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30 two Writing THE Word Storytellers, Cultural Brokers, and the Shape of Indigenous Memory The situation possesses the trappings of an archetypal romance. Upon being confronted by the ruins of a mysterious ancient city, a white explorer turns to one of the natives for a bit of local knowledge. Setting the scene, the narrator informs us: “The Indians regard these ruins with superstitious reverence. They will not go near the place at night, and they have the old story that immense treasure is hidden among them. Each of the buildings has its name given to it by the Indians. This is called the Casa del Anano [sic], or House of the Dwarf, and it is consecrated by a wild legend, which, as I sat in the doorway, I received from the lips of an Indian, as follows: . . .” (Stephens, Central America 423).1 Appealing to an authority based on the author-narrator’s firsthand account of things, these words reflect the attitudes and postures found in numerous works of ethnography, anthropology , travel literature, and folklore. The author-narrator immediately establishes a safe distance between an “us,” the author-narrator and his implied readership, and a “them,” the Indians, by saying they have a “superstitious reverence” for the ruined buildings. Assumed to be beyond all such superstitious belief, we readers are reminded that we should not take the story too seriously, and certainly not as seriously as the Indians take it.2 The Indians, simply by virtue of being Indians, are incapable of knowing in the ways that both reader and narrator know. They call the building the Casa del Anano, but this name comes from a “wild legend.” Moreover, Stephens’s use of the verb “call” suggests the structure’s real name and history are lost to the Indians themselves. The authoritative voice of the author-narrator Writing THE Word • 31 reasserts the truth-value of the narrative that follows by stating that this story, in all its superstition, in all its otherness, was told to him from the very lips of an Indian as they were among those very ruins. The narrator effectively steps back from his text and cedes narration to the anonymous Indian storyteller rather than risk having any part of the text’s potentially contaminating superstition being attributed to him. In doing so, the authornarrator recycles the discourse of the Indio and articulates the storyteller as a talking object who comes into being only through this layered act of metanarration. The author-narrator, and through him the reader, are silent listeners to the story “The Dwarf of Uxmal,” a story “hardly . . . more strange than the structure to which it referred” (Stephens, Central America 425). This chapter introduces the variegated relationship between storyteller and the author-narrator as cultural broker in Yucatán by focusing on a single story, “The Dwarf of Uxmal,” as iterated in the work by J. L. Stephens cited above, in the works by his Mexican contemporaries, and as told among contemporary Yucatec Maya storytellers in the bilingual town of Santa Elena. With this background, the following chapter traces the evolution of this relationship between cultural broker and storyteller as reflected across several different volumes of twentieth-century broker-edited literature: Antonio Mediz Bolio’s La tierra del faisán y del venado (Land of Pheasant and Deer; 1922); the literary magazine Yikal Maya Than (1939–1955), Luis Rosado Vega’s El alma misteriosa del mayab (Mysterious Soul of the Mayab; 1934), and Ermilo Abreu Gómez’s Leyendas y consejas del antiguo Yucatán (Tales and Legends of Ancient Yucatán; 1961); Manuel J. Andrade and Hilaria Máas Collí’s two-volume Cuentos mayas yucatecos (Yucatec Maya Stories; 1990, 2000); and Allan F. Burns’s An Epoch of Miracles (1983). In my analysis I privilege the Mayaness of these texts in order to gain a nuanced perspective on the fragmented and multilayered nature of these representations and how cultural brokers constitute, shape, situate, and mediate the figure of the Maya storyteller. These apparently aesthetic decisions are far from being ideologically neutral, as changes in how cultural brokers articulate the storyteller reflect changes in national, nationalist, and global ideologies that seek to domesticate indigenous others . By reading these texts against each other, we also observe the discursive agency exercised by the storytellers represented in these texts, as well as the mechanisms through which cultural brokers seek to blunt this agency. We thus gain a broader perspective on the multifaceted relationship between cultural broker...

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