The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala by J. T. Way (review)

The "meta-history of promise" proposed by modernization discourses and projects after World War II led to the growth of a development enterprise that touted fail-proof prescriptions.¹ The argument was that rational applications of capital and technology would lead to modernity. Yet, as Way aptly illustrates, the modernity achieved in Guatemala was born from, and continues to thrive on, the "dialectic between chaos and rationality" (5).

Way's The Mayan in the Mall is based on careful archival research bolstered by oral accounts and readings of literary and popular culture. Way grounds his complex story by focusing on Guatemala City. He traces the relationships between the shifting notions of modernity espoused by the government and the elite that changed the social space of urban workers and the poor. These shifts included a succession of what Way calls romantic, agro, social democratic high, anti-communist authoritarian high, and current neoliberal strategies for development. Way argues that all of these seemingly different stages or versions of modernity were fundamentally based on a racist and classist model of oppression that led to a paradoxical, chaotic modernity. For example, he notes, "Development has modernized Guatemala. However, the starvation wages and exploitation of workers embedded in that modernization guarantee the expansion of the informal economy that development putatively seeks to incorporate and transform" (10).

Way pays close attention to the process by which various interests within the city adapted and responded to governmental policies to meet their own needs. For example, he shows how the rise of working-class and poor neighborhoods, the land invasions of poor city dwellers, and the politics of the urban markets that employed and served urban workers and poor Guatemalans effectively challenged and contested orthodox renderings of modernity. Guatemalan modernity is as much a product of the urban working class and of poor Guatemalans as it is of the successive governments and the nation's neocolonial elite.

Way's methodology and research is the key to the study's importance. In order to reconstruct and piece together the "chaos" of the un-official and undocumented subaltern sectors, Way consulted the popular cultural expressions of different eras and excavated the archives of petty officialdom. The result is a fascinating narrative that complicates both sequence and chronology by weaving the hitherto hidden logic of everyday survival and resistance with the "rational" logic of a demythologized and demystified "modernity."