The recovery of identity in “Leyenda del Cadejo” (Legend of the Cadejo), by Miguel Ángel Asturias

Abstract

Leyendas de Guatemala (1930) is the result of the literary search of the author for the Guatemalan identity. For Asturias, its essence is in the mestizaje, or inter-racial breeding, having occurred historically between the indigenous Mayan civilization and the European Catholic one—an idea closely related to José Vasconcelos concept of La raza cósmica, or “cosmic race.” For that Mexican philosopher, such mestizaje means racial improvement. Such could be achieved by the white blood transfusion to the nation in order to compensate for the disadvantages of the indigenous and black peoples considered as an obstacle to the development. In contrast, in Leyendas de Guatemala, Asturias recovers the strata of the indigenous culture oppressed and destroyed by the homogeneous identity from the rule of the white race, still alive if not transformed into symbolic representations of dominant ideology. To examine the author’s ideas, this article analyzes one of his stories, “Leyenda del Cadejo”, to demonstrate how the heterogeneity that composes the work involves transculturation. To do so, it begins from an ethnological approach focused on rites of Mayan mythology, about which Asturias himself was an expert. The conclusion is that the indigenous as much as the foreign influence has worked to create a genuine mestizaje resulting in a unified identity in which both are recognized as equals, in spite of tensions between them