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Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World
The Maya of Santiago Chimaltenango have experienced increasingly rapid, even violent, integration into Guatemalan society in the last fifty years, yet they still distinguish themselves ethnically from Spanish-speaking Guatemalans and other Maya. Why this sense of ethnic identity persists—and also changes—over time is the focus of Maya Saints and Souls in a Changing World, a beautifully written ethnography of a Mam-speaking Maya town in the western highlands of Guatemala. John Watanabe uniquely explores how Chimaltecos themselves define their local distinctiveness. This approach uncovers significant continuities in lifeways and world view that might otherwise remain imperceptible to an outsider. Another important feature of the study is that it updates Charles Wagley's pioneering research in the community during the 1930s. Watanabe identifies both the external, historical factors that have prompted change in the community since Wagley's time and the people's responses to these changes.
I Ask for Justice
Given Guatemala’s record of human rights abuses, its legal system has often been portrayed as illegitimate and anemic. I Ask for Justice challenges that perception by demonstrating that even though the legal system was not always just, rural Guatemalans considered it a legitimate arbiter of their grievances and an important tool for advancing their agendas. As both a mirror and an instrument of the state, the judicial system simultaneously illuminates the limits of state rule and the state’s ability to co-opt Guatemalans by hearing their voices in court. Against the backdrop of two of Latin America’s most oppressive regimes—the dictatorships of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) an...
A Beauty That Hurts
Though a 1996 peace accord brought a formal end to a conflict that had lasted for thirty-six years, Guatemala's violent past continues to scar its troubled present and seems destined to haunt its uncertain future. George Lovell brings to this revised and expanded edition of A Beauty That Hurts decades of fieldwork throughout Guatemala, as well as archival research. He locates the roots of conflict in geographies of inequality that arose during colonial times and were exacerbated by the drive to develop Guatemala's resources in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lines of confrontation were entrenched after a decade of socioeconomic reform between 1944 and 1954 saw modernizing i...
The Maya of Morganton
In 2003, Leon Fink published his oral history of Guatemalan and Mexican migrants in Morganton, North Carolina, and their fight for unionization in a poultry processing plant. In the following years, Fink remained in touch with many of the people he profiled in the book, and in 2022 he returned to Morganton to interview them and talk with their children, new migrants in the area, and community leaders, particularly women. Their conversations covered a wide range of topics, including labor struggles and victories, grassroots and electoral political organizing, social activism (especially on issues affecting undocumented migrants), class mobility for second-generation migrants, and new cooperative worker-owned institutions, including a bookstore, a textile factory, and a preschool. This revised and expanded edition of The Maya of Morganton reveals what Fink found on his return to Morganton, documenting two decades of continuity and change in a new preface and chapter. Together, the new and original material present a comprehensive yet intimate examination of the migrant experience in western North Carolina.
Child Survivors of Genocide
This book examines the experiences of orphaned child survivors of Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict and genocide who were raised in an in-country permanent residential home. Now adults, they have faced long-term consequences but also have become resilient, well-adapted adults with a strong sense of identity and belonging.
War in the Land of True Peace
For the ancient and modern Maya, the landscape is ruled by powerful entities in the form of geographic features like caves, mountains, springs, and abandoned cities—spirits who must be entreated, through visits and rituals, for permission to plant, harvest, build, or travel their territories. Consequently, such places have served as points of domination and resistance over the millennia—and nowhere is this truer than in Guatemala’s Northern Transversal Strip, the subject of Brent K. S. Woodfill’s War in the Land of True Peace. This strategic region with its wealth of resources—fertile soil, petroleum, and the only noncoastal salt in the Maya lowlands—is the site of some of the mo...
Fifty Years of Good Reading
50 year since founding the University of Texas, they have witnessed major evolutions in the world of publishing.
Pluralizing Ethnography
This volume brings together eight Maya specialists and a prominent anthropological theorist as discussant to assess the contrasting historical circumstances and emerging cultural futures of Maya in Mexico and Guatemala. Rather than presume a romanticized, timeless Maya culture-or the globalized predicaments of transnationalized Maya imaginings-this seminar took its cue from contemporary Maya cultural activists who derive their enduring sense of Mayan-ness from a historical consciousness of five hundred years of cultural resilience. The contributors evaluate the history of Maya peoples and Maya anthropology by examining language, religion, political attitudes and activism, ethnographic traditions, and the relationship between economic change, migration, and cultural identity. In comparing Maya peoples across Mexico and Guatemala, the contributors' emphasis on culture recovers intermediate linkages between the personal and the political, the local and the global. Their work enables a controlled cross-cultural comparison across national boundaries and histories that in turn illuminates the articulation between locally constructed meanings and global transformations.
Resurgent Voices in Latin America
Annotation After more than 500 years of marginalisation, Latin America's forty million Indians have gained political recognition and civil rights. Here, social scientists explore the important role of religion in indigenous activism, showing the ways that religion has strengthened indigenous identity and contributed to the struggle for indigenous rights.
