Through performance and the spoken word, Yucatec Maya storytellers have
maintained the vitality of their literary traditions for more than five
hundred years. Telling and Being Told presents the figure of the
storyteller as a symbol of indigenous cultural control in contemporary
Yucatec Maya literatures. Analyzing the storyteller as the embodiment of
indigenous knowledge in written and oral texts, this book highlights how
Yucatec Maya literatures play a vital role in imaginings of Maya culture
and its relationships with Mexican and global cultures.
Through performance, storytellers place the past in dynamic relationship
with the present, each continually evolving as it is reevaluated and
reinterpreted. Yet non-indigenous actors often manipulate the
storyteller in their firsthand accounts of the indigenous world.
Moreover, by limiting the field of literary study to written texts,
Worley argues, critics frequently ignore an important component of Latin
America's history of conquest and colonization: The fact that Europeans
consciously set out to destroy indigenous writing systems, making
orality a key means of indigenous resistance and cultural continuity.
Given these historical factors, outsiders must approach Yucatec Maya and
other indigenous literatures on their own terms rather than applying
Western models. Although oral literature has been excluded from many
literary studies, Worley persuasively demonstrates that it must be
included in contemporary analyses of indigenous literatures as oral
texts form a key component of contemporary indigenous literatures, and
storytellers and storytelling remain vibrant cultural forces in both
Yucatec communities and contemporary Yucatec writing.
