by Luis de Lión
In the following section Pascual returns to his village to drown himself in alcohol: “When Pascual came back to town he brought with him . . . strange words, unknown, like a man who has learned other languages; on his feet he had shoes in place of the sandals made from strips of discarded rubber tires; on his head he had a hat made of vicuña leather in place of the simple grace of the woven straw hat; and on his body clothes that were different from those that people wore in the village. He wasn’t from here anymore.” Nobody recognizes him. The narrative voice offers a key element for understanding his return. Pascual “had lived with a prostitute who never bore him a child because she didn’t want it to be an Indian like its father, but who he loved anyway because of her color.” This telling information explains how Pascual was traumatized by the racism experienced in the Ladino world, but also, as Olen points out (6), how he has interiorized coloniality himself to the point that a man who has been racialized as inferior loves a Ladina prostitute simply because of the color of her skin, thus signaling the abjection of racialism. In Lugones’s words, it makes “visible the instrumentality of the colonial/modern gender system” in subjecting “both women and men of color—in all domains of existence” (1).
Pascual, carrying a big wad of bills in his pocket, heads to a cantina and starts drinking nonstop until he collapses from drunkenness. He repeats the same scene day after day until he runs out of money. He then tells Señora María to charge his bill to Juan Caca. She is surprised but goes to the white house and tells “Mister Juanito” what the drunken man had said. He then gives her “the money for the bill—plus some extra money as an advance on the man’s next bender.”
Following that section, Juan visits Pascual. However, Juan is called Gallina (Hen) by the narrative voice, and Pascual is addressed as Coyote. It becomes obvious they know each other, but both are gendered in this episode. Pascual is male (coyote). Juan is female (hen), and, for that matter, a hen admiring his gaze, his way of walking, his arms, his whole body, one wishing to be his female coyote (coyota in the original Spanish). Hen says that s/he thought he would never return. Coyote then says: “even if your town hates you, you won’t find anything like the warmth of your own little thatched hut anywhere else, especially if you are an Indian. Yeah, in other places, they’ll open their doors to you, but when they see your skin color, your face, your hair, they think that you’re not a man, but just a poor imitation of one, that you’re more like an animal, that your natural condition is to be below them.” Afterward, Pascual repeats the story about the prostitute: “And then you get together with some woman—any woman as long as her skin is a different color than yours—and that woman gives you everything a woman can give a man, except a child; because she doesn’t want that child to be like you.” Hen then gives him a sack full of white corn and another one full of black beans. Coyote “felt like crying for the first time in his life.”
Once more, the text stresses here the abjection of racialism, giving evidence as to how coloniality permeates all aspects of social existence, controlling sex, subjectivity, and self-worth while naturalizing subalternization. Behind it is the colonialized presupposition that all indigenous peoples are naturally inferior. Coloniality places subjects of color under the murderous gaze of the vigilant Eurocentric ego conquiro of Maldonado-Torres, thus debasing their very subjectivities by making them collude with the inferiorization of racialized females. Pascual and Juan are debased twins in this narrative. Only when this condition is overcome will “dawn,” that is, a new order of things where coloniality is no longer present, and, presumably, neither is gendered sexism, arrive. Still, Pascual and Juan, both racialized, colonialized males, discover each other as their equal and establish a relation of solidarity among themselves.
The third part is titled “And, in Fact, They Were Alive.” The text returns to the townspeople as a group looking at each other as if they were dead, because “they had slid down and suddenly fallen among the coals of the other side of the world.” At this point they begin to relive history backward “until they bumped into the last memory that they no longer remembered.” Then they begin to walk forward while crashing into everything they wished for. Xibalbá is here the damnation of non-European racialized subjects lost in the darkness of perpetual serfdom marked by continuous violation of their bodies, be that through rape, hunger, slavery, or any other means depriving them of agency and subjectivity.
In the following section Pascual visits the church, stealing and then raping the wooden statue of the Virgen of Concepción, in a gesture brimming with ethnic hatred. The virgin is referred to elsewhere as “la Ladina” and “the only Ladina in the village.” Despite the evident machista attitude implied in this abject gesture, de Lión reverses here its ethnic signification. The rape of indigenous women by Spanish/Criollo/Ladino men has been common since the Conquest. To this day the rape and murder of women continues to be one of Guatemala’s most entrenched crimes. In social terms, the act symbolizes the ways in which the Guatemalan army—an extension of the state—formed and deformed Pascual’s subjectivity, making of him a brutal, macho destroyer of his own culture. As Michel Foucault might say, the state makes bodies what they are and who they are. There is ample evidence of how the army made rape an instrument of destruction and “re-education,” employing it as a punitive counterinsurgency measure throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, along with the murder of Maya children. The racial resentment became confounded with machismo in the dreams of revenge, an untidy and grotesque affirmation of violence offering a problematic masculinist expression of agency. Through Pascual’s experience, the entire (male) community acquires consciousness of Ladino racism in an unresolved misogynist gesture. Del Valle Escalante argues that “the rape . . . is a radical transgression, an act that will culminate in a collective move to destroy a symbol of domination” (206). The implied “deconstruction” of the image’s power functions in the text in a way akin to sacrifice. De Lión invites the reader to imagine a rite that violates received notions of colonialist acceptance. Whereas I agree with del Valle Escalante that the virgin is “a symbol of power that spreads a colonialist Western ideology” (207), in my reading, instead of seeing rape as “symbolically representing the spiritual and political decolonization of the community” (207), the act becomes a destructive sign eliminating the possibility for transformation. It is hard to visualize sexuality as a sort of conscious manifesto when, as Karen Poe reminds us, it is mostly “the space of dissolution of subjective identity, of the loss of the self, of the failure of the exercise of power” (87). She adds that sexually, the virgin’s ardor defeated Pascual (88). Besides, there is no rebirth after this experience. The protagonists, once again, are more like the Hero Twins’ dual fathers in the Popol Wuj—defeated and mutilated by the lords of the underworld—than the Hero Twins themselves who emerge victorious at the end of their trek through Xibalbá. Where del Valle Escalante sees “a new national project” (208), I see a chaotic, failed spontaneous insurrection that, nevertheless, is transgressive and represents a promise of further changes to come that will permanently challenge coloniality. After all, we both agree that Xibalbá is “where the conflicts between death and regeneration are played out” (208), and that, indeed, “the challenge is to defy the gods of the underworld” (ibid.) to finally efface the legacy of coloniality, in the text as well as in contemporary Guatemala.
After raping the wooden image, Pascual falls asleep. The narrative voice informs us that the incident
was not without precedent. One of the town’s leaders once kissed her during the procession. Despite the priest’s intervention, all the men realized that they “wanted her, hungered for her, desired her,” and that they all had “kissed her on the mouth vicariously through the mouth of the cofradía leader.”25 In consequence, their women realized that their men did not love them. They had “only used them to release their sexual tension, to have their children, to cook their food . . . the men had of course always known that their women weren’t white; that they didn’t have blond, flowing hair . . . that they didn’t have thin bodies; and that they certainly were not Ladinas like her; now these differences seemed to weigh on them, hurt them.” When Concha and Juan heard the news, she walked out of the house.
In the fourth part, titled “And the Day Came,” we return to the townspeople. When they have found out that they are not dead, they begin to rebuild the town. Suddenly all the men realize at once that Concha is in the streets. They run to the church, force it open, throw out the old wooden Ladina virgin guilty of sleeping with Pascual, spit on her, strip her of her clothes and crown while calling her a “whore,” dress Concha in her attire, place her on the procession carrier, and take her out in a procession. The women try to rescue their husbands and sons, but the men “grabbed them by their braids, dragged them to the ground, ripped their dresses; they struck them with machetes and with pieces of firewood and slapped them in the face, on the breasts, in the sex, on the ass, on the legs, on the arms, until they left them lying there facedown or face-up in the streets, bleeding; and then, marching right over their bodies . . . they continued the procession through the streets of the town.” When the procession returns to the town square Concha asks to be taken to the pila (water deposit) in front of the town hall. She jumped from the procession carrier and ran to it. Taking her clothes off, so that all the men see her naked and stare at her black vagina, she jumps into the pila while the men rush at her and kill each other in the ensuing struggle.
Olen argues that this scene transforms Concha into a redeemer, akin to Ixkik’, the mother of the Hero Twins (22). In her reading, Concha first introduces fire into herself when burning her vagina, then plunges into the water of the pila, thus combining the two sacred elements, fire and water, needed for the birth of maize. She also succeeds in destroying the town, as the Hero Twins did with the Lords of Xibalbá. Unlike Ixkik’, however, she is not pregnant with twins, but with the understanding of the nature of coloniality and gender oppression. Olen goes on to argue that Concha is the sole character in the novel who not only undergoes a transformation, but reappears at the end in a positive light, feeding grains of maize to a rooster, a clear symbol of fecundity.
In the short section immediately following, Concha explains to Juan that all the men in the town feel nothing for the virgin but “a pure desire to fuck her.” Juan protests, but Concha argues that “she’s not our mother. She’s just another fucking Ladina; except that she was put here to show us up; you know, a town Ladina.” She then adds, “when the men from here are in the city, they look for the face of the Virgen in the faces of the Ladinas; but when they’re here in the village, they look for the face of the Ladinas in the face of the Virgen.” We also find out that Juan acquired “his unmanly mannerisms” in the seminary where he had studied for the priesthood. Concha finally states that she does not love him because he never gets his hands dirty “with shit,” and because he is “a hollow-ass faggot,” then leaves.
In a surrealist situation that could very well be a dream, a remembrance, or just him talking to himself, Juan remembers his mother telling him that he should get a woman for himself to make him food, to wash his clothes, and to close his eyes when he dies. He promises his dying mother he will do this. There is, however, a dreamlike sequence in which a woman enters his bed and forces him to have sex. Unlike previous situations, he succeeds in achieving an erection and ejaculates. The situation is written in such a fashion, though, that the reader does not know if it happened or not, and if he had sex with Concha, with the Ladina virgin, or with his own mother. The notable thing, as Poe points out, is not so much who Juan had sex with, but the fact that the woman is the active agent, transforming the male into a passive receptacle of sex, one implying the dispossession of the only power he had left as a colonialized male of color (89). The reader then discovers that, upon agreeing with his mother’s will to get married, Juan decides to find out who the woman that all the men visited is, and “one morning, when he was able to get a look at her, he realized that she looked like the one he loved in secret. Except that she was dark and Indian.” Like Pascual, Juan is in love with the wooden Ladina virgin to start with, thus confirming his state as Pascual’s symbolic twin.
In the “Epi . . . taph,” that follows, after a surreal psychic turn, the reader further confirms that Pascual and Juan are in reality symbolic twins: “to console himself, he looked for his other. . . . He went to the mirror. . . . He wanted at least the other to keep him company. . . . When he thought that the whole him from the other side was there, he let his eyes cross the dividing line between them, to greet him, so that the other would greet him, so that he would tell him not to worry about it, that He would keep Him company.” In my reading, this split personality is both a trope of Jun Junajpu and Wuqub’ Junajpu, and, at the same time, an epistemic metaphor of the Maya/Ladino split identity traversing both text and society, which destroys the individual as well as the town and the entire community. The protagonists represent two faces of the excruciating difficulties confronted by Westernized indigenous subjects after becoming ladinoized, as symbolized by Maya men who stood as racialized beings within the two pillars of power configuring the colonial order: Pascual with the army, Juan with the church. This is why all the townspeople are dead, waiting for the dawn of a new order, and why both Pascual’s and Juan’s mirror images are “only bones . . . with a few chunks of flesh still on it, but not many, just a few rotten remnants.” The text ends with the prologue, where “the sugar apple trees . . . were populated with . . . heads of children.” The trees finally let go of their fruits, but they fell “not little by little as the fruit matured, but all at once, like rain.” Everything then rots, and the last line states, “Then, that night, first there was the wind . . . ,” the title of the first part of the text, thus completing the circular cycle.
The Coloniality of Power
The local histories of Latin American nations with ethnicized and racialized populations appear to be both systemic and intrinsic to broader relations ensnared in a racial, ethnic, and caste hierarchy and identity formation of Eurocentric origin that Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano has labeled “the coloniality of power.” As Quijano has pointed out, we cannot conceive of Latin American nation-states without the definitional framework of a comprehensive understanding of this concept that informs the position of non-European colonialized peoples, while simultaneously problematizing ethno-racial subjective formations grounded on the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race and/or caste and the memories of violence that these invoke when they articulate their discursive production. While the concept of the coloniality of power may be relatively new, emerging in the early 1990s and gaining visibility after 2000, what it represents is not itself new, when considered in the world-historical context of the emergence, development, and decline of the modern world-system.
Coloniality of power means the production of identities based on race, conjoined w
ith a hierarchy between European and non-European identities in which the first have oppressed all others, together with the construction of mechanisms of social domination designed to preserve this historical foundation and social classification. The novelty of the argument is, therefore, both in regard to the explanation of the world-historical nature of coloniality, as well as its systemically constitutive role in the making of the modern world. Quijano is especially attentive to the efficacy of colonial racial categories and relations, given how they reproduce unequal political and economic power. They have thus constituted a framework whereby inequality reproduces itself.26 Coloniality would coincide with what Boaventura de Sousa Santos labels “abyssal thinking,” one where subalternized peoples become nonexistent in the eyes of Westerners exercising hegemony. As Arif Dirlik claims, “nationalism of the ethnoculturalist kind has always presented a predicament of easy slippage to racism” (1368), one where Mayas always end up essentialized as pre-Modern, inferior beings lacking reasoning. We cannot lose sight of the power dynamics of this labeling, nor of the coherence it lends to racial thinking across Guatemala. To the Guatemalan state, Mayas have always been fragmented nonorganic bodies coexisting and intermingling with modernity, nonsubjects excluded from conventional discourse, deliria of the secret threads of coloniality, threads of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called a “sociology of absences,” meaning an attitude whereby under the gist of rationality, ruling elites condemn to social forms of nonexistence those subjects that they label as “the ignorant, the residual, the inferior, the local, and the nonproductive”: “They are social forms of nonexistence because the realities to which they give shape are present only as obstacles vis-à-vis the realities deemed relevant, be they scientific, advanced, superior, global, or productive realities.” Starting with Life Commences in Xibalbá, however, we began to witness the rebirth of a process that testifies to the knowledge, skill, value, experience, and authority of Maya subjects employing fascinating rhetorical devices to engage coloniality and rearticulate their subjectivities within a decolonial framework. The overall Maya textual archive in process of constitution is already a rhetorical monument to this effort, a counterdiscursive strategy of the first order for the rearticulation of an alternative social imaginary within their scope, and a promise of peoples’ abilities to rearticulate their knowledges within the limits of the Eurocentric world, to then deploy across borders, disciplines, ethnicities, epistemes, or temporalities, creative frameworks to engage and confront centuries of subalternization and colonialized oppression.