Duke University Press
The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation
Key Metrics
- Greg Grandin
- Duke University Press
- Paperback
- 9780822324959
- 9.26 X 6.22 X 1.08 inches
- 1.39 pounds
- Social Science > Ethnic Studies - American - Native American Studies
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Focusing on Mayan elites in the community of Quetzaltenango, Grandin shows how their efforts to maintain authority over the indigenous population and secure political power in relation to non-Indians played a crucial role in the formation of the Guatemalan nation. To explore the close connection between nationalism, state power, ethnic identity, and political violence, Grandin draws on sources as diverse as photographs, public rituals, oral testimony, literature, and a collection of previously untapped documents written during the nineteenth century. He explains how the cultural anxiety brought about by Guatemala's transition to coffee capitalism during this period led Mayan patriarchs to develop understandings of race and nation that were contrary to Ladino notions of assimilation and progress. This alternative national vision, however, could not take hold in a country plagued by class and ethnic divisions. In the years prior to the 1954 coup, class conflict became impossible to contain as the elites violently opposed land claims made by indigenous peasants.
This history of power reconsiders the way scholars understand the history of Guatemala and will be relevant to those studying nation building and indigenous communities across Latin America.
Author Bio
Greg Grandin, who received his doctorate at Yale University under the direction of Emilia Viotti da Costa and Gilbert Joseph, previously taught at New York University for nineteen years.
He is the author of seven books, including The Blood of Guatemala, which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for best book published on Latin America in any discipline, The Last Colonial Massacre, Empire’s Workshop, Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Award, The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft and Beveridge awards in American history, Kissinger’s Shadow, and The End of the Myth, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and was a finalist in the history category.
Grandin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. He has co-edited, with Gil Joseph, A Century of Revolution, and, with Deborah Levenson and Elizabeth Oglesby, The Guatemala Reader. Grandin has published widely, in The Nation, where he is a member of the editorial board,the London Review of Books, the New Republic, NACLA’s Report on the Americas, and the New York Times, among other venues.
He is a regular guest on Democracy Now! A revised edition of Empire’s Workshop is forthcoming.
Source: Yale University
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