3 - If all the dead began to walk, the earth would be full of steps: Mulata de tal

Summary

Economic relations are impersonal. … It is the market, the exchange opportunity, which is functionally real, not the other human beings; these are not even means to action. The relation is neither one of cooperation nor one of mutual exploitation, but is completely nonmoral, nonhuman.

F. H. Knight, “The Ethics of Competition”

Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, but before, like the moral man, the man of duty, the scientific man and the reasonable man. For a long time man was something quite different: and it is not so long since he became a machine.

Marcel Mauss, The Gift

Violence alone, blind violence, can burst the barriers of the rational world and lead us into continuity.

Georges Bataille, L'Erotisme

Hombres de maíz culminates with an exchange presented as a gift: Man turns to the land, which rewards him with its bounty. In striking contrast, Mulata de tal (1963) begins with a gift that is in every way a badge of subservience: Celestino Yumí gives his wife to the Devil in exchange for wealth. Hombres de maíz celebrates the resurgence of the nuclear family and the foundation of the agricultural community; Mulata de tal announces their demise. In the thirteen years between these two novels all planned and established projects for public and collective enterprise in Guatemala were repudiated, hopes for social change shattered, and the men of maize once again recast as the disposable salt of the earth and not as its sustenance.