Travelers to the Other World: A Maya View of North America

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T ravel writing, the literary exploration of other cultures, has long been a tradition in the English-speaking world. This book turns the tradition on its head and records what is surely the first Maya literary exploration of the United States. The authors were Tzotzil-speaking Zinacantec Maya who accompanied Robert Laughlin, the compiler of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, on two trips to the United States. These were action-packed journeys. On the initial voyage, in 1963, they were in the United States for the assassination of President Kennedy. “The murderer had never met the President. He never had spoken a single word to him. He didn’t even know him!” one of the Zinacantecos reports. They also met Margaret Mead at an American Anthropological Association meeting and flew on their first plane, which they referred to as a “buzzard machine.” They also visited the Navajo and Zuni reservations. On the second trip, in 1967, they stormed the Pentagon with a protest march and met the Mexican actor Cantinflas, who had just had a facelift, in New York City. It took Laughlin several years to persuade his companions to write about their travels. Laughlin notes that Romin Teratol confided to him before returning to Zinacantán, “If I tell people what I saw, nobody will believe me.” Published here with Laughlin’s more academic account of his introduction to life among the Zinacantec Maya, these remarkable travelogues shed light on both Maya and American societies. Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, now deceased, were important participants in the Harvard Chiapas Project, one of the best known long-term field research projects in anthropology. Robert M. Laughlin is curator emeritus of Mesoamerican Ethnology of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Carol Karasik is a poet, writer, and editor who has worked on books and films in the fields of anthropology, art, ecology, and educational philosophy. She lives in Chiapas, Mexico. Antzelmo and Romin flanked by B. N. Colby (left) and Robert Laughlin, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1963. Lore Colby. Jacket photo by Helga Gilbert Jacket design by Deborah Flynn Post Anthropology / Latin America University of New Mexico Press unmpress.com 800–249–7737 Robert Laughlin is a distinguished anthropologist who, among other things, is the author of The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, a project that he accurately describes as “the most comprehensive dictionary of a native language in the New World” and which took him fourteen years to complete. Tzotzil is the language of the Zinacantec Maya and, in 1963, in connection with his dictionary research, Laughlin decided to invite two of his Zinacantec collaborators, Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres, to accompany him to the United States—a place no Zinacantec had ever been. “This was the equivalent of asking two of his non-Maya colleagues to travel with him to the moon. . . .   Laughlin flipped the conventions and made Teratol and Péres the observers and himself the informant.”—Foreword, “Visits to the Underworld,” Peter Canby “This book is filled with the varieties of human experience and expression as they are seen, heard, and felt by two innocents abroad, the first Mayas to describe the United States, Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres. Impelled by the wicked desire to change masks with my companions, so that I would become the superior native and they the unwitting and incredulous ethnologists, I invited Romin and Antzelmo to describe ‘gringoland.’ They show us another world, so familiar to us, so strange to them, where their fears were allayed by their spirit of high adventure and exploration, by their ready appreciation of the sometimes ridiculous, sometimes beautiful sights that awaited them. Of course it was they who had the last laugh as they placed in my hands a Mayan mirror, in which is revealed the curious, scary, and bizarre behavior of their host and his countrymen.”—Robert Laughlin, Travelers to the Other World Teratol and Péres Tra velers to the Other World Translator and Coordinator, Robert M. Laughlin Editor, Carol Karasik Romin Teratol and Antzelmo Péres isbn 978-0-8263-4888-3 ™xHSKIMGy348883zv*:+:!:+:! “ A Maya View of  North America Travelers to the Other World Travelers to the Other World • • • ...