Why All the Excitement?: “Hbaatab kaaswelah,” a Yukatek Maya Oral History of the End of the World

As the “end” of the Maya calendar approaches, a peculiar sort of “Maya fever” has gripped many in the Western media. While it would be impossible to disassociate the recent spate of Maya-themed movies like Apocalypto and The Ruins from a general Western fascination with Maya cultures, these films nonetheless represent a cinematographic and artistic trend that distorts Native American cultures, histories, and knowledges in ways that are easily accommodated to Western ways of knowing. This trend has recently culminated in the film 2012 and the genre of “Maya-themed” books spawned by the intersection of Western popular culture’s fascination with Maya cultures and the “end” of the Maya calendar. The slight-of-hand through which these works achieve their signifying power resides in their alienation of indigenous cultural elements, situations in which “aunque los elementos culturales siguen siendo [indígenas], la decisión sobre ellos es expropiada” (Bonfil Batalla 52). Indeed, these representations are an avenue through which dominant societies discursively assume control over indigenous cultures, using them as primary material to stage a variety of ideological fantasies.

Assessing how Mayas must respond to these images, the Jakaltek Maya Victor Montejo asserts, “the Maya must now focus their attention on the construction of texts (autohistory) that could destroy the negative images that are embedded in the minds of the ladino (non-Maya) population of Guatemala” (62). This article considers Montejo’s dictum within the context of the Yukatek Maya oral literature in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Rather than focusing on how contemporary authors construct such texts, this article focuses on the production of such autohistories in a story from the region’s archeological Golden Age in the mid-twentieth century, the oral story “Hbaatab kaaswelah” ‘Village Chief Cazuela’ (recorded 1930; published 2000). This article explores how both the story and its narrative situation address issues of cultural control that are no less relevant during the current “Maya fever” than they were when the story was told.

“Hbaatab kaaswelah”: an Oral History of the End of the World

Any approach to a text like “Hbaatab kaaswelah” must begin with an emphasis on the text’s orality. That is, although one may now encounter the story in written form, the text of “Hbaatab kaaswelah” is the transcription of a story told by the Yukatek Maya Lázaro Poot to the U.S.-based researcher Manuel J. Andrade in 1930. Poot’s performance of the story comes out of Yukatek Maya oral literary tradition and cannot be confused with Andrade’s recording.¹ Recognizing this story’s orality does not fetishize the “overall model of an oral America” that Gordon Brotherston has found in many works dealing with oral literatures and histories (40–5), but rather provides a context for understanding the agency that Poot exercises with regard to Maya culture in telling this particular story in this particular way.

Coincidentally, and as I will explore later in this article, cultural control is at the heart of “Hbaatab kaaswelah.” The position of “hbaatab” or ‘village chief’ dates to pre-colonial Yucatán and after the Conquest it became a person who, by the nineteenth century, was first and foremost a tax collector (Rugeley 12). Terry Rugeley claims not only that “The importance of the batabs’ crumbling status cannot be overestimated in tracing the origins of [Yucatán’s] Caste War [1847–1912],” but also that “The backbone of revolutionary instigation was a conspiracy among the batabs of a string of eastern communities” (185). As Poot opens the story, he says that one of the batab Cazuela’s two daughters has married a foreigner, in Yukatek referring to the man as both “huntúul náachil kàahil” ‘someone from a distant town’ and “ts’ùul,” a word connoting someone with white skin, someone with a good deal of wealth, or a foreigner (Poot 275; 278).² Interestingly, this question of foreignness plays a pivotal role in another Yukatek Maya text, the Chilam Balam of Chumayel (comp. 1800s), in which Others are both Mesoamerican...