pasture, the king says, where he will find a horse. He must load this horse with wood and lead it back to the temple. The husband finds a mare in the pasture and loads it with wood, but he can't get it to move. He returns to the king and asks what to do, and the king directs him to an oven that contains “alambres de rojo vivo”(“red-hot wires”; Cuentos 4: 43). “Llévate uno e insértalo en el ano del animal, de esta manera te obedecerá” (“Take one and insert it into the animal’s anus, in this way it will obey you”; 43). The man reluctantly does this, and then the mare speaks: “¡Ay esposo querido! ¿Por qué me haces esto?” (“Ay husband dear! Why are you doing this to me?”; 43). This is part of her punishment. In great surprise, the man asks the mare if she is his “mujercita,” and why was she changed into a horse. She doesn’t speak further. He is able to take her to the temple, and through a process of fire and water she changes back to a woman. Now they can

21 live together again. However, when it is time to eat, she presents him with urine coffee, fly- egg rice, and tortillas of animal excrement, as those are the kinds of things they have for food in that world (44). He refuses to eat. When the time comes to sleep with his wife, and she removes her clothes, she is a skeleton. The man decides to return to his previous life. Before he does, he notes how all the souls who enter that realm are punished for whatever wrongs they committed in the previous one. Upon his return, he warns his neighbors of this impending reckoning. He dies three days later. “Seis amantes” has a similar plot, though nothing as shocking as the red-hot wire. Here the man is taken to the other world along with his son, though the narrative seems to forget the son is there. The man comes to a house, and the “patrón” has his maid offer food: tick stew and animal pus soup (Cuentos 4: 137). When he won't take these, she provides him with some jerky. This seems acceptable, but when he takes a bite, it screams, “¡Ay, no me muerdas, soy yo, pues ” (“Ay, don't bite me, it's me!”; 139). The story explains, “Esa carne no era de animal sino que era el pequeño 'pajarito' de su mujer . . . ese era el castigo” (“That meat wasn't from an animal but from the ‘little bird’ of his woman . . . that was the punishment”; 139). As for what pajarito – “little bird” – means in this context, the version provides no explanation. Again, the man is reunited with his wife but does not want to stay, and so returns to the previous world. Again it is made clear that people are punished in the next world for their sins in this one, and again the man soon dies, this time eight days after his return. These stories show the roles of husband and wife, and the penalties for those who don't follow them. Though in both cases it is the wife who is unfaithful, the husbands also bear responsibility. Neither has the sense to suspect his wife is cheating, despite the evidence. In “seis amantes”, the husband is also lazy and a drinker: El hombre no sospechaba de dónde venía el pan, el trago, el cigarro, el remiendo para su pantalón y las cosas necesarias en su casa; como tomaba mucho, no le preocupaba si había o no. (Cuentos 4: 135) The man didn't suspect where the bread, the drink, the cigar, the mending for his pants and the necessary things for the house came from; he drank so much that he didn't worry about whether they were there. In “más allá” the husband is a diligent worker, but so blind to his wife's flaws that even after she dies and he marries again, he doesn't appreciate his new wife and still pines for the first (40). So while fidelity is an important value, so is the responsibility to the land and the

22 household. Men should work to produce food and income, and women should keep the home to support the men. These standards have led to problems, and indigenous women have created literature that addresses them. These two stories of infidelity are by and about men – the women's viewpoints are not explored. The men are flawed, but the women lack sufficient depth for us to know them at all. In chapters 2 and 3 I will examine gender issues and the serious complaints many indigenous women have raised. Though gender inequality is evident in “más allá” and “seis amantes”, the stories do portray gender roles that make sense in the context of these rural communities. If women are unfaithful, if men do not work, if both don't fulfill their roles to cultivate the land and create homes, the society will not continue as it should, and thus there must be punishment for those who transgress.

TENSION WITH THE DOMINANT CULTURE

Many of the Chiapas Mayans’ stories show evidence of the relationship the people have had with the Ladinos who dominate Mexican culture. Though conflicts do appear, more common are the stories that show influence of Western thought on the Mayan cosmovision. The two stories about men visiting the underworld may show influence of the Christian notion of hell, though the underworld was present in pre-Christian texts like the Popol Vuh. Other stories show more clear connections, with references to Jesus, Mary and saints, but in ways that differ vastly from the biblical accounts. In this section I will examine traditional stories that reflect the influence of Ladinos, and compare them with the Mexican- American corridos that flourished after 1848, in order to show why loss of land is a key part of Mexican-American literature’s more confrontational stance. Some in Chiapas can still tell stories of how they settled their land, giving authenticity to their place. The Tzeltal story “Como poblaron el pueblo de Oxchuc y como encontraron el ombligo de la tierra” (“How they settled the village of Oxchuc and how they found the navel of the world”) by Feliciano Gómez Santiz (Cuentos 4), as its title suggests, shows the importance of place to the community of Oxchuc, while also acknowledging that other communities might see it differently. Up until recent decades, the main source of identity for indigenous Chiapans was by community rather than language or indigenous status. In “Oxchuc”, Santo Tomás (whose name is spelled the same way in the Tzeltal text) leads his people from Guatemala in search of “el ombligo de la tierra o centro del mundo”

(“the navel of the earth or center of the world”; 69). The saint brings a snake on the journey, and the test is to find a place where the snake will rest for good. Several times they start building a church and other structures only to abandon them when the snake once again “levantó la cabeza” (“raised its head”; 69). In Ocosingo, the “Virgen de la Candelaria” protests, saying they have already walked enough and that she will stay there. “Hasta ahora, la Virgen está en Ocosingo y quedó como patrona del lugar” (“To this day, the Virgin is in Ocosingo and remains the place’s patron”; 70). The other wanderers finally reach a place on the banks of the Oxchuc River where people can draw water. The snake goes into the water and then declares: Ahora, por órdenes mías pueden hacer la iglesia . . . y Santo Tomás va a quedar como patrón de este lugar. Ustedes, que son nuestros seguidores, vivirén aquí toda la vida; ya nunca tendrán que destruir la iglesia porque este es el lugar donde se encuentra el ombligo de la tierra. (71) Now, by my orders you may build the church . . . and St. Thomas will stay as the patron of this place. You, who are our followers, will live here all your lives; you will never have to destroy the church because this is the place you find the earth’s navel. Of course Santo Tomás, the Virgin, and the importance of churches show Christian influence, but the key to the story is its emphasis on finding a place to establish a community’s life. Whether this story has some actual connection to the real founding of Oxchuc or is completely fictional, it shows the community’s location as the basis for its identity. The Spanish made sure that Catholic churches named for various saints would be built all over Mexico, but the Indians found ways to adapt the system to local needs and customs. So here is a story of how Santo Tomás became the patron saint of Oxchuc, and the story has nothing to do with the biblical St. Thomas. Rather than seeing themselves as conquered and controlled by the Spanish and forced into a faith from a far-off land, the Tzeltal of Oxchuc recast the saint as a leader of indigenous people who establish their community at the center of their world. The stories Mayans tell today of the creation of the world show a syncretism of Christian and ancient Mayan beliefs, and the Mayan aspect emphasizes the connection to the land through the cultivation of corn. The importance of corn, fundamental to indigenous Mayan identity, has survived from the Classic Mayan period. The ancient Mayans established a connection to the land by learning to cultivate corn, and some descendants of

24 those Mayans still grow corn on some of those same lands. Hence the idea, presented in the Mayan creation story recorded in the book the Popol Vuh, that the Mayans are made of corn, that the gods tried three times to make worthy beings before succeeding on their fourth attempt, when they used corn (Tedlock). In reality it was likely through corn that the ancient Mayans gained some dominion over the land, distinguishing themselves from animals, becoming the kinds of people who can establish a civilization and begin to think about questions like where they came from and why they are there. Whatever changes have come along, whether from outside Spanish or Ladino influence or from the ordinary social and cultural evolution that happens in any society, the connection to corn has endured, and this represents that the Mayan culture has endured as well. The Popol Vuh available today dates back to the first “alphabetic” version, written in Guatemala at some point in the 16th century, as Spanish priests were trying to abolish all trace of native religion. Just as Mayan peoples learned to use the symbolism of Christian saints as masks for ancient gods, so they learned to use the Roman alphabet as a mask for ancient texts. There was no little justice in the fact that it was the missionaries themselves, the burners of the ancient books, who first introduced Mayans to alphabetic writing. What they wanted their pupils to write was translations of Christian prayers, sermons and catechisms into Mayan languages, but very little time passed before some Mayans found political and religious applications for alphabetic writing that suited their own purposes. . . . What concerned the authors of the new version of the Popol Vuh was to preserve the story that lay behind the ruins. (Tedlock, 25-26) This version of a story written secretly in Guatemala to preserve a heritage in the face of invading Christians cannot be considered authoritative for today’s Mayans living in the highlands of Chiapas. Perhaps the ancient Mayans of Chiapas already had a different version from those of Guatemala. The details of available creation stories today do not correspond exactly with the Popol Vuh, just as the details about Christ in their stories do not correspond exactly with the Bible, but the influence of both is evident. The notion of “four creations” that Gossen uses as the title for his book may be connected to the ancient story that the gods needed four tries in order to get humans right, though the Chamulas’ details are quite different from those of the Popol Vuh and, as noted, somewhat different from each others’:

While all of my storytellers – indeed, all the Chamulas I knew – generally agreed that the history of time was laid out in a sequence of four cyclical creations, destructions and restorations, there was absolutely no agreement regarding the antiquity of these periods as translated into years. Opinions as to the beginning of the modern era, the Fourth Creation, varied from seventy years ago (1900, the approximate date of birth of a consultant’s grandparents) to tens of thousands of years ago. Similar differences of opinion prevailed regarding the antiquity of the other three creations. (Gossen xxix) I will examine the Four Creations story which Gossen calls “Of How the World Began Long Ago”. In this version “Our Father Sun” had created a man, but did not know what food to give him. He tried dirt and grass with no success. “But whatever can I give him to eat?” asked Our Father. He entered into deep thought. He then started to peel off a little bit of his own body. He pressed it beside the man’s mouth. When Our Father put his body next to the man’s mouth, The man quickly took Our Father’s body with his tongue. When Our Father saw that he quickly took his body with his tongue, he said: “Ah! Can it be that it is my body that you crave as food? But be assured that you will not eat more of it if you do not work hard.”. . . Our Father came to show him how to make the cornfield. “This is how you do it. This is how you proceed. This is how you clear the field,” said Our Father He showed the man all about the cornfield. (37-39) Several other stories in Four Creations feature this idea that humans became human by eating part of God’s body, and that God’s body was of corn. In addition to the Mayan idea that people are made of corn, we see the Christian notion that we are made in God’s image, as well perhaps the idea that we eat God’s body in communion. A different version of corn’s origins comes from the Tzeltal and Tojolabal regions. This story involves ants and a cave, and I include it in this section to provide contrast to the Tzotzil corn stories just discussed. Otherwise it would be a better fit for the previous section, as this story lacks any clear evidence of outside influence or syncretism of European and native ideas. The Tzeltal version in Cuentos, v. 7 is attributed to author Patricia Maldonado Nuñez and titled “El maíz y la arriera” (“The corn and the leafcutter ant”). Maldonado Nuñez opens

26 by saying it is a story her grandmother told her to help her value corn. Here, though, people ate corn from the beginning, rather than eating rocks and leaves, but it seems they did not have to work hard to produce it. They started to grow careless, throwing corn and uneaten tortillas just anywhere. “Un día el maíz comenzó a llorar como los niños” (“One day the corn began to cry like children”; 127). People didn’t know what to do. They were afraid to eat the corn if it was alive. They grew hungry. The suffering lasted two or three years. By that time it seemed the corn had disappeared. Then one day a man heading to work before dawn saw something moving on the path in front of him. He held his torch down and saw that it was “hormigas arrieras y todas llevaban cargando dos granos de maíz” (“leafcutter ants and all were carrying two kernels of corn”; 128). The man and his companions followed the ants to a small opening between some rocks, which they tried but were not able to move. Their efforts attracted the very angry earth lord who lived in the cave. After some negotiation, he agreed to let them have the corn if they would have a fiesta for him and give him “tabaco puro y el trago más fuerte” (“pure tobacco and the strongest drink”; 129). Other versions have variations. Tojolabal author María Roselia Jiménez’ “Así nació el mundo” (“How the world was born”), has it all happening with the first man (Collección 43-47). He had lived for some time on other food, but that did not make him strong, so the gods gave him corn. “Lo saboreó y se alegró su corazón y se hizo hombre de maíz. Desde entonces el maíz es indispensible en la vida humana” (“He tasted it and it gladdened his heart and he became a man of corn. Since then corn is indispensible in human life”; 46). Now he had to find more of it, and he saw some ants carrying kernels to a cave. In this version he uses a lightning bolt to open the cave, and this burns some of the corn, causing it to have different colors. The Earth Lord does not appear in this account. There are others where he does, or where the ants actively help the people to get corn. The corn and ants story also appears in Diego Méndez Guzmán’s 1998 novel El Kajkanantik (which I will discuss in Chapter 3) and was made into Sna Jtz’ibajom’s 2000 play When Corn Was Born (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 247-260). In all these recent stories, and in the ancient story recorded in the Popol Vuh, we see a people whose identity is connected to their land. The Tzotzil version admits some Christian narrative into the concept of the native origin, but keeps the corn. Thus however much these

27 indigenous Chiapans may have changed due to European influence, their roots to their original culture remain evident. Another repeated motif that involves Christian and Mayan ideas is the story of how people learned to procreate. The version from the story quoted above is typical. After God taught the man to grow corn, he took a rib from the man to create a mate. But the two did not know how to produce children, and God did not know what to tell them. “Then the Demon Pukuj appeared” (Four Creations 43). God had warned them not to talk to Pukuj, but they eagerly listened as he not only told them, but showed them. “Lie down, now Let’s have you see what to do,” said the demon. The woman was lying down. Then, when the woman was lying down, the demon lost no time in climbing on top of the woman. When the Demon Pukuj topped the woman, The man stood there and watched what the woman did. [Then the demon instructed the man to do the same, and he did.] “How was it? Did it feel good when you did it?” asked the demon. “Oh, it felt great to do it!” replied the man. “Well, you have to keep doing it like that until you have children.” (47) In the Bible, the original sin is not explicitly sexual, though some might interpret it that way. Here there is no doubt. There is some shame – as in Eden, the man and woman hide from God afterward – but there is also a sense that this was necessary: they had to procreate, and God would not teach them. When God finds out, he seems more resigned than angry: “‘Well, if you learned it that way,/ You can go on doing it until you have offspring,’ said Our Father” (Four Creations 47). God does instruct them on the dangers of adultery, something which can create much trouble in the society, so this is a lesson that comes from the story: “You see that long ago it was the Demon Pukuj who taught us how to get in trouble./ That is why we kill each other when we have affairs with married women” (51). It seems that through the oral tradition communities in Chiapas have found ways to take aspects of Christian narrative and apply them to their local realities. Although Mayans have been an oppressed, marginalized people with a history of rebellion, there is little overt evidence of a sense of loss or injustice in this early literature, particularly when compared with Mexican-American literature from the late 1800’s. The

28 most prominent Mexican-American literary form of this period is corridos, songs which tell stories from the lives of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. In Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems (1992), José Limón explores the history of the corrido, and how a particular form he calls the border heroic corrido flourished in the Rio Grande Valley after Mexico lost Texas to the U.S. From the 1860s until the turn of the century, heroic corridos . . . began to appear in large numbers along the Lower Border. The concept of the local hero fighting for his right, his honor, and status against external foes, usually Anglo authorities, became the central theme of this balladry, reaching its social artistic zenith in the most popular of corridos, that of Gregorio Cortez. (24) The corridos are generally tragic. The villainous Anglos are weak and corrupt while the hero is noble, strong, pure and extremely talented, but due to numbers the Anglos prevail in the end. Limón explains how the loss of place was the triggering event in the development of these corridos: “With the rapid loss of their small landholdings through legally and morally questionable means, the people of Mexican descent in south Texas either died, became dislocated cheap labor in the new economy, or left for Mexico” (26). In these corridos we see the beginning of what Homi Bhabha calls “a painful re- membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the present” (Bhabha 90). Bhabha was considering India’s independence after centuries of British control, and was discussing Franz Fanon, whose frame of reference was Algeria’s independence after over a century of French control. Finally free from colonial domination, these two nations could not just go back to the past, so they had to “re-member” their society, using available cultural material – religion, art, literature, legend – to build a meaningful world-view. Whatever India and Algeria have in common with each other, both are markedly different from the Mexican-American experience in the U.S. Southwest and the Mayan experience in Chiapas. Mayans have more of an authentic past culture to work with. Unlike with Algerians and (Asian) Indians, the Mayans’ colonizers have not left, but arguably also never completely arrived. As explained previously, neither the Spanish nor the Ladino Mexicans gained complete control over the highlands of Chiapas. (Perhaps that was on the verge of happening prior to the Zapatista uprising in 1994 – more on that later.) The adversarial colonial relationship did not overwhelm native culture, but it certainly had an influence,

29 which the literature reflects in ways less confrontational than the corridos. Some of the later literature reflects a more conscious re-membering, as the same growing awareness of the ancient cultures and new interest in celebrating indigenous identity that helped prompt Zapatismo has also inspired some modern Mayans to look more explicitly to their ancient ancestors for inspiration. This will be addressed in Chapters 2 and 3. For Mexican-Americans, the cultural heritage is perhaps broader but less deep. In the American Southwest, the first colonizers were the Spanish, and the Native American “Indians” the colonized. This began in the mid-1700’s. After 1848, colonizer became colonized, as Spanish/Mexican settlers lost land to Anglo encroachers. But the Spaniards themselves had not been there more than one hundred years. Furthermore, most Mexican- Americans came after 1848, choosing (or descended from ancestors who chose) to enter a place where they would be subject to a hostile dominant society. As Mexican society itself became more Mestizo, a wider variety of identities came into play, not just Spanish vs. indigenous, but with more competing interests, from the many different indigenous groups that had been in conflict with each other prior to Cortéz – Aztec, Maya, Tlaxcala, Mixtec, Zapotec, etc. – to the different categorizations that developed as a result of post-conquest history – Mestizo, Criollo, Tejano, Californio, Pocho, Chicano, etc. So a project for this people’s literature is to “re-member” an identity that was never unified before, and this would become a driving force for the Chicano movement. Limón describes how corridos helped this identity take shape. Citing the work of Americo Paredes, he discusses in Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems several factors which would be necessary to spur the popularity of heroic balladry: a general tradition of balladry, relative isolation, a patriarchal culture, reliance on oral entertainment, a kind of “vernacular democracy” where the community makes decisions for itself (19), and “an adversarial relationship with an external force” (22). Limón notes that all these were present in the Rio Grande Valley after 1848, whereas in Central Mexico the isolation, political style and adversarial relationship were less prevalent.6 However, as Porfirio Diaz’ regime opened

6 One might also point out that in pre-1848 California, the system was nowhere near a democracy, “vernacular” or otherwise, but more feudal in nature, with a few wealthy Spanish-Mexican (and some Anglo or European) families controlling the land, and masses of Indians as arguably slave labor (Thornton 38-39).

Mexico to foreign influence at the expense of the majority of the Mexican people, the adversarial relationship grew stronger. When the Revolution came, and in its course, the side of Villa and Zapata representing “‘the key interests of the peasants and workers . . . was defeated,’” Limón explains, “this defeat added the final ingredient to the forging of the corrido on the southern side of the border – the sense of a lost, though just, cause” (29, quoting Cockroft 1983:112, emphasis in original). Thus it was after the Revolution that corridos started to become popular in many parts of Mexico. In Chiapas, several of the factors Paredes and Limón identify are present, but with some important distinctions. For one the indigenous did not have a tradition of balladry, and, unlike the uprooted Mestizos, they have not absorbed the American/European tendency to exalt the individual hero. Also, while the Mayans’ relationship with mainstream Mexico has certainly been tense, with several open rebellions, Mayans had been acquiescent in many ways as well. The adversarial nature was usually more subtle, as seen in how Mayan stories and rituals maintain their traditional culture while putatively embracing Catholicism. Until Zapatismo, rebellion was sporadic rather than ongoing, and even now many Mayans remain “loyal” to the federal government as opposed to the Zapatistas (such loyalty may be seen as more strategic than sincere, as it provides opportunities for government benefits). Most importantly, perhaps, is that although the Mayans suffered, until recently they had stayed on their land with the culture that developed there. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the displacement of recent decades, which exacerbated the adversarial relationship with the federal government and provoked the Zapatista uprising, also opened the door for the corrido to catch on in Chiapas, but with an indigenous Mayan perspective. In the past when the adversarial relationship was less intense, Mayan stories that addressed their Ladino adversaries tended to do so in a comical way, and usually without exalting any individual Indians as heroes. In Four Creations, the story called “On the Origin and Nature of Ladinos” is misleadingly titled, as it features a Ladino woman whose origin is not explained. She and her dog are the only survivors of a flood, so it seems both Ladinos and indigenous would have existed before. At any rate, we now have the ignoble origin for the post-deluvian Ladinos, as she and the dog become the parents of the Ladino race. The story explains this in graphic detail (too graphic for me to want to quote), and Gossen uses profanity in his English translation to convey the comic vulgarity with which the Tzotzil

31 would tell this story (437-39). In his notes, Gossen explains that this story: accounts for what Chamulas view as improper Ladino social behavior, particularly regarding male-female interaction in public . . . . This appraisal of ethnic difference is, for Indians, a moral as well as a social commentary. They regard Ladinos’ acquisitiveness, waste of food, irreverence for deities, and inclination to common crime (for example, theft and rape) to be linked both metaphorically and historically to the Ladinos’ dog heritage. (1055) As for the indigenous, the story features another version of the familiar motif: not wanting Ladinos to be the only people, God creates a new race, and gives them part of his body (corn) to eat (441). Thus these God-nourished ones are the true people, and the Ladinos are the descendants of a dog. Further evidence of the Chamula Tzotzils’ views on Ladinos, as well as the Christian influence, is found in “Of Our Father Who Died on the Cross.” It tells of “Our Father” (the story does not use the names “Jesus” or “Christ”), born to “the Mother of Heaven” who “did not understand how she became pregnant” (Four Creations 101). From birth he has a bright halo, and for this reason the Jews are determined to kill him. Gossen explains the unfortunate vilification of Jews in this story: “Through the Dominican mission of Chamula, the Biblical Jews . . . and Judases . . . are linked conceptually with the Precolumbian monkeys (maxetik) and demons (pukujetik) as negative forces hostile to the social order created by and presided over by the Sun/Christ deity” (1034). When Our Father becomes an adult, he does not hide from the Jews, but allows them to kill him – twice: first by burial, then, after he rises on the third day, by crucifixion. In the story, the cross is actually Our Father’s idea, and he even “went to oversee the making of his own cross/ To advise them how big it should be” (123). He also tells them when to do it, and “The Jews obeyed his orders” (125). Our Father is not resurrected again in this story, but the next one in the Four Creations collection, “Of Our Holy Mother in Heaven,” tells how he became the Sun and his mother the Moon (127). As for the Jews, after the crucifixion, . . . the Earth Lords caught the Jews. They lost no time burning them alive in a great fire All the Jews died there. That is why the people of Chamula have the custom of Burning Judas in the fire every year. It is because the Jews committed these crimes long ago. (125) Gossen provides some context for this disturbing denouement: as part of the Easter ceremony

32 in Chamula, “Each year on Good Friday, after Our Father is nailed to the cross, a straw- stuffed image of Judas, dressed as a Mexican mestizo, is burned” (1035, emphasis added). Thus it appears the Dominican Catholic influence persuaded the Chamulas to make Jews the villains in the narrative, but their own impulses led them to choose a more familiar antagonist for their performance. The Chamulas are not the only ones with interesting casting for the role of the villain. In Dancing with the Devil, Limón relates U.S. Army Captain and folklorist John G. Bourke’s 1894 account of the Texas-Mexican “Miracle Play,” dramatizing the story of Jesus’ birth. It includes “the wrath of Lucifer when his minions hurry down to Hell to apprise him that the Babe was born in Bethlehem,” and the Devil in this production would be dressed as a Texas Cavalry Officer (40). The similarity with the Mestizo Judas in the Chiapas performance is striking, but the differences bear noting. From the details Bourke provides, nothing in the play shows indigenous influence – it could be any Christian community’s interpretation of the biblical version. Also, the Devil is not just any Anglo, but a cavalry officer. “I was once asked to lend a cavalry uniform for the purpose,” Bourke states, “and when I offered to secure one of the infantry, the offer was declined” (40). This means the Devil was someone who had actually waged battle against Tejanos, helping to take their land. So the expression of resistance is less subtle than in the Chiapas version. The only thing connecting the Tejano play to the land is the costume of the villain, while the Chiapas play combines the Christian story with uniquely Mayan notions of how their world came to be.

CHAPTER 3

TH MAYAN LITERATURE OF THE 20 CENTURY

STORIES ACKNOWLEDGING CHANGE As with any culture, the stories reinforce values. The corridos celebrate strength and honor even in the face of certain defeat. Mayan stories celebrate their community and culture even as outside influences continue to pose threats. As circumstances change, the value system must consider the change. The massive changes of the 20th Century have caused writers around the world to reexamine their values, and this is true even for indigenous storytellers. Some values should be reified, such as hard work and respect for heritage, and some should be reconsidered, such as appropriate treatment for women. The stories I discuss in this chapter will address these concerns. In this first section the stories might be considered pre-awakening, as the incorporation of a changing world into folklore seems to happen by a natural, unconscious phenomenon rather than active authorial purpose. The second section shows folklore by women which shows an alternate worldview and the beginnings of the kinds of feminist activism that would take hold in Zapatismo. The third section goes into clear activism, as the theatrical troupe Sna ‘Jtzibajom begins creating original plays to confront the problems in the indigenous world. From The People of the Bat (Karasik), the story “The King and the Ring” tells of a lazy man who begs on the courthouse steps and never tries to work. “He was a grown man, but he didn’t know how to earn a living” (187). A gold ring falls to him from the sky, and this magical ring causes coins to appear. The lazy man gains such wealth that he becomes King of Zinacantán. When word of the ring reaches Mexico City, the government sends for him, and, after various silly complications involving a dog, a cat, a mouse, a lizard and some fish (the Mayans like their stories to be entertaining as well as instructive), he leaves, never to return. “It was there that he grew old” (189). Laughlin believes this tale is unique to Zinacantán, perhaps reflecting the town’s history as the most prominent trading site in the Chiapas area before the Conquest: whatever power the town once had to create wealth, that power left for Mexico City (264-65). Though it might seem the lazy man here is rewarded,

34 he, along with the greedy ways of the Ladino capital, is also to blame for Zinacantán’s loss of grandeur. “Ever since there has been no more talk of Indian kings” (189). Furthermore, though the man apparently has a life of some length, and one might imagine he has great material comfort due to his ring, no details of this are provided. It seems life in the capital is not something the Zinacantecos contemplated. The story does include his unhappy death. When he was close to dying, he asked to be shut up in a water jug. He said he was going to be restored. “Don’t open it for three days!” he ordered. But they opened the jug before the three days were up and they looked inside. So he died once and for all. (189) Thus his lazy ways are ultimately unsatisfying. It is a frequent theme that those who want riches without having to work for them are punished. The emphasis in this story on Mexico’s Capital indicates an awareness that the dominant Mexican culture is bringing about changes in this part of the world. A perhaps related story but with a time-specific setting is “Echeverría”, another from Tzotzil Enrique Pérez López and featured in La voz profunda (Montemayor). An indigenous man leaves his community to seek his fortune in the city of Villahermosa, state of Tabasco. This man, whose name is not given, bears a striking resemblance to the president at the time, Luis Echeverría Álvarez (Mexican president from 1970-76). “Lo comenzaron a llamar Echeverría, sobrenombre que no se lo quitaría nunca más” (“They started to call him Echeverría, a nickname he would never give up”; 73). He buys formal clothes to look the part, and returns to Chiapas for a grand celebration. He says he is Echeverría, the president, and so the people in his hometown call him that too. Everyone forgets his real name. He then goes back to Villahermosa, becomes an alcoholic, and before long dies in the middle of the plaza, wearing his formal clothes. No one remembers his real name, not even his wife and children (77). The story is a warning, not just against forgetting one’s community and heritage, but against expecting reward without working for it. Of course it can also be seen as an attack against the real Echeverría, who, like the one in the story, “dijo muchas cosas que nunca cumplió, ofreció cosas que después olvidó” (“said many things that he never carried out, offered things that he later forgot”; 77). It is noteworthy that the resemblance goes unnoticed until the man leaves his hometown. The protagonist loses sight of the

35 guiding principles of his community and becomes engulfed in the corrupt outside influences. Staying true to one’s heritage is the way to endure. The two men from these stories who leave their communities in Chiapas are comparable to the Chicano vendido, who loses sight of his “real” culture, but the vendido in Chicano literature tends to live in a more directly confrontational stance with his culture. Like the King, he embraces material success available from mainstream society and, to the Chicano critic, loses his soul. Maybe the King’s failed attempt to cheat death is comparable to losing his soul. His hope to be brought forth in three days recalls Christ’s death, as well as many other instances in these stories where three days is significant in relation to a death, so his lack of resurrection could mean he missed the chance for eternal salvation. The Chicano’s feeling toward the vendido, however, is not one of dismay over the lost soul, but anger over the betrayal. Jorge Huerta explains: If the politically active Chicano is the hero, the apolitical Mexican-American is the villain. Since before the rise of the Chicano Movement, there have always been those Mexican-Americans who believe that there is no discrimination against their kind and that if there is it is the fault of the victims, not the perpetrators. . . . Mexican-Americans who ‘escape’ from the barrio are termed vendidos, or sellouts, and long before the rise of the Chicano Movement they became targets for parody and ridicule. (47-48) Apparently, one thing the activist and the vendido would agree on would be that there are problems in the barrio. One wants to fight to improve things, the other wants to escape; but the vendido is a villain not just because he abandons a community that needs him, but also because he blames his community for its problems and plans to help its adversaries. The barrio is in ongoing conflict with the mainstream, and the vendido has gone over to the other side. This is not what we see in the two Mayan stories. Whatever flaws the native communities have, they have a culture that is potentially sufficient and intact. The Mayans who leave those communities may be lost souls, but they don’t appear to be traitors. A story in Four Creations that more explicitly addresses a comparatively modern concern is “An Account of the Construction of the Highway to Tuxtla-Gutiérrez”. It relates several cases of deaths occurring during this construction, which took place in the 1950s. The first accounts involve earthly circumstances such as workers dying of dehydration or from rock blasting accidents. Later in the story the Earth Lord takes an active role. “Suddenly, the Earth Lord shouted. Just as suddenly the charge ignited!” (Gossen 989). Gossen explains that

36 the Earth Lord's shouting means lightning struck, a natural event expressed in supernatural terms (1096, n. 5). The story then tells how an engineer enters the Earth Lord’s cave to ask about building the road nearby. “But the Earth Lord declared that the highway was not to pass by the door of his home” (991). Thus the building progressed in a more settled area. Gossen states, "It is difficult for me to resist speculating that this event was orchestrated by the engineers to persuade the Zinacantecos of Na Chij that it would be better for the road to go straight through their hamlet rather than around it" (1097, n.8). The engineer’s possible manipulation notwithstanding, the story does show the Tzotzil perspective of cooperation with natural forces and punishment for going against them. It does not show, at least not overtly, any sense of threat due to changes something like this international highway might bring. Though providing some benefits, it may be seen as a precursor to the forces of globalization, that which the Zapatistas call neoliberalism, which would become the greatest threat to indigenous culture in Chiapas and the main reason Zapatismo came about. Up until the Zapatista uprising, the Mayan stories lack the sense of a struggle for cultural survival that is so central to Chicano literature. This is somewhat ironic, as based on numbers the Mayan culture would seem more threatened, but in the context of identity it makes sense. If the Mayans survive, their identity will most likely survive with them. Mexican-Americans are a huge and growing population, but their cultural identity is uncertain, perhaps threatened by the same growth that makes their demographics so secure. How can they keep their cultural heritage if they are such a widespread and varied group? How much common cultural heritage do they have? Can they agree on what is the cultural heritage worth keeping? The Mayan stories I have discussed so far are not activist in nature, though activist impulses may have inspired their authors to record them. To the extent that they deal with changes in their world, they do so as people observing how things are, not striving to make them what they should be. In these stories and many others, we see indigenous people working together to promote their cultural values, rather than quarreling among themselves about what those values are. Though partially insulated from mainstream Western society and its radical changes in the last 100 years, the indigenous of Chiapas face a similar concern of determining how the beliefs they have considered sacred may fit into a changing and confusing world. Edward Said in 1993 (just before the Zapatista uprising) wrote approvingly

37 of how indigenous people were dealing with these concerns: “In greatly disparate post- colonial regions one sees tremendously energetic efforts to engage with the metropolitan world in equal debate so as to testify to the diversity and differences of the non-European world and to its own agendas, priorities and history” (30). Said lamented that many European intellectuals who might be ideologically sympathetic to these “energetic efforts” were instead giving in to “a striking new lack of faith in what Lyotard calls the great legitimizing narratives of emancipation and enlightenment" and concerning themselves “only with local issues, not with history but with problems to be solved, not with a grand reality but with games” (26). If intellectuals on the Left react to “disappointment in the politics of liberation” by turning away from political engagement, Said says, “Enter now terrorism and barbarism” (26-27). Said’s preference for engagement and activism matches the practices in Chiapas, both in the literature and in the Zapatista movement. The stories discussed above help show the mentality of those who rose to resist the outside influence of the federal government, but they do not directly connect with the social concerns that motivated Zapatismo. For that I will examine the plays of Sna Jtz’ibajom, an indigenous theater troupe. First, though, I will address stories and incantations from a women’s point of view, showing a need for an uprising within the indigenous communities.

THE ALTERNATIVE COSMOVISION OF MAYAN WOMEN It may have come to the reader’s attention that the female characters tend not to fare well in these stories. An awakening of indigenous Chiapas women has been concurrent with the overall indigenous awakening and, as will be seen in Chapter 3, an indispensable aspect of Zapatismo. But before this movement began, through centuries of Spanish/Ladino domination of Indians and male domination of women, indigenous women were also keeping alive and passing along oral literature to express their alternative worldview. In 1975, Ambar Past, a North Carolina woman who became a Mexican citizen, began working with Tzotzil women to record the songs and incantations that nurtured their daily existence. Here, in the bellybutton of the world, as the Tzotzil call their homeland, the women live very much apart from the men. With the exception of married couples, women and men do not speak to each other . . . . Due to the distance between the sexes, the women have maintained their own cosmologies the men know nothing about.” (Past 74)

To illustrate this, Past quotes at length from Xalik Guzmán Bakbalom, a Tzotzil man “who knows just about everything a Tzotzil man can know about his culture,” or at least the male side of it: Mother of Night, I don’t know Mother of the Month, not either, Mother of Wind, don’t know. Mother of Hail, more or less. Mother of Corn, don’t know. Mother Breast, don’t know. Mother of Mist, don’t know Women’s Rock, don’t know. Mother Earth, don’t know. Mother of Water, don’t know. Mother of the Hearth, don’t know. Don’t know anything about these things. My father is dead and he never mentioned any of this at all. (75) Past’s work on the women’s side of the story is a project of Taller Leñateros (Woodlander’s Workshop), which she helped found in 1975 in San Cristóbal. According to the “about us” page on its website, projects include the documentation, praise and dissemination of Amerindian and popular cultural values: song, literature, and plastic arts; the rescue of old and endangered techniques such as the extraction of dyes from wild plants; and generating worthwhile and decently-paid employment for women and men who have no studies, no career, no future. (Taller Leñateros) One of Taller Leñateros’ accomplishments is the publication in different languages of Incantations: Songs, Spells and Images by Mayan Women. In this book’s Introduction, Past explains the different worldview for Tzotzil women, and that a fundamental aspect of it is the Earth Goddess Kaxail or Kaxil (45). There are also many spiritual mothers, as Guzmán Bakbalom references above, representing important aspects of Mayan life like the Mother of Blood, the Mother of Fire and the Mother of Water. The concepts seem adaptable: “Mother of the Light is a hydroelectric dam” (39). But these are notions carried by Mayan women, not men. The European invasion . . . drove the Mayan goddesses underground in fear and humiliation . . . . Even though the Earth Goddess is now considered old-fashioned and never mentioned among the men, contemporary Tzotzil women continue directing most of their incantations to her” (54-55). A double-ear of corn is the Mother of Corn. One or two of these may be found in

39 each cornfield. “When a Mother of Corn is found, incense is burnt and ancient Mayan stories are remembered” (39). The version of the original Mother of Corn from Past’s text, attributed to author María Xila, is short enough to include in its entirety. Mother of Corn is the daughter of Lightning. Long long ago a man found a snake which had been hurt. The snake asked him to please take her home and he did. She lived with her father in a cave full of snakes. Her father was so grateful that he offered the man whatever he wanted as a reward for saving his daughter. About this time, the snakes turned into women and the man was dazzled by their looks. “No, I don’t need anything, he said politely. “Do you have a wife?” asked Lightning. “I could give you one of my daughters.” “That would be good,” said the man, and he picked out the prettiest one, who just happened to be the snake he had saved out on the path. He took her for his wife. She was the Mother of Corn and if she harvested just one ear of corn from each corner of the field, it would mutiply and her net would be filled with corn. She and her husband would have big fights because he thought she was picking all his corn. But she was just magic. One time when her husband hit her, Mother of Corn wiped the blood from her nose with an ear of corn. This is how the red corn came to be. Where mother of corn peed, the first squash vines grew, when she peed again, a chayote came up. (39) This story again shows the importance of corn, but also sheds some harsh light on gender differences. It is the woman with the connection to the earth, but it seems domestic violence is so commonplace among the Tzotzil that it finds its way into this “ancient story” to explain the origin of red corn. The woman’s power is a threat to the man. The works in Past’s book, mostly presented in verse rather than prose, are not all about conflicts with men but rather cover a range of issues of importance to women. Some deal with ordinary activities: “Planting a Tree”; “Borrowing a Gourd”; “A Girl’s Song About a Tangled Loom.” Even in the songs for these mundane acts we see evidence of women using language to contemplate their place in the world, as these excerpts show: Lend me your gourd your bowl. I come from a lowly place, I am falling down from work, serving my people. – María Alvarez Jiménes, Me’ Avrila (140)

My moon, Woman in Flower,

Mother of the Flowers, Girl of the Flowers: Make me smart like you! Show me how to fix my loom. – María Patixtán Likán Chitom (Past 132) Several incantations seek to influence the natural world: “So the Bat Won’t Bite the Sheep”; “Song for Rain”: “To Stop Mother Wind”; “So the Corn Will Last for Awhile”. Other incantations show more about woman’s place in the world in comparison to men, and some show evidence of change based on modern developments.

Incantations Showing the Mayan Women’s Viewpoint For Tzotzil men, the sun is associated with Christ and the moon with his mother, but he is the one in charge, as mentioned before with “Of Our Holy Mother in Heaven” from Four Creations. Another version of the story from Cuentos, showing less Christian influence, presents the Sun as the youngest of three brothers (like K’ox from “K’ox and the Lord of the Water”). The older two torment him for his laziness, and he retaliates in a way that kills them. Some versions have all three brothers dying and then reviving more than once, though at some point the two older ones remain irretrievably dead. Their mother cries over this, though it seems mainly she’s worried about where the food will come from, since her youngest never wanted to work. The boy proposes they raise up the sky. From there they will light up the earth. People will perform ceremonies for them, and “velas e incenso . . . serán nuestros alimentos” (candles and incense . . . will be our food”; Cuentos v.4, 39). Her light is weaker than his because she cried away so much of it due to her elder two sons’ deaths. This sad, passive, faded creature is not the one we see in the women’s incantations, such as “How the Moon Taught Us to Weave”: When the Earth began, they say, the Moon climbed a tree There she was weaving, there she was spinning, up in the tree. “Learn to weave!” she said to the First Fathermothers. “Learn to spin!” That’s how weaving began. – Loxa Jiménes Lópes (Past 128) Here we see the moon acting on her own initiative for the benefit of others. “Before Felling a Tree” and “To the Wildwood” both show women apologizing to a tree, and by extension to Mother Earth, for chopping down the tree. The former, by Antonia Moshán Culej, addresses “Kaxil, Godmother,” and says, “Give me your heat to bake my

41 tortillas, to boil my beans./ Give me the beams to build my house/ and pillars to support the thatch, the vines, the mud” (Past 136). The other, by Xpetra Ernándes, says, “Let us be of one heart when you give yourself to me./ Sacred Mother, Holy coffer Where the Secrets Are Kept:/ I’m going to stand on your face./ I’m going to walk on you, Holy Mother Breast” (Past 137). This sort of intimate connection with the Earth, as one woman speaking to another, has no male counterpart in the indigenous folklore as far as I can tell. The Earth is essential to men’s lives, but it is not someone they speak with, whose presence they feel all around them. Some incantations not only present an alternate worldview but show the direct conflicts that may develop between men and women in this traditional life. In “Lullaby”, a mother sings her baby to sleep while worrying about what will happen when her husband comes home. Here is the full text. Go to sleep little baby, go to sleep. Your daddy’s drunk and if he hits me, I’m running to the woods. Go to sleep little baby, go to sleep. If you cry, the Pukuj will come. Here he comes now. Devil’s coming. Your daddy’s the Pukuj. – Petra Tzon Te’ Vitz (Past 149) In “So the Dog Won’t Bark at My Boyfriend”, the girl wants her boyfriend to be able to visit without her father knowing. Reading this incantation annoyed one of the men who worked with Taller Leñateros: “The girl isn’t supposed to know anyone has come to ask for her hand . . . . Now the girls have gone crazy. They go out looking for the boys and give themselves freely without asking for any bride price. In the old days wives were asked for and paid for” (Past 69). The author Xpetra Hernándes laughed at his comments. “What does he know? . . . The fathers have no idea the boyfriend comes over secretly, because the dog doesn’t bark” (70). For an extreme taste of a male-female conflict, there is “Hex to Kill the Unfaithful Man”: Stab a knife into his heart. Nail a nail into his body. Let a giant termite grow in his navel.

A huge wasp. A fire ant in his ear. Let his skull be stung with poison, the nine poisons Of the four-nosed Serpent. Toss his soul into the shit pile. Let worms eat his soul, eat his dick. – Tonik Nibak (184) This provides a counterpart with the stories discussed in Chapter 1 about unfaithful women who suffer vile punishments. Women can imagine such punishments for cheating husbands too. While most of the incantations deal with themes that could come from any age in Mayan history, a few show that Mayans are living in the modern world. For example, here is an excerpt from “Pexi Kola Magic”, from a woman working in a store and hoping for customers: Don’t let your dew turn sour; Don’t let your Panta rot, the Pexi go bad. Make soda pop support me Like a son who works to feed his mom. – Loxa Jiménes Lópes (Past 172) “The Mother of Treasure” by Xunka’ Utz’utz’ Ni’ presents the common Mayan theme of how finding treasure or otherwise getting rich without earning it can lead to problems: “She is also a serpent and if she smells the pulse of your fear,/ She will bite you when you touch her gold” (Past 100). The poem includes the line “There are those who find treasure and buy a truck” (100). A minor detail, but not only is a truck a relatively recent invention in terms of Mayan history, but it also could enable its owner to venture beyond familiar territory, toward assimilation with larger Mexican culture, as in “The King and the Ring”. The people of Chiapas have become more transient, so the theme of what happens to those who depart their traditional land is starting to show up more in the literature. Consider “Prayer So My Man Won’t Have to Cross the Line”: I don’t want to go to someone else’s house. I don’t want to work far away. I don’t want to go to Los Angeles. I don’t want to live in Florida. – Xunka’ Utz’utz’ Ni’ (110)

In general the incantations present a view of the female Mayan world that complements but has tension with that seen in the narratives of men. When it comes to narrative stories, as opposed to songs or prayers, the male perspective seems to predominate. I do not here intend to pursue a full feminist literary criticism analysis of these trends – i.e., the phallogocentrism of the male-oriented stories vs. the subversive and open-ended female- oriented incantations – though I think there is fertile ground, under the dominant, consistent male sun and the submissive, changing female moon, for such ideas. I do wish to examine a few of the narrative stories from Mayan women to see how they contrast with the male view.

Mayan Women’s Narratives In the Cuentos y relatos series, male authors outnumber female roughly eight to one. Does that mean men are more likely to have stories, or that the story collectors – also mostly male, judging by the names listed – were more likely to find stories from men? The few stories attributed to women do sometimes present some different views of the Mayan world. In “Historia de Me’ Suyul” (“Story of Me’ Suyul”) by Tzotzil author Juana María Ruiz Ortiz, a young woman has a daughter who is born healthy but soon falls ill. She gets thinner and won’t stop crying. An older woman advises the mother to take her daughter to the pozo, a word which generally means “well” but in this case seems more like a natural spring. When they get there, the girl likes the water, and happily starts saying “Suyul, suyul, suyul” (Cuentos 4: 20 – “Suyul,” is not translatable; I believe it represents the sound she makes). When the mother’s back is turned, the girl goes in. Her mother tries to reach her but cannot. In the water, the girl grows into a young woman before her mother’s eyes. Her mother then tells her to come out, but she refuses. She does try to offer her mother gifts, however. These gifts include the mother of money, the mother of chicken, the mother of bean and the mother of corn. An editor’s footnote explains: “El vocablo madre en este contexto remite a la idea de abundancia” (“The term madre in this context refers to the idea of abundance”; 20, n.2). This of course corresponds with the incantations’ frequent mentioning of mother deities related to the Earth goddess. In my readings, I have not encountered this madre concept in any stories attributed to men. The actual mother of the girl wants none of these gifts, and nor does the girl’s father, who learns what happened from

44 his wife and then comes to the place with her. The pozo expands and becomes a laguna, or lake (21). When news of these events reaches the community, people come to the lake and tell the girl’s parents that their daughter is now the Virgin of Me’ Suyul. Some, including the woman who had suggested the trip to the pozo, say they had seen this in their dreams. They order a girl to prepare a blouse for the Virgin so she can be dressed like her mother. The girl finishes quickly because the Virgin gave her the power. The people organize a ceremony to offer a prayer with various items, including candles and incense. They place the blouse in a gourd, and it floats as if pushed to the center of the lake. The lake accepts the blouse, then the gourd returns to the shore. The idea is that the Virgin will provide good fortune and good harvests, like the gifts she tried to offer her parents, if people show the proper respect. This was the beginning of a yearly ceremony. However, when people did not offer the prayer properly, “pues se emborrachaban y fornicaban” (“because they were getting drunk and fornicating”), then the Virgin became angry and did not accept the blouse (22). Thus the story reaffirms the community’s values. The nature of this ceremony is confirmed in another entry from Cuentos, v. 4, an essay in which a male author tells of the ceremony and how he came to understand its significance in 1971 when he was eight. His essay, however, does not address the origin of the Virgin of Me’ Suyul. I am not in a position to say that this is due to its being female-oriented, outside his cosmovision, but that seems a likely explanation. The story “El cazador y la hija del rayo” (“The hunter and the ray of light’s daughter”) by Tzotzil author María González Sánchez tells another version of the Mother of Corn story in Incantations. A hunter sees a beautiful flower. A voice tells him that if he cuts it, it will change into a huge snake, but that he may do it if he is not afraid. He says he has no fear and that he can kill the snake, but the voice says not to “porque lo que ella quiere es que alguien la estime” (“because what she wants is that someone appreciate her”;7 Cuentos 5: 88). The hunter cuts the flower, then a giant snake appears and asks if he is afraid. When he says no, the snake changes into a beautiful woman, who agrees to be the hunter’s wife. The marriage does not go well, however. As in the previous story, the woman uses her magical

7 In Spanish the feminine is used to refer to the noun la serpiente, though it also fits for what happens next.

45 powers to produce food, and the man becomes angry and beats her. Here, though, after the beating the woman returns to snake form. The hunter goes back to the site of the flower to find out what to do. The ray of light reminds the hunter that he was supposed to “estimar” (“appreciate”) his daughter, not regañar (“scold”) or pegar (“beat”) her (90). The man accepts this, and he returns to his wife to seek forgiveness. He promises not to scold or beat her again, and he keeps his word. In comparison with the male authors’ stories of cheating wives, the mysterious appearance of daily household necessities is due here and in “Mother of Corn” to the women’s power, not to any infidelity. There the men are seen as fools for not questioning it; here they are brutes for not accepting it, though there is a chance for redemption. The different perspectives of indigenous men and women continue to develop with the indigenous awakening in Chiapas. Of the traditional stories I found, the one with the most revolutionary view toward women is “La venganza del nahual” (“The revenge of the nahual”) by Tzeltal author María Luisa Gómez Sánchez. The details here come from Micaela Morales López’ Raices de la Ceiba. The story shows how respect for one’s heritage need not exclude adapting one’s views. The concept of a nahual, an animal counterpart to human, is common to many indigenous Mesoamerican groups. For the Tzeltal, the traditional belief is that elders or leaders may have supernatural help from a figure that represents itself in the form of an animal. Sometimes the nahual is said to die when the person does, but not in this story. The protagonist is a girl who, after her parents die, receives help from an old man who says her parents’ spirits sent him. The family land is sacred, he explains, “porque tu papá y mamá venían a rezar, a invocar al dador de las cosas y eso que no les faltaba nada” (“because your father and mother came here to pray, to invoke the giver of things, and therefore they did not lack for anything”; Morales López 204). This man soon dies as well, but before he does he tells the girl that his nahual, an enormous dog, will protect her. When some workers on the family land later try to steal some of the harvest, the old man and his dog nahual appear and frighten them out of their plan. The next day the girl says to them, “¿Por qué no me piden lo que necesitan? Por esta ves les perdono . . ., ¡pero no lo vuelvan a hacer porque entonces morirán!” (“Why didn’t you ask me for what you needed? I will pardon you this time . . ., but do not do it again because then you will die!”; 206). Morales López notes: “El relato es importante porque pone de relieve la búsqueda de la igualdad entre hombres y mujeres en

46 los grupos indígenas” (“The story is important because it highlights the quest for equality between men and women among the indigenous”; 206). Equality between men and women was an issue in the Chicano movement as well. Limón notes the patriarchial nature of both the corridos (created by, for, and about men) that inspired Chicanismo and the epic poems that helped it reach its peak (Mexican Ballads 85). He also relates that when he attended his first meeting of the Mexican-American Student Association at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, with corridos on a record player as background music, “I started going around the room meeting men students, encountering women only when I made my way to be served at a food and drink table, food and drink they had prepared” (82, emphasis in original). Gloria Anzuldúa expresses her concern over a movement that would celebrate Mexican-American culture unreservedly, when she had often felt herself a victim of that culture’s prejudices. Though I’ll defend my race and culture when they are attacked by non- mexicanos, conozco el malestar de mi cultura. I abhor some of my culture’s ways, how it cripples its women, como burras, our strengths used against us, lowly burras bearing humility with dignity. . . . I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me and which have injured me in the name of protecting me. (43) As we will see in the next section, the women of the Zapatistas made sure from the beginning their voices would be equal in that movement. They would agree with Limón’s statement: “No dominated people can effectively engage their oppressors with one of the gendered pair – male or female; both are needed to mount the most effective response to political or cultural repression” (Mexican Ballads 127). “La venganza del nahual” does not elevate the female voice at the expense of the male, nor does it suggest a greater inherent virtue for women. As this longer-than-average story continues, the woman marries and gives birth to two children – significantly, a girl and a boy. Some time later she proceeds to what seems a quite dignified death. She announces that her death is coming so preparations can be made, then dies three days later as she had predicted (Morales Lópes 208). Her husband remarries, but chooses poorly. His new wife tells him lies and mistreats both the children and the workers. He goes along with her choices, even agreeing to send the children to stay with his parents. Some of the workers go to the hill where their deceased patrona used to pray, and there they find four enormous animals, representing the woman, her parents, and her old advisor. Are views on nahuals

47 changing as views on women change? The advisor’s nahual tells the workers he will take care of matters. The young woman’s nahual, in the shape of a wolf, goes to her former house to surprise and punish her husband and her successor. The couple is exiled, and the two children are allowed to return. The story concludes with their visit to the sacred hill to commune with the spirits of their departed mother and grandparents (208). So in this story, both male and female are capable of both good and bad. Both may be punished for the bad, and both may share in the power of their ancient culture if they are deserving. Customs may change, as in the story women can now possess both land and a nahual, but the sacred places remain.

SNA JTZ’IBAJOM: MAYAN COMMUNITY THEATER

Sna Jtz’ibajom means “The House of the Writer” in both Tzotzil and Tzeltal, and it began in the 1980’s with no intention of being theatrical. In Monkey Business Theater, Robert Laughlin tells how three Tzotzil men who had worked with him in the Harvard Chiapas Project came to ask for help setting up a Tzotzil-Tzeltal Mayan cultural association. With seed money from some of the foreign researchers, this group set up Sna Jtz’ibajom (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom, 3). The members of Sna began collecting and writing stories and recollections from older members of their communities, but soon wondered if the project was worthwhile – why collect writings in a language no one could read? Some natives could read Spanish, as that was the language taught in schools, but literacy in indigenous languages was virtually non-existent. When the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indian Institute) arrived in the Chiapas highlands in the 1950s, they discovered that among the 25,000 Chamulans, there were only twenty-five literate men. They began the first grades with members of the community given a minimum degree of training as teachers. But this was soon abandoned, and Indian teachers were replaced by Ladino teachers with no knowledge of or respect for Mayan culture. (173) The government’s efforts did not improve. Describing the state of affairs as of 2008, Monkey Business Theater states: State and National education departments proudly announce the publication and distribution of thousands of bilingual teacher manuals, but in Chiapas, at least, these attractively illustrated manuals present a mix of all the dialects, a sort of Mayan Esperanto, spoken by nobody and which no one wishes to learn. Recently

top officials of the federal and state departments of education have acknowledged their inability to cope with the situation. (173) Sna decided to start offering classes in reading and writing Tzotzil and Tzeltal. The classes were successful on a small scale, but Sna wanted to promote interest among wider audiences, both within and beyond their communities. They began performing (3). It started in 1985 with puppet performances designed to tell the stories in the books. They performed around Chiapas, and while this did not, according to Laughlin, bring in new readers, it did resonate with the public. “Before long, the troupe had gained such popularity that it was receiving fifteen to twenty invitations a month.” (6) Members began writing works directly for the stage, some based on well-known traditional stories, others spoofing issues of current relevance like “alcoholism and Western versus herbal medicine” (7). They began traveling further, to other parts of Mexico and to the U.S. On a trip to Guatemala for a linguistic workshop, they were asked, after their well-received puppet shows, to perform a tale presented them by two of the participants. Initially, Laughlin reports, “The Indians’ response was ‘How dare they?’” (8), but they read the story and became interested in how they could present it without puppets. “It was the memory of this performance that a year later bolstered the puppeteers’ confidence enough that they considered becoming actors in live theater.” (8). Sna's first works were much like the first stories writers started recording: with a main goal of cultural preservation, they sought to retell established stories that promoted traditional values. Their first play was “The Loafer and the Buzzard”, based on an old tale in which a lazy man is punished (45). Another early play was "Who Believes in Spooks?" which deals with longstanding Tzotzil and Tzeltal beliefs about a “boogeyman” that causes various sorts of trouble and may be “the amalgam of cultural beliefs and historical events spanning thousands of years” (59). This is the “Demon Pukuj” we have seen previously. That performance would be a way to bring these stories to life is quite natural considering its long tradition in the region. In Contemporary Mayan Theater in Mexico: Death-Defying Acts, Tamara L. Underiner states that various types of performance were practiced all over Mexico at the time the first Spanish arrived. Letters from the new colonizers described: a variety of performance forms: farces, comedies, jugglers, acrobats, magic shows, puppet shows, clowning, and elaborate spectacles in which wigged, masked, and costumed players enacted ritual stories. In Mexico, such activities

were observed in the Aztec societies that dominated the north and central regions, as well as in Mayan communities under their rule to the south and east. So talented were some of them at mimicry that they would be hired by Spanish officers to provide spoofs of the Spaniards for an evening’s entertainment. (20) The Church sought to channel this theatricality into religious ceremonies to help convert the natives. As with so many of the Catholic religious endeavors in Mexico, this both succeeded and failed. It is true the performances helped establish Catholicism; however, as Underiner notes, “When indigenous performers acted and danced the Spanish religious texts, the resulting performances generated meanings that exceeded the intentions of the latter” (22). I noted above that the indigenous of Chiapas might use a religious ritual to dramatize their feelings towards Ladinos by, for example, portraying the villainous “Jew” in the story of Christ’s crucifixion as a Ladino (Gossen 1035), and that Tejanos dressed up the devil as a Texas Ranger (Limón, Dancing 40). Performance tradition in Mexico survived and evolved in other ways as well. Yolanda Broyles-González discusses the tradition known as the carpa, or tent show. She quotes Mexican artist Covarrubias to describe carpa in the 1930’s: “collapsible, barn-like carps, show tents that were drawn on trucks and even mule carts from suburb to suburb and from village to village, quickly set up in the main square or out in the middle of the street, a presage of a coming fair” (8). Broyles-González claims this tradition dates back to at least the 18th century, possibly before, and she shows how it flourished in the 20th century “in connection with the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath” (7). As with the corrido, carpa appears to be another way the common people’s discontent found creative expression and a sympathetic audience. Perhaps it evolved from performance traditions, like those of the Mayans, that existed in other pre-Conquest cultures. The carpa is associated with “the blood, sweat, and tears of the disenfranchised masses of Mexicans” (7), and it “continued with full force into the 1950s and early 1960s, a resilience probably attributable to its native and working-class roots, as well as its ability to speak to the daily reality of Mexican workers in an entertaining manner” (10). Just as the Mayans in Chiapas found ways to display their indigenous perspectives while seeming to conform to Catholic conventions, carpa was a way working class Mexicans could create a shared national culture while living under a dominating government. This would explain why theatrical troupes appeared so quickly across the U.S. Southwest in the 1960s. As Mexican-Americans were seeking to define and

50 unify a Chicano culture, it is natural that a tradition popular through much of Mexico in the previous decades, a tradition with ancient roots and the common people’s perspective, would now sprout up in so many new places. It is instructive to compare Sna in its relationship to the indigenous movement in Chiapas, and particulary Zapatismo, and Teatro Campesino in its relationship with its relation to the Chicano movement in the U.S. The Sna troupe began well before the Zapatista uprising of 1994, and had no affiliation with the Zapatistas, but both shared the concern of preserving a threatened culture, and both found ways to do that which were novel for their communities but connected to their ancient traditions. Both are part of what is now referred to in Tzotzil as “k’alal xijulavkutik” – “when we awoke” (Rus et al., Mayan Lives 8), the time beginning in the 1980s when the indigenous became aware of the value of their ancient cultures and the need to confront modern threats. The Zapatista uprising is perhaps when the sun rose, but the pre-dawn stirrings had been going on for some years. The Chicano movement lacks such an identifiable initiating event, but is generally considered to have started roughly in 1965. Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965 when Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers united and I Am Joaquín was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul – we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together – who we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become. (Anzuldúa 85) If what they wanted to become was an authentically Mexican people in another country, the beloved carpa tradition was a perfect fit, and the sudden blossoming of Chicano theatricality in the mid-1960s is not surprising. For Sna, becoming a theater troupe was more of an accident. However important performance was to the ancients, and however integral certain rituals had become to the community, the idea that a group of people would get together and work full-time creating and performing original (to some degree) works was mostly a novel conception,8 not

8 Mostly but not entirely: according to Laughlin, “I made this decision [to start puppet theater] knowing that twenty-five years before, the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (the National Indian Institute), with the aid of novelist Rosario Castellanos, had introduced puppet theatre to ‘civilize’ the Indians” (Laughlin and Sna

51 something the group planned. As described previously, they went in a few years from printing texts to teaching classes to puppetry to full live performance, with no one having planned it that way from the start. They began by recreating traditional stories their audiences would know, but, as happened with the oral short stories that got set to writing, Sna's plays started to turn their attention to recent social changes as well. Deadly Inheritance in 1991 examined a true incident "where two brothers, after their father died, murdered their two sisters to appropriate their land" (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 75). In the play, only one sister is killed, and the other prevails in court to claim her inheritance. Here, as with "La venganza del nahual", is evidence of literature reflecting a changing view toward women. Because Sna performed this work before fascinated audiences, it perhaps both reflected change and contributed to it. Let’s Go to Paradise! in 1993 portrayed the brutal conditions Indians faced when they went to work on the coffee fincas of Soconusco, the Pacific coastal region of southwest Chiapas, an area that has not been part of the Mayan territory since the Conquest. Set in the 1930’s, the play features the historical figure Erasto Urbina, an agent in President Lazaro-Cardenas’ government who worked with labor unions to force reforms for finca workers. The play ends with these triumphant reforms, except that the actor playing Urbina steps forward to say: But little by little, people forgot what he had done to help the Indians. The union leaders were bought off by the owners of the coffee plantations, and they put on a false front again so that we Indians would be screwed up as badly or worse than before. . . . This is what is happening to the Mayas today on the lands of our ancestors, who once were the most civilized people of this continent. (148) Was enacting these long-held grievances on stage a precursor to political action to change them? For Teatro Campesino, they started by addressing current events in hopes of effecting change. They worked directly with Cesar Chavez, who said: I had the idea of using the carpa in the Farm Workers Union. I had seen carpa a lot in Mexicali, Tijuana, and Nogales. I wanted a carpa in the union for purposes of communication. With a carpa we could say difficult things to people without offending them. We could talk about people being cowards, for example. Instead

Jtz’ibajom 3). Furthermore, the father of one of the founding members “had been a puppeteer in Castellanos’ Teatro Petul, and the puppets were still in the family” (Underiner 49).

of being offensive, it would be funny. Yet it could communicate union issues. (Broyles-González 13) The performers were actually farmworkers, performing mostly for others like themselves, trying to understand their experiences and figure out how to change them. “The struggle against farmworker abuse was at the core of the Teatro Campesino’s early performance pieces. Later the scope broadened to include a wider variety of issues facing Chicanas/os: racism in the schools, the war in Vietnam, urban problems, or questions of identity and colonialism” (21). As the scope broadened, the troupe looked to experts in Aztec and Mayan culture. Broyes-González’ descriptions of the Teatro’s reasoning for this approach shows again how the Chicanos re-membered their cultural past, selecting from what was available. Though its members had various tribal ancestries, they merged into a common process of recovery based on Mayan and Aztec knowledge and mythology. Why Aztec and Mayan? The merger and choice of a common ground was conceptually facilitated by the teachings of the Aztec Conchero dancer Andrés Segura and Mayan specialist Domino Martínez Paredez, who provided – as a living Mayan maestro for the Teatro and as a scholar of Mayan culture – a theoretical foundation postulating the essential cultural unity of all American tribal peoples . . . . The recourse to Mayan and Aztec knowledge was also in part dictated by historical convenience: these are among the best documented of American tribal cultures. It also appeared justified by the general recognition of the strong indígena presence in Chicana/o barrios, regardless of tribal specificity and provenance. Although the focusing on the native ancestral culture was certainly the cultural nationalist self-validation process of the Chicano movement, the Teatro Campesino never posited “the native” as an essentialist notion of race, or as a pure or unadulterated ideal state. To the contrary, “the native” is typically discussed as a thoroughly historical and heterogeneous construct, indeed, a necessarily syncretic body of contemporary cultural practices. (85-86) For Sna, indigenous specialists were not needed for them to conceptualize a native ancestral culture – such was their everyday life. But it is also true that they benefited directly and indirectly from the work of non-indigenous academics who helped recover the ancient culture and promote the living languages. Robert Laughlin was active with them from the beginning. Also, Amy Trompetter of Antioch College provided initial guidance with puppeteering (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 4), and New York theater director Ralph Lee started spending every February with Sna to help create and direct new plays (9). When comparing Sna and Teatro Campesino, it is tempting to consider the two as a clearly contrasting oppositional pair – the indigenous needed westernized experts, the

53 westernized Chicanos needed indigenous experts – but it is not that simple. True, the modern Mayans have more of a shared geography and culture, and more connection to a specific ancient language, but they also have differences among themselves and from their past, and they also rely on specialists for help with re-membering, or, to use Broyles-Gonzalez’ terms, with the cultural self-validation process. Teatro Campesino may have needed help understanding concepts of an ancient heritage from which not all of them were descended, but the carpa tradition does seem rooted in authentic indigenous performance tradition as it evolved through the centuries. Both groups choose somewhat selectively what part of their ancient heritage they want to claim. The close of Let’s Go to Paradise! shows these modern Mayans confronting their ancient past with some selectivity. Mayans “once were the most civilized people of this continent,” the actor says (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 148), but this “civilized” status does not mean some of its members were not perhaps treated just as inhumanely as Mayan fieldworkers are today. Two quite similar plays from Sna and Teatro demonstrate their engagement with the past in a way that does not idealize it. Teatro Campesino’s puppet show La Conquista de Mexico from 1968 shows how Cortez used the enmity among various indigenous groups to get them to fight each other, enabling the Spanish to conquer them all. At the end the character of Cuauhtémoc says, “Nosotros los mexicanos de la antigüedad, perdimos porque no estábamos unidos con nuestros carnales de la raza” (“We ancient Mexicans, we lost because we were not united as brothers of la raza”; Valdez 65). In Jaguar Dynasty in 1992, Sna looks critically at the Mayan legacy. The play presents a tale based on the Popol Vuh, but it also concludes with a message that Mayans must unite, rather than fighting among themselves as they had in ancient times. The prophet Matawil, who has led his apprentice (and the audience) on a journey to the past, now warns: “You must learn to live together . . . . If you do not believe this, you will have a dark future. . . . You will kill each other. You will surely lose your land. You will suffer for five hundred years or longer unless you unite” (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 118). When his apprentice asks how to unite the land, Matawil says, “If you think of one year, plant corn. If you think of a hundred years, plant many trees! But if you think of more years, educate your children well!” (118). So both plays acknowledge that the revered past was not ideal, and both end with a call for unity, but only Sna’s warns of losing the land. For the most part, the Mexican-Americans had already lost

54 theirs. Chicanos sought to unite la raza to find a new place, but one of the difficulties was figuring out how to do this in a foreign land. Many of the Mayans in Chiapas want to unite so that they can keep the place they have. Rather than invoking la raza, they start with corn, go to trees, and then take the next step to educating children. Corn was and is essential to their native land. Invoking trees shows a greater understanding of their land’s relation to the wider world. Education is something new – a realization that they will need to understand and adapt to changes. Education was not a priority among indigenous Chiapas for most of the past five hundred years, but now many are seeing that they will need it to keep their identity. They must know the new to preserve what is worthy in the old. Through indigenous stories and plays, a movement was taking shape. It seems almost unconscious at first. As the written language becomes accessible, people go from writing familiar stories in order to preserve them, to considering how these stories connect to each other and to the greater world, to creating new stories that both valorize traditions and speak to new visions for the Mayan place in today’s world. A Tzotzil woman in Sna named Petrona de la Cruz Cruz explained how Jaguar Dynasty affected her: This play has made me think, and has made me dream about our ancestors, about what they were like. There have been so many generations which have since passed through this world, that we need to recover the culture of our first ancestors, and show it to people who have forgotten. I cannot go from person to person, or from house to house, explaining what our ancestors were like, how they passed through this world, how they used to live. Through Jaguar Dynasty we can now show people how things were, and what the Conquest was like. This play is very important for the people of Chiapas. (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom, 100) Sna had no affiliation with the EZLN, but the two groups would soon be working for the same cause.

CHAPTER 4

A LITERARY UPRISING

INSPIRATION IN ZAPATISMO “We apologize for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.” 9 Politely but insistently, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN – Zapatista Army of National Liberation), on January 1, 1994 took over five municipalities of Chiapas and issued a Declaration demanding democracy, justice and peace. Indigenous men and women wearing ski masks and bearing rifles were rising up against the Mexican government and something called neoliberalism, the global corporate capitalism that sees all places on Earth in terms of resources available for profits. The Earth’s people are viewed similarly, either as cheap labor in the forces of production or obstacles to be removed so resources can be exploited. In Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (2010), Alex Khasnabish details several events leading up to the armed uprising: The match was put to the fuse of rebellion in 1992 when the Salinas Government reformed Article 27 of the Constitution in order to lay the foundation for the implementation of NAFTA. This reform removed the rights of campesinos to petition for land redistribution and made ejido land open to privatization in order to encourage capitalist investment in agriculture. On the ground in Chiapas, it was the final piece setting the stage for a head-on confrontation between the state, large landowners and the peasantry. (59) The government deemed the passage of NAFTA more important than the Constitutional protection of Indian communal lands from sale or privatization. Thus the day of NAFTA’s taking effect became the day of the uprising: Jan. 1, 1994. Under NAFTA, [Article 27’s] guarantee was defined as a barrier to investment. With the removal of Article 27, Indian farmers would be threatened with the loss of their remaining lands, and also flooded with cheap imports (substitutes) from the U.S. Thus, the Indians labeled NAFTA as “a death sentence” to Indian communities all over Mexico. (Vodovnik 37) NAFTA, then, might have concluded the process begun with the Conquest but that neither the Spanish nor the Ladinos ever completed – the annihilation of indigenous identity. The

9 “Disculpen las molestias, esto es una revolución.” This is what Subcomandante Marcos is reported to have said to tourists who complained that the road from San Cristóbal to Palenque was closed (Vodovnik 33).

Spanish sought to convert them, Ladinos sought either to assimilate them or keep them as lower-class labor. Neoliberalism sought to subsume them into the machine or push them out of its way for good. Perhaps no individuals would be directly killed in this process, but the culture could die. The popular Zapatista slogan “Ya Basta!” – “Enough!” – is the EZLN saying they will no longer have their fate determined by others, and while this has many implications, at a basic level it is saying they will not give up their land. This is the great loss that the Mexican-Americans of 1848 could not avoid – the loss of the land that defined the culture. This is the loss the Chicano Movement sought to recover. For now the Zapatistas remain in Chiapas, and their roughly 2000-year-old identity remains intact, though certainly not unchanged nor unchanging. For Mexican-Americans, Chicanismo served as an awakening, a rallying call for themselves to take pride in their identity and heritage, and a statement to the rest of America that they would not be ignored or, as I Am Joaquín puts it, “absorbed.” As Anzuldúa says, “Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965 when Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers united and I Am Joaquin was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. With that recognition, we became a distinct people” (85). Part of being distinct included, for some, the desire to create a separate Chicano nation within the U.S. Despite such separatist notions, some absorption has been inevitable, and perhaps not undesirable. What Chicanismo helped accomplish, though, was to make sure the absorption could work both ways. Latinos may soon be the largest minority in the U.S., and perhaps at some point no longer a minority. As with any sizable minority, including Mayans in Mexico, they have divisions among themselves, but the Chicano movement helped establish that Mexican-Americans have a culture of their own they can bring with them as they negotiate their place in American society. The Zapatista uprising was more a cultural battle than a military one. They fought with guns at first, but they could never have matched the federal army militarily. Their word was their weapon. By using words to appeal to the Mexican society as a whole, and to many people beyond it, the Zapatistas established themselves as spokespeople for indigenous cultures in Mexico, as well as for the democratic spirit of Zapata. As Limón noted, Zapata and Villa represented ordinary people in the Revolution, and they lost in reality, but in legend, and in Mexican popular culture, they are the heroes, the ones whose names are

57 remembered. Monuments and memorials all over Mexico – Villa in the North, Zapata in the South – testify to the wistful popular pride in these heroes. Thus the Zapatistas partook of the people's legend and longing in creating their identity. Khasnabish explains how identifying with Zapata helped appeal to the Mexican masses: In a nation awash in revolutionary symbolism and history, the reclaimed legacy of Emiliano Zapata requires no explanation. Furthermore, the movement's right to claim this name and its history -- one so often co-opted by ruling elites -- was testified to by the fact that “entire Indian communities had organized an army,” embodying both the grassroots and autonomous legacy of the original Zapatista struggle. (102, quoting Adolfo Gilly) But the Zapatistas didn't just invoke the familiar Zapata legend, they presented a new one. Here is part of what has made Zapatismo both unique and uniqely appealing among revolutionary movements. A speaker for the EZLN going by the name of Subcomandante Marcos came to the forefront. Like Zapatistas generally, he wore a ski mask to keep his true identity hidden. This “true” identity is now a rather open secret, but Marcos has never admitted to it, and this recalls how indigenous view the world, with Our Father Sun, various Mothers, the Earth Lord(s), the Water Lord, demons, nahuals, etc., all considered real in a world where “reality is characterized by the coexistence or planes or levels of reality” (Montemayor and Frischmann 21). Two levels of reality apparently came together when the college-educated Marcos met the wise Tzeltal elder he calls Viejo Antonio. Is the story true? Does that matter? Marcos explains what he, a Mestizo, is doing living with the Indians as part of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. “Tell me more about that Zapata,” Antonio says. I start with Ananecuilco, then with the Plan de Ayala, the military campaign, the organization of the villages, the betrayal at Chinameca. Old Man Antonio continued to stare at me until I finished. “It wasn’t like that,” he says. I'm surprised and all I can do is babble. “I'm going to tell you the real story of this so-called Zapata.” . . . “Many stories ago, in the time of the first gods, the ones who made the world, there were two gods who were Ikal and Votan. Two were one single one.” (Marcos, Ya Basta! 69) Ikal and Votan wanted to walk, but they couldn't figure out how. They started asking questions about why they weren't moving. “When they did this they moved a little bit. First

58 by asking why, and then by asking where” (69). So then they were able to move some, but when they wanted to take a long road, they faced a problem. Ikal declared that he did not know how to walk by day and Votan declared that by night he was afraid. So they cried for a long time, then finally agreed that Ikal would walk by night and Votan by day. Since then the gods walk with questions and they never stop, they never arrive and they never leave. So that is how the true men and women learned that questions serve to learn how to walk, and not to stand still. Since then true men and women walk by asking, to arrive they say good-bye and to leave they say hello. They are never still. (70). Marcos asks what this has to do with Zapata. Antonio says that Ikal and Votan learned they were the same and could become Zapata. And Zapata said he had finally learned where the long road went and that at times it would be light and times darkness but that it was the same, Votan Zapata, and Ikal Zapata, the black Zapata and the white Zapata. They were both the same road for the true men and women. (70) This is from the communiqué titled “The Story of the Question” (68). One question that may arise is, is this any way to fight a revolution? For the Zapatistas, it was perhaps the only way, to speak for a people whose everyday reality coexisted with myth, to speak to a nation almost all of whose citizens had some indigenous ancestry, to challenge a government which only spoke the language of money. The Zapatistas became an opponent the federal government could not defeat, just as a sword cannot defeat water. In “The Story of the Sword, the Tree, the Stone and the Water”, Marcos tells how the sword fought against the tree. It was a difficult battle, but eventually the tree fell. The sword then fought a stone. The sword was blunted and scratched, but eventually it broke the stone into little pieces. Then the sword fought water. The sword attacked the water with great force. It made great scandal and noise; it shocked the fish and the water did not resist the blow of the sword. Little by little, the water returned to its original form, enveloping the sword . . . . Time passed and the sword in the water began to grow old and rust, losing its edge, and the fish came near it without being afraid and made fun of it. With shame the sword withdrew from the water in the ditch. Without an edge and defeated, it complained, “I am stronger than it, but I couldn't hurt it, and it without fighting, has beaten me!” (Marcos, Ya Basta! 194) The actual Zapatista soldiers were like water, retreating into the jungles and mountains when the federal army advanced, but never going away, eventually returning to their original form.

And Marcos’ words are like water, too slippery to pin down, able to come around from another side. Marcos has produced hundreds of communiques amounting to thousands of pages, weaving intricate and fanciful narratives of daily life in Zapatista territory, direct criticism of the federal government, appeals to Mexicans’ shared values, and fables to illustrate his points, sometimes more obviously than others. A general impression about Marcos is that he went to Chiapas with the Marxist notion of enlightening the masses, but found instead that they were enlightening him. These “whites” came to convert the Indians to the revolution, as their ancestors did in the old days to the Gospel, but, in fact, it is the Indians who have converted them to another conception of the world. Those who came from the city brought with them a sense of individuality, of the nation, and of the wider world; the natives a sense of harmony, of real democracy, and of listening. This crossbreeding of two microcosms has meant the progress for both of them. The new, sui generis conception of the world was born – a world in which many worlds fit. (Vodovnik 35, emphasis in original). Could Marcos’ writings, thus influenced, be considered indigenous literature? The indigenous Zapatistas have embraced Marcos as their spokesperson, but he clearly brings his Mestizo background. It is also worth pointing out that none of the literature discussed in this paper could have reached me without some involvement from non-indigenous parties. The argument could be made that the indigenous culture speaks through Marcos, but I will not pursue that argument here. I will focus on literature more directly attributable to native language speakers, whatever outside force may have played a role, and I will examine how this literature responds to the actions of Marcos and the EZLN. Sna’s engagement with social issues would increase dramatically with the advent of Zapatismo. Members were initially divided in their perceptions of the uprising. Our president, Tziak, came from Tenejapa, where the Zapatista movement was gaining popularity, and he was all for celebrating the uprising, but the Zinacantecs demurred: “Who was Subcomandante Marcos? What did he want? Why is he causing all this trouble?” Following Zinacantán’s centuries of opposition to Indian rebellion, they decided that the subject of the play should be ecology – a more prudent endeavor. Tziak protested, “But Marcos said that if it weren’t for the jungle, they’d all be dead, so he’s an ecologist!” (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 149) The troupe decided to work both political and ecological themes into their play From All, for All, the title being one of the slogans promoted by Marcos to describe the Zapatista vision of

Mexico. In the play, Indians forced off their land by Ladinos are relocated in the jungle, thereby forcing out several animals. The animals complain to the Earth Lord, who sends sickness to the Indians. A shaman provides a cure, but also tells the Indians they must unite to reclaim their land. They do so, with the help of a Mestizo student named Juan López (the name comes from a figure in the Tzeltal Rebellion in 1712). Gods, humans and animals are all thrown together in a silly stage spectacle, but the substance of the play is a serious criticism of Mexican policies on both agrarian rights and environmental preservation. The message of From All, for All shows various influences. The shaman begins his healing chant with, “God, Jesus Christ, my Lord,/ Why are your children suffering so?’ (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 167). When the Earth Lord comes in to stop the violence at the end, he expresses the Christian viewpoint: “Don’t you know that you are all brothers?” (171). The Indian uprising has elements of Marxism, as the shaman says, “You will have to be organized. You will have to join together to demand what is yours” (167), though it is also true that the Indians feel their private property rights were violated when the Ladino took their land. Indeed, the underlying impulse behind the uprising takes its cue from Enlightenment notions of human rights. At the behest of the Earth Lord, Juan López agrees that they will put down their arms, “But it must be peace with justice and democracy, because without dignity there will never be peace!” (171). The play also makes a point of including women – it is a woman who is the first one to take up the attack: Maruch: And why can’t we face up to them? You mean you aren’t real men? (The men look at each other but don’t say anything.) Well, if you aren’t brave enough to go yourselves, I’m going to meet with the women so that we will go and attack them. We don’t want our children to keep dying of hunger and diarrhea! Now we women, too, will organize! (168) Along with these serious issues comes a great deal of comedy. The wealthy landowner Don Pomposo is “a portly man, wearing a half mask with a big red nose and a mustache. He sports a cowboy hat, boots, and a pistol” (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 155). The government agent’s secretary is “a man in drag, wearing a full pink face mask with blonde hair, flowered dress, and high heels” (155). The actors portraying animals cavort extensively, and include an armadillo who serves as the Earth Lord’s chair. When the animals’ meeting is over, he says, “Aah, what a relief! Our Lord is so heavy!” (164). But it is the play’s serious message that makes it so powerful. When first performed, in the city of

Chamula, the audience immediately understood the meaning of the story. “…seeing the campesina, the audience exclaimed, laughing, ‘That’s Ramona!’10 And when the young man, Juan López, appeared from the city, ‘That’s Mr. Marcos, just his name is different!’” (151). Not only does the play help put in perspective the reasons for the Zapatista uprising, it also challenges some longstanding Mayan views: “In the scene where the Indian woman turns to the men and cries out, ‘A poco ustedes no son hombres?’ (‘You mean you aren’t men?’) and pledges to unite the women in resistance to the government, the entire audience, both sexes, inevitably cheers. Within the cooperative and without, attitudes are changing” (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 52). This is literature of agency and urgency, seeking not just to preserve a language and culture, but to work in concert with political activists seeking to change society. Though local audiences could make the Zapatista connections easily, Sna has performed this play in many locations outside of Chiapas. The themes of respect for the environment and justice for all people have resonance beyond any single community. Later in 1994, Sna visited Immokalee, Florida, where migrant Mexican workers were enslaved. Sna met with and performed for these workers, only a small number of whom were from Chiapas. Laughlin reports the words of one undocumented worker: When we go to cut tomatoes, they give us each a bucket. For every bucket they give us a chip. If the bucket’s not full, they scold us, they hit us, and they won’t give us the chip. They treat us like dogs. When we go to work, they growl at us if we don’t work fast enough. When we’re thirsty, they say, “Drink the water from the ditch!” Then they kick us. (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 38) Sna performed From All, for All for these workers. “Next we improvised a play later entitled ‘El largo camino a $5.25’ (‘The Long Road to $5.25’). In our play, using the vocabulary we had learned, we showed the hard lives of the pickers and the many abuses they endured” (34). Sna maintained contact with the workers, returning three years later. According to Lucas Benítez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Our relationship with Sna Jtz’ibajom was instrumental in organizing our community of farm workers . . . because their plays helped us to see our reality. They gave us the chance to examine the lives we are living and in that way seek solutions to our problems” (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 35). Moreover, the play did contribute to a material difference in workers’ lives.

10Ramona was “one of the Zapatista rebel movement's most important women’s rights advocates.” (Associated Press)

Our play would reinforce their demand for a raise in pay, from $4.00 to $5.25 an hour, the basic minimum wage. That was the idea and that is what happened. The workers told us that after one day of not working the ranch owners lost thousands of dollars. The following day the contractors offered $5.25 an hour. (37) Sna's coded but clear embrace of Zapatista ideas is just one example of the influence, or perhaps confluence, the political movement had on/with the literary. Zapatismo makes another literary appearance in native historian Domingo Gómez Gutiérrez’ book compiling various versions of the legend of Juan López, the Tzeltal rebel from 1712 (Benjamin 439), whose name was used for the Marcos-like character in Sna Jtz’ibahom’s play From All, for All. Published in 1996 in Tzeltal and Spanish, Gómez Gutiérrez’ book features seven versions of the story. Though details differ, several key plot points reappear – Juan’s mother was a virgin; Juan created an earthquake to show the local elders his power; he caught Mexican soldiers’ bullets in his sombrero, then killed thousands of soldiers with one shot; he was eventually executed, but it was hard to kill him; though he died, he will someday come back when his people need him. Gómez Gutiérrez’ book closes with his own “Version Conjuntada” (“Combined Version”) in which he states: “En nuestros días tambien sigue la rebeldia de los pueblos indios. Los tzeltales, junto con otros indígenas, se levantaron el premier día del ano de 1994 contra los malos tratos que sufren. El primer ejemplo fue el de Juan López en Bachajón” (“In our days also we have a rebellion of the Indian people, they rose up on the first day of 1994 against the wrongs they suffer. The first example was that of Juan López in Bachajón”; 120). From a historical perspective, Juan López hardly seems a legitimate precedent for Zapatismo. Putting aside the issue of his magical deeds, historical accounts of the Tzeltal Rebellion of 1712 do not even suggest he was a key figure. According to Gosner, he was in fact hanged by the Tzeltals who did lead the rebellion, as he was the leader of another Tzeltal group that sought, and obtained, greater benefits for the Tzeltals in general (139). The myth seems a syncretic merging of Juan López with Christ. From a realistic perspective, the Juan López myths are preposterous, but on the symbolic-mythic level so important to Chiapas Mayans, perhaps the Zapatista movement does mark the return of this hero. A symbolic-mythic perspective could potentially justify Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’ use of Joaquín Murrieta as a representative heroic figure for Chicanos, but there are problematic differences. For one, as explained previously, it seems likely the real Joaquín

63 was actually a murderer and thief whose victims included Mexican-Americans (Thornton 15- 20). For another, though it is true that no one person created the Joaquín Murrieta legend, its prominence seems due more to commercial publishing than authentic folk tradition. John Rollins Ridge’s 1853 novel most likely originated many of the details, and Gonzales’ 1967 poem made Murrieta significant to Chicanos. Again, a clear-cut distinction between the Mayan legend and the Mexican-American one is elusive – both distort historical reality for effective literary inspiration – but the fantastical Juan López seems more an authentic, organic myth, and Joaquín Murrieta more a contrived political commodity. For what it’s worth, I have found nothing in any official Zapatista publications, nor in any of Marcos’ writings, that mentions Juan López. Their preferred legend is, of course, Zapata. Juan López also may also be compared with a border corrido hero, the one great man from the defeated community who shows up the dominant culture. In both cases the story of the hero is a way for the subordinate culture to express resistance. Of course no corrido hero, however talented, could start an earthquake or kill thousands with one shot. Corridos tell stories from the real world, perhaps embellished, but not completely beyond credulity. It is as if they are striving to be taken seriously by rational Western tradition from which they are at least partly derived. Gregorio Cortez might escape “more than three hundred” Texas rangers (Limón, Dancing 81), but he would not try to fight so many, pistol in his hand or not. Flights of imagination work better for the Mayans. How else could a small, barely armed group of rebels face off against the Mexican government, and at least partially prevail? The literature since 1994 shows new imaginings for what the indigenous mind can produce.

CONFRONTING INTOLERABLE TRADITIONS: THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT WITHIN THE MOVEMENT The pivotal moment in From All, for All when the campesina Maruch, the one inspired by Comandante Ramona, cries out, “A poco ustedes no son hombres?” (“You mean you aren’t men?”) demonstrates Zapatismo’s impact on theater and theater’s impact on the culture. Changing attitudes toward women is part of the Zapatista agenda and practice, and is also a project of the literature indigenous Mayan women are creating. Many of the Zapatista soldiers who helped take over communities on January 1, 1994 were women “wearing military uniforms instead of traditional dress and carting guns instead of babies” (Khasnabish 74, quoting Abdel-Moneim). Before the uprising, the EZLN had to

64 work out how women would fit into their army. Women joined for a variety of reasons, including to escape abuse in their communities and to have more opportunity and self- autonomy. So just as Zapatistas in general were demanding a new relationship with Mexico, Zapatista women were demanding a new relationship with men. Joining a military organization might not be a step toward liberation if the army replaces one patriarchal system with another; however, in the EZLN, women united to claim their share of authority. Marcos has called this “the first uprising of the EZLN,” which in March 1993 “was led by the women Zapatistas. They suffered no losses and they won” (Khasnabish 76). An insurgent named Major Susana had canvassed the female EZLN members and presented a report on the laws they wanted. Though the male members seemed hesitant, “the proposals were unanimously passed and codified as the Women’s Revolutionary Law.” In addition to positions of authority within the military, the Law also promised rights to more general matters such as health care and education, and to women’s self-determination in choosing a sexual partner and deciding how many children to bear (77-78). As with any law to promote human rights, enforcement is an ongoing concern. Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska reports the following incident the day the law was adopted: After the “women’s laws” were approved unanimously, a Tzeltal man was heard saying, “The good thing is that my wife doesn’t understand Spanish, because if she did . . . .” A female Tzotzil insurgent with the rank of major in the infantry started in at him: “You’re screwed, because we’re going to translate it into all of our dialects.” The impertinent man could only lower his gaze. (56). The Zapatista movement inspired Indian women to take pride in themselves and take notice of the opportunities available to them, in contrast to traditional limitations. According to Tamara L. Underiner, “When a son is born to an indigenous family in Chiapas, tradition holds that a chicken be killed and a feast prepared. When a daughter is born, she is given a tortilla as a symbol of what she will spend her life preparing” (77).11 Traditions and viewpoints that have lasted centuries are not easily changed and, once again, as in Chicanismo, we see a conflict within the movement when women see their interests belittled or neglected.

11 I do not know how widespread this custom is. I found no reference to it other than the one cited.

In El Teatro Campesino, many women contributed as part of the collective yet felt neither they themselves nor women’s interests in general were well-represented. The female characters tended to fall into certain regular stereotypes. These characters are defined in a familial or age category: mother, grandmother, sister, or wife/girlfriend. . . . In addition to the familial or age category, all women are also assigned one of two sexual categories: whores or virgins, a categorizing evident since the early period of the actos. Wives, sisters, girlfriends and mothers are made to fall chiefly into either the whore or the virgin category. Although some degree of mixing and matching can occur – such as with the “whore- mother” character of Chata in Fin del Mundo (1980) – women fall into only one of two categories: good woman or bad woman. (Broyles-Gonzalez 135). The female Teatro members mostly started in their teens and did not think to challenge this system at first, but as they learned and grew, they found such limits increasingly frustrating. Broyles-Gonzalez asserts that this dynamic was typical of the Chicano movement and of leftist movements in general. In the 1960s and 70s, in the U.S. and around the world, Liberation of people in general was considered the chief priority. It is ironic that those engaged in struggles for human equality were slow to recognize that class struggles and ethnic struggles would not necessarily better the lot of women. The women of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s who raised women’s issues were accused of being divisive. (140) As Luis Valdez sought to move into the mainstream in the 1980s, producing plays that could appeal to Anglo as well as Chicano audiences, female roles were increasingly stereotyped and marginalized. Broyles-Gonzalez provides ample evidence of this. I will cite one example from Zoot Suit, possibly Valdez’ most well-known work for the stage: We again encounter the stereotypical dominant mother, the whorelike Bertha, the virginal Della, and a white savior, here Alice Bloomfield. Most lamentable, the true historical role of Chicana Josefina Fierro in organizing the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in 1942 on behalf of the zoot suiters was completely erased. Valdez supplants her in the play and film by a white female character. (160) As the women of the troupe left their teens and twenties, they began to seek more substantive female roles. Broyles-Gonzalez relates the different paths some of the former teatristas followed in the 1980s. Yolanda Parra and Olivia Chumacero both got involved doing theater work with children, and Chumacero also taught at UC-Santa Cruz and UC-Riverside. Diane Rodriguez joined the sociopolitical comedy group Latins Anonymous (153). In Chiapas we find a similar example of teatristas leaving a male-dominated troupe in order to pursue a different kind of theater. The female members of Lo’il Maxil at first had

66 trouble taking part in decision-making, though they attended meetings and were encouraged to participate. Underiner reports that language and language tradition were an obstacle. Meetings are conducted in Spanish, the second language of the members. However, in 1996 several of the women told me they were afraid the men would laugh at their use of Spanish, so they were too embarrassed to say much. (Only one of those women was still a member six years later.) . . . . It has been far more common for indigenous women to be monolingual in their mother tongue, because contact with ladinos traditionally has been the domain of men. (53) But change is evident. By 2002, Sna’s president was the Tzeltal woman Leticia Mendez Intzin (53). Lo’il Maxil made some effort to include women’s issues and strong female characters in their plays, but what Underiner calls “the conflict between nascent feminism . . . and Mayan tradition” did lead two prominent female members – Isabel Juárez Espinosa and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz – to leave Lo’il Maxil and form Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya (FOMMA, “Strength of the Mayan Woman”), an all-female theater troupe which is still creating and performing plays that address women’s issues (Underiner 54). Though FOMMA is officially neutral politically, it was in 1994 that both the Zapatista movement and this movement by two Mayan women sought to create their own autonomous community. It seems likely that the high profile of women in the EZLN helped inspire Juárez Espinosa and de la Cruz Cruz to create a forum to raise their own profiles, and those of other women, but the break with Sna had its roots in earlier developments. In 1991 de la Cruz Cruz had written Una mujer desesperada (A Desperate Woman), the first play “written by an indigenous Highland Mayan woman” (Marrero 318). Like Lo’il’s Deadly Inheritance, it shows the violence a woman may face in the traditional communities, but while the former play’s villain is one particular violent man, in Mujer the violence is shown to be endemic in the society, with women having no escape. The main character María suffers regular beatings from her alcoholic husband Juan, but she relies on him to support her three daughters and herself. When neighbor Rosa tries to intervene during one of the beatings, Juan falls, hits his head and dies. The oldest daughter then goes to work in a city, but the modernized world also has dangers for indigenous women: she is struck by a car and killed. María and her two younger daughters try to get by, taking work where they can, but María worries, “I don’t want you to go hungry so often. What would we do if I got sick and couldn’t work? People here don’t respect widows” (de la Cruz Cruz 301). She

67 decides to accept the marriage proposal of Antonio, despite her daughter Teresa’s reservations: “I don’t like the way he looks at us” (301). After the marriage, Teresa’s fears are confirmed. Antonio refuses to let the women have any say over their own lives, and he wants Teresa too: “I’m in love with your daughter! Now you know; you both belong to me. That’s why I do not want her to marry anyone. From now on you will stay here under lock and key” (de la Cruz Cruz 306). In the ensuing fight, Antonio kills María with a machete, then Teresa kills Antonio with a shotgun. Rosa and her husband José then appear, along with some authorities. Teresa worries that she will go to jail, and tells Rosa, “My boyfriend is going to come this afternoon . . . to ask for my hand in marriage. Tell him that I did all this to protect my honor, and because I love him very much!” (310). She then leaves the stage, and a shot is heard from the next room. With Teresa dead, the neighbors José and Rosa agree to raise the youngest daughter Lupita. The judge says Lupita will have the house for her patrimony, but José (a sympathetic male character) says, “Why would we want this cursed house! Better to sell it and keep the money for when Lupita needs it” (310). Una mujer desesperada is bleaker than any of Lo’il’s plays, which, although confronting the wide range of difficulties indigenous people face, usually incorporate humor and end on an upbeat note, with hope that a better future may come. But maybe in 1991, for an indigenous woman in Chiapas, there was no such hope. The “cursed house” could represent negative aspects of Mayan tradition, and selling out the preferable option. As a Sna member, de la Cruz Cruz was part of a collective that could, and in some ways did, take steps to improve women’s treatment, but they also presented obstacles. In “Eso sí pasa aquí: Indigenous Women Performing Revolutions in Mayan Chiapas,” Teresa Marrero describes the troupe’s resistance to performing de la Cruz Cruz’ work when on tour in the U.S.: “The men argued that such things do not happen in the community (eso no pasa), and there was no need to stage them for the gringos in Texas” (314). But according to de la Cruz Cruz: They tell me: No, why are you going to come out writing those things that men kill and fight over a woman, that doesn’t happen in the community. Yes, it does happen in the community, because I lived it. I went through it, I tell them. So then, I lived part of my work . . . my mother was beaten eight days before dying. Therefore I lived part of my work . . . And another person (a woman) from Zinacantán was machetied . . . the grandmother and the granddaughter were

machetied to death in their homes. So I became very, very focused. . . . It’s my way of writing, it’s my way of being able to do things, I tell them. (Marrero 318) De la Cruz Cruz was rejected by her community because she was a rape victim. She joined Sna as a way to address the kinds of problems women faced in her community, but she found she was still limited. In 1992 she and Isabel Juárez Espinosa “were beginning to be promoted in the international press as Mexico’s first indigenous women playwrights” (Underiner 54), and de la Cruz Cruz became the first indigenous person to win the Rosario Castellanos Prize for Literature (Taylor and Costantino 292) – for a work her troupe would not perform. De la Cruz Cruz’ interest in exposing a dark side of indigenous life does not mean she lacked Mayan pride. She was an eager participant in Lo’il Maxil’s plays that promoted Mayan cultural identity. As noted before, it was she who said, “Through Jaguar Dynasty we can now show people how things were, and what the Conquest was like. This play is very important for the people of Chiapas” (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 100). So at the same time she was promoting her own play that dramatized flaws in her current culture, she was also eagerly acting in a play that celebrated the culture’s ancient roots. A similar hybrid identity was at work in the Zapatista movement. Zapatismo is a modern, some have said postmodern, movement inspired by an ancient culture. It takes the Mexican government to task for failing to respect indigenous rights, but it also pursues an internal program to challenge traditional views on such matters as women’s rights, education and alcohol. Marrero states: If the group FOMMA has taken up their communities’ social ills through dramatic, symbolic performance, offering ideal redressive and reintegrative conclusions, Zapatista women continue their public struggle for physical survival, redress and reintegrative practice in the nonfictional space of live political struggle. By doing so, each in their own way, they have not only called into question and reconfigured conventional notions of revolution, they have feminized the public field of war, and social revolutions. In Latin America (and possibly the world), a contemporary declaration of war by an insurgent group that includes the specific demands of women is a first. (325) Perhaps Zapatista championing of women inspired Juárez Espinosa and de la Cruz Cruz, or perhaps both developments are part of the trend of k’alal xijulavkutik, where Mayans begin to understand how in their simple, marginalized lives they are carrying forward an ancient

69 culture. While this culture contained many hardships for women, it also had a place for women’s voices. As described previously, the Taller Leñateros has recorded the incantations Mayan women use in their daily lives, based on their own cosmologies. This process began in 1973, long before the Zapatistas took the stage, and has continued since. How much one has to do with the other may be impossible to determine, but the two have definitely worked toward common goals. Ambar Past tells how a group of contributors to Conjuros y ebriedades, the Tzotzil-Spanish first edition of the book Incantations, traveled to Mexico City in 1998 to present the book. Mayan women “sang as though they were quite accustomed to performing for a thousand people” (Past 19). Mexican and Spanish television filmed the performance, and it made the front page of the newspaper La Jornada. Also, Subcomandante Marcos congratulated our efforts with a speech in his own hand: Here we have our own incantations. And even though drinking is not allowed, We have our drunken songs. We sing, not only of suffering and injustice, But also because it’s morning. Especially in the morning. That’s when we sing. – Subcomandante Marcos (Past 19) Incantations also includes the full text of the speech EZLN Comandanta Esther gave in 2001 when the Zapatista Caravan reached Mexico City, seeking to persuade the government to implement the San Andrés Accords that would have granted some autonomy to the Zapatista region. I quote here two separate excerpts from this speech to show two sides of traditional life for indigenous women. From the moment we are born we suffer from contempt and marginalization, because no one looks out for our interests. Because we are females, they do not think we are worth anything. They believe we do not know how to think or how to live our lives. That is why many of us women are illiterate, because we did not have the opportunity to go to school. . . . Some of our traditions are intolerable, including hitting and beating women, buying and selling us, forcing us to marry against our will, denying our participation in assembly, locking us up in our homes. (Past 25) Esther does not make direct complaints against the Mexican government, but she speaks in the hope that it will adopt the San Andrés Accords both so women can challenge societal abuses, and so they can protect what is valuable in their society. Here is the second excerpt:

We want our way of dress recognized, our way of speaking, of governing, of organizing, or praying, of curing, our method of working in collectives, of respecting the land and of understanding life, which is nature, of which we are a part. Our rights as women are also defined by this law. Now no one will be able to limit our participation, our dignity, and our safety in any kind of work will be assured. We will have the same rights as men. (26) Though women could not, in most cases, own land, Esther’s speech still shows its importance as part of the indigenous woman’s identity. FOMMA’s work explores the tension between cherished traditions and intolerable ones. In Juárez Espinosa’s La Migración (1994), Catalina urges her husband Carlos to stay and continue working on their land, but he says, “You have to go wherever I go, whether you want to or not! As for the land, if I want to sell it, I’ll sell it, because it’s mine!” (Underiner 68). When the city’s promises don't come through, the couple ends up homeless with few prospects for work. Here the traditional agricultural life is valorized over the capriciousness of opportunity in the Ladino-influenced city, but there is also conflict within tradition. If Carlos had not been consumed with traditional machismo, he might have heeded Catalina's preference for traditional land-based work, and the traditional life that comes with it. Another migration play, however, concludes with ambiguity even about the land- based tradition. In Victimas del engaño (Victims of Deceit, 1999), whose authorship is attributed to FOMMA collectively, the wife stands firm in her decision to stay behind, believing the promises luring her husband to the city are unreliable. They are, but eventually the husband finds a new wife who owns a business in the city, and he finds some success in helping her manage it. “The character of the errant husband is compassionately drawn, despite his bigamy. (It is not uncommon for men of all stations to maintain more than one household in Mexico, but it is not formally sanctioned and women do not necessarily accept such arrangements with equanimity.)” (Underiner 71). Meanwhile, the first wife struggles to get by, unable to work the land because she must care for three children. Unlike the plays of Sna, there is no clear moral takeaway. City life can be both treacherous and rewarding, and staying with tradition may not lead to prosperity. Perhaps the women of FOMMA were showing that they themselves did not claim to know the answers. Others of FOMMA's works do suggest solutions that balance tradition with progress. In La vida de las Juanas (Life of the Juanas, 1998), three women named Juana move to the city to seek better opportunity. What they find is soulless corruption.

One finds work in a governmental office, where she witnesses the sloth of her boss who takes advantage of his bureaucratic position to watch boxing on television and to obsess over his paycheck. Another "Juana" is swindled by two employees of a store who take advantage of her unfamiliarity with the going prices for the goods she purchases. A third "Juana" is humiliated and abused when she seeks work as a domestic servant. (Underiner 69) The three decide to join forces to make their own way in the world. They start a business that makes bread, does weaving and performs theater. With this play the women of La FOMMA reenacted their own lives, mixing the traditional – women baking and weaving, performance celebrating Mayan culture – and revolutionary – women taking control of a business and presenting themselves onstage. In La Conchita desenconchada (Conchita Comes Out of Her Shell, 2001, "the title a play on words that English doesn't capture," Underiner 73), the main character Conchita is a grandmother whose son-in-law throws her out of the house. She goes to live with her son, a storeowner in the city, but he lacks respect for her as well, "ashamed not only of her but also of the family he left behind and the culture they represent" (73). His daughter, though, is intrigued by this culture, especially after Conchita is able to cure the young woman’s illness with a traditional remedy. "She offers her grandmother a home and offers the audience a glimpse of intergenerational sorority that is tied to cultural preservation. Lest the reader think this is a conservative bow to cultural nostalgia, consider the last scene -- in which Conchita is portrayed learning to drive her granddaughter's car" (74). Respect for ancient wisdom need not mean rejecting the benefits of modernity, and even an old Indian woman can learn to drive herself. Here is clear evidence of women becoming less desperate: in a 1991 play a young woman is killed by a car, but in 2001 a young woman teaches her grandmother to drive one. It should be noted that FOMMA is also capable of the raunchy humor that the Mayans appreciate. Mexican scholar Teresa Ortiz reports the following from a 1997 FOMMA performance, title not provided: It was a comedy portraying an urban working-class family, and it had an array of characters all played by the indigenous actresses of FOMMA. Two of the characters were an indigenous macho-but-loving husband and his docile and obedient wife. In addition, there were a bunch of street children of all ages, a nosy neighbor, and a helpful midwife who advised the mother on the value of birth control. The play was received with laughter and screams of excitement from the very mixed audience. The high point of the comedy was a scene which was repeated

over and over again. On stage there was a curtain, ostensibly leading to a bedroom. In the bedroom, a couple is making love, but the audience can only see two pairs of entangled naked feet emerging from the curtain. The giggles and murmurs of the man and woman are heard from behind a curtain. This scene is followed by that of the woman pregnant and the scene of the birth of a new baby. The sequence repeats until the couple has six children, and they finally decide to try family planning. (We wondered if it was not too late.) (80-81) La FOMMA doesn't just create plays about women taking control of their lives, they have activities to make this happen as well. Like the Juanas, "FOMMA conducts literacy, theatre, breadmaking, dressmaking and weaving workshops" (Marrero 316). FOMMA is continuing to contribute to the cultural awakening in Chiapas which is helping to both shape and valorize the indigenous Mayan identity for the 21st century. In the next section I will examine some of the most recent available literature to show how modern Mayans are using literature to express their culture in new ways.

KEEPING ROOTED WHILE BRANCHING OUT The Chiapas Awakening helped indigenous people see new value in themselves and their culture. The Zapatista uprising contributed to this process, but it also brought something new. It announced that indigenous people would take control of their own destinies, and maybe even influence the world beyond. This became an unavoidable theme in politics and literature for Chiapas. We have seen how Sna Jtz’ibajom incorporated thinly disguised Zapatista issues into their plays, how FOMMA steered away from any reference to the movement while still confronting some of the same concerns, and how Taller Leñateros presented itself as an explicit Zapatista ally. In this section I will examine a variety of literature published since the uprising to show how Zapatista ideas regarding indigenous pride and self-determination came to affect both form and content of modern Mayan writing. In preparing this section, accessibility was a key concern. The flourishing of literature that began in Chiapas in the 1970s may now be an explosion, along with other forms of expression like art and music. Even the ancient craft of weaving is developing new styles through cooperatives that promote this traditional work (Ortiz 88). When it comes to new literature, there is both too much and too little – too much for me to come anywhere close to a comprehensive awareness of it, and too little that has found its way to U.S. publication. I have found websites that list or make reference to myriad published works, but

73 most of the works themselves are beyond my access. Examples of websites include celali.gob.mx (Centro Estatal de Lenguas, Arte y Literatura Indígenas – State Center of Indigenous Languages, Art and Literature), conecultachiapas.gob.mx (Consejo Estatal para las Culturas y las Artes de Chiapas – Chiapas State Council for the Cultures and the Arts), and autonomiazapatista.com, which lists publications recommended by the EZLN. I present in this section some works that I was able to access and read. Further study of modern Mayan literature would definitely be valuable to determine how cultural developments inspire indigenous authors, and how those authors in turn contribute to cultural development. As literacy spreads and indigenous authors find their places in universities, such studies will no doubt come. Some may well be published somewhere already. In at least one case an indigenous author came into prominence somewhat by accident. Marian Peres Tsu was a driver for a workers’ collective, taking people from San Cristóbal’s outskirts into the town so they could sell their goods. His position afforded access to many stories and rumors about what was happening during and after the uprising. He was not a Zapatista and did not know their background, but his letters help show the effects of the movement on the ordinary indigenous people of the area. The accuracy of his stories may be questioned – he questions it himself at times – but they provide useful insights about the before-and-after mentality of the Indians. Before the uprising, the federal army was seen to have made the land itself deadly. Before the invasion of San Cristóbal, everyone always talked about how the soldiers at the army base overlooking the southern approach to the city had spread booby traps all around their land, how they had fixed it so no one would ever dare attack them. . . . According to what people said, the soldiers had strung a special wire around their barracks that was connected to a bomb every few steps. If the damn Indians ever did come around, they said, all the soldiers would have to do was lean out of their beds and touch the wire with a piece of metal – like, say, a beer can – and the bombs would all blow up. (Tsu 655-56) These Indians living in the margins of San Cristóbal had mostly been forced off their land in other communities, so the extent to which they believed the soldiers controlled the land around the barracks shows how powerless the Indians felt without land of their own. But the Zapatistas showed that the soldiers were not really so strong. After all those preparations, what happened? On January first, the soldiers were asleep when the Zapatistas arrived in San Cristóbal! But snoring! They didn’t see the Zapatistas go by their check-points with the other passengers on the

second-class buses! They didn’t notice the Zapatistas get out of their buses at the station and walk to the center of town. They didn’t see anything! And when the soldiers woke up, the Zapatistas had already seized the Palacio de Gobierno and set up their own guards around the city! After all, it was the Army that was left outside of town, safely holed up in its barracks! (656) By claiming the center of town, the Zapatistas changed the barracks from the source of power to a place on the margins. Tsu shows how the positioning of power influenced Indians who were not Zapatistas. In a section titled “Toward a Free Market”, he discusses the immediate aftermath of the January 1, 1994 uprising. He writes: One example of this is that in mid-January, when the kaxlan12 officials were all still hidden, the Indian charcoal sellers got together and formed the “Zapatista Organization of Charcoal Sellers.” Then, without asking anybody’s permission, they moved from the vacant field where they had always been forced to sell in the past to the street right next to the main market. . . . But there are a lot of other Indians who have always been relegated to the edges of the market, too. When these people saw that the charcoal sellers had changed their location without asking anyone’s permission, they started coming around and asking if they could change as well. . . . Suddenly there were a couple of hundred people sitting in orderly rows selling vegetables and fruit and charcoal in what used to be the parking lot where rich people left their cars! (659) This went on for several days. Eventually the Market Administrator returned and ordered the vendors to leave, but they refused. One spoke up and said, “You sound brave now . . . but when the Zapatistas were here you didn’t say anything because you were hiding behind your wife’s skirts. Not until now have you had the balls to talk. . . . Maybe it would be better for you if you kept quiet, because if you run us off we’re going to make sure the sub-comandante of the Zapatistas gets your name, and then we’ll find out how much of a man you are.” (660) The Administrator didn’t like it, but he had no response, and he left the vendors alone, taking his fee collectors with him. “Thanks to the Zapatistas, the Indians are learning to stand up for themselves,” Tsu reports (660). Subcomandante Marcos included this account from Tsu in his communique from January 2009, commemorating the 15th anniversary of the uprising. Pointing out that it is also the 15th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Act,

12 “Kaxlan” is the Tzotzil and Tzeltal word for “Ladino.”

Marcos introduces the section by saying “so now something about free trade” (Marcos, enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx). Tsu’s writing of course has much in common thematically with the ideals of Zapatismo, promoting indigenous pride, unity and resistance, but the format also owes a debt to the EZLN. “The Zapatistas are only Indians, but what the army officers forgot is that Indians too are men” (656), Tsu notes, and considering the great fear they had toward the army, it seems some of the Indians may have forgotten it too. The Zapatistas helped them remember. “And since they are men, they also could be armed and trained, just like the army. All they needed was the idea” (656). As the federal army was not the only one that could use guns, so too kaxlan writers were not the only ones that could use words as weapons. Tsu showed that an indigenous man could use a Western concept like personal testimonial narrative to promote an indigenous identity. Tsu wrote in Tzotzil of stories he heard from Tzotzil speakers. Though writing at least to some extent of his own experiences, he does not use “I” often, focusing on the community more than himself, though that community may not be so well-defined anymore. The fantastical worldview of the Indians also comes through. Speaking of negotiations in May 1994 between the governor and Marcos, he says, “Although the governor got real mad, neither he nor his people could shut [Marcos] up or stop him, because whenever they blinked, Marcos would turn into a plant or a fly or who knows what, and disappear” (662). In August 1997 he tells how there was a gigantic snake in the jungle. “Of course, this is the ch’ulel of subcomandante Marcos, his soul animal” (666). Then, after a meterorite appeared: “And if they’d been afraid of Marcos’s big snake, now that they’d seen him turn himself into fire and speed across the sky, why, they just wanted to flee, to not go any deeper into the jungle” (667). Tsu had written poems and stories before 1994, but only then did he turn his attention to current affairs in his community, creating what Jan Rus thought might be “the first history of the new urban and indigenous society from the inside, by one of its own members” (Tsu, 655). It apparently took the Zapatista uprising to wake this writer up to the potential to create a compelling new narrative based on events from his daily life. This is one of many literary “firsts” the Zapatistas helped inspire.

The Chicano Movement lacks such a dominant event. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo may now be seen as a painful starting point for Chicano identity, but its effects took years to manifest themselves, its boundaries covered a far vaster area for which it was harder to claim cultural or political unity, and its victims’ attachment to the land, however strongly felt, was not much more than a century old. Other events through the years led to other actions, but no single event led to such a re-evaluation as that which Zapatismo brought Chiapas. The labor and student movements of the 1960s helped establish a Chicano identity that Mexican-American writers could not ignore, though they might not embrace it, but it was a creation. As Juan Bruce-Novoa says, “The political identity was not allowed to be the sum of all possible parts of the community, but one restricted to those who fit into the ideological program. . . . Identity was not simply to be found, but to be forged, with careful attention to history and ideology” (134). The Zapatistas engaged the indigenous identity rather than seeking to define it. They might be delighted if every indigenous person were to embrace their cause, but theirs was a specific political organization to which people might choose to belong. The non-indigenous Marcos expresses pleasure with those like Taller Leñateros or Marian Peres Tsu who approve of the EZLN’s actions while not formally joining. As the EZLN showed that Indians were capable of new achievements politically, it inspired others to new achievement in literature. In 1998 Diego Méndez Guzmán, a member of Sna Jtz’ibajom, published the first novel by an indigenous Chiapas writer. Méndez Guzmán wrote the novel originally in Tzeltal, with the rather unwieldy title: KAJKANANTIK JCH’ULTA TIKETIK TE LEKE SOK TE CHOPOLE la yak' jipik ta spojel te jun lum tseltal ja' la sts'ibuj Tsiak Tsa'pat Ts'it He also wrote the Spanish translation titled Kajkanantik: Los Dioses del Bien y el Mal: Luchas de liberación de un pueblo tzeltal (“Kajkanantik: the Gods of Good and Evil: Fights for Liberation of a Tzeltal Village”). Both titles appear on the cover of the book. 13 It is a novel – a long work of fiction, five chapters spread over about 200 pages, telling a

13 The Tzeltal text comes first, with the Spanish beginning on page 217.

77 continuous story written by one author, but in many ways it is different from most all other novels. It is not wholly original, bringing together plots from many traditional stories of Chiapas. It combines the mythical with the mundane, never with explanation and generally without warning, and only two names of characters are given. Though it has no direct nor clear allegorical reference to the Zapatistas, evidence of their influence is there, even from the title. Would any indigenous Chiapan have used the phrase “Fights for Liberation” in a title before the Zapatista Army of National Liberation had come on the scene? The first chapter tells of the gods creating the earth, trying to have beings that will pray and give thanks to them. It includes the Tzeltal story of the creation of corn, as noted in my first chapter, in which the ants help people acquire the kernel of maize (Méndez Guzmán 219). It features a “malvado” (evildoer), somewhat like the previously mentioned Demon Pukuj, who leads people astray and eats them. The second chapter “El Diluvio” (“The Flood”) tells how the gods send a flood as punishment. Those who survive the flood continue to disrespect “El Dios Padre,” so God changes them into animals. Then “Dios Padre y los seres sagrados decidieron reunirse nuevamente en el cielo y acordaron formar nuevos hombres como relevo de la humanidad destruida por el diluvio” (“God our Father and the sacred beings decided to meet again in the heavens and agreed to form new men to replace the humanity destroyed by the flood”; 265). Is there any other novel where a third of the way in, all of the people are dead or changed into animals? The reality of the mythical world and the emphasis on people collectively rather than individually are two significantly Mayan qualities of this novel. An individual protagonist does appear in Chapter III, and even a name. The chapter is “Aparición de Kajkanantik san Alonso (Ildefonso).” Alonso is born to a poor couple who owns no land. When Alonso reaches adulthood, the story enters familiar territory, as he decides he will leave his home to find a place to help his people survive, a place “adquirir un poco de comida para sembrar nuestro futuro” (“to acquire a bit of food to sew the seeds of our future”; 274). So the story of Alonso becomes the story of the founding of the town of Tenejapa, with Alonso becoming San Alonso Ildefonso, the patron saint. His travels to find the place, picking up followers along the way, take up Chapter III. In Chapter IV, “Construcción de la Iglesia” (“Construction of the Church”), San Alonso and his followers begin settling in to Tenejapa. In addition to building the church,

78 the people sew their fields, fulfilling Alonso’s goal: “Ya no tuvieron que sufrir de hambre con sus hijos y hasta se pudieron acumular reservas para la próxima cosecha” (“Now they did not have to suffer from hunger with their children and they would be able to accumulate reserves for the next harvest”; 347-48). With this achieved, the narrative then brings back the evil being from Chapter I, now called the “pukuj malvado.” As Alonso is organizing the townspeople, the man he picks as leader asks what they will do about this pukuj that is among them (348). They try appealing to the pukuj’s conscience, explaining why it is wrong to eat children. “Ellos también tienen almas como nosotros, desean la paz, piensan, tienen sabiduría y conocen bueno y malo. . . . Ellos son hijos del Dios Padre del cielo” (“They too have souls like us, desire peace, think, have wisdom and know good and bad. . . . They are children of Father God in heaven”; 351). When this doesn’t work, they devise a plan to trick him. They invite him to a fiesta and get him drunk on their pox aguardiente until he falls unconscious from his seat (369). Alonso then orders the townspeople to tie him up, and the strongest men carry him to the sea. When they arrive there, they change themselves into birds to convey the pukuj to the end of the world, leaving him in a huge tree. “Se quedó sentado, con la mirada hacia arriba, tal como invocaba el gran diluvio que casi extermina la humanidad” (“He stayed seated, with his gaze turned upward, as in the way he invoked the flood that almost exterminated humanity”; 370). The fifth and final chapter is “Peregrinación de San Alonso Kajkanantik” (“Pilgrimage of San Alonso Kajkanantik”). It tells a story seemingly based on the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that divided Chiapas in the 70s and 80s. Many people in Tenejapa start to believe new ideas, that there is a “new God” that can cure their diseases, that they don’t need to buy candles and incense to pray to this God, that the saints in the churches are useless “por no mover los ojos” (“since their eyes don’t move”; 394). (It now starts to become unclear how much Alonso is like a person who can move on his own as opposed to a statue residing in the church.) Alonso is distressed over these new developments. It seems no one remembers “la cultura ancestral del pueblo, que es la que los mantenía unidos y respetado a la Madre Tierra” (“the ancestral culture of the people, which is what kept them united and respectful to Mother Earth”; 396). He decides to leave for a new land, but finding no place he would rather be, he soon returns. However, the people of nearby Cancuc, “k’ankukeros” the story calls them, have come to know the Kajkanantik’s

79 value, and upon his return he finds them waiting with candles and incense. In return, he grants them what they want: good harvests of corn, beans and chiles (397). The K’ankukeros decide to take the saint to their church in Cancuc. Harvests begin to go well in Cancuc but poorly in Tenejapa. Some time later a priest who knows el Kajkanantik’s power decides to steal him and sell him at market. There a Mestizo who had settled in Tenejapa recognizes the image and takes it by force from the priest. He tries to take it back to Tenejapa, but it becomes heavier as he is walking, so instead he leaves it in a remote house. It seems the saint was resisting the return to Tenejapa, having gotten accustomed to Cancuc. The people of Tenejapa come for him, though, and they return him to their church. They admit their mistakes in not respecting him before. El Kajkanantik tries to escape again, but they catch up with him to forcibly return him. In the struggle, his toes come off. They take him back to the church and offer a prayer. Thinking it over, el Kajkanantik accepts that he was wrong to abandon his children. Even if they had rushed without thinking into the new ideas, they still need his help. He tells them the damage that has been done in their lands will be repaired, “pero deben recuperar las costumbres . . . pues está será la cultura de ustedes para siempre, junto con sus hijos” (“but you must restore the customs . . . as this will be your culture forever, together with your children”; 409). They ask him what to do about their fields that still won’t produce. He tells them to plant his toes that came off. From them will grow “cacahuates, kaxlanchenek’ o frijol de ladino” (410 – the Tzeltal word for peanut, kaxlanchenek’, translates literally as “Ladino bean”). Though in the chapter and prose format of a novel, in content Kajkanantik comes closer to the Odyssey or Metamorphoses, or perhaps the Popol Vuh, works that took stories from an ancient oral tradition and arranged them into one (or more?) writer’s concept of an integrated work. Perhaps Méndez Guzmán or someone like him would have been motivated to do this even without the Zapatista influence. Through his involvement with Sna, Méndez Guzmán had gotten to know several academics and had the opportunity to travel outside Chiapas, so his personal relationship with a wider culture may have led him to novelistic writing in any event. But it is also true that the trajectory of Sna had significant Zapatista influence, and we know from Monkey Business Theater that Méndez Guzmán, referred to in the book as Tziak, was a supporter of Zapatismo early on and made a connection to it. I

80 include the following long quote, part of which I used in section one of this chapter, to provide detail on the connection between Zapatismo and Sna, and specifically with Méndez Guzmán, a.k.a. Tziak: Our president, Tziak, came from Tenejapa, where the Zapatista movement was gaining popularity, and he was all for celebrating the uprising, but the Zinacantecs demurred: “Who was Subcomandante Marcos? What did he want? Why is he causing all this trouble?” Following Zinacantán’s centuries of opposition to Indian rebellion, they decided that the subject of the play should be ecology – a more prudent endeavor. Tziak protested, “But Marcos said that if it weren’t for the jungle, they’d all be dead, so he’s an ecologist!” Shortly after the uprising, Tziak, as president of Sna Jtz’ibajom, attended a meeting attended by 285 members of Indian and campesino organizations. Their leaders, one after the other, listed their problems and presented their demands to the new interim governor. He recorded the video, which he showed to the group. “That’s the truth!” they exclaimed. “That’s straight talk! All right, let’s put that together with ecology!” And so the playwrights from Tenejapa, Zinacantán, and Chamula debated from morning to afternoon over each possible scene But it was not easy. The phone rang. Word had spread about Tziak’s video. The governor wanted a copy. Ten minutes later it was Bishop Samuel Ruiz’s office requesting a copy for the bishop and another for Marcos. (Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom 149-50) The book earlier includes the following statement from Tziak, which can also be found on the online exhibit Unmasking the Maya: the Story of Sna Jtz’ibajom on the website of the Smithsonian Museum’s Department of Anthropology14: When we mounted DE TODOS PARA TODOS (FROM ALL FOR ALL) in 1994, we dedicated it to the memory of our countrymen who fell in ancient and recent wars in Chiapas, struggling against the same social, economic, political, and cultural conditions that we have endured for over 508 years. The play reflects our beliefs and convictions about the causes of the Zapatista movement, which surprised the entire world with its armed uprising. (38) With an author so impressed and influenced by Zapatismo, the question might be why is there not more reference to it in his novel. The title says “fights for liberation,” but the main such fight is not with Spanish or Ladinos but with the pukuj malvado. Is he meant to represent European intruders? He is described as “Muy pálido, como los kaxlans o ladinos” (“Very pale, like the kaxlan or Ladinos”; 226), and he appears after the first humans have settled into social stability, so such an interpretation is possible. Then what to make of his

14 The specific URL is http://anthropology.si.edu/maya/mayaprint.html.

81 eating children and being defeated by alcohol? The former could be symbolic of diseases or corruption brought on by the pale newcomers. The latter seems more like wishful thinking – alcohol as the solution to social ills. In reality alcohol has caused many problems in indigenous Chiapas, though, as in any society, people see that it can be useful if handled correctly (Eber and Kovic 155). Exalting it hardly fits with Zapatismo, which bans alcohol for its adherents. For this and other reasons, claiming the book for Zapatismo does not fully work. The book focuses on one town, Tenejapa, rather than the whole of indigenous Chiapas or even the whole of the Tzeltal speaking region, and is generally constructed from several existing stories. However much Méndez Guzmán may have admired the Zapatistas, his project here stays focused on his hometown, and perhaps he felt compelled to stick to the stories as he knew them. But the influence is there. In the first chapter, after the details of the first humans and their respect for the land and each other, the narrator says, “Si a alguien se le occurría no respetar o hacer actos de injusticia de todo esto, algún día el Kajkanantik vendría a traer justicia, paz, libertad y hermandad para todo el mundo” (“If it would occur to someone to show disrespect or do acts of injustice to all this, someday the Kajkanantik would come to bring justice, peace, liberty and brotherhood for all the world”; 225). It is then the struggle to return to this harmony, after the pukuj malvado arrives, that is the theme of the rest of the novel. This is like the Zapatistas’ goal, to be able to live in harmony on the ancestral land without the corrupt influence of the federal government and its neoliberal policies. The following quote addresses themes that show up repeatedly in the EZLN declarations and Marcos’ communiques: Housing, land, employment, food, education, independence, democracy, liberty, justice and peace. These were our banners during the dawn of 1994. These were our demand during that long night of 500 years. These are, today, our necessities. Fourth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle, EZLN, 1998. (Marcos, Ya Basta! 661) Though San Alonso may not function as an allegory for Zapatismo, the two certainly share some common goals. Along with the issue of how much Zapatismo influenced Méndez Guzmán’s themes is that of whether it influenced him to write a novel in the first place. Did the Zapatista idea that Indians could have a role in world affairs, but on their own terms, influence Indian

82 writers to practice new, “non-indigenous” forms of literature, but with an indigenous sensibility? It certainly seems possible, as new forms of expression have become increasingly popular in Chiapas. New forms of expression also took hold with the Chicano Movement. With so much of its energy coming from student groups, it is not surprising that it quickly led to a push for “Chicano” literature. Juan Bruce-Novoa recounts how in 1970 the publishing company El Quinto Sol created an award known as the Premio Quinto Sol with the goal of fostering literature that Chicanos could praise and study (135). Again, these efforts expose the forged nature of the Chicano identity. While some Chicano academics criticized as elitist the notion of a “Western canon” of great literature, others consciously emulated that notion. They had a specific type of literature in mind, “based largely on extraliterary concerns,” Bruce-Novoa notes (94), and they sought to promote that which fit their socio-political agenda, rather than choosing from the spectrum of literature that developed naturally. The authors who benefited include those Bruce-Novoa calls “the Chicano Big Three,” – Rudolfo Anaya, Tomás Rivera and Rolando Hinojosa – and their work can hardly be called inauthentic, but the notion that these were the designated writers appropriate for Chicano studies speaks to an unnatural process. Even one of the winners noted this, according to Bruce-Novoa: “As Tomás Rivera remarked to me years ago, Chicanos were the first people to have an anthology – Quinto Sol’s El Espejo/The Mirror – before they had a literature” (135). The Big Three were “giving us the image that we wanted of ourselves,” Bruce-Novoa says, “an affirmation of the process of our communal selves” (136). Apparently their communal selves were male, since the prizewinning works were are all by and primarily about males. In the years since the Chicano Movement, Mexican-American writers with alternative, non-canonical viewpoints have come to prominence, such as Richard Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo and Michael Nava. Rather than conforming to a predetermined ideology, these authors explore differing cultural perspectives which readers may accept or reject, reflecting the broad array of viewpoints befitting a large, hybrid population. I have not found any indigenous Chiapas writers who challenge Zapatista ideology, though some may well exist. What I have found are writers using various formats to express their particular views, and even as the new forms spread, the indigenous roots remain evident. Poetry is a genre that has found new expression in the aftermath of the Zapatista

83 uprising. Of course, poetry of a sort has been present in Chiapas from the beginning, in the “incantations” that the indigenous speak to the world as they go through their daily lives, but the Western notion of creating a poem, fixing it in a particular form that is then shared with an audience, is a newer concept. We have seen how Taller Leñateros helped promote the incantations as something worth writing and publishing, so that now they resemble our concept of poems. In recent years poets have made a more concerted effort to present a message to a wider audience. Tzotzil poet Andrés López Díaz, like Gonzales, has explored his culture’s past in order to find material to motivate his people today. He has the advantage of writing after historians have gone through the factual record regarding a legend. His long poem Sbel sjol yo’nton ik’, Memoria del viento, coauthored in 2006 with Angelina Díaz Ruíz and Luís López Díaz, deals with the violent incidents of 1868-70 in the Tzotzil region, which the dominant historical narrative had called a “Caste War,” and which supposedly included a Tzotzil massacre of Ladinos and “a young boy crucified on Good Friday, 1868, as an Indian Christ” (J. Rus 43). However, recent research has shown that “almost none of the story appears to be true” and in fact “the provocation and violence were almost entirely on the side of the ladinos; the Indians, far from having been the perpetrators of the massacre, were the victims!” (44-45). I was not able to find the text of this poem, but according to Jan Rus, it “retells the events of 1869” from the Indian perspective, “with an added note of righteous anger and lament at the racism and violence indigenous people suffer” (7-21-12 email correspondence). Two texts from López Díaz that I did find show his clear intent to speak through poetry to his people and the world beyond as part of a new indigenous force. These appear on the website seriealfa.com,15 where they are presented in Tzotzil, Spanish, English, Portuguese and Catalan. The poem “Speech” is a poetic indigenous uprising. If its conclusion is as powerful in Tzotzil as it is in English, one can imagine it firing up a rally the way I Am Joaquín used to. He speaks on behalf of the bats’iviniketik, “real men”: I am word of the bats’iviniketik of the present, Face of the starving and humiliated,

15 The specific URL is http://seriealfa.com/alfa/alfa43/ALopez.htm.

my word is neither rough nor smooth, it is a flower of history. Ah! and it is also a flower of fire, it is warmth and light for its future because my words will spread to the cosmos like blood burning in the nerves of time. (22-30) The idea that the words of indigenous people will be heard the world over is a repeated theme of the Zapatistas: Today, with the indigenous heart which is the dignified root of the Mexican nation, and having listened long enough now to the voice of death which comes from the government’s war, we call on the People of Mexico and on the men and women of the entire planet to unite their steps and their efforts with us in this stage of the struggle for liberty, democracy and justice.” Fifth Declaration of the Lacondon Jungle, EZLN, 1998. (Marcos, Ya Basta! 678) It is also an idea that any indigenous person, Zapatista or not, may embrace. Some indigenous, however, do not embrace Zapatismo or any other such fiery ideas. López Díaz has a poem for them too, showing that his confrontational stance is not just with the dominant culture. In “One Day” he writes: One day I spoke with my veins tightening in my throat, my voice boomed, and hundreds of pairs of eyes saw me my verses galloped, flew and traveled from city to city announcing the whip of the signs. On my forehead drops of fear flowed bitter water of history; they threw to my tongue signs of courage, fire which burns the shadow of the past. (1-12) In this opening López Díaz expresses the excitement of using his voice to speak up against the place where history has attempted to confine him. This is likely the same voice that challenged history in Memoria del Viento. But “One Day” takes a different turn at the end, and we see that perhaps there are some Mayan vendidos: But my brothers tsotsils and tseltals never saw my eyes, they remained blind and quiet, ignoring their essence and their roots, they dress up as wise and civilized men and call me “the indian” (18-24)

The issue of assimilation, so prevalent in Mexican-American literature, does not seem to appear much in traditional Chiapas folklore, but as Chiapas and the greater world are more aware of each other, perhaps this conflict will be a more common theme in modern Mayan texts. Ruperta Bautista Vázquez is another writer practicing in new formats. A Tzotzil from the highlands who studied cultural anthropology at the Autonomous University of Chiapas, Bautista writes poetry and plays addressing the challenges of indigenous life, especially for women. Her play We Are Not to Blame (2000) features poor children trying to make a living by selling goods or shining shoes in the San Cristóbal marketplace. It may be a sign of progress that, despite resistance from Mestizo shopowners, there is “an open-air indigenous market in front of the Church in Santo Domingo (or at least there was in 2003, according to Eber and Kovic 72). The defiant will of the vendors that Tsu described in 1994 seems to have endured. In 2001 the PRI-affiliated municipal president tried to evict the indigenous vendors, and the police used violent beatings and tear gas to make this happen – but not for long: “In the end, the vendors prevailed. They had been organized in unions and were back in their original positions within a week” (Eber and Kovic 72). Bautista Vázquez’ play addresses the hardship of life for child vendors. In addition to a family trying to sell various items with little luck, it features a PRI candidate who promises to bring progress to all: “This is the new PRI! Because we are new, like the new Lemon Fab. I await your votes” (Eber and Kovic 77). There are also two teachers with differing views. One looks down on the child vendors: “They don’t think. They don’t even go to school and they don’t speak Spanish. They’re stupid indigenous girls.” The other says she should not judge: “Don’t you think you are also to blame for those girls and the way they are?” (77). After a few scenes of frustration among the vendors, and no significant resolution, the play ends with a poem, spoken by a ten-year-old girl, who says in part: Our ancestors used to live on this land The winds used to sing. Their voices were silenced When evil spirits took their land Ever since I ask, what is my crime? Why do they attack us? (78) This play and the marketplace conflict that came after it show that the “Ya Basta” spirit is strong among people not affiliated with the Zapatistas. Now that they have been awakened

86 to their history, now that they know their roots, they will use that knowledge to resist being uprooted. Perhaps it would be more correct to say they are resisting being further uprooted. The vendors, both real and fictional, come from people who lived by farming in the highlands. They are still in the general Mayan region, still speaking a Mayan language, but living in a new community with new customs. The Zapatistas also came from various parts of Chiapas, mostly the central highlands, and are now making their stand in the canyons and jungle to the east. Their roots have been pulled, but maybe not entirely pulled out, and now they are fighting to keep hold of the connection they still have. Literature of resistance has risen up in many forms in Chiapas, and just as the Zapatistas have had help from outsiders and outside ideas, such outside influences have found their way into the indigenous voice. Corridos, which as I discussed in Chapter 1 were not a part of traditional Chiapas folk expression, have become popular in recent decades, but with a Mayan perspective. Reviewing the ideas of Paredes and Limón about the conditions necessary for corridos to become popular, it seems that the “adversarial relationship with an external force” (Limón, Mexican Ballads 22) became more serious as land displacement became more severe. Also, the greater exposure to outside influence perhaps meant that an interest in balladry could develop even if there had not historically been “a general tradition of balladry” (19). Perhaps the increasing Western influence meant the corrido would have found its way to Chiapas in any event.16 Eber and Kovic, writing in 2003, state that corridos had been popular in rural Chiapas for decades (67), so their initial appearance cannot be attributed to the Zapatista uprising, but the Zapatistas and others now use corridos as a means of resistance. These, however, are not Limón’s father’s corridos. In Chiapas in the 1990s, a nonviolent warrior, and a woman, can be the corrido’s hero. “The Birth of Guadalupe” tells of a woman who was killed at a protest in Ocosingo in January 1998. The reason for the protest was the Acteal massacre of December 22, 1997, when 45 men, women and children, members of the nonviolent social justice group Sociedad

16 Young Tzotzil and Tzeltal are now making rock and rap music. Examples may be found on Youtube, with musicians in traditional outfits and a mix of traditional and modern instruments. One group is named Raíz de la Madre Tierra: Root of Mother Earth.

Civil Las Abejas (Civil Society of the Bees), were killed in shooting that lasted over four hours (Eber and Kovic 117). Though the government denied responsibility, “investigation revealed that high-ranking officers were complicit in the massacre” (Eber and Kovic 12). At the demonstration in January, “the seguridad publica (state police) fired randomly into the crowd. Their bullets killed Guadalupe Méndez López, a 38-year-old woman demonstrator, and injured her infant child” (67). The song is now sung by women to remember Guadalupe and inspire others, especially women. Guadalupe’s name remains engraved in history like those who have died fighters for peace and true justice for the oppressed people Fly little dove, all over the world. take this message to them: that the people have risen up in order to reach the victory of a true and just peace. (Eber and Kovic, 68-69) Eber and Kovic note that Las Abejas has a choir called “The Voice of the Displaced” that has produced several cassettes of corridos in Spanish and Tzotzil (67). The corrido format that became popular in 19th Century Texas and spread to Mexico with the Revolution was male-oriented, violent-themed and individualistic: “the fearless man defending his right with a pistol in his hand” (Limón, Mexican Ballads 17). It was a hybrid form of expression from birth: descended from Spanish balladry, and embracing the Western notion of the individual hero, it did also have a communal aspect: While most corridos are the work of a single author, any personal point of view manifested in the ballad seems to represent a shared perspective. “Above all,” [Merle E.] Simmons posits, the composer “must identify himself with the pueblo and take care that the opinions he expresses are acceptable to the pueblo.” (15) But only part of the pueblo would really have any say: Woman is almost wholly excluded or repressed in the male world of the corrido, in the ballad’s predominant imagery and subject and equally so in its principally male-defined performative context. (And a case could be made that the corrido’s form – its rigid, repetitive quatrains, its linear, hard-driving narrative style, its sharply bounded universe with its formal openings and closings – is male- engendered.) (37)

Guadalupe did not have a pistol in her hand. She did not have any special skills that made her a standout among her people or a threat to the enemy. (And, a case could perhaps be made, especially if one had the Tzotzil or Spanish version available, that the form of this corrido, with six lines per verse instead of four, varying numbers of syllables per line rather than the standard eight, and more emphasis on the expression of emotion than the narrative details of the plot, is not particularly male-engendered.) What Guadalupe had was an ancient culture, an enlightened sense of justice, and a community of support. A lone hero may be admirable, but if he is defeated, what is left? The corridos from the border or the Revolution celebrate those who lost nobly, and may offer a sense of moral superiority, but not much hope for triumph. Indigenous corridos can also mourn fallen heroes, but they are helping their movement grow, not lamenting its loss, and using their words to put the world on notice. Through personal narrative, novels, poetry, plays, and songs of different styles, the indigenous of Chiapas are now addressing the world, but on their own terms.

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

The Zapatista Movement in Chiapas brought to light a rich cultural heritage among the indigenous Mayan people there. Many of them had already been awakening to a process of cultural rediscovery and renewal, but the uprising helped make the indigenous worldview known globally and unavoidable locally. While the Zapatistas seek many changes, their most urgent claim is for something not to change – their connection to their land. In all probability they are descended both culturally and biologically from its first human inhabitants. The importance of this connection can be seen in virtually all indigenous authors, even as they experiment with new literary forms. The significance of a lack of connection, and therefore a striving to make one, prevails in Chicano literature. I will not say “virtually all” in this case, as the field is too wide, but a recurring theme is that Mexican-Americans have an uncertain, hyphenated identity due to deterritorialization. If a writer’s roots go back to before 1848, they look back longingly to the time when they felt secure on their land. If they or their parents are immigrants, they may invoke an indigenous past to feel a sense of connectedness, even if they cannot actually prove this connection. As the indigenous of Chiapas and Mexicans in the U.S. have used literature to preserve the traditions they deem valuable, women within both cultures have written of how some traditions must change so everyone can be valued. It is perhaps evidence of a rising feminist tide that the Zapatistas, coming a generation after the Chicano Movement and the worldwide revolutionary fervor of the 1960s, made a greater effort to incorporate women’s rights into the official agenda. Unlike the male activists of the 1960s, Chicano and otherwise, the Zapatistas saw women’s concerns as fundamental to the movement, not something that should wait until the more important needs were met. Thus the Zapatistas can now be seen as a model for the primacy of women’s rights. While sexism may remain a serious problem among many other indigenous Chiapas communities, the Zapatista model inspires writers, male and female, to address these themes and keep promoting gender equity.

The struggle over rootedness continues for both minority groups. While Mexican- American numbers are growing in the U.S., and literary expression growing along with it, issues of what defines their Mexican identity and how much they should retain will continue to dominate writers’ attention. In Chiapas the battle for cultural survival is tied directly to their place. The agrarian lifestyle, communal nature and mixed-level sense of reality can all adapt to modern innovations, and might even help inspire some elsewhere, but only if they remain rooted to the land of their origin.

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