The Domingo Martinez Paredez Mayan Reader is a translation of five of the major works of Martinez Paredez, a Mayan Indian born in 1904 to a curandera mother. The five books translated are: "Un Continente y Una Cultura" (One Continent and One Culture); "Hunab K'u: Sintesis de Pensamiento Maya" (Hunab K'u: Synthesis of Mayan Philosophical Thought); " El Idioma Maya Hablado y el Escrito" (The Mayan Language Spoken vs. Written); "El Hombre y el Cosmos en el Mundo Maya" (Man and the Cosmos in the Mayan Worldview); and "El Popol Vuh Tiene Razon" (The Popol Vuh Has Reason). Martinez Paredez became a philologist who studies languages, and he was fluent in Nahuatl, as well as his native Yucatec Mayan and the K'iche and Kakchiquel Mayan languages of Guatelmala. Professor of Mayan Studies at Mexico's national university, the UNAM; his voice was a native voice, with a native perspective, much different than the rest of the academic world which follows the European version. His mastery of the native languages and his culture enabled him to plumb the depth of the meaning of their words, and thus reveal to the modern world how the Mayan and other natives visualized themselves; as part of Mother Nature, subject to her laws, and an integral part of the evolutionary cosmos through the integration of his Father, the Sun. Martinez Paredez thus arguably is the most brilliant philosophical native American author who has published in either of the Americas, with all his works only in Spanish. These English translations were consistently made in the native tradition by the Chicano author, whose maestro was the Mexica capitan-general de la danza, Andres Segura Granados, and whose Mayan maestro was Domingo Martinez Paredez. Ysidro Macias' previous books are: "The Compassion of the Feathered Serpent: A Chicano Worldview" and "Walking the Red Road on Chicanismo."
About the Author: Ysidro Ramon Macias was born into a farmworker family in Salinas California in 1944. He was a founding member of the Chicano Movement in 1967, and organized Chicano student groups in southern and northern California, including MASC-Berkeley and the Third World Liberation Front at Berkeley. He also co-organized the Brown Berets of San Francisco's Mission District. He was jailed for political activities on several occasions, including receiving the longest sentence given to a Berkeley protestor. A former professor at various California universities in the 1970's, he was also involved in Chicano theater as a director/playwright where he met Andres Segura Granados in 1972, the Mexica capitan-general de la danza who taught him, via oral tradition, the Mexica creation worldview, "La Esencia de las Cosas." He subsequently became an farmworker attorney in Fresno California until 1990, when he moved to Hawaii. Establishing a tortilla factory there, his family now runs the tortilla business while Macias has retired to the island of Kauai. Throughout these life and geographical changes, Macias has remained centered on "indigenismo," the study of his native Mexican ancestors and their knowledge and culture. His two previous books also center on native Mexican and American culture and thought: "The Compassion of the Feathered Serpent: A Chicano Worldview," and "Walking the Red Road on Chicanismo."