The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (review)

This is an exceptional book about an exceptional town. For much of the nineteenth century, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second largest city, had a majority indigenous population. In a country where to be Indian generally meant to be rural, poor, and marginalized, Quetzaltenango's urban Indians included a substantial number of successful artisans, merchants, professionals, and commercial agriculturalists who were active in local government. Grandin's book examines how this K'iche' elite struggled to maintain its position from the years before Independence into the twentieth century, against the pressures of both a centralizing state controlled by ladinos [non-Indians] and the effects of economic changes that exacerbated class divisions within the Indian community. Their principal, if ultimately unsuccessful, vehicle for this was construction of an "alternative consciousness" (p. 12), one that rejected ladino racism and political-cultural dominance and proposed instead an inclusive nationalism based on a modernization that did not require assimilation.

Immersed in a sea of Indians, the Spanish and Creoles of colonial Quetzaltenango never entirely managed to wrest control of the highlands from indigenous elites. As economically successful Indians increasingly adopted capitalist patterns of accumulation, these found they "had to walk a fine line between the Spanish world which granted them political power, and the K'iche' world, which allowed them to exercise it" (p. 51). Not surprisingly, Quetzaltenango's Indians welcomed the Carrera revolt. For ladinos, such enthusiasm, together with resistance to anti-cholera measures, fed a growing sense that not only were Indians a "race apart," but that they constituted a barrier to Guatemala's progress. Only if they gave up being Indians and adopted "western" values could the country get ahead.

Coffee changed Guatemala and Quetzaltenango. "Indian" more and more came to mean "impoverished coffee laborer," and ladinos collapsed ethnicity and class. Interest in assimilation faded. But whereas coffee undercut the situation of the most Indians, some of Quetzaltenango's indigenous elites prospered, as entrepreneurs in urban construction, in commercial agriculture, or as merchants and labor intermediaries. Others profited from the commodification of land, buying parcels and foreclosing on loans. As the resulting class divisions among Indians became more obvious, indigenous elites turned increasingly to alliances with ladinos and the ladinos' state. To obscure this, and to combat a hardening ladino racism that denied their very possibility, Quetzaltenango's Indian elites advanced the idea of regeneración, or liberation, for all Indians, an alternative, inclusive nationalism that defined ethnicity by "blood" rather than culture and, thus, had no need of assimilation or fear of modernization.

The 1944-54 Revolution delivered a fatal blow to this carefully nurtured edifice of ethnic solidarity. Struggles over land, and particularly the efforts of the rural poor to gain access to the remaining ejido and forest lands, fractured the community along class lines. For most of the subsequent half century, class analysis, not ethnicity, has framed popular resistance. But with the failure of leftist insurgency in the 1980s, Pan-Maya organizations again today seek to construct an ethnicity not linked to class, while most ladinos still cannot imagine a Guatemala that would grant equality to Indians.

Solidly rooted in archival research and interviews, Grandin's book successfully integrates postmodern sensibilities with the now old "new social history," opening genuinely original ways of seeing the country's history. Grandin shows that the construction of ideology is not the preserve of dominant classes and that even disadvantaged groups can constitute their own visions of the world and work to implement these. He skillfully illuminates the contradictions, uncertainties, and liminalities this process entails. This is a complex book and not all parts fit equally well: the several excursions into gender, in particular, seem a bit forced and unfinished. But no short summary can do it justice. The great strength of Grandin's work is unsparingly to force the reader...