Maya Lessons in Modernity

How have recent indigenous self-determination movements transformed political practices and disrupted indigenista discourses about what it means to be indigenous in Latin America? What roles have indigenous and non-indigenous writers and artists played in subverting the indigenista equation of indigeneity with quasi-subjectivity and quasi-agency? From distinct historical and geographical perspectives, Emilio del Valle Escalante’s Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala: Coloniality, Modernity and Identity Politics and Brian Gollnick’s Reinventing the Lacandón: Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas examine how indigenismo forms part of a larger colonial discourse that posits a mutually exclusive relationship between indigeneity and modernity. At the same time, both of these books offer insights into the multiple ways in which indigenous people assert collective anticolonial agency in their engagement with this colonial discourse. As Emilio del Valle Escalante argues, the million dollar question is not whether indigeneity and modernity are compatible, which is essentially a question that brings us right back to the indigenista status quo and is itself another discursive manifestation of the coloniality of power; the real question of the question, he suggests, is how the terms modernity and globalization function to euphemize colonization/imperialism and legitimate colonial/capitalist hegemony.

In distinct forms, each author provides valuable perspectives on the ways in which indigenista discourses mirror and legitimize colonial regimes of violence in Guatemala and Mexico, respectively. Both emphasize the ways in which twentieth- and twenty-first-century Maya cultural production engages in the very kinds of discursive subversions considered hallmarks of Western modernity and hence, incommensurate with indigenous identity such as self-consciousness, self-fashioning and dialogic banter with colonizing discourses. Each author demonstrates how Maya cultural agency and cultural production engages with and subverts those discourses in support of its varied political and cultural agendas, which, as del Valle Escalante puts it, seek to eradicate the condition of subalternity among Maya communities.

Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges centers on the multifaceted Maya movement in a Guatemala devastated by the genocidal war against the Maya majority. Del Valle Escalante weighs gains made and challenges confronted in Maya intellectual and political self-determination within and against the grain of the Guatemalan state. He examines the tensions between divergent currents within the contemporary Maya movement, namely those working toward forming an intercultural Guatemalan nation-state, and those that view the nation-state as a brutal manifestation of the coloniality of power and thus seek a more radical transformation and reparation of Guatemalan society. Maya Nationalisms is an important book for readers seeking to understand how the historic conviction of Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide relates to these Maya political and cultural mobilizations as well as to the emerging intercultural collaborations against impunity that have brought the case to trial.

Del Valle Escalante argues that, “to understand the Maya movement and its struggles, we must place it in dialogue with the non-indigenous counterparts who have given themselves the authority to speak for and about the indigenous world” (127). Yet he affirms that this project of understanding how indigenous people are rendered subaltern in indigenista discourse is only the first step in the urgent cultural and political project of indigenous emancipation from the coloniality of power. The key, he argues, is to acknowledge the ways in which the multifaceted Maya movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has interrupted that discourse by articulating a project of intercultural citizenship and decolonization. Toward this end, he outlines the ways in which Maya intellectuals in Guatemala engage with the cultural paradigms of the dominant society as a key element of their struggles against the coloniality of power inscribed in those paradigms. Del Valle Escalante poses the question: “If the coloniality of power is modernity’s dark side, then how is this being resisted or recycled? How does the Maya...