CHAPTER 13 THE INDIAN VOICE IN RECENT MESOAMERICAN LITERATURE 501movements, held a virtual monopoly (largely in the form of Biblical and other reli-
gious texts) on the production of written materials in native languages. For these
reasons, the new Indian cultural organizations have been for the most part self-
supporting, depending on funds generated by the sale of their publications and by
private donations. The published works of these organizations are available in low-
cost editions and usually carry a dual language text in the Indian language and Span-
ish. The subject matter varies from the retelling of traditional folktales, to the
interpretation of recent historical events, to extensive biographical and autobio-
graphical texts. In some cases, ancient Mayan and Spanish colonial texts are being
translated and interpreted in modern Indian languages. The following brief excerpts
will provide a sampling of this “new” Indian literary creation.
“About Pajarito and Chamula in 1911”
This work, dated 1991, is Publication 8 of the Writers’ Cooperative (Sna Jtz’ibahom,
or Cultura de los Indios Mayas, A. C.) of San Cristóbal de las Casas. This organization
was founded in the late 1970s by a group of Tzotzil, Tzeltal, and Tojolabal Indian writ-
ers, with the assistance of Robert Laughlin of the Smithsonian Institution of Wash-
ington, D.C. Although initially supported by private donors (notably Cultural Survival,
Inc., and the Fundación Interamericana), the organization has become to a certain ex-
tent self-supporting. The publication series is supported by the Mexican govern-
ment’s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.
The book whose preface is reproduced next derives from oral sources about a
famous Chamula Tzotzil historical figure, Jacinto Pérez Chishtot, who was the leader
of a violent political and religious movement of 1910 and 1911. He and his follow-
ers sought, under the tutelage of the conservative Bishop Francisco Orozco y Jiménez,
to place the town of San Juan Chamula in the political camp of the counterrevolu-
tionary forces of the Chiapas theater of the early years of the Mexican Revolution.
“Pajarito,” as the leader was known in Spanish (meaning “Little Bird,” from his
Tzotzil surname Chishtot), has not fared well in Mexican official history, for he was
eventually executed as a counterrevolutionary by the Mexican army. However, the fol-
lowing introduction to the Tzotzil retelling of these violent events of 1911 leads us
to entertain a more complex reading of his life and political career than that given
in official histories, where he is simply written off as a counterrevolutionary “crazy.”
As in the case of Doña Luz Jiménez’s Nahuatl chronicle, the rendering of historical
events depends a great deal on where one stands in the flow of these events, and,
above all, who one is in terms of local identities and affiliations.
As we shall now see, one person’s counterrevolutionary is another’s ethnic hero. Pajarito
emerges from this account as an Indian ethnic martyr who tragically died at the hands of
self-interested and deceitful ladinos, both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries.
This account of the life and work of the famous “Pajarito” presents another facet of this
well-known historical figure. We see here both an ironic and ambiguous side to his char-
acter that differs somewhat from the official accounts of him that appear in history books.
This point of view is possible because the account recorded here was narrated by the son
of one of Pajarito’s closest political allies and co-religionists who fought side by side with
him in his ill-fated uprising against the Mexican authorities.