Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life After Genocide by Diane M. Nelson (review)

With some of the highest homicide rates in the world today, Latin America has struggled with high levels of violence for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Guatemala, along with its immediate neighbors Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras, remains one of deadliest nations in the region. Since the 1996 peace accords, the nature of violence has changed, but not its persistence. As the author demonstrates, Guatemala's civil war and genocide and their aftermath are complicated processes that continue to shape the nation in surprising ways.

By adeptly weaving observations about numbers and counting throughout the chapters, Nelson offers a fresh framework for analyzing contemporary Guatemala. Engaging in the debates about the statistics surrounding the civil war—200,000 killed, over one million displaced—she interrogates what those numbers and battles over them tell us about Mayas and other Guatemalans. Beyond exploring the accuracy and significance of numbers, Nelson demonstrates the myriad ways people use them. The book is particularly compelling when she allows interlocutors' insights to guide the narrative. Maya intellectual Romelia Mo' uses statistics related to illiteracy, malnutrition, and other social injustices to calculate their cost to Mayas: more than $600 a person each year (in a nation where the average income calculated by the United Nations is $3210). Even before Mayas pay for housing, food, and medical care, racism—structural and otherwise—consumes a large percentage of their incomes.

Like Mo', many Maya who study their own culture, mathematics, language, history, and glyphs are empowered by the process. One Maya teacher and journalist notes, "I talked to my father, my abuelos, the ancianos. . . . It wasn't until much later that I realized it was all part of a larger project, what my father said are pilares de la cultura, cultural foundations. Numbers are a part of this but also the seeking itself; it opened me to these ways of being, of understanding" (52).

Emboldened by such pursuits, many Maya activists sought to defend their communities from mining companies. In Guatemala, catalyzing change is arduous, slow, and often dangerous work. It also can amaze. As can be discerned from the professions of the community leaders, which range from local politician and Maya ajq'ij (day keeper) to doctor and midwife, the anti-mining movements are eclectic. In an apparent manifestation of unconventional collaboration, a group of street kids and gang members refused offers of payment to intimidate protesters and instead warned them of the impending danger and joined their cause. In Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death (2013), Deborah Levenson (who Nelson does not reference) asserts that gangs of youths have a long history of civic engagement contrasted against a more recent phenomena of violence that in many ways has been foisted upon them. On the other end of the political and social spectrum, young federal soldiers ate tortillas with anti-mining activists in the midst of a protest. The payoffs for such creative collaboration can be enormous, as the 2017 mining ban in El Salvador underscores.

Nelson's ability to connect with individuals across a broad geographic and socioeconomic spectrum enriches the text in provocative ways. Some genocide survivors suggest murder can be productive. One Maya man whose father was murdered recalls, "My father drank a lot and he beat us often. Maybe it's for the best" (103). A Maya war widow notes that she never could have done the social justice work she now organizes had her husband survived the war. Of course individual rationalizations of violence hardly offset genocide, which in addition to violent death enabled people to gain access to the businesses of others, settle generations-old scores, and consolidate large land holdings by eradicating pesky peasants seeking land rights. Violence reverberates through contemporary Guatemala in ways that reinforce Maya marginalization. A parent's murder during the civil war "sets back generations in terms of...