Grafting the Maya World Tree: Cosmic Conservation in Romelia Alarcón de Folgar's _Llamaradas_...

ERIN S. FINZER

Grafting the MayaWorld Tree:Cosmic Conservation in RomeliaAlarcón de Folgar's Llamaradas

(Guatemala, 1938)

In 1925, the Mexican Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos, pub-lished La raza cósmica [The Cosmic Race], which envisioned a futurespiritual and aesthetic utopia of Latin America's mixed races and cul-tures that would vindicate Latin America, thus giving it a claim to cul-tural, if not political, autonomy. Vasconcelos's ideas, which areunderstood today as broadly racist and assimilationist, initially gaveintellectuals throughout Latin America a rhetoric with which toimagine an inclusive modern society that included indigenous citi-zens.1 Primarily interpreted as promoting inclusion and egalitarianism(even though in reality it was typically implemented as a means of ac-culturation), mestizaje, the mixing of races and cultures in Hispanicsociety, functioned as an important nation-building discourse thatwould attempt both to characterize and define autonomous nationalidentities for twentieth-century Latin American republics. As part of itsnation-building projects, mestizaje also promoted indigenous cultures inthe fine arts through what Peruvian sociologist José Mariátegui definedas indigenismo: literary and artistic expression with indigenous themeswritten by non-indigenous people that collaborates “conscientemente ono en una obra política y económica de revindicación [de la culturaindígena]” [“consciously or not in a political and economic effort ofrevindication (of indigenous culture)”] (332).2 Guatemalan indigenist

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2014), pp. 1–23doi:10.1093/isle/isu129© The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for theStudy of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved.For Permissions, please email: [email protected]

by guest on April 15, 2015

http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from

http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/

literature flourished at this time, beginning famously with vanguardistMiguel Ángel Asturias's Leyendas de Guatemala [Legends of Guatemala](1930) and Luis Cardoza y Aragón's Pequeña sinfonía del nuevo mundo[Little Symphony of the New World] (1948; written between 1929 and 32).Poet Romelia Alarcón de Folgar's Llamaradas (Blazes; 1938) discursivelygrafts Maya cosmology and signs of Western modernity into the imageof a great tree. This paper examines how Llamaradas foregrounds whatcan be seen as an early environmental ethos as part of the cultural move-ment of mestizaje, embraced by intellectuals of the time as the utopicmixture of Latin America's diverse races and cultures.

Throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Central American conser-vationism and movements for political autonomy were accompaniedby intellectual discussions of mestizaje. Isthmanian governments, aswell as revolutionary Mexico and the Andean states, grappled withthe issue of assimilating indigenous populations into modernizednations. Cultural historian Marta Elena Casáus Arzú writes about theimportance of indigenism within theosophy, the spiritual movementthat united Central American intellectuals and politicos throughoutthe early twentieth century. With the Spanish publications of the Popolvuh (1927; the sacred text of the Quiché Maya) and the Libro de ChilamBalam de Chumayel (1930), it is not surprising that Central Americanindigenist literature typically vindicates not only Maya culture, butalso the Maya social and sacred environments of the tropical high-lands.3 Literary historian José Ramón Naranjo has explored theconcept of “deep ecology” in the Popol vuh. Similarly, critic ArturoArias has argued the essentialist link between Maya indigenist litera-ture and the land by stating that a key aspect of Maya cosmology isthat “la vida animal y vegetal presupone mayor importancia que lahumana” [“animal and vegetable life assumes greater importancethan human life”] (Arias).4 In this way, Maya indigenismo also carrieswith it an implicit land conservationism that promotes indigenous(ergo discursively national, in the 1930s context) autonomy and sover-eignty over the land. Although Alarcón's poetic representation of thetropical environment and its people is not as exotic or surreal as that ofher indigenist contemporaries, such as Asturias and Cardoza yAragón, the aesthetic experience of her verse nevertheless imparts acompelling vision of what I call (with a nod to the more affirmingaspirations of Vasconcelos) “cosmic conservationism.” I define cosmicconservationism as an ethic that not only values biodiversity andhuman diversity, but also nurtures the contingencies between living inharmony both with the environment and peoples of different culturesand ethnicities.

2 I S L E



ownloaded from


A product of its time in Latin America, the practice of cosmic con-servationism was determined by the relationships among land tenureand political, economic, and cultural autonomy and expression. Thisrelationship was perhaps nowhere stronger felt in Latin America thanin the banana-growing regions of Central America and the Caribbean,which included extensive areas of Guatemala. A popular staple in theNorth American diet, bananas were in high demand as early as theend of the nineteenth century. By the 1920s, however, banana planta-tions throughout the Caribbean and Panama had been spoiled byPanama disease and soil depletion. The United Fruit Company (UFC),the monolithic North American banana magnate, discovered that themost efficient way to respond to Panama disease was simply toabandon affected lands in favor of new lands throughout the CentralAmerican isthmus. The land holdings of the UFC were so extensive—historians often compare the total square acreage to the approximatesize of the state of Connecticut—that the company could easily trans-fer operations from one tract of land to another, leaving both largetracts of soil and communities devastated in its wake. Meanwhile, thevast majority of this land, acquired through economic coercion and po-litical corruption, was kept uncultivated and off-limits to landlesspeasants, whowere typically indigenous (S. Miller 134).5

The tremendous presence of the UFC was felt throughout 1930sCentral America as a harbinger of both economic oppression andadvancement. In addition to the abysmal labor conditions it brought tothe isthmus, the UFC was also responsible for ushering modernizationinto the region. Historians have documented that, in order to keep its op-erations running smoothly, the corporation installed and maintained rail-ways and highways, paved street systems, sea walls, 102 steamshipsknown as The Great White Fleet, airplanes, 3,500 miles of telephone andtelegraph wires, twenty-four radio stations, hotels, commissaries, laun-dries, electric plants, ice plants, mail service, bakeries, lighthouses, waterplants, sewer systems, schools, churches, country clubs, housing tracts,hospitals, banks, and ball fields. Elite sectors of society unequivocallyexperienced the luxuries and conveniences of modern technology andleisure culture; however, most Central Americans were unable to accessthese material aspects of modernity. In addition to its economic power,the ubiquitous UFC also threatened the political sovereignty of theCentral American republics. Kepner and Soothill refer to the UFC as“a State within a State, an empire superimposed upon many states,”which controlled local and national governments through propaganda, fi-nancial coercion, and other forms of strong-arming (The Banana Empire255). Read within the context of the economic and political power that theUFC wielded throughout Central America, land conservation efforts of

Grafting the Maya World Tree 3



ownloaded from


the time were also effectively anti-imperialist in that they implicitly signi-fied Latin American autonomy from foreign investors and governments.

Archival research in Guatemala suggests that, in this country, treeconservation efforts were closely linked to land conservation efforts, asthe tree carried important cultural significance for the people ofGuatemala.6 Guatemala's press featured extensive editorials and arti-cles on trees and forests in the months of May and June as it rallied inter-est for the national Día del Árbol, established annually by the 1935 LeyForestal as the last Sunday in May. In addition to this annual celebrationof the tree, Guatemala's daily newspaper, El Imparcial, routinely ran arti-cles detailing the deforestation taking place in neighboring El Salvadorand Honduras, as well as reforestation efforts in Guatemala throughthe establishment of national parks.7 Such forest conservation not onlyreflects the development of Guatemala's tourist industry, which wasbudding in the 1930s as a nationalist project of the Jorge Ubico govern-ment and enabled by the construction of highways and railroads, butalso suggests that Guatemala took part in a hemispheric movement ofconservationism that took form in the United States under PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal (1933–1945) and in Mexico underPresident Lázaro Cárdenas's revolutionary government (1934–1940). Asoutlined by environmental historian Lane Simonian, in addition to pro-moting the establishment and development of national parks, these twogovernments also promoted (to varying degrees of success) sustainableagricultural practices, fish and wildlife protection, and soil and forestryinitiatives (85–110). Among their top priorities was the protection ofbirds, which were beginning to show signs of population decline due tothe popular pastimes of hunting and birding (81, 101). Insofar as forestsprovided homes for both migratory and resident birds, game andbird enthusiasts became important advocates for forest conservationthroughout the hemisphere.

In the Central American context, forest conservation efforts, like thoseof land conservation, lent themselves to anti-imperialist enterprises.Historian Björn-Ola Linnér documents the worldwide population-resource crisis of the 1930s: “Highland regions were ploughed,rainforests were cleared, and arid regions were made fruitful. Thesearch for land to plant in fragile areas dramatically increased soilerosion” (13). This deforestation and soil erosion were indirectly dueto a global “demand in richer markets for coffee, citrus fruits,bananas and beef cattle [that] required more fertile tropical low-lands” (13–14).8 Thus, as the wealthier economy of the north calledfor fruits and timber from Central America, Central Americans lostsovereignty over land and forest resources. Reforestation campaigns,like land conservationism, implicitly sought to circumvent the

4 I S L E



ownloaded from


impact of the UFC and other neocolonial entities that negatively af-fected Central America's forested ecosystems.

Cultural production of the 1930s also expressed Central America'searliest conservationist values, but Alarcón appears to be the onlyvoice dedicated to tree conservation. In narrative fiction of the period,an entire genre of critical realism dedicated itself to documenting thedire labor and living conditions imposed by the UFC. Critic ElizabethHoran attributes the beginning of “banana plantation fiction,”which in-cludes Costa Rican Carlos Fallas'sMamita Yunai (1940), to Carmen Lyra'snarrative, Bananos y hombres [Bananas and Men], published in 1931 (47).In Guatemala, Carlos Wyld Ospina developed the novela criolla, a genreof fiction that combined social protest with the novela de la tierra [novelsof the earth], which develops the role of the tropical landscape to thepoint where it can be seen as its own character, potent with ominousagency. Critic Steven White's ecocriticism of the Nicaraguan vanguards,notably Pablo Antonio Cuadra, underlines the poet's nationalist useof environmental tropes, as well as the marriage of indigenism andecology. Nicaraguan teacher, journalist, and feminist activist JosefaToledo de Aguerri, founded the country's first Arbor Day in 1919, andher compatriot Olga Solari published the poetry collection Selva in 1944,which lamented devastation to her beloved Matagalpan jungle. TheGautemalan vanguardist writers Asturias and Cardoza y Aragón alsotook on the tropical landscape for its exoticism and lyric potential.

Although the early poetry of Alarcón does not engage in social crit-icism or contain the showy experimentalism of her vanguardist con-temporaries, her treatment of nature in Llamaradas is noteworthy dueto its articulation of an early environmentalist ethic and vision of mes-tizaje. Beautifully crafted, this collection presents some of the mostcomplex and compelling poetry of early twentieth-century CentralAmerica as it lyrically grafts the opposing worldviews of Maya cos-mology and Western modernity throughout the collection by unitingthem in the image of a great tree. In this way, Alarcón not only engen-ders a naturalist poetic of nature, she also asserts a utopian, autono-mist vision of the mestizo race.

As a poet, Alarcón is best known for her later collections, which takeon themes of domesticity and social protest. According to critic JudyBerry-Bravo, however, her early poemswere alsowell received, describedby contemporary novelist and poet, Argentina Díaz Lozano, as “origi-nales, audaces y bastante bien escritos” [“original, audacious and ex-tremely well-written”] (qtd. Berry-Bravo 63). Literary historian FranciscoAlbizúrez Palma devotes over two pages to the poet in his definitiveHistoria de la literatura guatemalteca, thus inscribing a place (albeit margin-alized in the chapter dedicated to “Literatura femenina guatemalteca”)




ownloaded from


for Alarcón in the Guatemalan canon (276–280). In addition to writingpoetry, Alarcón wrote short stories and enjoyed a prolific career as a jour-nalist in newspapers, magazines, and radio, founding and editing themagazineMinuto and traveling internationally as the editor of the RevistaPanamericana. In the early 1940s, Alarcón joined other artists and intellec-tuals in Guatemala's Comité Pro-Ciudadanía, a feminist organizationthat promoted women's suffrage (Monzón). Unlike many other CentralAmerican female writers of her day, Alarcón began her public, literarylife after having raised seven children; for this reason, she is also com-monly described as “a traditional Guatemalan housewife of the middleclass” (Valle). Although her later poems have been anthologized in col-lections of women's poetry (see O'Reilly and Agosín), Alarcón's earliestpoetry, which demonstrates a heavy mestizo and environmentalist con-sciousness, has been critically neglected except for a structural analysis ofLlamaradas in Berry-Bravo's 1996 monograph that examines how this col-lection sets the stage for poetic subjectivities in Alarcón's later works.Insofar as these early texts were published in the 1930s—the first decadethat saw widespread publishing of books of poetry by women through-out the Central American region—Alarcón, as well as other female envi-ronmental writers of the Isthmus, deserves revisiting in order to examinehow gender inflected participation in key cultural conversations of theday, especially land conservation and cultural politics, which were inex-tricably bound together in environmental literature.

The voice of Alarcón, like those of Gabriela Mistral and other LatinAmerican female writers of the era, resonates with the pan-LatinAmerican movements of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the AlianzaPopular Revoluncionaria Americana [American Popular RevolutionaryAlliance (Aprismo)].9 Struggling against U.S. economic imperialism,these activists were often in favor of communal land reform to keepLatin American resources in the hands of Latin Americans. Althougheconomically and politically motivated, these movements also under-stood that foreign land ownership and occupation were associated withthe depletion of soil and natural resources. In this way, they can be seenas environmentalist in that, however indirectly, they demonstrated aconcern for the natural environment. For example, Mistral links thedepletion of natural resources with the deletion of possibilities for LatinAmerican autonomy and self-sufficiency:

As long as the earth is ours, anything is possible,because creation knows what to do with itself . . . Butwhen soil loss comes; when the owner of the mine whofeeds a city changes; when the coffee plantations are de-finitively handed over to foreigners; when nitrate

6 I S L E



ownloaded from


deposits escape from our power; in short, when our landis passed out from under our crops like a serving tray,then all the possibilities of our perfecting the land havegone by the wayside.

[Mientras la tierra es nuestra, existen todas las posibilidades, porque lacreación tiene donde asentar los pies . . . Pero venga la pérdida delsuelo; cambie de dueño la mina que alimenta a una ciudad; pasen defin-itivamente el cafetal y los cafetales a manos lejanas; váyasenos eldepósito de salitre de nuestro poder; en una palabra, córrasenos debajode las plantas el territorio como una bandeja, y se han acabado con . . . todas las posibilidades de hacer perfecta [la tierra].(“Conversando”172)].

The naturalist, anti-imperialist vision of Mistral and other writersof her day form part of what I see as a naturalist “worldliness,” orwhat Edward Said describes as the way that texts always existwithin the circumstances of time, place, and society.10 Although earlytwentieth-century texts foregrounding Latin American nature maynot have been intentionally conservationist, their naturalist ethos nev-ertheless took part in and was informed by a discourse that valuednaturalism as part of a nationalist and anti-imperialist strategy, aswell as part of a continuation of nineteenth-century Romanticism'snostalgic return to nature as an aesthetic resistance to modernization.Moreover, it is possible that this naturalism was influenced by theconservationist efforts underway in Revolutionary Mexico and NorthAmerica, two entities with whom Central American intellectualsenjoyed a lively cultural and political exchange.11 Accordingly, theirnaturalism can be seen as taking part in a larger hemispheric environ-mentalist discourse that was beginning to be articulated in the 1930sand 1940s through conservationist policy-making and the promotionof nature to nationalist ends.

Historians have established that later twentieth-century LatinAmerican environmentalism came as an outgrowth of earlier landstruggles and conservationism. Shawn William Miller, for example,writes that in Latin America, “most early forms of environmentalismcan be labeled as conservationist, a strand of environmentalism with arather long history that dominated environmental thinking well into thetwentieth century” (196). Greg Cushman corroborates this fact in hisrecent book when he writes about the hemispheric Pan AmericanConservation Movement of 1938–1948, which primarily strove to assertnational control over natural resources and to preserve habitat andlandscape as monuments of natural and historic value (246–50).Participation in this technocratic movement was almost exclusively




ownloaded from


masculine, but, as I have shown elsewhere, a corpus of female writers—chief among them Mistral—effectively created a cultural—versus tech-nocratic—milieu for conservationist ideals through nature writing(Finzer “Mother Earth, Earth Mother”). Female activists and teachers,such as Peru's Magda Portal and Luz Jarrín de Peñaloza, complimentedthese literary conservationist activities with tree-planting campaignsand national Arbor Day celebrations.

Insofar as Central American intellectuals' naturalist writings par-ticipated in a broader discourse of international conservationism,they can be valued as cultural precursors to the more concertedefforts at conservationist and environmental policies that wouldgain speed in the later twentieth century.12 In this way, Alarcón andother isthmanian women's gendered visions of nature can be seenas environmentalist antecedents and read with an ecocritical ap-proach that more closely considers the early twentieth-century rela-tionship between literature and the environment in Latin America.Understanding this relationship is integral to establishing not onlythe strength of early twentieth-century conservation movements inCentral America, but also women's collaboration in these movements.Recently historian Mark Carey called for just this kind of interdisci-plinary work in Latin American environmental history to flesh outour understanding of early environmental consciousness and activismin Latin America (248).

The poetry collection Llamaradas, whose title is evocative of forestfires, consists of twenty-two poems in free verse that can be read togeth-er as a single long poem whose trajectory follows the seasonal lifecycle of a tree. Throughout the collection, the poetic voice(s) speak asthis tree. The personified image of the tree, ubiquitous throughoutLlamaradas, also imparts a Maya inflection to the collection. A Mayanistinterpretation of the speaker-tree in Llamaradas is supported by the pres-ence of various images that occur throughout the collection and are bor-rowed from Maya culture and the Popol vuh. For example, in variouspoems the speaker interacts with the milpa (plot of corn), izote (yucca),añil (indigo), Tohil (Maya god of fire), witches, the moon, Ixmucané, anowl, weaving, and the Quiché people (6, 9, 14, 16, 19).13 Trees are alsoan important element in the Popol vuh, in which the false god SevenMacaw lives in an animate tree; a calabash tree guards the head of OneHunahpu and impregnates Blood Woman with the hero twins,Hunahpu and Xbalanque; the fruit of the croton tree is used to trick thelords of Xibalba into thinking they have the heart of Blood Woman; andthe yellowwood tree grew so tall as to trap One Monkey and OneArtisan into being monkeys (D. Tedlock 112–14, 116, 121). As if playingoff the agency of the trees of the Popol vuh, Mayan languages personify

8 I S L E



ownloaded from


trees in that their distinct parts are named for parts of the human body;for example, in the Kaqchikel dialect, fruit is ruwach (“its eyes”), leavesare ruwi’ (“its hair”), branch is ruqa’ (“its arms”), trunk is raqan (“itsleg”). In Quiche, the powerful positional k'i (chi in Kaqchikel), whichmeans “in the middle of,” is also derived from the word for tree, onceagain underlining the centrality of the tree image in the Maya worldview (Villar-Anléu 10).

The speaker-tree in Llamaradas is so pervasive and personified as tosuggest its identity as a ceiba tree, revered by indigenous and Africancultures throughout Latin America as a powerful and mystical, evensacred, entity. Ceiba trees can grow to over 70 meters tall with enor-mous systems of buttressing roots and canopies, which are home tohundreds of insects and birds and whose widths can exceed one and ahalf times the tree's height. One often finds ceiba trees in public plazasor markets, where they are valued for their shade. Guatemalan histori-an Luis Villar-Anléu writes that the ceiba is known as the national treeof Guatemala and that one of the etymologies for the name of thecountry is “lugar de árboles” [“place of trees”] (10). Throughout hiscolorful book, Villar-Anléu attributes not only magical and sacredproperties to the tree, but also views the tree as an historical witness tohundreds of years of colonial history. In the Maya cultures of theGuatemala highlands and southern Mexico, the ceiba tree is known asWakah Chan (the World Tree among the Classic; today referred to as“Yax che’,” meaning First, or Green Tree, among the Yukatec Maya)and represents the axis mundi, the continuous life cycle of creation anddestruction, the king (who embodied the creator god), the movementsof the Milky Way, and the portals to the Heavens and Underworld(Friedel, Schele, and Parker 53, 55, 394–97; Schele and Friedel 66–70).In the opening lines of the Chilam Balam, a Yucatec Maya book ofhistory, oracles and medicine, we are told of a great tree that buttressesthe universe and divides it into the four cardinal directions. MayanistElizabeth Newsome explains that each of these quadrants were associ-ated with specific colors, spiritual meanings and values, gods, floraand fauna (9). Like the Tree of Life of many cultures around the world,the Wakah Chan represents the order of the cosmos, as its branchesextend into the thirteen levels heaven, its trunk exists in the earthlyworld of humans, and its roots reach into the nine levels of theUnderworld of Xibalba. In that its yearly life cycle seems to follow themovements of the Milky Way, the ceiba also incarnates the Maya calen-dar system, upon which the Maya cosmology, oracle and religion arebased.

As in other cultures, Maya shaman-priests, known as ajq'ij (literally,“daykeepers”), can pass through the different realms of the universe,




ownloaded from


represented by the World Tree, carrying with them the powers of spiri-tual beings and ancestral deities from other worlds.14 Mayanist anthro-pologists, Linda Schele and David Friedel, tell us that supernaturalbeings could be accessed by shaman-priests through ritual objects, fea-tures of the landscape, and in the body of the human performerthrough bloodletting (70). These same sacred sites and activities allowfor the communication and travel among the different realms. In thePopol vuh, travel among the different realms results in a recurringmotif of characters' going down in physical space and coming upagain. Representative of passing between the human world, the under-world, and the heavens, these downwards and upwards move-ments, or “sowing and dawning,” can also be interpreted as the cycleof creation, which includes continual death by sacrifice and rebirth(D. Tedlock 70). The Maya, who were acute astronomers and mathe-maticians, believed that this cycle, and thus their sacred story of crea-tion, was reenacted throughout the calendar year by the movements ofthe Milky Way, the shape of the Calendar Round, and the life cycle ofthe ceiba tree. For this reason, the Maya creation story is inextricablytied up with the passage of time and its representation in the MilkyWay and the Wakah Chan. Also for this reason, shaman-priests wereliterally called “daykeepers” because they kept track of an extraordi-narily complex, cyclical system of ritual calendars that not only inter-preted daily events as part of pre-ordained historical patterns, but alsopredicted the future. Insofar as the poetic trajectory of Llamaradasfollows the life cycle of the tree and, therefore, the passage of time, thespeaker of the collection functions as a sort of poetic ajq'ij. Embodiedby the tree, the speaker also has access to the different parts of the treeand is the reader's intermediary, or guide, throughout the collection.

The shamanic speaker-tree does not characterize herself as exclu-sively Maya, however, as images of Western culture and modernityfloat throughout the collection. These images include references toDios (with a capital D, this Dios likely refers to the Christian God),jazz, marihuana, cellophane, talkie films, 100-watt light bulbs,cameras, and parachutes (Llamaradas 8, 9, 11, 13, 17, 18, 20). Togetherwith a life cycle of birth, death by sacrifice and resurrection, the refer-ence to Dios, the Christian God, also allows for the interpretation ofthe tree as the Christian symbol of the cross. Indeed, Llamaradas callsattention to a Christian interpretation by alluding to Holy Week, theÁngelus (a form of sung prayer), and the rosary (9, 10, 21, 22). Alarcónis not original in blending the Christian cross with the Wakah Chan,although it was not until the late 1980s that this syncretism was firstrecognized by Western anthropologists, when Friedel, Schele, andParker documented the presence of modern Christian-Maya crosses

10 I S L E



ownloaded from


throughout the Yucatán and Chiapas as a syncretic way for theregion's Maya both to worship the Christian God and to provide aritual space for the Maya gods through the image of a tree (53–5).

By blending modern Western and indigenous elements, Llamaradasimparts multiple times (evocative of what García Canclini has termed“multitemporal heterogeneity”) and the mixed, or mestizo, experienceof cultures that characterized twentieth-century Guatemala (36).Despite time's passing around her, however, the speaker does notmove with it; she remains an immobile tree, accountable to her placearound which unanchored signifiers come and go. As a tree, the axismundi, the poetic speaker maintains easy access to the cultural signsthat orbit around her with the passage of time. In this way, she acts asan ajq'ij in another sense: she organizes and articulates these multiplecultural signs, passing between the indigenous and Western worlds.As an ajq'ij, she both mediates and embodies a multitemporal mesti-zaje through her verse, thus privileging the circular, Maya concept oftime—represented here by the life cycle of the tree—over more linear,Western notions of time that might otherwise delegate Maya culture tothe past. Accordingly, Alarcón's poetry allows indigenous culture toco-exist—even prevail—in a modern world that might otherwise wishto exclude or erase indigeneity by assimilating it into a homogenous,“modern” national identity.

The poetic voice can be seen not only as an ajq'ij, but also an ajtzib’,or scribe. Stone stelae of the classic Maya city were conceptualized astrees, or tetun (“tree-stones”), incarnating the World Tree not onlythrough their shapes (suggestive of a trunk), but also through theircarved decorations and writing, which were viewed as sacred andbore ritual importance.15 Moreover, Maya scholar Antonio MedizBolio recounts that books were revered among the Yucatec Maya as“trees that speak,” not only because their paper was made of treepulp, but also because they held spiritual value similar to that of trees(A la sombra [In the Shade] 269). Maya writing, whose glyphs on stelae,temples, and books are only recently being decoded, blends logo-graphic and syllabic writing systems, often in relationships that playon sound similarity. Adding to the enigma of Maya writing, ajtzib’ ap-parently enjoyed flaunting their individual styles and talent, resultingin parallel images that look different but share the same meaning (A lasombra 112). I read these artistic, phonetic plays with glyphs as a kindof poetry, or word artistry, likening the Maya scribe to a poet. In fact,in the Popol vuh, the creator gods are frequently referred to as “mason”and “sculptor,” as if referring to the act of inscribing, or carving, atetun, which have been described by Newsome as “visual poetry”(xviii). The act of creation, then, also links the Maya scribe to Western




ownloaded from


ideas of the poet, which The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry andPoetics (1993) explains is derived from the Greek word poietes,meaning “maker.”

As an ajq'ij and ajtzib’, the speaker-tree of Llamaradas not only mon-itors and records the passage of time, but also bears a special relation-ship to her landscape, much like a tree in a forest. In every poem, thespeaker-tree relates herself to the world around her and to the passageof time, consistently locating herself temporally and geographicallywithin the Maya cosmos. In Maya cosmology the landscape is sacred,as certain features, such as mountains, caves, lakes, and springs, act asshamanic portals between the different worlds. This sacred landscapeis so important that it was mirrored in classic Maya architecture andurban design, with pyramids that represented mountains, tunnels ascaves, plazas representing valleys or plains, and stelae as trees (Scheleand Freidel 71–3).

In the first verse of the first poem of Llamaradas, the speaker literallyroots herself in her landscape when she announces, “Tengo el almaempotrada en el paisaje” [“I have my soul planted in the landscape”](1). Across the collection, the speaker(s) identifies with a tree invarious stages of the life cycle, uniting individual poems with therefrain, “soy un árbol” [“I am a tree”]. In the poem, “En primavera”[“In Springtime”], the speaker announces three times, “soy un árbolviejo” [“I am an old tree”] (5). The Spanish árbol viejo also translates to“nurselog,” or a large tree whose falling in the forest opens up a bigspace in the canopy, allowing for new life to grow from its ownremains.16 In “La canción del árbol” [“Tree Song”]: “soy un árbolnuevo” [“I am a new tree”] (7).17 In the poem “Reflexionando[“Reflecting”], the speaker-tree states, “soy árbol centenario” [“I am ahundred-year-old tree”] (11). In the final poem of the collection, “Hevivido” [“I have lived”], she affirms five times, “yo soy ahora unárbol” [“I am now a tree”] (24). Other poems in the book also charac-terize the poetic voice as a tree and carry throughout them images ofnature; in fact, humans are practically absent in the collection apartfrom uncontextualized images taken from modern Western culture. Asmentioned earlier, such foregrounding of nature over human activityhas been described by Arias as central to Maya cosmology. It is alsothis emphasis on nature that opens the collection to an ecological inter-pretation.

Despite their privileging Maya content, the poems of Llamaradasdo not demonstrate traditional Maya lyric form, characterized byparallel constructions crafted with word plays and reiterations of thesame concept in different ways; in fact, nearly all of the texts employtraditional Spanish versification.18 Throughout the collection, the

12 I S L E



ownloaded from


overwhelmingly Maya content, combined with traditional Spanishversification, yields a uniquely mestizo poetry. Composed in freeverse (or verses of regular poetic meter with no terminal rhyme),most poems are in the form of the Spanish silva, a poetic form consist-ing of verses of seven and eleven syllables in no certain order andwhose name comes from the Latin word for “forest” or “woodland.”Since medieval times, the silva has been the preferred form for thebeatus ille (a text extolling the virtue and beauty of country life)and mystical poetry. In the Latin American context, the Chileanpoet, Andrés Bello, employed the silva in his canonical work on thetropical sublime, Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida [Silva to theAgriculture of the Torrid Zone] (1826). Thus, insofar as Llamaradas fea-tures both the mystical and natural life of a tree, this poetic form isvery appropriate and roots the poet in both the Latin American andPeninsular aesthetic traditions of bucolic literature.

Alarcón employs other forms of versification that demonstrate apoetic conversation with Hispanic vanguard poetry. First trading ontraditional Spanish meter—including the romance, or popular balladform, and various forms of arte mayor, or “high” poetic form—the poetdisplays her talent for difficult versification. In a more experimentalvein, she also includes several poems of blank verse, thus breakingwith tradition altogether and aligning herself with the more modernverse of the literary vanguards. In addition to her predominant use oftraditional Spanish meter, Alarcón displays a markedly Western stylethrough intertexts with other Spanish-language poets and Christiandevotional verse and song, as in “Toque de oración” [“Call to Prayer”]and “El ángelus” [“Angelus”]. Specifically, her use of surrealist imagesof midnight, moons and the popular romance point to the influence ofSpain's Federico García Lorca. The reference to a parachute's falling in“Anochece” [“Night Falls”] can be interpreted as an intertext withChilean Vicente Huidobro's long poem, “Altazor,” and the final verseof the final poem of the collection suggests an intertext with Uruguay'sJuana de Ibarbourou. By citing these contemporary poets, Alarcónthus situates herself both among her Hispanic vanguard contemporar-ies and the bestselling female poets of her day.

Commonly exploited for their exoticism and perceived cultural“authenticity,” indigenous themes were popular among writers andartists of the Latin American vanguard.19 Unlike these writers,however, Alarcón's poetic voice does not exoticize the indigenous ele-ments in Llamaradas; instead, Maya allusions are typically so integratedinto the poetic content that they can go unnoticed if one is not lookingfor them. For example, in “La milpa,” the speaker describes thedesigns of a woman's huipil, or woven blouse, in the third stanza:




ownloaded from


y los macacos de la tarde [la milpa] enhebraen chacales vistososcon el hilo inquietante de sus flores.and [the milpa] threads the afternoon monkeysin bright jackalswith the startling thread of her flowers.20 (14)

Like this metaphor of the milpa's (or cornplot's) weaving, the Mayaconcept of cyclical time and the World Tree are never made explicit inthe collection, although their presence is ubiquitous and central tothe poem's ideology. The subtlety of such images contributes to themestizaje project of her verse, which weaves together Western and in-digenous themes so finely that neither calls unwarranted attention toitself nor posits itself against the other.

The mestizaje of Llamaradas's speaker-tree is complicated throughoutthe collection by the speaker's gender. The speaker identifies herself asfemale only in two poems: “En primavera” and “He vivido” (5, 24). Anotherwise ungendered speaker hints at femininity throughout the col-lection, however, as she engages in traditionally gendered activities—such as weaving in “Lamilpa” and “Fuego” [“Fire”]—or extends identi-fying traits or activities—such as writing poetry in “En primavera”—from poems where she identifies herself as female, to other poemswhere the speaker is ungendered (5, 14, 19). In this way, the speakermaintains a feminine continuity throughout the collection. Despite myinterpretation of her as feminine, however, I also read the speaker's ef-facement of a gendered identity in the majority of the poems as contrib-uting to a hybrid, mestizo subjectivity. Biologically speaking, treesgenerally include both male and female reproductive organs and allowfor the grafting of different varieties or species. The speaker-tree, then,can both literally and figuratively embody different genders and races,evoking the hybridity inherent both in mestizaje and biodiverse ecosys-tems, which is central to my concept of cosmic conservationism.

In the context of Mexican indigenist literature written by RosarioCastellanos, critic Joanna O'Connell describes the shared inequalitiesbetween women and indigenous peoples. She avoids a facile compari-son of the suffering of women with that of indigenous people by ex-plaining that Castellanos (and, by extension, other female indigenistwriters, such as Alarcón) “shows how the pain of sexism and racismprevent people from recognizing the suffering of others and fromimagining solidarity” (3). The female speaker of Llamaradas negotiatesher contradictory positioning by imagining herself as a tree, which inturn opens itself to tropes borrowed from Maya cultural identity.Moreover, as the subordinate positions of female and indigenous

14 I S L E



ownloaded from


converge with one another, the image of the tree also assumes a radi-cally subaltern position. It is at this nexus of subalternity that the col-lection again lends itself to an ecocritical reading, or one that valuesthe role of nature in literature over more human-centered interests, inthat we are given the tree's perspective, which would otherwise beignored in anthropocentric Western culture. Moreover, insofar as sub-altern studies encompass humanitarian activism within the academy,it is also here that Llamaradas enables an ethos of early environmentalactivism by elevating the status of the Maya landscape in ladino (non-indigenous) literature and implicitly calling for indigenous landrights.

Rooted in the sacred Maya landscape, the speaker-tree ofLlamaradas underlines her fragility and contingency by naming thethreats of the hatchet in “La canción del árbol,” and of fire which ulti-mately consumes her in “Fuego” and “Junto al hogar” [“Hearthside”](19, 23). The almost constant presence of human-caused threats thusreminds readers that this landscape has also historically been the siteof conquest and colonial oppression, susceptible in 1938 to the foreign,capitalist interests of the banana magnates. In this way, the naturallandscape once again assumes an essentialized femininity by under-lining its vulnerability to both patriarchal consumption and gratifica-tion and, by doing so, foreshadows the capitalist critique thatecofeminist pioneer Carolyn Merchant would later identify as theheart of ecofeminism.21

Since Annette Kolodny published The Lay of the Land in 1975, theo-rists have grappled with the essentialist tendency to link women andthe environment by characterizing them both as passive and mallea-ble, ideal spaces for colonization in phallocentric relationships ofpower. Latin American critic Mary Louise Pratt has summed up thispower differential in Latin American colonial literature with the“seeing-man,” her term for “the white male subject of European land-scape discourse—he whose eyes passively look out and possess” (9).Since then, Gillian Rose has tried to reconcile the metaphor ofland-as-woman.22 In Feminism and Geography (1993), she coined theidea of paradoxical space, which involves the occupations of two posi-tions at once, thereby simultaneously undermining and inhabitingboth sides of the gendered binary relationships of colonizer/colonized,subject/object, active/passive, conqueror/victim (152). “The subject offeminism,” Rose writes, “depends on a paradoxical geography inorder to acknowledge both the power of hegemonic discourses and toinsist on the possibility of resistance” (155). In other words, for Rose,feminism depends on paradoxical spaces as sites of resistance and sub-version within existing structures of patriarchy. The eco-feminism




ownloaded from


imagined in Llamaradas depends on such paradoxical spaces that notonly span dichotomies of masculinity and femininity, but also ofWestern and indigenous cultures and the different ways in which bothinterface and interact with the natural environment.

As a paradoxical space, Llamaradas allows for the coexistence ofthe differences mentioned above, modeling a new ecology of subaltern(indigenous, feminine, environmental, colonial, etc.) resistance withinprevailing power structures. Alarcón avoids this trap of facilely equat-ing indigenous peoples with environmental responsibility—a fallacyreferred to as the “pristine myth” by geographer William Denevan—by employing Maya cosmology to refer deictically to a sacred landscapeof which the speaker is part and to which the speaker is responsible,thus making it a paradoxical space.23 The poem, “La canción del árboland the final poem of the collection, “He vivido,” achieve such spacethrough images of rebirth and reaffirmation, captured in the verses“Y soy un árbol nuevo” [“And I am a new tree”] in “La canción” and“Yo soy ahora un árbol” [“I am now a tree”] in “He vivido” (7, 24). Thecyclical motif of rebirth not only resonates with Christian stories of res-urrection, but also the Maya concept of sacred time and creation, as wellas the cyclical patterns of the natural seasons and the life cycle of a tree.Following this cycle of death and renovation, the Maya landscape, asthe site of conquest and colonial oppression, is converted in Llamaradasinto a place of continual cultural convergence and creativity. Nowheredoes the speaker identify herself explicitly as mestiza, but she availsherself of words and images from both Maya andWestern cultures. Thespeaker-tree thus incarnates what Marilyn Miller describes as “the slip-periness of mestizaje as a somatic or semiotic category of signification”in that she displaces conventional cultural signification by inserting itsindicators in strange relationship to one another throughout the collec-tion (7). In “Plenitud” [“Plenitude”], the voice explains:

Tengo el alma empotrada en el paisajesoy como el río,que parte en dos el llanocon alfanje de seda.I have my soul planted in the landscapeI am like the riverthat divides the plain in twowith its silky scimitar. (1)

Culturally speaking, the subject—like her landscape—is split, upset-ting the topos of enunciation because the identity of the speaker cannotbe nailed down. These unstable signifiers result in paradoxical space,characterized by Rose as that “which straddles the spaces of

16 I S L E



ownloaded from


representation and unrepresentability,” thus celebrating a juncture ofcultural differences that are boldly mestizo (in its utopian sense) inthat they can no longer be assimilated or colonized (154).

By straddling the spaces of representation and unrepresentability—or attempting to represent the unrepresentable through poetry—Llamaradas loans its mestizo, paradoxical space to the literary expressionof cosmic conservationism. Llamaradas's speaker-tree serves as a cosmicconservationist subject, producing an aesthetic experience of aweand one-ness with the universe while also providing the collectionwith meaning as the organizing image. As a metonym for the earth,the organizing principle of the speaker-tree can be extended to allnatural existence, inspiring an environmental ethos among its readers.Contingent in Llamaradas upon the referents of the sacred Maya land-scape and modern images (such as talkie films and cellophane), thetree-as-earth returns us to the context of 1938 Guatemala, where suchan ethos can be interpreted practically as a call for Latin American au-tonomy in the forms of cultural independence and sovereignty of theland. Seventy years later, this ethos has evolved to entail more urgentand concentrated conservationism through both environmental stew-ardship and the sustainable management of ecosystems, agriculturalpractices, and development. As Western culture continues to associateindigenous cultures—rightly or wrongly—with sustainable environ-mental practices, the utopian vision of mestizaje in Llamaradas contin-ues to resonate with twenty-first century cultural and environmentalwork through its vision of a cosmic ecology.

The image of the tree in Llamaradas functions as a metonym for theenvironment at large. As such, it also acts as a space for radical hybridi-ty, for mixing species, races, and genders, as well as cultural traditions.Because the poetic voice in Llamaradas is embodied in the tree, theimage effectively marries the projects of mestizaje and environmentalresponsibility because one's biological survival is contingent upon cul-tural survival, and vice-versa. In this way, the implicit “green” readingof the collection is interdependent with a “brown” (mestizo) one. AsWakah Chan, the speaker-tree of Llamaradas signifies the interconnec-tions between human life and the natural and supernatural worlds,which are one and the same in Maya cosmology. These connections areenabled by the coexistence of Maya andWestern discourses and cosmol-ogies and ultimately engender the sublime ethos of Llamaradas.Articulating both cultural and biological differences through her poeticvoice, Alarcón envisions a new ecology of cultural and environmentalsustainability that, although not indicative of a viable conservationistmovement in her day, does suggest an intellectual and artistic preoccu-pation with the Central American environment.




ownloaded from


Llamaradas serves as a gendered case study of how discourses of en-vironmental preservation often accompanied cultural discourses of na-tionalism, political and economic sovereignty, and even ethnic identity.In the conclusion to his Latin American environmental history, S. Millerstates that “Latin America has yet to exhume her environmental proph-ets, individuals who were ignored by their contemporaries and buriedwithout eulogy or epitaph” (203). Critic Cheryll Glotfelty similarlywrites of ecocriticm's “second” stage, which includes recuperating envi-ronmental writers to form a genre or tradition of nature writing. In fact,much work has been done recently to recuperate Latin America's envi-ronmental prophets, but women's roles in early conservation efforts stillneed to be highlighted.24 Alarcón may not have been a prophet to thedegrees of Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, but insofar as it is combinedwith other cultural discourses relevant to 1930s Latin America, her envi-ronmentalist vision resonates clearly with that of other Latin Americanfemale thinkers of her time and points to a later, more determined cul-tural preoccupation with environmental threats and responsibility. Inthis sense, she and many of her contemporaries should be rememberedas environmental sages and deserve to be reevaluated in order torestore an environmentalist tradition to Latin American cultural and lit-erary histories.

N O T E S

1. Marilyn Grace Miller explains the imperialist, assimilating, and evenracist ends to which Vasconcelos's mestizaje was later used. Vasconcelos,himself, denounced his ideas in La raza cósmica later in life, calling it “one ofmy silly notions” and explaining that it was written in response to socialDarwinism (40).

2. All translations are mine. Indigenismo, like mestizaje, has been histori-cally problematic in that it involves the representation of a subaltern culture bya person of privilege.

3. The 1927 edition of the Popol vuh was enthusiastically received byCentral American intellectuals for being both a “genuina obra americana decarácter moral” (“genuine American work of moral character”) and part of aninternational effort to restore spiritual anxiety after the horrors of World War I(M. Víctor 286).

4. Arias contrasts this world view with that of the white man in which, hetheorizes, the human and natural worlds are separate, and even hostile to oneanother.

5. Kepner and Soothill write that over 85 percent of UFC lands were unim-proved (27), while S. Miller writes that the UFC cultivated only 5 percent of itsGuatemalan holdings, which eventually led to popular discontent, land reformunder President Jacobo Arbenz, and the U.S.-backed insurgency of 1954 (134).

18 I S L E



ownloaded from


For more on the dealings of the UFC and its social, economic and politicalimpacts in Central America, see Kepner, Stanley, Soluri, Chapman, and Chomsky.

6. The importance of the tree in Guatemalan culture has recently been ana-lyzed by Anderson. For examples of how the tree resonates in popular culture,see Villar-Anléu and Rubio, who anthologizes some 249 poems, each by a dif-ferent author, about trees.

7. From 1938, the year that Llamaradas was published, the newspaper dailyEl Imparcial ran the following articles by Napoleón Viera Altamirano, who ap-parently covered conservationism for the paper: “La desforestación deHonduras” (25 agosto 1938, p. 3), “Reforestación centroamericana” (1 septiem-bre 1938, p. 3), and “Desforestación en El Salvador” (31 agosto 1938, p. 3). Thefollowing articles were unsigned: “El sacrificio de los árboles” (12 septiembre1938, p. 3), “El bosque de la Cambre, encanto y orgullo de Bruselas” (30 agosto1938, p. 3), and “Es función trascendental del árbol crear tierra vegetal (30agosto 1938, p. 3).

8. See also McNeill et al.9. Aprismo was a leftist movement throughout Latin America begun in

Peru in 1924 by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. It advocated Latin Americanunity against foreign imperialism, as well as the Marxist ideals of nationalizingall industry and land and class solidarity. I have linked Aprismo ideology andPeruvian Magda Portal's conservationist poetics (“Trees, Seas, and EcofeministImaginary”).

10. Said's worldliness is also akin to Raymond Williams's “structure offeeling,” or the textual indicator of the lived experience of a society at a partic-ular moment (132–3).

11. See Finzer, Poetisa Chic (210–11) and “Among Sandino's Girlfriends”(151, n.15).

12. See Evans, Cushman, and Simonian.13. Corn (or milpa) is also central to the Popol vuh: humans are made from

it, and Ixmucané watches it die and grow again as a symbol of her grandsons'deaths and rebirths. Villar-Anléu tells us that there is also a Mesoamericancorn tree (el árbol de maíz or el árbol de Iximche’) that bears seeds similar to corngrains and are used in traditional Maya cuisine as substitutes for or comple-ments to corn in tortillas and other dishes (77). Owls are the messengers to thelords of Xibalba, the Underworld. Tohil is the god of fire. When the hero twinsascend into the sky, one becomes the sun and the other becomes the moon.Ixmucané is one of the creator gods, or first mothers, who deified corn bynaming it. She is also a divine midwife, grandmother of the hero twins. Mayawomen weave their huipiles (ornate blouses), whose distinct patterns signifytheir individual communities. Indigo (añil) is a common dye in women'sskirts, called morgas. Alarcón also makes various references to the Quichépeople and superstitions among them, including witches (Ajq'ij, or shamanicpriests, are commonly known as witches). The yucca plant (izote) is believed totake human form at night.

14. In Time and the Highland Maya, anthropologist Barbara Tedlock writesthat the ajq'ij were both shamans and priests, in that shamans are understoodto directly possess or be possessed by supernatural beings, while priests act asintermediaries between humans and gods (47).




ownloaded from


15. For more on tetun, see Newsome. In 1986, David Stuart interpreted theMaya glyph for “stela” as tetun but, in 1994, he decided that the glyph is lacam-tun, or “large stone” (Newsome xvii). Newsome argues, however, that“despite the obsolescence of the tetun reading, Stuart made a connection thatis still fundamentally sound” (xvii). She explains that, as stelae were meant torepresent the royal power on given dates, they effectively incarnate WakahChan as the renewer of all things, the origin of time and direction and theballast of the universe.

16. Thanks to Greg Cushman, who pointed out this meaning to me.17. The poem, “La canción del árbol,” could be referring specifically to

marimba music, or the national music of Guatemala. Villar-Anléu explainsthat the árbol de hormigo, or palo de marimba, is the tree from whose sonorouswood the marimba is fashioned (58).

18. For more information on Maya poetics, see Carmack et al.19. Mariátegui famously discussed literary indigenismo among the van-

guards in his Siete ensayos.20. The word macacos can be translated as either “monkeys” or “kids.”

A milpa is a uniquely Mesoamerican farming method that complementarilycombines corn, beans and squashes in a way that continuously replenishes thesoil. This alimentary cocktail also results in a complete protein.

21. Merchant writes that feminism, like environmentalism, is “sharply criti-cal of the costs of competition, aggression, and domination arising from themarket economy's modus operandi in nature and society” (xx).

22. Critic Andrea Blair first used Rose's concept of paradoxical space toanalyze Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, and her thinking has influencedme here.

23. In discussing Denevan, Charles Mann warns against using “Indians asgreen role models” and insists that, despite history's tendency to depictIndians as living in spiritual balance with Nature, pre-Columbian indigenouspeoples did alter the environment through massive agricultural operations(278). He also criticizes current usage of the collapse of classic Maya civiliza-tion, believed to be caused by an exhausted environment, as a parable forgreen activists because it also strips indigenous peoples of environmental andhistorical agency (278).

24. See, for example, Cushman, Barbas-Rhoden, andWhite.

W O R K S C I T E D

Agosín, Marjorie. These Are Not Sweet Girls. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 1994.Print.

Alarcón del Folgar, Romelia. Llamaradas. Guatemala: Imprenta Minerva, 1938.Print.

Albizúrez Palma, Francisco and Catalina Barrios y Barrios, eds. Historia de laliteratura guatemalteca. Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1984. Print.

Anderson, Kit. Nature, Culture and Big Old Trees. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004.Print.

20 I S L E



ownloaded from


Arias, Arturo. “La literariedad, la problemática étnica y la articulación de dis-cursos nacionales en Centroamérica.” Istmo 8 (2004). http://www.istmo.denison.edu/n08/articulos/literariedad.html

Asturias, Miguel Ángel. Leyendas de Guatemala. Madrid: Salvat Editores, 1970.Print.

Barbas-Rhoden, Laura. Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction.Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2012. Print.

Berry-Bravo, Judy. “La irreverencia de dos poetas guatemaltecos: María JosefaGarcía Granados y Romelia Alarcón Folgar.” Alba de América 15 (1997): 28–29. 175–84. Print.

———. Romelia Alarcón Folgar: Palabra y poesía de Guatemala. Guatemala:Serviprensa Centroamericana, 1996. Print.

Blair, Andrea. “Landscape in Drag: The Paradox of Feminine Space in SusanWarner's The Wide, Wide World.” The Greening of Literary Scholarship. Ed.Steven Rosendale. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007. 111–30. Print.

Cardoza y Aragón, Luis. Pequeña sinfonía del nuevo mundo. San Carlos,Guatemala: Editorial U, 2001. Print.

Carey, Mark. “Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends,Interdisciplinary Insights, and Future Directions.” Environmental History14.2 (2009): 221–52. Web.

Carmack, Robert M., Janine Gasco, and Gary H. Gossen. The Legacy ofMesoamerica: History and Culture of a Native American Civilization. NewJersey: Prentice Hall, 1996. Print.

Chapman, Peter. Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World.New York: Canongate, 2007. Print.

Chomsky, Aviva. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in CostaRica, 1870–1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996. Print.

Cushman, Gregory T. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A GlobalEcological History. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.

Denevan, W. M. “‘The Pristine Myth’ The Landscape of the Americas in 1492.”Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 369–85. Web.

Evans, Sterling. The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica. Austin:U of Texas P, 1999. Print.

Fallas, Carlos. Mamita Yunai. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial y DistribuidoraCentroamericana, 1970. Print.

Finzer, Erin. “Among Sandino's Girlfriends: Carmen Sobalvarro and theGendered Poetics of a Nationalist Romance.”LARR 47.1 (137–60).

———. Forthcoming. “Mother Earth, Earth Mother: Gabriela Mistral as EarlyEcofeminist.”Hispania.

———. Poetisa Chic: Fashioning the Modern Female Poet in Central America, 1929–1944. PhD dissertation, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Universityof Kansas, Lawrence.

———. Forthcoming. “Trees, Seas, and Ecofeminist Imaginary in the VanguardPoetry of Magda Portal (Peru, 1900–1989).”Hispanófila.

Friedel, David, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker. Maya Cosmos: Three ThousandYears on the Shaman‘s Path. New York: WilliamMorrow, 1993. Print.




ownloaded from

http://www.istmo.denison.edu/n08/articulos/literariedad.html








García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la mod-ernidad. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2001. Print.

Horan, Elizabeth Rosa, ed. The Subversive Voice of Carmen Lyra: Selected Works.Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000. Print.

Kepner, Charles David and Jay Henry Soothill. The Banana Empire: A CaseStudy of Economic Imperialism. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1935. Print.

———. Social Aspects of the Banana Industry. New York: Columbia UP, 1936.New York: AMS Press, 1967. Print.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History inAmerican Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Print.

Linnér, Björn Ola. The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-WarPopulation-Resource Crises. Isle of Harris, UK: The White Horse Press, 2003.Print.

Lyra, Carmen. “Bananas and Men.” The Subversive Voice of Carmen Lyra:Selected Works. Ed. Elizabeth Rosa Horan. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2000.47–61. Print.

Mann, Charles. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.New York: RandomHouse Vintage, 2006. Print.

Mariátegui, José. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. 19th ed.Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, 1971. Print.

McNeill, J.R., John Robert McNeill, and Paul Kennedy. Something New Underthe Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York:Norton, 2001. Print.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the ScientificRevolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Print.

Mediz Bolio, Antonio. El libro de Chilam Balam de Chumayel. San José, CostaRica: Imprenta y Librería Lehmann, 1930. Print.

———. A la sombra de mi ceiba: Relatos fáciles. México, DF: Ediciones Botas, 1956.Print.

Miller, Marilyn Grace. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje inLatin America. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004. Print.

Miller, Shawn William. An Environmental History of Latin America. New York:Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

Mistral, Gabriela. “Conversando sobre la tierra.” Repertorio Americano 23.11(1931): 172. Print.

———. “Ponencia a un congreso interamericano de bibliotecarios.” Magisterio yniño. Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1979. Print.

Monzón, Ana Silvia. “Las mujeres guatemaltecas y la ciudadanía.” Albedrío.org: Revista electrónica de discusión y propuesta social. 2007. http://www.albedrio.org/htm/articulos/a/asm-001.html.

Naranjo, José Ramón. “La ecología profunda y el Popol Vuh.” Anales deLiteratura Hispanoamericana 33 (2004): 85–100. Print.

Newsome, Elizabeth. Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World: The Serial Stelae of“18-Rabbit-God K,” King of Copan. Austin: U of Texas P, 2001. Print.

O'Connell, Joanna. Prospero's Daughter: The Prose of Rosario Castellanos. Austin:U of Texas P, 1995.

22 I S L E



ownloaded from

http://www.albedrio.org/htm/articulos/a/asm-001.html







O'Reilly Herrera, Andrea. A Secret Weavers Anthology. Buffalo: White PinePress, 1998. Print.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London:Routledge, 2008. Print.

Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.

Rubio, J. Francisco. El árbol en la poesía guatemalteca. Guatemala: Ministerio deEducación, 1987. Print.

Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.Print.

Schele, Linda and David Freidel. A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of theAncient Maya.New York: WilliamMorrow and Company, 1990. Print.

Simonian, Lane. Defending the Land of the Jaguar: A History of Conservation inMexico. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995. Print.

Solari Mongrío, Olga. Selva. Santiago, Chile: Talleres de Moneda, 1944. Print.Soluri, John. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental

Change in Honduras and the United Status. Austin: U of Texas P, 2005.Stanley, Diane K. For the Record: The United Fruit Company's Sixty-Six Years in

Guatemala. Guatemala City: Editorial Antigua, 2000. Print.Tedlock, Barbara. Time and the Highland Maya. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico

P, 1992. Print.———. The Woman in the Shaman's Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and

Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 2006. Print.Tedlock, Dennis. Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn

of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. New York: Simon and Schuster,1995. Print.

Valle, Luz. “Romelia Alarcón de Folgar.”Nosotras 9.100 (1940). Print.Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race/La raza cósmica. Baltimore: The Johns

Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.Víctor, M. “El Popol-Vuh.” Repertorio Americano 19.18 (1929): 286–88. Print.“Villar-Anléu, Luis. Guatemala: Árboles mágicos y notables. Guatemala: Artemis

Edinter Editores, 2006. Print.White, Steven F. El mundo más que humano en la poesía de Pablo Antonio Cuadra:

Un estudio ecocrítico. Managua: Multimpresos Nicaragüenses, 2002. Print.———. “Ecocrítica y chamanismo en la poesía de Pablo Antonio Cuadra.”

Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana 33 (2004): 49–64. Print.———. Arando el aire: La ecología en la poesía y la música de Nicaragua. Managua:

400 Elefantes, 2011. Print.Williams, Raymond.Marxism in Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.




ownloaded from


Grafting the Maya World Tree: Cosmic Conservation in Romelia Alarcón de Folgar's _Llamaradas_...

Documents

Transcript of Grafting the Maya World Tree: Cosmic Conservation in Romelia Alarcón de Folgar's _Llamaradas_...