ABSTRACT
With all of the extraordinary legacy of texts and commentary on colonial Mesoamerican verbal arts that we have considered in Chapter 6, it may come as something of a surprise to the reader to find that the nineteenth century appears, by comparison, to be relatively weak with regard to serious scholarly works either by or about Mesoamerican native people. This does not mean that Mesoamerican verbal arts were either moribund or inert in the nineteenth century. Ample testimony to the contrary comes from the powerful role played by oral traditions and underground native books of prophecy in such political movements as the Caste War of Yucatán (1848) (see Chapter 7). One can also infer, from the extraordinary documentation of Indian oral traditions that has been achieved in the twentieth century, that these forms were no doubt thriving in both the formal and the informal fabric of life in Indian communities of the nineteenth century. They simply did not get recorded, either by mestizo or creole scholars, for they generally lacked interest in the subject, or by the Indians themselves, for they were for the most part nonliterate in either Spanish or their native languages.
