The Blood of Guatemala: The Making of Race and Nation (review)

The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. By Greg Grandin. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2000. xx + 343 pp., introduction, maps, tables, photographs, glossary, appendix, bibliography, index. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

In December 1996, representatives of the Guatemalan army and guerrilla fighters signed a peace accord that brought to an end one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in the history of Central America. According to the 1999 report of the United Nations–sponsored Truth Commission, the thirty-six-year conflict left in its wake over 200,000 dead or disappeared, most of them Maya Indians. The report also concluded that the state, army, and army-allied paramilitary organizations were responsible for the vast majority—over 90 percent—of the killings.

Greg Grandin’s The Blood of Guatemala is the latest addition to a burgeoning literature concerned with making sense of that horrific upheaval. Grandin, a historian at Duke University who worked as a consultant for the Truth Commission, seeks to gain a better understanding of the turmoil through a long-term examination of Guatemala’s past, focusing on the role of the Indian majority in the country’s social processes of state and economic formation. Grandin is convinced that acknowledging and understanding the complex role that Maya Indians have played in the unfolding of Guatemalan history is a necessary first step toward reconciliation and the construction of a multiethnic and socially just society in the wake of the violence.

Grandin traces the roots of the crisis back to the 1954 military coup, when “the most serious effort by Ladino leaders to create an integrated nation collapsed under the combined weight of political division, class struggle, and foreign intervention” (9). Significantly, the revolution’s more inclusive vision was, according to Grandin, a variant of an alternative nationalist discourse formulated in the 1890s by the Maya-K’iche’ elites of the city of Quetzaltenango. Unlike Ladino (non-Indian) nationalism, which regards the progress of the nation and indigenous ethnicity as mutually exclusive, K’iche’ nationalism considered these notions as mutually dependent—one could not advance without the other. So, from Grandin’s perspective, underlying the 1954 debacle was the failure to resolve a historical feud over national identity.

One of the most-consequential results of this failure, according to Grandin, was the rapid unraveling after 1954 of a socio-political arrangement brokered by Maya and Ladino elites that had helped maintain a degree of social equilibrium for nearly a century. Grandin devotes the bulk of The Blood of Guatemala to tracing the origins of that brokerage tradition and alternative nationalist vision to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century among the Maya-K’iche’ of Quetzaltenango. He focuses on that community’s elites, or principales, whose actions and discourses, in Grandin’s opinion, profoundly affected the formation of the modern Guatemalan nation-state as well as the country’s unique ethnic configuration. His analysis starts in the mid–eighteenth century and ends in 1954 with Arbenz’s ill-fated agrarian reform.

The Quetzalteco principales were a privileged group comprising political leaders, landowners, and merchants who by the late colonial period had come to wield considerable economic and cultural power within the community’s civil-religious hierarchy. Their power allowed the group to play the key role of brokers, or intermediaries, between the Ladino state and the community. In the nineteenth century, succeeding generations of principales contended with powerful Ladinos over the meaning of national identity and the place of Maya ethnicity within the evolving nation-state.

In the course of the period under study, Guatemalans, both Indians and Ladinos, engaged in an often contentious struggle over the nature and meaning of three major social projects: the building of a liberal national state, the transition to what Grandin terms “coffee capitalism,” and the efforts by elite Ladinos to create a homogeneous national identity premised on the assimilation of Indian culture. Grandin argues...