The Peten department of northern Guatemala until quite recently suffered little of the violence and conflict so characteristic of the history of that country. This is because, argues the anthropologist Norman Schwartz in Forest Society, “relationships between the material base of the local society and the struggle to control resources . . . simultaneously gave Peteneros an opportunity and also compelled them to build a stable, moderate society, marked by continuity of social status and commutative connections between ethnicity, community, and social class” (p. 9). Skillfully combining field work and oral history with documentation from various archives, Professor Schwartz has written a valuable and largely jargon-free history of a distinct region of Guatemala over a broad sweep of time, something quite rare to date.

From a belated conquest at the end of the seventeenth century to the 1890s, the Peten remained an isolated backwater with little population, few apparent resources, and very limited access to markets. What resulted was a society of fairly evenhanded poverty, ruled by a handful of luckless officials sent from the capital and a tiny local creole elite of merchants and landowners. A recognized ethnic hierarchy arose, putting Indians at a disadvantage, but there was little incentive for those with power to seize the land or to seek to coerce the labor of the indigenous population. Independence, if anything, increased the isolation, and the nineteenth-century cochineal and coffee booms entirely passed the region by.

It was, instead, chicle that brought the Peten into the national and international economies after 1890, and it is on oro blanco that Forest Society focuses. Schwartz finds that the export had few forward or backward linkages to develop the region, and that while the demands of the crop may have reduced the importance of ascribed ethnicity, the income it generated exacerbated socioeconomic differences and increased class tensions. The real change came after 1970, however, with massive immigration, accelerated petroleum exploration and logging, rapid population growth, “anarchic” (p. 256) land struggles, and alarming deforestation, bringing in their wake the social and political problems long typical of the rest of Guatemala.