John T. Way (2012)
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 310 p.
Reviewed by Taylor H. Jardno
Department of History, Yale University
On 21 May 2013, the day after Guatemala’s Constitutional Court
overturned the conviction of General Efrain Ríos Montt, the
official Twitter account of the Starbucks coffee shop at Guatemala
City’s posh Oakland Mall asked its followers: “How is your day
going? Have you visited us already?” (21 May 2013, https://twitter.com/ Starbucks_gua/). The tweet
concluded with a link to a picture of the chain’s iconic white cup
labeled with a smiling emoticon and the metadata tag
“#indivisible”. Instead of selecting one of the ubiquitous
photographs of Maya women protesting the ex-president’s dropped
genocide charges, the Oakland Mall store repurposed a stock image
from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s 2012 U.S. anti-partisanship
campaign. Fans of the second of the chain’s two franchises in the
country failed to respond to this ambiguous national solidarity,
answering instead with descriptions of favorite beverage orders
(French-pressed Kenya blend) and praise for the location’s modern
conveniences (electrical outlets). These digital conversations
present a very different face of a city criticized frequently in
the international press for what its modernity has yet to fix:
sinkholes, crime, poverty, and
racial violence.
Just how Guatemalan urbanization has produced these two disparate
and precariously coexisting worlds – one of luxurious ladino (non-Maya)
consumption and another of impoverished indigenous subsistence –
is central to J.T. Way’s The Mayan in the Mall. Way, an
assistant professor of Latin American history at Georgia State
University, delivers in his debut monograph a captivating urban
narrative that showcases the insights gained from his years spent
as an historian and resident of Guatemala City.
The book, a revision of Way’s 2006 dissertation, is perhaps best
viewed as a series of impassioned essays that reveal this
underside of Guatemalan modernity. Sampling from documents as
diverse as legal briefs, newspaper accounts, and contemporary
novels, as well as scores of interviews, Way argues that Guatemala
City’s modernity is continually built upon its “anti-modern” past
and present (35); the indigenous and poor are at once the scourge
and the mascot of a nation whose informal economy employs nearly
three times the workforce of the formal sector. In his
introduction, Way re-periodizes Guatemala’s twentieth century in
terms of different eras of “modernism”, which are explored in
seven roughly chronological chapters. Way examines each of these
periods from an array of perspectives and scales, complementing
other findings on the discontents of Guatemalan modernity by
scholars like Greg Grandin, Deborah Levenson, and Jean Franco.
Chapter 1 explores the transition from the “romantic modernism” of the 1920s to the “reactionary modernism” promoted by the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico (1931-1944). Examining spiritual fads, labor culture, and tourism, among other topics, Way argues that in the century’s first four decades Guatemalan political and economic elites (along with their North American imperialist accomplices) helped to indelibly write racialist ideology into discussions of what a modern nation should resemble.
Chapter 2 focuses on El Gallito, a centrally- located shantytown
that is home to two perils of sanitation: the public cemetery and
the municipal dump. Way follows the paper trail of contested land
invasions and the “high modernist” schemes of the Juan Arévalo
(1945-1951) and Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954)
governments to rationalize through city planning the chaos
engendered by the mid-century surge of the urban poor. Of
particular note is Way’s resistance to idealizing the social
democratic revolution comprised of these two administrations,
whose own variant of modernism extended the reach of the state
into the lives of the poor in complicated and often destructive
ways.
Chapter 3 examines the informal economy – which Way regards as the
only economy – through the eyes of the women that constitute the
majority of this workforce. Fleshing out the previous chapter’s
stories of land invasions, Way creatively explores how poor women
navigated the military government’s anticommunist high modernism.
His readings of social worker reports and neighborhood petitions
reveal the impacts of the military’s feminized, family-oriented
discourses of welfare and failure to acknowledge the importance of
women’s labor.
Chapter 4 describes how the consequences of the military’s
modernism transformed the city into what he calls an “immoral
metropolis” (93) where crime, vice, and violence became quotidian
realities. Way insightfully chronicles the imploded dream of
modern infrastructure by examining the failures of La Terminal, a
massive bus depot and market inaugurated in the early 1960s, to
provide safe and efficient transportation and commerce.
In chapter 5, the author discusses the impact of Guatemala’s
modern economy, characterized by an emphasis on agricultural
exports and continued anticommunist security campaigns, on urban
life and labor. Whereas most accounts of the years 1970-1985 focus
on the genocide of poor and Maya campesinos in the rural
highlands, Way uncovers the export-caused food shortages and
increased state surveillance on urban labor groups like Carlos
Melgar’s meat vendor association.
Way’s last two chapters investigate the neoliberal modernism of
the post-genocide period, seeking to understand how globalization
has impacted urban culture. Chapter 6 is an ethnographic portrait
of market vendor organizations – primarily those of the Mercado
Cervantes and La Terminal – that highlights the ethnic and
gendered fault lines of the informal economy. Chapter 7 details
how third- party developmental modernism, promoted by NGOs,
multinational corporations, sweatshops, evangelical movements, and
transnational crime networks, has done little to ameliorate
inequality. Forgoing a separate conclusion, Way’s closing words in
this chapter reveal his skepticism that any future modernisms will
solve Guatemala’s structural crises.
Despite Way’s eye for historical detail, the book suffers somewhat
from a lack of spatial representations of Guatemala’s urban
development. The publication’s front matter provides only two
unscaled maps of the city, one generated with data from the 1970s
and the other undated. Way’s urban portrait would also have
benefited from more and better-integrated photographs to
illustrate the city’s century of chaotic expansion, as well as
clearer chapter organization. Some of Way’s richest archival work
gets lost in a proliferation of subsections that are often
tenuously tied to the genealogy of modernity presented (but not
theoretically defined) in the introduction. Lastly, it is
important to note that the first part of the book’s title should
be understood as a metaphor rather than a preview. Way’s
discussion is not really about urbanization or the
indigenous-cum-consumer (the proverbial Mayan in the mall) but
about interrogating why the iconography of the Guatemalan poor
simultaneously undergirds and threatens spaces like the sleek,
import- laden shopping center.
These editorial criticisms aside, Way has innovatively documented
Guatemala City’s cultural and social history. He provides an
excellent historical ethnography of the urban poor that decenters
the traditional historiographical focus on the country’s rural
agrarian conflict. He is at his best when exploring the nuances of
the “everyday politics” of state formation, especially through the
lenses of gender, labor, and urban planning (p. 170). His critical
analysis of the policies of the Arévalo and Árbenz
years is a welcome reappraisal of pre- coup society.
Undergraduates and non- specialists may find Way’s discussion more
easily digestible when paired with a broader account of modern
Guatemalan history, especially for the 1944-1954 and 1970-1985
periods. Latin Americanists of all disciplines, however, should
take careful note of Way’s themes, methods, and sources, which
will undoubtedly serve as a guide for future scholars attempting
to destabilize the field’s omnipresent rural/urban binary.