Chapter 4 begins by reading the textual traces of the relationship between José Sabino Uc (a Lacandón Indian boy) and his adopted father Karl Hermann Berendt (an influential linguist and archaeologist of Yucatán and Central America). This relationship raises the question of how indians from this period and region actively responded to the colonial tactic of reducción in the context of the Caste War. It then turns to letters from Maya leaders and combatants during the first decades of the war, which themselves respond to that tactic. Writing in Spanish and Yucatec Maya, the letters speculatively appropriate and repurpose the...