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  • Writing “Maya Country” in Mexico and Guatemala
  • Bret Gustafson (bio)
Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatán. By Karen D. Caplan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. vii + 289. $60.00 cloth.
Global Maya: Work and Ideology in Rural Guatemala. By Liliana R. Goldín. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009. Pp. x + 242. $50.00 cloth.
Escaping the Fire: How an Ixil Mayan Pastor Led His People out of a Holocaust during the Guatemalan Civil War. By Tomás Guzaro and Terri Jacob McComb. Afterword by David Stoll. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pp. xv + 224. $24.95 paper.
Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics, Cultural Contentions, and Moral Engagements. Edited by Pedro Pitarch, Shannon Speed, and Xochitl Leyva Solano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. ix +377. $84.95 cloth. $23.95 paper.
White Roads of the Yucatán: Changing Social Landscapes of the Yucatec Maya. By Justine M. Shaw. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008. Pp. x + 226. $45.00 cloth.
Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala. By Emilio del Valle Escalante. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2009. Pp. x + 210. $29.95 paper.

Guatemala is spiraling into deepening inequality and institutionalized criminality, with an economy dominated by export-oriented assemblage, agriculture, mining, migration, and drug transport. The Yucatán has become an outpost of the absurdities and dislocations of tourism-based development. Chiapas is also part of a new global logic, combining corridors of extraction, increasing militarized security, local struggles for change, and low-intensity counterinsurgency. In some ways reminiscent of the Cold War era—replete with nearby coups d’état, heavy-handed U.S. policies, and resurgent criminal and military rule—new economic modalities, new languages of organizing, and new struggles over the representation of past and future are reshaping the Maya region of southern Mexico and Guatemala. The challenge to analyze and interpret these developments is intensified when the region is viewed through the particular optic of its unity as “Maya Country,” as in the present review, by bringing to the surface histories of colonialism in collision with neoliberal development, ongoing academic politics, and grassroots struggles. The works reviewed here shed light on emergent and [End Page 207] older developments, linking—and recentering—Mayan places and peoples in the context of broader shifts in the cultural politics of indigeneity and of transformations in Latin America.

Escaping the Fire is the life story of Tomás Guzaro, a Mayan evangelical pastor, as told to and written by Terri Jacob McComb, a missionary with the New Life Advance International Mission. Guzaro recounts how he led a group of Ixils out of guerrilla-controlled territory in 1982 and delivered them to a new life in a refugee camp linked to the Foundation for Aid to the Indian People (FUNDAPI), an organization created by then de facto president of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, and controlled by the army and missionaries. Guzaro’s story was written as first-person narrative, having been compiled from interviews with McComb, retranslated into Spanish, and checked by Guzaro. As a result, Escaping the Fire is a curious work, at first glance testimonio with reminiscences of the story of Rigoberta Menchú, not least because of the afterword by David Stoll, who perhaps most famously questioned the authenticity of Menchú’s own first-person testimony. Yet it is distinct from testimonio as a historically situated genre, and in fact, better exemplifies the Anglo-Protestant genre of Christian biography. Its publication by an academic press will raise concern in some quarters, as its plot, cast, and politicized morality tale offer up a Maya hero for the Christian right. Guzaro is thus antithetical to Menchú, and with a new edition of I, Rigoberta Menchú and yet another reassessment of Menchú’s narrative recently out, Escaping the Fire is sure to fuel debate.1

In contrast to Menchú’s image as a revolutionary, Guzaro is a recovering alcoholic, small landholder, entrepreneur, evangelical pastor, and tailor, with a traditionalist Maya father and an evil stepmother. He relates that he strived to maintain neutrality throughout Guatemala’s civil war, following the word of God as his...

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