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  • Discarded Pages: Araceli Cab Cumí, Maya Poet and Politician
  • Martha Lafollette Miller
Discarded Pages: Araceli Cab Cumí, Maya Poet and Politician. By Kathleen Rock Martín. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. xx, 312. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95 cloth.

Here, Kathleen Rock Martín studies Araceli Cab Cumí (Maxcanú, Yucatán, 1932), “the only indigenous woman to have ever been elected to the Yucatecan State Congress” (p. 1). Although Cab Cumí does not fit the conventional profile of politician or writer, Martín succeeds in portraying her 75-year-old subject as a remarkable individual and as an “organic intellectual,” a term borrowed from Antonio Gramsci and defined as a person who can convey his or her social group’s world-view to outsiders and who can help to forge new leadership for that group. Martín seeks not only to examine Cab Cumí’s public life but also to demonstrate her inner life and aesthetic impulses. Martín’s work shuns and counteracts paternalistic and exploitative attitudes toward the Maya and other indigenous groups, as well as the tendency, prevalent historically, to dismiss indigenous people’s capacities.

Cab Cumí’s achievements in the political arena, though significant, were somewhat limited, a fact that Martín attributes to a variety of factors but principally to the failure of the ruling PRI to provide sufficient avenues for Cab Cumí beyond her initial service as an alternate delegate to her state congress, who through the resignation of the elected representative became a representative. Cab Cumí’s writings, mostly unpublished poetry and speeches, are likewise not remarkable for their extensiveness or for their public recognition. But the context Martín provides makes Cab Cumí’s thirst for learning and desire to make a difference for women and for the Maya seem remarkable and moving, and these elements, combined especially with the beauty of some of the poems, justify Martin’s choice of subject. Clearly, Cab Cumí, whom Martín tries to let speak for herself through her writings, attempted to create a better world and embraced the challenge of assuming agency in a society that had denied those of her gender and ethnicity such agency in the past.

In giving Cab Cumí a voice, while celebrating from within the academy a selftaught, talented woman from a marginalized community, Martín’s book resembles Broyles-Gonzalez’s, Lydia Mendoza’s Life in Music (2003), in which the author put her own commentary at the end of the book expressly to foreground the words of Mendoza herself. Like Broyles-Gonzalez, Martín comes across as a facilitator who allows her subject to tell her own story. Another similarity between the two volumes is the desire to make the subject’s words available to a general audience beyond the specialist reader. In Lydia Mendoza’s Life and Music, the singer’s recollections appear in both Spanish and English. Martín, likewise, provides translations of all the [End Page 268] works by Cab Cumí that she discusses, as well as photocopies of the original manuscripts in Cab Cumí’s handwriting. In another concession to the non-specialist reader, Martín provides copious notes about terminology, Mexican history, and the culture, geography, and history of the Yucatán peninsula. Although often useful, sometimes these explanatory notes seem digressive and/or unnecessary, as for example when Gramsci’s early life is reviewed or the term “huaraches” is defined. The information in such notes would be better omitted or included in the text itself, given that the book’s format is already somewhat unwieldy. (The English translations of Cab Cumí’s writings appear twice: first as complete poems or speeches, then piecemeal as Martín comments on them; the original manuscripts appear at the end of each chapter.)

Martín uses every effort to make her work accessible to an English-speaking public. Unfortunately, the translations do not do justice to Cab Cumí’s original poetry and in fact not only leave out the graceful rhymes and other important formal touches but also contain frequent errors. For example, “Heme aquí” (Here I am) is translated as “I have here” (p. 151); “trinos” is rendered...

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