Human Rights in the Maya Region edited by Pedro Pitarch, Shannon Speed, and Xochitl Leyva Solano, Duke University Press, 2008, 392 pp., $23.95 (paperback)
Perhaps nowhere in the Americas have debates over human rights come to prominence than in the Mayan regions of Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. This collection brings together a diverse group of scholars, activists, and indigenous people who explore and analyze the ongoing negotiations between the state, Maya movements, and transnational actors over the question human rights and indigenous peoples. The authors grapple with three interrelated issues: the tension between the global human rights discourse and local communities; the extent to which human rights discourse is a product of neoliberal globalization; and how that discourse is appropriated on the ground.
One essay discusses the Maya Tzeltal version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, the title of which translates to “So That It Is Known on the Whole Surface of the Earth the Respect for Human Beings.” The essay authors analyze how the concept of human rights both fits in with and challenges the neoliberal state. The authors discover that on one hand, the Western, globalized version of human rights can be foreign to and incompatible with local concepts and norms. How can they be “appropriated, reshaped, and made relevant and useful for social actors involved”? The answer, it seems, might offer new possibilities for “anti-racist, anti-neoliberal, or other counter-systemic struggles.”
Global Maya: Work and Ideology in Rural Guatemala by Liliana R. Goldín, University of Arizona Press, 2008, 264 pp., $50 (hardcover)
Corporate-led globalization in Guatemala has left lasting and dramatic impacts on local communities. While these impacts have pushed an unprecedented number of people to emigrate from Guatemala, many of them coming to the United States, others have chosen to stay and eke out a living adjusting to the country’s new reality. Based on fieldwork in five different communities in the western highlands of rural Guatemala, Liliana Goldín has produced a study that examines not only how people have responded and adjusted in their attempt to make a living but also how attitudes and perceptions about the economy are changing.
Based on more than 10 years of research drawn from interviews and surveys, Goldín offers four case studies of post-globalization Maya labor: cottage-industry garment production, vegetables grown for internal and border markets, crops grown for export, and maquiladora labor. Meanwhile, the author depicts the complexities of change in the interplay between local communities, traditional values (folktales are incorporated into the book), gender relationships, and the global economy’s voracious appetite for cheap labor. “I have traced empirically the process of change,” Goldín writes, “a constant but imperfect readjustment between self and practice, global and local, as we actively participate in history.”
Voices From Exile: Violence and Survival in Modern Maya History by Victor Montejo University of Oklahoma Press, 1999, reissued 2008, 304 pp., $24.95 (paperback)
When the counter-insurgency war in Guatemala was at its worse in the 1980s, “the research [on Guatemala] receiving media attention in the United States was that on the archaeological past,” writes Guatemalan scholar Victor Montejo. Voices From Exile, originally published in 1999 but now republished in paperback, aims to reverse that tendency by telling the story of the Mayas from the Kuchumatan highlands who fled the violence. Combining his autobiography with political analysis, testimony, and intense field research, Montejo fills the narrative with numerous insightful and sensitive descriptions about a people who lived through the worst horrors of war that erased 440 Mayan communities in Guatemala, including his own.
The book follows the trajectory one of the most heart-wrenching stories in recent Latin American history: from the military control of the Guatemalan highlands and ensuing violence, to the exodus to Mexico and long years in the refugee camps, and finally, the return home after years in exile. Montejo’s work focused on the camps where the “Mayas are engaged in a constant struggle to make themselves visible in a world that works to dehumanize them. . . . My efforts . . . are strongly directed toward the revitalization of Maya cultures.”
