Results by title
133 books match the query 'Guatemala' and 8 start with i
I Ask for Justice
Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–1944By David Carey Jr.
University of Texas Press, 2013
This study of the Guatemalan legal system during the regimes of two of Latin America’s most repressive dictators reveals the surprising extent to which Maya women used the courts to air their grievances and defend their human rights.
Winner, Bryce Wood Book Award, Latin American Studies Association, 2015
Given Guatemala’s record of human rights abuses, its legal system has often been portrayed as illegitimate and anemic. I Ask for Justice challenges that perception by demonstrating that even though the legal system was not always just, rural Guatemalans considered it a legitimate arbiter of their grievances and an important tool for advancing their agendas. As both a mirror and an instrument of the state, the judicial system simultaneously illuminates the limits of state rule and the state’s ability to co-opt Guatemalans by hearing their voices in court.
Against the backdrop of two of Latin America’s most oppressive regimes—the dictatorships of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931–1944)—David Carey Jr. explores the ways in which indigenous people, women, and the poor used Guatemala’s legal system to manipulate the boundaries between legality and criminality. Using court records that are surprisingly rich in Maya women’s voices, he analyzes how bootleggers, cross-dressers, and other litigants crafted their narratives to defend their human rights. Revealing how nuances of power, gender, ethnicity, class, and morality were constructed and contested, this history of crime and criminality demonstrates how Maya men and women attempted to improve their socioeconomic positions and to press for their rights with strategies that ranged from the pursuit of illicit activities to the deployment of the legal system.
Images from the Underworld
Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave PaintingBy Andrea J. Stone
University of Texas Press, 1995
In 1979, a Kekchi Maya Indian accidentally discovered the entrance to Naj Tunich, a deep cave in the Maya Mountains of El Peten, Guatemala. One of the world's few deep caves that contain rock art, Naj Tunich features figural images and hieroglyphic inscriptions that have helped to revolutionize our understanding of ancient Maya art and ritual.
In this book, Andrea Stone takes a comprehensive look at Maya cave painting from Preconquest times to the Colonial period. After surveying Mesoamerican cave and rock painting sites and discussing all twenty-five known painted caves in the Maya area, she focuses extensively on Naj Tunich. Her text analyzes the images and inscriptions, while photographs and line drawings provide a complete visual catalog of the cave art, some of which has been subsequently destroyed by vandals.
This important new body of images and texts enlarges our understanding of the Maya view of sacred landscape and the role of caves in ritual. It will be important reading for all students of the Maya, as well as for others interested in cave art and in human relationships with the natural environment.
In Search of Providence
Transnational Mayan Identities, Updated EditionPatricia Foxen
Vanderbilt University Press, 2020
In the mid-1990s, Patricia Foxen traveled back and forth between the Guatemalan highlands and Providence, Rhode Island, to understand the migration paths of K'iche' Mayan Indians who had fled the Guatemalan civil war to work in the factories and fisheries of New England. More than two decades later, many Mayans are still migrating to the US. As Foxen argues, the recent surge in Mayan border crossings must be contextualized within both the longer history of violence, marginality, and exclusion that has long led Guatemala's Indigenous populations to be "survivors on the move," as well as contemporary push factors such as climate change and growing inequality that have forced people from their communities.
And yet one of the most significant drivers of continued emigration today, ironically, is the very culture of migration (described in the book) that has accelerated social change within many Indigenous communities, setting in motion a complex series of economic and cultural shifts that have compelled a continuous movement of people and generations to the US. Reading this story in 2020—at a time of massive growth in flows of irregular migrations around the world—can help us better understand the highly complex set of factors that propel long-term migrations and that shape transnational communities on both sides of the border.
In Search of Providence offers a layered, historically grounded perspective that speaks to the local specificity behind the migration experience in order to point to the universal themes and contradictions of contemporary global displacements.
Inconstant Landscape
The Maya Kingdom of El Zotz, GuatemalaThomas G. Garrison
University Press of Colorado, 2020
In this volume, contributors address the challenges faced by smaller polities on the peripheries of powerful kingdoms and ask how subordination was experienced and independent policy asserted. Leading experts provide cutting-edge analysis in varied topics and detailed discussion of the development of this major site and the region more broadly. The first half of the volume contains a historical narrative of the cultural sequence of El Zotz, tracing the changes in occupation and landscape use across time; the second half provides deep technical analyses of material evidence, including soils, ceramics, stone tools, and bone.
The ever-changing, inconstant landscapes of peripheral kingdoms like El Zotz reveal much about their more dominant—and better known—neighbors. An Inconstant Landscape offers a comprehensive, multidisciplinary view of this important but under-studied site, an essential context for the study of the Classic Maya in Guatemala, and a premier reference on the subject of peripheral kingdoms at the height of Maya civilization.
Contributors: Timothy Beach, Nicholas Carter, Ewa Czapiewska-Halliday, Alyce de Carteret, William Delgado, Colin Doyle, James Doyle, Laura Gámez, Jose Luis Garrido López, Yeny Myshell Gutiérrez Castillo, Zachary Hruby, Melanie Kingsley, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, Cassandra Mesick Braun, Sarah Newman, Rony Piedrasanta, Edwin Román, and Andrew K. Scherer
Indigenous Archives
The Maya Diaspora and Mobile Cultural ProductionFloridalma Boj Lopez
Duke University Press, 2026
Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds
Religion and Modernity in a Transnational K'iche' CommunityC. James MacKenzie
University Press of Colorado, 2016
Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines tension and conflict over ethnic and religious identity in the K’iche’ Maya community of San Andrés Xecul in the Guatemalan Highlands and considers how religious and ethnic attachments are sustained and transformed through the transnational experiences of locals who have migrated to the United States.
Author C. James MacKenzie explores the relationship among four coexisting religious communities within Highland Maya villages in contemporary Guatemala—costumbre, traditionalist religion with a shamanic substrate; “Enthusiastic Christianity,” versions of Charismaticism and Pentecostalism; an “inculturated” and Mayanized version of Catholicism; and a purified and antisyncretic Maya Spirituality—with attention to the modern and nonmodern worldviews that sustain them. He introduces a sophisticated set of theories to interpret both traditional religion and its relationship to other contemporary religious options, analyzing the relation among these various worldviews in terms of the indigenization of modernity and the various ways modernity can be apprehended as an intellectual project or an embodied experience.
Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds investigates the way an increasingly plural religious landscape intersects with ethnic and other identities. It will be of interest to Mesoamerican and Mayan ethnographers, as well as students and scholars of cultural anthropology, indigenous cultures, globalization, and religion.
Indigenous Women and Violence
Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of InjusticeEdited by Lynn Stephen and Shannon Speed
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Indigenous Women and Violence is built on engaging case studies that highlight the individual and collective struggles that Indigenous women face from the racial and gendered oppression that structures their lives. Gendered violence has always been a part of the genocidal and assimilationist projects of settler colonialism, and it remains so today. These structures—and the forms of violence inherent to them—are driving criminalization and victimization of Indigenous men and women, leading to escalating levels of assassination, incarceration, or transnational displacement of Indigenous people, and especially Indigenous women.
This volume brings together the potent ethnographic research of eight scholars who have dedicated their careers to illuminating the ways in which Indigenous women have challenged communities, states, legal systems, and social movements to promote gender justice. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience and resistance of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression.
Contributors: R. Aída Hernández-Castillo, Morna Macleod, Mariana Mora, María Teresa Sierra, Shannon Speed, Lynn Stephen, Margo Tamez, Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj
Itzaj Maya Grammar
Charles A Hofling
University of Utah Press, 2000
The Itzaj Maya language is a member of the Yukatekan Maya language family spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize, a family that includes Maya, Mopan, and Lakantum. Many classic Maya hieroglyphic texts were written in an earlier form of these languages, as were many important colonial documents. In addition to being a valuable record of ancient language, Andrew Hofling’s Itzaj Maya Grammar contributes greatly to the study of these older documents.
This exemplary grammar completes a basic documentation that began with Itzaj Maya Texts and Itzaj Maya-Spanish-English Dictionary. It’s coverage of the linguistic structures of Itzaj includes the phonological, morphophonological, and syntactic structures. Each morphological and grammatical construction is carefully explained, with additional examples of each construction included.
Itzaj Maya Grammar is a landmark contribution to the study of discourse in Maya language. When used with Hofling’s previous texts, it provides a thoroughly dynamic documentation of the language, useful to all interested in the study of Yukatejan languages or linguistics.