Dana Frank, The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup (Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2018), pp. 335, $17.95, pb.
Indigenous communities, like the Nahuas of Tzinacapan, dispensable. The book has a few weaknesses that reflect the challenges of moving seamlessly between multiple scales: from the international to the national, and between different dimensions of the local. For example, the reader does not learn how Cuetzalan became a Magical Village until Chapter 6, information that would have been valuable at the outset. Chapter 5, which provides a close reading of a meeting between local tourism stakeholders, was a missed opportunity to examine the local beneficiaries of the programme. The chapter provides glimpses through the hotel proprietors, knowledge producers and bureaucrats involved in the meeting, but the sketch of the primary local proponents and beneficiaries remains unclear. Nevertheless, the book’s important insights outweigh these minor flaws. It provides a concrete example of the perils of the politics of recognition for marginalised communities by revealing how the official embrace of Indigenous heritage can function as yet another form of dispossession, and is thus of interest to a broad range of scholars of tourism, heritage studies and Indigenous studies, and scholars of the politics of recognition in and beyond Latin America.