Earl Shorris 

The Mesoamerican cradle exists now only in stone and contemplation. The great helmeted heads, the werejaguar babies are most of what remains. What the Olmecs said and how they said it, with what sounds, tones, stops, we shall probably never know. We know only that they began and that they did not limit their influence to the flatlands between the great rivers at the side of the Caribbean Sea.

There was Olmec influence in the world of Teotihuacan and Tula to the northwest of the cradle and then the Maya to the south. The great city/state of the Mexica in the high plateau came late in the evolution of the culture, but not last, for it spread everywhere, to the four cardinal directions, in works of war and trade. Then the Spaniards came, and there was a moment when the culture that sprang from the Olmec cradle could have entered its grave. But the Mesoamerican ethos survived. It contracted, and then began to spread again.

After the Spanish invasion Mesoamerican culture moved north into the states that had been Yaqui, Raramurl', and Paquime' territory. Along the Rio Bravo, to point out just one place, the people the Spaniards had named Manso, meaning docile, hunter/gatherers of the northern highlands, slowly adopted the culture that flowed north from Tenochtitlan. The northern villages themselves were reconfigured in the style of the central plateau. The zocalo [central square] of Tenochtitlan appeared in El Paso del Norte. The diet of the hunter/gatherers grew more sophisticated, and the gods of the north came more and more to resemble the gods who were born or discovered by the Olmecs who lived in what is now the state of Tabasco.

Some of the change came as a result of the northward migration of the people from the more densely populated south and some was brought by the Spaniards who had become "Mexicanized." The cake of cornmeal filled with meat, vegetables, fish or fruit took its Nahuatl name, "tamal," to villages from Chihuahua to Colorado and California.

With the continuing northward migration of indigenous people and people of mixed Spanish, indigenous and sometimes African ancestry, Mesoamerican culture began to mix with the northern European culture that dominated so thoroughly in the early centuries of what is now the United States. As the combination of Spanish, African and indigenous origins had produced the mestizaje, sometimes still described as "la raza cosmica," the cosmic race, in Mexico, the continuing northward migration produced a new mestizaje in the United States.

As the northern boundary of Mesoamerican culture reached to Canada and beyond, spread by railroad workers, migrants, people fleeing the Revolution of 1910, the name of Mesoamerican culture bearers underwent a series of changes: Mexican, Mexican-American, Latin American, and Chicano, the latter perhaps the most politically aware and active incarnation. The Chicano concept was defined in his column in the Los Angeles Times by Ruben Salazar, a journalist who was born in Chihuahua and murdered by Sheriff's deputies in East Los Angeles. In his definition Salazar spoke of the Chicano as one who was aware of his indigenous heritage and who defended it.

When Salazar wrote the column in 1970, it was largely politically active young people and a few scholars who were concerned with the Mesoamerican heritage of Mexicans and people of Mexican descent in the United States. For many people of the older generation their Spanish heritage was more desirable. They did not want to be considered "Indians," and perhaps with good reason, for no group of human beings in the United States had suffered more at the hands of the government than those who were called "Indians."

The Chicanos were a new generation; one might best describe them as culturally courageous. They were neither ashamed nor fearful of their indigenous ancestors. Instead, they sought strength in their cultural patrimony.

However, separation from Mexico and the effects of Mexico's ambivalent attitude toward its indigenous people (an alternate homage to pre-hispanic times and a continued discrimination and impoverishment now), complicated the nature of the northward spread of Mesoamerican culture. Some Chicanos began to speak of the southwestern United States as Aztlan, the place of origin of the people who moved south into Mexico and adopted the Mesoamerican ethos. Others preferred to abandon the Mesoamerican ethos in favor of European culture.

Cultural migration, of course, is an individual decision now in the Americas. Toltec troops will not move north into the United States as they once moved south into the lands of the Maya. Nonetheless, the Mesoamerican ethos affects the ethos of the United States and particularly that of people of Mexican national origin, just as the Toltec ethos affected the Maya.

The nature of the spread of Mesoamerican culture northward will depend to a large extent upon what is available. If the culture is limited largely to the repasts provided by fast food restaurants spiced with smatterings of the intellectual achievements of Mesoamerica, it will have been an unfortunate journey.

Many Chicanos and others of Mexican descent who do not use that appellation have begun to seek out the deeper values of Mesoamerica in the art and literature that originated in the cradle of the Olmecs. Until now, a single source of Mesoamerican literature from Palenque to the present has not been available in English, and much of the literature has not been available in English in any form.

While a single book cannot be more than a small part of the Mesoamerican wave that rolls north, it is the hope of the authors that this collection of works may help to enrich and beautify that wave, both for English readers of Mexican descent and for those who read it to enjoy the experience of communicating with one of the world's great original cultures.

Note: This essay is a version of Earl Shorris's foreword to In the Language of Kings, an anthology of Mesoamerican literature edited by Mr. Shorris and Dr. Miguel Leon-Portilla (Emeritus Professor of History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, former Mexican Ambassador to UNESCO, historian of the City of Mexico, and author of Aztec Thought and Culture, Broken Spears, and many other books). This volume is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Excerpted from In the Language of Kings by Earl Shorris. Copyright © 2001 by Earl Shorris. With Permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

About this contributor
Earl Shorris was educated at the University of Chicago and served in the U.S. Air Force. He is a novelist, contributing editor for Harper's magazine, and the Founder and Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Clemente Course in the Humanities, now associated with Bard College (Odyssey Project). His fictional publications include: In the Yucatan (W.W. Norton 2000); Ofay, The Boots of the Virgin, and Under the Fifth Sun: A Novel of Pancho Villa. His non-fictional publications include: Riches for the Poor: The Clement Course in the Humanities(W.W. Norton 2000), The Death of the Great Spirit, Latinos: A Biography of the People (new edition Spring 2001), A Nation of Salesman: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture, and New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy.