Chol (Mayan) Folktales: A Collection of Stories from the Modern Maya of Southern Mexico by Nicholas A. Hopkins And J. Kathryn Josserand (review)

Lest the casual reader overlook this volume because of its narrowly focused title, it must be pointed out immediately that the work is far more than another collection of Maya tales. Drawing on decades of fieldwork in Mexico collaborating with Ausencio “Chencho” Guzmán, Nicholas A. Hopkins and J. Kathryn Josserand’s latest publication combines the presentation of bilingual texts (in Chol and English) with highly nuanced essays and thorough introductions to the stories themselves. This format provides the novice in the field with enough information to engage the material and the expert with a number of challenging insights into Chol culture and storytelling in general. In sum, the work should find a welcome home on the shelves of scholars and enthusiasts alike, and may even be useful in upper-level undergraduate or graduate classrooms as an accessible text that could be used to introduce students to the complexities of contemporary Maya cultures and storytelling traditions.

Within this context, one of most fascinating aspects of Hopkins and Josserand’s study is the fact that their principal collaborator, Ausencio (Chenco) Cruz Guzmán, “identifies himself as a Ladino, not an ethnic Chol,” whose life experiences meant he was fluent in Spanish and Chol and “had acquired an extensive repertory of folktales and stories” (p. xi). In other words, the volume’s central storytelling voice challenges many preconceived notions about who tells stories, how, and why. Although the authors themselves do not spend much time meditating on the implications of a non-Maya interlocutor relating Maya stories in a Maya language, Cruz Guzmán’s positionality no doubt opens up into a series of fascinating questions as scholars have long noted a tendency for these racial power dynamics to run in the opposite direction. Writing on the ethnic identity of James D. Sexton’s collaborator, Tz’utujil Maya Ignacio Bizarro Ujpán, for example, Marc Zimmerman compares his status to that of K’iche’ Maya Rigoberta Menchú Tum, noting that Ujpán may “best represent the more individualized, ladinoized Indians integrated in relatively privileged ways into the national system” (1996:121). Cruz Guzmán would seem to be the opposite, a self-described Ladino who has incorporated aspects of a Chol Maya identity. Given the privileged status of language as a marker of cultural and ethnic identity in academic scholarship and indigenous movements alike, the notion of a mestizo or ladino who is culturally and linguistically fluent enough in an indigenous language to be a superb storyteller strikes one as something of an impossibility. And yet, in both language and style, that is precisely what Cruz Guzmán appears to be.

The stories are grouped into three sections–“Myths and Fables,” “Tales of the Earth Lord,” and “Things That Come Out of the Woods.” Unlike many collections of Maya narratives, these include not only iterations of frequently anthologized tales such as “The Blackman” (“El Negro Cimarron”) and “The Turtle and the Deer,” but also a contemporary narrative about a personal encounters with the supernatural, “A Visit to Don Juan.” The historicity that results through the juxtaposition of these narratives themselves creates a welcome counterpoint to the articulation of folklore as occurring in a remote past. Recalling the format of a book like Allan F. Burns’s An Epoch of Miracles, here the presentation of the stories themselves further emphasizes storytelling’s status as living verbal art through introductions that locate individual tellings as occurring among a unique set of actors in a particular setting at a particular moment in time. Digressions and audience interventions are included as part of the stories themselves, aspects of storytelling’s meaning-making process, and not ancillary events to be discarded in preparation for publication. What may strike some as a mundane editorial decision thus underscores communal aspects of storytelling...