Janferie Stonebecause it is the bones of the forefathers that give the maize, and then
the earth demands bones, and the softest ones, those of children, pile
up on top of her and beneath her black crust, to feed her” (quoted in
Menchú 1984 , 38 ). But it is necessarily women who carried the bur-
den of bringing those children into a corporeality. That was, and is,
anything but poetic in practice. The lives of Maya women are shaped
by a deep want that makes the beauty and drive of Maya expressive
culture more penetrating.
During la violencia the presence of women in traje assumed a greater
significance, contrasting characterizations of women as delicadas (weak,
frail) with women as valientes (Hendrickson 1995 , 133 ) for carrying
the markers of Maya culture when men had ceased to do so for fear
of being picked up by the army on conscription or guerilla sweeps.
The everyday secular performance of women came to carry a higher
political stake in the context of state violence. But the role of women
as nawals took place against a deeper Maya ideology. Supporting
the proposition that the nawal describes an alternate role to that of
the idealized woman in traje are the words Asturias used to describe
nawalism: “becoming animal without ceasing to be a person” where
“animal and person co-exist in them, through the will of their pro-
genitors at birth” (quoted in Menchú 1984 , 38 ). In the Maya world-
view, the progenitors of society, both mythically and in their current
embodiments as leaders in the towns, are named as the mother–fa-
thers. At the end of the tale told in San Andrés, the wife as nawal has
been driven into the spiritual realm inhabited by the ambiguous and
ancestral forms from which the communities must make themselves
anew after the terror. Rigoberta Menchú defined the nawal of a child
as “a shadow, his (or her) protective spirit who will go through life
with him [or her]... the representative of the earth, the animal world,
the sun and water, and in this way the child communicates with na-
ture” (Menchú 1984 , 18 ).
The deeper metaphorical burden of the nawal tale, beyond its mes-
sages of violence and distrust in the affairs of humans, is to carry the
regenerative power of women back into nature, into the earth, so that
humans may renew society in the aftermath of violencia. The woman
as nawal fulfills an extraordinary spiritual performance. Only thus