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His vivid and plain-spoken account of life among the Maya during the war between guerrillas and the army in the 1980s and 1990s offers detailed descriptions of the atrocities committed by both sides and brings the reader into a Mayan world richly textured with indigenous beliefs and practices.
Central America from the eyes of a peasant illuminates the complex problems of the region: social, personal, economic, medical, and religious as well as the political issues related to the great masses of Latin America's poor.
In the delightful Mayan folktale The Dog Who Spoke, we learn what happens when a dog’s master magically transforms into a dog-man who reasons like a man but acts like a dog. This and the other Mayan folktales in this bilingual collection brim with the enchanting creativity of rural Guatemala’s oral culture. In addition to stories about ghosts and humans turning into animals, the volume also offers humorous yarns. Hailing from the Lake Atitlán region in the Guatemalan highlands, these tales reflect the dynamics of, and conflicts between, Guatemala’s Indian, Ladino, and white cultures. The animals, humans, and supernatural forces that figure in these stories represent Mayan cultural values, social mores, and history. James D. Sexton and Fredy Rodríguez-Mejía allow the thirty-three stories to speak for themselves—first in the original Spanish and then in English translations that maintain the meaning and rural inflection of the originals. Available in print for the first time, with a glossary of Indian and Spanish terms, these Guatemalan folktales represent generations of transmitted oral culture that is fast disappearing and deserves a wider audience.
After dealing with more than a thousand clients whose marriages have dissolved, Sexton knows all of the what-not-to-dos for couples who want to build-- and consistently work to preserve-- a lasting, fulfilling relationship. He dives straight into the most common marital problems, and shows how these usually derive from dishonest-- or nonexistent-- communication. Though he deals constantly with the heartbreak of others, he still believes in romance and the transformative power of love.
On 10 May 1968, President Lyndon Johnson activated James Sexton from the U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve. The machine-signed orders gave him 30 days to withdraw from his second year of graduate school in anthropology at UCLA and report to Ft. Lewis, Washington. Letters and tapes by James and his wife, Marilyn Rex, serve as the basis for their story from 1968 to 1969, focusing on Ft. Lewis, Ft. Belvoir, Cam Ranh Bay, Nha Trang, and the surrounding hamlets and villages during the peak of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Five out of six of the some 2.5 million military personnel who served in Vietnam were support troops rather than grunts in the field. Because most books on Vietnam ...
This collection of folklore offers a rich and lively panorama of Mayan mythic heritage. Here are everyday tales of village life; legends of witches, shamans, spiritualists, tricksters, and devils; fables of naguales, or persons who can change into animal forms; ribald stories of love and life; cautionary tales of strange and menacing neighbors and of the danger lurking within the human heart. These legends narrate origin and creation stories, explain the natural world, and reinforce cultural beliefs and values such as honesty, industriousness, sharing, fairness, and cleverness. Whether tragic or comic, fantastic or earthy, whimsical or profound, these tales capture the mystery, fragility, and power of the Mayan world.
Anything is possible in the world of Latin American folklore, where Aunt Misery can trap Death in a pear tree; Amazonian dolphins lure young girls to their underwater city; and the Feathered Snake brings the first musicians to Earth. One in a series of folklore reference guides ("...an invaluable resource..."--School Library Journal), this book features summaries and sources of 470 tales told in Mexico, Central America and South America, a region underrepresented in collections of world folklore. The volume sends users to the best stories retold in English from the Inca, Maya, and Aztec civilizations, Spanish and Portuguese missionaries and colonists, African slave cultures, indentured servants from India, and more than 75 indigenous tribes from 21 countries. The tales are grouped into themed sections with a detailed subject index.
When A Beauty That Hurts first appeared in 1995, Guatemala was one of the world’s most flagrant violators of human rights. An accord brokered by the United Nations brought a measure of peace after three decades of armed conflict, but the country’s troubles are far from over. George Lovell revisits Guatemala to grapple once again with the terror inflicted on its Maya peoples by a military-dominated state.