Why All the Excitement?: “Hbaatab kaaswelah,” a Yukatek Maya Oral History of the End of the World

Abstract

As end of calendar approaches, a peculiar sort of Maya fever has gripped many in Western media. While it would be impossible to disassociate recent spate of Maya-themed movies like Apocalypto and Ruins from a general Western fascination with cultures, these films nonetheless represent a cinematographic and artistic trend that distorts Native American cultures, histories, and knowledges in ways that are easily accommodated to Western ways of knowing. This trend has recently culminated in film 2012 and genre of Mayathemed books spawned by intersection of Western popular culture's fascination with cultures and end of calendar. slight-of-hand through which these works achieve their signifying power resides in their alienation of indigenous cultural elements, situations in which aunque los elementos culturales siguen siendo [indigenas], la decision sobre ellos es expropiada (Bonfil Batalla 52). Indeed, these representations are an avenue through which dominant societies discursively assume control over indigenous cultures, using them as primary material to stage a variety of ideological fantasies. Assessing how Mayas must respond to these images, Jakaltek Victor Montejo asserts, the must now focus their attention on construction of texts (autohistory) that could destroy negative images that are embedded in minds of ladino (non-Maya) population of Guatemala (62). This article considers Montejo's dictum within context of Yukatek oral literature in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Rather than focusing on how contemporary authors construct such texts, this article focuses on production of such autohistories in a story from region's archeological Golden Age in mid-twentieth century, oral story Hbaatab kaaswelah 'Village Chief Cazuela' (recorded 1930; published 2000). This article explores how both story and its narrative situation address issues of cultural control that are no less relevant during current Maya fever than they were when story was told. HBAATAB KAASWELAH: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE END OF THE WORLD Any approach to a text like Hbaatab kaaswelah must begin with an emphasis on text's orality. That is, although one may now encounter story in written form, text of Hbaatab kaaswelah is transcription of a story told by Yukatek Lazaro Poot to U.S.-based researcher Manuel J. Andrade in 1930. Poot's performance of story comes out of Yukatek oral literary tradition and cannot be confused with Andrade's recording. (1) Recognizing this story's orality does not fetishize overall model of an oral America that Gordon Brotherston has found in many works dealing with oral literatures and histories (40-5), but rather provides a context for understanding agency that Poot exercises with regard to culture in telling this particular story in this particular way. Coincidentally, and as I will explore later in this article, cultural control is at heart of Hbaatab kaaswelah. position of hbaatab or 'village chief' dates to pre-colonial Yucatan and after Conquest it became a person who, by nineteenth century, was first and foremost a tax collector (Rugeley 12). Terry Rugeley claims not only that The importance of batabs' crumbling status cannot be overestimated in tracing origins of [Yucatan's] Caste War [1847-1912], but also that The backbone of revolutionary instigation was a conspiracy among batabs of a string of eastern communities (185). As Poot opens story, he says that one of batab Cazuela's two daughters has married a foreigner, in Yukatek referring to man as both huntuul naachil kaahil 'someone from a distant town' and ts'uul, a word connoting someone with white skin, someone with a good deal of wealth, or a foreigner (Poot 275; 278).2 Interestingly, this question of foreignness plays a pivotal role in another Yukatek text, Chilam Balam of Chumayel (comp. …