Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village - Softcover

Montejo (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915306654 ISBN 13: 9780915306657

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1995

Synopsis

TESTIMONY: DEATH OF A GUATEMALAN VILLAGE is an eyewitness account by a Guatemalan primary school teacher detailing one instance of violent conflict between the indigenous Maya people and the army. An accidental clash between the village's "civil patrol" and a Guatemalan army troop leads to the execution or imprisonment of many villagers. Written in clear, direct prose, this account reads like an adventure story while conveying an historical reality. This vital and essential record captures how Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which reached its most violent peak in the 1980s, ripped the traditional fabric of Guatemalan society.

About this title

Review:

"Victor Montejo writes vividly, with a translator of distinction, about another Latin American reality." --The Guardian

"Montejo has first-hand involvement with the violence that Didion both mystifies and, in a morbid way, romanticizes. He conveys a rare sense of the lived reality in Central America, in a clear storytelling voice that makes it chillingly human." --San Francisco Sun

"...may even be the first [text] modeling what can become a key epistemological dynamic: Indigenous autobiographies." --Auto/Biography Studies

About the Author:

Montejo is a Zacaltecan Maya and a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Davis.

Victor Perera (1934-2003), born in Guatemala, authored numerous books, including Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy, The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey, and a novel, The Conversion. For RITES he won the Present Tense/Joel Cavior Award in Biography. He has also been awarded the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (1980), the PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize (1986), and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writing Award (1992-94). Perera was also a reporter for the New York Times Magazine, a staff member of the New Yorker, and a professor at UC Berkeley. He cofounded Ivri-NASAWI, a national organization celebrating Sephardic arts and culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0915306654
• ISBN 13: 9780915306657
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277