To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965, and: A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (review)

To Die in this Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965. By Jeffrey L. Gould. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empire, Nations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiv, 305 pp. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95.

A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. By Diane M. Nelson. Berkeley: University of California, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Appendix. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xxii, 427 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $22.00.

Jeffrey Gould's To Die in This Way and Diane Nelson's A Finger in the Wound mark a turning point in Central American scholarship. Along with the work of Charles Hale and Carol Smith, these are among the few studies conducted by United States scholars to examine seriously, and successfully, the dialectical relationship between national politics and indigenous identity. Despite the fact that Central America's complex historical and cultural legacy demands innovative comparative and multi-disciplinary work, both historians and anthropologists have remained intensely parochial. In general, historians have hesitated examining Central American society in relation to similar regions--Latin American or otherwise--and have almost unanimously refused to engage with theoretical perspectives being used to understand the interrelationship between popular consciousness and state formation. Anthropologists, with a few notable exceptions, likewise remain tied to local ethnographies, unable to examine how indigenous culture informs state formation. (I would argue that it is this parochialism which has led to the recent controversy surrounding Rigoberta Menchú's life; blind to how indigenous culture and society both informs and is formed by larger social relations, scholars fall back on simplistic dualities to understand recent Guatemalan history: Maya were either unambiguous revolutionaries or they were duped and used by non-indigenous leftists). In both of these books, the false divide separating local "culture" from the "state" is closed; these works will hopefully become the standard by which subsequent Central American studies are judged.

Jeffrey Gould's To Die in This Way is a brilliant work of integrative scholarship. If his previous work entitled To Lead as Equals was an attempt to understand what went right in the decades leading up to the Sandinista Revolution, this book is perhaps best understood as an effort to examine what went wrong. Gould explores what he calls the "myth of mestizaje"--the "commonsense notion" that apart from the Atlantic Coast Miskitos Nicaragua has been an ethnically homogenous society since the end of the nineteenth century (p. 13). In their effort to theorize national history and promote a revolutionary nationalism, Sandinista intellectuals developed a class-based version of this myth, arguing that with the proletarianization and land loss that accompanied Nicaragua's transition to coffee capitalism, Indians disappeared. To Die in This Way challenges this myth, examining the survival of indigenous identity in a number of communities in central Nicaragua. Gould explores the extent to which local ethnicities articulated with efforts to forge national identities, be they liberalism, conservatism, Sandino's "Indo Hispanism," or Sandinista nationalism.

In order to reconcile this myth of mestizaje with the continued existence of indigenous identity, Gould separates local "memories of primitive capital accumulation" (assaults on communal subsistence production and autonomy) from "memories of mestizaje" (assaults on communal identity). In those communities where these two memories coincided, local history could be more readily incorporated into Sandinista nationalism: In Yúcul, and Uluse, for example, the "memory of accumulation . . . has been interwoven with a memory of mestizaje that . . . recognizes a fundamental cultural transformation that occurred between the distant past and the present" (p. 265). This transformation allowed for the continued existence of an autochthonous identity, yet one that could be easily assimilated into revolutionary theory, practice, and vision.

But no such incorporation could take place in communities such as Matagalpa, where local memories of mestizaje and capital accumulation...