Arturo Arias

Program in Latin American Studies
University of Redlands
arturo_arias@redlands.edu

 

At the first conference on Maya studies in Guatemala City (August 1996), Luis Enrique Sam Colop, a K’iché Maya academic, public intellectual and newspaper columnist who debates politics in the national press, accused the country’s most celebrated Ladino writer, novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, of racism on the basis of ideas he expressed in his graduate thesis in 1923. When Ladino conservative pundit Mario Roberto Morales defended Asturias in turn, Mayas in the audience heckled him and agreed with Sam Colop. Their support for Sam Colop attests to the radical position many Mayas take regarding ethnic identity and to the leading role Sam Colop has played in debates on the subject since 1991, when he began to expose the historical roots and perniciousness of racism in the country.¹Sam Colop made his statements about Asturias not simply to attack an obscure work that the Nobel laureate had written when he was still a student, before he had published anything literary or left for Europe, where he gained his insights on Maya culture, but as part of a strategy to challenge those who have presumed to speak for Mayas. His intervention created a public controversy in the Guatemalan press, because, as Kay B. Warren has pointed out, Sam Colop’s attitude generalized essentialist constructions to all non-Mayas, suggesting that all non-Mayas are racist (21). This controversy dragged into 2003, when K’iché Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal became the first Maya writer in Guatemala to be awarded the Miguel Angel Asturias National Prize in Literature, an honor he declined. He said that he refused to accept the prize because it was named for a Ladino writer who had made racist comments against indigenous peoples, this despite the fact that it was bestowed upon him by the country’s first Maya Minister of Culture, Otilia Lux de Cotí, a member of Ak’abal’s same ethnic group though of a different social and professional class, who defended the name of the award.

 

The stance adopted by the group surrounding Sam Colop implicitly disqualified Asturias’s creative attempts to portray Guatemalan identity as ethnically hybrid.² Ironically, these Mayas end up validating an essentialist position on indigenous ethnicity that is the photographic negative of many Ladinos’ pernicious essentialism regarding Mayas. Other Maya leaders, however, have generated a displacement in indigenous identity as part of an effort to build bridges toward ladinidad. In 1999, it was 1992 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchú who inaugurated Asturias’s centennial celebration at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and wrote the introduction to the event’s catalogue. She stated:

 

The life and work of our Guatemalan brother, his written words in literary works . . . demonstrate in contextual arguments that the word and ideas are more effective than arms and violence. Love for others, respect for difference . . . his constant dialogue and cultural interchange . . . constitute the strength and immortality of his words. (16-17)

 

Menchú’s assessment of Asturias invents a new dimension in Maya/Ladino relations, in which neither is the stained/blemished image of the other, but in which the a focus on relations of power has been interestingly displaced in favor of an emphasis on the Maya woman, thus reconfiguring ethnic and gender power. Menchú in turn re-presents Asturias and revalidates him on the global scene, underscoring his “respect for difference,” which locates the intercultural dialogic relationship between Mayas and Ladinos as a foundational element of Asturian textuality.

 

Why this apparent contradiction between the stance of some Maya intellectuals, who accuse Asturias of racism, and Menchú, who defends the most prominent Ladino writer and man of letters? The present article addresses this question. It is concerned with explaining ethnic and gender contradictions in Guatemala as represented in two particular books, I, Rigoberta Menchú and Mulata, that are emblematic of the country’s two Nobel laureates, Miguel Angel Asturias (1967 Nobel Prize for literature) and Rigoberta Menchú (1992 Nobel Peace Prize). The literary works of both articulate a politics beholden neither to the nation-state nor to transnational politics, but rather reorganize the ethnic question altogether through a re-semantization that transforms ethnic identities in a way that destabilizes racial and gendered hierarchies.

 

The Maya/Ladino ethnic conflict is a consequence of the Spanish invasion in 1524. The Maya population began to exercise a degree of authority in present-day Guatemalan politics, culture, and economy as a result of 37 years of civil war in this Central American country. The U.N. Truth Commission report states that between 1980 and 1986, the army wiped out well over 600 Maya villages. Over 100,000 people were killed, primarily older people, women, and children, and over a quarter of a million were driven into exile.³ However, this genocide led to a Maya cultural revival as well. Grassroots Maya leaders, of whom Menchú is only one, emerged from this process. Based on contextual elements of the Pop Wuj, the sacred book of the Mayas,these leaders and “organic intellectuals” forged collectively a cultural memory to counter their historical exclusion.⁴ This common text has enabled present-day Maya intellectuals to generate complex layer of textual symbolism that interplays past and present through the repetition of classical Maya motifs. The symbolism of ancestral images underlines the uninterrupted continuity of culture and community for more than 1,500 years, and questions the notion of “the fatherland” founded by Spanish conquistadors, a construct that thus becomes simply another discursive fiction in a nineteenth-century rhetoric that conceived of the nation as the imagined community of criollos, that is, full-blooded Europeans born in the Americas. Never mind that Ladinos, in reality, are people of mixed ethnic origin.

 

Technically speaking, a Ladino can be any person of mixed European and indigenous origins.⁵ The epistemic and colonial difference of being labeled “Ladino,” as opposed to “Maya,” plays a role in the binary representation of urban and rural in Central America, and in the correspondent difference between “modern” and “primitive.” Despite their repeated displays of an ethnic inferiority complex in relation to “white Europeans,” for the most part Ladinos have self-defined as white, Western, and Christian in the process of nation-building projects that enabled them to constitute themselves as a hegemonic class in Central America. However, given the preponderance of indigenous genetic traits even among the Ladino population, Western clothing and the Spanish language have served them as ethnic identity markers.

 

In the re-semantization of Asturias, Menchú becomes a Maya transvestite in the sense that in the international arena, she plays an ethnicized representational role that grants her both celebrity and authority that also empower her at the local level, while performing the role of submissive Maya woman dressed in colorful hüipiles for public consumption. Marjorie Garber uses the term “transvestite” to indicate a “‘category crisis’ disrupting and calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances . . . to disrupt, expose, and challenge” (16), thus questioning the possibility of a stable identity. In A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala, Diane M. Nelson also uses Garber to help her define Menchú as a transvestite, though she works equally with Lacanian terms to signal not only a “category crisis,” but also a failure of distinctions, a bodily borderline where Menchú represents the opposite of the castration anxiety. That is, she embodies the phantasmatic object you are afraid to see, namely a “masculine” indigenous woman, masculine because of her power and her globalized political clout, a “phallic woman” wielding the power that traditionally belonged only to Ladino men:

 

She represents a category crisis that is both already underway (in the vibrant Mayan rights movement, growing feminism and popular and revolutionary organizations) but that is also always already there in the fluid constitutions of national, ethnic, and gender bodies politic in pre-and post-Quincentennial Guatemala. (190)

 

In other words, the provocative use of the term “transvestite” in this fashion addresses the regulatory norms and erasures that structure the impact of her performativity on an audience.

 

According to this logic, cross-dressing signifies the inversion of identities perceptually considered one’s “own,” with the result that the subject is located in a space apparently “outside one’s nature.” It is an instance of passing oneself off as another, a representation. As Garber affirms, it defies binarism by creating a third possibility as a mode of articulation, as a way of describing a space of possibilities that breaks with the notion of unitary identity (11) and that can subsequently generate possibilities for a “third space” of reading. The irruption of an unexpected element generates a crisis in the stability of the identitary category. This would also explain what Nelson calls “gender-intrigued reactions” to Menchú that are anxious “about the crossing of ethnic identity boundaries occasioned by an indigenous woman who is a thoroughly modern and well-spoken international celebrity” (196).

 

The relationship between Menchú and Asturias can serve as a starting point for a consideration of their links to guatemalidad, understood here as a symbolic dis-location from a territorial imaginary that forces many subjects to cross-dress in order to hide both their exilic and their subaltern positions. This is especially true in the context of the criticism generated by their respective Nobel Prizes, given that both laureates have at different times been accused of projecting a false identity, of pretending to be who they were not. Asturias was accused of falsely portraying himself as a Maya when he was a Ladino. Menchú was accused of falsely portraying herself as an indigenous leader when she was a revolutionary militant.

 

Why this negative reaction to their discursivities? To my way of thinking, this reaction reflects the difficulty a wide range of critics have accepting parameters that diverge too much from Eurocentric ones, especially when they are dealing with, and framing, issues and problems of global coloniality.⁶ They also do not understand that indigenous movements constitute a break with the Western sense of nation-building in their aim to create political and ethical “re-foundations.”⁷ Finally, this reaction reflects fears of phallic inadequacy that both Asturias’s and Menchú’s works generate among many of Guatemala’s Ladino males.

 

In the case of Asturias, this deliberate cross-dressing appears in the foundational origin of his work. From the outset he was interested in creating a transvestized alternative Otherness of an emancipatory sort; what we know today as Mulata arose from what he conceived as a totalizing masterwork in the late 1920s and first expressed in Leyendas de Guatemala (1930). In that text, a male subject has a feminine life-experience because of his ethnic nature. Symbolically, the Ladino imaginary establishes a binarism, attributing masculinity to Ladino hegemony and associating indigenous subalternity with femininity.⁸ When it comes to identity, the “poet-prince” (as the character is described in the text, because he is a manifestation of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, god of knowledge and culture) knows that he is a subaltern ethnic subject, whose identity is associated with femininity. For this reason, he seeks to escape the restrictions of both by affirming his royal lineage.⁹ Femininity in this context is simply a repressed presence, and it is transferred to the woods roamed by Cuero de Oro, who will later become Kukulkán, the Plumed Serpent in question¹⁰: “Darkness falls without twilight, rivulets of blood flow between the trunks, a faint redness glows in the frogs’ eyes, and the forest becomes a tender, malleable, boneless mass, undulant like hair that smells of resin and lemon-tree leaves.”¹¹ Cuero de Oro associates the jungle with femininity, but the jungle is himself. This is a clear act of transference. In the role of woman he is passive; he cannot advance because “the four roads were forbidden me” (32). When the forest turns hostile after the symbolic rape of the indigenous people by Spanish conqueror Pedro de Alvarado, it becomes a forest “of human trees,” and the roads turn in on themselves. Cuero de Oro then transforms into Kukulkán, which implies “ceasing to be a woman,” acquiring a masculine image, exercising a new discipline of power over his body. Hence the process of coiling up the snakes around his body, an obvious phallic symbol emphasized as such in the text: “The black ones rubbed my hair until they fell asleep with contentment, like females next to their males” (33). Now Cuero de Oro is Kukulkán, the (multi)colored snakes that possessed him are females, and he, “concupiscent,” feels himself growing roots, experiencing this as “sexual agony.” His roots grow like erect phalluses, until they take on the power of destruction associated with phallic power. At the same time, he misses his lost mobility. This phallic power is also the embrace of death, and thus “hurts the heart all the deeper” (34). Cuero de Oro sacrifices his feminine vitality for masculine power, which implies death, and his repressed impotence is projected as the invalidated feminine subject.¹² Kukulkán, purified, re-emerges as a masculine subject charged with lethal power. In this way he externalizes the inherent impediment he had encountered in becoming the subject he imagined himself to be, the desired subject. He mystifies his problematic “femininity.” Freighted with the illusion of masculinity, he has no problem existing as the cross-dressed Kukulkán. The story’s stylistic complexity simultaneously obscures and makes visible the fault-line, the suture, in the phantasmatic unity of Asturias’s project of mestizaje (miscegenation). The asymmetry that undermines the purported equality between the two ethnic groups, projected onto the plane of sexuality, creates a sort of void on the political plane of the text. The inner peace that this resolution generates for Cuero de Oro, however, entails an inability to love. For him to be a Maya god means to dedicate himself wholly to the function of artifice. This redeems his art because he has found an entry into language in the process of becoming aware of his identity. But it makes him distant, if not impotent, indifferent to the desire of the Other. He sublimates the negation of his own sexuality in a mystical project, as do Catholic saints whose motivations transcend desire.

 

In Mulata de tal (1963; Mulata, 1967) Asturias presents such “inversions” as a code when he refers to the invasion of his country in 1954 as a sexual “perversion” going against the “normal” reproductive role of society. In this way, he makes ethnicity and power twist and turn on the axis of sexuality’s “unspeakable practices” and “abominable acts” in the process of codifying this language as the expression of a different epistemology.

 

In Mulata, the sexual ambiguity of the Mulata provides the starting point for an unending series of ethnic transfigurations and re-semantizations of linguistic and cultural signs. No one can define the Mulata, not even on the purely biological level: “I don’t know what she is, but she isn’t a man and she isn’t a woman either. She doesn’t have enough inky-dinky for a man and she has too much dinky-inky for a woman. Since you’ve never seen her from the front.”¹³ The sexual ambiguity of the Mulata is another instance of the polyvalent Guatemalan identity, and her sexual ambiguity creates confusion and anxiety for all the characters of the text, disturbing their own identities to such an extent that they actually become transformed into other characters with different ethnicities and genders. In this sense, the Mulata plays the emblematic role of the “phallic woman,” and as such she threatens the main character, Celestino Yumí, with symbolic castration, a literary pre-enactment of the situation previously described of Menchú’s ambivalent relation to restrictive Ladino masculinist power in Guatemala. But by also being the moon, the Law of the Mother, the mulata implies fear of castration. Celestino finds and marries the Mulata after making a pact with the Maya devil (figured as the corn god Tazol) in which he trades his wife Catalina for the ability to turn corn into gold. The Mulata, in turn, torments Celestino, threatening to kill him for his golden skeleton. Later in the novel, Celestino repents of his choice and helps Catalina escape, but she is now a dwarf and becomes the Mulata’s slave and fetishized toy. Celestino and Catalina trick the Mulata and lock her in a cave and trade their ethnic peasant identities for the magical powers of a hybridized religion of devil-worship in Tierrapaulita, but the Mulata does not remain buried. Rather, she resurfaces in a catastrophic earthquake and reclaims her power through a series of transfigurations and fragmentations, which include the detachment of her prominent female sexual organs, which thereafter circulate on their own. For Freud, all fetishes are substitutes for the phallus the woman has lost: fetishism is a mechanism to quell the fear of castration on the part of male subjects. If the simulacrum of the phallus is at the base of Sadean representation, the fear of losing it is equally key to Asturian representation (Frappier-Mazur 80). Thus in Mulata the female sex organs acquire the value of a fetish object both from the semiotic and from the psychoanalytic points of view. Recall that in Freud’s thinking, if the female subject is “castrated,” the male subject is also in danger of becoming so. On the other hand, emphasis on the female sex organs can proclaim their superiority to the phallus, and this inversion can reverberate to the male subject as a sign of impotence.

 

Asturias represents these travestisms as metamorphoses in Mulata, radical transformations in the bodies of the characters that make them almost unrecognizable and that illustrate the ways in which a variety of Guatemalan subjects cloak themselves in deceptive vestments to appropriate authority and power. At the novel’s climax, Celestino Yumí battles the Mulata, symbolically represented at this point by the priest, Father Chimalpín, who then takes the form of a cassocked spider, an emblematic act of transvestism, given that priests dress as women. But it is also an act of syncretism, where the devils, Tazol and Candanga, are embodied by priests, who are then variously gendered. The priest had earlier entered the body of the sexton, who himself becomes the character Jerónimo de la Degollación and tries to possess Celestino: he opens his cape, and “on the pretext of giving him the chamber pot (tries to) despoil him of his male attributes” (232). But Jerónimo is also the transvestite Mulata, the first “phallic” woman, complicating the sexual symbolism. The union of the priest, Jerónimo de la Degollación, and the sexton through this joint identification with and “possession” by the Mulata also underscores the eminently queer nature of the sexton, of the Mulata herself, and of Celestino’s desire for the Mulata (whom he always sexually possessed from behind). Celestino has never ceased to desire her, which implies a minimal recognition of his homosexual desire. Seeing himself confronted openly by Jerónimo, he reacts as would any “macho” who could not admit to homoerotic desire; that is, with violence. Textually, this is represented on a plane of illusion, of fantasy: in a symbolic cross-dressing, Celestino sprouts spines from his smallpox scars and is converted into a giant porcupine. Transformed, he penetrates Jerónimo–whose own desire is fully evident–with those phallic protuberances and leaves him for dead. Next he goes after the “cassocked spider,” the transvestized Father Chimalpín. The response of Celestino-as-porcupine may be fantasioso (conceited), but it is also phantasmatic. The subject’s orifices are transformed into barbs/penises, to carry out an imaginary penetration of Jerónimo, the Mulata, and the priest, who is also the “father,” reproducing his psychological struggle with the paternal image. Chimalpín ends up in the same condition as Celestino: pitted with smallpox, punctured with holes, feminized. The subject’s hatred for the paternal image is read as recognition of the father’s homosexual tendencies and as a deconstruction of the virile subject.

 

These complex relations and representations delineate for Asturias the history of relations between the United States and Guatemala, and in particular the U.S.-sponsored 1954 invasion that overthrew Guatemala’s democracy and unleashed a 37-year-long civil war, an issue I develop extensively in my critical edition of Asturias’s Mulata.¹⁴ But he also sees that history as part of a global design, to paraphrase Mignolo. Reading the text as a symbolic re-encoding of the political, a metaphorized story of his country, gives it a new meaning. The subject’s inability to coexist with the figures of the father and the mother implies the impossibility of encountering common spaces in which to forge social, community, or national ties. The meta-fictional value of the text becomes evident when we understand its narrative as the encoded chronicle of a nation’s destruction.

 

We can read the text another way by substituting for the signs in question the identity tropes of Ladinos and Mayas, and U.S. academics’ determination to normalize them within Western parameters. It may well be that Mulata is a novel and not a testimony, but the text certainly demands a knowledge of the paratextual context, as does Menchú’s text. They address the same local history, with the same imperial connotations. Nonetheless, in Guatemalan discourse, the relationships between enunciations and the institutional spaces of criticism have nothing to do with the nation-state, since the criticism of both proceeds from beyond its boundaries. Mulata was called an “untruthful novel” by South American critics of the 1960s, such as Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Angel Rama, who, defending existing hegemonic narratives, labeled it as “premodern” on the grounds that Asturias merely “copied” readily-available indigenous sources. By contrast, novels emphasizing urban/metropolitan topics were celebrated for accentuating their European roots in the process of elaborating stylistic experimentations. According to this bias, urban/cosmopolitan writers were read (and celebrated) for their innovative styles, whereas writers such as Asturias were read (and panned) for content, while their equally innovative styles went ignored. Once their work had been found guilty of essentialized primitivism because of its double consciousness of modernity/coloniality, much of Latin American metropolitan “taste” assumed that no possible notion of style or textual strategy could be submerged there.¹⁵ None of the critics who made these charges were Central American, nor did they take into account the region’s singular ethnic and political realities in their readings of the novel. They did, however, attempt to silence it, in a preamble to Menchú’s later testimony. As a result, it took Gerald Martin’s Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989) to re-establish Asturias’s reputation as a precursor to Latin America’s 1960s literary boom in the English-speaking world, a prestige he had retained exclusively in France, thanks primarily to the efforts of Amos Segala and the Association d’Amis de Miguel Angel Asturias.¹⁶

 

The South American furor against Asturias, which extended to the U.S. when his critics moved to leading American universities, brought to bear a power/knowledge relationship that imposed certain cosmopolitan prejudices against marginality: racial prejudices toward indigenous subjectivity, geopolitical prejudices toward Central America, machista prejudices against women and the specter of homosexuality. These came in the guise of supposedly modernistic aesthetics. Thus Asturian textuality remains to this day relegated in the Latin American literary canon, created by cosmopolitan critics from South America in U.S. universities, to the pejorative classification of “premodern literature” and to the sub-genre of the Latin American “novela indigenista,” and Mulata, a true masterpiece, languishes in critical oblivion, branded as an unintelligible or unstructured novel.¹⁷

 

In an important section of Mulata Celestino meets the “Sauvages,” people transformed into boars for refusing to be dehumanized. That is, in this additional form of cross-dressing, the only civilized subjects are “mistakenly,” from an epistemological point of view, called “Sauvages.” Their description is accompanied by a meditation on writing, positioned as hieroglyphic repositories of collective memory: “Crags covered with blue-greenish lichens on which the tusks of the Sauvages had drawn capricious signs. Could that be their way of writing? Did they keep their annals in those drawings made with the tips of their tusks?”¹⁸ Celestino, in other words, cannot “read” them. The cryptic meaning of the capricious signs evokes the glyphs on Maya monoliths, which tell a story incomprehensible to a traditional Western mind that refuses to see how colonial power conforms the space-in-between. It is a story that has already ended, brought to closure by imperialist intervention. The subaltern subject, civilized despite being called “Sauvage” by the dominant Other, possesses a discourse and a history that remain incomprehensible to those who attempt to fit them into a foreign cultural mold.

 

Now let us return to Menchú. Her testimonio I, Rigoberta Menchú (1984) is also misread because its project resembles Asturias’s:

 

All the (Maya beauty) queens go with the customs from the different regions . . . . There are always a lot of tourists . . . . And they take all the photos they want. But, for an Indian, taking a photo of him in the street is abusing his dignity, abusing him . . . . A friend who was a queen told me that they taught her how to present herself. This compañera couldn’t speak Spanish very well, so she had to learn the boring little speech she was going to give: greetings for the President, greetings for the most important guests, greetings for the army officers . . . . This is what hurts Indians most. It means that, yes, they think our costumes are beautiful because it brings in money, but it’s as if the person wearing it doesn’t exist. (208-09)

 

This fragment evidences an anxiety about dressing as a Maya woman for the Ladino gaze, and about being fetishized as such. The implication here is that Maya women are forced to perform an act that is not intrinsic to their culture, one for which only their exoticized clothing is valued, but not the person wearing it. The picture-taking implies a commodification of the person wearing Maya clothing as well, while having to learn a speech in the language, Spanish, that was the only official language in Guatemala until 1996, indicates the Mayas’ subaltern status as colonized subjects within their own country.

 

However, Menchú herself turns the tables around by performing in public while wearing those very clothes as a sign of her identity; she has made a point of never appearing in public wearing Western clothes, though she normally switches to blue jeans and other Westernized items for comfort in private.¹⁹ This apparent contradiction has to do with Menchú’s intuitive recognition that, paraphrasing Saldaña-Portillo, Mayas might be Guatemala’s ideal ancestors, but Ladinos are Guatemala’s ideal citizens.²⁰ At the same time, she knows that Maya clothing is both about social identity and about the construction of gender, which was a fluid potential, not a fixed category, before the Spaniards came to Mesoamerica in any case.²¹ Ethnicized clothing is, after all, a symbolic cultural product that represents cultural affirmation, and dress serves as a site for the continual renegotiation of identity–gendered, ethnic and otherwise. It is part of the systemic structure that supports ethnic identities and the formation of ethnicized communities. Thus Menchú places ethnicity at the fulcrum of a new, hybrid national identity that will redefine Guatemala in the future. That is why, in her book, every single chapter has an epigraph that quotes either the Pop Wuj, Asturias’s Men of Maize, or Menchú herself, the three dominant voices that articulate the interrleations in her understanding of a new matrix forming guatemalidad. Interspersed within her life story are chapters describing birth ceremonies, the nahual, ceremonies for sowing time and harvest, marriage ceremonies, and death rituals. For example:

 

Every child is born with a nahual. The nahual is like a shadow, his protective spirit who will go through life with him. The nahual is the representative of the earth, the animal world, the sun and water, and in this way the child communicates with nature. The nahual is our double, something very important to us. (18)

 

In the process, she impersonates male, foreign anthropologists, while simultaneously retaining her position as a subaltern indigenous woman informant. In the quote above, this tension is clear. The first three sentences could very well have been taken from any classical anthropological book, such as those by Adams.²² However, in the fourth sentence, the possessive pronoun “our” and the indirect object pronoun “us” that underline the “possession” of this trait, signal her belonging to that specific community and mark a crossing over in reverse: from the Western centrality of the discourse that names marginality, back to ethnicized marginality itself as “home.”

 

Needing to appropriate for herself the construction of a Pan-Maya identity in this stance, Menchú represents herself as embracing traditional Maya religion, given its role as an axiological basis for the definition of identity. Still Menchú is, officially, a practicing Catholic, a member, as was her father, of Acción Católica, an organization that attacked the shrine of Pascual Abaj, one of the best-known shrines of traditional Maya religion, in Chichicastenango in 1976, as Duncan Earle has documented (292). The example quoted above is one indication of Menchú’s syncretism. Nahuals are exclusive to practicioners of Maya religion. The same is true of other rituals, such as the sowing ceremonies:

 

The fiesta really starts months before when we asked the earth’s permission to cultivate her. In that ceremony we incense, the elected leaders say prayers, and then the whole community prays. We burn candles in our own houses and other candles for the whole community. Then we bring out the seeds we will be sowing. (52)

 

This passage describes part of the fiesta system that Earle defines as the basis for the development of indigenous authority anchored in Maya religion (293). It underscores the Maya cosmological system whereby vegetation, the human life cycle, kinship, modes of production, religious and political hierarchy, and conceptions of time and celestial movement are unified. This quote also reflects the Maya cosmological viewpoint, a complex, three-dimensional conceptualization involving cross sections of the universe and specific boundaries or points in space. These are not, however, compatible with a Catholic understanding of the world. We can see another example of Menchú’s cross-dressing as a Maya shaman to imagine a syncretic religion when she details other prayers:

 

We pray to our ancestors, reciting their prayers which have been known to us for a long time–a very, very long time. We evoke the representatives of the animal world; we say the names of dogs. We say the names of the earth, the God of the earth, and the God of water. Then we say the name of the heart of the sky–the Sun. (57)

 

This cosmological vision is, again, typical of Maya religion and not at all Catholic. Still, Menchú makes it her own with the subject pronoun “we,” repeated five times in this short passage, which also denotes possession, and is marked emphatically by the object pronoun “us.” The phrase “a long time–a very, very long time” also gives rise to a textual interplay between the Maya classical past and the present, common among defenders of Maya religion; it denotes a desire to underscore the uninterrupted continuity of Maya culture and community of more than 1,500 years. This concept of time not only erases traditional Ladino periodicity, but also creates within the text a foundational act to nurture that imaginary continuity of Maya history. Nevertheless, it is a contradiction with the genealogy of her Catholic faith, and that of Acción Católica, the organization in which her father was a catechist, and which propelled her activism. These quotes show that, in her quest for a unification of heterogenous peoples and systems of belief, Menchú poses as a Maya priestess, a shamanic role that does not belong to her, as it involves the intertwining of cosmology, culture, history, and language.²³ Her own words fail to account for these complex relationships. Earle situates Menchú’s need to anchor her vision in a religious axiological constituent, and to impersonate a shamanistic voice, “in the context of a priest-based” religious social system (305) that enables her to “make coherent and unified statements that are hopeful and empowering, without contradictions or inner conflicts” (306). This re-semantization transforms her into a symbolic ethnic religious cross-dresser.

 

Like transvestism, “cross-dressing” also applies to Guatemalan ethnicity. Nelson begins her chapter on “Gendering the Ethnic-National Question” with a reference to Maya women “and the anxiety of cross-dressing” (170), linking this term to the ambiguity of dressing Western as opposed to dressing Mayan. There are lines of flight in it, because it is an assemblage of a multiplicity of perceptions without a center that does not refer to verifiable data but only to the actual process of its own reiteration as a “truth effect.” Its repetition–a sort of never-ending dress rehearsal–produces and sustains the power of the truth effect and the discursive regime that has constructed it and that operates in the production of racialized and ethnicized bodies.

 

In this sense, the symbolic use of cross-dressing seems appropriate to describe the gendering of ethnic politics in a country where dressing in traditional Maya costume, as opposed to dressing in Western clothing, defined ethnicity for many decades.²⁴ As Nelson indicates, Maya women’s traditional colorful clothing has been commodified to attract tourists (170), and their alleged passivity is supposed to be emblematic of the expected behavior of all indigenous peoples. She adds: “When Ladino candidates touring the country for votes think they’ve found ‘the real Guatemala’ on the shores of Lake Atitlán, it is the traditionally costumed, dutifully worshipping Mayan woman they refer to” (170). Nelson concludes that Mayas “disappear” when they take off their traje. She could have very well added that they become Ladinos, the simplest definition of which would be a person with indigenous traits dressed in Western clothing, as Adams asserted in the 1950s.

 

Menchú was misunderstood and misrepresented by a U.S. anthropologist who spearheaded a conservative reaction against the testimonial genre by returning to universalist juridical principles that claimed to articulate known “truths.”²⁵ Returning to the psychoanalytic reading I began with Asturias, we can also read in Menchú and in reactions to her a similar psychoanalytic imaginary, expressed by a whole series of linguistic cross-dressings, the symbolic re-encoding of Maya/Ladino relations. In this reading, the Maya becomes the fetish of the Ladino. The symbolic castration experienced by the subaltern subject also endangers the Ladino because the latter fears that castration can be reversed. Similarly, emphasis on what is Maya proclaims its superiority. This is why in Menchú the Ladino is obsessed with stealing the Maya’s jouissance. This act, however, would involve the negation of the differences between both groups. When the Maya acquires power, the Ladino subject makes a contract with his “ideal woman” to be reborn by her hands. However, the Candanga (Devil) from another world, the North American anthropologist David Stoll, breaks this contract by denying her validity, symbolically castrating her and by extension the male Ladino. Ladinos are forced into the position of having to defend Menchú against the attack that calls into question this new agreement. This would explain why figures from the Guatemalan Right, such as Jorge Skinner Kleé, joined forces to defend the wronged woman in 2000 (see The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy).

 

Asturias was also misunderstood and misrepresented by a universalist literary criticism that reacted against the transcultural ethnic subjectivity, mockery of Western culture, and ambiguous sexuality in his novels.²⁶ Thus Menchú and Asturias have in common, independently of their different géneros (genres, but also genders, in Spanish), the misreading by critics who cannot see the signs of an alternative set of principles that anchors Mesoamerican identity and constitutes its cultural matrix, outside the Western parameters they favor. Postcolonial theorists have argued that Western critics customarily encounter their own limitations when they confront that Other who does not return their gaze as they would like to see it returned. In this case, the problem arises from an original imperialist negation of the paratextual context that determines Menchú’s and Asturias’s particular ethnicizing positionalities, a hybrid but predominantly indigenous condition that is the source of all their enunciations. This discursivity can only be deciphered by looking beyond the boundaries of the Western genres–novel, testimonio–in which it is expressed, and by truly exploring a “third space” of reading in the sense defined by Garber. Nonetheless, criticism of Asturias has limited itself to the thematic aspect of his work, and assessments of Menchú are framed by a definition of what truthful testimony is supposed to be.

 

But then, can we assume that the very guatemalidad that dispossesses them also unites them? Both Asturias and Menchú are “Sauvages.” Both are keepers of the capricious signs that guard their stories and remain meaningless to those who wish to invisibilize the guatemalidad in their writing as a conceptual horizon. Both of them depart from a specific referent to trace their singular vision of an imaginary community’s desire, structured by their phantasmatic nostalgia for a fatherland as an authenticating mechanism. However, even if both imagine a community named “Guatemala,” Asturias and Menchú–and the ethnicized classes they have come to represent–certainly imagine different cultural events and evoke emotional ties not necessarily leading to unification through a common language, religion, or race. The nation-state, Deleuze and Guattari claim, is nothing more than a model for a particular realization (456), an artifice, an illusion. Its formation usually implies a struggle against imperial powers, but it also connotes a totalitarian deployment against its own minorities for the sake of forming a new homogeneous space corresponding to a collective subjectivization that encodes the supposed nationality, as happened in Guatemala between Ladinos and Mayas. As with identity, nationality is a concept that at times only generates the illusion of a possible explanation for collective belonging, as a will to be a part of a political community emerging, in Latin America’s case, through the convergence of historical forces during the nineteenth century that led to the hegemony of a Western-looking patriarchal criollo oligarchy.²⁷ Indeed, Menchú refuses to speak of a nation, to avoid both the trap of falling into Maya ethnic nationalism, extant among the various Maya ethnic groups vying for indigenous hegemony, and the negative model of the existing “Ladino nation.” However, she does speak of being “Guatemalan.” The desire for a collective identity shapes both her narrative and Asturias’s with similar symbolic assemblages, which allow a Ladino novelist and a Maya K’iché testimonialist to touch each other without becoming the same. “Guatemala” is in this way transformed into a conceptual horizon, a particular nostalgia for spaces with certain traits to which its members adhere emotionally, a certain cultural sensibility with unique inflections and connotations.

 

Finally, it must be added that in both cases, the instability of the gendered, ethnic body is significant. It destabilizes identities at the biological level and resignifies them while revealing how the layers of meaning ascribed to them are instead colonizing strategies. Needless to say, that is why they make hegemonic heteronormative males nervous.

 

Notes

 

1. For Colop’s ideas and standing see chapter six in Warren’s Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. The 7 August 1996 panel included the author of this article as well as Morales and Colop. Thus, though I also presented on Asturias on that occasion, I also witnessed Colop’s presentation, Morales’s reply, the audience heckling Morales and supporting Colop, followed by Morales stepping off the podium angrily and abandoning the room to a crescendo of boos from the audience.

 

2. I employ hybridity here in relation to race, as it has developed in transnational theories of the 1990s traced by Lund in The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing.

 

3. See the U.N.’s Truth Commission report, Guatemala, Memoria del Silencio.

 

4. I use here Gramsci’s concept of “organic intellectuals” with the caveat that by organic intellectuals I mean Maya subjects who, emerging from subaltern conditions of exploitation and racism, nevertheless managed to obtain university degrees at U.S. or European universities. They returned to Guatemala’s civil society not as academics, but as grassroots leaders, or as professional cadres exercising governmental functions, or as leaders of international agencies that benefited Maya people.

 

5.”Ladino” is a word originating in colonial times, designating someone who speaks Latin (and, thus, someone who works at the service of the local priest, an interstitial space and positioning between the West and its Other). Mayas were forbidden from learning Spanish during colonial times for fear that they could acquire useful knowledge along with their linguistic skills. During the nineteenth century there were sizable Belgian and German migrations to the country, and most Belgians and Germans mixed with Mayas, adding a new variant to Guatemala’s miscegenation process. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century significant numbers of Italian migrants also mixed with Mayas. Ladinos, however, regardless of their ancestry, generally consider themselves “white,” are proud of their European origins, frequently deny that they have any indigenous blood in their ancestry, and invariably consider themselves Western in outlook.

 

6. Westernism, “Occidentalismo” in Spanish, as defined by Mignolo and Dussel, is the Other of Orientalism, in the sense employed by Said. In other words, it is a will to be Westernized, a will to belong to the Western world.

 

7. Menchú is not interested in creating an autonomous Maya nation in the traditional sense, geographically separate from the Ladino-dominated Guatemalan nation, but rather to Mayanize the existing Ladino-dominated Guatemala in a co-habitation process that would lead ultimately to a recognition of the often hybrid and predominantly Mayan identity of the nation. See my article “Conspiracy on the Sidelines: How the Maya Won the War.”

 

8. What is at play is power relations: what counts is who is “on top” and who is “on the bottom,” the last being associated with weakness, submissiveness, passivity, surrender, traits that justify oppression and discrimination. “The conquered was conquered for being weak, and therefore deserves to be treated like a woman” would be the operative axiom in the subconscious of the Ladino in this text, who is thus ashamed of and denies the indigenous/woman side of himself in the process of projecting his identity as an instrument to mediate his fragmented subjectivity, adapting the inner not only to the outer but to an imagined “Western” behavior pattern that expresses a desire more than a reality.

 

9. Prieto notes that Asturias associated his “Spanish” side with his father, and his more mestizo, even more “indigenous” side with his mother (120), symbolically ratifying this binarism. All cited passages correspond to the 1993 edition.

 

10. A similar transference occurs in El señor presidente (1945), Asturias’s best-known novel, in the scene where Cara de Angel and Camila walk through the forest toward the baths.

 

11. In the original Spanish: “Oscurece sin crepúsculo, corren hilos de sangre entre los troncos, delgado rubor aclara los ojos de las ranas y el bosque se convierte en una masa maleable, tierna, sin huesos, con ondulaciones de cabellera olorosa a estoraque y a hojas de limón” (31).

 

12. In this sense, it is a sort of “Faustian bargain” analogous to that of Celestino Yumí with Cashtoc in Mulata.

 

13. In the original Spanish: “No sé lo que es, pero no es hombre y tampoco es mujer. Para hombre le falta tantito tantote y para mujer le sobra tantote tantito. A que jamás la has visto por delante” (60). The translation cited throughout is by Gregory Rabassa.

 

14. See my “Transgresión erótica, sujeto masoquista y recodificación de valores simbólicos en Mulata de tal.” Unfortunately, this article has been published only in Spanish. The only other critic to mention this problematic is Prieto in his chapter on Mulata in Miguel Angel Asturias’s Archeology of Return.

 

15. This assertion is mentioned originally by Gerald Martin in “Asturias, Mulata de Tal y el ‘realismo mítico’ (en Tierrapaulita no amanece).” Idelber Avelar also problematizes it in his introduction to Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Finally, I develop it further in Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America.

 

16. Amos Segala, personal communication, Paris, 16 November 1998. Needless to say, Asturias has remained a celebrity in his native Guatemala, and in the entire Central American region. However, even in Mexico, he is overshadowed by the cult status of his Guatemalan contemporary Luis Cardoza y Aragón, a leading Surrealist poet who befriended Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

 

17. As we know, inside what is called “Latin American literature” there exist several marginalized, opaqued, sidelined literatures, “minor” literatures in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari. “Latin American literature” has been, by and large, one more illusion produced in the late 1970s, a phenomenon also worthy of a thoroughgoing study.

 

18. In the original Spanish: “Peñascales recubiertos de líquenes azulverdosos, en los que los colmillazos de los Salvajos dibujaban signos caprichosos. Sería su forma de escribir? Guardarían en aquellos trazos hechos a punta de colmillo, su historia?” (83).

 

19. Regarding her refusal to appear in public in western clothes, Menchú communicated this to me while wearing blue jeans during dinner in Arturo Taracena’s house, Paris, France, 26 January 1982. Besides Menchú, Taracena and myself, Pantxika Cazaux, Sophie Féral and Juan Mendoza were also present.

 

20. In fact, Saldaña-Portillo is talking about Mexico. She originally states: “Indians may be Mexico’s ideal ancestors, but mestizos are Mexico’s ideal citizens” (294-95). The extrapolation is justified because Guatemala built its own modern national identity based on Mexico’s policies of indigenismo. Saldaña-Portillo mentions in her article that this happened in Mexico during the Cárdenas administration in the 1930s. The same policies were exported to Guatemala in the late 1940s through the dynamic relationship between Vicente Lombardo Toledano, founder of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and a close collaborator of Cárdenas, and Guatemala’s labor leaders and cabinet members of the Arévalo government of this period, which included pro-indigenista social scientists such as Mario Monteforte Toledo and Antonio Goubaud Carrera.

 

21. Joyce makes this argument in Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica, stating that “unlike the modern European solution to the imposition of disciplinary norms of gender and the production of sexed positions, the citational norms of Mesoamerica were based on the conception of human subjectivity as fluid” (198).

 

22. See, for example, Political Changes in Rural Guatemalan Communities: A Symposium.

 

23. Indeed, at the Russell Tribunal trial in Madrid, Spain, that condemned Guatemala’s dictatorship for genocide, in January 1983, where both she and I were witnesses for the prosecution, I saw her literally perform the role of a Maya priestess on stage at the Teatro de la Villa, in a short presentation staged by Guatemalan playwright Manuel José Arce and directed by Roberto Díaz Gomar.

 

24. See Adams’s writings on ethnic differentiation from the 1950s. His works are emblematic of the positivist, pre-structural legacy of American anthropology in Guatemala’s ethnic studies.

 

25. See my edited book The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy regarding this matter.

 

26. I refer to the criticism of Asturias’s work by Rodríguez Monegal, Rama, and Rufinelli, who accuse him of being a “bad writer.” See Martin’s “Asturias, Mulata de tal y el realismo mítico (en Tierrapaulita no amanece).”

 

27. This is a preoccupation for Moreiras in examining the articles of Beverley and Sommer on Menchú (210). Shukla and Tinsman also show how Latin American cultural critics problematize the concept of nation.

 

 

Works Cited

• Adams, Richard N., ed. Political Changes in Rural Guatemalan Communities: A Symposium. MARI Pub.4. New Orleans: Tulane UP, 1957.
• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
• Arias, Arturo. “Conspiracy on the Sidelines: How the Maya Won the War.” Cultural Agency in the Americas. Ed. Doris Sommer. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 167-77.
• —, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.
• —. Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007.
• —. “Transgresión erótica, sujeto masoquista y recodificación de valores simbólicos en Mulata de tal.” Miguel Angel Asturias, Mulata de tal: Edición crítica. Ed. Arturo Arias. Madrid: Archivos, 2000. 956-78.
• Asturias, Miguel Angel. Leyendas de Guatemala. Madrid: Oriente, 1930.
• —. Men of Maize. Trans. Gerald Martin. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995.
• —. Mulata. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1967.
• Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
• Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth, ed. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Delgado, L. Elena, and Rolando J. Romero. “Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter Mignolo.” Discourse 22.3 (Fall 2000): 7-33.
• Dussel, Enrique. Etica de la Liberación en la Edad de la Globalización y de la Exclusión. Madrid: Trotta, 1998.
• Earle, Duncan. “Menchú Tales and Maya Social Landscapes: the Silencing of Words and Worlds.” The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Ed. Arturo Arias. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 288-308.
• Frappier-Mazur, Lucienne. Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” On Sexuality. Vol. 7. London: Pelican Freud Library, 1977. 345-57.
• Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• García Canclini, Néstor. La globalización imaginada. México: Paidós, 1999.
• —. “Entrar y salir de la hibridación.” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana Año XXV No. 50. 2nd Semester 1999. 53-58.
• Joyce, Rosemary A. Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000.
• Lund, Joshua. The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006.
• Martin, Gerald. Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1989.
• —. “Asturias, Mulata de Tal y el ‘realismo mítico’ (en Tierrapaulita no amanece).” Miguel Angel Asturias, Mulata de tal: Edición crítica. Ed. Arturo Arias. Madrid: Archivos, 2000. 979-86.
• Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2000.
• Moreiras, Alberto. “The Aura of Testimonio.” The Real thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Ed. Georg M. Gugelberger. Duke UP, 1996. 192-224.
• Nelson, Diane M. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Prieto, René. Miguel Angel Asturias’s Archeology of Return. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
• Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. “Reading a Silence: The ‘Indian’ in the Era of Zapatismo.” Nepantla 3.2 (2002): 287-314.
• Shukla, Sandhya, and Heidi Tinsman. “Editor’s Introduction.” Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004): 1-10.
• Sommer, Doris. Proceed With Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
• United Nations CEH. Guatemala, Memoria del Silencio. Vol 6: Casos Ilustrativos. Annex 1. Guatemala: Informe de la Comisión Para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, 1999.
• Warren, Kay B. Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.