Guatemala Field Station Blog

Our Tz'utujiil contributor Doña Rosario (or Doña Sara, as she's better known in Patzún) is famous in town for her “patines”, a dish from the Tz’utujiil area surrounding Lake Atitlán. Every week, she gets requests to cook the dish, which consists of a spicy tomato sauce and one of several kinds of meat: fish, shrimp, chicken, or “cecina”—beef that has been marinated in pure lime juice overnight. Our last week of working in Patzún, Doña Rosario prepared her “cecina” patines for us, and they were DELICIOUS! The photo below shows the carefully wrapped meal in “maxán” leaves—in Tz’utujiil, the dish is known by the name in (1) below: (1)        Jk’omik           chu-pam                      tz’alem             sauce       ...

Gesoel and I have had the pleasure to work with several speakers of Kaqchikel and Tz’utujiil for our project exploring the distribution of /wi/ , which has been described as a post-verbal focus particle in Kaqchikel. We first interviewed Doña Toya in Tecpán. Doña Toya hosted Emma for two weeks, and will be welcoming her back to her home after our Patzún adventure. Doña Toya is a very enthusiastic person who loves to share her knowledge of Kaqchikel; to summarize some of our findings for her dialect, Doña Toya rejected the /wi/ particle in many of the environments in which it has been reported to be obligatory in the literature—for instance, we expected /wi/ to occur obligatorily after the verb upon the extraction of a locative, but she rejected it outright: (1)  X-Ø-tzopin           Lolmaay chwa jay.        COM-B3s-jumo   Lolmaay backyard        'Lolmaay jumped in the yard.' (1') Akuchi’   ...