Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures

5. Telling Maya Modernity: The Works of María Luisa Góngora Pacheco, Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and Briceida Cuevas Cob

133 five Telling Maya Modernity The Works of María Luisa Góngora Pacheco, Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and Briceida Cuevas Cob As outlined in the previous chapter, Yucatec Maya storytelling must be considered an episteme, and stories such as “The Story of Juan Rabbit” contain the formulae, tropes, and narrative structures that serve as a basis from which to articulate performances of new stories like “The Waiter and the Gringo.” Overemphasis on the word tradition in the expression “oral tradition” thus occludes the fact that this tradition remains a viable mechanism through which Yucatec Maya and other indigenous communities understand the modernity we all share. It should come as no surprise, then, that many Yucatec Maya authors have adopted the position of the storyteller or emphasized acts of storytelling to construct their own written literary works. I argue that works that exhibit these tendencies do so in order to mobilize Latin letters in the service of Yucatec Maya oral performance, essentially claiming the space of the written page for this Maya episteme and the articulation of what Castañeda and Hervik have labeled “Maya modernity” (Hervik 163–89; Castañeda 21). Recognizing that indigenous women have often been portrayed as repositories of indigenous traditions, this chapter focuses on the works of three Yucatec Maya women: María Luisa Góngora Pacheco, Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and Briceida Cuevas Cob, in order to demonstrate how these women harness the storyteller’s voice to position Yucatec Maya female subjects at the center of how modernity is constructed and interpreted within Yucatec Maya communities.1 Moreover, it should be noted that these female writers write from a position of triple marginalization. Xóchitl Gálvez, an Hñahñu (Otomí) speaker from Mexico, describes this state as “being poor, being a woman, and being 134 • Chapter 5 indigenous” (quoted in Kellogg 174). Indigenous movements themselves are not devoid of these tensions (Warren 241, n14), and examples from oral literature even show how physical abuse against women is ideologically normalized at the local level.2 As recently demonstrated by Diana Gómez Correal, even sacred indigenous texts are not necessarily immune from normalizing unequal gender relations within indigenous communities. Yucatec women writers in particular often take a critical stance with regard to their own culture. Despite the “renaissance” Maya culture in Yucatán has experienced since the mid-1990s, these women have advocated that an end to their marginalization within the larger Maya community should accompany this more general rebirth (Leirana Alcocer, “La literatura” 67–68). Folklore and Storytelling in Writing Two of the authors that will be examined here, María Luisa Góngora Pacheco and Briceida Cuevas Cob, are associated with the Montemayorled workshops and the literature series known as Maya Dziibo’ob Bejla’e, or “Contemporary Maya Writing.” As such, the criticism leveled at this project provides ample background for issues of representation surrounding indigenous cultures as well as an appropriate segue into these works and the storytellers represented in them. The most thorough of these comes from the Cataluñan scholar Francesc Ligorred Perramon, who finds the project [demuestra] un espíritu controlado de rescate y de preservación lingüística y literaria de lo indígena como fundamento para la integración de una sola Nación Mexicana; una impresión-presentación populista; un indigenismo apegado al ámbito rural y alejado de la modernidad; una transcripción de la oralidad; un bilingüismo dudoso, ya que en unas ocasiones , el texto originario pareciera estar escrito en castellano o, al menos, recreado a partir de esta lengua ¿reaparece el fantasma de la traducción, lingüística y/o cultural?; un cierto mensaje-indirecto-mexicanista integrador ; unos autores, más o menos, preseleccionados; un uso del maya y del castellano que llega a ser simultáneo en los llamados talleres literarios; etc. . . . En fin, como decíamos en la Introducción, se trata de presentar una ‘literatura mexicana escrita en lengua maya.’ (Mayas y coloniales 126; italics in original) [shows] a controlled spirit of rescue, of literary and linguistic preservation of what is indigenous as the basis for integration into a unified Mexican Telling Maya Modernity • 135 Nation; a populist impression-presentation; an indigenism stuck to rural environs and distanced from modernity; a transcription of orality; a dubious bilingualism where on some occasions the originary text appears to have been written in Castilian or, at...