Ivonne Recinos Aquino's De la patria del criollo a la nación de las elites takes its title and inspiration from the classic work of the Guatemalan Marxist historian Severo Martínez Peláez. Written in 1970, Martínez's La patria del criollo: Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca inspired a generation of young scholars and revolutionaries concerned with understanding the colonial origins of Guatemala's social problems. Based upon her doctoral dissertation written 30 years after La patria del criollo, Recinos's book has abandoned Martínez's structural Marxist approach. Nonetheless, Recinos, like Martínez, seeks to illustrate how Guatemala's long history of exclusionary nationalism is rooted in criollo mentalities. Her approach is cultural, intellectual, and interdisciplinary. While she uses the language of mentalities, what she analyzes is a bundle of subjectivities, discourses, and representations. Moving beyond homogenous and unified identities, she traces criollo mentalities through the frameworks of cultural hybridity, mestizaje, and...

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