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"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, commmunity, state, nation, and nationalism in Guatemala. Greg Grandin has skillfully united the disciplines of history and anthropology; he is part of a new generation of committed, sophisticated, and clearheaded intellectuals."--Deborah Levenson, Boston College
List 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.
Summary
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the Guatemalan state slaughtered more than two hundred thousand of its citizens. This title locates the origins of this ethnic resurgence within the social processes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century state formation rather than in the ruins of the national project of recent decades.
