Poetry, orality and performance in the contemporary Maya world of Guatemala

Within the framework of Guatemala's ethnic movements, the vitality of Mayan artistic production stands out. Parallel to the transformations of literary genres brought about by postmodernity, the authors who adopt an indigenous critical position reappropriate instruments of the Mayan cultural tradition, such as the collective character of poetry, the union of word and gesture, the use of music, semantic rhythms, and the performance of poetry. Overcoming of the barriers between the Western literary genres leads to the sharing of artistic patterns from different fields and to an incursion into various formal modalities of postmodernity, such as electronic music, video art, installations, and performance. This offers an analysis of the contemporary Mayan poetic panorama of Guatemala and to study the hermeneutic models proposed by the indigenous intellectuals in recent decades to create a live poetic act, understood in all its full semantic breadth.