484 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
In the following excerpt (from the 1962 English translation Juan the Chamula),
Juan Pérez Jolote tells of his homecoming to his Indian village of birth after a ten-
year absence during which he fought as a conscripted soldier in the Mexican Revo-
lution (see Figure 8.10).I went into the house and greeted my father, but he didn’t recognize me. I’d almost for-
gotten how to speak Tzotzil, and he couldn’t understand what I was saying. He asked me
who I was and where I came from.
“You still don’t know me? I’m Juan!”
“What?... You’re still alive! But if you’re Juan, where have you been?... I went to
the farm twice to look for you.”
“I left the farm and went to Mexico City to be a soldier.” I was kneeling down as I said
this.
“Did you really become a soldier?”
“Yes, papacito.”
“Well, I’ll be damned! But how come you didn’t get killed?”
“Because God took care of me.”
Then he called to my mother. “Come here and see your son Juan! The cabrón has
come back to life!”
My mother came in and my father asked her, “Do you know who this is?”
I knelt down again. “I’m your Juan, mamacita.”
My mother began to cry and said to my father, “Look at him, he’s grown up! If you
hadn’t hit him so much, he wouldn’t have run away from us.”
My father said, “Well, he’s back now, so that’s that. Let’s go inside.”
They gave me a chair and I sat down and looked at them. I couldn’t make any con-
versation because I’d forgotten too much of our language.
They called my brother Mateo and my sister Nicholasa to come see me. “Come here!
It’s Juan who ran away!”
My brother and sister came in to greet me, but I couldn’t talk with them, all I could
do was look at them. They didn’t remember me, because they’d been so little when I left
home.
“He’s your older brother,” my mother told them. “The one that ran away because his
father kept beating him.”
Then my sister said, “We thought you must be dead.”
“No, thanks to God. He took care of me.”
Some of the words I used were Tzotzil, but the rest were Spanish. Everybody laughed
at me because I couldn’t say things correctly in our language.
And I stayed here, I lived in my own village again. The first night I woke up when my
father started blowing on the embers of the cooking fire. I was afraid he’d come over and
wake me up by kicking me. But he didn’t, because I was a man now! My mother got out
of bed and gave him some water so he could wash his hands. She washed hers, too, and
began to grind the dough for the tortillas.
We all gathered around the fire to warm ourselves, and I watched the flames, how they
surround the comal [tortilla griddle] on which the tortillas were baking.... While my
mother was making the tortillas I remembered a lot of things I’d forgotten: my mother’s
dreams, the stories the old people like to tell, their joys and sorrows.
Three hours later the sky grew bright and the sun came up from behind the moun-
tains. My mother put some coals into the clay incense burner and went out to greet the
first rays of the sun. She dropped some pieces of copal into the burner, knelt down to kiss
the ground, and begged the sun to protect us and give us health. (Pozas Arciniega
1962:44–47)