The Enkidu Summer Conference 2008: Storytelling, Memories and Identity Constructions

México City, 3 - 7 July, 2008

Stories in Collision: Globalized Narratives about the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

Wendy Call

Department of English

Pacific Lutheran University

Seattle, Estados Unidos

In 1995, the front page of the New York Times business section told the story of a “garage sale” of the railroad across Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the120-mile stretch of land that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Pacific Ocean. Before that article, the Mexican Isthmus hadn’t figured prominently in a New York Times article since 1973, when a report entitled “Women’s Lib? Mexican Town Knows It Well” described women’s economic power in Juchitán, Oaxaca, the market center of the isthmus. If the U.S. media’s narrative about the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has faded nearly to silence, it was once strong and clear. One hundred fifty years ago, a column appeared regularly on the front pages of The New York Times titled “Tehuantepec,” telling hundreds of stories about the isthmus.

Meanwhile, the people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the istmeños, have constructed an unusually rich and compelling narrative of place, through strong traditions of oral history, poetry (in the languages of Zapotec, Mixe, Huave, and Spanish), literary publication, and song. Their homeland connects the northern and southern halves of the hemisphere. It has been a transit region for Europeans, Asians, and North Americans traveling east-west for 500 years, and for Latin Americans traveling north-south for thousands of years. As a result, the indigenous narratives of the isthmeños have been remarkably cosmopolitan, since long before the conquest. Both the stories of the New York Times and those of the istmeños are narratives of globalization. (For all the ways that life on the isthmus has been negatively affected by economic globalization, the istmeños have found ways to accommodate it, to incorporate it, to use it to their advantage.)

In this talk, I explore the Isthmus of Tehuantepec’s long acquaintance with what we’ve come to call “economic globalization,” comparing the resulting narratives developed by U.S. newspapers, by Mexican-American artist/anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias, by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and by contemporary istmeño writers, including Andrés Henestrosa and Natalia Toledo. I argue that globalization has been a key element of isthmus narratives, by both insiders and outsiders, for several hundred years.

About Wendy Call

Wendy Call is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington and was a 2000-2002 Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. She co-edited Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (Plume/Penguin, 2007) with Mark Kramer. Her narrative nonfiction book-in-progress, No Word for Welcome, explores how economic globalization intersects with village life in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. She writes creative nonfiction and translates the work of indigenous Oaxacan poets from Spanish into English.