Men of Maize
Men of Maize
by Miguel Ángel Asturias
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in Guatemala beginning in 1898 and spanning approximately 50 years; published in Spanish (as Hombres de maíz) in 1949, in English in 1975.
SYNOPSIS
Six separate yet interwoven stories explore the plight of native people of Guatemala, who fight to maintain their cultural identity in the face of the forces of change.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
Miguel Ángel Asturias was born in Guatemala City in 1899. No stranger to oppression, Asturias lived much of his life abroad in order to avoid political persecution at home. During his stay in Paris in the 1920s, he studied surrealism and, under the tutelage of Professor Georges Reynaud, translated the Popol Vuh, a sacred book of the Maya Indians of Guatemala. Asturias’s first novel, El Señor Presidente (1946), explored political corruption and discontent in Guatemala—subjects that would reappear in many of his later works, including the “Banana Trilogy,” a fiercely polemical exposé of the United Fruit Company that included the novels Viento fuerte (1949; Strong Wind), El Papa verde (1954; The Green Pope), and Los ojos de los enterrados (1960, The Eyes of the Interred). Although his popularity never rivaled that of later Latin American authors, in 1967 Asturias became the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature—one year after he was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. El Señor Presidente was arguably Asturias’s most popular work during his lifetime, but since his death in 1974, critics have widely acclaimed Men of Maize as his masterpiece.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
The importance of maize
Asturias’s use of maize (corn) as the central motif in the novel corresponds to the myth of creation in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Maya Indians. In the Popol Vuh human beings are created from yellow and white maize, ground nine times by the Xmucane (Grandmother of Light), and from water, which becomes human fat when worked by several mythic beings called “Bearer, Begetter, Sovereign Plumed Serpent”:
the making, the modeling of our first mother-father
with yellow corn, white corn alone for the flesh,
food alone for the human legs and arms
for our first fathers, the four human works [first four human beings].
(Tedlock, p. 164)
Asturias echoes the Popol Vuh at the beginning of Men of Maize as Gaspar Ilóm reflects upon his reason for fighting the maizegrowers: “The [maizegrowers’] maize impoverishes the earth and makes no one rich. … Sown to be eaten it is the sacred sustenance of the men who were made of maize. Sown to make money it means famine for the men who were made of maize” (Asturias, Men of Maize, p. 11). Generations later, an old woman that Hilario Sacayón, another of the novel’s characters, meets on his journey reiterates: “[W]e can feed on maize, which is the flesh of our flesh on the cobs … but everything will end up impoverished and scorched by the sun, by the air, by the clearing fires, if we keep sowing maize to make a business of it, as though it weren’t sacred, highly sacred” (Men of Maize, p. 192).
In Indian communities, the sowing and harvesting of maize are tasks that combine the ritualistic and the practical. Rigoberta Menchú (see Í, Rigoberta Menchú , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times), a late twentieth-century Quiche Indian woman, describes the ceremony performed before maize is sown:
We choose two or three of the biggest seeds and place them in a ring, candles representing earth, water, animals and the universe… . The seed is honoured because it will be buried in something sacred—the earth—and because it will multiply and bear fruit the next year.
(Menchú, p. 32)
Another Indian recalls, “When you plant [maize], you throw four seeds into the ground, no more, no less… . Each group of corn has four stalks, four plants… . [W]e cut down any other plant growing next to the corn because it robs it of its strength” (Simon, p. 38).
Theological implications notwithstanding, maize is essential to Indian life. “[T]heir primary food is the corn-based tortillas which furnishes one-half the calories in the average daily diet. A family of six consumes 150 tortillas daily… . Guatemala produces over 500,000 tons of corn each year” (Simon, p. 22). In the novel Horn invites the Machojón family to a feast in which maize-based tamales constitute much of the menu: “Large tamales, red ones and black ones, … and smaller ones like acolytes in white maize-leaf surplices … and tamales with aniseed and tamales with green maize-ears, like the soft un-hardened flesh of little maize boys” (Men of Maize, p. 22).
Racial tensions
Asturias does not furnish the reader with an exact time frame for Men of Maize, but most critics agree that, roughly speaking, the action begins in 1898, a year before Asturias was born, and ends in the mid-1940s, about the time the novel was written. This was a particularly turbulent period for Guatemala, which had been plagued by ethnic division and social unrest since its independence from Spain on September 15, 1821. Between 1821 and 1847 Guatemala was part of a federation of Central American states (including Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, for example), which together adopted some social reforms of Spanish traditions during these years. Many of Guatemala’s social and political problems stemmed from the uneasy relationship between the indigenous people, of Mayan Indian descent, and the ladinos. A loose category, the term ladino refers to everyone who has adopted the clothing and behaviors of Western culture. Ladinos may be European, Indian, mestizo (a mix of the two), or black; a ladinized Indian is one who has adopted Spanish traits. Since the Spanish conquest in 1524, ladino descendants of the original conquistadores (conquerors) have controlled the wealth and resources of Guatemala, as they do when the novel begins.
The ongoing conflict between Indians and ladinos acquires a personal dimension at the start of Men of Maize. Gaspar Ilóm, an Indian chieftain, and his tribe battle the ladino planters who cut down their trees to plant maize for profit: “The maizegrower sets fire to the brush and does for the timber in a matter of hours. And what timber. The most priceless of woods… . Different if it was to eat. It’s to make money” (Men of Maize, p. 11). Tomás Machofón, who used to be one of Horn’s men, is caught in the middle of this struggle because he is married to a ladino woman, Vaca Manuela. Interracial marriages have, in fact, been frowned upon in Guatemala: “Throughout the highland Mayan region, in Mexico and Guatemala, Ladinos believe themselves to be superior, treat Indians as inferiors and shun mixed marriages” (Brintnall, p. 20). In the novel Vaca Manuela is the “supreme authority” in the Ma-chofón’s marriage; she persuades her husband to betray the Indians and adopt the planters’ cause.
Señor Tomás … was an Indian but his wife, Vaca Manuela Machofón, had turned him into a Ladino. Ladino women have iguana’s spittle, which hypnotizes men. Only by hanging them by their ankles can you extract those viscous mouthfuls of flattery and servility which get them their way in everything. That was how Vaca Manuela won Señor Tomás over for the maizegrowers.
(Men of Maize, p. 18)
It is through ladino treachery—as personified by Tomás and Vaca Manuela—that the Indian Horn is poisoned and his men slaughtered by Colonel Godoy. This betrayal of the Indians by the ladinos resonates throughout the novel in the form of a curse that dooms all the betrayers.
Nineteenth-century Guatemalan politics—an overview
Historically, political alliances in Guatemala have been divided into two factions, Conservative and Liberal. For the most part, Conservatives have adopted a “live and let live” strategy in dealing with the indigenous people, who are too poor to wield any real political power but too numerous to ignore completely. Liberal politics, which favor the more mercantile interests of the ladinos, are in ascendancy when the novel begins. This period of Liberal ascendancy began in 1873 when Justo Rufino Barrios, known as the “Reformer,” became president of Guatemala. During his 12 years in office (1873-85), Barrios implemented many of the sweeping economic and political changes that provide the backdrop for Asturias’s novel.
THE UNITED FRUIT COMPANY IN GUATEMALA
A major economic and political force in Guatemala until recent years, the United Fruit Company was a multinational corporation founded in 1899 by three enterprising U.S. citizens: a ship captain, a fruit importer, and a railroad developer. In 1906 Guatemalan President Manuel Estrada Cabrera made critical concessions to the North Americans so that they would bring their business to Guatemala instead of to another Latin American country with similar resources; among other things, he granted them the exclusive right to operate Guatemala’s central railway line. While the wealthy elite of Guatemala prospered from this relationship, the Indian people were forced to leave their homes in the highlands and to work as peons on the plantations. Forcing the Indians to work against their will was nothing new in Guatemala. In 1877 the Liberal government issued an edict, the Reglamento de Fornaleros (Law of the Day Laborers), which permitted coffee growers to recruit a certain number of Indians for a limited time from communities in the highlands, even against their will. The system remained in effect through the early 1900s, although over time the government took some steps on behalf of the forced laborers—for example, the setting of minimum wages. Such measures hamstrung exploiters to a degree but certainty did not stop them. The monopolies granted to United Fruit by Estrada Cabrera and his successors allowed the company to exploit the people and the land of Guatemala—creating a reserve of resentment in the indigenous population that would fuel future conflicts.
Determined to “modernize” Guatemala, Barrios and his supporters embarked upon a program of progressive reform that included establishing a strong, centralized national government and seeking foreign capital to invest in Guatemala’s economy. To attract investors (both ladino and foreign) the government legalized the sale of uncultivated Indian land to the highest bidder and forced the Indian people to toil on privately owned plantations, often in a form of debt peonage. Commerce was likewise under non-Indian control; much of it wound up in the hands of foreigners because Indian culture discouraged the accumulation of goods beyond what was necessary to live. In the novel, the presence of the two foreign shop owners in remote San Miguel Acatan (the Bavarian Don Deferic and the anonymous “Chinaman”) suggests the success of Barrios’s Liberal policies in reaching even the most rural sections of Guatemala.
Barrios’s plan to centralize and consolidate government authority resulted in the construction of new roads, railways, and telegraph lines, which made formerly remote villages (like Pisiguilito in the novel) increasingly accessible to outsiders and more susceptible to government control. The Indians were no longer permitted to govern themselves, and instead were obliged to adopt a system in which tribal elders functioned solely in an advisory or ceremonial capacity—only the ladino alcade (mayor) with the support of government troops wielded any real power. In the story of Gaspar Ilóm, for example, the Indian elders are ill-defined figures who step out of the shadows only when custom demands that they take part in the ceremonies welcoming Colonel Godoy to Pisiguilito.
Indian insurrections in the highlands
Not surprisingly Barrios had trouble implementing many of his ideas without the use of force. In fact, under Barrios’s rule the military became a tool of political oppression for the first time in Guatemala. When the Indians protested government policies (such as forced labor on the plantations) with weapons instead of words, troops were dispatched to force them into submission. Hidden in the hills, the Indian insurrectionists presented a real threat to planters and townspeople alike. The novel’s Colonel Godoy points out to the townspeople of Pisiguilito: “If we hadn’t arrived here last night the Indians would have come down from the mountains this morning and not one of you slobbering bastards would have lived to tell the tale” (Men of Maize, p. 14). What Godoy leaves unsaid, however, is the part that Liberal policies played in fostering the acrimonious relationship between ladinos and Indians.
A system of oppression
These tensions did not disappear when Manuel Estrada Cabrera became president in 1898. A ruthless dictator, Estrada Cabrera not only expanded upon the policies (both good and bad) that Barrios had implemented, but persecuted anyone—ladino or Indian—who questioned his authority. When Asturias’s father, for example, a district judge, dismissed a case against political opponents of the dictator, he lost his job and nearly lost his life. Estrada Cabrera accomplished some good—he substantially improved the public health and education systems, for example—but his rule has been remembered much more for its tyranny and oppression. In 1920 Estrada Cabrera was finally deposed, after being declared insane by a government assembly.
EL SEÑOR PRESIDENTE
Manuel Estrada Cabrera provided the model for Asturias’s first, and arguably most popular, novel, El Señor Presidente. This is the complex story of a corrupt dictator who manipulates and destroys the lives of his people. Asturias wrote the novel over a period of 24 years, finally publishing it in 1946. Any reluctance to release such an indictment of despotism is not surprising given the atmosphere of deceit and intrigue that persisted in Guatemala during the presidency of Jorge Ubico (1931-44).
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
The narrative of Men of Maize unfolds on two levels, sometimes simultaneously: the magical realm of Mayan myth and the factual, everyday reality of the ladinos. “Men crisscrossed with cartridge belts” and wielding machetes share the same space with firefly wizards who sow “sparkling lights in the black air of the night” and who dwell “in tents of virgin doeskin” (Men of Maize, p. 19). The narrative often shifts abruptly from one perspective to the other, offering multiple interpretations of passing events, leaving the reader to decide which world—that of the Indian or the ladino—makes more sense. The plot is divided into six parts—“Gaspar Ilóm,” “Machofón,” “The Deer of the Seven-Fires,” “Colonel Chalo Godoy,” “María Tecún,” and “Coyote-Postman”—covering an indefinite span of years. The second, third, and fourth sections all take place seven years after the events of the first part, addressing the consequences of an Indian massacre brought about by treachery. Still more time has passed in the last two sections, both of which deal with the disappearance of a beloved wife and the Indians’ loss of cultural identity.
“Gaspar Ilóm.” At the turn of the century, deep in the highlands of Guatemala, Gaspar Ilóm and his men battle ladino planters and state troops in an attempt to reclaim the land of their Mayan ancestors. Government-sponsored planters have destroyed the forests and exhausted the fields of the Indians in order to cultivate high-yield crops for financial gain. This abuse of the earth controverts the religious reverence with which the indigenous people hold the natural world. “We are made of maize,” a
MAIN CHARACTERS IN MEN OF MAIZE (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
Gaspar Ilóm Leader of the Indian guerillas who are determined to reclaim the homeland of their ancestors from the maizegrowers, by violent means if necessary. He is married to La Piojosa Grande (translated in the novel as “great fieabag/’ but more traditionally as “the great filthy one a reference to the Aztec Great Earth Mother). She runs away after Horn is poisoned.
Tomás Machojóm Once a member of Gaspar Horn’s band, now married to Vaca Manuela , a ladino woman who urges him to betray his former leader.
Colonel Gonzalo Godoy: The head of the government troops ordered to track down and kill Gaspar 116m and his guerilla band.
Zacatone: Apothecary who sells the poison used to kill Gaspar Horn.
The Tecún Brothers: Seven brothers who take revenge on Zacatone and his family for bewitching their grandmother. Curer/Deer of the Seven-Fires: Indian shaman who can assume the shape of a deer (his nahual double) at will. He counsels the Tecun brothers when their grandmother falls ill.
Goyo Yic: Blind beggar who regains his sight and becomes a peddler in order to wander the world in search of his runaway wife. Maria Tecun; Supposedly the only member of the Zacatone family to survive the Tecun brothers’ wrath; the runaway wife of Goyo Yic.
Nicho Aquino: Postman for San Miguel Acatan whose wife has disappeared without a trace.
Hilario Sacayón: Muleteer sent by the people of San Miguel Acatan to trace the path of the broken-hearted postman.
character will say later in the novel, “and we can’t make a business out of what we’re made of, out of what our flesh is” (Men of Maize, p. 192). Gaspar’s guerrilla tactics have proven so effective that the nearby townspeople refuse to leave their houses before midday for fear of being shot by “Indians with rainwater eyes” (Men of Maize, p. 12). Finally it is only through deceit that Colonel Chalo Godoy can bring down the “invincible” Gaspar Ilóm. With the aid of Horn’s former comrade, Tomás Machojón, Godoy poisons the unsuspecting chieftain. La Piojosa Grande, Horn’s wife, runs away with their son when she realizes that her husband is poisoned. While Horn rushes to the river to purge himself, Godoy massacres Horn’s men. Horn survives the poison but drowns himself when he realizes the fate of his companions.
“Machojón.” Stories begin to circulate within the Indian community that the firefly wizards—godlike figures who seem to change shape at will—have vowed to “extinguish” Horn’s murderers and all of their descendants. Seven years after Horn’s death, Machojón, the only son of Tomás Machojón (who is now the prosperous owner of a large hacienda), mysteriously disappears one day while riding into town to court his beloved. The reader knows that Machojón has been attacked by the firefly wizards, who have mourned the death of Gaspar Ilóm and laid a curse on those involved. It may be that the disappeared Machojón has been turned into a star:
The fireflies beat against the straw hat pulled down around his ears, like golden hailstones with wings on… . The horse, the packsaddle, the sheep-skin cover … everything was on fire, without giving off either flame, smoke, or any smell of burning. The candle glow of the fireflies streamed down from his hat, behind his ears, over the collar of his embroidered shirt, over his shoulders, up the sleeves of his jacket, down the backs of his hairy hands, between his fingers, like frozen sweat, like the light at the beginning of the world, a brightness in which everything could be seen, but without definite form. … He sat himself upright, with his face uncovered, to confront the enemy who was dazzling him. … As long as he stayed in the saddle he would be a star up in the sky.
(Men of Maize, p. 31)
Machojón’s body is never found, and no one knows whether he was swallowed by the earth, has gone to travel the world, or was consumed by a fiery “swarm of locusts” (Men of Maize, p. 31). His father and Colonel Godoy, however, believe that he was gunned down by Indian guerrillas. Soon Indian peons (field laborers) claim to see the figure of “Machojón” outlined in the glow of the burning fields. Desperate for work, the Indians gamble that Don Tomás will allow them to first burn and then cultivate his land so that he might catch a glimpse of his lost son in the flames. The chapter ends when a catastrophic fire consumes the lives of all those involved in the destruction of the land.
“The Deer of the Seven-Fires.” With the Machojón family dead, the curse of the firefly wizards descends that same year upon the Zacatones, the family of the apothecary who supplied the poison used on Ilóm. This section, however, revolves around the Tecún brothers, who have played no previous part in the story, and their connection to the Zacatones is revealed only belatedly.
When their grandmother falls ill with “cricket hiccups,” the Tecún brothers seek help from the healer or “curer,” a practitioner of Indian remedies, and, some believe, a firefly wizard in human form. (Later in this chapter, the curer will be identified as the human “double” of the mysterious Deer of the Seven-Fires). Informed that the Zacatones have bewitched their grandmother, the brothers retaliate with terrifying swiftness: before the night is out, every member of the Zacatone family, except for María Tecún, is dead.
In an unexpected twist, the healer himself is found with a bullet through his head at approximately the same moment that Gaudencio Tecún shoots and kills a splendid deer. Was the healer killed by government troops or by the hand of Gaudencio Tecún? No one knows for sure. But Gaudencio grounds his explanation on the Mayan belief of nahualism: “The curer and the deer … were one and the same person. I fired at the deer and did in the curer, because they were one and the same, identical” (Men of Maize, p. 56).
“Colonel Chalo Godoy.” While riding on patrol, Colonel Godoy and his men are trapped in a mountain cirque (a steep crater) by a mysterious forest fire. Only Godoy stands his ground when his terrified soldiers break rank and attempt to scale the steep walls of the cirque. Many manage to escape the flames only to be shot and killed by the Tecún brothers, who await them at the top of the hill. The guerilla tactics of the Tecún brothers suggest that they, too, have joined the struggle against the maizegrowers and the government troops who support them. Later, Eusebio Tecún tells his brother that it was the curer, now transformed into the Deer of the Seven Fires, who came back to life to take revenge on Colonel Godoy for the murder of Gaspar Horn. After telling Eusebio his story, the resurrected deer “set off running downhill. Soon after, the fire could be seen” (Men of Maize, p. 98). Colonel Godoy’s death ends the first part of the novel. At least one of his men, and therefore the curse of the firefly wizards, survives.
“María Tecún.” When Goyo Yic, the blind beggar, is deserted by his wife—María Tecún—and family, he tries to resume the familiar routine of his life by returning to the foot of an Amate tree to beg for alms. Without the support of his family, however, he lacks the endurance to continue: “The blind man wearied of hearing so many people passing by him all day and all night and of repeating unto nausea his prayers for alms” (Men of Maize, p. 107). Goyo turns to a practitioner of Indian remedies (in this case, an herbalist) to restore what he has lost: first his eyesight, and then, he hopes, his wife.
NAHUALISM
The sacred books of Mayan religion tell of the Indian’s unique relationship with his or her animal double, or nahual. This animal is the Indian’s special protector and, in certain circumstances, an extension of the Indian. There are various ways to pick a nahual; it is often determined by the closeness or the action of an animal on the person’s birthday. The fates of the person and nahual are believed to be linked. For example, Goyo Yic, the peddler, spends his days searching for his missing family; his nahual is an opossum: “The moonlight changed him from a man into an animal, an opossum, a female possum, with a pouch in front of him to carry the babies in” (Men of Maize, p. 124). The connection between a man and his nahual is so strong that when Goyo becomes distracted from his search by the charms of pretty women and drink, the pet opossum he adopted runs away.
Through a combination of religious ritual and surgical skill, the herbalist removes the cataracts from Goyo’s eyes. Yet Goyo’s hope soon turns to despair when he realizes that his eyes cannot help him to find a wife that he has never seen. What is worse, the inner vision he once relied on is now obscured by the ever-changing spectacle of the world around him.
Becoming first a peddler of trinkets, then a vendor of alcohol, Goyo sadly admits to Mingo, his friend and partner, that his search for his wife has lasted too long: “I don’t feel anything. Before compadre, I searched to find her; now I search so as not to find her” (Men of Maize, p. 137). Goyo takes refuge in alcohol, drinking away his profits until one day he and Mingo become so drunk that they lose their liquor license and are arrested for smuggling. Transported to an island prison, Goyo now has no hope of seeing his family again. Ironically, it is at this moment, when the future appears the darkest, that Goyo’s luck will begin to change.
“Coyote-Postman.” The tale of the coyote-postman is, in some ways, the culmination of the five stories that precede it. Many of the lingering questions and unsolved mysteries from earlier portions of the novel find resolution in this final chapter—a chapter which, not surprisingly, is longer than the first five combined.
Some years have passed and the story of Goyo Yic and his errant wife has become a part of local legend—now any woman who deserts her husband is called a tecuna, after María Tecún, Goyo’s wife. In this final section the deserted husband is Señor Nicho Aquino, the postman for San Miguel Acatan, “a small town built on a shelf of golden stone above abysses where the atmosphere is blue” (Men of Maize, p. 154). Once again the narrative unfolds on two levels—the everyday reality of the townspeople and the magical reality of Mayan mythology. Nicho, the coyote-postman, has a foot in both worlds, and, as his story progresses, he finds it increasingly difficult to keep the two separate. In fact, early in the narrative, Nicho assumes the shape and inhabits the world of his nahaul double, the coyote.
After an arduous trip delivering mail to the capital, which is many miles and many mountains away, Nicho returns home to San Miguel Acatan, eager for the company of his beautiful wife, Isabra. To his dismay, he finds his rancho deserted; the fire is cold and his bed is empty. After drowning his sorrows in drink at the local bar, he is arrested for drunkenness, dosed with camphorated oil to rid him of the alcohol, then flogged.
Nicho is far from recovered—either emotionally or physically—when he sets out three weeks later on his normal route to the capital. Gamely shouldering two heavy sacks laden with mail, he sets off for his destination via the now infamous Tecún Pass. He reaches the inn of Nana Moncha at the village of Tres Aguas, where he meets a strange old man with blackened hands: a firefly wizard in human guise. Traveling together, they veer from the “high road” and enter the mythological realm of Nicho’s ancestors. Here the postman undergoes a series of trials, journeys through fantastic landscapes (a cavern of firefly wizards that leads to an aerial plain suspended from branches over the earth and dimly lit grottos), reviews the secrets of the past and, ultimately, discovers the tragic fate of his missing wife.
Meanwhile, Hilario Sacayón, a muleteer, has been sent by the people of San Miguel Acatan to locate the missing postman. Although aware of the legends of runaway wives and the men who die in search of them, Sacayón remains skeptical of their veracity. He himself has contributed to the propagation of one local myth about a tragic romance between a traveling sewing-machine salesman named O’Neill and a nonexistent girl, Miguelita of Acatan. An old woman he meets on the road assures him, “When you tell a story that no one else tells anymore, you say: I invented this, it’s mine. But what you’re really doing is remembering—you, through your drunkenness, remembered what the memory of your forefathers left in your blood” (Men of Maize, p. 204). Sacayón remains a skeptic, however, until he meets, on María Tecún Ridge, a coyote that seems very familiar:
Was it or was it not a coyote? How could he doubt that it was, when he saw it so clearly. But that was it, he clearly saw it and saw that it wasn’t a coyote, because as he looked he had the impression that it was a person and a person he knew… . They’ll laugh in my face if I tell them I arrived in good time at María Tecún Ridge and saw Aquino the postman in the form of a coyote.
(Men of Maize, p. 210)
Thoroughly shaken by his experience, Sacayón keeps his encounter with the coyote-postman a secret.
Meanwhile, Nicho emerges from the cavern and realizes that there is no going back to the world he left behind; one of the conditions of his passage through the mythic realm was that he destroy the bags of mail he had carried from San Miguel Acatan. Traveling to the coast, he finds work doing odd jobs in a rat-infested hotel. One of Nicho’s jobs is to ferry guests of the hotel out to the Harbor Castle prison on an island just off the coast. It is during one of these trips to the island that he encounters María Tecún, on her way to visit her oldest son, who was recently imprisoned in Harbor Castle. It is here that the paths of the remaining characters converge. Goyo Yic, also imprisoned in Harbor Castle, is reunited first with his son, then with his runaway wife, who explains her flight: she feared having too many children by him and not being able to provide for them. Believing Goyo Yic to be dead, Maria Team has married Benito Ramos, a sterile survivor of the massacre of Gaspar Horn’s tribe so many years before. The epilogue to Men of Maize reveals that Nicho eventually inherits the hotel from the original owner, the Boss Lady. Meanwhile, Goyo Yic and María Tecún reconcile after Benito Ramos’s death and return to Pisiguilito, where they build a rancho big enough for their children and grandchildren to live with them: “Wealth of men, wealth of women, to have many children. Old folk, young folk, men and women, they all became ants after the harvest, to carry home the maize” (Men of Maize, p. 306).
Myth: the key to social and political identity
Recurring throughout Men of Maize is the loss of cultural identity for the Indian whose lifestyle and traditional beliefs are in danger of being absorbed by ladino society. Both the peddler, Goyo Yic, and the postman, Nicho Aquino, have allowed themselves to be subsumed into a materialistic culture that venerates profit over a heritage with roots that extend deep into the earth itself. Ariel Dorfman (author of Death and the Maiden [also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times] argues that in such cases “human beings … possess their myths only in order to orient themselves in the darkness, to understand their essence which is scattered in time” (Dorfman in Asturias, p. 411).
The interpolation of Mayan legend into the narrative is one of the ways that Asturias underscores the importance of myth in Indian society. René Prieto argues that in order “to paint a picture of hope and renewal, Asturias looks back to the ancient myths of Mesoamerica” (Prieto, pp. 132-33). More importantly, perhaps, Asturias allows his characters to generate their own mythology—a collection of stories that interpret the uncertainties of life according to traditional standards. The local legend of the tecuna (runaway wife), for example, makes sense of a phenomenon that threatens to disrupt the core of domestic society in San Miguel Acatan.
Not surprisingly, therefore, it is in the subterranean cavern of firefly wizards, where Nicho observes the stories and history of his people, that he first understands “the emblems of a rich tradition that defines and sustains him” (Prieto, p. 145). By choosing his Indian heritage over the privileges and power of the ladino world, Nicho passes the test that most other characters (Tomás Machojón, Goyo Yic) have failed up until now; when confronted with adversity and self-doubt, Nicho listens to the voice of his ancestors. The problems plaguing Nicho do not magically disappear when he leaves the cavern—he is never reunited with his wife and never returns to San Miguel Acatan. He does, however, become the agent through which the now chastened Goyo Yic can recapture the future he had lost.
Sources and literary context
For much of the mythological details in Men of Maize, Asturias drew upon the sacred books of Mayan religion: the Popol Vuh, the Annals of the Cakchiquels, and the books of the Chiiam Balam. Interestingly, his familiarity with the literature of the indigenous people of the Maya can be traced back to his stay in Paris in the early 1920s—it was under the guidance of the French scholar Georges Raynaud that he helped translate the Popol Vuh into Spanish. It was also during this period that Asturias came into contact with the work of the French Surrealists. He would later adopt and incorporate into his own work many of the innovations of the Surrealists—their emphasis on the alternative reality of the dream state and non-chronological time, for example, are key components in each of the sections of Men of Maize.
In his seminal study, Miguel Ángel Astuñas, Richard Callan details the parts that Aztec as well as Greek mythology play in Asturias’s work. The ancient Aztecs inhabited the same general region—Mexico and Central America—as the Mayans. Widespread contact in the region over the centuries led to similarities in mythologies.
Several gods from the Aztec pantheon are discernible in the first section. Gaspar Ilóm … is Huitzilopochtli, the sun and fertility god; his wife, la Piojosa Grande (literally, the Great Filthy One), is the Great Earth Mother, Tlazolteotl, whose name in Náhuatl means “Goddess of Filth.” From their union was born Martin who is actually referred to as corn in the novel… in view of the Indians’ belief that they were Corn Men.
(Callan, p. 66)
Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written
The end of the Liberal regime
Asturias’s manipulation of time in Men of Maize makes it difficult to speculate at exactly what point in Guatemala’s history the novel ends (one character will race from infancy to mature adulthood in the time it will take another to travel from adolescence to middle age). It is almost as difficult to pinpoint when the novel was written. According to Gerald Martin (who translated Menof Maize into English), Asturias began working on the novel “without knowing it” while living abroad in the mid-1920s. Martin notes that “fully recognizable fragments of parts one, three and six appeared between 1925 and 1933 in newspapers and magazines in France and Latin America” (Martin in Asturias, p. xv). Yet the majority of Men of Maize was almost certainly written after Asturias returned home in 1933—two years after General Forge Ubico had been elected president of Guatemala.
Life for the Indian people did not improve under Ubico’s regime. Although he did away with the system of debt peonage, Ubico implemented a vagrancy law that made any Indian without a job vulnerable to periods of enforced labor. The laborers were often sent miles away from their families to work on the large coffee plantations on the coast, and were paid barely enough to survive from season to season. Ironically, Ubico, the man responsible for separating the members of countless families, encouraged the Indians to refer to him as Tata, or Papa. Within three years of assuming office, he passed a decree that obliged all Indian men to pay a tax or to work for two weeks of the year without pay. In June 1944 disgruntled workers called a general strike that successfully forced Ubico from office.
“Ten Years of Spring.”
The years before the publication of Men of Maize (1949) brought a number of changes to Guatemala. President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1945-50), an idealistic university professor, supported a program of labor reform that dispensed with Ubico’s vagrancy law of 1934 and replaced it with a system that protected the rights of all workers. In 1952 President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (1950-54) dismantled the Liberal legacy one step further by sponsoring an agrarian reform act redistributing large tracts of public and privately owned land. Many of the new social and political reforms would not last ten years (a period that would subsequently be referred to nostalgically as “The Ten Years of Spring”). Yet the optimistic note upon which the novel concludes reflects the climate of promise prevailing in Guatemala when Asturias was writing Men of Maize—a novel he could never have hoped to publish in his homeland just five short years before.
Changing cultural identities
When Asturias was writing Men of Maize, race relations between Indians and ladinos continued to be strained (and are to this day), although the years since the 1940s saw minute social changes in the way indigenous people are treated. In the decades between the publication of Men of Maize in 1949 and its translation into English in 1975, some of the more blatant discriminatory practices were abolished. Indians were no longer forced to walk in the streets instead of on public sidewalks or expected to remove their hats and look down on the ground when addressed by a ladino. Ladinos, however, continued to speak to Indians as inferiors: “[I]t is still the rule that Ladinos address Indians, no matter what their age and position, as children by using the informal tú or vos. Titles of respect, such as don, doña, señor and señora are almost never used with Indians, except as a joke” (Brintnall, p. 19).
In contrast to the novel, in which recognition of their common culture ultimately unites such diverse characters as Goyo Yic, Hilario Sacoyón, and Nicho Aquino, many Indians abandoned their heritage through “ladinoization.” Hoping to achieve a higher level of social status and acceptance in the ladino world, these Indians reshaped their cultural identities by changing the way they dressed, learning to speak Spanish, or, like Tomás Machojón in the novel, marrying a ladino. This trend was a fairly minor occurrence in the highlands: “[I]t is generally recognized that it is almost impossible for an Indian to Ladinoize without leaving the community where he was born” (Brintnall, p. 21). But Indians who relocated to the city were often able to adapt: “Ladinoization does occur on a massive scale, but generally among Indians who have become part of the permanent labor force on large commercial plantations … or who have entered the ranks of the urban poor” (Brintnall, p. 21).
Reviews
Although critics in the United States hailed Men of Maize as a “richly textured work,” most of them acknowledged that the complex novel might be difficult going for a reader unfamiliar with the “myth-haunted Mayan landscape” (Perera in Samudio, p. 55). What to one reader was the work of “an innovator of language and an individual stylist,” was dismissed as “feverish overwriting” by another (Choice in Samudio; Allen in Samudio, p. 55). More recently, Mario Vargas Llosa (author of The Storyteller [also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times]) noted that the “temporal confusion and chronological arbitrariness” have proven to be troublesome obstacles for all but the most “stubborn and determined readers” (Vargas Llosa in Asturias, p. 445).
Despite the difficulties of its style, the novel has enjoyed a long life in print. Seven different editions have been published in Spanish and the novel has been translated into the major European languages.
—Deborah Kearney and Pamela S. Loy
For More Information
Asturias, Miguel Ángel. Men of Maize: The Critical Edition. Trans. Gerald Martin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.
Brintnall, Richard. Revolt Against the Dead: The Modernization of a Mayan Community in the Highlands of Guatemala. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979.
Brinton, Daniel G., ed. Annals of the Cakchiquels. Trans. Daniel G. Brinton. Philadelphia: Brinton, 1885.
Callan, Richard. Miguel Ángel Asturias. New York:Twayne, 1970.
Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Trans. Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984.
Prieto, René. Miguel Asturias’ Archeology of Return. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Samudio, Josephine, ed. The Book Review Digest, 1976. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1977.
Simon, Jean-Marie. Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
Tedlock, Dennis, trans. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Watanabe, John M. Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.