Mayas in Postwar Guatemala
Mayas in Postwar Guatemala

Author: Walter E. Little

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2009-05-17

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0817355367

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Like the original Harvest of Violence, published in 1988, this volume reveals how the contemporary Mayas contend with crime, political violence, internal community power struggles, and the broader impact of transnational economic and political policies in Guatemala. However, this work, informed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Mayan communities and commitment to conducting research in Mayan languages, places current anthropological analyses in relation to Mayan political activism and key Mayan intellectuals’ research and criticism. Illustrating specifically how Mayas in this post-war period conceive of their social and political place in Guatemala, Mayas working in factories, fields, and markets, and participating in local, community-level politics provide critiques of the government, the Maya movement, and the general state of insecurity and social and political violence that they continue to face on a daily basis. Their critical assessments and efforts to improve political, social, and economic conditions illustrate their resiliency and positive, nonviolent solutions to Guatemala’s ongoing problems that deserve serious consideration by Guatemalan and US policy makers, international non-government organizations, peace activists, and even academics studying politics, social agency, and the survival of indigenous people. CONTRIBUTORS Abigail E. Adams / José Oscar Barrera Nuñez / Peter Benson / Barbara Bocek / Jennifer L. Burrell / Robert M. Carmack / Monica DeHart / Edward F. Fischer / Liliana Goldín / Walter E. Little / Judith M. Maxwell / J. Jailey Philpot-Munson / Brenda Rosenbaum / Timothy J. Smith / David Stoll

Maya after War
Maya after War

Author: Jennifer L. Burrell

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2013-06-01

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0292745672

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war culminated in peace accords in 1996, but the postwar transition has been marked by continued violence, including lynchings and the rise of gangs, as well as massive wage-labor exodus to the United States. For the Mam Maya municipality of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, inhabited by a predominantly indigenous peasant population, the aftermath of war and genocide resonates with a long-standing tension between state techniques of governance and ancient community-level power structures that incorporated concepts of kinship, gender, and generation. Showing the ways in which these complex histories are interlinked with wartime and enduring family/class conflicts, Maya after War provides a nuanced account of a unique transitional postwar situation, including the complex influence of neoliberal intervention. Drawing on ethnographic field research over a twenty-year period, Jennifer L. Burrell explores the after-war period in a locale where community struggles span culture, identity, and history. Investigating a range of tensions from the local to the international, Burrell employs unique methodologies, including mapmaking, history workshops, and an informal translation of a historic ethnography, to analyze the role of conflict in animating what matters to Todosanteros in their everyday lives and how the residents negotiate power. Examining the community-based divisions alongside national postwar contexts, Maya after War considers the aura of hope that surrounded the signing of the peace accords, and the subsequent doubt and waiting that have fueled unrest, encompassing generational conflicts. This study is a rich analysis of the multifaceted forces at work in the quest for peace, in Guatemala and beyond.

War by Other Means
War by Other Means

Author: Carlota McAllister

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2013-10-14

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0822377403

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala's civil war claimed 250,000 lives and displaced one million people. Since the peace accords, Guatemala has struggled to address the legacy of war, genocidal violence against the Maya, and the dismantling of alternative projects for the future. War by Other Means brings together new essays by leading scholars of Guatemala from a range of geographical backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives. Contributors consider a wide range of issues confronting present-day Guatemala: returning refugees, land reform, gang violence, neoliberal economic restructuring, indigenous and women's rights, complex race relations, the politics of memory, and the challenges of sustaining hope. From a sweeping account of Guatemalan elites' centuries-long use of violence to suppress dissent to studies of intimate experiences of complicity and contestation in richly drawn localities, War by Other Means provides a nuanced reckoning of the injustices that made genocide possible and the ongoing attempts to overcome them. Contributors. Santiago Bastos, Jennifer Burrell, Manuela Camus, Matilde González-Izás, Jorge Ramón González Ponciano, Greg Grandin, Paul Kobrak, Deborah T. Levenson, Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson, Elizabeth Oglesby, Luis Solano, Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj, Paula Worby

The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town
The War for the Heart and Soul of a Highland Maya Town

Author: Robert S. Carlsen

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2011-04-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0292723989

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This compelling ethnography explores the issue of cultural continuity and change as it has unfolded in the representative Guatemala Mayan town Santiago Atitlán. Drawing on multiple sources, Robert S. Carlsen argues that local Mayan culture survived the Spanish Conquest remarkably intact and continued to play a defining role for much of the following five centuries. He also shows how the twentieth-century consolidation of the Guatemalan state steadily eroded the capacity of the local Mayas to adapt to change and ultimately caused some factions to reject—even demonize—their own history and culture. At the same time, he explains how, after a decade of military occupation known as la violencia, Santiago Atitlán stood up in unity to the Guatemalan Army in 1990 and forced it to leave town. This new edition looks at how Santiago Atitlán has fared since the expulsion of the army. Carlsen explains that, initially, there was hope that the renewed unity that had served the town so well would continue. He argues that such hopes have been undermined by multiple sources, often with bizarre outcomes. Among the factors he examines are the impact of transnational crime, particularly gangs with ties to Los Angeles; the rise of vigilantism and its relation to renewed religious factionalism; the related brutal murders of followers of the traditional Mayan religion; and the apocalyptic fervor underlying these events.

Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War
Yucatán's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of the Caste War

Author: Terry Rugeley

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780292770782

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Social history that challenges earlier views of the Caste War. Examines the development of the social, political, and economic structure of the Yucatâan during the first half of the 19th century and profiles four towns involved in the Caste War. Emphasizes the eroding status of Maya elites as a key to the revolt"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Central America in the New Millennium
Central America in the New Millennium

Author: Jennifer L. Burrell

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0857457527

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Most non-Central Americans think of the narrow neck between Mexico and Colombia in terms of dramatic past revolutions and lauded peace agreements, or sensational problems of gang violence and natural disasters. In this volume, the contributors examine regional circumstances within frames of democratization and neoliberalism, as they shape lived experiences of transition. The authors--anthropologists and social scientists from the United States, Europe, and Central America--argue that the process of regions and nations "disappearing" (being erased from geopolitical notice) is integral to upholding a new, post-Cold War world order--and that a new framework for examining political processes must be accessible, socially collaborative, and in dialogue with the lived processes of suffering and struggle engaged by people in Central America and the world in the name of democracy.

Maya
Maya

Author: Maya Torngren

Publisher:

Published: 2007-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780595443451

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the life story of a German girl growing up in Germany during Hitler's regime. She spent the night of her fifteenth birthday huddled in the basement with her family as her home town of Augsburg suffered its largest air raid of the war, during the coldest night of that year. Life was very interesting for the teenager after the war ended and the American troops entered the city, bringing with them the Big Band Sound. Five years after the war, she met and married an American soldier. Moving to America was just the beginning of many different experiences that awaited her. When the couple had four children, aged thirteen, twelve, nine, and six, they left the U.S. to embark on an eleven-month, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Africa, the Canary Islands, and Europe. Four years after their return to the U.S., they moved to California, where they remain to this day. Sadly, a few years later, tragedy struck the family. The book ends 60 years later on Maya's 75th birthday.

Unsafe Motherhood
Unsafe Motherhood

Author: Nicole S. Berry

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1845459962

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general.”—Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women’s survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.

Invading Guatemala
Invading Guatemala

Author: Matthew Restall

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 0271027584

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The invasions of Guatemala -- Pedro de Alvarado's letters to Hernando Cortes, 1524 -- Other Spanish accounts -- Nahua accounts -- Maya accounts

Popular a Memoir
Popular a Memoir

Author: Maya Van Wagenen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0525426817

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Documents a high school student's year-long attempt to change her social status from that of a misfit to a member of the "in" crowd by following advice in a 1950s popularity guide, an experiment that triggered embarrassment, humor and unexpected surprises.