Nacionalismo maya y descolonización política: Luis de Lión y El tiempo principia en Xibalbá/Mayan Nationalism and Political Decolonization: Luis de Lion and El tiempo principia en Xibalbá/Nacionalismo maia e descolonização política: Luis de Lión e El tiempo principia en Xibalbá (O tempo começa em Xibalbá)

This article analyzes the novel El tiempo principia en Xibalbá (1985) of Mayan Kaqchikel writer Luis de Lion (1939-184), considered to be the first novel written by a Mayan writer in Guatemala. Read as one of the first epistemological and political displays of the so-called Mayan Movement in Guatemala, we argue in this paper that the works of Lion demystify and take apart traditional and stereotypical constructs of the indigenous world in the indigenist discourse (literature on indigenous people by nonindigenous authors). Lion counters this indigenist idea by proposing Mayan nationalism as a discourse of freedom and a political alternative for an anticolonial and antiracist struggle for the Maya, and the indigenous world in general.