In this book, anthropologist Paul K. Eiss writes against the grain in several productive ways about the Hunucmá region of far northwestern Yucatán. Concerned with neither the nineteenth-century Caste War that captivates so many anthropologists, nor the capitalist transformations and revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) politics of henequen that attract historians, Eiss explores the notion of el pueblo — that allusive Spanish word for a place, a people, a national public — in Hunucmá towns over the last two hundred years. Further against the grain, he attributes el pueblo not to class or ethnicity but to the historical awareness that people in Hunucmá have of their past as abiding dispossession yet inalienable repossession. The resulting historical ethnography transcends timeless cultures or always political and therefore ever presentist memories. Instead, he shows how el pueblo, and history more generally, happen as people conventionalize events in telling about them before, during, and sometimes long...

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