Ricardo Falla is Guatemala’s most accomplished social anthropologist, and this is his well-known 1969–70 field study of the municipio of San Antonio Ilotenango, Quiché Department. The book’s dramatic title is something of a misnomer, reflecting hopes that rebellious Mayan peasants would bring the Guatemalan Left to power. When Falla submitted his research as a doctoral dissertation in 1974, the only rebels in it were religious converts—upwardly mobile K’iche’ Mayas rejecting their inebriated “idols behind altars” folk traditions for the more ascetic, orthodox Catholicism promoted by missionary priests like Falla himself, who is a Jesuit. Only four years later did the work acquire its resonant title, upon publication by San Carlos University, where someone coined “Quiché Rebelde” as a prophetic reference to the Mayan insurgents who in fact challenged Guatemala’s military dictatorship in 1979–82.
But did the Catholic Action movement described by Falla lead ineluctably to a guerrilla uprising? That is...
