ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Ana Patricia Martínez-Huchim’s novel, U k’a’ajsajil u ts’u’ noj k’áax / Recuerdos del corazón de la montaña [Memories from the Heart of the Forest]. The novel is a biography of the writer’s aunt, who spent several years working as a cook for a group of chicle (rubber) harvesters in the dense jungle. Martínez-Huchim’s work is a counterbalance to the affective relationship with the Peninsula in My Land and frequently describes the jungle inhabitants as a threat. Drawing on Hoffmeyer’s notion of the “semiotic niche”, the chapter argues that the characters are partially adapted both to the forest and to their village, but fully adapted to neither. This oscillation between the two environments invites a questioning of the dichotomy between the relative “chaos” of the uncultivated world and the “ordered” context of human habitation, a foundational cultural distinction in the Mayan world that Martínez-Huchim nonetheless deconstructs. José Manuel Tec-Tun, in the parallel chapter in Part 2, equally engages in a partial deconstruction of this distinction.
