La participación indígena en la construcción de la república de Guatemala, S. XIX. SONIA ALDA MEJÍAS: Madrid: UAM Ediciones, 2000.

Abstract

The central argument of Participación indígena is that the indigenous population of nineteenth-century Guatemala involved itself regularly in national politics through voting and elections, not just sporadic outbursts of violence. Communities had clear ideas of what might be gained by this participation, the author argues, and the national parties encouraged and facilitated their involvement, both in hopes of winning votes and as part of a larger project to construct and legitimate a modern, centralized nation state. Thus the book falls squarely within recent efforts both to write a new political history for Latin America and broader attempts to recognize agency among previously neglected groups.