Murder, Memory, and the Maya review in LARR

S. Ashley Kistler, assistant professor of anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean studies at Rollins College, has a review on Murder, Memory, and the Maya for the Latin American Research Review that takes a look at these four recent books.

For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, 1960–1990. By Betsy Konefal. 

A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala. Second revised edition. By W. George Lovell. 

After the Coup: An Ethnographic Reframing of Guatemala, 1954. Edited by Timothy J. Smith and Abigail E. Adams.

The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala. By J. T. Way. 

Here's her takeaway

These works give us new insights into the historical events that preceded Guatemala’s 1954 coup and twentieth-century Guatemalan ideologies of race and ethnicity, while bringing the reader closer to understanding how the civil war forever transformed Guatemalan culture and society. They remind us that while the civil war ended more than fifteen years ago, the inequalities and instability it created continue to define life in Guatemala today.

Peace has eluded Guatemala, these books show, in part because national attitudes that stigmatize Maya culture as “antimodern” and an obstacle to progress have not changed. Those enduring attitudes are primary causes of decades of violence and centuries of inequality. As Lovell writes in A Beauty That Hurts, “How, I ask myself, can a ‘new struggle’ be avoided if the root causes of the civil war are talked about, year after year, administration after administration, only to be addressed in theory, not in practice?” (98).

For Guatemala to achieve peace, it must confront its past and change national attitudes toward the Maya. While the trial of Guatemala’s former president Ríos Montt offered the country the possibility for one such change, the reversal of his conviction perpetuated the liminal status of the Maya and presented yet another obstacle in their fight for justice and equality. The court’s decision to postpone Ríos Montt’s retrial left the future uncertain not only for the former dictator but for all Guatemalans.

And yes I would have highlighted the review even if she hadn't gone to Florida State University.