In Review
Brazil: War on Children by Gilberto Dimenstein, Latin America Bureau, 1991, 88 pp., $10.00 (paper). Brazil's street children inhabit a world of drugs, petty crime, prostitution, and...
...Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival by Nancy M. Farriss, Princeton University Press, 1984, 585 pp., $21.95 (paper...
...The history of Guatemala is, in many ways, the history of the efforts of the country's indigenous majority to maintain cultural traditions in the face of state repression...
...Blending archival research in Mexico and Spain with the results of anthropological fieldwork in the Yucatan, Farriss turns to Maya kinship systems to explain the persistence of Maya cultural knowledge and cosmological beliefs in the face of Christianity, the hacienda economy and direct political incorporation during the late eighteenth century...
...This book gives a detailed look at the effects of Reaganomics in the Caribbean (case studies include Jamaica, Grenada and Dominica), and, most importantly, how grassroots groups are constructing their own viable strategies for development...
...The 1990 Mohawk armed standoff with the Quebec police and the Canadian army is captured here in all its drama and political import...
...In the 1970s, three multinational corporations made plans, later abandoned, to construct a mammoth copper mine in western Panama, on lands inhabited by the Guaymi Indians...
...Brazilianjournalist Gilberto Dimenstein enters that world, interviewing the Church and non-governmental groups that work with the homeless, the authorities who turn a blind eye, the killers, and the children themselves...
...Conditions Not of Their Choosing is a case study of Indian resistance, detailing the power relations among the various groups who supported or opposed the project: the corporate directors and government officials, the Catholic Church, non-Indian workers and the Guaymi...
...Conditions Not of Their Choosing: The Guaymi Indians and Mining Multinationals in Panama by Chris N. Gjording, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 409 pp., $42.50 (cloth...
...University of Texas Press, 1990, 316 pp., $27.50 (cloth...
...In this entertaining collection of Maya folk tales, Victor Montejo has rescued from his Guatemalan childhood an oral tradition of wisdom handed down through families for generations...
...Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540 to 1988 by Carol A. Smith (ed...
...Brazil's street children inhabit a world of drugs, petty crime, prostitution, and vigilante-style death squads...
...The Caribbean Basin in the 1980s was a testing ground for aid and trade policies that are now standard fare for the Third World...
...Canada), 1991,438 pp., $29.95 (cloth...
...These fables offer important lessons, such as "who cuts the trees cuts his own life," that modernity ignores at its own peril...
...Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives in the Caribbean Basin by Kathy McAfee, Zed Books/Oxfam America, 1991, 259 pp., $15.00 (paper...
...In this scholarly anthology, noted historians and anthropologists provide a long-overdue examination of the "ethnic question...
...While most studies of indigenous peoples in the early modern period tend to focus on their initial demographic collapse, Farriss emphasizes their precarious survival...
...The book excels in its blowby-blow reconstruction of events from interviews with participants...
...Reporters York and Pindera (Globe & Mail and CBC Radio respectively) uncover the inner workings of the Canadian high military and political command while providing a thorough history of Mohawk struggle...
...Allegorical stories of the rabbit, the jaguar and the monkey teach the values of patience, cunning, honest labor, and faithfulness...
...The Bird Who Cleans the World and Other Mayan Fables by Victor Montejo, Curbstone Press, 1991, 120 pp., $22.95 (cloth...
...People of the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka by Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera, Little, Brown & Co...
Vol. 25 • December 1991 • No. 3
