As we read, Chacon studies Maya and Zapotec literatures.

She started talking about the

Problems:
 Chacon describe the position of indigenous writers in the “Republic of letters”.
Which is the canonic literature.

 Indigenous writers are not taking in count because the critics like Ángel Rama
said: “Introductions or preambles to literary histories devoted to indigenous
literatures make me uncomfortable. I have always found this form of organization a
bit mythical (...) 

 Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, said that poetry written in the indigenous

languages is “primitive” and with “false” literary value, he consider unworthy for his
anthology.

 Salvador Madariaga: “If there is unity from Argentina to Chile to Mexico and
Guatemala, this unity is Hispanic”

that´s why she uses Latin America concept than hispanic, even the term was created to
name an extension of the Latin nations of Europe. She remarks that the body of
knowledge and literatures she studies is understood as Latin American.

In a context like this, the indigenous activism was fundamental because it was necessary
to legitimized not only the indigenous literature, their communities too.

Chacon said that the Indigenous literary and artistic expressions have distinct aspects of
canonical literatures.

So, what implications have these distinct expressions?

 indigenous literatures reference other linguistic universes. The language does

not come from Greek o Latin like Spanish. So, it challenges the critics to think
outside the machine we are familiar 

 Expressed differently, the use of certain discursive structures indicates a cultural

and political shift in indigenous cultural productions that contest the notion of
orality as exclusively indigenous

 Establish a new relationship of authorship

 create projects of autonomy. In various perspectives a literature that demands

intellectual autonomy.

 articulate new relationships with the past and present

  Maya and Zapotec writers transgress the literary world-system. We think the
were originating in Western Europe and moving across its peripheries, as some
critics would have it in their theorization of the novel.

 it contested homogeneity and monolingualism.

 

Chacon´s methodology:

 She examines the conceptual, political, and imaginative spaces presented, not in
the frames of globalization. I mean, The study form the proper aspects not in
function by other problems.

 She describes indigenous historiographic to talk about Maya and Zapotec

literature

 She expects her study can work in the decolonization of knowledge in

Mesoamerica.

Chacon´s proposals: 

1. The indigenous have a writing system before the Spanish alphabet .The first is
the naturalized assumption that indigenous peoples lacked a comprehensive
writing system until the introduction of the alphabet by the Spanish in the sixteenth
century (que los pueblos indígenas carecían de escritura antes del alfabeto
español.)

Proves:

 Dennis Tedlock observes in 2000 Years of Mayan Literature, “The time has come
to take a further step and proclaim that literature existed in the Americas before
Europeans got here—not only oral literature but visible literature.”

 First, I do so because the Maya and Zapotec people developed sophisticated

ideographic and phonetic writing systems long before the armada of the
Spanish colonizers arrived on their shores—and that fact becomes an important
knowledge and power reference in public proclamations.

Cosmolectics
 2. I work from the premise that twentieth and twenty-first-century Maya and
Zapotec literatures resist the distinction between orality and literacy,
modernity and tradition, Western and non-Western. (These partitions risk
missing the interconnectedness between ancient scripts, performance,
provenance, narratives, and their blending with contemporary literature through
what I call a Mesoamerican cosmolectics)

 They resist thanks to indigenous cosmolectics we can follow this premise,

because it foregrounds a different universe and a singular way of
experiencing the world.

 She proposes that cosmolectics (for Mesoamerica, tying together the

fundamental role that the cosmos and history, sacred writing and poetry, nature
and spirituality as well as glyphs and memory) articulate Maya and Zapotec
ontologies. That’s why the indigenous communities self-name. For example:
Ñuu savi (gente lluvia) the relation is human- nature. Chol- cholel (el que trabaja la
milpa)

 Something in Cosmolectics is that it counters the sociological imagination that

indigenous (thesis) and European roots (antithesis) produce a mestizo
synthesis. (José Vasconcelos’s work, the culmination in the cosmic race where
Indians and blacks eventually disappear)

 Mesoamerican cosmolectics involves not just thesis, antithesis, and synthesis but
also a There is a fourth element known in Mesoamerican philosophy as
kab’awil, a vision that duplicates.

Kab’awil

 Is an interpretative tooI to theorized.

 kab’awil as a philosophy and logic applicable to Maya writing that embodied

past and present temporal modes that dissolved contradictions.

 kab’awil has undergone alterations in its denotation, connotation, and

representation, that’s why it has provoked various debates

 it´s a polysemous term (glyphs, archeological, ceramic) 

 generally, is the double gaze, she uses like a way to critique assimilation
proyects, sexism with indigenous communities. Called to In-betweenness
(methodology for equality)
  it helps to understand that writing, memory and orality are interrelated, and
they aren’t an evolutionary order.

 Example of K’iche feminist Alma López: know that myself and my reality and then
reconstructed myself whit de good things. That’s why Kab’awil is a lived
experience and not just symbolic.

3. The genres was in the indigenous cosmolectics and didn’t came outside
Mesoamérica. The book demonstrates that the far-reaching chronology evoked in
this body of literature challenges the assumption that aesthetic expressions in
formal literary genres originate outside Mesoamerica. (los géneros no se
originan fuera de Mesoamérica)

Proves:

 difrassismo or libana.

 there are genres in native communities but named in other linguistic

codes. Like Zapotec have a novel genre 

 I underscore how the production of literature in formal genres becomes an

important space for decolonization that differs from other forms, like
myths or fables/ because the indigenous can explain from their own
cosmolectics how a genre works.

Which are the implication on this statement?

“In fact, from an indigenous perspective there is no clear demarcation between what a
literary tale [is] and medical, religious, or historical information.”

¿Se fuerza a un orden? ¿De verdad se necesita un orden, necesitamos una filosofía?

Elmar Schmidt

Taboada Tabone is a morelense filmmaker, who make a film called 13 Pueblos en

defensa del agua, el aire y la tierra, Taboada Tabone focuses on his Mexican home-
state of Morelos and narrates the resistance of a coalition of indigenous communities
against governmental construction plans for the region. In one case, official
infrastructure
The have projects for the area include the construction of about 100,000 new private
homes and a golf course. According to statements made in the

Taboada Tabone portrays an indigenous identity consisting of cultural difference,

resistance, and environmental consciousness*, and merges it with Neozapatista, anti-
neoliberal protest to construct a new strategic identity of common resistance.

*What contributes to think like that? The appearance of ‘toxic discourse’ in transnational
and national political fields roughly coincided with a change in rural development politics
throughout Latin America

In the film they construct an essentialized image of ‘nature’s defenders,’

The Elmars Questions is whether indigenous populations play an active role, or whether
they are passively functionalized by social movements to improve the positions of the latter
in political negotiations?

Proposals for this problem:

-instead of requiring simulated ‘authenticity’ from indigenous cultures, social actors and
movements, it would seem more productive to reconceptualize this specific aspect of
global environmental discourses.

-To escape the ‘authenticity fallacy,’ it would be necessary to accept indigenous social
actors as ones that legitimately reformulate social and political identities, invent alternative
traditions, and image new communities.

Because we are in exchange and communication with global developments and

imaginations, with knowledge about the images that circulate about them, appropriating,
integrating and modifying certain elements, the way networked communities have always
done.