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Ethnohistory 50.4 (2003) 707-712



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Review Essays Representing the Maya

Edward F. Fischer,
Vanderbilt University


A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala. By W. George Lovell. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. xxi + 191 pp., preface, maps, bibliography. $19.95 paper.)

El Q'anil: Man of Lightning. By VÌctor D. Montejo. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. xxx + 104 pp., forward, introduction, bibliography. $24.95 paper.)

Joseño: Another Maya Voice Speaks from Guatemala. Translated and edited by James D. Sexton. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. vii + 312 pp., introduction, glossary, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth.)

In recent years there has been a concerted effort to introduce native voices into the academic dialogue and to experiment with new and creative forms of representation. The three works on the Maya of Guatemala under consideration here speak directly to these concerns. Each stemming from a different intellectual tradition and employing different representational tactics, these books share a concern with humanizing the Maya experience.

In A Beauty That Hurts, George Lovell, a Scottish geographer of Guatemala living in Canada, offers a sensitive reading of Guatemalan history and contemporary society interspersed with a modest dose of self-reflection. Lovell seems to effortlessly insert himself into the text in a manner that is neither pretentious nor self-indulgent. We hear many calls within the academy these days to make explicit our self-positioning in social science narratives. Too often this is realized in either inadequate nods of the [End Page 707] head or overly indulgent excursions from the subject ostensibly at hand; here Lovell has found a workable middle ground.

A Beauty That Hurts is a hard book to pigeonhole into our comfortably neat categories. The University of Texas Press classifies it as "Geography; Latin American Studies," and I suppose it is geography, at least to the extent that what geographers write is geography. But it is much more as well: history, anthropology, journalism. It is probably the best concise introduction to contemporary Guatemala I have read. The book makes no pretensions to comprehensiveness, yet it manages to convey both the hard reality and the more affective qualities of the Guatemalan experience; it covers the longue durée and yet never loses sight of the individuals who make (and are made by) history, of their passions and sorrows and the being of everyday life.

Lovell begins with the story of Genero Castañeda, a Q'anjob'al man living in Canada. Genero fled Guatemala as a teenager in 1984, following an incident in which he had been questioned and released by the military while selling ice cream at a distant city's annual fair. In chapter 1 we get an almost lyrical account of Genero's life before and after he left Guatemala. Of Guatemala City, where Genero shined shoes for a while, Lovell writes: "If Nero fiddled as Rome burned, then the government of Guatemala is a symphony orchestra playing in the midst of an even greater conflagration. What do the bright lights and commercial paraphernalia of downtown Guatemala City, the multinational consumerism and chic glitter of Sixth Avenue, the elegant mansions and flashy nightclubs of Zone Ten, have to do with the events and circumstances of a life like Genero's?" (10). The answer that emerges in the chapters that follow is: quite a bit more than first meets the eye.

Chapters 2 through 6 present short readings of the work and lives of Rigoberta Menchú, Victor Montejo, photographer Jean-Marie Simon, filmmaker Mary Ellen Davis, and Doña Magdalena, a K'iche' woman whose husband and son were killed by civil patrollers working under the army's command. Chapters 7 through 17 offer a history of Guatemala from 1981 to 1995. Following a leitmotif provided by the Guatemalan newspapers, we follow the development of Guatemala's violence from horrific shock to mundane reality in headlines such as "Journalist Was Disfigured; Bodies of Other Persons also Found Butchered" (1981) to the more prosaic "This Time in Zone 2" (1990). Lovell's big picture history is always personalized in his account, from RÌos Montt...

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