The Good Road situates Guatemala’s early 1980s Indigenous uprising and the genocide that crushed it within a five-hundred-year history of Indigenous resistance to colonization and exploitation. Drawing on decades of archival and ethnographic research, Carlota McAllister traces the emergence of conciencia, a Spanish word meaning both "consciousness" and "conscience," in a Maya-K’iche’-speaking community called Chupol after the Pan-American highway was built through it in 1956. Foregrounding the role of the Catholic Church in mediating state-Indigenous relations and promoting rural transformation in Cold War–era Guatemala, McAllister shows how Chupolenses came to embrace revolutionary armed struggle as both a moral and political imperative. She argues that Chupol’s participation in revolution unfolded through organizational processes and political concepts animated by longstanding Indigenous theopolitical critiques of the organization of power in the Americas. The Good Road shows how, despite the uprising’s bloody defeat, the theopolitical imperative to build a “good road” forward continues to animate Indigenous politics in twenty-first-century Guatemala.

Carlota McAllister is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. She is the coeditor of War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala, also published by Duke University Press.

List of Abbreviations  ix
Note on Terminology  xi
Introduction. The Good Road  1
1. Centering Chupol and Birthing Conciencia  25
2. Clear Heads, Solidary Hearts, Combative Fists  64
3. The Rise and Fall of a New Iximche’  98
4. The Sovereignties of the Dead  138
5. Gender and Generativity After Revolution  171
Epilogue. Don’t Get Angry When We March  205
Acknowledgments  213
Glossary of K’iche’ Terms  217
Notes  219
Bibliography  243
Index  267