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Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope (Volume 8)
Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz—an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala—tells the story of the village of Santa María Tzejá, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village—its birth, destruction, and rebirth—embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today.
Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.
Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.
330 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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May 26, 2019
Poverty is /because/ of wealth. 3% of landholdings--plantations for export--take 65% of the farmland. Leaving 90% of landholdings too small to subsist on. [p. 16] Eisenhower's CIA deposed reformer Árbenz in 1954. Ever since, the U.S. has given money, arms, training to brutal military dictatorships. [pp. 21-22, 254] Any failure to worship the military was crushed. 200,000 were murdered. Kill "communists." The worst period was 1982-1983 under Reagan and Ríos Montt. Landless people slash and burn jungle to farm; this soil doesn't yield for long. Poverty is /because/ of wealth.
People with power /never/ give it up voluntarily. Though leftists won in Nicaragua in 1979, and were doing well at the time in El Salvador, Guatemalan leftists didn't know the extent to which /every/ U.S. president from Eisenhower through Clinton /loved/ to lavish money and military hardware and training on the Guatemalan army. (Carter was the lone exception. ) The leftist guerrillas had no chance. The peasant population was a casualty of the army's scorched earth policy, which Americans had learned in Vietnam.
The book is an academic cultural anthropology, focusing on one village in northern Guatemala, that turned out to be the center of the storm. All its inhabitants the army could find were massacred in 1982. Survivors eventually rebuilt; refugees returned from Mexico. But wealth is still hoarded by the few, who prey on the many poor. The author spent several weeks there, every year or every few years, from 1973 through 2003. (In 1973, the terror was not yet thought of.)
https://books.google.com/books?id=oHx... a New York Times editorial by the author in the 1990s, detailing some of the U.S.-supported genocide.
Americas Watch and Amnesty International reports on the genocide:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstr...
worldcat.org/title/guatemala-massive-...
Quiz question:
https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/work...
People with power /never/ give it up voluntarily. Though leftists won in Nicaragua in 1979, and were doing well at the time in El Salvador, Guatemalan leftists didn't know the extent to which /every/ U.S. president from Eisenhower through Clinton /loved/ to lavish money and military hardware and training on the Guatemalan army. (Carter was the lone exception. ) The leftist guerrillas had no chance. The peasant population was a casualty of the army's scorched earth policy, which Americans had learned in Vietnam.
The book is an academic cultural anthropology, focusing on one village in northern Guatemala, that turned out to be the center of the storm. All its inhabitants the army could find were massacred in 1982. Survivors eventually rebuilt; refugees returned from Mexico. But wealth is still hoarded by the few, who prey on the many poor. The author spent several weeks there, every year or every few years, from 1973 through 2003. (In 1973, the terror was not yet thought of.)
https://books.google.com/books?id=oHx... a New York Times editorial by the author in the 1990s, detailing some of the U.S.-supported genocide.
Americas Watch and Amnesty International reports on the genocide:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstr...
worldcat.org/title/guatemala-massive-...
Quiz question:
https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/work...
June 8, 2013
Imbedded, activist anthropology narrating the story of one Guatemalan rainforest village much in the words of participants and her own frequent visit. She follows the same people from collective imagining on lowland plantations to the arduous founding in no-man's land in the jungle with hope and care; onto the generally mutually supportive interaction between autonomous, self-reliant villagers and the guerrilla movement based near their home; and then, to the genocidal massacre in which the Guatemalan army stopped distinguishing between indigenous Maya human and armed enemy combatant. Manz follows the story over two more decades to sufficiently complicate easy narratives about guilt and collaboration, condemning the army but refusing to judge the choices of tortured and destitute survivors from the village, without absolving actions and words of consequences, either.
This village, Santa Maria Tzeja, was unique in Guatemala for its combination of purposeful, cooperative founding and villager-led organized reunification post-conflict. It's a testament to the strength of organization, as well as insurmountable obstacles of poverty. Manz's writing is urgent and careful, and she situates herself clearly without distracting from the words and opinions laid out by her subjects. She interviewed these villagers over years and years, living with them at times, bringing photos and messages between refugees in Mexico and the family in Guatemala, advocating for justice and later international money, building deep relationships that allowed for trust and honesty. The book is a wonderful insider-outsider look into experience and thought, focused on one place and people but informed by a broad history of Guatemala and anthro theory. She didn't catch everything, and as she concludes by explaining the ways in which Santa Maria Tzeja was not representative of the Guatemala civil war I was left wondering who were the guerrillas (insiders? outsiders?) and how did this racist capitalism get so deep and wide into the army's soldiers? What did genocide mean in villages less collectively organized, where the act of founding the village was not itself a conscious rebellion against exploitation of the Maya?
I wish she had written more about gender and relationships within the village, and exploring the links between the exploitation of capitalism and the brutality of racism; the threat of collective action in the collectively-conceived indigenous body. Read with care; she details tortures I hadn't heard of before.
This village, Santa Maria Tzeja, was unique in Guatemala for its combination of purposeful, cooperative founding and villager-led organized reunification post-conflict. It's a testament to the strength of organization, as well as insurmountable obstacles of poverty. Manz's writing is urgent and careful, and she situates herself clearly without distracting from the words and opinions laid out by her subjects. She interviewed these villagers over years and years, living with them at times, bringing photos and messages between refugees in Mexico and the family in Guatemala, advocating for justice and later international money, building deep relationships that allowed for trust and honesty. The book is a wonderful insider-outsider look into experience and thought, focused on one place and people but informed by a broad history of Guatemala and anthro theory. She didn't catch everything, and as she concludes by explaining the ways in which Santa Maria Tzeja was not representative of the Guatemala civil war I was left wondering who were the guerrillas (insiders? outsiders?) and how did this racist capitalism get so deep and wide into the army's soldiers? What did genocide mean in villages less collectively organized, where the act of founding the village was not itself a conscious rebellion against exploitation of the Maya?
I wish she had written more about gender and relationships within the village, and exploring the links between the exploitation of capitalism and the brutality of racism; the threat of collective action in the collectively-conceived indigenous body. Read with care; she details tortures I hadn't heard of before.
May 13, 2024
Paradise in Ashes is an excellent historical narrative of the Maya people of the village Santa Maria Tzeja. There is an excellent focus on collective formation in settling the tropical lands and the ability of the people to form a cooperative. Discussion of guerrilla participation is formed through extensive interviews with villager participants both during the insurgency and afterwards, examining the collective and individual memories of those participants.
The last third of the book is an excellent telling of the resiliency of the people: even atomized and cut through during the war, refugees and remainee villagers refind their communal bonds and continue to exist and succeed throughout the most difficult of times.
The last third of the book is an excellent telling of the resiliency of the people: even atomized and cut through during the war, refugees and remainee villagers refind their communal bonds and continue to exist and succeed throughout the most difficult of times.
November 8, 2012
Everyone needs to read this book 1) because there is not enough discussion or acknowledgement of the genocide in Guatemala and 2) because the story of survival and determination is incredibly inspiring and moving.
March 4, 2025
An incredible anthropological account of a town’s evolution over 25 years in Guatemala. Insightful, but a little dry. Missed certain elements that would provide greater context .
April 5, 2017
I received this book as a Christmas present and didn't stop reading from the moment I picked it up, finishing in 4 days flat.
The book is an excellent ethnographic account of a modern, majority-Mayan Guatemalan village that spans decades. It begins in the 1970s, as highland villagers fleeing oppression and poverty in their home region settle the village in the Ixcan region. Through hardwork, they are able to develop a model cooperative town in which they are able, despite the continued hardship, to at long last live free of the nexus of plantation owners, police, and state institutions which previously kept them in a vicious cycle of poverty and discrimination.
The author then follows the village amid stepped up repression as the state takes notice of the region's success. Manz does an excellent job tying in the local politics of military repression against the villagers with the broader Cold War politics and US backing for right-wing Central American dictatorships during the period, allowing us to watch step by step and understand the consequences and feedback loops that tied this remote village into national, regional, and global politics, eventually leading to a terrible massacre and the expulsion of most of the villagers.
Due to the incredible amount of time Manz has spent tracking the story of the village, the book is breathtaking in its scope: after closely following the town as a model cooperative society in the 70s and witnessing how the military took control in the 1980s, the author spent time in refugee camps in Mexico meeting with survivors and linking them back to the few who managed to remain in the village (after living for years in hiding). This allows an incredibly complex and nuanced reading of the politics of refugee return in the 1990s detailed by the author from both sides.
Although toward the end Manz presents a great level of personal detail and downplays the events occurring in national politics - making it a little confusing as to what exactly has changed politically that allows certain events to occur after decades of repression - overall the book is an excellent ethnography that offers an extremely important and relevant glimpse into modern Guatemalan history, the genocide of the Maya carried out by US-backed military leaders in the 1980s, and the history of modern Central America more broadly. Highly recommended.
The book is an excellent ethnographic account of a modern, majority-Mayan Guatemalan village that spans decades. It begins in the 1970s, as highland villagers fleeing oppression and poverty in their home region settle the village in the Ixcan region. Through hardwork, they are able to develop a model cooperative town in which they are able, despite the continued hardship, to at long last live free of the nexus of plantation owners, police, and state institutions which previously kept them in a vicious cycle of poverty and discrimination.
The author then follows the village amid stepped up repression as the state takes notice of the region's success. Manz does an excellent job tying in the local politics of military repression against the villagers with the broader Cold War politics and US backing for right-wing Central American dictatorships during the period, allowing us to watch step by step and understand the consequences and feedback loops that tied this remote village into national, regional, and global politics, eventually leading to a terrible massacre and the expulsion of most of the villagers.
Due to the incredible amount of time Manz has spent tracking the story of the village, the book is breathtaking in its scope: after closely following the town as a model cooperative society in the 70s and witnessing how the military took control in the 1980s, the author spent time in refugee camps in Mexico meeting with survivors and linking them back to the few who managed to remain in the village (after living for years in hiding). This allows an incredibly complex and nuanced reading of the politics of refugee return in the 1990s detailed by the author from both sides.
Although toward the end Manz presents a great level of personal detail and downplays the events occurring in national politics - making it a little confusing as to what exactly has changed politically that allows certain events to occur after decades of repression - overall the book is an excellent ethnography that offers an extremely important and relevant glimpse into modern Guatemalan history, the genocide of the Maya carried out by US-backed military leaders in the 1980s, and the history of modern Central America more broadly. Highly recommended.
March 31, 2015
The job of an ethnographer seems to be to call them as she sees them and this is exactly what Beatrice Manz does in this moving and frightening book. The land tenure system she describes in Guatemala is unbelievable to outsiders--the plight of peasants there is comparable to that faced by African-American citizens in the south after the end of Reconstruction. The law was what the landowners said it was and they had state power to back it up. In Guatemala this incuded the police, the army and semi-official paramilitary death squads which were as lawless as the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan but more effective.
The village that Manz studies is incredibly poor. The people of the village decide to set out for the wild northern part of Guatemala where land has been promised. Once there, having borne the hardships of a trek through unimproved jungle they found that their very existence was a threat to the landowning class. Using methods which the U.S. had tried in Vietman (and which were first used years before in Central America by the U.S. trained military) the villagers were rounded up into strategic hamlet type operations with military posts nearby, informers to spy upon them and agent provacateurs to infiltrate their policitical and social organizations.
It is a heartbreaking tale but ultimately uplifting as Manz shows that the human spirit is indominatable. Beautifully written--this may be an academic study but is by no means done in "academic" prose--and well worth reading.
The village that Manz studies is incredibly poor. The people of the village decide to set out for the wild northern part of Guatemala where land has been promised. Once there, having borne the hardships of a trek through unimproved jungle they found that their very existence was a threat to the landowning class. Using methods which the U.S. had tried in Vietman (and which were first used years before in Central America by the U.S. trained military) the villagers were rounded up into strategic hamlet type operations with military posts nearby, informers to spy upon them and agent provacateurs to infiltrate their policitical and social organizations.
It is a heartbreaking tale but ultimately uplifting as Manz shows that the human spirit is indominatable. Beautifully written--this may be an academic study but is by no means done in "academic" prose--and well worth reading.
January 10, 2013
Well written, compelling, and, as Paul Farmer likes to say 'historically deep and geographically broad" account of a small Guatemalan community over half a century of repressions, migrations, and war. This is by far an outstanding piece of anthropological work, the result of more than 30 years of fieldwork and of tremendous historical background research. Mantz, as any good anthropologist, puts the personal lives of the small Guatemalan community into perspective and also places world history and politics in the personal perspective of the Guatemalan villagers.
May 7, 2007
Explores advocacy anthropology and the genocide in Guatemala. Manz is an excellent author and a truly courageous woman.
August 19, 2015
This was a hard but necessary book to read as I traveled through Guatemala recently. While I was most interested in the thread of village life between the pressures of both the guerrillas and the military, I was also interested in her discussion of anthropological approaches and the role of memory.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews