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NATION BUILDING & NATIONALISM La Patria del criollo: An Interpretation of Colonial Guatemala. By Severo Martínez Peláez. Translated by Susan M. Neve and W. George Lowell. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. Hi, 329. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.
Historians of Guatemala regularly feed on two fundamental questions: "How do historians and social scientists divide society?" and "What forces propel change?" One Guatemalan, Severo Martínez Peláez, shifted the historiographical debate around these two questions almost single-handedly in 1970 with his acclaimed publication, La Patria del criollo. We finally have a deftly edited and sharp translation of this monograph. Susan Neve and George Lovell have accomplished this labor-intensive project with two additional dollops, a captivating introduction into the life and works of Professor Martinez Peláez (coedited by Christopher Lutz) and a handy "go-to" glossary for those essential Spanish and indigenous words that defy easy translation.
The publication of La Patria del criollo offers an extraordinary entrée into the classic dialogue between the twentieth -century intellectual and committed revolutionary, Martinez Peláez, and the late eighteenth-century chronicler and visionary...