In the Land of the Lacandón illuminates [Bernard] de Colmont’s expedition against the backdrop of late imperialism on the eve of the Second World War in Europe. It investigates the history of exploration, science, and media, revealing how these narratives represented and constructed Indigenous Peoples for the public – and how such representations continue to resonate.Which is an accurate assesment of the book's point, but it completely glosses over the means with which it makes it. Which I think is vital to appreciating the book.
The first part of the book is a graphic novel of Jobs presenting a college lecture on a radio show presented by de Colmont about an expidition he took to southern Mexico. (I know that sounds a little convoluted, but it makes sense in the story, trust me.) The second part is an academic essay that puts de Colmont’s expedition in context. In relation to 1930s ethnography, in relation to the news media platforms of the era, in relation to the string of pop culture that goes from Allan Quatermain to Indiana Jones to Lara Croft, in relation to where we are today in 2025. The third part is a poem imagining how the Lacandón felt in their meetings with de Colmont. The fourth part is a discussion of the means and process of the research and production of this book by way of the creators interviewing each other. And the fifth part are educational discussion guides and end notes. The book looks at de Colmont’s work holisitically, using different forms of expression to address different approaches to the idea. I don't know how you would explain that to a publisher and them say, "Yes, we could sell that!"
Don't get me wrong -- it's cool and interesting in ways that I will get to in a moment, but it just doesn't filter down into an easy elevator pitch. Indeed, the marketing copy all but ignores the multiple formats within the book, and focuses on the broad theme of highlighting de Colmont’s expedition as indicative of broader ideas of the time, and how that continues to affect us nearly one hundred years later.
So here's the deal: de Colmont went trekking through southern Mexico in the 1930s looking for the "lost" tribe of the Lacandón. He found them, took a bunch of pictures and some movie footage, and came back to his native France selling the idea that he'd discovered a group that were closely related to the ancient Mayans. Except he didn't discover them. They had lived in the area of generations and previous explorers had come across them multiple times decades earlier -- de Colmont even used some of their notes to find them. And they were only related to the Mayans in the sense that they happened to be living in vaguely the same area. And, of course, he considered them uncivilized and considerably lower than he was culturally. The pictures of the Lacandón looking confused at modern technology were all staged; at least in so much as de Colmont told them to act surprised or confused or amazed or whatever. But de Colmont did a good job telling his story about the hardships of an interprid explorer, acting selflessly to find ancient cultures that could provide the key to who we are as humans, and his audiences lapped it up, often paying handsomely.
See, in the early part of the twentieth century, we were just getting communications technology to the point where people were starting to really grasp that there were other cultures all over the world, and that they were sometimes radically different than just speaking a different language like they did just one country over. The travel to these 'exotic' locations was still difficult if not treacherous, so people paid good money to hear the exploits of adventurers braving the jungles of the Amazon or "Darkest Africa" or any place that didn't have regular contact with the rest of the world. Henry Morton Stanley was actually hired by the New York Herald newspaper to find David Livingstone because Stanely's communications would make for a good story -- the famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" line is almost certainly a fabrication for this story; Robert Ripley -- before gaining fame for his Believe It or Not! cartoons -- was sent on a trip around the world by The Globe newspaper for the sole purpose of creating daily dispatches about whatever he saw/encountered. People were just learning about all these different cultures and were often dumbfounded by the novelty of how the rest of the world thought and acted. So men like Ripley and Stanley and de Colmont often made their living simply telling people, "Here's what I saw in some country you've never heard of."
Whether the audiences were actually interested in these other cultures was irrelevant, these people told good stories. Often very literally man versus nature. And to make those stories captivating... well, it didn't matter how accurate they actually were, so long as they met people's expectations of being "exotic." Their explorations were springboards, but their inspirations came from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. They carried with them generations of colonialism and, while a lone man can't really colonize a people single-handedly, he can't bring with him the racism inherent in that colonialistic system, and saw all of these so-called 'lost' peoples are inferior. After all, they didn't have manufactured clothing or firearms. So, even in the case of de Colmont, who was decidedly less egregious than other adventurers, he still played towards his audiences' expectations about their being removed from "civilization" and presented their ideas and methods in what-is-easily-recognizeable-in-hindsight as a racist manner.
It's in this light that movies like King Kong and King of the Jungle (both from 1933) make more sense. It's in this light that comics like Tintin in the Congo (1931) and The Phantom (1936) make more sense. Those weren't one-offs; they were very much in line with what audiences were looking for, as problematic as they might have been. And that relatively simple man versus nature through-line continues to Secret of the Incas (1954) to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) to Tomb Raider (1996) to Uncharted (2007). But because the origins of these stories ultimately are rooted in that sense of colonialism and cultural (if not racial) superiority, they tend to remain at least a little problematic, often despite attempts to remove the worst elements. Jobs expressly points out, for example, that the racism in Tintin in the Congo was toned down considerably between its original serialization and when it was first collected -- and that collected edition is still pretty awful in that regard.
I've not really talked much on the actual content of the book, and that's intentional. It's very interesting and enlightening, but not in a way that lends itself to a simple and straight-forward summary. As I said, the basic story of de Colmont’s expedition is told from the perspective of Jobs relaying how de Colmont told the story of the actual expedition on a radio program. Lots of layers that, while not difficult to parse, would take as much time to explain as it would to just read the darned thing. The majority of the book is not in comic form, but the comic is fundamental to the overall themes of the book, and the prose work after -- both the academic text and the poem -- provide significant context and commentary on the events relayed in the comics. It's a very interesting intersection of forms that all play off each other in a way that I don't believe I've seen before. At least not to this degree. And while the focus is on de Colmont himself, the lessons here are readily and easily applicable to a much wider set of subjects. The content -- even the academic text portion -- is a very accessible, but still offers a great deal to think about and contextualize. It is very much right up my alley and, while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to everyone, I would recommend it to people who want to put some context on anyone from Frank Buck to Kit Cloudkicker.
In the Land of the Lacandón came out last month from McGill-Queen's University Press and should be available from your favorite bookseller. It retails for $29.95 US but I was provided with a review copy.
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