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Thunderweavers / Tejedoras de rayos (Camino Del Sol)
Thunderweavers / Tejedoras de rayos - Camino Del Sol Author:Juan Felipe Herrera The highlands of Chiapas are smoldering with death. — In the winter of 1997, paramilitary agents ambushed and killed many Mayan villagers in Acteal, Chiapas. Gifted writer Juan Felipe Herrera has composed a stirring poem sequence -- published in a bilingual format -- written in response and homage to those who died, as well as to all those... more » who call for peace and justice in the Mexican highlands and throughout the Americas. Thunderweavers is a story of violent displacements in the lives of the most impoverished residents of southern Mexico, the Tzotzil Tzeltal campesinos. It deals with the destruction of a people and all evidence of their lives:
Why am I Tzotzil?
Why was I born in this land of so many storms?
I plant corn and yet I reap gunpowder
I plant coffee and yet I reap mad spirits
I plant my house and yet I reap the viscera
of this fallen earth.
The sections are written in the voices of four women from a family in Chiapas: Xunka, a lost twelve-year-old girl; Pascuala, the mother; grandmother Maruch; and Makal, an older daughter who is pregnant. Each voice weaves into the others and speaks for still other members of the larger Mayan and Native American family. Herrera, a major Chicano poet known for his expansive, surreal writing, here takes on a spare and lyrical style in the tradition of Rosario Castellanos, recalling as well the canto legacy of Pablo Neruda and the testimonial call of Ernesto Cardenal. Thunderweavers is a poetic account of transcendence and continuity in the midst of chaos, suffering, and war -- a Mayan cycle of personal, physical, and spiritual struggles that Indian women have been continuously engaged in for the past five hundred years.« less