There have been two currents in Guatemalan colonial historiography. One has been intellectual history in which the literary and artistic vogues that preoccupied the educated elites have been examined at length, but in isolation. The other current, narrative history, has been taken up with the onrush of events in the colony, giving a rare nod, if that, in the direction of economics and social structure.

In these two books we have attempts to tie together these mutually isolated histories. Both authors are concerned with the interaction between the socioeconomic life of Guatemala and the way people thought and behaved. While Martínez is over deterministic—his creoles seem little more than creatures of their ambiente at times—both authors are to be praised for their attempts to remove colonial intellectual history from its ivory tower and relate it to the life of the times.

The book by Saint-Lu is at once more imaginative and less meticulous than his earlier work (La Vera Paz: Esprit Evangelique et Colonisation). He now wishes to trace and document the rise of a creole consciousness. Some of the material is not new. The crisis over the New Laws and President López de Cerrato has been better done by William Sherman and others, the story of Antonio de Remesal’s persecution is well known, and Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María’s introduction to the latest edition of Fuentes y Guzmán’s Recordación Florida is superior as an examination of the motives of that fascinating chronicler. What is new is the tracing of the rise of creole discontent from these small beginnings to the feeling of separateness and nationhood shortly after independence. Especially subtle is the way in which he describes the phases between the raw “spirit of possession” of the conquistadors and the spirit of belonging of the elites of the early nineteenth century. Throughout the creoles are tied in to the world in which they lived, the lack of fleets to and from Spain, the influxes of job-hungry peninsulares, and the other hardships that threatened their lifestyle.

In some 170 pages of text the reader feels that too much has been attempted. Considering the quantity of research there is only a sketch of what could have been. But it is a thoughtful, readable, and pioneering sketch and that is probably what Saint-Lu intended.

Martínez Peláez cannot be accused of brevity. A text of 638 pages is followed by a large bibliography and voluminous notes. It is also clear early that the author sees no need to avoid polemics. Scorn is heaped on traditional intellectual history. He will not be concerned, he states emphatically, with the “espíritu” of an era or such generalities as “perfil cultural.”

He then turns to an explanation of the Guatemalan colonial mentality by examining the economic structure of the colony and the class divisions and hostilities caused by this structure. The “laziness” of the Indian is passive resistance, the creoles’ dislike of the Indian is seen as a “poor white” response because of the creoles’ inferiority vis-à-vis the peninsulares, Fuentes y Guzmán is examined at even greater length than he was by Saint-Lu because he was so typical of the creoles of his age. Above all, he claims, colonial Guatemalan attitudes are still to be found in the nation of today. The book is often passionate, declamatory, even simplistic. Well thought out conceptualizations are stirred in with abandoned generalizations and banalities. Economics determines all.

Martínez’s book is flawed, Saint-Lu’s is a rapid survey, but both these authors have placed the intellectual elites of colonial Guatemala in their social ambientes, and that in the context of Guatemalan historiography is pioneering work.