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Many scholars of Latin American literature have considered the porous boundaries between writing and orality and the ways in which varying combinations of both have manifested themselves in the literature of the Mayan region. Other scholars trace the various sites of contact, conflict and productive exchanges of Latin America's hybrid literature. My intention in this essay is to borrow from the ways in which these scholars have insisted on the multifaceted ways of reading the cultural tensions and the power dynamics of knowledge that have played out variously in Latin American texts over the centuries. My own project is less about situating the novels I explore along the literacy-orality spectrum and more about analyzing the formal dynamics of cultural representation at specific historical junctures, about how each reiteration of the initial disruptive encounter between world visions on the written text is informed by the circumstances of their time.
To this end, I turn to two texts written in the late twentieth century by Guatemalan authors of indigenous ancestry: Luis de Lión's El tiempo principia en Xibalbá (1985) and Gaspar Pedro Gonzalez's La otra cara (la vida de un maya) (1992). Each of these novels is exemplary of particular approaches to representing cultural differences through contemporary literature, distinct from each other in terms of both content and, especially, in their approach to aesthetic form. Published posthumously, Lión's text was written in the early 1970s. This is pertinent to my comparative analysis because the dates in which these novels are composed are separated by the most violent period of state-run ethnocide of Guatemala's civil war. In the armed conflict that spanned roughly thirty-six years, 1978-1985 saw the implementation of policies of "scorched earth" and other counter-insurgency techniques that targeted the Maya. As recognized in the report of the United Nations' truth commission, the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), under the header "Las masacres y la desvastación del pueblo maya" the CEH report concludes that the Maya people were aggressively sought out by the army in racially determined campaigns of mass extermination
