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Featured Review
| Darío A. Euraque, Jeffrey L. Gould, and Charles R. Hale, editors. Memorias del mestizaje: Cultura polífitica en Centroamérica de 1920 al presente. Miami: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica. 2005. Pp. 626.
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| As fate would have it, this reviewer found himself in Guatemala City the week of Ronald Reagan's death and elaborate state funeral in June 2004. Watching from a distance in one of Reagan's bloodiest success stories in Central America and suffering cable television's obsession with endlessly repeating pomp and circumstance seemed quite unlike what was portrayed as an alternately celebratory and cathartic American experience of one last good-by to the Great Communicator. How strange that overblown rhetoric of remembrance must have seemed to local observers, reminiscent of the campaign claim made by Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, that Central America was the most important place in the world for the U.S. to stand tall. In Guatemala the survivors of the Cold War on the Left denounced what they considered the genocidal policies of the late president and his allies, while the latter offered their own fulsome praise for his having turned back the tide of communism where it mattered most for them, at home and not in Eastern Europe. |
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As the Marx of the master classes for their generation, Reagan and Kirkpatrick had stridently warned of the specter haunting America in the Cold War world, communist expansionism in its own backyard. With now both dead one can only wonder what they may have thought of the results of their policies in the region, if indeed they every again thought of such backyards once the crisis had passed. Neo-liberalism and electoral democracy of one sort or another emerged triumphant in all the Central American nations by the 1990s, however much or little the latter owed to Washington's guidance and support. Now nearly a generation removed from the region's bloody civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s, there is no small irony in the fact that precisely in Guatemala, where the left-wing forces of non-Indian (referred to as ladino in Guatemala and mestizo elsewhere in the region) society were most soundly defeated militarily, and hundreds of Indian communities were decimated by the victorious armed forces, virtually simultaneously there emerged an extraordinarily vibrant pan-Mayan movement. Elsewhere in Central America, non-Mayan indigenous groups also joined in a process of challenging national governments of both the Right and Left to seek to create truly multi-ethnic states rather than the Spanish-only, assimilationist ones of the past. |
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That process in Guatemala and elsewhere in the region represented both a surprise for analysts and a true watershed moment for turn-of-the-century Central America. Thus, the volume reviewed here, on the ideologies and experiences of race mixture and cultural politics since the 1920s, represents far more than an interesting collection of case studies of twentieth-century ethnic relations and politics. It also amounts to an X-ray of the paths being opened by new, multi-ethnic politics long either repressed at the national level or submerged at the local and regional level by those same national elites. For the present it offers multiple historical reminders of paths not taken and obstacles not overcome; for the past it makes possible new ways of conceptualizing national and regional experiences not captive to those same homogenizing, supra-ethnic ideologies created by the traditions of a ladino/mestizo Liberalism and Conservatism that ultimately led to the cataclysmic violence of the recent past. |
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