ABSTRACT
Colonial and postcolonial subjects are caught in a psychological trap that Gregory Bateson first identified and described in the 1970s as a double bind: "a situation in which no matter what a person does, he 'cannot win'". Written in 1931 for the Editorial Cenit, a Spanish publisher who requested a children's story from Vallejo, Paco Yunque was initially rejected as "too sad" and was not published until 1951 in the journal Apuntes del Hombre, over ten years after Vallejo's death. Paco's move to the city implies major changes in his understanding of the world. He moves from relative silence to noise, from order to chaos, from clarity to confusion, from a fundamentally indigenous "ethos" to a Western one, which makes him feel frightened and trapped. Paco and Humberto are on opposite ends of the power continuum. Humberto, because of his social status, is not only more powerful than Paco but also more powerful than all the adults around him.
