Promotional Information

A study of the political and cultural formation of one of Guatemala's indigenous communities that explores the nationalisation of ethnicity, the preservation of Mayan identity, and the formation of a brutally repressive state.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Searching for the Living among the Dead 1
Prelude: A World Put Right, 31 March 1840 20
1. The Greatest Indian City in the World: Caste, Gender, and Politics, 1750-1821 25
2. Defending the Pueblo: Popular Protests and Elite Politics, 1786-1826 54
3. A Pestilent Nationalism: The 1837 Cholera Epidemic Reconsidered 82
4. A House with Two Masters: Carrera and the Restored Republic of Indians 99
5. Principales to Patrones, macehuales to Mozos: Land, Labor, and the Commodification of Community 110
6. Regenerating the Race: Race, Class, and the Nationalization of Ethnicity 130
7. Time and Space among the Maya: Mayan Modernism and the Transformation of the City 159
8. The Blood of Guatemalans: Class Struggle and the Death of K'iche' Nationalism 198
Conclusions: The Limits of Nation, 1954-1999 220
Epilogue: The Living among the Dead 234
Appendix 1 Names and Places 237
Appendix 2 Glossary 241
Notes 243
Works Cited 315
Index 337

About the Author

Greg Grandin is Assistant Professor of History at New York University. He worked with the Guatemalan Truth Commission in 1997–1998.

Reviews

"Bold, fascinating, and important, The Blood of Guatemala is a model of careful, yet highly innovative and original scholarship. Grandin has gone well beyond fine research to create a powerful narrative of two important centuries' worth of Guatemalan history. Its many different dimensions--political, economic, social, demographic--form an histore totale."-- "Anyone interested in Latin American history will enjoy this myth-and-stereotype-shattering study of Mayan cultural and national identity as it has evolved over centuries in one region of Guatemala, 'Los Altos.' Thick with novelistic detail and anecdote, brilliantly and imaginatively researched, totally engrossing in its melding of convincing analysis and strong narrative sweep, Grandin takes us to a 'high place' and guides us back over the tangled, treacherous paths that led there."--Francisco Goldman "Brilliant, bold, and beautifully written from the first page to the last, The Blood of Guatemala convincingly challenges previous interpretations of the histories of ethnicity, community, state, nation, and nationalism in Guatemala. Greg Grandin has skilfully united the disciplines of history and anthropology; he is part of a new generation of committed, sophisticated, and clearheaded intellectuals."--Deborah Levenson, Boston College "Grandin has amassed an intriguing collection of census reports, minutes of council meetings, letters and photographs. His thesis that present-day pan-Mayan nationalism is not a rejection of the bankrupt nationalism of the State, but the offspring of nineteenth-century liberal positivists is bound to provoke controversy. This scrupulously researched, ingeniously argued book deserves the most serious consideration."--Times Literary Supplement, 1 December 2000 >"The title of Greg Grandin's fine and meticulously researched book, The Blood of Guatemala, refers to the inextricable roles that ethnicity, caste and violence have played in that nation's history. This study presents a detailed analysis of the tensions, accomodations and carefully considered mutual alliances that have framed notions of race and power in Guatemala and in Xela... Grandin ... lay[s] out a complex portrait of indigenous agency and self-conscious subjectivity in the creation of an alternative vision of Guatemalan "nationality"'--Virginia Garrard-Burnett, The Times Higher August 24, 2001 "A timely and impeccably researched addition to the growing body of work that examines the extent to which the reformist government of the mid-twentieth century brought about their own destruction and the subsequent ignition of a violent Civil War... The author uses a solid base of primary and secondary information sources, from photographs to council meeting minutes, to argue his somewhat controversial standpoint on the reasons behind the collapse of the reformist state. The quality of this research/writing means that we should give careful consideration to his proposals."--British Bulletin of Publications on Latin America, April 2001 " ... this is a very complex and elegant book that combines a compelling narrative with meticulous scholarship. It will be of interest to all scholars concerned with the relationships between class, ethnicity, gender, nation and state formation."--Journal of Latin American Studies, February 2002