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	 Constructing Ethnic Bodies and Identities in Miguel Angel Asturias and 	 	 Rigoberta Menchú

      *Arturo Arias *
      / University of Redlands/
      arturo_arias@redlands.edu

      (c) 2006 Arturo Arias.
      All rights reserved.

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   1. 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.[1 <#foot1>] Sam 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.

   2. The stance adopted by the group surrounding Sam Colop implicitly
      disqualified Asturias's creative attempts to portray Guatemalan
      identity as ethnically hybrid.[2 <#foot2>] 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.

   3. 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.

   4. The Maya/Ladino ethnic conflict is a consequence of the Spanish
      invasion in 1524. The Maya population began to exercise 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
      <#foot3>] 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 <#foot4>] 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.

   5. Technically speaking, a Ladino can be any person of mixed European
      and indigenous origins.[5 <#foot5>] 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.

   6. 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)

   7. 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).

   8. 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.

   9. 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 <#foot6>]
      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 <#foot7>]
      Finally, this reaction reflects fears of phallic inadequacy that
      both Asturias's and Menchú's works generate among many of
      Guatemala's Ladino males.

  10. 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 <#foot8>] 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 <#foot9>] 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 question[10 <#foot10>]: "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 <#foot11>] 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 <#foot12>]
      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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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 <#foot13>] 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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 <#foot14>] 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.

  15. 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 <#foot15>] 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 <#foot16>]

  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 <#foot17>]

  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 <#foot18>]
      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.

  18. 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.

  19. 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 <#foot19>] 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 <#foot20>] 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
      <#foot21>] 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 <#foot22>] 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."

  20. 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.
      /Nahual/s 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 <#foot23>] 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/.

  21. 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.

  22. 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 <#foot24>] 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.

  23. 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
      <#foot25>] 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).

  24. 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 <#foot26>] 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.

  25. 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 <#foot27>] 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.

  26. 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.

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

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          Notes

      1 <#ref1>. 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 <#ref2>. 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 <#ref3>. See the U.N.'s Truth Commission report, Guatemala,
      Memoria del Silencio.

      4 <#ref4>. 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 <#ref5>."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 <#ref6>. 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 <#ref7>. 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 <#ref8>. 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 <#ref9>. 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 <#ref10>. 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 <#ref11>. 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 <#ref12>. In this sense, it is a sort of "Faustian bargain"
      analogous to that of Celestino Yumí with Cashtoc in Mulata.

      13 <#ref13>. 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 <#ref14>. 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 <#ref15>. 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 <#ref16>. 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 <#ref17>. 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 <#ref18>. 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 <#ref19>. 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 <#ref20>. 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 <#ref21>. 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 <#ref22>. See, for example, Political Changes in Rural
      Guatemalan Communities: A Symposium.

      23 <#ref23>. 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 <#ref24>. 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 <#ref25>. See my edited book The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy
      regarding this matter.

      26 <#ref26>. 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 <#ref27>. 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.


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