David Carey

Place of the Lord's Daughter: Rab'inal, Its History, Its Dance-Drama (review)

tors have constructed a context for their interpretation consistent with the main theme of this volume. Even when contributors document survival of tradition (rather than the creation of new identity), they display particular Mayas as motivated historical subjects, as men and women in groups or individually exercising significant and creative agency in the world. To do that requires an exceptional amount of detailed research, and many of the contributions to this volume, though presented as conference papers, represent very substantial pieces of important research. This handsomely published volume offers an excellent and broad collection of studies usefully consulted as a body or individually for topics in Mesoamerican history, culture, society, and linguistics.

Runaway Mothers and Daughters Crimes of Abandonment in Twentieth-century Guatemala

As evidenced by laws addressing abandonment of the home and children, family preservation was paramount for early twentieth-century Latin American nation builders. The judicial record of abandonment cases from Guatemala demonstrates how men attempted to enforce their authority in the home and then enlisted state officials to uphold it when their wives or daughters defied them. Yet, abandonment litigation often liberated women. By condoning female flight as a response to domestic abuse, judges emancipated women with the very laws intended to corral them. The same gendered institutions that buttressed patriarchies also provided women with the tools to challenge mens perceived right to intimidate and beat women.

Shades of Peace and Democracy: Social Discontent and Reconciliation in Central America

After traversing the twenty-kilometer road that leads from the Pan American highway up into the central highland town of San Juan Comalapa in Guatemala, one of the first breaks from the verdant scenery is a mural painted on the cemetery walls. In 2002, teachers, artists, students and other community members sketched and painted the history of their town and people; the result stands as a testament to Mayan resistance. For the recent past, it depicts Guatemalas civil war, the poverty

Forced and Forbidden Sex: Rape and Sexual Freedom in Dictatorial Guatemala

As the sun was setting on December 12, 1907, the 16-year-old Tecla Xicay and her sister Inocenta were returning to their village of Tonajuyu, San Martín Jilotepeque (henceforth San Martín), in highland Guatemala when a portly ladino with a thin blonde mustache jumped out from behind a gate, took off his shoes, and attempted to rape Tecla. When she resisted, he hit her twice in the neck and then stabbed her in the back as she fled. Illiterate and monolingual speakers of Kaqchikel-Maya (henceforth Kaqchikel), the sisters recounted their harrowing ordeal through an interpreter the next day in Chimaltenangos municipal court. Apparentiy eager to escape the grasp of the state and ladino world, the two indigenous women did not tarry in Chimaltenango. Despite the military surgeons insistence that Xicay be admitted to the hospital to cure her open wound, she refused, saying she would take care of it herself. Ladino and patriarchal in their design and operation, institutions such as courts and hospitals that held the potential to assist indigenous women often alienated them.

Genocides - Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life After Genocide. By Diane M. Nelson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. 328.

The literary corpus that Venkatesh situates within particular social, political and economic processes of globalization and neoliberalism is ambitious, impressive, and laboriously researched. The theoretical framework is equally impressive in scope and is a valuable contribution to the field of Latin American literary studies generally and masculinity studies more specifically. However, due to the number of novels studied throughout the book and the array of theorems, postulates, and analysis employed, the focus is somewhat unbalanced.

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authors sought to represent an environment unique to the colony. Sampson Vera Tudela admirably discusses how the hagiographic form succumbed to the influence of the travel narrative and the chronicle because it included the history of those nuns who made the physically hazardous journey to the Americas rather than rely solely on the European narrative device of a spiritual journey. Another chapter discusses the founding of the San Jose convent and how various authors presented the history of the order, borrowing from, but also changing, the narrative tradition established for the Carmelite order by its founder Saint Theresa. With an analysis that has much in common with other studies discussing the spiritual autobiographies of nuns and the role of male confessors in the creation of such works, chapter four analyzes the manner in which various authors fashioned the spiritual biography of a particularly saintly nun, Sebastiana Josefa de la Santisima Trinidad. The two final chapters are particularly intriguing. In these, the author analyzes how Caramelite nuns, divided and plagued by internal rivalry and charged with heresy before the Inquisitors, sought, via their respective testimonies, to represent themselves and their adversaries over the issue of non-Carmelite versus Carmelite confessors for their convent. In this case, they had recourse to various narrative genres to formulate their respective positions but also included references to identity markers and characterizations along criollo/peninsular lines and linked these to concepts of religious orthodoxy. This leitmotif regarding identity designation and the nature or depth of ones spirituality is evident in several of the chapters but is best articulated in the last chapter regarding the founding of the convent for elite, pious, Native American women.