Paul K. Eiss

Redemption's archive: Remembering the future in a revolutionary past

While Alice brushed the White QueenOs tousled hair, the monarch offered her employ as a ladyOs maid for a salary of two pence a week, along with a regular ration of jam. As Lewis Carroll relates in Through the Looking Glass, Alice was disinclined to accept in any case. Nonetheless, she grew disturbed when the Queen informed her that the offered jam was only to be given Oevery other dayO--that is, only OyesterdayO and Otomorrow,O but never Otoday.O Alice immediately realized that she would never receive jam on the series of OtodaysO she worked, but could only enjoy the expectation of receiving it in the future, or perhaps the memory of having received it previously. In response to AliceOs questions about the proposed arrangement, the Queen attributed her confusion to the Oeffect of living backwards,O a prospect that Oalways makes one a little giddy at first.O The Queen explained that Alice lived OforwardsO and was thus condemned to remember only Obackwards.O The White Queen, on the other hand, lived ObackwardsO and could remember Oboth ways,O informed by a previous experience both of the future and of the past. The monarch was so confident of her faculties that she had the KingOs Messenger sent to prison for punishment in advance of his trial and sentencing. OOf course,O the White Queen explained, Othe crime comes last of all.OSee Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Norton, 1971), 150-51.

The Narcomedia A Reader’s Guide

Most commentators interpret the messages left by drug traffickers—often accompanied by gruesomely disfigured human remains—as simple acts of score-settling or claims of territory between rival groups. A case study of the narcomedia—narcomensajes, narcovideos, and narcomantas— in Yucatán in 2008, as well as an exploration of contemporary public debates relating the narcomedia at the national level over the ensuing years, provides some alternative ways to read the narcomedia: in the context of the rise of the new media; in terms of networks of relationships between new and “old” media; as interventions into regionally embedded and nationally framed political struggles; and as a focal point of struggles over media censorship, the public sphere, and counterpublics in contemporary Mexico. Mayoría de los comentaristas interpreta los mensajes dejados por narcotraficantes, a menudo acompañados por restos humanos brutalmente desfigurados, como simples actos de venganza o reclamos territoriales entre grupos rivales. Un estudio de caso de los narcomedios (narcomensajes, narcovideos y narcomantas) en Yucatán en 2008, así como una exploración de los debates públicos contemporáneos relativos a éstos a nivel nacional en los años subsiguientes, ofrece algunas alternativas de lectura: en el contexto del surgimiento de los nuevos medios; en relación a las redes de relaciones entre los medios nuevos y “viejos”; como intervenciones en luchas políticas integradas regionalmente y enmarcadas a nivel nacional; y como un punto focal de luchas sobre la censura de los medios de comunicación, la esfera pública y contrapúblicos en el México contemporáneo.

Constructing the Maya

The boys stand barefoot, clad in fraying garments. They do not face the photographer, but rather gaze smiling, perhaps laughing, to their right. A caption dates the photograph (see the cover image) to 1955, places it at San Juan Chamula, a Tzotzil town in the Chiapas highlands, and specifies that it was taken in the course of an anti–whooping cough campaign organized by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI, National Indigenist Institute). The boys’ laughter, however, was not in response to the prospect of their imminent vaccination, but rather to a spectacle provided by the INI for the occasion: Teatro Petul, a puppet show, staged off camera to the boys’ right. Teatro Petul’s comical performances, in native languages such as Tzotzil, were intended to convince as they entertained, conveying to audiences young and old the importance of collaborating with the INI’s modernization and public health programs. More than simply documenting an immunization campaign, the photograph seems to document a novel relationship between the Mexican state and its indigenous subjects. That relationship, the photograph seems to suggest, could be one built on affect, trust, and even friendship, thus securing the promises of modernity with the power of laughter. The articles presented in this collection under the title “Constructing the Maya” are case studies of ethnicity and state formation in indigenous areas of Yucatán (Eiss and Fallaw), highland Chiapas (Lewis), and highland Guatemala (Carey and Little). Both individually and as a collective, the authors are well aware of the difficulties of adopting “the Maya” as a rubric. While the term “Maya” has gained in currency in recent years in the wake of pan-Maya movements in Guatemala and Mexico (Fischer and

Playing mestizo: festivity, language, and theatre in Yucatán, Mexico

ABSTRACT This article takes Yucatán’s ‘Monument to Mestizaje’ as the entry point to an analysis of mestizo culture in Yucatán in the 19th and 20th centuries. Providing three genealogies of mestizaje in Yucatán – focused on festivity, language, and theatre – this article takes a historical and performative approach; it focuses neither on the workings of ‘mestizo’ social identity nor on ideologies of mestizaje, but on the performance of mestizo acts in particular historical contexts and in politically charged ways. In festive dances, the speaking of ‘mixed’ Maya, and racial impersonations performed on stages of theatre or politics, Yucatecans enact mestizaje in ways that sometimes ratify hegemonic racial discourses, but other times leave them in pieces.

Introduction: Mestizo acts

ABSTRACT How is one to approach mestizaje in a way that is not definitionally predicated on ‘race,’ or at least, on a modernist formulation of race as phenotypically expressed biological difference? The contributors to this volume provide explorations of this question in varied national contexts (Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru), from the16th century to the present. They treat ‘mestizo acts’ neither as expressions of preexisting social identities, nor as ideologies enforced from above, but as cultural performances enacted in the in-between spaces of social and political life. Moreover, they show how ‘mestizo acts’ not only express or reinforce social hierarchies, but institute or change them – seeking to prove – or to dismantle – genealogies of race, blood, sex, and language in public and political ways.