El habla de los indígenas en "Hombres de maíz"

The work studies the speech of natives as it is reported in various literary works. It starts with the linguistic analysis of three fragments by Carlos Samayoa Chinchilla, Francisco Mendez and Flavio Herrera. A careful analysis reveals that the natives, in the indigenist literature, speak in a Spanish whose deviations from the modern norm are also documented in the Iberian Peninsula, and which have nothing to do with the actual speech of the descendants of the Maya. Subsequently, the essay switches to a fragment of "El Señor Presidente" by Miguel Angel Asturias, where the Guatemalan narrator speaks with emphasis, creating phonetic deviations, which is more frequent on the Mexican plateau, and whose occurrence has yet to be proved in the Guatemalan language community. In "Hombres de maíz", however, Asturias follows the rule of his predecessors, and makes the Maya speak either without inflections, or in a way typical of elderly Spanish peasants. The work aims to highlight the paradox of a so-called indigenist literature that makes the natives sound as if they were elderly Spanish peasants.