Ignacio: The Diary of a Maya Indian of Guatemala [Paperback]

James D. Sexton (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1992

Central America from the eyes of a peasant illuminates the complex problems of the region: the nature of the social, personal, economic, medical, and religious matters as well as the political issues related to the great masses of Latin America's poor.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Spanning the years 1983-87, this volume is the sequel to Campesino: The Diary of a Guatemalan Indian ( LJ 7/85). Ignacio, a Mayan campesino living in the mountainous region around Lake Atitlan, supports his large family by tending fields of coffee and other crops, baking bread, and hiring himself out for small jobs. His observations are remarkable, not only for their astuteness, but also for their scope. Civil, religious, and military politics permeate the lives of the townspeople and villagers, who are daily caught between threats and promises from all sides. Struggles for improved education mingle with struggles for enough to eat. Ancestral traditions continue, while new customs, including chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous, arise to help the Indians deal with enduring problems. The narrative is repetitious and disjointed in places and would have been better served by heavier editing. Editor and translator Sexton adds several pages of useful contextual notes on contemporary events in Guatemala. A good purchase for college and research libraries, and for any library holding the previous volume.
- Ruth M. Mara, Agency for International Development, Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Son of Tecun Uman: A Maya Indian Tells His Life Story," "Campesino: The Diary of a Guatemalan Indian," and "Ignacio: The Diary of a Maya Indian of Guatemala"--have been a collaborative endeavor with a Guatemalan resident of a small village, Ignacio (not his real name).

The books make fascinating reading for the specialist and general audiences. Ignacio's topics range from politics to religion to the local economy. He also includes details of his upbringing, marriage, children, and grandchildren, and personalities from his village. The writing style is direct and Sexton's translation is meticulous. Ignacio's life history illustrates what anthropology is about--trying to understand aspects of human life in another culture -- Flare, Arizona Daily Sun, Friday, July 18, 1997

Ignacio Bizarro Ujpan was born in San Jose la Laguna (a pseudonymous town) on the shores of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, in 1941. The story of his life, and of a turbulent, perilous period of Guatemalan history, is now available to us in an unparalleled trilogy of diaries written by Bizarro, translated and edited by James Sexton. Ignacio: The Diary of a Maya Indian of Guatemala is the third volume of this remarkable series -- Latin American Indian Literatures Journal, Fall 1993

Ignacio is a fascinating and intimate glimpse into the daily life of an endangered cultural minority. -- Albuquerque Journal, Sunday, September 6, 1992

The diaries (Son of Tecun Uman: A Maya Indian Tells His Life Story 1981; Campesino: The Diary of a Guatemalan Indian 1985; Ignacio) and the folktales weave together to provide one of the most important sets of documents we have for Guatemala and Mesoamerica...

The Bizarro-Sexton team is a rare good event for Mesoamerican scholarship. They have produced documents of great value to ethnographers, historians, political scientists, community developers, folklorists, and the general audience. The documents will be mined and minded for generations -- Ethnohistory, Vol. 30, 1993

Thus Ignacio emerges as a man who by this third volume is quite able to articulate the pattern of abuses to which the poor and indigenous are subjected in Guatemala, and yet who, like the vast majority in the years of reasserted military hegemony from Rios Montt on, is unwilling to opt for armed revolutionary resistance. For Ignacio, and perhaps a large segment of the poor he may indeed represent, hope for change lies in the combinations of tradition and modernity, of the socioeconomic transformations fostered under the new electoral policies as they filter into the local communities. Ignacio knows quite well that the national politicians 'always...favor the millionaires and never the suffering people" (220). However, sick of guerrilla-miliary war, sick of abuses and violence that seem to lead nowhere, he is hopeful that the national government can change enough to improve wages and keep prices down, while he (and here his own protagonizing role) becomes increasingly involved in the local community and its political struggles as he works to bring new educational and entrepreneurial cooperative projects and win support from political candidates who Rigoberta might well consider as progressive.

These are the attitudes which ethnographer Sexton sees as significantly representative in the Mayan areas of Guatemala. If this is so, we may have some inkling as to why the Indian uprisings of the early 1980s did not represent a deeper, more extensive revolutionary movement that could lead to a potentially transformative conjuncture. Here we are, then, at the deepest, most significant level of Ignacio's texts as testimonio. To put it in terms of the older Marxist (Lukcsian-Goldmannian) categories evoked earlier in this discussion, Rigoberta may represent the "potential consciousness" of Guatemalan Indians, but Ignacio may well represent their "real consciousness" -- Literature and Resistance in Guatemala Textual Modes and Cultural Politics From El Senor Presidente to Rigoberta Menchu by Marc Zimmerman, 1995

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press; 1St Edition edition (February 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812213610
• ISBN-13: 978-0812213614
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,834,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.