SOURCE: "Books in Flames: A View of Latin American Literature," in The Antioch Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 141-53.

Cheuse is an American novelist and critic. In the following essay, he traces the influences and evolution of Latin American literature.

The flat, swampy, low jungle of the Yucatan peninsula is hot enough even in winter for its inhabitants to live without using fires at night for heating purposes. But in the Mayan city of Mani, eighteen kilometers south of Merida, the state's present capital, in the year 1562, a great fire roared for days outside the walls of a convent newly constructed from the stones of a Mayan temple. Tens of thousands of religious articles and every extant Mayan holy manuscript that the priests, led by Bishop Diego de Landa, could find in the territory fed the flames in a book-burning that was much more devastating than those we...