On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala

by Sarah Foss

Overview

During the Cold War, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, economics, and society grew in scope and complexity, with diplomatic legacies evident in today's hemispheric policies. Development became a key form of intervention as government officials and experts from the United States and Latin America believed that development could foster hemispheric solidarity and security. In parts of Latin America, its implementation was especially intricate because recipients of these programs were diverse Indigenous peoples with their own politics, economics, and cultures. Contrary to project planners' expectations, Indigenous beneficiaries were not passive recipients but actively engaged with development interventions and, in the process, redefined racialized ideas about Indigeneity.

Sarah Foss illustrates how this process transpired in Cold War Guatemala, spanning democratic revolution, military coups, and genocidal civil war. Drawing on previously unused sources such as oral histories, anthropologists' field notes, military records, municipal and personal archives, and a private photograph collection, Foss analyzes the uses and consequences of development and its relationship to ideas about race from multiple perspectives, emphasizing its historical significance as a form of intervention during the Cold War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469670331
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/29/2022
Series:	New Cold War History
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Sarah Foss is assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University.&8239;

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Foss offers a crucial window into twentieth-century Guatemalan history and the Latin American Cold War and sheds new light on the continuities and discontinuities in imaginations of citizenship, modernization, and nation."—Julie Gibbings, author of Our Time Is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala



Adroit, adept, and rooted in the daily experiences of Indigenous and ladino actors who implemented or were otherwise engaged with aid projects and programs, this will be an oft-cited book in the scholarly literature on postcolonial Guatemala and the effects of development and modernization more broadly."—David Carey Jr., author of I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–1944

Editorial Reviews

An extensively researched and thoughtful volume. . . . a necessary intervention in how we examine development, as it moves away from a focus on policy and toward how development was implemented, contested, and negotiated on the ground."—Hispanic American Historical Review



Creatively researched and thoughtfully written and analysed, On Our Own Terms is a welcome contribution to the historiography of the Cold War in Guatemala."—Journal of Latin American Studies



Excellent. In this well-researched book . . . Foss shows readers how states used development to forge a politically useful populace. On Our Own Terms is a praiseworthy contribution."—Journal of Social History



An innovative study of Cold War-era development projects in rural Guatemala. . . . 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."—The Americas



A pivotal contribution to the study of development and Indigenous history in Guatemala. Foss's account places Indigenous communities at the center of the global Cold War, revealing them as purposive participants in development initiatives over a half-century of Guatemalan history." —A Contracorriente

From the Publisher