Myths Die Hard

Parker Hatley reviews Gerald Martin’s updated translation of the Guatemalan novel “Men of Maize” by Miguel Ángel Asturias.

By Parker HatleySeptember 11, 2024

• Fiction

WHEN DAVID UNGER’S new translation of Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias’s 1946 novel El Señor Presidente (Mr. President) was published in 2022, several review essays were penned examining the strange lack of interest in the author in the English-speaking world. At least in Latin America, it is rarely disputed that Asturias originated the style now popularly referred to as “magical realism.” Anyone who reads one of Asturias’s great novels may gasp, as I did, at the prowess of this minor American giant and wonder about the causes of his relative obscurity. Mr. President, depicting a thinly veiled Guatemala City (under the rule of the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera), is a nightmarish marvel of the picaresque, a chronicle of unrelenting depravity that often feigns a slip into the fantastic before you remember that all of it is essentially true.

Penguin Classics has also now republished Gerald Martin’s English translation of Hombres de Maíz (Men of Maize), Asturias’s enigmatic 1949 masterpiece. In an election year luridly fixated on the insidious myths spun about Central America and Central Americans, the book’s arrival is as timely as Asturias’s great dictator novel was in 2022. After winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967 and being asked by a Swiss journalist which of his books he would save from the flames, Asturias reportedly said that he wouldn’t want to be remembered for Mr. President, which was far too bleak and sad. He chose Men of Maize instead, his obscure, modernist epic, at once an ode to Mayan culture and literature; an engaged survey of the consequences of conquest, colonization, and centuries of injustice; and an expressive portrait of a society in the throes of what anthropologists call acculturation. It is an overstuffed, mystical, and beguiling masterpiece. Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano called it the “most profound, and also the least accessible,” of Asturias’s works, a kind of “‘Ulysses’ from Guatemala” written in the delirious style of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947).

In 1984, Gerald Martin, who has dedicated most of his career to the study of Asturias’s writing, helped coordinate the first critical edition of Men of Maize for the inimitable Colección Archivos, a publication initiative funded by Mexico’s Fondo de Cultura Económica that has released 66 expanded editions of some of the most important texts of Latin American literature. Men of Maize was published with Martin’s translation for the first time in 1975, with Delacorte Press (now an imprint of Penguin Random House), and a condensed version of the Colección Archivos critical edition, funded by UNESCO and released by the University of Pittsburgh Press, was released in 1994. Penguin’s new edition features an updated introduction and notes by Martin and a foreword by the Guatemalan American writer Héctor Tobar.

Asturias was born in 1899 and spent most of his adolescence between Guatemala City and the rural town of Salamá. After running afoul of the Cabrera regime and losing his post as a judge, Asturias’s father was forced to move the family out of the capital to de facto exile in the interior. In his family’s country store, Asturias eavesdropped on the muleteers that set up camp in the courtyard after unloading their cargo (Hilario Sacayón, the scruffy gallant featured in Men of Maize, was undoubtedly inspired by such men). Most often remembered as an ode to the culture of Indigenous Guatemalans, Men of Maize is also a portrait of the oral culture, mannerisms, and expressive machismo of the rural mestizos that Asturias knew as a child.

In his twenties, Asturias traveled to London, planning to study political economy, but reportedly spent most of his time wandering the British Museum’s extensive archaeology collections. On holiday in Paris, he saw a flyer advertising a course on the ancient Maya taught by Georges Raynaud, professor of the study of Pre-Columbian American Religions at the École pratique des hautes études. He spent the next five years studying with Raynaud, translating the Popol Vuh—the sacred origin text of the K’iche’ Maya—and the Annals of the Kaqchikeles, which narrates the Spanish conquest from the point of view of the Kaqchikel Maya, under his supervision.

In Paris, Asturias met Pablo Picasso, Miguel de Unamuno, and Tristan Tzara and was friends with Robert Desnos and César Vallejo. His conversations with Vallejo, a committed socialist, bolstered Asturias’s anti-imperialist stance and encouraged him to incorporate his politics into his writing. Asturias was drawn to the language games of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Léon-Paul Fargue, then in vogue, and experimented with the automatic writing techniques associated with the surrealists, composing a large chunk of what would eventually become Men of Maize in the process. Words are sacred, animate entities in Men of Maize, as they are in the Popol Vuh—referred to by some as the “Maya Genesis.” Gods created the world with words, and words nourish the gods. In the banquet speech he gave when accepting his Nobel Prize, Asturias said that he wasn’t interested in substituting words for things but in looking for “word-things” and “word-beings,” a “scaffolding” that would support “the new tongue.”

The Guatemalan writer Luiz Cardoza y Aragón described Men of Maize as a “prolonged storm of metaphors,” a “dream and a nightmare of omens and superstitions of shamans, sometimes with a codex accent, with colloquial reflections, written when Asturias lived in his libidinous mansion in the clouds.” It is laced with the sonorous, expressive forms of the Popol Vuh: incantatory refrains, vessels for prayers, spells, and curses; restatements of the same thought using different words; frequent alliteration and onomatopoeia. The doubling or tripling of words or syllables for emphasis that is found in Mayan languages also appears in Men of Maize—for example, in the use of the superlative “arbololnón” to describe a really big tree.

Martin has met the Herculean task of translating such variegated, multivoiced prose—Asturias’s “American idiom”—with aplomb. Scores of words for animals, vegetables, precious stones, flowers, sounds, colors, scents, and geographical features appear in the novel that don’t appear in Spanish dictionaries. Every surname and place name is embedded in a whole complex of metaphorical and symbolic meanings. The glossary in the Spanish critical edition includes several hundred items, reduced to just 65 in the Penguin text, testament to the difficulty of translating Asturias’s prose and the inevitable loss of lexical specificity that is fundamental to any act of translation. The shaving-off of some of Martin’s occasionally fanciful, if always edifying, suggestions may also be a blessing for the reader. Both Martin’s translation and the most recent Guatemalan critical edition—published by the University of San Carlos press in 2008—are heavily indebted to the dictionaries of “Guatemalismos” published by Lisandro Sandoval (1941) and of Guatemalan place names by J. L. Arriola (1973), both invaluable ciphers for decoding Asturias.

The natural world, too, is animate and alive in Men of Maize, and indeed, Martin makes the case in his introduction that the novel represents a quintessential work of ecological fiction, its essential message the sacredness of the bond of our species with the more than human world. “In Hombres de Maíz,” Asturias said in a 1966 interview,

the spoken word has a religious significance. The characters of the book are never alone, but always surrounded by the great voices of nature, the voices of the rivers, of the mountains. The background is no longer more theatrical scenery as it was, for instance, in the Romantic novel. The landscape has become dynamic; it has a life of its own.

Frequent instances of figurative language reproduce natural phenomena, one of the many challenges facing the translator: “The sun let down its hair.” “Gratitude must smell […] of rain-soaked earth.” Hills are “garlic-colored.” “A mottled cat [is] the color of a butterfly.” “The river fell away […] like a flight of birds with liquid feathers.” “[A] man carries his children in his pouches as the possum does.” There are “pigeons whose nests stink of lime,” “raccoons that wash their food,” and “vipers which seem to be listening to cymbals as they sleep.”

The first part of the novel chronicles the efforts of a group of Indigenous villagers, led by their chief Gaspar Ilom, to resist the encroachments of “maizegrowers,” Ladinos (the word in Guatemala for mestizos) who have been clearing their ancestral land to raise corn and sugarcane for profit. The encroachment of slash-and-burn fires, which denude the living surface of the earth and threaten the sacred bond between the people of Ilom and their traditional ecology, eventually stirs Ilom into action and guerrilla war. This section ends with his passage from the plane of history into that of myth, inspiring future generations to resist the intruders who would profane the relationship between them and the crop that is sown to be eaten and not sold:

The matapalo is bad, but the maizegrower is worse. The matapalo takes years to dry a tree up. The maizegrower sets fire to the brush and does for the timber in a matter of hours. […] What guerrillas do to men in time of war the maizegrower does to the trees. Smoke, flames, ashes. Different if it was just to eat. It’s to make money. Different, too, if it was on their own account, but they go halves with the boss, and sometimes not even halves. The maize impoverishes the earth and makes no one rich. Neither the boss nor the men. 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.

Gaspar Ilom’s death gives rise to a curse that resonates through the rest of the novel. In the ensuing three parts, the cycle of retribution instigated by the arrival of the maizegrowers continues, with the narration moving between the Indian villagers, mixed townsfolk from the community of Pisgüilito (“Pissalike” is the closest translation, according to Martin), and the administrative and military functionaries carrying out the will of the capitalist state. In revenge for Ilom’s poisoning, a group of five brothers from his clan murders the family responsible for preparing the poison, the Zacatones (“zacate” means “herbs,” “weeds,” or “fodder” in Guatemalan Spanish; the Zacatones are pharmacists). The war goes on. Victims of the curse are roasted alive, decapitated, or rendered sterile. The man responsible for ordering the poisoning loses his son, Machojón, in an explosion of fireflies, another history doomed to repeat itself. A humorous cast of foreigners also populates these sections, including a priest-ethnographer scribbling reports about native idolatry, a blue-eyed and paternalistic German merchant, and O’Neill, an American traveling salesman likely based on the famous playwright.

In part five, a blind peasant, Goyo Yic, is abandoned by his wife, has his cataracts cured by a shaman, goes off searching for her, becomes a liquor peddler, and ends up, after many twists and turns, in a coastal prison. Part six teleports into a future in which past events have been transmuted into myth. A Ladino muleteer, Hilario Sacayón, fails to keep hold of his beloved, while an Indian postman, Nicho Aquino, is abandoned by his wife, like Gaspar Ilom and Goyo Yic before him. And so Nicho too goes off searching for her, on a Ulyssean quest through the underworld, shape-shifting between his human form and his nahual, the coyote. In the epilogue, Goyo Yic returns to the land of Ilom and begins planting corn, a hopeful note gesturing towards the possibility of cosmic renewal and rebirth.

Reduced to its bare bones, this plot summary of an unsummarizable novel shows the marked presence of the picaresque. Women are constantly abandoning their husbands, which critics have interpreted as either a commentary on the suppression of the divine feminine wrought by the arrival of the maizegrowers or an expression of Asturias’s sublimated misogyny. Their men go determinedly chasing after them, doomed to the cyclical repetition of the quest and its forking detours, never without an element of tragic humor. Some of the best sections in the book invoke the slapstick and the carnivalesque: Asturias was an exceptionally wicked humorist in a country that has mastered both tragicomedy and the bleak or belittling joke.

Asturias said repeatedly that he wrote Men of Maize with “no concessions to the reader.” In contrast to the popular South American indigenist novels of his contemporaries, whose primary purpose was explanatory, Men of Maize explains nothing. “There are events that really happen and afterwards become legends, and there are legends which afterwards become events; there are no boundaries between reality and dreams, between reality and fiction, between what is seen and what is imagined.” The past contaminates the present; myths are living things. “I have a feeling myths are a little bit like malaria,” he said in an interview. “Malaria appears as a headache, a stomachache; it festers and spreads. Which is more or less what myths do. They die hard.” They are both the dictator’s pastime, “spinning evil from secret corners like spiders,” and a ballast for tradition. Machojón explodes into permanent stars in a swarm of fireflies, becoming a legend, only to reappear again in the flesh to fulfill a vengeful prophecy. The legend is retold in exchange after exchange; its meaning and form are eventually transformed in the act of telling.

The Chilean critic Ariel Dorfman, in his 1967 essay on Men of Maize, “Myth as Time and Language,” one of the best pieces of writing about Asturias in any language, referred to the novel as “the source and backbone of all that is being written in our continent today.” In the same essay, he lamented the fact that most readers passed from the “dynamic coherence” of Mr. President directly to the Banana Trilogy (1950–60), a series of comparatively plainspoken and engaged novels set on American-owned banana plantations on Guatemala’s southern coast, for which Asturias won the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1966. Gregory Rabassa’s translations of the trilogy, rushed to print to capitalize on the author’s Nobel win, are uncharacteristically poor. In the 1973 New York Times review of Rabassa’s translation of the trilogy’s final volume, The Eyes of the Interred (1960), Victor Perera urged the translation of Men of Maize and Legends of Guatemala (1930) so that the “size and singularity of this authentic, if flawed, and in the largest sense, American genius can be more justly appreciated.”

Reviewers of Asturias ever since have endeavored to understand his bad luck. El Señor Presidente wasn’t published until 1946, 20 years after he’d started writing it, and Hombres de Maíz, which Asturias wrote portions of in Paris, wasn’t published until 1949. For Perera, Asturias was the least translatable of all of the major Latin American writers. Add to that the fact that Asturias had the misfortune of accusing Gabriel García Márquez—a very translatable writer—of plagiarizing Balzac’s The Quest of the Absolute (1834) for his One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which provoked the ire of legions of readers and fans worldwide. I’m not convinced, like other reviewers, that these comments affected Asturias’s readership. Still, they hint at the frustration he must have felt at settling into his reputation as the stodgy, pretentious elder statesman of Latin American letters.

Asturias’s image is everywhere in Guatemala, co-opted by successive governments that spent decades undoing the social and political reforms he championed and murdering their own civilians. I first read El Señor Presidente in 2010, during my first visit to Guatemala, and it provided me with a kind of shock-therapy introduction to the country. Another decade passed before I picked up Hombres de Maíz, scared away by friends who found it impenetrable and sometimes objected to Asturias on political grounds. In 1968, the author had accepted an ambassadorship to Paris under the regime of Julio César Méndez Montenegro, the only civilian to hold the presidency between 1954 and 1986, who presided over an intensification in military and paramilitary repression. In the words of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, the ambassadorship represented one of the “highest honors of bourgeois society” ever awarded by a criminal military dictatorship. Dalton’s scathing words, which I first read in an essay by the Guatemalan novelist Arturo Arias, appeared in the introduction to a book of poems by Otto René Castillo, the poet and revolutionary who, with his lover Nora Paiz, was apprehended, tortured, and burned alive by the Guatemalan military in March 1967, during the Méndez Montenegro regime.

Given the political climate in Guatemala at the time and the fates of writer-revolutionaries like Castillo, it is unsurprising that Asturias had difficulty escaping his reputation as a bourgeois reactionary among the ranks of the fractured and traumatized Guatemalan Left, even if his decision to accept the ambassadorship was based on the counsel of his contacts in the Guatemalan Labour Party (PGT), one of the leading promoters of revolutionary struggle throughout the second half of the 20th century. It is an interesting accident of history that Asturias, a writer whose books consistently expressed a bilious but progressive and humane vision of the world, should continue to be disparaged by so many, while the checkered past of Jorge Luis Borges, a brilliant but solipsistic writer who publicly supported the military junta in Argentina, has been mostly ignored or forgiven.

Perhaps more notably, many contemporary Indigenous Guatemalan writers remain highly critical of Asturias, including the Kaqchikel critic Demetrio Cojtí, and the K’iche’ Maya poet Humberto Ak’abal, who in 2004 sternly refused the Asturias Prize (a.k.a. the Guatemala National Prize in Literature), claiming that Asturias’s views on assimilation “offend the indigenous population of Guatemala, of which I am part.” Most of Cojtí’s and Ak’abal’s criticisms were leveled at Asturias’s university thesis, “The Social Problem of the Indian” (1923), which, though progressive in intent, drips with patronizing condescension. In it, Asturias refers to the Indigenous Guatemalans as a degraded race needing improvement through education and mestizaje. The thesis reflects the prevailing influence of Social Darwinism prominent in educated circles at the time, which, at its worst, prompted some Guatemalan intellectuals to call for eugenic solutions to the “Indian problem.”

In taking ancient Mayan texts, rather than living Indigenous people, as his primary reference for the “Indian’s point of view,” Asturias’s works lend credence to harmful myths about the noble Mayan past and the post-conquest, postcolonial present. He liberally amalgamates the cultural traditions of several distinct ethnolinguistic groups, combining source material, often quoted verbatim, from the Popol Vuh (K’iche’), the Annals of the Kaqchikeles, the Rabinal Achí (Achí), the Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Yucatec Maya), and the Annals of Cuauhtitlán and Legend of the Suns (Aztec). Martin occasionally takes questionable leaps in his source attributions but makes a convincing case for the direct influence of these texts, sometimes locating quotations that were pulled from them verbatim. Asturias said that he “heard a lot, assumed a bit more, and invented the rest” when writing Men of Maize. One imagines him in an attic room somewhere on the Left Bank, a bricoleur unabashedly transmuting the myths and images from Mesoamerican texts into fiction through the kaleidoscope of his unconscious. For today’s reader, there is something a little obscene here, not unlike the exuberant arrogance of early ethnology. In stark contrast, however, to many of his contemporaries, Asturias attributed the so-called “degraded” condition of Indigenous Guatemalans not to some racialized essence but to the effects of institutionalized racism, poverty, and exploitation by the local oligarchy.

In 1971, Asturias published a new foreword to his thesis that retracted his abhorrent suggestion that foreigners should be imported from Europe to interbreed with Indians and “improve” the race. The “protest” of his thesis, he reaffirmed, concerned the state’s “total abandonment of the Indian” and “the exploitation to which they are subject by the so-called upper classes and by foreign capital.” Men of Maize is undoubtedly not a “Maya novel” but rather one Ladino writer’s flawed attempt to develop a pluralist “American idiom” that contains within itself all the dynamic contradictions of a postcolonial and multilingual nation, complete with its stubborn myths, its prejudices, and its poetry. It is a political novel, an ode to his country’s mixed inheritance and the suppressed cultural traditions and lifeways of Indigenous Guatemala, as well as a profound indictment of the historical processes that have continued to suppress them up to the present day, 50 years after Asturias’s death.

Ilom is a real place in the western highlands of Guatemala, one of the political centers of the Ixil Maya at the time of the Spanish conquest. Ixiles have their own distinct cosmology and history, and many I’ve spoken to resent the common assumption that their traditions are the same as those of the K’iche’ or other Maya groups. The real Gaspar Ilom, Gaspar Hijom, was a chieftain in the Ixil village of Ilom at the turn of the 20th century who led organized resistance against Ladino invaders after Cabrera’s predecessor, Justo Rufino Barrios, the first great Liberal dictator, passed a law that abolished communal property and facilitated its expropriation. Hijom was eventually poisoned with strychnine by Ladino settlers, just like his fictional namesake. In 1924, the progressive newspaper El Imparcial, for which Asturias wrote a regular column from Paris, In the Shadow of the Eiffel Tower, published an article describing a violent confrontation between villagers from Ilom and a group of surveyors sent to the community by the planters. Three years later, a series of four articles titled “El Guatemala Desconocido,” or “The Unknown Guatemala,” by Asturias’s colleague Flavio Guillen, was published in the same paper. In these essays, Guillen describes the efforts of a group of hardscrabble Ladinos to settle the fertile “virgin lands” around the village of Ilom and the resistance they encountered there from local Indians. He related how the brave settlers sold their horses to survive, “burning their boats like Cortés.”

The articles were based on a series of durable myths about Indigenous Guatemalans, the traces of which still lurk in the national unconscious. Indians are depicted as improper stewards of the “untapped” potential of the rich agricultural land around Ilom, their “apparent humility” concealing a “deep hatred of the Ladinos, exacerbated by prejudice” and a bloodthirsty desire for insurrection. A Ladino from southern Mexico, Lisandro Gordillo, took advantage of the conditions created by the Liberal reforms to purchase and appropriate massive swaths of Ilom’s ancestral lands. While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Ilom in 2022, I spoke with senior community members who still remember hearing from their parents about the confrontation chronicled in the 1924 article. The anthropologist Juan Carlos Mazariegos and the historian Elaine Elliott have each written brilliant studies on Ilom and the events chronicled in the Imparcial series (Elaine, who lived in Ilom in the 1970s and first informed me about the existence of the articles, has an academic essay on historical distortion in Men of Maize forthcoming from the journal Maya America, based on her MA thesis on the same topic from the University of San Diego).

The history of Ilom, mythologized in the pages of El Imparcial and then in Men of Maize, exemplifies Guatemala’s core problem in miniature: access to cultivable land. Decades before the Christian Democrat Jacobo Árbenz inaugurated his land reform campaign as part of the short-lived October Revolution (1944–54), Asturias frequently wrote about how the opportunism, greed, and cruelty of the planter class had poisoned his country, consigning the vast majority of Indigenous Guatemalans to malnutrition, illiteracy, debt, and de facto slavery on the plantations. In 1928, a year after Guillen’s “Guatemala Desconocido” was published, Asturias wrote a series of articles for the same paper on the “indispensable necessity of organizing a political party for campesinos,” in which he proposed the nationalization of unused foreign-owned lands, state support for small farmers, and the redistribution of free land as a solution to the problem of land access and poverty, particularly in Indigenous regions of the country. “The agricultural problem of our country,” he wrote from Paris, “cannot be resolved with the feudalistic criteria of lords and vassals, disguised among us under the appearance of bosses and workers; its resolution must be sought in the need for the boss and the worker to possess what they cultivate and nothing more.”

Besides land reform, Asturias called for a total overhaul of the nation’s schools and a general cultural revival, both cornerstones of the “spiritual socialism” of Juan José Arévalo, who immediately preceded Árbenz. Unfortunately, the story of the military coup in 1954, which undid virtually all of the preceding 10 years of reform, is little known in the country that orchestrated it. Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger’s 1982 book Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala is an excellent history; Week-end en Guatemala (1956) is Asturias’s own outraged account of the coup. In the weeks following the fall of the October Revolution, which initiated decades of state terror and brutality, Asturias was stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile; supporters of the coup burned his books together with works by Arévalo, Victor Hugo, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in public bonfires. In the early 1970s, Asturias’s son Rodrigo founded the Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA), one of the country’s largest guerrilla groups, adopting Gaspar Ilom as his nom de guerre. In 1974, shortly before his father’s death, he smuggled a note to him in a cigarette that read, “Los hombres de maíz se volvieron guerrilleros” (“The men of maize have become guerrillas”). In the 1980s, conflict between ORPA and other leftist guerrilla groups and the Guatemalan military intensified, eventually resulting in genocidal state violence against the Ixil and other Maya communities. Our government’s support for a succession of murderous governments on the wrong side of this hemisphere’s only legally recognized genocide is an essential fact of our shared history that is rarely, if ever, taught in American secondary schools.

One of the first endnotes in the new edition describes what occurred in Ilom on March 23, 1982. The note is absent from the previous American edition, published two years before the Peace Accords in 1996. On that day, less than 100 years after Gaspar Hijom was murdered, the Guatemalan army, accompanied by a paramilitary patrol, rounded up and executed 96 people and burned most of the village to the ground. The massacre was provoked by the suspicion that members of the community were supporting the guerrillas, conforming to the genocidal pattern of the counterinsurgency in that era. The paramilitary patrol accompanying the army came from the nearby coffee plantation, the former property of the same Lisandro Gordillo, the leader of the settler group that first encroached on Ilom’s ancestral communal lands. The journalist Vincent Bevins interviewed survivors of the massacre in his 2020 book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, which takes Ilom as a case study of the consequences of US government support for and complicity in the mass murder of civilians during the Cold War. The history of our country is umbilically intertwined with the fate of Guatemala.

Ilom has been transformed by what the K’iche’ anthropologist Giovanni Batz refers to as the “four invasions”—the Spanish conquest, the plantation economy, the genocidal counterinsurgency, and, most recently, foreign and national extractive capitalist enterprise. The river that Gaspar Ilom drinks from to cleanse his body of poison is today girdled with a hydroelectric dam owned by a private corporation based in Honduras. The wounds of the “civil war” are far from healed. Most people live below the poverty line, and thousands of young people have migrated to the United States for better opportunities. Conflicts over the land continue, and many prominent local families are tirelessly involved in litigation efforts to reclaim holdings they lost as far back as a century ago, embodying the spirit of resistance that has animated the people of Ilom since before the time of that mythical giant, Miguel Ángel Asturias.

During one of my visits to Ilom in 2022, Don Juan Laynez, who died last November in his nineties, told me his father’s story. Don Laynez’s father was 10 years old in 1924, when the simmering conflict between Ilom and the invaders erupted into violence. “Lisandro Gordillo was a thief,” he said, “who stole all of the land that belonged to us and persecuted the people of Ilom.” When Gordillo sent surveyors to title the land, the people surrounded and imprisoned them. Gordillo arrived the next day on horseback, demanding that the surveyors be freed. He appealed to the mayor to release them, but the man refused and, in the ensuing scuffle, shot two men. One would die of his wounds, and the other, Don Laynez said, died later in prison in Santa Cruz del Quiché, the departmental capital, after Ladinos “stuffed poison up his nose.” In an act that would repeat itself during the worst years of the internal armed conflict in the 1980s, Gordillo, then the largest landowner in the area, called in the army. As Don Laynez explains,

Fifteen men from Ilóm were captured by Lisandro, and fifteen women were captured too. They were detained in Santa Cruz del Quiché for two months. They left on foot from Ilom to Quiché. They didn’t have shoes because they were poor and traveled to Quiché barefoot. They were delayed there for two months and without food. Who was going to feed them? There were thirty prisoners, fifteen women and fifteen men. Lisandro had them arrested. And now the new patron won’t give us back our land.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better demonstration of the parallelism of Mayan languages, one of the recurrent literary devices that structures Men of Maize, than in this quote, translated into English from Don Laynez’s native Ixil. The past repeats itself too: Gaspar Ilom’s poisoning was followed 20 years later by another poisoning. Ilom’s centuries-old resistance against foreign invaders, which has inspired its own myths and legends, continues into the present. Gaspar Ilom is dead, but his successors are everywhere: in the land of Ilom but also in Los Angeles; Richmond, Virginia; and Lynn, Massachusetts. As Nana Moncha tells Hilario Sacayón toward the end of this radiant, imperfect novel: “Tales are like rivers, they pick up what they can as they flow past, and if they can’t pick up something and carry it along, then they carry its reflection.”