front cover of Adiós Niño
Adiós Niño
The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death
Deborah T. Levenson
Duke University Press, 2013
In Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death, Deborah T. Levenson examines transformations in the Guatemalan gangs called Maras from their emergence in the 1980s to the early 2000s. A historical study, Adiós Niño describes how fragile spaces of friendship and exploration turned into rigid and violent ones in which youth, and especially young men, came to employ death as a natural way of living for the short period that they expected to survive. Levenson relates the stark changes in the Maras to global, national, and urban deterioration; transregional gangs that intersect with the drug trade; and the Guatemalan military's obliteration of radical popular movements and of social imaginaries of solidarity. Part of Guatemala City's reconfigured social, political, and cultural milieu, with their members often trapped in Guatemala's growing prison system, the gangs are used to justify remilitarization in Guatemala's contemporary postwar, post-peace era. Portraying the Maras as microcosms of broader tragedies, and pointing out the difficulties faced by those youth who seek to escape the gangs, Levenson poses important questions about the relationship between trauma, memory, and historical agency.
[more]

front cover of Conquistadores de la Calle
Conquistadores de la Calle
Child Street Labor in Guatemala City
By Thomas A. Offit
University of Texas Press, 2008

The first comprehensive, book-length study of its kind, Conquistadores de la Calle presents the findings of nearly two years of ethnographic research on the streets of Guatemala City, toppling conventional wisdom that the region's youth workers are solely victims, or that their labor situations are entirely the result of poverty and family breakdown.

Documenting the voices and experiences of the city's working children, this fascinating study reveals counterintuitive motivations for those who choose to abandon schooling in favor of participating more fully in their families' economies. The processes of developing skills and planning for their social and economic futures are covered in depth, presenting evidence that many members of this population operate well above survival level and are decidedly not marginalized or members of an underclass. Conquistadores de la Calle also makes important distinctions between these young workers—a generation of Maya and Ladino boys and girls—and the homeless children or gang youth who have been so much more widely studied.

Contextualizing a variety of data, ranging from detailed ethnographic portraits of the children's lives and the monthly income of children engaged in common street vocations (such as shining shoes or serving as porters) to educational histories and socialization activities, Thomas Offit has produced a rich trove of findings in a significant segment of urban economics that is tremendously important for anthropologists, Latin Americanists, and those interested in the lives and labors of children in the cities of the developing world.

[more]

front cover of A New-World Collection of Polyphony for Holy Week and the Salve Service
A New-World Collection of Polyphony for Holy Week and the Salve Service
Guatemala City, Cathedral Archive, Music MS 4
Edited by Robert J. Snow
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Following the conquest of Mexico by Cortés and much of Central America by Alvarado, cathedral churches were established throughout the region, all with European-style polyphonic choirs. Among the most important of these early centers of Spanish culture was the cathedral of Guatemala City, where polyphony was already in use in the 1540s.

Shortly after 1600, the organist and choir director of the cathedral collected, organized, and copied into choirbooks all of the then-extant music used by the choir. The manuscript presented here in modern edition, one of at least five choirbooks prepared at the time, contains a number of otherwise unknown works by such major Old World composers as Francisco Guerrero and Cristóbal de Morales. Significant works by Hernando Franco and Pedro Bermúdez, choirmasters of the Guatemala City Cathedral, are also included. The manuscript presents a unified repertory for Holy Week and for the Salve services in Lent, including four settings of the Passion, for which the Spanish were famous throughout Christendom. Some of the works predate the sixteenth-century reform of the Roman Breviary and Missal, among them the original versions of several Vespers hymns and Magnificat settings by Guerrero that are otherwise known only in later versions found in Spanish sources. An extensive historical introduction by Robert J. Snow discusses the formation of the cathedral's musical repertory and illuminates both Old and New World practices of sixteenth-century Spanish liturgical music.
[more]

front cover of Organizing Strangers
Organizing Strangers
Poor Families in Guatemala City
By Bryan R. Roberts
University of Texas Press, 1973

Bryan Roberts’ study of two poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City is an important contribution to the understanding of the urban social and power organization of underdeveloped countries. It is the first major study of any Central American urban population.

Organizing Strangers gives an account of how poor people cope with an unstable and mobile urban environment, and case material is provided on the emergence of collective action among them. Several themes that are crucial to understanding the significance of urban growth in the underdeveloped world are explored: the impact of city life on rural migrants, the relationship between living in cities and the development of class consciousness, and the changing significance of personal relationships as a means of organizing social and economic life.

Guatemala City’s rapid growth and low level of industrialization created a keen competition for jobs and available living space and inhibited the development of cohesive residential groupings. Thus the poor found themselves living and working with people who were mostly strangers. Trust is difficult to create in such an environment, and the absence of trust affected the capacity of the poor to organize themselves.

While the poor were integrated into city life, the manner of their integration exposed them to greater exploitation than if they were truly socially isolated or marginal. Bryan Roberts analyzes a variety of formally organized voluntary associations involving the poor and concludes that such associations are essentially means by which middle- and upper-status groups seek to negotiate order among the poor.

The problems faced by these poor families are due less to their own incapacities or inactivity than to the effects of economic and political relationships that exploit them locally, nationally, and even internationally. A major conclusion of this study is that the uncertainties in the relationships among poor people and between them and other social groups are the underlying causes of a general political and economic instability.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter