Material #52: Balún Canán

A story of land reforms in Mexico with timeless implications

From a poster on the wall of a place we stayed in Dominican Republic while visiting family this month - a signature says “Gitlally” but beyond that I’ve been unable to trace the artist

At the start of this year I committed to sharing one take on the word “material” each week. In the coming days I’ll share thoughts on the connective threads that have emerged, but first, here we are at number 52…

Over the holiday break I finished reading Balún Canán by Rosario Castellanos. It was a second hand copy I had found and bought for two dollars here in Queens: a note at the front informs me that this copy was part of the fifth addition, published 50 years after the book was first released.

Balún Canán means “nine stars”, or “nine guardians”. It is the Mayan name for the area now called Comitán in the State of Chiapas in Mexico. The book is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed seven year-old girl - “Miro lo que está a mi nivel / I see what is at my level” she says on the first page - and then in third person, and then back to the girl narrator’s account. It is set in the 1930s, when Mexico’s president Lázaro Cárdenas has ordered land reforms breaking up white-owned estates.

The girl narrator is the daughter of one of the land-owners, César Argüello. Her world as a child exists between that of the adults in her family and that of the indigenous communities on which their livelihood has depended. The materiality of these worlds, and how they have been built into existence through a combination of physical structures and spiritual and inherited beliefs, emerges at multiple levels throughout the book. But to hone in on just one: the estates are the physical manifestation of indigenous labor. Felipe, a member of the Tzeltal community on the Argüellos’ Chactajal estate who became aware of the land reforms on a visit to Mexico City, says:

“Nuestros abuelos eran constructores. Ellos hicieron Chactajal. Levantaron la ermita en el sitio en que ahora la vemos. Cimentaron las trojes. Tantearon el tamaño de los corrales. No fueron los patrones, los blancos, que solo ordenaron la obra y la miraron concluida; fueron nuestros padres los que la hicieron.”

“Our grandparents were builders. They made Chactajal. They built the hermitage on the spot where we see it now. They cemented the barns. They tested the size of the animal pens. It was not the bosses, the whites, who only ordered the work and saw it completed; it was our forefathers who built it.”

Part of the reforms required that landowners would provide schools at which the children of workers on estates could learn Spanish (language plays a huge role in the book too). Felipe holds the Argüellos to this commitment, leading the construction of a school building:

“Habíamos dicho: será la obra de todos…Aquí los ancianos se descargaron de su ciencia, invisible como el espacio consagrado por la bóveda, verdadero como la bóveda misma”.

“We had said: it will be a work of everyone…Here the elders unloaded their science, invisible like the space consecrated by the arch, true like the arch itself”.

Castellanos does not simplify the dynamics of construction, nor the narrative, though. Her feminist stance reveals power dynamics wherever they arise. Felipe’s wife Juana observes the fact that by channelling all his energy into the project of building the school he has ensured that the school has wooden furniture - made from an ocote tree - while his own modest home has none.

No building or place would exist without the labor that has gone into its creation. Taking this understanding as a starting point reveals truths about the past, the present, and futures that can potentially be built.

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Through 2024, It’s Material has shared one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays