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Clothing the Body in Otherness
function in the future to initiate a new cycle of uprising, another im-
pulse toward change. Thus, narratives that describe such movements
come to inhabit layers of enactment. As Bakhtin suggested, “Each
word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its so-
cially charged life” (Bakhtin 1981 , 293 ). Whether performed through
tales or festival activities, the particular telling consciously invokes
text within text, all of which have become available to the audience
through constant retelling and embodiment. If narratives recount up-
risings of Maya power that ended in failure, then the unrest and re-
sistance will accumulate below the bar of oppression until the power
wells up once again. The underlying premise is that if Maya peoples
can endure, change will finally be affected against the oppressive state
that exists as a legacy of conquest and colonialism.
Placing tales of shapeshifting wives against the background of la vi-
olencia, one may see that female symbolic dominance is manifesting
in the public sphere when change is imminent. The appearance of a
female spokesperson, Rigoberta Menchú, on the international scene,
and the telling of the nawal tale within communities signal a surge of
force that aligns with the long historical cycle of resistance to colo-
nial and postcolonial administrations, of male political and military
engagement, and finally, against the convulsive civil war and repres-
sion, of change. Within the chaos of genocide the storytelling itself
was a ritual movement to work balance, to set ethical standards for
the community, and finally, to harness the power of the uncontrolla-
ble sacrifice that was taking place. The extent and rupture of this sac-
rifice ultimately affected the structural changes that had to come in
the sociopolitical reality that is Guatemala, through the kind of in-
version posed by Carol Smith when she stated, “One would hardly
have expected Maya self-determination to be the rallying cry to rise
out of the ashes of Guatemala’s holocaust” (Smith 1991 , 29 ). Victor
Montejo has suggested that when the violence was at its height, an
ancient Maya stirring was set into motion that had its own momen-
tum and destined outcomes (Montejo 1999 , 13 ).
The centrality of sacrifice in Maya views of land and history was po-
etically invoked by Miguel Angel Asturias when he wrote that “those
who sow the earth with maize for profit leave the earth empty of bones,
