:Ladinos with Ladinos, Indians with Indians: Land, Labor, and Regional Ethnic Conflict in the Making of Guatemala

Abstract

René Reeves's study of nineteenth-century Guatemala is a major work of revision in our understanding of the three eras—Liberal, Conservative, and Reformista Liberal—that define that century. While Reeves does not challenge the periodization of the century per se, he does demand that we reexamine the tropes and tendencies that define all three eras. The traditional historiography holds that the nineteenth century unfolded like a triptych. The first decades after independence were defined by Liberal rule, followed by the so-called “Conservative Interregnum” during the long reign of caudillo Rafael Carrera in mid-century. In the 1870s, a few years after Carrera's death, Guatemala returned to Liberal rule under Justo Rufino Barrios—an era known as La Reforma and characterized not only by full-throttle, pro-capital Liberalism but also by new “sciences” such as positivism and eugenics. In this traditional historiography, the early Liberal period witnessed a proliferation of violence, public demonstrations, and uprisings, particularly on the part of the Maya, who the newly formed Guatemalan state found to be resistant to the kinds of nation-building projects that Liberal leaders imposed on the populace. Liberal “modernizing” projects included such efforts as the regularization of land ownership; the introduction of the notorious Livingston Codes, a “modern” legal apparatus for the new state that both required heavy investments in the building of municipal structures and that also interfered with traditional systems of justice; and even efforts to control the sale and distribution of alcohol. All these aspects of the Liberal agenda created enough ill-feeling and distrust among rural Maya people that they eventually came together in the large-scale uprising in western Guatemala that brought the Conservative Carrera to power. In the dominant historiography, Conservative rule—paternalistic, backward-looking, but benignly neglectful of Mayan bodies and communities—eventually fell, thanks to the rise of a commercially oriented (Liberal) elite who needed markets, roads, and cheap and docile labor to develop Guatemala's key agricultural commodity, coffee.