This intimate, personalized review of sociologically significant institutions and currents in Guatemala is extensively buttressed by statistical evidence and the findings of other writers. Its author is a moderate leftist political figure, newspaperman, novelist, a member of the research staff of the Institute of Social Investigations, and since 1956 an exile in Mexico. The book first appeared in 1959, and as the author makes clear, the publisher’s label notwithstanding, this is no more than a second printing without revision or correction.
In many respects, including general theme and corroboratory statistical documentation, the work resembles Nathan Whetten’s Guatemala: The Land and the People (1961). It differs, however, in several respects. Certain topics, such as religion and education below the university level, are scarcely discussed in systematic fashion; other themes, such as acculturation, demography, social classes, and certain aspects of economic development, are covered at length and in detail. The familiar treatment of some of these topics gives valuable insights and an air of immediacy which must be counted among the book’s main values. An aura of persisting political involvement does not inhibit some remarkably candid observations on the revolutionary period, but it results in interpretation of subsequent policy largely at the sacrifice of revolutionary conquests.
Major topics are developed with strong emphasis on historical evolution, often without adequate basis. Sources seem to have been chosen for point of view rather than for reliability—Vicente Sáenz, for example, is cited as authority on the nature of liberal reforms instituted under Mariano Gálvez and Justo Rufino Barrios (p. 144). Also some sections appear to have been written without recourse to a reference work. Gálvez, for example, comes to power two years too early (pp. 142, 259) and institutes the Academia de Estudios seven years before the fact (p. 330); and Belgian colonists appear at Santo Tomás thirty or more years too late (pp. 255-256). Such inaccuracies in chronology may not invalidate the interpretations of the events with which they are associated, but they raise the question whether the same imprecision extends to other aspects of the work. In like fashion, rather frequent typographical errors give cause to wonder how many misprints of statistical data also went unnoticed.
Finally, certain aspects of method are open to challenge. It may be questioned, for example, whether evidence relevant to Guatemala can be deduced from studies of other countries, however similar. The validity of statistical demonstrations may also be suspect when the author uses conflicting sets of figures (for example, the data on imports given in tables on pp. 500, 502, 505) at different places in the book without recognizing the discrepancy.
