Reviews
Through a Glass Darkly: The U.S. Holocaust in Central America by Thomas R. Melville, 2005, Xilibris, 652 pages, $38.99 cloth, $28.99 paperback. The horrors of Guatemala’s “silent...
...Particularly moving are the accounts of Father Hennessey’s friendship with Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador...
...You’re always thinking about what might happen to [Edison...
...Edison, in his role as comandante, grants a woman permission to live in an abandoned house, organizes social events and talks with the local community council as they plan infrastructure projects...
...For example, García Canclini points to the 2003 América Profunda colloquium in Mexico City, attended by many of the hemisphere’s indigenous movements...
...Though he doesn’t offer a developed set of theories to replace the old ones, he sketches a blueprint for how Latin America can be conceptualized beyond the simplistic narratives offered by the main camps in today’s intellectual wars: the neoliberal globalization side and the so-called globalifóbico, or “anti-globalization,” camp...
...He describes the difficulty the participants had in responding to a question about what united them besides being originarios in the New World...
...Like a beleaguered CEO, he complains that no one understands the pressure and responsibility that come with his much-envied power...
...The sole Mayan survivor was less fortunate and was dragged from his bed and murdered...
...It seems that is exactly what they did, and it shows...
...They are usually adept at diagnosing difference, at detecting inequality and at locating isolated and excluded minorities and describing how these have mobilized to struggle for rights...
...The machismo-laden romantic relationships of the film’s protagonists reveal the gender dynamics between gang members and their girlfriends...
...From the CIA-backed coup of 1954 to the village-by-village massacres of the 1980s, the full history of the 36-year “internal conflict” is set forth in a manner that makes the book hard to put down...
...One of Edison’s five girlfriends explains how she feels about the conflict: “You’re always worried about the shootouts...
...and Jesús, a 19 year-old fellow gang member...
...The men cockily assert to the camera that the women in the barrio all want a guy with power, guns and a motorcycle, while their various girlfriends simply want their boyfriends to “settle down...
...It tells the story of the local paramilitary gang, the Bloque Metro, in a bloody struggle with a rival gang of guerrillas aligned with the leftwing National Liberation Army (ELN...
...With a broad smile, he muses about perhaps pursuing a career in civil engineering and someday returning to the community, earning its respect by building clinics...
...The Guatemalan government has long insisted that protesters caused the fire, but the terrifying details offered in this book set the matter to rest...
...As the “scorched earth” counterinsurgency campaign reached its mad zenith in the early 1980s, their hard-won successes were swept aside as the Army burned the crops and savagely massacred the locals...
...Néstor García Canclini’s newest book, currently only available in Spanish, dares to suggest we must radically revise many of our existing ideas about Latin America...
...The story of his personal journey, as a thinker, a man and a priest, is both moving and inspiring...
...However, it soon becomes clear that ideology isn’t driving the violence, but is merely a footnote in its rationale...
...For him, any given cultural group is the constantly changing sum—not of its parts—but of the flow of interactions between its cultural influences...
...Anthropology came to the world, not so much to reaffirm identities,” writes García Canclini, “but to understand their conflictive multiple existences...
...The horrors of Guatemala’s “silent holocaust” are meticulously recorded and portrayed in this searing book...
...In 1999, the UN-sponsored Truth Commission (CEH) issued its grim report, “Memory of Silence,” finding the Guatemalan military and paramilitary forces responsible for genocide against the Mayan citizenry and 93% of the atrocities, including 660 massacres and the torture and murder of some 200,000 civilians...
...For the filmmakers to capture such candid moments and create a detailed picture of life amid such violence, they clearly had to gain the trust of the community’s residents...
...Both cried out against the repression...
...Thomas Melville has brought this reality to life in an unparalleled, clear-eyed work of love...
...The Ambassador, badly burned, leaped through the flames and survived, only to be chased from his hospital bed and pursued through the streets by death squad gunmen...
...Many of the richest ideas in the book are incisive critiques of the limitations of the multicultural lens, especially within academia...
...The author, Thomas Melville, himself a former missionary in Guatemala and close friend of Hennessey, offers intimate details about the Mayan communities, their culture and their struggle to survive under apartheid-like conditions...
...This resulted in the fiery deaths of dozens of Mayan protesters as well as virtually all of the Embassy staffers...
...No matter how damning the evidence or how gruesome the deeds, these shadowy figures always seem on hand to insist that things are not clear, that perhaps the army is not to blame, that nothing should be said or done and that no protection can be offered...
...But he also is wary of any superficial idealizing of the exotic or dispossessed, any “exaltation of the subaltern,” a tendency that he sees prevalent in anti-globalization movements and 1990s-style multiculturalism...
...García Canclini argues the real common ground among indigenous peoples can be found in their pattern of cultural interactions...
...This is a harsh reality that all U.S...
...Colombia’s four-decades-long civil conflict has gone from the countryside to the barrios...
...Father Hennessey remained in Guatemala, standing by his Mayan friends in the face of the terrifying campaign...
...In García Canclini’s view this is a priceless intercultural heritage: “The Indians, with their complex combining of communitarian and mercantile modes of socialization, help us imagine the Americas as a place where plurality will not be impoverished...
...As the violence and savagery grew to unimagined extremes, the two Church leaders found solace in one another, grew together and stood their ground together...
...La Sierra, a documentary film produced and directed by Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez, takes us into one of Colombia’s most dangerous neighborhoods and reveals the urban dimensions of the war...
...For Latin American thinkers, moving beyond difference must mean a willingness to explore the space of interactions...
...García Canclini points to the fascination Latin America exercises on the modern imagination: drug wars, the utopian projects, the postmodern guerrilla, indigenous and peasant movements, mestizaje, the universes of urban slums...
...Not so much to console the minorities or to confront those who want to subordinate them, but to describe the work of coexistence...
...García Canclini—who teaches urban studies and anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de México—has no patience for facile celebrations of globalization as an inevitability that will sooner or later deposit the gifts of abundance on everybody’s doorstep as it blurs economic and cultural differences...
...not to mention their constant reformulation of European symbols absorbed in the colonial and postcolonial period...
...But it is only by working in the intercultural space that such inequities can be corrected, in Latin America and elsewhere...
...They also have in common the management of interactions between their communal economies and the capitalist economies of which they are also part...
...The CIA was harshly criticized for its support of the responsible intelligence divisions...
...That he would be a working guy like anyone else and not in the ranks...
...There is the harrowing account, for example, of the notorious burning of the Spanish Embassy in 1980...
...When an academic apparatus not sufficiently aware of its own biases and conditioning looks at these phenomena, it tends to focus on manifestations of what is most floridly different and distinct in Latin American culture...
...Hennessey survived, yet again, alone...
...Alongside this, the filmmakers explore the daily lives of three young Colombians, documenting their private thoughts and feelings: Edison, the 22 year-old leader of the Bloque Metro...
...In their most intimate moments, both Edison and Jesús admit they too would prefer to care for their children and to provide a different kind of life for them...
...Melville also traces the efforts of remarkable Church leaders like Father Hennessey and Father Bill Woods to work with starving villagers to clear remote swampland for agricultural cooperatives...
...citizens aboard, was suspiciously shot down...
...Celio, a 17 year-old mother who is dating an incarcerated gang member...
...The problem, says the author, is that most of these accounts then fail at a critical juncture...
...The text is dotted with the sinister appearances of the “ugly Americans” from the Embassy and other U.S...
...Putting oneself in the position of the dispossessed … is still a distance removed from knowing who we are,” García Canclini writes...
...The book also provides crucial facts and evidence that have never before been fully revealed...
...As one local man laments, La Sierra is “in the hands of kids with guns...
...The insider information and accounts offer unique insight to a chapter of history best known for official distortions and the fearful silence of the survivors...
...In no way an apologist for cultural imperialism, he makes a point of warning that Latin Americans are becoming cultural minorities on the world stage—and sometimes in their own lands—since the realms of the Internet, science, academia, film and music are increasingly Anglo-European (and English-language) domains...
...The story is told through the eyes of Father Ron Hennessey, an Iowa farmer-turned-priest working in the Mayan hinterlands when the military crackdown began in the late 1970s...
...La Sierra, a film by Scott Dalton and Margarita Martinez, distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 2005, 84 minutes, color $440 (video), $125 rental...
...But when it comes to thinking about how a full coexistence or concept of citizenship can be constructed out of this diversity, these analyses fall short...
...For those of us who wish to know the difficult truth about Guatemala, this book is a must read...
...The film depicts the turf battles between rival gangs who act as urban proxies for the armed groups of Colombia’s larger conflict, while providing a sympathetic glimpse into the lives of residents of La Sierra, a poor neighborhood in Medellín...
...With disturbing honesty, La Sierra reveals the centrality of the gang as an institution that has come to perform various integral community tasks within the barrio, where, except for the occasional police incursion, the government is entirely absent...
...He points to biculturalism, for example, or “the experience of circulating in the diverse matrices represented by (different) languages...
...I would prefer that he weren’t involved in it...
...After many threats, Father Woods perished when his small plane, with four other U.S...
...García Canclini’s intercultural paradigm yields interesting results when the tricky question of identity is raised, since he posits identity as something unessential, hybrid, always in flux, determined by interactions...
...The problem today is that intercultural interactions are seldom as reciprocal as they should be, and are often unjust, which is why García Canclini vehemently argues that questions of power and economics must always be considered...
...agencies...
...residents must learn and face...
...Diferentes, Desiguales, y Desconectados: Mapas de la Interculturalidad by Néstor García Canclini, 2004, Gedisa Editorial, 233 pages...
Vol. 39 • November 2005 • No. 3
