Guatemalan Journey
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- £17.99
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- £17.99
Publisher Description
Guatemala draws some half million tourists each year, whose brief visits to the ruins of ancient Maya cities and contemporary highland Maya villages may give them only a partial and folkloric understanding of Guatemalan society. In this vividly written travel narrative, Stephen Connely Benz explores the Guatemala that casual travelers miss, using his encounters with ordinary Guatemalans at the mall, on the streets, at soccer games, and even at the funeral of massacre victims to illuminate the social reality of Guatemala today.
The book opens with an extended section on the capital, Guatemala City, and then moves out to the more remote parts of the country where the Guatemalan Indians predominate. Benz offers us a series of intelligent and sometimes humorous perspectives on Guatemala’s political history and the role of the military, the country’s environmental degradation, the influence of foreign missionaries, and especially the impact of the United States on Guatemala, from governmental programs to fast food franchises.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Most books on Guatemala concentrate on either the country's nightmarish political situation or its mysterious Maya past, making it difficult for readers to get any clear idea of contemporary daily life. Fulbright scholar Benz spent two years doing such ordinary, day-by-day things as shopping for food, buying a motor scooter and standing in the same administrative lines as ordinary Guatemalans. With his family in tow, he traveled to some of the most remote and unstable parts of the country, watched, listened, and came back with stories a more hard-driven reporter would probably never have taken the time to hear. Benz doesn't flinch from the fact that this is a country where, during massacres of peasants, the opening of a shopping mall hogs the news coverage. He grapples with the hot issues of the influx of foreign missionaries, mass killings and a strangling bureaucracy with the refreshing attitude that he is not an expert but an observer. Unfortunately, the book comes to a rather abrupt end, leaving readers searching for a missing chapter and eager for this astute observer's conclusions about his journey.
