The Good Road

The Good Road situates Guatemala’s early 1980s Indigenous uprising and the genocide that crushed it within a five-hundred-year history of Indigenous resistance to colonization and exploitation. Drawing on decades of archival and ethnographic research, Carlota McAllister traces the emergence of conciencia, a Spanish word meaning both “consciousness” and “conscience,” in a Maya-K’iche’-speaking community called Chupol after the Pan-American highway was built through it in 1956. Foregrounding the role of the Catholic Church in mediating state-Indigenous relations and promoting rural transformation in Cold War–era Guatemala, McAllister shows how Chupolenses came to embrace revolutionary armed struggle as both a moral and political imperative. She argues that Chupol’s participation in revolution unfolded through organizational processes and political concepts animated by longstanding Indigenous theopolitical critiques of the organization of power in the Americas. The Good Road shows how, despite the uprising’s bloody defeat, the theopolitical imperative to build a “good road” forward continues to animate Indigenous politics in twenty-first-century Guatemala.