Sarah Foss's book is an innovative study of Cold War-era development projects in rural Guatemala. Rather than focusing solely on project outcomes, Foss explores the complex interactions and negotiations that took place between aid recipients and local development agents, presenting community development as a dialectic. She convincingly argues that development efforts often reinforced state efforts to control, surveil, and racialize rural Mayan communities, but because indigenous Guatemalans were not passive recipients, development projects also provided opportunities for these communities to question racism and forge alternative definitions of modernity.
Each of the book's seven chapters spotlights a development project in a different community. This approach succeeds thanks to Foss's extensive archival research and her collection of over 60 oral histories from former development agents, indigenous community members, and military officials. These sources allow Foss to center each chapter's narratives around the actions and perceptions of specific historical actors and to construct community vignettes that are cognizant of events at the national and international level. Each chapter illuminates the way that aid recipients negotiated, challenged, and reconstituted development projects to meet their needs and interests.
Foss skillfully weaves a chronological narrative that spans significant national, regional, and global shifts, integrating them into her history with such grace that her reader might overlook this accomplishment. Her history begins with an analysis of state efforts to modernize the Guatemalan countryside during the nation's Democratic Spring, which lasted from 1944 to 1954. During this period, the nation's progressive government saw poverty as the root cause of malnutrition, low levels of education, and other issues faced by rural indigenous communities. The government actively sought to bring indigenous communities into the nation through literacy programs, the extension of suffrage to all adult males, and land redistribution efforts. Perhaps one of the more interesting elements of Foss's pre-coup period analysis is her study of a poorer rural community that rejected land reform, perceiving this effort as a destabilizing communist threat.
Foss then turns her attention to the post-coup military government, which favored development projects that could be completed quickly and produce easily measurable results. The book's final chapters focus on Guatemala's civil war in 1960-96, a period during which the military government interpreted attempts by indigenous communities to assert their agency or negotiate the terms of a government development project as acts of subversion. Foss examines the Maryknolls’ Ixcán Grande colonization project, which initially received USAID funding and was touted as a successful development effort by the military government. A decade after its founding, however, when community members sought to assert their autonomy, challenging the established racial, economic, and political order, the military declared the community a “Little Cuba.” In the context of the civil war, the residents of Ixcán Grande would learn that even minor challenges to the military state could provoke horrifying racialized violence.
The final chapter considers the aftermath of the military's genocidal attack on Ixcán Grande and other communities through two collections of historic photographs of displaced survivors. Foss provides detailed descriptions of several photographs from both collections, but reproduces photos from only one of the two collections. This creates an imbalance in her analysis, weakening her ability to develop this chapter's central argument: that the government established “Model Communities” to consolidate state power and control over the lives of displaced survivors. Despite this shortcoming, Foss successfully highlights indigenous agency in this chapter, through her study of a Community of People in Resistance, one of many communities composed of people uprooted by the conflict who survived by hiding in the Guatemalan jungle. Foss's analysis of the photographs of this community emphasizes how they developed a communitarian understanding of development, directing their energies to the dual goals of surviving and resisting further state violence.
Foss has published a solid examination of rural development and indigenous agency in Guatemala. This book promises to excite Guatemalan and Central American scholars interested in the history of development, the Cold War, and rural nation-building efforts.
