CHAPTER 13 THE INDIAN VOICE IN RECENT MESOAMERICAN LITERATURE 479Figure 13.2 “Día de los muertos: la
ofrenda” [Day of the Dead: the
Offering], fresco by Diego Rivera in the
Ministerio de Educación Pública in
Mexico City. Reproduced with
permission of the Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México.1954, at which time the U.S.-backed counterrevolution both directly and indirectly
discouraged indigenistapolitical and cultural programs (as discussed in Chapter 8).
During this brief decade, however, the Guatemalan government sponsored major
research projects focusing on the nation’s majority Indian population; from that pe-
riod forward to our time, anthropologists, linguists, and ethnohistorians, many of
them foreign, have been relatively free to conduct research there.
Although Indian themes in the arts and in popular and institutional culture have
never achieved the huge popularity that they have in Mexico, the middle and late
twentieth century have produced major discoveries and studies of Guatemalan colo-
nial ethnohistoric documents written in Indian languages. In addition, a significant
corpus of ethnographic literature and important collections of Indian oral traditions
have also appeared during this period. In spite of these scholarly advances in the
post-1954 era, local and national government interest in the Indian past and pre-
sent has been, until the past few years, largely focused on the value of Indian “folk-
loric” themes (for example, Indian festivals and architectural monuments) for
promoting tourism.