Recent research and the release of newly declassified U.S. government documents underscore the importance of reading Guatemala's current history through the lens of 1954. Scholars and researchers who have worked in Guatemala from the 1940s to the present articulate how the coup fits into ethnographic representations of Guatemala. Highlighting the voices of individuals with whom they have lived and worked, the contributors also offer an unmatched understanding of how the events preceding and following the coup played out on the ground.

Contributors are Abigail E. Adams, Richard N. Adams, David Carey Jr., Christa Little-Siebold, Judith M. Maxwell, Victor D. Montejo, June C. Nash, and Timothy J. Smith.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 2002

As ideas, goods, and people move with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries and geographic distances, the economic changes and technological advances that enable this globalization are also paradoxically contributing to the balkanization of states, ethnic groups, and special interest movements. Exploring how this process is playing out in Guatemala, this book presents an innovative synthesis of the local and global factors that have led Guatemala's indigenous Maya peoples to assert and defend their cultural identity and distinctiveness within the dominant Hispanic society.

Drawing on recent theories from cognitive studies, interpretive ethnography, and political economy, Edward F. Fischer looks at individual Maya activists and local cultures, as well as changing national and international power relations, to understand how ethnic identities are constructed and expressed in the modern world. At the global level, he shows how structural shifts in international relations have opened new venues of ethnic expression for Guatemala's majority Maya population. At the local level, he examines the processes of identity construction in two Kaqchikel Maya towns, Tecpán and Patzún, and shows how divergent local norms result in different conceptions and expressions of Maya-ness, which nonetheless share certain fundamental similarities with the larger pan-Maya project. Tying these levels of analysis together, Fischer argues that open-ended Maya "cultural logics" condition the ways in which Maya individuals (national leaders and rural masses alike) creatively express their identity in a rapidly changing world.

Guatemala draws some half million tourists each year, whose brief visits to the ruins of ancient Maya cities and contemporary highland Maya villages may give them only a partial and folkloric understanding of Guatemalan society. In this vividly written travel narrative, Stephen Connely Benz explores the Guatemala that casual travelers miss, using his encounters with ordinary Guatemalans at the mall, on the streets, at soccer games, and even at the funeral of massacre victims to illuminate the social reality of Guatemala today.

The book opens with an extended section on the capital, Guatemala City, and then moves out to the more remote parts of the country where the Guatemalan Indians predominate. Benz offers us a series of intelligent and sometimes humorous perspectives on Guatemala's political history and the role of the military, the country's environmental degradation, the influence of foreign missionaries, and especially the impact of the United States on Guatemala, from governmental programs to fast food franchises.

A collection of narrative essays on femininity, sexuality, community, and belonging

Miss Southeast explores the strange, often contradictory cultural circumstances of being queer and female in the American South and beyond. Born and raised in North Carolina, the youngest in a family of precocious daughters, Rogers spends her teenage years as a half-closeted lesbian desperate to escape the South, convinced the rest of the United States must be “more enlightened than our cow-dotted corner of the county.”

Adulthood takes Rogers to Ohio, New York, Louisiana, Arkansas, Washington, DC, and China, but each essay finds her reckoning with participation in and resistance to rigid cultural institutions—whether a coming-out story set at a high school beauty pageant or a meditation on swimming pools as emblems of racial divides across the South. In lyric prose enlivened by a poet’s sense of musicality, Miss Southeast considers how both place and our layered identities shape our sense of belonging.

The candid, inspiring story of a woman’s experience with a chronic, unpredictable neurological condition

When twenty-nine-year-old reporter Stacia Kalinoski regained consciousness on a couch at the  TV station where she worked, she assumed that she’d had another seizure. But the electrical storm that had just torn through her brain was more destructive than she could have imagined, and the broadcast journalism career she loved swiftly came to an end. Forced to confront the reality of her medical condition, Kalinoski made the risky decision to undergo brain surgery, targeting the epilepsy that was ravaging her life.

In Racing Uphill, Kalinoski describes the seizures that occurred while she was running, which led to her pursuit of an uncertain cure. Rallying the grit she developed as an athlete and engaging the research and reporting skills she acquired as a journalist, she gives us a rare inside look at the ways epilepsy can change a life. Moving beyond her own personal experience, Kalinoski interviews prominent epileptologists to understand how seizures can spread, steal memories, and create strange behaviors and mood disorders. She seamlessly joins what she learned from her research with her own story, offering valuable insight into the experience of grappling with a relentless neurological disease.

The vivid auras that preceded seizures and the damage that followed; the toll of her epilepsy on her family and loved ones; the extraordinary determination her reckoning required—these are all part of Kalinoski’s story of adversity, denial, acceptance, and resilience. In sharing the remarkable opportunity that epilepsy presented for her courage and growth, Stacia Kalinoski speaks to anyone facing an uphill battle and offers inspiration for taking control of one’s own health.