CHAPTER 13 THE INDIAN VOICE IN RECENT MESOAMERICAN LITERATURE 477and afflictions (irrational, prelogical thought; sensuality; cruelty; paganism, etc.). In
the end, nineteenth-century representation of Indians, such as it existed, was not
about Indians, but about creole views of themselves and of what they were not.THE REPRESENTATION OF INDIAN VOICES IN RECENT
MESOAMERICAN ART AND LITERATURE
Mexico
The beginning of the twentieth century marks both a political and a methodologi-
cal change in approaches to recording, understanding, and representing the Indian
voice in Mesoamerican verbal arts and literature. The political backdrop of this
change is manifest in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1918, which sought noth-
ing less than a redefinition of Mexico, to itself and to the world at large. Along with
the radical reforms in land tenure, labor laws, church-state relations, and govern-
ment stewardship of vital natural resources and industries, the revolution brought
massive ideological changes that were reflected in the arts, sciences, and literature.
The unifying theme of this intellectual transformation was the celebration of Mex-
ico’s Indian past and present as the soul of its national identity (See Chapter 8).
Indigenistathemes came to permeate national life, from public policy to creative
work in the arts: for example, the symphonic music of Carlos Chávez and the great
school of muralist painters, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros.
Popular and academic interest in Indian and peasant art forms flourished. Pre-
Columbian architecture and decorative art, as well as contemporary folk art, pro-
vided the models and inspiration for expressive forms as diverse as government
buildings, schools, clinics, novels, calendar arts, and formal painting. Indeed, the
proletarian political focus of the revolution found perhaps its optimal expression in
the graphic, plastic, and verbal arts, for these forms were thought to communicate
the new revolutionary order more effectively than formal written tracts and abstract
public policy statements (Figures 13.1, 13.2, and 13.3).
Not only did Indian and peasant themes enjoy a vogue in popular and academic
culture, but there was also abundant public funding to support the scientific collec-
tion, study, and publication of native art forms. Nationalism and nation-building jus-
tified massive public investment in archaeological and ethnographic research and in
restoration of pre-Columbian monuments. These same nationalistic efforts encour-
aged scholarship in the area of native languages and oral literatures, as well as re-
search on colonial documents written in these languages. Not only Mexicans, but
also foreign scholars—including anthropologists, historians, and Protestant mis-
sionaries—acquired sophisticated knowledge of Indian languages, thus enabling
them to record and document, from live field settings, a substantial archive of mod-
ern Indian art and literature. Some of this contemporary material was transcribed and
translated from Indian languages that had never before, prior to the twentieth cen-
tury, enjoyed a written literature of any kind.
Another important trend in twentieth-century Mexico has been the revitaliza-
tion of scholarship on the Indian languages and literatures that have a significant