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The Good Road
A K’iche’ Revolutionary Theopolitics
Carlota McAllister
Duke University Press, 2026
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.
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front cover of War by Other Means
War by Other Means
Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala
Carlota McAllister and Diane M. Nelson, eds.
Duke University Press, 2013
Between 1960 and 1996, Guatemala's civil war claimed 250,000 lives and displaced one million people. Since the peace accords, Guatemala has struggled to address the legacy of war, genocidal violence against the Maya, and the dismantling of alternative projects for the future. War by Other Means brings together new essays by leading scholars of Guatemala from a range of geographical backgrounds and disciplinary perspectives.

Contributors consider a wide range of issues confronting present-day Guatemala: returning refugees, land reform, gang violence, neoliberal economic restructuring, indigenous and women's rights, complex race relations, the politics of memory, and the challenges of sustaining hope. From a sweeping account of Guatemalan elites' centuries-long use of violence to suppress dissent to studies of intimate experiences of complicity and contestation in richly drawn localities, War by Other Means provides a nuanced reckoning of the injustices that made genocide possible and the ongoing attempts to overcome them.

Contributors. Santiago Bastos, Jennifer Burrell, Manuela Camus, Matilde González-Izás, Jorge Ramón González Ponciano, Greg Grandin, Paul Kobrak, Deborah T. Levenson, Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson, Elizabeth Oglesby, Luis Solano, Irmalicia Velásquez Nimatuj, Paula Worby

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