CHAPTER 13 THE INDIAN VOICE IN RECENT MESOAMERICAN LITERATURE
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY HIATUS
With all of the extraordinary legacy of texts and commentary on colonial Mesoamer-
ican verbal arts that we have considered in Chapter 6, it may come as something of
a surprise to the reader to find that the nineteenth century appears, by comparison,
to be relatively weak with regard to serious scholarly works either by or about
Mesoamerican native people. This does not mean that Mesoamerican verbal arts
were either moribund or inert in the nineteenth century. Ample testimony to the con-
trary comes from the powerful role played by oral traditions and underground na-
tive books of prophecy in such political movements as the Caste War of Yucatán
(1848) (see Chapter 7). One can also infer, from the extraordinary documentation
of Indian oral traditions that has been achieved in the twentieth century, that these
forms were no doubt thriving in both the formal and the informal fabric of life in In-
dian communities of the nineteenth century. They simply did not get recorded, ei-
ther by mestizo or creole scholars, for they generally lacked interest in the subject,
or by the Indians themselves, for they were for the most part nonliterate in either
Spanish or their native languages.
To make sense of this pattern, one should recall that the nineteenth century was
a period of creole ascendancy in the political, social, and economic arena. The same
was true of the arts. The last thing that interested the new creole masters was artistic
representation of their region as composed of an ancient or a contemporary Indian
substratum; this emphasis would merely testify to their “backwardness,” both to them-
selves and to the world community. The name of the artistic game in the period
therefore became self-conscious imitation of European and U.S. literary fashions.
Such as they were considered, Native Americans in nineteenth-century Mexican and
Guatemalan literature, like that of the United States in the same period, came to
symbolize the vanquished primitive world, with both its romantically attributed virtues
(the “noble savage” theme) and its (then) scientifically and historically assigned vices476