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140 SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO ANTHROPOLOGY NUMBER 23
[days] with as much as is eaten at each meal. Once it
was a very stiff punishment. It will come again,
you'll see, some day, some year! The holy rain isn't
good like this. Some years it falls and some years it
doesn't. But the price of corn will rise here, you'll
see, because they spill it and step on it all the time.
Ehh, the holy corn suffers so much here. I saw it. I
saw it this morning. It suffers so.
The trouble is, it is offered up because the money
flows out here. Here is where they keep buying
things. But corn is so hard to raise. It is so much
work. There is exhaustion. There are, ooh, long trips
to where the holy corn is harvested. The holy corn
takes so many days!
Xun's father's and brother's trip to Chix-te7tik, from whence
they returned with only eight ears of corn, dramatises the
extreme scarcity, for Chix-te7tik is a hamlet near Mitontic, that
must have been more than a day's walk from their home.
An almud is 15 liters and a fanega is 180 liters. So ten fanegas
of corn would be about 51 bushels, and an almud would be a
little under half a bushel.
Xun's belief, that human carelessness and disrespect toward
corn bring divine punishment, is a fundamental tenet of Chiapas
Indian communities. In Chenalho, "white hunger" is caused by
men's carelessness, "black hunger" by women's, and "red hunger"
by children's (Guiteras-Holmes, 1961:243). Sahagun reported
Aztec women praying as they picked up scattered corn,
noxtok Ie7e, xak'el avil k'usi k'ak'al jabilal, 7a li
ch'ul-vo7e che7e, mu slekiluk lavi x7elane, byen mi
xp'aj, byen mu xp'aj ta jabil, pero chtoy stojol i
ch'ul-7ixime Ii7e, xak'el avil komo Ie7e che7e,
tztaniik tzpatz'ik ta tek'el ta j-mek, je, tol svokol i
ch'ul-7ixim Ii7e, 7ijk'el 7ijk'el nax tol svokol.
K'usi chich' pak'alinbel porke Ii7 chlok' i tak'ine,
Ii7 tzmanulan, pero li 7ixime toj vokol chmeltzaj, toj
batz'i trabajo te lubel, te, jii, nat xanbal bu 7oy chlok'
i ch'ul-7ixime, ta xjalij bu k'ak'al ch'ul-7ixime.
"Our Sustenance suffereth: it lieth weeping. If we should not
gather it up, it would accuse us before Our Lord. It would say
'O, Our Lord, this vassal picked me not up when I lay scattered
upon the ground. Punish him!' Or perhaps we should starve." (J.
E. Thompson, 1970:285).
A Chamulan report of this same famine, that occurred around
the time of the influenza epidemic, also lays the blame on San
Cristobal Ladinos' disrespect for corn (Gossen, T94).
Xun Vaskis points explicitly to the dilemma of traditional
Indians in a money economy governed by forces beyond their
control. Corn that is grown with sacred care must be delivered
into grasping white hands so that an Indian can get the money to
buy many of the necessities of twentieth-century life.