Presenting Mayan history from the perspective of Mayan women--whose voices until now have not been documented--David Carey allows these women to present their worldviews in their native language, adding a rich layer to recent Latin American historiography, and increasing our comprehension of indigenous perspectives of the past. Drawing on years of research among the Maya that specifically documents women's oral histories, Carey gives Mayan women a platform to discuss their views on education, migrant labor, work in the home, female leadership, and globalization. These oral histories present an ideal opportunity to understand indigenous women's approach to history, the apparent contradictions in gender roles in Mayan communities, and provide a distinct conceptual framework for analyzing Guatamalan, Mayan, and Latin American history.
This study of the Guatemalan legal system during the regimes of two of Latin America’s most repressive dictators reveals the surprising extent to which Maya women used the courts to air their grievances and defend their human rights. Winner, Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2015 Given Guatemala’s record of human rights abuses, its legal system has often been portrayed as illegitimate and anemic. I Ask for Justice challenges that perception by demonstrating that even though the legal system was not always just, rural Guatemalans considered it a legitimate arbiter of their grievances and an important tool for advancing their agendas. As both a mirror and an instrument of the state, the judicial system simultaneously illuminates the limits of state rule and the state’s ability to co-opt Guatemalans by hearing their voices in court. Against the backdrop of two of Latin America’s most oppressive regimes—the dictatorships of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931–1944)—David Carey Jr. explores the ways in which indigenous people, women, and the poor used Guatemala’s legal system to manipulate the boundaries between legality and criminality. Using court records that are surprisingly rich in Maya women’s voices, he analyzes how bootleggers, cross-dressers, and other litigants crafted their narratives to defend their human rights. Revealing how nuances of power, gender, ethnicity, class, and morality were constructed and contested, this history of crime and criminality demonstrates how Maya men and women attempted to improve their socioeconomic positions and to press for their rights with strategies that ranged from the pursuit of illicit activities to the deployment of the legal system.
Guatemala’s “Ten Years of Spring” (1944–1954) began when citizens overthrew a military dictatorship and ushered in a remarkable period of social reform. This decade of progressive policies ended abruptly when a coup d’état, backed by the United States at the urging of the United Fruit Company, deposed a democratically elected president and set the stage for a period of systematic human rights abuses that endured for generations. Presenting the research of diverse anthropologists and historians, Out of the Shadow offers a new examination of this pivotal chapter in Latin American history. Marshaling information on regions that have been neglected by other scholars, such as coastlines dominated by people of African descent, the contributors describe an era when Guatemalan peasants, Maya and non-Maya alike, embraced change, became landowners themselves, diversified agricultural production, and fully engaged in electoral democracy. Yet this volume also sheds light on the period’s atrocities, such as the US Public Health Service’s medical experimentation on Guatemalans between 1946 and 1948. Rethinking institutional memories of the Cold War, the book concludes by considering the process of translating memory into possibility among present-day urban activists.
This field guide to oral history in Latin America addresses methodological, ethical, and interpretive issues arising from the region’s unique milieu. With careful consideration of the challenges of working in Latin America – including those of language, culture, performance, translation, and political instability – David Carey Jr. provides guidance for those conducting oral history research in the postcolonial world. In regions such as Latin America, where nations that have been subjected to violent colonial and neocolonial forces continue to strive for just and peaceful societies, decolonizing research and analysis is imperative. Carey deploys case studies and examples in ways that will resonate with anyone who is interested in oral history.
During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evident in today's hemispheric policies. Development became a key form of intervention as government officials and experts from the United States and Latin America believed that development could foster hemispheric solidarity and security. In parts of Latin America, its implementation was especially intricate because recipients of these programs were diverse Indigenous peoples with their own politics, economics, and cultures. Contrary to project planners' expectations, Indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity. Sarah Foss illustrates how this process transpired in Cold War Guatemala, spanning democratic revolution, military coups, and genocidal civil war. Drawing on previously unused sources such as oral histories, anthropologists' field notes, military records, municipal and personal archives, and a private photograph collection, Foss analyzes the uses and consequences of development and its relationship to ideas about race from multiple perspectives, emphasizing its historical significance as a form of intervention during the Cold War.
The Kaqchikel Maya, who live in the highlands of central Guatemala, experience soul as part of a continuum of bodily states. This account of life in one highland Maya community shows how, among Kaqchikels, spirit expresses itself fundamentally through the body, and not as something entirely separate from the body. By examining the lived-meanings of midwifery, soul therapy, and community dance in the town of San Juan Comalapa, the book identifies the body as the primary vehicle for spiritual grounding in daily life. Hinojosa invites readers to understand how specialists in these activities articulate their knowledge of the spirit through their understanding of blood, and he encourages readers to glimpse the hidden life of the body and how bodily processes guide local understandings of spirit at the personal and group level. This work further illuminates the agentive role of the body in Maya spiritual experience and enriches the current discussions of Maya spiritual revitalization.
Winner of the CALACS Book Prize 2021 from the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Winner of the 2021 Judy Ewell Book Prize from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies In this groundbreaking new study on ladinas in Guatemala City, Patricia Harms contests the virtual erasure of women from the country's national memory and its historical consciousness. Harms focuses on Spanish-speaking women during the "revolutionary decade" and the "liberalism" periods, revealing a complex, significant, and palpable feminist movement that emerged in Guatemala during the 1870s and remained until 1954. During this era ladina social activists not only struggled to imagine a place for themselves within the political and social constructs of modern Guatemala, but they also wrestled with ways in which to critique and identify Guatemala's gendered structures within the context of repressive dictatorial political regimes and entrenched patriarchy. Harms's study of these women and their struggles fills a sizeable gap in the growing body of literature on women's suffrage, social movements, and political culture in modern Latin America. It is a valuable addition to students and scholars studying the rich history of the region.
The term cacica was a Spanish linguistic invention, the female counterpart to caciques, the Arawak word for male indigenous leaders in Spanish America. But the term’s meaning was adapted and manipulated by natives, creating a new social stratum where it previously may not have existed. This book explores that transformation, a conscious construction and reshaping of identity from within. Cacicas feature far and wide in the history of Spanish America, as female governors and tribute collectors and as relatives of ruling caciques—or their destitute widows. They played a crucial role in the establishment and success of Spanish rule, but were also instrumental in colonial natives’ resistance and self-definition. In this volume, noted scholars uncover the history of colonial cacicas, moving beyond anecdotes of individuals in Spanish America. Their work focuses on the evolution of indigenous leadership, particularly the lineage and succession of these positions in different regions, through the lens of native women’s political activism. Such activism might mean the intervention of cacicas in the economic, familial, and religious realms or their participation in official and unofficial matters of governance. The authors explore the role of such personal authority and political influence across a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic range—in patterns of succession, the settling of frontier regions, interethnic relations and the importance of purity of blood, gender and family dynamics, legal and marital strategies for defending communities, and the continuation of indigenous governance. This volume showcases colonial cacicas as historical subjects who constructed their consciousness around their place, whether symbolic or geographic, and articulated their own unique identities. It expands our understanding of the significant influence these women exerted—within but also well beyond the native communities of Spanish America.
"In the early to mid-twentieth century, the governments of Ecuador and Guatemala sought to expand Western medicine within their countries, with the goals of addressing endemic diseases and improving infant and maternal health. These efforts often clashed with indigenous medical practices, particularly in the rural highlands. Drawing on extensive, original archival research, historian David Carey Jr. shows that indigenous populations embraced a syncretic approach to health, combining traditional and new practices. At times, the governments of both nations encouraged--or at least allowed--such a synthesis, yet they also attacked indigenous lifeways, going so far as to criminalize native medical practitioners and to conduct medical experiments on indigenous people without consent. Health in the Highlands traces the experiences of curanderos, midwives, bonesetters, witches, doctors, and nurses--and the indigenous people they served. Carey interrogates the relationship between 'progressive' public health policy and indigenous well-being, offering lessons from the past that remain relevant in the present. Our best way forward, this history suggests, may be a compassionate syncretism that joins indigenous approaches to healing with science and a pursuit of environmental and social justice"--
The Transnational Construction of Mayanness explores how US academics, travelers, officials, and capitalists contributed to the construction of the Maya as an area of academic knowledge and affected the lives of the Maya peoples who were the subject of generations of anthropological research from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Expanding discussions of the neocolonial relationship between the US and its southern neighbors and emphasizing little-studied texts virtually inaccessible to those in Mexico and Central America, this is the first and only set of comparative studies to bring in US-based documentary collections as an enriching source of evidence. Contributors tap documentary, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological sources from North America to expand established categories of fieldwork and archival research conducted within the national spaces of Mexico and Central America. A particularly rich and diverse set of case studies interrogate the historical processes that remove sources from their place of production in the “field” to the US, challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the geography of data sources that are available for research, and reveal a range of historical relationships that enabled US actors to shape the historical experience of Maya-speaking peoples. The Transnational Construction of Mayanness offers rich insight into transnational relations and suggests new avenues of research that incorporate an expanded corpus of materials that embody the deep-seated relationship between Maya-speaking peoples and various gringo interlocutors. The work is an important bridge between Mayanist anthropology and historiography and broader literatures in American, Atlantic, and Indigenous studies. Contributors: David Carey, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Lydia Crafts, John Gust, Julio Cesar Hoil Gutierréz, Jennifer Mathews, Matthew Watson
