David McCreery

Maya in Exile: Guatemalans in Florida.

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Jeronimo Camposeco 1. Maya Refugees and Applied Anthropology 2. Escape and Arrival 3. Life Crisis and Ritual 4. The Maya in Community and Ethnic Context 5. Work and Changes in Social Structure 6. Conflict and the Evolution of a New Maya Identity 7. Visual Anthropology and the Maya 8. Always Maya Bibliography Index

‘This Life of Misery and Shame’: Female Prostitution in Guatemala City, 1880–1920

A number of recent studies 1 suggest that prostitution – ‘The act or practice of indulging in promiscuous sexual relations, especially for money’ 2 – in western society increased dramatically in the late nineteenth century, both in real terms and in popular consciousness. ‘Large scale, conspicuous prostitution’, they argue, ‘was a by-product of the first, explosive stage in the growth of the modern, industrial city…’ It is a proposition of this article that such changes were, in fact, far more widespread. From the evidence of Guatemala it appears that prostitution also increased during these years in agricultural export societies. Under the impact of demands from industrializing nations, colonial and neo-colonial regimes overhauled domestic economic and social structures to increase raw material and food production for export. Unprecedented but unstable economic prosperity, urbanization, and the social disorganization resulting from the implementation of systems of forced labour and removal from the land created a climate propitious for an increase in and institutionalization of commerical sex. This paper is an examination of the growth of female prostitution in late nineteenth-century Guatemala City, of the situation and attitudes of the women involved, and of state efforts to control the traffic. More broadly, it argues that attempts to regulate prostitution must be understood as part of a liberal drive to mobilize and control society as a whole in the interest of a class-defined vision of national development.

Pueblos, comunidades y municipios frente a los proyectos modernizadores en America Latina, siglo XIX (review)

century were projected onto the past. In part 2, these Boom writers speak out against the perceived inequities of the contemporary era through interviews or features for newspapers and magazines. Nunn suggests that, in a manner echoing William Faulkner’s assessment of the Southern past as not even passed, these writers claimed the past portrayed in their revisionist prose is “omnipresent” (p. 119). In part 3, Nunn moves from the interviews and expository prose of the Boom novelists to the investigations of Latin American social scientists. In this genre, history becomes “constricted” or even disguised (p. 184), but the tenor of criticism remains sharp. The defects that Boom writers portrayed in their fictional history are the dysfunctions that the region’s social scientists reveal in the charts and graphs of today’s academic journals. Nunn interprets all this as corresponding to the corsi and ricorsi (flux and reflux) that Giambattista Vico argued is the character of history. Having said that he finds evidence that the Boon writers have a familiarity with Vico’s theory, Nunn issues another disclaimer: that his book is not one about Vico and Latin America. Although I remain a bit puzzled by what exactly Nunn is up to, I appreciate his pleasant, relaxed prose, with its occasional smile here and there. I suggest the book deserves your attention, especially to the manner in which El Boom collides with its past to produce cataclysmic history.

The Indians and Brazil (review)

Northeasterners faced in and around the “pesthole” Belem and of why various efforts to import Europeans failed. But the lives and cultures of indigenous peoples are left in the background; greater reliance on anthropological sources about the Kayapó and Mundurucú, for example, would have brought the human element of this history into sharper relief. Anderson saves the best for last. Her conclusion is clear, hard-hitting, and convincing. Her epilogue places recent Brazilian and international megaprojects in the context of the history she has written, presenting arguments and findings that will cheer environmentalists and democrats, embarrass World Bank officials, and trouble Brazilian planners who dream of colonizing and exploiting Amazonian environments and peoples.

An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1824-1914. By Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Pp. viii, 324. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Cloth

The authors familiarity with the rich literature on the impact of export agriculture on Latin American societies, apparent throughout the text, is used to great advantage in the concluding chapter to single out the factors that explain the diversity of experiences encountered throughout the region. Despite the important caveat mentioned above, reading this book is a most rewarding experience, it is local history at the service of larger questions.