Entre comunidad y nacion: La historia de Guatemala revisitada desde lo local y lo regional (review)

The articles gathered here address a society that is both fascinating and notoriously complicated. The authors' finely drawn portraits of local history often run counter to the received wisdom regarding national events. Their evidence will intrigue specialists, and several articles will also engage undergraduates. For example, Isabel Rodas's careful archival work on Patzicía allows her to reconstruct patterns of wealth and privilege across four generations of families that were direct and legitimate heirs to the conquistadors. Yet distance from the colonial capital and failure to maintain alliances with the political elite caused them, over time, to shed their Spanish identity. Instead, they acquired land by "incorporating themselves clandestinely into the social space of the indigenous communities," reidentifying as ladino—a social category that included mestizos, Afro-Guatemalans, and Mayans who had fled their communities to escape labor and tribute burdens. Edgar Esquit studies the same municipality following the advent of the coffee boom, which greatly expanded the privileges of the ladino elite. Kaqchikel-Maya rights suffered steady erosion, and indigenous municipal officers served mainly to deliver labor to their ladino counterparts. Their only remaining sphere of autonomy—the administration of justice according to indigenous norms—came under the ax in 1935 when Jorge Ubico imposed his intendancy system. It was in this decade that Kaqchikel men founded a school explicitly for Mayan youth and also attempted to recapture some of their land base. This organizing provides the context for the 1944 massacre, nearly always told from the urban perspective. This dominant perspective claimed for itself the mantle of national history, but Esquit shows that such claims are deeply subjective and silence other narratives.

Jean Piel's view of indigenous elite in Quiché is far less flattering. She questions ladino hegemony during the coffee boom, using methodological tools similar to those of Rodas. Douglas Sullivan-González likewise reveals misconceptions and deepens our understanding of elite events. He looks at the 1837 and 1857 cholera epidemics in Santa Rosa: local events linked to the earlier epidemic brought down the state, while those of the later period served to strengthen it. At both points, religious fervor generated overwhelming popular support. The largely ladino identity of Santa Rosa's poor gave shape to emerging expressions of Guatemalan patriotism.

Indigenous autonomy is the point of departure for both Gregory Grandin and Ana Lorena Carrillo, whose very different articles on Quetzaltenango focus on the Kiché-Maya elite and middle strata. Grandin chronicles the elite's construction of public buildings and monuments, as they laid claim to the national rhetoric of progress. He also charts their ability to outmaneuver ladino municipal officers by successfully petitioning the national government. As in Patzicía, Quetzaltenango's indigenous elite brokered the labor of the poor. However, the city's comparative wealth allowed the K'iché elite to buffer the hardships of forced labor by providing local jobs, which was not the case in Patzicía, where the majority worked seasonally on the coffee plantations. While the K'iché elite put the language of progress to good use, they did so at the cost of "distancing themselves not only from the impoverished or common Indians of their own community, but from all the Indians of Guatemala" (p. 91 ). Moreover, their small victories played out against a larger canvas of diminishing power.

Todd Little-Siebold and Richard Adams turn to the statistical record of San Marcos (near Quetzaltenango) to reconstruct power relations and ethnicity in the plantation economy. Little-Siebold's picture of local resistance to mandamientos during the early years of the coffee boom recalls the painstaking research done on Mexico's system of forced labor. The main characters that emerge are local power holders. Class also shapes Carrillo's argument concerning ethnicity among the contemporary middle classes in Quetzaltenango. She explores...