Tejedoras de rayos / Thunderweavers.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Tejedoras de rayos / Thunderweavers, by Juan Felipe Herrera. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.

In 1997 paramilitary agents stormed towns in Chiapas--a mountainous, rugged region of southern Mexico--and killed scores of Maya villagers. The incident fueled the Indians' resistance to government injustice and provoked international indignation. Fighting still continues in Chiapas. Juan Felipe Herrera, a poet and performance artist from California who visited the area, composed his bilingual verse collection, Tejedoras de rayos / Thunderweavers, in homage to those who died in the violence and those who stand firm against wrongdoing and inequity.

The compilation recounts poetically the displacement of the impoverished Tzotzil Tzeltal peasants. Four Chiapas women--Xunka, a twelve-year-old girl; Pascuala, her mother; Maruch, her grandmother; and Makal, her pregnant older sister--tell their stories in stark, searing images that provoke sorrow and wrath. Images of "charcos de cuerpos / puddles of bodies" and "ninas moribundas / little dying girls," magnificent in their simplicity, convey the mother's pain and the horror of the situation. Depictions of broken cornfields, tanks rolling over old women, pulverized corpses, and weeping bones suggest the brutal disruption of everyday life.

The Indians' simple existence contrasts dramatically with the violence that permeates the place. Maruch says: "Siembro maiz pero cosecho polvora / Siembro cafe pero cosecho animas con rabia // I plant corn and yet I reap gunpowder / I plant coffee and yet I reap mad spirits." It is perhaps she, the grandmother, who articulates most eloquently the senselessness of the invasion. The grey-green men with their spotted masks, "eran nuestros hijos en otto tiempo. / Teniamos las mismas rodillas. / Teniamos los mismos arados. /El maiz crecia igual al pie de nuestras ofrendas. //once they were our children. / We had the same knees. / We had the same plows. / The cornfields grew the same at the foot of our offerings." But the soldiers, who are of the same stock as the Indians, do the government's bidding. Perhaps in order to survive, they have allied themselves with the...