Dictators, Guatemalan nationalism and Mayan alphabets

• In Event: Precarious Languages, Emerging Norms, and Linguistic Labor in Indigenous Media Part 2

Abstract

In this presentation I examine the K’ichee’ writings of Father Celso Narciso Teletor (1891-1968). K’ichee’ is a Mayan language spoken today by more than one million people in the western highlands of Guatemala. Teletor was a prolific author, newspaper columnist and propagandist for the Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico’s regime (1931-1944). Nevertheless, Teletor tirelessly denounced the exploitation of indigenous workers in the 1930s and 1940s and was a firm critic of wealthy hacendados. He believed in the preservation of indigenous communities from the onslaught of modernity and in traditional power structures and ritual practices. Regarding orthographic conventions, he was a nationalist who criticized the Spanish-based phonemic alphabet developed by American linguists associated with the Wycliffe Bible Translators. Teletor embodies a series of apparently contradictory stances: Politically conservative, proudly indigenous, openly nationalist and devoutly Catholic. Contrasting Teletor’s with other K’ichee’ writers, I will examine purist discourse registers in highland Guatemala and the contested nature of the literacy field since the 1930s. Contemporary indigenous movements in Guatemala appropriated language ideologies and orthographic practices rooted in the 1930s. I end with a discussion of the intrinsic political ambivalence of media in indigenous languages and of the limitations imposed on indigenous collective agency by the modern Guatemalan state and a globalized media economy.

Author

• Sergio Francisco F Romero, University of Texas at Austin