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reviews 151 helps to explain the paradoxes cited by the essays that precede his own. For example, in discussing the effect of Maoism, in which political opposition no longer could be distinguished on the basis of class or party affiliation, Jameson characterizes the later schisms within the movements as acts of self-definition in which internal oppositions were created in the absence of those traditional antagonists from the outside. Furthermore, by showing how the revolutions in Third World countries occurred at the same time that they were being penetrated by new production techniques, he defines the 60s as a period in which an older form of imperialism was replaced by a newer form of capitalist exploitation, resulting in movements of decolonization which went hand-in-hand with a different kind of re-colonization. Finally , by placing the decade of the 60s within the thirty-to-fifty year cycles posed by Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism, Jameson presents that infiltration of capitalism into the Third World as illustrative of its encroachment into all areas of social life around the world. When viewed within this global context, the focus of any analysis of the 60s shifts from its failures to the immense obstacles which any radical movement during this period battled. If, as Flo Kennedy says in the collection's final piece, "It's damn slick out there," Jameson suggests just how slick it is—and how much slicker it's getting over time. So if he ends his essay reaffirming " 'traditional' Marxism," he also knows full well the greater forces of opposition that it now faces. STACEY OLSTER Let's Go! by Otto René Castillo. Trans. Margaret Randall. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1984. 95 pp. $7.50 (paper). I Riqoberta Menchu, An Indian Woman in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchú. Trans. Ann Wright. Ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. London: Verso Editions, 1984. xxi + 252 pp. $8.95 (paper). Imagining a Revolution: Poems About Central America by Dennis Trudell. Madison, Wisconsin : Ojala Press, 1984. 28 pp. $3 (paper). Guatemala has been, for centuries, a rich land inhabited by the impoverished, a beautiful land where atrocities regularly take place, where colonialists and neo-colonialists use ladinos (Guatemalans who reject Mayan values) to cheat that country's indigenous majority out of their gold, their minerals, their oil, their lands and finally their lives. Not long after the conquest of Mexico, Hernán Cortes, tempted by stories of the riches of the Guatemalan highland tribes, sent his cohort, Captain Pedro de Alvarado, to subdue them. Alvarado recognized that, although he had been received in peace at their capital Utatlan, the natives might object to becoming Spanish minions, and so he seized their kings, condemned them as traitors, executed them as examples to terrorize the people, razed the city and scattered the inhabitants. In a letter to Cortés from Utatlan dated April 1 1 , 1524, Alvarado summed up his actions: "And as I knew them to have such a bad will toward service to His Majesty, and for the good and peace of this land, I burned them and orderd the city burned and levelled to the ground, because it is so dangerous and so strong that it seems more like a house of thieves than [the abode] of people" (Adrian Recinos, "Introduction," Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950], 4). These are the specifically Guatemalan and generally Central American themes which form the warp and woof of all the books reviewed here: the "benevolent" invaders bringing the miracle of development and stability; the traitorous natives who are guilty of preferring autonomy; the scorched earth policy; the creation of internal and external refugees; genocide. The poetry of Trudell and Castillo and the oral history of Menchú's life testify to 152 the minnesota review the present repetition of this ancient act of exploitation, and by this witnessing, which is also a judging, they call us to act, to alter the course of this repeated history. Trudell's short collection of 19 poems, the first 11 of which are written to accompany photographs by Susan Meiselas in her Nicaragua (Random House, 1981), works like a series of snapshots: photos...

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