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Guatemala City

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. The construction of Guatemala City in the Ermita Valley, its fourth and final home, began in the mid-1770s in the wake of serious earthquake damage in what today is known as La Antigua Guatemala. After slow growth as Central America disintegrated into separate republics, the city began to bustle with Guatemala’s 1871 Liberal revolution, and more so after the 1920 overthrow of the dictator Estrada Cabrera. The majority of the works in this bibliography postdate this period. From 1920 forward, modernization and infrastructure development began to give rise to an overburdened and largely impoverished metropolis, through various phases: a period of urban unionization and political opening (1920–1930); the Ubico dictatorship (1931–1944); the Guatemalan Revolution (1944–1954, the democratic “Ten Years of Spring”); the authoritarian, anticommunist period following the CIA-led invasion of 1954 (1954–early 1960s); Guatemala’s civil war (1960–1996); and finally, a period of neoliberalism, which is still underway (roughly 1986 forward). Euphemistically called the “Armed Internal Conflict,” the civil war originated in 1960. Death squads began to terrorize the city in 1966, and the military government unleashed genocidal violence in the Mayan highlands from 1981 to 1983. Despite a return from military to civilian rule in 1986, after unprecedented violence had effectively defeated the guerrillas and the popular movement, the war continued until the signing of Peace Accords in 1996. During those years, a turn to neoliberalism began, exacerbating the tensions and class-based division of space and resources in a primate city already wracked by waves of rural-to-urban migration that had become acute by the 1950s and that grew in the decades ahead. When the 1976 earthquake displaced over a million people, the majority of Guatemala City’s inhabitants who had homes were living in slums and land invasions. The informal economy remained the predominant means of sustenance as refugees fleeing atrocities and “agrarian transformation” in the countryside poured into the city. Today’s metropolitan area (Área Metropolitana de Guatemala, or AMG) is made up of seventeen municipalities, most of which continue to urbanize on a daily basis. The privatization of space, the lack of planning, and the profusion of new social, cultural, and economic phenomena such as gangs, evangelical Christianity, vigilante violence, consumer culture, and spiraling crime have attracted researchers’ attention, and a recent body of interdisciplinary works on these topics complements other strands in the literature that focus on state terror, internal migration, and urban growth. Researchers should consult works on the nation in general, not included here because they do not specifically focus on the city.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
  6.  
  7. Other than Gellert and Pinto Soria 1990, there is no general overview of Guatemala City’s history per se. Adams 1970, Grandin, et al. 2011 and McAllister and Nelson 2013 are edited readers that have selections relating to Guatemala City, while O’Neill and Thomas 2011 focuses specifically on the capital.
  8.  
  9. Adams, Richard N., ed. Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan National Social Structure. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970.
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  11. Still of great utility today, this volume examines the anthropology of Guatemala’s social sectors as well as the power that the United States exerts over the nation. It includes work on Guatemala City by Bryan Roberts, who later produced voluminous work on the poor and the Latin American city.
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  13. Gellert, Gisela, and J. C. Pinto Soria. Ciudad de Guatemala: Dos estudios sobre su evolución urbana, 1524–1950. Guatemala City: CEUR USAC, 1990.
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  15. Also cited under Studies Covering Early Guatemala City, this source provides a general overview of Guatemala City from its origins to late in the 20th century.
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  17. Grandin, Greg, Deborah T. Levenson, and Elizabeth Oglesby, eds. The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
  18. DOI: 10.1215/9780822394679Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  19. Part of Duke University Press’s Latin America Readers series, this collection of scholarly writings, printed primary documents, and images covers a wide range of topics that range in time from the pre-Columbian past to the new millennium. Useful as a reference and for excerption in undergraduate classes.
  20. Find this resource:
  21. McAllister, Carlota, and Diane M. Nelson, eds. War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
  22. DOI: 10.1215/9780822377405Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  23. This interdisciplinary collection of essays is “about the violence war both channels from earlier times and generates anew, and the promise that an ‘after’ to this war will someday come.” Explores Guatemalan society, politics, and culture in the aftermath of genocide, focusing on the effects on neoliberalism.
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  25. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis, and Kedron Thomas, eds. Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
  26. DOI: 10.1215/9780822393924Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  27. Also cited under Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society, this edited interdisciplinary reader provides an excellent overview of Guatemala City in the neoliberal period, linking social space to insecurity. It also covers the connections between urban and rural communities.
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  29. Reference Works, Textbooks, and Journals
  30.  
  31. While no reference work, textbook, or journal is specifically dedicated to Guatemala City, its population, or its urban development, several publications still stand out in this regard. The journal Mesoamérica has, since its inception in 1980, been exclusively dedicated to the region, and scores of articles on all aspects of Guatemala City may be found within its pages. The multivolume Historia General de Guatemala (Muñoz 1993–1999) contains entries of utility to any researcher interested in the city, including its cultural history, and is updated by Guatemala: Historia reciente (1954-1996), released by FLACSO in 2012. Woodward 1999 remains the standard overview of Central American history, with a wealth of detail on Guatemala City and an extensive bibliographic essay.
  32.  
  33. Álvarez Aragón, Virgilio, Carlos Figuero Ibarra, Arturo Taracena Arriola, Sergio Tischler Visquerra, and Edmundo Urrutia García, eds. Guatemala: Historia reciente (1954-1996). 5 vols. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 2012.
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  35. This 5-volume set covers politics and social conflicto, the revolutionary movement, the indigenous and politics, the peace process, and culture and art. It is an essential reference for any scholar of Guatemala City.
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  37. Mesoamérica. 1980–.
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  39. The only journal dedicated to Mesoamerican studies. Has scores of articles that are indispensable to researchers interested in Guatemala City.
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  41. Muñoz, Jorge Luján, ed. Historia general de Guatemala. 6 vols. Guatemala City: Asociación de Amigos del País, 1993–1999.
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  43. A multivolume set covering pre-Columbian times to the 20th century, and of use as a comprehensive reference work. Contact the Fundación para la Cultura y el Desarollo in Guatemala City to find copies. The foundation’s website lists other collections “derived” from the Historia General that may be of interest.
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  45. Woodward, Ralph Lee, Jr. Central America: A Nation Divided. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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  47. The standard and essential text on Central American history. Of particular note is the comprehensive “Selective Guide to the Literature on Central America” included as an appendix to the book. This annotated bibliographic essay, nearly ninety pages long, provides a panoramic overview of scholarly production on Central American history.
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  49. Research Resources
  50.  
  51. While Guatemala offers many libraries and difficult-to-access ministerial and municipal archives, the sources listed here have at least some digital presence and are reliably open to inquiry from researchers. The Archivo General de Centroamérica (AGCA, cited under Archives and Digital Document Collections) is the central and single most important archive for Central Americanists, and may be complemented by the collections at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA, cited under Archives and Digital Document Collections) in Antigua Guatemala, which are particularly strong on the 20th century. The recently discovered Guatemalan National Police Archive, in Guatemala City, is the subject of an ambitious University of Texas digitalization project (see Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive, cited under Archives and Digital Document Collections), and is the single best available collection of primary sources on state violence. Researchers interested in state violence and foreign interference may consult the Central Intelligence Agency (cited under Archives and Digital Document Collections) for access to declassified documents, along with the National Security Archive Guatemala Project (cited under Archives and Digital Document Collections) at George Washington University. Active research institutes such as the Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala (AVANCSO) and Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO Guatemala) (both cited under Research Centers) are essential sources of reports and publications that are difficult to access outside the nation; FLACSO also houses some document collections. CIRMA’s research publications, many of which relate to race and ethnicity, are available through the institution’s bookstore. The Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Rurales of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (CEUR USAC, cited under Research Centers), located at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, is an essential resource for any scholar interested in Guatemala City. Researchers of Guatemala City quickly learn that accurate maps and reliable statistics are almost impossible to find. To help in this quest, a section on National Sources of Maps and Statistics is included. It should be noted that the methodology used in data collection has changed over time, making it problematic to compare the results of one census to those of another. Figures should be taken with a grain of salt, and should be compared with data available from well-known sources not included here, such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Maps may be found at the Instituto Geográfico Nacional and the website of the Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Guatemala, but serious research will require mining a wide array of secondary sources. Historical maps can be found in the CIRMA map collection (mapoteca).
  52.  
  53. Archives and Digital Document Collections
  54.  
  55. The Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN Digital Archive), Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional 2011, the declassified documents available from the Central Intelligence Agency, and the rich collection of documents and reports at the National Security Archive Guatemala Project at George Washington University are all critical for documentation of state terror, foreign interference, and human rights violations. The Archivo General de Centroamérica (AGCA) has by far the best collection of government documents up to roughly the middle of the 20th century. The Historical Archive at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA), built from private collections (many from the Left), is the strongest on contemporary history, especially on the Armed Internal Conflict. CIRMA also houses the papers of Presidents Juan José Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. The institution’s Fototeca contains images of Guatemala dating back to the invention of the camera, and is invaluable to any researcher seeking to illustrate a book or article. Researchers should also consult the growing collections at FLACSO, cited under Research Centers.
  56.  
  57. Archivo General de Centroamérica. Guatemala City.
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  59. The main archive for Guatemalan and Central American historical documents, the AGCA is increasingly accessible online, and it has several of its collections digitalized. The AGCA is near the Biblioteca Nacional, and it contains the Hemeroteca Nacional de Guatemala, a periodicals archive.
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  61. Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional. Del silencio a la memoria: Revelaciones del Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional. Vol. 1. Guatemala City: Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, 2011.
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  63. Details the structure of the National Police and related security forces, provides sample cases, and serves as an indispensable accompaniment to the digitalized police archive. Available in English translation from the University of Oregon.
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  65. Central Intelligence Agency.
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  67. Declassified CIA documents relating to Guatemala may be downloaded from the Central Intelligence Agency website. See also Grandin 2001, cited under State Violence and its Effects.
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  69. Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica.
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  71. The Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) is home to a social sciences library, an extensive historical archive, and the Fototeca Guatemala, an historical photographic archive with images of Guatemala dating back to the invention of the camera. CIRMA has been under renovation in 2013 and 2014; interested researchers should be sure to contact the institution for up-to-date information on the accessibility of resources.
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  73. Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive. University of Texas at Austin.
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  75. This major digitalization effort has already made available some 10 million documents from the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, which was discovered in Guatemala City in 2005. An annotated guide is available as a PDF download on the George Washington University National Security website. See also Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional 2011.
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  77. The National Security Archive Guatemala Project. George Washington University.
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  79. The National Security Archive Guatemala Project at George Washington University, directed by scholar Kate Doyle, is an essential source of both primary documents and analysis. Holdings include digital archives, microfilm collections, books, and electronic briefing books. For related information, researchers should consult AVANCSO 2013 and Weld 2014, cited under State Violence and its Effects.
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  81. Research Centers
  82.  
  83. Social science research centers that actively engage in research projects include the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO Guatemala) and Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala (AVANCSO), which also houses document collections, while the Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Rurales of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (CEUR USAC) is a similar center located in the state university. Theses written at USAC may also be searched and consulted there, as well as at the newer, private universities in the city. The Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) no longer conducts research projects, but reports and publications from its previous efforts in this regard are available in its bookstore and library.
  84.  
  85. Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala.
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  87. The Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala is a social science research association that has published scores of studies. Several exemplary texts from AVANCSO’s collection are listed here, but a thorough examination of the organization’s books, reports, and published debates is essential for all serious researchers.
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  89. Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Rurales of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala.
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  91. The Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Rurales (CEUR) of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala (the state university) is a multidisciplinary research unit founded in 1975 that has produced many studies of use to researchers of Guatemala City. Its catalogue of publications may be consulted online.
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  93. Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica.
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  95. Also listed under Archives and Digital Document Collections, CIRMA has in the past sponsored many research projects, and its publications may be perused online. While none of these deals specifically with modern Guatemala City, they will still be of interest to researchers, and are especially strong in race and ethnicity.
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  97. Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales.
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  99. The Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales is an essential source of published studies, primary documents, and books. FLACSO’s library and archive contain millions of documents, which are searchable online. Holdings include collections donated by academics and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
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  101. National Sources of Maps and Statistics
  102.  
  103. Accurate maps and statistics are very difficult to find, and the resources in this section should be of assistance. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) is the government’s statistical website, and the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN) is its geographic institute, which was founded by the military. Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Guatemala, while designed to help the public interface with City Hall, also has resources, maps, and statistics of use to researchers.
  104.  
  105. Instituto Geográfico Nacional.
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  107. The Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN) is one of the few sources of detailed maps of the metropolitan area and of the nation. More urban maps may be found at the website of the Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Guatemala. For older maps, consult the mapoteca section of the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA, cited under Archives and Digital Document Collections).
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  109. Instituto Nacional de Estadística.
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  111. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) is the Guatemalan government’s data-collecting branch. It has census data, consumer price index information, a directory of businesses, and other information of use for researchers of Guatemala City, much of it available online.
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  113. Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Guatemala.
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  115. Primarily designed for use by city residents, this website offers statistics, publications, and urban legislation records. An urban atlas section provides maps unavailable elsewhere, and a page called “Barrio Querido” gives a tour of city neighborhoods.
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  117. State Violence and its Effects
  118.  
  119. Every text published on contemporary Guatemala grapples to some extent with the issue of state violence and its effects. The publications included below have been selected because they fall into one of several categories. First are primary accounts of testimonial produced by mandate of the Peace Accords (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico 1999 and Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica 1998, both cited under Primary Reports on State Violence). Others include general overviews of state violence that from a variety of perspectives pay special attention to Guatemala City. Ball, et al. 1999 is a quantitative study of state violence in Guatemala, while Grandin 2001 reproduces primary evidence of atrocities committed by the Guatemalan state and in tandem with the United States, much of it in Guatemala City. Grandin 2004 and Jonas 1991 both have sections with a specific urban focus and place state violence in historical context. Simon 1987 is a moving, photojournalistic account of that violence in Guatemala City and around the country. Finally, Weld 2014 is a groundbreaking study of the National Police Archives, which came to public light in 2005. A history of the police from the 1790s to 1996 may be found in AVANCSO 2013. Again, researchers should be aware that there is a vast literature on state violence in Guatemala that is not included here because it does not specifically focus on Guatemala City. Finally, several texts focus specifically on the effects of state violence in Guatemala City, such as Bastos and Camus 1994, Levenson 2003 under State Violence and Guatemala City). See also the texts covered in Labor, Leftist, and Student Movements, all of which also cover state violence.
  120.  
  121. AVANCSO. Ordenar, vigilar, perseguir y castigar: Un acercamiento histórico a la institución policial en Guatemala. Guatemala City: AVANCSO, 2013.
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  123. This work covers the pólice from the 1791 to the signing of Peace Accords in 1996.
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  125. Ball, Patrick, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer. State Violence in Guatemala, 1960–1996: A Quantitative Reflection. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999.
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  127. Combining historical, sociological, and quantitative analysis of state violence as charted in the database of the Centro Internacional para Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos (CIIDH, this work is of particular use to researchers on Guatemala City because of its comparison of rural and urban violence.
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  129. Grandin, Greg. Denegado en su totalidad: Documentos estadounidenses liberados. Guatemala City: AVANCSO, 2001.
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  131. Written by one of the most prolific scholars on Guatemalan and Latin American history, this work presents declassified CIA documents related to state violence in Guatemala and Guatemala City. See also Central Intelligence Agency, cited under Research Resources.
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  133. Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
  134. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226306872.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  135. The third chapter of this work, “Unfinished Lives,” charts US involvement in state violence—most particularly, “Operation Cleanup” of 1966, in which many of the nation’s left-wing leaders were captured, tortured, and murdered in Guatemala City. Excellent on the PGT (Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo, the nation’s Communist Party).
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  137. Jonas, Susanne. The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and U.S. Power. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991.
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  139. This structural analysis of the civil war in Guatemala focuses on economic and social structures. Of use to scholars interested in Guatemala City not only for its analysis of the nation’s elite, but also for the information it presents on the death squads.
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  141. Simon, Jean-Marie. Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.
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  143. This book of photojournalism, produced in the violent 1980s, is the best published visual account of the violence in Guatemala, both in the city and the countryside alike.
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  145. Weld, Kirsten. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
  146. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376583Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  147. This work details the discovery and management of the archives of the National Police, located in Guatemala City, from 2005 forward. It makes important arguments about archives and state terror, the police and human rights violations in Guatemala City, and the politics of historical memory.
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  149. Primary Reports on State Violence
  150.  
  151. The most important primary reports on state violence during the Armed Internal Conflict are the results of the “Truth Commission” (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico 1999) and of the church’s independent investigation, Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica 1998. Both include voluminous amounts of testimonio (testimonial) collected under rigorous fieldwork conditions. AHPN, meanwhile, is the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive, which is being digitalized by the University of Texas at Austin (see Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive).
  152.  
  153. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico. Guatemala: Memoria del silencio. 12 vols. Guatemala City: United Nations Office of Project Services, 1999.
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  155. Multivolume work. Presents the findings of the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), or “Truth Commission,” which was mandated as part of the Guatemalan Peace Accords. An essential reference for all scholars of the nation, it details a long history of atrocities, committed overwhelmingly by forces of the state. An edited English version is available: Rothenberg, Daniel, ed. Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). See also REHMI 1998.
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  157. Digital Archive of the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive. University of Texas at Austin.
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  159. This major digitalization effort has already made available some 10 million documents from the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, which was discovered in Guatemala City in 2005. An annotated guide is available as a PDF download on the George Washington University National Security website. See also Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional 2011, cited under Archives and Digital Document Collections.
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  161. Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica. Guatemala: Nunca más. Guatemala City: Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, 1998.
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  163. The Catholic Church’s Interdiocesan Project to Recover Historical Memory (REHMI) was the first comprehensive study of atrocities committed during the Armed Conflict (see Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico 1999). Two days after he announced its release, Monsignor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was beaten to death in his garage. Translated into English as Guatemala, Never Again! (Marymount, NY: Orbis Books, 1999).
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  165. State Violence and Guatemala City
  166.  
  167. Bastos and Camus 1994 covers rural refugees who fled to Guatemala City during the Armed Internal Conflict. Levenson 2003 provides information on the urban milieu into which those refugees came, detailing working-class organizations in the city that faced terror to advocate for social change as part of a broad popular movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
  168.  
  169. Bastos, Santiago, and Manuela Camus. Sombras de una batalla: Los desplazadas por la violencia en Ciudad de Guatemala. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1994.
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  171. A comprehensive study of people displaced by violence in Guatemala City. Charts refugees who fled to the city during the civil war and explores the difficulties and logistics of survival in the city, as well as ethnic identity, community structures, religiosity, and conceptions of society. Includes testimonials.
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  173. Levenson, Deborah. “The Life That Makes Us Die/The Death That Makes Us Live: Facing Terrorism in Guatemala City.” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 94–104.
  174. DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2003-85-94Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  175. Details how Guatemala City’s working-class activists organized and advocated for social change in the face of state terror in the 1960s and 1970s. Presents information on the period difficult to find elsewhere, especially on the CNT (National Central of Workers) and the Young Catholic Worker movement. See also Levenson-Estrada 1994, cited under Labor, Leftist, and Student Movements.
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  177. Weld, Kirsten. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
  178. DOI: 10.1215/9780822376583Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  179. This work on the archives of the National Police provides both an overview of the police forces in Guatemala City during the Armed Internal Conflict and an ethnography of the city residents who worked in the archive after its discovery in 2005.
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  181. The Indigenous, Ethnicity, and Race
  182.  
  183. Over the past two decades or so, scholars have moved beyond paradigms that linked Guatemala’s Mayan population exclusively to its rural landscape. Notable for promoting this line of study is the voluminous work of Santiago Bastos and Manuela Camus, a representative sample of which is included in the listings in this section (Bastos and Camus 1990, Bastos and Camus 1995, Bastos and Camus 1998). Camus 2002, which began its life as a prize-winning dissertation, remains the most thorough and definitive work on the capital’s Mayan inhabitants. In the US academy, the anthropologist Diane Nelson’s groundbreaking work A Finger in the Wound (Nelson 1999) studied Mayan activists as not only a group working in Guatemala City, but also as members of a greater Guatemala City, and Guatemalan, culture; her concept of the “Maya hacker” stands out in this regard. On structural racism, intellectual history, and the elite, Marta Casaús Arzú is the leading authority, and Casaús Arzú 1995 and Casaús Arzú and García Giráldez 2005 are essential reading on these topics.
  184.  
  185. Bastos, Santiago, and Manuela Camus. Indígenas en la Ciudad de Guatemala: Subsistencia y cambio étnico. Debate No. 6. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1990.
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  187. Part of a 1989–1991 study by the Sociedad para la Juventud Guatemalteca de Mañana. Focuses on families in an urban educational center. The project also resulted in “Descripción básica de la aldea Lo de Bran,” and Camus’s “FGER en sus 25 años,” on the Federación Guatemalteca de Escuelas Radiofónicas.
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  189. Bastos, Santiago, and Manuela Camus. Los mayas de la capital: Un estudio sobre identidad y mundo urbano. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1995.
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  191. This widely cited study focuses particularly on issues of indigenous cultural identity as the Mayan population grew in Guatemala City in the last three decades of the 20th century.
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  193. Bastos, Santiago, and Manuela Camus. La exclusión y el desafío: Estudios sobre segregación étnica y empleo en la Ciudad de Guatemala. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1998.
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  195. Examining ethnic segregation in the workplace in the capital, this FLACSO study was one of the first to address issues of race and ethnicity in the urban workplace.
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  197. Camus, Manuela. Ser indígena en la Cuidad de Guatemala. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 2002.
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  199. The definitive anthropological work on Mayans in Guatemala City. Covers numerous peripheral neighborhoods and workplaces and also provides an excellent history of the arrival and growth of urban Mayan populations. Specific areas and neighborhoods covered include the La Terminal wholesale market, La Brigada, and La Ruedita.
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  201. Casaús Arzú, Marta. Guatemala: Linaje y racismo. 2d. ed. San José, Costa Rica: FLACSO, 1995.
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  203. A study of family heritage and racism in Guatemalan society, this work traces the colonial creole elite to the present times. It is essential reading for any researcher studying either the elite of Guatemala City or the structural racism that underpins the metropolis’s urban development.
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  205. Casaús Arzú, Marta, and Teresa García Giráldez. Las redes intelectuales centroamericanas: Un siglo de imaginarios nacionales (1820–1920). Guatemala City: F&G Editores, 2005.
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  207. This is a critically important study of Guatemalan and Central American elite circles, national imaginaries, and racial discourses that conditioned interethnic relations.
  208. Find this resource:
  209. Nelson, Diane. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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  211. An anthropology of “body politics” in Guatemala at the time of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing examines racial discourse and Mayan activism in the capital city and around the country. Required reading for all scholars of Guatemala City and contemporary Guatemala in general.
  212. Find this resource:
  213. Offit, Thomas. Conquistadores de la Calle: Child Street Labor in Guatemala City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
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  215. This in-depth ethnography of children working on the streets of Guatemala City (also cited under Street Children) is notable for the information it presents on the social and family networks of itinerant Mayan vendors who come into the capital from outlying villages.
  216. Find this resource:
  217. Labor, Leftist, and Student Movements
  218.  
  219. Scholarly interest in social and political movements has produced a growing body of work dedicated specifically to this topic, much of it focused specifically on Guatemala City. Unions are covered in Asociación de Investigación y Estudios Sociales 1991–1994 and Levenson-Estrada 1994, which can be complemented with the memoirs of labor leader Antonio Obando Sánchez (Obando Sánchez 1978). Student movements and repression and the University of San Carlos are covered in Kobrak 1999 and Vrana 2012. Ramírez 2001 is a wide-ranging guerrilla memoir that includes stories from the author’s childhood in Guatemala City and her entry into the secondary school student movement.
  220.  
  221. Asociación de Investigación y Estudios Sociales. Más de cien años del movimiento obrero urbano en Guatemala. 4 vols. Guatemala City: Asociación de Investigación y Estudios Sociales, 1991–1994.
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  223. A four-volume set based largely on reporting from the nation’s major newspaper of the 20th century, El Imparcial, this detailed history of the urban labor movement in Guatemala from its inception to 1992 is an essential reference for researchers interested in the history of unions in the nation.
  224. Find this resource:
  225. Kobrak, Paul. Organizing and Repression in the University of San Carlos, Guatemala, 1944 to 1996. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1999.
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  227. The University of San Carlos of Guatemala (USAC, the state university), long a center of grassroots organizing, was a focal point for particularly brutal state violence. This work is a study of nearly five hundred cases of such violence, committed against students, professors, and even university employees.
  228. Find this resource:
  229. Levenson-Estrada, Deborah. Trade Unionists Against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954–1985. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
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  231. In 1984, some four hundred workers began an occupation of the Coca-Cola bottling plant that lasted for over a year. Levenson seeks to understand how workers understood and continued their struggle in the face of terror. Religion and an understanding of the self as an agent of change underpinned their resistance.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Obando Sánchez, Antonio. Memorias: La historia del movimiento obrero en Guatemala en este siglo. Ed. corregida y aumentada. Guatemala City: Editorial Universitaria, 1978.
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  235. The memoirs of a leading union activist who organized for some three decades beginning in the 1920s, this work is a rich source for scholars interested in the urban and rural labor history of Guatemala.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Ramírez, Chiqui. La guerra de los 36 años: Vista con ojos de mujer de izquierda. Guatemala City: Editorial Oscar de León Palacios, 2001.
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  239. The gripping autobiography of a Guatemalan guerrilla activist whose political career began in FUEGO (the Frente Unido del Estudiantado Guatemalteco Organizado, or United Organized Guatemalan Student Front), a leftist secondary-school organization, provides a firsthand account of activism in Guatemala City during the Armed Internal Conflict.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Vrana, Heather. “Revolutionary Transubstantiation in ‘The Republic of Students’: Death Commemoration in Urban Guatemala from 1977 to the Present.” Radical History Review 114 (Fall 2012): 66–90.
  242. DOI: 10.1215/01636545-1598015Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  243. Studies political funerals in Guatemala City’s center for “martyred” student activists from USAC, the University of San Carlos of Guatemala (the state university). Explores “the generative possibilities of death in politics,” and contributes to the literature on both university student organizing and the city’s landscape of memory and death.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Economics, Policy, and Urban Expansion and Planning
  246.  
  247. The works included in this section relate to the physical growth of Guatemala City, to the policies related to that growth, and to the economics underpinning it. Covering the early years of Guatemala City from the time of its foundation in the Ermita Valley are Gellert 1994 and Gellert and Pinto Soria 1990 (cited under Studies Covering Early Guatemala City), which may be complemented by information from Muñoz 1993–1999 and Woodward 1999 (cited under Reference Works, Textbooks, and Journals). Dym 2006 (cited under Studies Covering Early Guatemala City) covers the changing political role of municipalities in Central America through the era of the Bourbon reforms into early independence, and is useful for scholars interested in Guatemala City during this period. Peláez Almengor 1994 (cited under Studies Covering Early Guatemala City) explores entrepreneurialism and the meat industry in the city from 1871 to 1898, and is also an example of the many articles on all aspects of Guatemala City found in the Mesoamérica (see Reference Works, Textbooks, and Journals). Emblematic of later eras are Guatemala’s first two master urbanization plans—Esquema director de ordenamiento metropolitano and Metrópolis 2010 (cited under Urbanization Plans)—which were produced in reaction to the chaotic and rapid development of this primate city (Smith 1984, cited under Urban Economy). Underpinned by changes in the agrarian economy, infrastructure development, population growth, and a new industrial economy (see Dosal 1995, and Gellert and Palma 1999 (both cited under Urban Economy), as well as O’Neill and Thomas 2011 and Way 2012, cited under Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society), this disorderly development is critiqued in García Vettorazzi 2000 and Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 2003 (both cited under Urban Growth). Details at the neighborhood level are found in Camus 2002 and Rodas Maltéz 1996 (both cited under Urban Growth), while Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 1998 and ONGs, sociedad civil y Estado en Guatemala (cited under Urban Economy) look to the 1990s and beyond to explore, respectively, the effects of structural adjustment and the explosion of NGOs in the city in the neoliberal age.
  248.  
  249. Studies Covering Early Guatemala City
  250.  
  251. General backgrounds that cover Guatemala City’s early years include Woodward 1999, a textbook, and Historia General de Guatemala (Muñoz 1993–1999), an encyclopedic collection of historical essays. The latter should be used with the understanding that, given the time period in which it was produced and the perception of the politics of the Asociación de Amigos del País, which published it, many scholars from the Left declined to participate. Caplow 1949, Gellert 1994, and Gellert and Pinto Soria 1990 are all monographs on Guatemala City from its foundation in its current location to roughly the time of the works’ publication. Pinto Soria 1994 studies the city from late colonial times to the 1944 Revolution. Dym 2006 examines the power of the municipality in relation to that of the state from late Bourbon times to early independence, while Peláez Almengor 1994, an example of the fine-grained pieces of research available in the journal Mesoamérica, illuminates the urban economy in a study of the meat industry in the city from the 1871 Liberal revolution to the turn of the century.
  252.  
  253. Caplow, Theodore. “The Social Ecology of Guatemala City.” Social Forces 28.2 (December 1949): 113–133.
  254. DOI: 10.2307/2572637Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. Serving also as a richly detailed survey of Guatemala City’s neighborhoods, businesses, social structure, and infrastructure during the Ten Years of Spring (the 1944–1954 Revolution), this article meticulously traces the capital’s development from the time of its foundation through a close reading of maps, surveys, and censuses and government documents.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Dym, Jordana. From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State, and Federation in Central America, 1759–1839. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
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  259. This work posits that a move from municipal sovereignty to national sovereignty was a key element of the political revolution of the 19th century. Bridging the era of the Bourbon reforms to that of early independence, this work places the city at the center of the formation of new nation-states.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Gellert, Gisela. “Ciudad de Guatemala: Factores determinantes en su desarrollo urbano (1775 hasta la actualidad).” Mesoamérica 27 (June 1994): 1–68.
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  263. Especially strong on the early decades of Guatemala City’s history, this article argues that the Liberal reforms of 1871, which teamed urban development with agro-export policies, marked a sea change in the city’s development. Also covers the city’s expansion in the middle of the 20th century.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Gellert, Gisela, and J. C. Pinto Soria. Ciudad de Guatemala: Dos estudios sobre su evolución urbana, 1524–1950. Guatemala City: CEUR USAC, 1990.
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  267. Divided into two essays, this source covers the urban evolution of Guatemala City from its origins to late in the 20th century. Particularly useful for tracing neighborhoods, commercial spaces, and infrastructure from the city’s foundation. Includes social, cultural, and ethnic detail and is strong on the city’s early history.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Muñoz, Jorge Luján, ed. Historia general de Guatemala. 6 vols. Guatemala City: Asociación de Amigos del País, 1993–1999.
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  271. As noted in Reference Works, Textbooks, and Journals, this source contains numerous articles covering Guatemala City and Guatemalan culture.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Peláez Almengor, Oscar Guillermo. “La economía urbana de la Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción vista a través de los negocios de Francisco Cordón Batres: El abastecimiento de carne, 1871–1898.” Mesoamérica 27 (June 1994): 157–173.
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  275. This work covers the business in beef and its by-products in the capital in the late 19th century and tells the story of an exploitative entrepreneur.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Pinto Soria, Julio C. “Guatemala de la Asunción: Una semblanza histórica (1776–1944).” Mesoamérica 27 (June 1994): 69–92.
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  279. Situates the city as a site that reflects greater changes in the country’s society and economy and as the home of its elite. Offers information on the city’s stagnation throughout the first three quarters of the 1800s and on its transformation during the Liberal reforms of 1871.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Woodward, Ralph Lee, Jr. Central America: A Nation Divided. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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  283. As noted in Reference Works, Textbooks, and Journals, this authoritative source on Central American history is rich in detail, and is particularly strong on the 19th century.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Urbanization Plans
  286.  
  287. Guatemala City’s two master urbanization plans are Esquema director de ordenamiento metropolitano (1972) and Metrópolis 2010 (published in 1995). These should be consulted by researchers interested in city planning.
  288.  
  289. Esquema director de ordenamiento metropolitano (EDOM) 1972–2000: Plan de desarrollo metropolitano. Guatemala City: Municipalidad de Guatemala, 1972.
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  291. A printed primary source, this document is the first master urbanization plan published in the municipality of Guatemala’s history, preceded only by a 1956 Preliminary Law on Urbanism (Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 2003, cited under Urban Growth). See also Metrópolis 2010, below. Both urbanization plans are briefly glossed in Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 2003 (cited under Urban Growth) and Way 2012 (cited under Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society).
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Metrópolis 2010: Plan de desarrollo metropolitano. Guatemala City: Municipalidad de Guatemala, 1995.
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  295. This printed primary source is the second of the municipality’s master urbanization plans, following EDOM (Esquema director de ordenamiento metropolitano, 1972).
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Urban Growth
  298.  
  299. Works that specifically focus on urban growth, which is also a preoccupation of nearly all studies of Guatemala City during the 20th century, include Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 2003 and García Vettorazzi 2000, both of which approach the topic through a wide-angle lens. Rodas Maltéz 1996 covers three municipalities: Mixco, which is densely urbanized, and the still urbanizing Santa Catarina Pinula and San José Pinula, all of which are part of the AMG. Camus 2002 is a brilliant study of Guatemala City’s Mayan residents, and is an enthnography that covers a number of neighborhoods and markets in the city.
  300.  
  301. Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala. El proceso de crecimiento metropolitano de la Ciudad de Guatemala: Perfiles del fenómeno y ópticas de gestión. Guatemala City: Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala, 2003.
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  303. Detailed overview of the growth of the Área Metropolitana de Guatemala (AMG). Pays particular attention to urban policy in comparative perspective and provides important information about urban governance, legislation, planning, and infrastructure management. An essential text on municipal and national policy. Includes a map that charts urban expansion from 1981 to 2000.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Camus, Manuela. Ser indígena en la Cuidad de Guatemala. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 2002.
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  307. The definitive anthropological work on indigenous residents of Guatemala City. Provides information on the city’s growth, in terms of urban expansion, of peri-urban space, and of rural-to-urban conversion. Also cited under The Indigenous, Ethnicity, and Race.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. García Vettorazzi, Silvia. “El crecimiento espacial de la Ciudad de Guatemala: ¿Un desorden permitido?” In La Ciudad de Guatemala y su área de influencia urbana: Perfiles de problemas y líneas de solución. Serie Temas Urbanos 2000, No. 1. Guatemala City: AVANCSO, 2000.
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  311. Insists that private actors and private capital have driven the spatial growth of Guatemala City. Provides essential information on the growth of neighborhoods and districts. Lacking any master planning, this work argues, Guatemala has grown in a chaotic and disorderly manner, creating a “disperse and fragmented” city.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Rodas Maltéz, Francisco. Producción de suelo habitacional y de los servicios básicos en la periferia metropolitana de la Ciudad de Guatemala: Estudio de los municipios de Mixco, Santa Catarina Pinula y San José Pinula. Guatemala City: CEUR, 1996.
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  315. A study of basic urban infrastructure in land converted for housing use from 1950 to 1994 in three outlying municipalities of the AMG. Santa Catarina Pinula and San José Pinula are especially understudied, making this an essential source.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Urban Economy
  318.  
  319. Questions of urban primacy and the city’s role in the greater economy are covered in Smith 1984 and Pérez Sáinz 1997, while Pérez Sáinz 1990 focuses specifically on the urban informal economy. Issues of development are taken up in two works: Gellert and Palma 1999, which details women’s roles in urban community development projects, and ONGs, sociedad civil y Estado en Guatemala 1990, which was an early work addressing the explosion of NGOs in Guatemala—a phenomenon described in the nation as ONGificación (or NGOification). On the rise of the industrial elite and on industry in the city and its environs more generally, see Dosal 1995, and on the effects of structural readjustment, Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 1998.
  320.  
  321. Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala. La economía de Guatemala ante el ajuste estructural a comienzos de los ‘90. Guatemala City: AVANCSO, 1998.
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  323. Focusing on the devastating effects of structural adjustment at the beginning of the 1990s, this study is useful for linking together changes in the agrarian and urban economy during the time period.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Dosal, Paul J. Power in Transition: The Rise of Guatemala’s Industrial Oligarchy, 1871–1994. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995.
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  327. Traces the rise, from 1871 to 1993, of a new oligarchy that would ultimately challenge the older coffee-growing elite. While this political and economic history is not explicitly urban, it provides essential information about the fractures in the elite sectors that ran both the nation and its capital.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Gellert, Gisela, and Irene Palma. Precariedad urbana, desarrollo comunitario, y mujeres en el Área Metropolitana de Guatemala. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1999.
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  331. Packed with data essential for researchers seeking information at the neighborhood level, this study focuses on women’s participation in community development projects in poor urban neighborhoods in Guatemala City. Also charts Guatemalan statistics against others from the region. Excellent on institutional projects, especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. ONGs, sociedad civil y Estado en Guatemala: Elementos para el debate. Guatemala City: AVANCSO-IDESAC, March 1990.
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  335. This 1990 work was one of the first within Guatemala to flag the exponential growth of NGOs in Guatemala and offer approaches to the debates about to what extent NGOs empowered civil society and/or deprived the state of sovereignty and relieved it of its proper obligations.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Pérez Sáinz, Juan Pablo. Ciudad, subsistencia e informalidad. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1990.
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  339. This work by a FLACSO sociologist covers the informal and subsistence economy in Guatemala City, and may be complemented by the author’s other works on Central America as a whole that cover the same topic.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Pérez Sáinz, Juan Pablo. “Guatemala: The Two Faces of the Metropolitan Area.” In The Urban Caribbean: Transition to a New Global Economy. Edited by Alejandro Portes, Carlos Dore-Cabral, and Patricia Landolt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
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  343. Written by a FLACSO sociologist, this piece draws on extensive research on urban informality in a volume that compares urbanization in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Smith, Carol A. “El desarrollo de la primacía urbana, la dependencia en la exportación y la formación de clases en Guatemala.” Mesoamérica 8 (December 1984): 195–278.
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  347. On urban primacy in an agro-export economy. Explores urbanization in the 19th and 20th centuries in a world-comparative framework. Highlights sociopolitical trends and calls for ground-up research that amplifies theories of urban primacy. Smith’s voluminous work, not covered in this bibliography, is essential reading for all researchers.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society
  350.  
  351. Guatemala City’s marbled mix of neighborhoods, as well as its diverse population and their cultural production, remain rich areas for further research. The neighborhoods, shantytowns, and the city’s population of young people—a population larger than ever before, because of the baby boom that followed the end of the civil war—are the subjects of a developing scholarly literature produced by Guatemalan and foreign scholars alike. The works in this section represent both recent scholarship and classic studies from the 1960s and 1970s that remain useful not only as historical sources, but also as windows onto the formation of a neoliberal urban landscape with levels of crime and violence that shock the world. The neoliberalism that has brought spiraling levels of crime and insecurity to the city (see O’Neill and Thomas 2011) has been concomitant with the explosion of evangelical Christianity, which O’Neill 2009, a groundbreaking work, argues has produced a sea change in conceptions of social citizenship. The author not only provides an in-depth ethnography of El Shaddai, a neo-Pentecostal church, but also expands his insights about the individualistic nature of Christian citizenship to publicity campaigns and popular culture in the nation, making this book essential reading not only for those readers interested in religion, but also for any scholar interested in culture and everyday life in Guatemala in the new millennium. The fabric of everyday life, besides being characterized by violence, is changing in remarkable ways as part of the global communications revolution, Guatemala’s postwar baby boom, and the rise of consumer culture. González Ponciano 2013 explores new class identifications in the postwar period in a brilliant anthropological essay that details offensive, quasi-racial, classist slurs that have become popular in urban slang since the fall of the popular movement. The social landscape of post-civil-war, neoliberal Guatemala City, González Ponciano argues, is exemplified by a new sort of “cosmopolitanism from below” that challenges elites’ exclusive access to the United States and to foreign culture in general. Class in the city is also explored in Levenson 2005. This study looks at three generations of a working-class family in a city that, over time, has become increasingly divided and insecure, providing a touching and human face to the history of social space and its evolution—a topic detailed in Way 2012, which covers the city’s and country’s history from 1920 to 2005, linking greater trends in the nation’s development to everyday life in poor neighborhoods and urban markets in Guatemala City.
  352.  
  353. González Ponciano, Jorge Ramón. “The Shumo Challenge: White Class Privilege and Post-Race, Post-Genocide Alliances of Cosmopolitanism from Below.” In War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala. Edited by Carlota McAllister and Diane M. Nelson, 307–329. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
  354. DOI: 10.1215/9780822377405Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  355. Focuses on a new “cosmpolitianism from below” that has given rise to, or given new meaning to, class identifications and class-based epithets such as shumo, muco, and cholero (all different classifications for lowbrow and largely urban groups tinged, but not defined, by race).
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Levenson, Deborah. Hacer la juventud: Jóvenes de tres generaciones de una familia trabajadora en la Ciudad de Guatemala. Guatemala City: AVANCSO, 2005.
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  359. Taking an interest in the evolving history of youth and concept of youth in Guatemala, this study explores three generations of a working-class family in Guatemala City, revealing how politics, visions of the future, and class identity have changed over time.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis. City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
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  363. An ethnography of neo-Pentecostal Christianity that focuses on Christian citizenship and relocates the evangelical explosion in the realm of politics. This groundbreaking analysis is essential reading for scholars interested in the neoliberal period as well as in evangelical Christianity (see also books by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, not cited in this article).
  364. Find this resource:
  365. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis, and Kedron Thomas, eds. Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
  366. DOI: 10.1215/9780822393924Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. Focuses on issues of security in the increasingly insecure and crime-ridden Guatemala City in the neoliberal period. Its essays cover topics ranging from the privatization of space, structural violence, structural readjustment, and class decline to grassroots retail, street vending, and Christian outreach. Excellent for undergraduate courses.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Way, J. T. The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
  370. DOI: 10.1215/9780822394785Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. Charts the city’s growth and development from the bottom up against top-down projects from 1920 to 2005. Weaves together histories of the nation, the city, and poor neighborhoods and municipal and street markets. Argues that for decades Guatemala has been at the forefront of modernizing and modernist projects.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Neighborhoods
  374.  
  375. Monzón Lemus 1990 is a fascinating proletarian novel covering life in Barrio El Gallito in the middle decades of the 20th century. Today, El Gallito is arguably the nation’s most notorious slum. The foundation of this barrio in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a state-owned “workers’ neighborhood” is covered in Way 2012 (cited under Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society and Land Invasions). Camus 2005 and Bastos and Camus 1992 both study neighborhoods in the municipality of Mixco, an understudied and densely urbanized municipality of the AMG that might be called the city’s “Brooklyn.” Camus 2005 is a particularly notable ethnography that captures the phenomenon and lived experience of the shattered dreams of middle-class citizenship that take physical form in the degraded neighborhood of Primero de Julio, whose trajectory the author traces from a hopeful Cold War project of class formation to its present state. Older studies include Micklin 1969, which contains a wealth of data on La Limonada, another famous poor neighborhood, and Roberts 1973, a sociological work that compares conditions of life in a planned urban community and in a land invasion.
  376.  
  377. Bastos, Santiago, and Manuela Camus. A la orilla de la ciudad: Belén, una colonia periférica del Área Metropolitana de Guatemala. Debate No. 14. Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1992.
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  379. Part of the series of works written by Bastos and Camus for FLACSO (see Research Resources), this is one of the few studies of Colonia Belén, a neighborhood located in Zona 7 de Mixco.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Camus, Manuela. La colonia Primero de Julio y “la clase media emergente.” Guatemala City: FLACSO, 2005.
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  383. An ethnography of a public housing project created in 1966 as part of a program of middle-class creation that over the decades has fallen into a dangerous, neglected, lower-class area. Traces work, politics, and identity in the area from its creation to 2005.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Micklin, Michael. “Urbanization, Technology, and Traditional Values in Guatemala: Some Consequences of a Changing Social Structure.” Social Forces 47.4 (June 1969): 438–446.
  386. DOI: 10.2307/2574533Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  387. Can be mined for data and information about La Limonada, a poor neighborhood that exploded in size in the middle of the 20th century. The author had previously published work on the social demography of Guatemala, focusing on birth rates.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Monzón Lemus, Cristóbal. Camino de adolescente: La vida de Ramón en el barrio “El Gallito.” Guatemala City: Delgado Impresos & Cía., 1990.
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  391. One of Guatemala’s few proletarian novels. Tells the story of a boy growing up in the (now infamously dangerous) Barrio El Gallito of Zone 3 in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. An invaluable source on daily life and on the changing economy of the city and nation.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Roberts, Bryan. Organizing Strangers: Poor Families in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973.
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  395. Compares the internal politics, the circumscribed ability to organize, and the internal differentiations in a planned urban community and a squatter settlement in Guatemala City. Roberts’s later, voluminous work on urban sociology and the poor, while not specifically focused on Guatemala City, should be consulted by all researchers.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Land Invasions
  398.  
  399. Studies of specific land invasions include Roberts 1973, on San Lorenzo, and Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 1993, on Tierra Nueva I y II. Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 1993 is particularly useful for its in-depth detail on the stunning array of popular, city, state, and international institutions that were conducting projects in Tierra Nueva II, all of which failed to prevent the host of social and economic woes soon to beset the community. Way 2012 includes details on the land invasions that created the shantytowns in the ravines around El Gallito and La Palmita in the 1940s, while “Invasiones de tierras” gives an overview of land invasions in the first four years of Guatemala’s return to civilian rule, from 1986 to 1990. It can be complemented with Quesada S. 1985, which lists land invasions in the period leading up to the return to civilian rule.
  400.  
  401. Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala. “Aquí corre la bola”: Organización y relaciones sociales en una comunidad popular urbana. Cuadernos de Investigación. Guatemala City: Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala, 1993.
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  403. A fine-grained study of the Chinautla land invasions that created Tierra Nueva I in 1976 and Tierra Nueva II in 1986. Provides in-depth information on multiple neighborhood, national, and international organizations—all of which failed—at work in Tierra Nueva II.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. “Invasiones de tierras (1986–1990): Un desborde popular en tiempos de Democracia.” Boletín del Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales 9 (November 1990).
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  407. This study examines urban land invasions in the four-year period from Guatemala’s return to civil rule in 1986 to the time of its publication.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Quesada S., Flavio J. Invasiones de terrenos en la Ciudad de Guatemala. Serie Informes 85.1. Guatemala City: Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1985.
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  411. This early study of urban land invasions in Guatemala City provides useful data for researchers seeking to count and map these events as well as to understand how they are precipitated and how they function.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Roberts, Bryan. Organizing Strangers: Poor Families in Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973.
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  415. This sociological work provides rich data about San Lorenzo, a squatter settlement, using interviews, surveys, questionnaires and the like. See also the listing in Neighborhoods.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Way, J. T. The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
  418. DOI: 10.1215/9780822394785Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. This work, also cited under Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society, provides in-depth detail on the land invasions in the ravines surrounding El Gallito and La Palmita in the middle of the 1940s.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Street Children
  422.  
  423. Street children and slums are emblematic of the tragic development of social space in Guatemala City. In Tierney 1997, we hear from street children in their own words. Rich in original insights, the detailed ethnography in Offit 2008 offers a close-up of child street laborers and illuminates the social and family networks in which they move, often linking country and city together. Many of Offit’s subjects are Mayan (his work complements Camus 2002, cited under The Indigenous, Ethnicity, and Race), and they transit between their outlying villages and the “marginal neighborhoods,” or slums, of Guatemala City.
  424.  
  425. Offit, Thomas. Conquistadores de la Calle: Child Street Labor in Guatemala City. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
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  427. An in-depth ethnography of children working on the streets. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the social and cultural networks in which this growing sector of society moves. Debunks the conventional wisdom that most child laborers are orphans or solely victims, and shows how Guatemala functions at the grass roots.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Tierney, Nancy Leigh. Robbed of Humanity: Lives of Guatemalan Street Children. New York: Pangaea, 1997.
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  431. This emotive text based on testimonial is excellent for use in teaching. See also Offit 2008.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Gangs
  434.  
  435. The profusion of street gangs in Guatemala since the 1990s has been the subject of much public and scholarly alarm and is directly linked with escalating levels of crime, violence, insecurity, and femicide. Levenson 2013a, another of the key works in the new literature on Guatemala City, draws on decades of research to explore the roots of this phenomenon in a history of “necropolitics,” brilliantly breaking the paradigms that relate Guatemalan gang violence solely to Los Angeles and US policies of deportation. Levenson was also the head researcher on Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 1998, which found that the city’s early gangs were less violent than those to follow. Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica, Brenneman 2012, and De Cesaré 2013 focus more widely on gangs in Central America, while O’Neill 2010 explores evangelical ministries working with gang members in Guatemala City prisons. A second wave of studies on gangs in Guatemala is on the verge of publication, following on works such as those listed below. A related strand in the literature explores the fragmentation of Guatemala in the postwar, neoliberal age; in particular, see McAllister and Nelson 2013, cited under General Overviews, González Ponciano 2013, cited under Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society), and O’Neill and Thomas 2011 and O’Neill 2009 (both under Urban Neighborhoods, Culture, and Society).
  436.  
  437. Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala. Por sí mismos: Un estudio preliminar de las “maras” en la Ciudad de Guatemala. 2d ed. Guatemala City: Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala, 1998.
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  439. An early study of gangs based on research conducted by Deborah Levenson with the assistance of Nora Marina Figueroa and Marta Yolanda Maldonado. Views maras (gangs) not just through the lens of violence and delinquency, but also as a means of expression, survival, and social belonging for gang members. First published in 1988. See also Levenson 2013b.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Brenneman, Robert. Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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  443. Though not focusing exclusively on Guatemala City, this work, based on interviews with gang members, details “push” and “pull” factors, both physical and emotional, that condition young people’s decision to join a gang, and sometimes to later convert to evangelical Christianity. Compares gang structures with those of evangelical churches (see O’Neill 2010).
  444. Find this resource:
  445. De Cesaré, Donna. Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World Of Gangs/Los niños en un mundo de las pandillas. Translated by Javier Auyero. Foreword by Fred Ritchin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. Focusing on youth and their disrupted lives, this work argues that Central America’s notable level of gang activity is grounded in its particularly violent history of repression.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Levenson, Deborah. Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013a.
  450. DOI: 10.1215/9780822395621Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. The definitive work on the topic. Situates gangs within the realm of politics, and most particularly “necropolitics,” and examines changes from the 1980s to the new millennium, as gangs evolved from less violent groups to ones that embrace death. Also provides information on the prisons, drugs, and remilitarization.
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Levenson, Deborah. “What Happened to the Revolution? Guatemala City’s Maras from Life to Death.” In War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala. Edited by Carlota McAllister and Diane M. Nelson, 195–217. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013b.
  454. DOI: 10.1215/9780822377405Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. This piece complements Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala 1998 and Levenson 2013a, and provides an excellent short-form writing for assignment to undergraduates.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica. 4 vols. San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2001–2006.
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  459. A detailed overview of gangs around Central America, this reference work compiles the findings of numerous researchers. This work is useful for on-the-ground details and data, as well as for comparative studies.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. O’Neill, Kevin Lewis. “The Reckless Will: Prison Chaplaincy and the Problem of Mara Salvatrucha.” Public Culture 22 (2010): 67–87.
  462. DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2009-016Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. Using a Foucauldian approach to gangs, this article explores a ministry working with members of MS-13 inside Guatemala City prisons. The fact that Christian conversion is one possible way for members to escape gangs has led to increased support for ministries in the context of an absent state.
  464. Find this resource:
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