Carnaval en Tenejapa

Resumen

This bilingual Tzeltal Maya and Spanish text on the fiesta of Carnaval in the Highland Mayan community of Tenejapa, Chiapas, México, by Tenejapan author Petul Hernández Guzman, is the fruit of an experiment carried out by the author in collaboration with anthropologist Luisa Maffi in 1992. The two were working together on Maffi's doctoral research in Tenejapa. During the annual Carnaval, both Maffi and Hernández Guzmán took ethnographic notes about the fiesta, which they later compared. Hernández Guzmán's description of the events was so much more detailed and vivid than Maffi's, that it was jointly decided to prepare his text for publication, with his own Spanish translation and an introduction and explanatory footnotes to the Spanish version by Maffi. The text covers preparations for the fiesta and various phases of the fiesta itself, as carried out by the two traditional groups of "barrio de abajo" (alan k'inal) and "barrio de arriba" (ajk'ol k'inal), both in Tenejapa's municipal center and at the important ceremonial site of najtikil kurus ("tall crosses") in the paraje of Pokolum. This work represents both a unique example of native ethnography of a Highland Mayan Carnaval and a significant contribution to contemporary indigenous Mayan literature.