ABSTRACT

This chapter dialogues laterally with Chapter 4 by focusing not on trans-species heteroglossia but intraspecies heteroglossia, namely, the conflicting interpretations of humanity that arise from a shifting habitat. It compares two poems by María Elisa Chavarrea-Chim: U muk’yaj in kaajal / El lamento de mi pueblo [The Lament of My Village] and Túumben ko’olel / Mujer de hoy [Woman of Today]. The first poem laments the loss of ancestral traditions and attributes to this fact the Peninsula’s widespread ecological degradation. The second, by contrast, presents an optimistic appraisal of modernity, which affords new possibilities for individual freedom, particularly for women. The chapter argues that, taken together, the poems epitomize the often-conflicting (though not necessarily contradictory) semiotic readjustments that occur when a shifting habitat puts in motion a reconfiguration of the inhabitant, in this case humanity. The juxtaposition of the two poems illustrates how heteroglossia is characterized as much by dialogic tensions as it is by harmony, in contrast to the utopian vision of Chapter 4.