“Strange Lands and Different Peoples”: Spaniards and Indians in Colonial Guatemala by W. George Lovell etal. (review)
Dividing their book into fourteen chapters with a succinct but eloquent conclusion and complemented by a genuinely useful appendix, George Lovell, Christopher Lutz, Wendy Kramer and William R. Sweezey weave archival sources, early histories, and secondary literature into a coherent treatment of sixteenth-century Guatemala. While the book’s final two chapters are dedicated to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the core concentrates on the mechanisms and processes that set the foundation for Spanish colonial rule. Given the importance of the sixteenth century in the development of colonial society, this decision seems both prudent and logical. Indeed, as historians of the region have argued, patterns of rule and social strata that characterized the early period continue to haunt modern Guatemala.