ABSTRACT
A dramatic encounter between literature and anthropology made history in 1986 in Chiapas, a southern Mexican state at the socio-economic periphery of Mexico. The representation of Chamula as a cultural and ethnic identity endangered by contact with a superior and hegemonic Ladino/a culture reflects a racial hierarchy based on the logic of colonial modernity and "salvage ethnography". In contrast, the ethnographic encounter in Palestine occurs outside the field and, sometimes, even after the fact. Ricardo Pozas's Juan Perez Jolote is a foundational text for both contemporary Mayan literature and the Mexican novel. Mayans and Palestinians share a common history of struggling as indigenous minorities against colonial states. Moreover, as an ethnography based on a fictionalised oral account of a Mayan biography, Juan Perez Jolote is embedded with many tensions that result from its location on a threshold.
