Category: literature

Mayan glyphs as a truetype font set

This truetype typeface is a free download from dafont.com. It would be nice if the meaning of the glyphs was documented, but for the price who can complain?

Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan

This book, one of the classics of travel writing, is now available online via Google Book Search. It’s a funky scan, but at least it’s not an appalling…

First Tortilla

The First Tortilla, a children’s book by Rudolfo Anaya (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) has received the New Mexico Library Association and the New Mexico International Reading…

Inventory of a Dawn

Here’s a poem by the Guatemalan poet Luis de Lión, who was disappeared during the war. (Please tell me if I have mistranslated anything.) Inventory of a dawn…

Dichos

Dichos are Spanish popular sayings. Unlike proverbios, which are more extended thoughts, dichos can be either brief phases or longer refranes. When I was running Mercury House I…

El Bus

On the chicken bus. Bonus: another chicken bus photo

The Art of Political Murder

Ilan Stavans reviews Francisco Goldman’s The Art of Political Murder in the Los Angeles Times. The book is a look at the 1998 murder of bishop Juan Gerardi…

Revolution in Guatemala, 1944

Jorge Ubico y Castañeda ruled as dictator of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944, the year documented in this great historical footage (with “Sail to the Moon” by Radiohead…