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

Visits to the Underworld

13 Visits to the Underworld Peter Canby years ago, I spent a period of time in the remote Maya highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala. What I found in there was, to me, a seductive revelation—small houses with high-peaked thatch roofs and the smells of wood smoke and damp lanolin suffusing the air; tiny colonial-baroque chapels inside which the vacant eyes of saint-effigies peered through incense-heavy gloom. Like other visitors, I developed the powerful sense of having been transported into a parallel universe, a universe charged with a moral significance long vanished from my own. On more occasions than I can readily count, however, this reverie would be shattered by villagers seemingly determined to find out how I’d arrived in their particular hamlet. In response to their interrogations , I’d motion towards the far horizon and, in an area over which jets seldom flew, explain that I’d come from the north by plane. “And how much did that cost?” they’d demand triumphantly as if I’d already confirmed their worst suspicions. 14 Visits to the Underworld “Three or four hundred dollars,” I’d answer, halving the actual cost. “Ah ha!” they’d respond, as if I’d just resolved their ongoing debate. For a while, I took these encounters to be part of the inevitable result of coming from a rich region to a poor one, but they were persistent and similar enough that I gradually came to understand them as underlain by something else. Traditional Maya such as the Zinacantec, whom Bob Laughlin so vividly and sympathetically portrays in Travelers to the Other World, exist in a universe dominated by the sun, whose daily progress across the sky is made possible only by careful ritual conducted by intricate hierarchies of religious elders. These elders, however, must also manage the underworld, whose teeming forces are the source of the earth’s riches. In the Maya world, the underworld is all those places in which the sun doesn’t hold sway: caves, nighttime everywhere and, on a diurnal basis, along the horizon where the sun’s influence is weak. By waving to the horizon to explain my provenance, therefore, I was merely confirming what my interrogators already suspected: that the pale-skinned person before them, untutored in the proper ways of the Maya and able to spend extravagant sums to travel from the northern horizon, was in fact an underworld creature—rich, untutored, and potentially dangerous. By now, it’s no longer unusual for pale-skinned people from the north to descend on remote Maya hamlets. Nor is it unheard of for 15 Visits to the Underworld Chiapas and Guatemalan Maya to make the perilous trek to the United States, where they have learned to mow the lawns and clean the offices of the underworld people who live there. Despite these confluences, the Maya world and the world of what one Mayanist, Linda Schele (confusing her cardinal directions), sometimes referred to as “the West,” remain far apart. Among other things, the traditional Maya vision of the underworld continues to be surprisingly robust. This is perhaps because it works so well as metaphor. After all, what have the pale-skinned people ever brought the Maya but danger, trouble, and disruptive wealth? And now that the influence of the pale-skinned underworld people has become so much greater, the need for the Maya to successfully manage it has become more important than ever. Travel writing—the literary explorations of other cultures—has long been a tradition in the English-speaking world. The great virtue of Robert Laughlin’s Travelers to the Other World is that it turns this tradition on its head and records what is surely the first Maya literary exploration of the United States. 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, 16 Visits to the Underworld 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...