Precious Water, Priceless Words: Fluidity and Mayan Experience on the Guatemalan-Belizean Border

This article challenges the long-standing omission of Mayan Belizean epistemologies from discussions of Central American intellectual production, through the study of a novel by David Ruiz Puga, Got seif de cuin! (1995), and frames code-switching and multilingualism as techniques of resistance. Born out of Mayan beliefs about the fluidity and importance of water, such practices embolden the novel’s Mayan characters as they pass from being “subjects” of the Queen in British Honduras to “citizens” in Creole Belize. The text becomes a critical assessment of language/literature, breaking the rules of colonialist monolingual imperial, as well as national and literary traditions. As such, Got seif de cuin! defies the constrictive premises that excised the Mayan borderlands’ consciousness from the Isthmus’ regional literary history.