On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala. By Sarah Foss

Abstract

On Our Own Terms is excellent. In this well-researched book, Sarah Foss assesses the global Cold War through the experiences of Indigenous Guatemalans and the state and military actors who studied, categorized, and conceived of “development” projects to transform them. What was “development” in Guatemala? Readers learn that development was a process, a history, a social construction, a response to the Cold War, a counterinsurgency tool, a nation-building project, and often top-down but always collaborative. Case studies in the departments of El Quiché, Alta Verapaz, and Sacatepéquez show how, to paraphrase, the Guatemalan state “used” development (20). Two arguments are at the book’s core. First, “while for the Guatemalan state, development projects were intended to curb political instability and ensure national progress, this top-down homogenizing project was not neatly implemented, as local-level staff and mid-level bureaucrats reworked it and applied it to different contexts” (1-2). The book’s second argument is that Indigenous people were active in determining the meanings and implementation of development projects. It was not modernization, per se, that “development’s intended recipients” rejected, but “rather parts of the process like top-down impositions and the hierarchies that it imposed” (43-44). By connecting development projects to the ideological anxieties of the Cold War, Foss places Indigenous people who lived far from Guatemala City and Washington, DC, at the global conflict’s heart. These arguments are important. The case studies, particularly the chapters on Magdalena Milpas Altas (Chapter 3) and Ixcán Grande (Chapter 6), stand out.