Tabasco Chontal is spoken mainly in the coastal area of Tabasco, in the central part of the state north of Villahermosa, and around Macuspana. There are some differences in the speech from area to area. The texts presented here are from the Nacajuca area, northwest of Villahermosa.The texts were written by Plácido Luciano Gerónimo (now about 66), a native Chontal speaker who has lived all his life in the Chontal town of Tapotzingo.Keller encouraged him to write down stories he had heard in the area or knew from boyhood. He recorded the original versions on casette tapes as well as on paper in the 80s and the early part of the 90s, with a free translation into Spanish. Later both authors worked out the semi-literal sentence by sentence translation into Spanish, given here.These stories are part of a larger collection comprised of 22 texts. Keller first went to the Chontal area to live among the people in Tapotzingo and learn the language in 1943, and has been there off and on since then. Together she and Plácido have completed a dictionary, Diccionario Chontal de Tabasco (Mayense), published as number 36 of the Serie de Vocabularios y Dicciona rios Indígenas 'Mariano Silva y Aceves". México: ILV (1997). Other materials published in or about the Chontal language are listed in the bibliography of the dictionary.The first text, "The Story of the Lost Children" is a version in Chontal of "Hansel and Gretel", while the second, "The Story of the Boy Who Was Born from a Chicken Egg", is the story of a baby whose mother finds it too much bother, kills him, grinds him up, and puts his remains in an egg, which she then throws out. An old woman who hasn't been able to have children finds the egg, the child comes back to life again, and she and her husband raise the boy. When he grows up, he finds his biological parents, and turns them into the first deer.
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