Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico

6. Seeing Double: Indigenous Authors, Readers, and the Paradox of Revival

6 Seeing Double Indigenous Authors, Readers, and the Paradox of Revival Xiñee gui’chi’, paraa biree gui’chi’, gasti’ cá lu, gutaguna’ diidxa’ riree ruaanu, diidxa’ biruba ca bixhozególanu lu guie, ni bí’ndcabe lu geela’ ra biyaacabe, ni bitieecabe guriá lídxicabe, ndaani’ xhiu’ stícabe, ra yoo la’hui’ stícabe Why write on paper? Where was paper born, that it was born white and imprisons our words: those our ancestors carved among flowers, those they sang in the night as they danced, those they used to adorn their houses, the inside of their temples, their royal palaces? —Victor de la Cruz, Zapotec poet and indigenous intellectual, from the poem “Tu laanu, tu lanu,” (“Who are we? What is our name?”) in La flor de la palabra 198 Chapter 6 The Double-­ Edged Pen The poem excerpted in theepigraph, “Tu laanu, tu lanu” (“Who AreWe? What Is Our Name?”), is from a widely anthologized work by Victor de la Cruz, one of Mexico’s most prominent indigenous writers.1 While his history is unique in many ways, it is also representative of the indigenous intellectuals who drive “the continent-­ wide rise in . . . literatures in the indigenous languages of Latin America” (Franco 2005: 455). One practice above all unifies them: they publish their work in bilingual editions with the indigenous-­ language version facing the Spanish-­ language version. There are departures from this norm, in which texts appear in indigenous languages only: Heriberto Prado Pereda’s recent work as part of the Mazatec Indigenous Church, for example, or the set of three Zapotec-­ language poems that conclude a thirty-­ poem volume by the Zapotec poet Javier Castellanos (1999 [1986]). But these exceptions are rare, and the convention of bilingual publication is so thoroughly established that publishing monolingual indigenous-­language texts is politically charged, a gesture that makes a statement. The vast majority of modern literary works in indigenous languages appear in editions in which the indigenous-­language version—the “original” or “true” text—is presented on the left, and the Spanish version—the “translation”—appears on the right.2 Thus, the very nature of this literature anticipates a double audience. How readers of indigenous literature literally read such texts—beginning with the basics of whether they examine one version or the other, or both—aligns with other tendencies and assumptions.While indigenous writers are at least ostensibly always addressing two (or more) audiences simultaneously, they are also required to “see” double, as well: to pay attention to the different assumptions that go along with writing for different audiences.The ability of a given author to sustain such double vision has implications for the impact and influence authors can have. The doubleness of these texts also has implications for readers. Most indigenous readers encounter texts written in their native languages in bilingual form, with the two versions on facing pages. Like authors, readers of indigenous texts participate in a peculiar form of double vision: they use two languages at once, or they treat one as largely irrelevant. In the lattercase, the text in the indigenous language becomes an emblem representing something about the author’s identity, thus framing the work in certain ways, but they do not interact with it beyond reading it as a symbol. Readers of indigenous-­ language texts also engage in a more pervasive kind of double reading, however , as the bilingual nature of the text is linked, in ways that shift for dif- Seeing Double 199 ferent types of readers, to different discourses about indigenous identity, national belonging, modernity, and tradition. What, then, are indigenous-­ language texts? What are the implications of developing a bilingual literature based on “double texts” and, perhaps, a deeper level of double orientation? Local context is obviously critical to the meaning people make of texts. The Sierra has witnessed at least two cases that demonstrate this: largely unsuccessful attempts by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (sil) in the mid-­ twentieth century to promote certain kinds of indigenous language texts (Gudschinsky 1951–52; Pike 1960; Pike and Cowan 1959), and the differential responses by people in the Sierra to the ideas about texts that undergird the Sierra’s revival projects. Because indigenous-­ language literature is explicitly tied to notions of indigeneity, similar perils attend assumptions about how indigenous identity and community are conceived. The differences among the revival projects in Nda Xo mirror differences among revival projects viewed in...