George Lovell modestly describes this work as “an attempt to reconstruct aspects of the historical geography of the Cuchumatanes from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century” (7). Although scholarly interest in the Cuchumatán highlands of northwestern Guatemala has grown, few have rigorously studied the colonial era. Fewer still have produced a regional colonial history of the Cuchumatanes as such. Thus, Lovell's monograph stands virtually alone. Yet, modesty aside, Lovell does more than survey the Cuchumatán highlands under Spanish rule: he rewrites Guatemala's entire colonial history by placing evidence and protagonists from an overwhelmingly Maya periphery at its center. The result is a deeper and more balanced understanding of the people and forces that shaped Spanish colonialism.

Although his self-professed goal is to piece together the colonial history of the Cuchumatán region, Lovell repeatedly illustrates the adage that people make history even if they do not make it as they choose. He combines research on the Cuchumatanes with scholarship from other areas of Guatemala to show that the Maya, despite many disadvantages and hardships, shaped both the Spanish conquest and the practices, institutions, and society that followed. For example, Lovell points out that thousands of “yndios amigos” from Mexico and Guatemala were crucial to Alvarado's early victories over the K'iche'. Yet, he also emphasizes how the continuing opposition of unconquered enemies and erstwhile allies alike prevented the consolidation of a pax colonial in Guatemala for nearly two decades. As missionary activity superseded military conquest, Lovell demonstrates, indigenous resistance to congregación undermined Spanish policy even in places where it was apparently imposed with success. The Maya reverted to preconquest demographic patterns for reasons both cultural and practical, progressively deserting nucleated congregaciones until they resembled virtual ghost towns.

Lovell similarly places the Maya at the center of his discussions of how labor exploitation and land tenure evolved under Spanish rule. Debt peonage, he argues, resulted as much from indigenous antipathy toward onerous exactions imposed on the república de indios as it did from hacendado coercion. Hacienda peonage allowed the Maya to trade the tyranny of local crown and town officials, priests, and repartimiento labor in its various forms for the tyranny of the hacendado, who typically exploited their labor in exchange for payment in wages and goods in kind as well as offering access to land and credit. Although Lovell finds evidence that Cuchumatán haciendas had their roots in the encomienda, which used the policy of composición to take advantage of indigenous decline, he concludes that Mayan communities also employed composición and other legal mechanisms to protect their own territories from Spanish usurpation. “During the last century of colonial rule,” Lovell writes, “Indians still controlled two-thirds of the agricultural land of the [Cuchumatán] region” (134).

In this fourth edition, Lovell tightens the narrative, deletes some of the less effective figures, and moves the many tables to an appendix at the rear of the book. He also significantly expands his exploration of the challenges of historical research, in particular the problem of sources, or a lack thereof, and how to interpret them. He examines scholarly debates to demonstrate the cumulative, if tentative, nature of historical knowledge. Lovell does this most explicitly in his discussions of pre-Columbian demography, postconquest mortality, and competing interpretations of the epic struggle among Spaniards and rival indigenous groups during the conquest era.

Throughout, Lovell provides just enough background and context to make challenging topics accessible to the non-specialist while simultaneously enlivening the narrative with events and people drawn from the documents. The result is a historical geography that is both engaging to read and brimming with scholarly insight. For years, I have successfully used earlier editions in place of a textbook in my undergraduate courses on colonial Latin America. Given the improvements, I am certain this edition will be even more effective.