ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a glimpse into how Indigenous intellectuals used discourses of integration and development after the consolidation of nation-states through education to advance their own agendas. Writing novels in Indigenous languages and Spanish becomes a political act, an unforeseen outcome of the developmental and assimilationist literacy projects of the state that strove to annihilate Indigenous languages. Education would then come to represent the apparatus states would install to assimilate and modernize Indigenous communities. A. Henestrosa revisited the place of the printing press in documenting Indigenous languages and stories and intimated that the strong writing cultures of Mesoamerica necessitated its importation. Contemporary Indigenous writers assume a responsibility to their respective communities. While Indigenous people wrote about their perspective of the colonial encounter, the crux of our discussion anchors Indigenous writers who negotiate(d) national belonging decades after the establishment of Mexico and Guatemala as nation-states.
