488 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
which the following excerpt is taken, mounts what is essentially an epic framework
for addressing both of these themes. The imagery of the book is borrowed from the
Popol Wuh(see Chapter 6 for a discussion of this work); yet this contact-period K’iche’
Mayan symbolism is cast against a twentieth-century backdrop of social and political
conflict over Maya Indian rights to their land, which for them has both sacred and
economic value. The overall plot of this quasi-mythical epic story concerns the In-
dians’ heroic quest for repatriation of their lands from their ruthless ladino (mestizo)
usurpers.
The following passage evokes the mood of a Mayan village religious observance:Each woman stopped beneath the portico to lift her shawl over hair strummed by the
wind from the mountains, each man paused briefly to spit out the butt of a maize-leaf cig-
arette and take off a hat like a cold tortilla. They were frozen, like hailstones. The church,
inside, was a mass of flames. The confraternities, men and women, the oldest of them
with bands around their heads, held small bundles of candles between fingers streaming
sweat and hot wax. Other candles, a hundred, two hundred, were burning on the floor,
fixed directly to the ground, on islands of cypress branches and chorequepetals. Other
candles of various sizes, from highborn ones with silver paper decorations and votive of-
ferings pinned to them, down to the smallest tapers, waxes of less value, in candlehold-
ers which looked like tinplate flowerpots. And the candles at the altar adorned with pine
branches, pacayaleaves. In the center of all this veneration stood a wooden cross painted
green and spotted with red to represent the precious blood, and a white altar cloth draped
hammock-style over the arms of the cross, also spotted with blood. The people, the color
of hog-plum bark, motionless in front of those rigid timbers, seemed to root their sup-
plication in the holy sign of suffering with a whispering of leached ashes. (Asturias
1975:127)TRADITIONAL INDIAN VERBAL ARTS
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Major works of Mesoamerican Indian literature in a number of genres—narrative,
song, poetry, ritual language, and public discourse—have been known and published
for centuries (as discussed in Chapter 6). That Mesoamerica has by far the earliest
documentation of native verbal expressive culture of any region of the Americas is
no doubt related to the fact that the cultures from which most of these texts come
(the Nahua, Mixtec, K’iche’ Maya, Kaqchikel Maya, and Yucatec Maya) had writing
systems and the tradition of books and literacy long before contact with the Spanish
missionaries under whose aegis their texts were set down in the Latin alphabet in
the Colonial period. Although these colonial texts have been rediscovered, studied,
and translated in the modern era, the cultural and linguistic traditions from which
they come have been limited to those areas that were subject to early and continu-
ing missionary presence, notably the Mexican Central Valley, the Valley of Oaxaca,
highland Guatemala, and Yucatan.
A major addition to this circumscribed pattern of areal coverage of historical
texts has emerged only recently with the important breakthroughs in the decipher-
ment of hundreds of Classic lowland Mayan hieroglyphic texts. These developments,
discussed elsewhere in this text (see Chapter 11), have already revealed a written