Recovering Lost Footprints, Volume 1 , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Arturo Arias

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174 pages

English

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Recovering Lost Footprints is the first full-length critical study to analyze Latin American Indigenous literary narratives in a systematic manner. In the book, Arturo Arias looks at Maya narratives in Guatemala. The study of these works is intended to spark changes so that constitutions recognize these cultures, their rights, their languages, their centers of worship, and their cosmologies. Through this study, Arias problematizes the partial or full omission of Latin America's original inhabitants from recognized citizenry. This book analyzes these elements of exclusion in the novelistic output of three salient figures, Luis de Lión, Gaspar Pedro González, and Víctor Montejo. The works by these writers offer evidence that most native people have entered modernity without renouncing their respective cultures or the specifics of their singular identities. The philosophical ethics elaborated in the texts, such as respect for nature and recognition of the holistic value of natural beings, enable non-Indigenous readers to both understand and relate to these values.
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. A Brief History of Guatemalan Maya Literature’s Emergence

2. Luis de Lión: The Tragic Pioneer

3. Gaspar Pedro González: A Maya “Best Seller”

4. Víctor Montejo: The Framer of a New Imaginary

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Latin American

Latin America

Caribbean

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	14 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438467412
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Recovering Lost Footprints
RECOVERING LOST FOOTPRINTS

VOLUME 1
CONTEMPORARY MAYA NARRATIVES
ARTURO ARIAS
Cover image: Láminas 8 y 9 del Códice de Dresden, dibujado por Lacambalam ( pages 8 and 9 of the Desden Codex, drawn by Lacambalam). © Lacambalam (Jens Rohark).
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Mike Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arias, Arturo, 1950– author.
Title: Recovering lost footprints. Volume 1, Contemporary Maya narratives / Arturo Arias.
Other titles: Contemporary Maya narratives
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058082 (print) | LCCN 2017018899 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467412 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438467399 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Maya literature--History and criticism. | Guatemalan literature—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PM3968 (ebook) | LCC PM3968 .A75 2017 (print) | DDC 897/.42709—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058082
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Brief History of Guatemalan Maya Literature’s Emergence
2. Luis de Lión: The Tragic Pioneer
3. Gaspar Pedro González: A Maya “Best Seller”
4. Víctor Montejo: The Framer of a New Imaginary
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making. Whereas in-depth research began ten years ago, I can trace its origin to a night in the spring of 1981 in Mexico City. I was living at Avenida Universidad 1900, a large complex of forty towers located a few blocks from UNAM, Mexico’s National University. In a close-by tower lived Maya Ixil leader Pablo Ceto, one of the founders of the CUC, Spanish acronym for the Committee for Peasant Unity. CUC was the first-ever grassroots organization in Guatemala to be founded by Mayas and directed exclusively by Mayas. In that famous spring night of 1981, Pablo invited me to dinner in his apartment. In a memorable conversation that evening, he confided me what was then a secret. Though Mayas were supporting various revolutionary organizations struggling against Guatemala’s military dictatorship, they were keeping their true goals a secret. Pablo called this “ La conspiración dentro de la conspiración ” (“the conspiracy within the conspiracy”). The conspiracy consisted of trying to move up the revolutionary ladder as far as possible, but not to further the Ladino revolutionaries’ goals as a whole; rather, the goal was to further Mayas’ own secret goals of agency. I was shocked at his confession and asked him bluntly why had he trusted me with this information. He said he and his then-wife had been watching me for some time, and both had concluded I was not only trustworthy, but someone who could work with Mayas for the rest of his life. I felt as if a lifetime gift had been given to me. Within months, Maya Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú—still unknown at the time—was living in my house, after arriving as a refugee in Mexico City. Later came Maya Kaqchikel leader Domingo Hernández Ixcoy to share my home and, towards the end of my stay in Mexico City, Maya K’iche’ scholars Francisca Álvarez Medrano and her sister Carmen. I learned from all of them, shared my daily life, my home, and they captured my soul forever.
I also want to thank the many colleagues at the at the University of Texas at Austin with whom we often discussed these topics, debated them, or else, furthered Native American and Indigenous research and shared observations as a team. These include those colleagues who created the Native American and Indigenous Studies Center: Shannon Speed—presently at UCLA—Luis Cárcamo-Huechante, Nora England, Kelly McDonough, Sergio Romero, Pauline Strong, and Luis Urrieta. While at Texas I also enjoyed the support and friendship of David Stuart of the Mesoamerican Center, always generous and willing to share his knowledge. Above all, I want to thank Charles R. Hale, Director of the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Benson Latin American Library, who was always the best of friends, an ethusiastic supporter, and while LLILAS-Benson Director, awarded me research leaves.
Outside of Texas, my network of supporters was enormous, and I risk failing to mention all. I especially want to thank Linda Tuhiwai Smith who organized a Maya-Māori Seminar at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa (New Zealand) in 2013; Kathryn Lehman who invited me as a Hood Fellow to the University of Auckland, thus enabling my contact and exchange with Māori scholars and communities; Elizabeth Monasterios, who facilitated my attendance at Journadas Andinas de Literatura Latinoamericana (JALLA) in La Paz, thus augmenting my knowledge of Aymara culture; Maya K’iche’ scholar Emilio del Valle Escalante, who shares our achievements with a wonderful sense of humor; my former graduate students Alicia Ivonne Estrada and Adam Coon, who probably taught me more on Indigenous issues than I had taught them; Maya K’iche’ scholar Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj and Maya K’iche’ poet Rosa Chávez who read and critiqued the Spanish version of this text; Maya K’iche’ leader Domingo Hernández Ixcoy, Director of the Uk’ux B’e Maya Association who always makes a point of keeping me informed on Maya issues in Guatemala; Pablo Ceto, who started me on this path, and is now President of the Ixil University in Nebaj; and Rigoberta Menchú, to whose cause I have rallied during many moments in my life. Old friendships seldom die. And then, all those others who know who they are, but would be impossible to list in such short space.
Finally, but most important of all, I want to thank the greatest love of my life, Jill Robbins, without whom nothing—not this book, not others, not research—would ever have been possible. She has not only been with me through so many changes and struggles that would have tested the toughest of people, but has also led me through a path of joy and discovery that I would never have expected before I met her. There’s magic in everything she does, and I welcome some of the glowing powder that enables me to go forward in what is otherwise a bleak world. Thanks, love. I would no longer be around without you.
Introduction
My overall project analyzes Abya Yala’s Indigenous literary narratives written from approximately the mid-twentieth century to the present. Abya Yala is the name that Indigenous peoples give to the Latin American continent, a notion to which I return in the last section of this introduction. By “narratives” I mean—from the perspective of literary genres—novels, short stories, and testimonios . Going beyond the nature of genres themselves, however, I understand narrativeness as a notion that is opposed to poetry and poetics. Narrativeness privileges storytelling and prose in a more general sense, over poetic genres that are more semiotic, establishing autonomous systems of significance. Though “narrative” has become a contested term, narratives are, in their simplest form, structured discursive practices—which, as we know, can also be multidimensional ones not subordinated to sound—that articulate signifiers for telling or retelling stories, whether recalled or imagined, that, manipulated to a certain degree by the writer/storyteller, ultimately points to larger ontological issues that, in Indigenous cases, often close the divide between nature and culture.
Whereas my analysis is limited to contemporary written Indigenous narratives—and to Guatemalan Maya narratives in this particular volume—there is an obvious connection between written narratives and the heritage of Native American and Indigenous oral traditions as discursive forms intended for live audiences, with varying sets of performativity and performative protocols. 1 In both cases, Indigenous narratives recount cultural histories reenacting aspects of their given epistemologies that Mayas label “cosmovisions,” a category to which I also return to in the Indigenous imaginations and alternative modernities section.
Though writing in their native languages, the authors I examine in this book do not live isolated from the West. 2 They interact with non-Indigenous agents and agencies—whether governmental agencies, NGOs, or international foundations—who may train, support, encourage, or finance these literary efforts and movements. Asymmetrical relations of power inevitably materialize in the production of their textualities, in seeing them come out in print, and in activating their circulation and consumption through heterogeneous venues, whether this happens in their home countries or beyond. These factors are analyzed in the four chapters of this book on the emergence of Guatemalan Maya nar