The Book of Lamentations, first published in Spanish as Oficio de tinieblas, in 1962, followed Castellanos’ autobiographical Balún Canán, and was to be the last novel she published. The plot recreates an Indian rebellion that took place in the vicinity of San Cristóbal de las Casas (the official name of the book’s “Ciudad Real”) in the mid-nineteenth century. The novel is faithful to the known facts in many respects, including the character who sparks the rebellion when she hears miraculous voices issuing from three “talking rocks”—a woman called Catalina Díaz Puiljá in the book, Agustina Gómez Checheb in real life—and the ritual crucifixion of her foster child, called Domingo in both fact and fiction.

The plot differs from history in one respect: Castellanos decided to set it in the 1930s—the very time when her family was suffering the impact of the Cardenista reforms. She transformed the real-life nineteenth-century mestizo anarchists from central Mexico, who provided the Maya rebels with much of their military training, into a romantically complicated trio: the historical Ignacio Fernández Galindo is the basis for the novel’s Fernando Ulloa, the Cardenista school teacher and land reform agitator; Ulloa’s assistant in the book, César Santiago, corresponds to Fernandez Galindo’s real-life aide; while Fernandez Galindo’s wife, who appears to have been an epically courageous woman, is replaced in the novel by the equivocal, sexually traitorous Julia Acevedo. There is ambiguity in the author’s attitude towards the mestizo protagonists of The Book of Lamentations. Perhaps it springs from her childhood memories of dispossession. Perhaps, in the case of Julia Acevedo, it is related to the mistrust she appears to have felt for women who were sexually lively and openly seductive.

But the novel’s heart is not really with the mestizos (or Ladinos, as they are called in Chiapas). It is with the Maya outcasts of a desolate highland village, who put the white-skinned inhabitants of Ciudad Real to siege because three speaking rocks have told them that justice will someday be theirs. What is astonishing is Castellanos’ fluent understanding of the world view of the hopeless rebels; of their sense of how whites behave, of their singular relationship with the Catholic God the Father and his attendant saints, of the ways in which a woman in the Maya community can acquire power and of the ways in which individuals with a tiny measure of power in such deprived communities can come to be distrusted and feared. Castellanos was able to know and imagine all this because in her outcast childhood the people closest to her were the equally hapless Indians who cooked for her, carried her on their backs, sang her to sleep and loved her, as the nanny does the willful, sickly Idolina in The Book of Lamentations.