CHAPTER 13 THE INDIAN VOICE IN RECENT MESOAMERICAN LITERATURE 491It is important to note that the couplet pattern and multiple forms of such re-
dundancy do not by any means characterize all of Mesoamerican verbal art. Readers
will see in the examples that follow in this section that different linguistic traditions
and different performers within these traditions do not follow couplet structure with
any rigidity or absolute consistency. Furthermore, different scholars who have col-
lected and transcribed oral texts from Mesoamerican traditions do not always agree
on how best to translate the pattern of native oral style into Western languages. There
is, however, a “center of gravity” to Mesoamerican oral literary style that tends, like
so many aspects of their expressive and spiritual universe, to complementarity, du-
ality, and opposition.
Three examples of contemporary Mesoamerican verbal art are provided in the
pages that follow. The first case study, from the Chamula Tzotzil of Chiapas, Mex-
ico, provides a broad portrait of the content, structure, and poetics of a living oral
tradition. The second case study, from the Huichol of Western Mexico, presents a
long didactic or instructional text dictated by a shaman. The purpose is to explain
the meaning of a native ritual practice, that of the peyote vision quest. In this case
study, we will see how different genres of stylized language move freely in and out
of the flow of ordinary conversational language. The third example, from the Nahu-
atl-speaking people of Central Mexico, presents an extract from what is now re-
garded as one of the first major Nahuatl-language texts to be transcribed in the
twentieth century. Transcribed and translated by Fernando Horcasitas from a re-
markable narrator, Doña Luz Jiménez, it recounts a Nahua Indian view of the Mex-
ican Revolution.
The Tzotzil Mayas of Chiapas, Mexico
This case study comes from the research of Gary H. Gossen. The goal of the descrip-
tion that follows is to illustrate the importance and the extraordinary diversity and
coherence of stylized language use in a Mesoamerican Indian community, San Juan
Chamula, the largest (over 100,000 people) of twenty Tzotzil Maya–speaking municipios
found in highland Chiapas today. (See the account on Chamula in Chapter 8).
What is a literature? The term becomes feeble when one tries to apply it to non-
literate oral traditions. For literate traditions, the term carries some evaluative nuance;
literature contains exemplary works of recognized genres: short story, poetry, essay,
and so forth. For oral traditions, the task of considering them as literatures becomes
enormously more difficult, for although there may be a native view of what counts
as a native genre in the tradition, it is ultimately up to those of us who care to take
them seriously as literatures to classify culturally significant genres and provide good
examples of them. One cannot provide the wood smoke and laughter or adequately
transcribe the delight that listeners find in a well-turned sexual pun. Nor can one re-
produce the complex cadence of spoken Tzotzil in the silent fog on a muddy moun-
tain path as an old man tells you of his father’s encounter with an earth lord. Much,
therefore, is lost in sketching an oral tradition whose very life is ephemeral, highly
variable, and always linked to a particular performance context that will never again
be quite the same.