[In the following essay, Schaefer examines the major thematic concerns of the stories in City of Kings.]

A writer capable of plotting the most superbly ironic of situations for her characters and a woman deeply aware of her own role in the everyday ironies of the Mexican social reality in which she lived and wrote, Rosario Castellanos would undoubtedly find a certain amount of joyful paradox in the translation of Ciudad real [City of Kings] (1960) for an English-speaking audience during the time of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' fateful landing on the American continent. For were it not for the act of the translator, the cultural intermediary, we perhaps could not even begin to fathom how historical events would have transpired or been reported through the centuries; and were it not for Castellanos' painfully self-conscious awareness of her own acts of cultural interpretation, we as readers would lose the rich texture of ambiguity which so permeates the relationships between the cultures of which she speaks.

The beauty—as well as the tragic irony—of Castellanos' stories in this collection and indeed of her entire written legacy to us is that while it was her fate to witness the first moments of the birth of modern Mexico as a nation in the 1930s and 1940s under the leadership of Lázaro Cárdenas and others, she simultaneously became aware of the personal sacrifices necessary to form and maintain that vision of a social collectivity. In City of Kings, as in numerous other narratives, Castellanos posits many of the crucial issues regarding identity, ethnicity, class, and community which have made a reappearance now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, within, along, and even beyond the borders of Mexico itself.

Her own status as a ladina or white woman of mixed (European and indigenous) ancestry who belonged to a family of wealthy landowners in Chiapas, then as a university-educated woman in mid century Mexico whose sentimental ties to her region had not been severed even though her economic ones had disappeared along with her father's expropriated possessions, and finally as an intellectual whose participation in official government programs both in the interest of the indigenous communities in Mexico and to benefit Mexico's interests abroad (as cultural ambassador to Israel and indirect sponsor for her country's petroleum industry there) placed her in a position of privilege which she never ceased to question. We find her often futile search for answers played out across the pages of her novels, short stories, essays, newspaper articles, theatrical works, and abundant collections of poetry. While trying to live up to her own ideals of gender, societal, and economic equality, Castellanos apprises us of the constant barrage of impediments she faces in putting these ideas into practice, especially in terms of the inevitable and frequently violent encounters between different cultural groups within the same national boundaries. As a result, her writings take on an autobiographical dimension, with each instance depicted showing the results of the individual or collective exercise of power over the powerless victim and each text having as its narrative axis—either directly or indirectly—the experiences of Castellanos herself.

The overwhelming sense of guilt which erupts from this ambiguous position as participant and critic at the same time is evident in her use of narrators trapped by their own naïveté and storytellers ultimately finding themselves outsiders, excluded from “belonging” except in their identification with the pain and suffering of all victims—in particular, women, children, and the Amerindians. In one of her frequent confessional moments, Castellanos remarks that the literary consequence of this social alienation is embodied in the tone of sarcastic humor which invades most if not all of what she writes, what she calls “the claw mark of ferocious humor” inspired by the duality of the urgent need to write (in order to feel alive) and the frustration with the problematic contents of that very writing. In her own version of the popular saying about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks, however, Castellanos declares that she must go on doing what she does best, like “a dinosaur that can't change its skin or species” she insists on using the power of the written word to exorcise her own ghosts with the hope that someone some day will read the results. By embodying this sacrificial yet culturally productive role in several of her characters, Rosario Castellanos vividly portrays what Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has referred to as “las buenas conciencias,” those who live haunted by the vision of social injustice around them while recognizing that their “good intentions” effect little real change in the status quo; they prick the collective conscience of society with their words but are often themselves consumed in the process. Cut short by a tragic accident in 1974, Castellanos' life and works are imbued with such overtones of well-intentioned thoughts and proposals in defense of human rights and women's rights which she witnessed dashed on the rocks of a patriarchal family, a patriarchal state, and an institutionalized religious hierarchy with no “good intentions” of their own to relinquish any of their power.

As part of the group of writers in the Mexican capital commonly referred to as the “Generation of 1950” and which included such important literary figures as Emilio Carballido, Jaime Sabines, Ernesto Cardenal, and Augusto Monterroso, Rosario Castellanos shared many of their social and cultural preoccupations; but she stood out as a lone voice working through on a personal level many of the problems and potentialities of what in the 1990s we might want to call a feminist politics. Marriage, motherhood, the relationships between parents and children, and the attraction of a professional career all enter into her scrutiny, yet she never separates these issues from the broader Mexican social perspective. Indeed, several of the stories in the present volume have female protagonists—among them “The Truce,” “Modesta Gómez,” “The Fourth Vigil,” and “The Wheel of Hunger”—but the fact that they are all women proves to be a double burden since they are all Indians as well and therefore must submit to two orders of control over their bodies: male authority and the power of the ladino or mestizo. Thus hunger, economic servitude, persecution, abuse, the ramifications of offering or accepting charity, and the fight for cultural survival are what lie beneath the relationships sketched out in the ten stories of City of Kings.

Along with the two novels Balún Canán [The Nine Guardians] (1957) and Oficio de tinieblas [Office of Tenebrae] (1962) and the volume of short stories entitled Los convidados de agosto [The Guests of August] (1964), City of Kings completes what has been called the “Chiapas Cycle” in Castellanos' fictional works. As part of the important literary project of indigenista narratives in Latin America, one which includes works by Miguel Angel Asturias, Ermilo Abreu Gómez, and Eraclio Zepeda as well and whose most remote roots some trace back to sixteenth century Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas' defense of the native inhabitants of the Americas as human beings rather than the savage beasts condemned by the European conquerors, City of Kings reflects this writer's valuable contribution to the general (and radical) attempt to articulate the literary text with the indigenous world of the “zona maya.” This ancient cultural and geographic zone's communal identity is centered around a common linguistic family of Mayan languages and a ceremonial religious tradition based on agricultural cultivation; it does not correspond directly to any one modern national entity but instead extends along the Mexican states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, and Yucatan, through Quintana Roo, across the republics of Guatemala and Belize, all the way into the territory of Honduras. Born into a family of provincial wealth tied to landholdings in Comitán, Chiapas, a small town on the Mexican border with Guatemala many of whose current residents still preserve dialects derived from the Mayan linguistic tree, Castellanos chooses key cities for the native populations of this state as focal points for the narrative settings of her indigenista novels and stories.

She returns time and time again to that region of well-documented historical resistance to the colonizing forces from Spain and, more recently, the site of failed federal projects to integrate the indigenous populations (forming a majority of the area's inhabitants almost always) into the cultural and economic universe of the ladino ruling classes. Without the real possibility of immersing herself completely in the world of these Tzotzil-Tzeltal groups—in spite of her contact with them through her work in the National Indigenous Institute and her direction of its pedagogical outreach programs to “Castilianize” the natives during the 1950s—Castellanos turns to the foundational myths of the Popol Vuh and other sacred Mayan texts to create the most vivid (and perhaps most clearly recognizable to other Mexicans) possible suggestion of these cultures for the Spanish speaking reader. (She, of course, reads the Spanish version of the Mayan mythology.) These origin myths of the Maya-Quiché become one of the fundamental sources from which a basic timeless cosmovision and a popular speech put in the mouths of indigenous characters are extracted. The second stimulus for the narratives is an honorable and fervent desire to address the need to resolve the political, social and economic problem of the “Maya Zone” which has left the descendants of the original native populations at a dead end for decades, if not more accurately centuries, with regard to a decent level of existence; this “problem” has also left the centralized federal government in Mexico City with an unresolved and frequently volatile situation in the more distant provinces. The two elements—the somewhat exotic mythic universe of the historical Maya and the actual life-and-death struggles of their contemporary descendants—function side by side in the composition of Castellanos' works.

In the dedication of the Spanish language version of City of Kings we find the author's overt statement of faith in the government bureau established under President Cárdenas to reform the laws of property, land, and citizenship for all the inhabitants of that region of the country: “[I dedicate this] to the National Indigenous Institute, which is working to change the living conditions of my people” (emphasis added). Castellanos' willing assumption of the role of cultural interpreter and defender of the natives of Chiapas, along with her adoption of them as “her people” with whom some type of bond has been created either by accident (birth) or choice (her return as cultural liaison), are echoed in several of the well-meaning characters of the stories in City of Kings: the doctor and his female assistant at the Indian Aid Mission (in “The Wheel of Hunger”), the anthropologist at the Mission of Charity (“The Gift, Refused”), and the linguistic expert brought in to translate the Bible into Tzeltal for the “Organization” in the highlands of Chiapas (“Arthur Smith Finds Salvation”). Whether or not Castellanos arrived at conclusions similar to those reached by these individuals—representing the medical establishment, the intellectual community, and organized religion, three of the institutions traditionally charged with the mission of “changing for the better” the lives of indigenous peoples—is hard to say. In purely literary terms, however, each of these three instances is premised on some “need” of a community of “others” for which one's own culture seems to offer the best (and only?) solution, a relationship of power suspiciously like that of the National Indigenous Institute and its street theater workshops to promote “education by assimilation” into mestizo culture. And each of the three closes with a solidifying of the distance between the cultures of the protagonists, just as the streets of The City of Kings are divided into separate zones for the Indians and for the mestizos, and the fertile valleys are claimed for the ladinos while the natives live perched on the arid mountaintops. In the end, the doctor, the anthropologist, and the linguist all fail miserably in their attempts at communication with and acculturation of the Indians, both individually and collectively, and all retreat into the very structures of power that have historically contributed to holding these cultures in contentious encounter. It is left up to the conscience of the reader to deal with the personal motivations of these characters as well as with the dilemma of their obviously sentimental attachment to the charitable relationship between well-meaning ladinos (and all of them do not mean well in Castellanos' stories) and the objectified Indian. What survives as an overall characteristic of these tales is their dramatic irony—the space between thought and act, between theory and practice, between innocence and disillusionment. The translators of this volume have done an admirable job with the difficult task of capturing the ironic innuendos and the differences in tone and language of the two communities portrayed. José Antonio Romero, student of anthropology from an urban university, volunteer in The City of Kings to mediate disputes between feuding towns, detailed observer of local customs, and generous to a fault, ends up asking himself (although he actually appears to be addressing the reader directly since he says “What I want you to tell me is this …”) a series of questions that serve to sum up this cultural rift: “Did I, as a professional, as a man, do something wrong? There must have been something. Something I didn't know how to give them.” We can begin to examine the reception (or rejection) of his acts of benevolence by focusing our attention on this single verb.

Clustered around the unifying image of The City of Kings, ancient name of the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and cultural center for the Chamulas, the ten narratives of this collection are inserted into clearly historical frameworks such as the time of Carranza and the Mexican Revolution, the establishment of the Faculty of Anthropology at the National University, or the references to the implementation of Article Three of the 1917 Mexican Constitution. Yet these moments of ladino history give way to a dimension of myth from the outset, the realm established for the indigenous from the epigraph on. The eternal present in which yesterday, today, and tomorrow coexist indistinguishably is where these characters seem to be relegated to function—in clear opposition to those in control of measuring, dividing, and categorizing that historical continuum. Doctor Salazar, man of science, collector of watches, and sporadic practitioner of medicine at a rural clinic, leaves us with no doubts when he reveals that he needs to be reassured of the existence of the “real” world by winding all his watches at once and listening to them tick, for in his daily routine he deals only with those who live in the realm of the timeless. Since it is supposed that they have experienced no changes in their lives since time immemorial when the companion spirits led the Bolometic community out of the green meadows and into the gray mountains, far away from the invading white civilization, the indigenous peoples seem merely to relive their ancient narratives in the twentieth century. Even in their internal monologues on which Castellanos eavesdrops, these individual human beings with names and faces, laudable qualities as well as weaknesses, only recover the power of language to merge back into the narrative stream of traditional myth; they do not “curse the colonizer” as the appropriation of this privileged voice has been termed today. The predicament created by the linguistic silencing of the Amerindians (their economic oppression and cultural disappearance) has a correlative in Castellanos' need to find a narrative language with which to represent women's subjective voice as well. The translation of these stories allows the English language reader to discover what choices the author made for her characters to express their ideas, and what options she chose as vehicles for her own thoughts.

Throughout City of Kings the reader is constantly kept aware of the paradoxical nature of a national quest for some type of “modernity” imposed from above or outside. With its own cult figures and new myths—capitalism, education, Coca Cola, the media—grafted on or substituted for the old, the social and ethnic stratification of Mexican society still continues and the victimization (sacrifice) of the Indian is perpetuated in yet another guise: as tourist attraction, exploited laborer, or invisible national “treasure.” At a critical time when this problem is being confronted in Mexico—as well as in the U.S. and around the world—yet again, Castellanos' stories are almost chilling in their thirty year old reminders to us all. The issue of the writer as witness to and mediator of cultural encounters is an extremely difficult role that can sometimes only forge between these groups something akin to what the title of the second story hints at: a fragile “truce,” a relationship of inequality as yet unresolved. This space of opposition is the universe Rosario Castellanos inhabits. No one should miss out on the opportunity to experience her working at this challenge, for we can learn as much about our own culture as we do of others from her texts. This timely translation of City of Kings offers us that chance.