This is a new edition of the 1923 doctoral dissertation of Miguel Ángel Asturias with an introduction by Dr. Julio César Pinto Soria. Originally published in 1971 in France and again in 1977 at Arizona State University, the text is a sociological examination of the problems facing Guatemala’s indigenous population in the early twentieth century filtered through the lens of turn-of-the-century sociological theories. One of the reasons behind this new edition of Asturias’s doctoral dissertation is made clear in Pinto Soria’s frustration with what he terms a long history of disinterest and denial of the author’s work in his native country. In addition to the editor’s introduction, the book includes the original dissertation as written and edited by Asturias in 1923 and the “Advertencia” written by Asturias to accompany its 1971 publication. This is the first time that the text has been published in this form in Guatemala, but the widespread negative reception of its ideological conclusions is unlikely to be altered by the location of its publication.Pinto Soria’s introduction accurately portrays the sociological and historical environment within which Asturias studied and developed his dissertation. Through a careful examination of the influences of positivism, social Darwinism, social regeneration, and eugenics on Asturias’s 1923 text, Pinto Soria attempts to show that El problema social del indio is more than a racist diatribe against the indigenous population of Guatemala. Indeed, the editor argues that Asturias, having gone to study in Europe shortly after completing his dissertation, quickly distanced himself from the racist sociological theories evident therein but maintained his desire to critique the continued exclusion and oppression of Guatemala’s indigenous population. According to Pinto Soria, this transformation is clear in Asturias’s early literary works, Leyendas de Guatemala (1930) and Hombres de maíz (1949), in which indigenous themes are central to his representations of Guatemalan culture.Pinto Soria recognizes the lengthy criticism that has shrouded Asturias’s first text and attempts to refute the accusations that the author was a racist who promoted the elimination of indigenous cultures. By highlighting the many critical social observations that the young graduate student made concerning the treatment of Guatemala’s indigenous population, Pinto Soria highlights Asturias’s critical observations of the treatment of indigenous people and attempts to reposition the text as the first step of a writer whose work would ultimately incorporate and celebrate myriad themes and images of Guatemala’s indigenous cultures. Though the editor claims that Asturias needs no defense or justification, much of his introduction focuses on redirecting the critical polemic surrounding the 1923 text. This argument is not likely to garner much critical support either in Guatemala or abroad.Asturias develops his thesis around the premise that the indigenous populations of Guatemala have suffered a long process of “devitalization” since the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest, which has left them with little or no chance of salvation as a race. Though he identifies the conditions of exploitation, exclusion, and misery imposed upon Guatemala’s indigenous majority as a primary cause of this devitalization, Asturias’s solutions center mainly on Eurocentric immigration and racial “revitalization” through a homogenizing infusion of “stronger” racial lines. Asturias’s introduction to the 1971 edition of his text retracts this solution, calling it youthful enthusiasm, and proposes that indigenous populations be provided the means to develop their own cultures; but this brief statement does little or nothing to change the disparaging lens that dominates his portrayals of an entire race. This text is an interesting representation of the influence of nineteenth-century sociological theories on a young Guatemalan scholar, but the reader is left to wonder about the intellectual value a new edition of Asturias’s 1923 text in an era when so many contemporary scholars, many of them indigenous themselves, are examining and working to improve the situation of Guatemala’s indigenous population with no reliance on debunked racist sociological theories.Pinto Soria’s introduction to this 2007 edition of El problema del indio provides a well-researched perspective of the sociohistorical environment within which it was originally written. By examining the many European and Latin American influences within Asturias’s doctoral dissertation, Pinto Soria considers the text as a valuable historical document and an integral part of Guatemalan intellectual history, without feeling any need to defend the elements of the discourse that have been so widely criticized. The goals of this latest edition appear to be a multifaceted effort to preserve a part of Guatemala’s cultural heritage, despite its controversial nature, to attempt to shed light on the circumstances of its production, and to make it more easily accessible to Guatemalan readers interested in that heritage.