Capitalist Exclusion vs. Radical Ventriloquism: From the Caste War of Yucatán to the Zapatistas

• In Event: Precarious Performance/Resistance: Language Valorization in Puerto Rico, Ventriloquism in the Yucatán, and Chilean Pharmakon Performance

Abstract

Central to Oficio de tieneblas, Rosario Castellanos’s complex tale of historical, mid-nineteenth century Maya rebellion in Chiapas, is a talking clay figurine that compels its followers to rise up against their oppressors. Similarly, historical accounts from roughly the same period explain how speaking wooden crosses encouraged the decimated Yucatán Maya to regroup and battle against Ladino oppressors. According to various documents (as well as Hernán Lara Zavala’s novel, Península, Península), performative acts of ventriloquism initially enabled these inanimate objects to speak, and thus played crucial roles in the Caste War of Yucatán, particularly for indigenous tribes whose precarious world was on the verge of extinction due to new, exclusionary laws. Approximately 150 years later, not far from where the speaking stone led indigenous Maya to rebel, the Zapatistas began staging a more postmodern (and also highly performative) struggle—against more virulent and widespread strains of capitalism, including NAFTA—with the assistance of a different (yet related) sort of ventriloquism.

After explaining the role of ventriloquism and performing objects as types of masks in 19th century Chiapas and the Caste War of Yucatán, I will discuss correlations between these earlier resistance movements—whose radical “voice throwing” was triggered by moments of intensive oppression—and the Zapatistas’ utilization of ventriloquism and masks (beginning on the first day of NAFTA). I will suggest that as emergent forms of resistant performance practices with connections to historical precedents, these uses of ventriloquism can—by making various masks speak—frame and resist (and perhaps even abet) globalization.

Author

• Rick Mitchell, California State University, Northridge