Creatively researched and thoughtfully written and analysed, On Our Own Terms is a welcome contribution to the historiography of the Cold War in Guatemala, illuminating indigenista development policies during the Revolution (1944–54) and highlighting Indigenous agency in relation to changing forms of counter-insurgency development. Sarah Foss pursues a ‘holistic analysis of the lived experiences of development’ (p. 7) in Indigenous communities through archival research and oral histories with programme officers and surviving recipients to revisit well-known cases and explore less-examined programmes. A core concern is the intersection of development and race, specifically how development programmes were shaped by broader and narrower conceptions of acceptable indigeneity, or the ‘permitted Indian’.
Foss pursues a ‘layered history’ (p. 9) to highlight how development was understood often quite differently by planners, implementers, and their intended beneficiaries: Indigenous communities whom Foss positions as the protagonists. A key theme is that Indigenous communities have embraced many but not all forms of modernisation and reworked development on their own terms.
Foss offers a fascinating description of the emergence of the Instituto Indigenista Nacional de Guatemala (Guatemalan National Indigenous Institute, IING) at the intersection of Guatemalan indigenismo and action anthropology, and its role in reimagining Indigenous citizenship and institutionalising this new vision. Foss describes how state development during the Revolution did not aim to assimilate (‘ladinize’) Indigenous culture, but rather incorporate it into modernity and national economic life: ‘integration without assimilation’ (p. 48). ‘De-Indianizing’ in this context meant shedding negative qualities associated with Indianness while preserving customs and traditions. Analysing a rural literacy campaign, she argues that revolutionary-era programmes ‘sought to be more racially inclusive while still maintaining the status quo’ (p. 53). Foss describes assertions that Indigenous citizens must undergo modernisation as paternalistic, although Indigenous ethnographers Agustín Pop (Tz'utukil) and Simón Otzoy (Kaqchikel) saw backwardness in San Bartolomé Milpas Altas as an effect of poverty. She also shows how some communities rejected revolutionary policy due to allegiances with competing parties and concerns that echoed anti-communist propaganda.
The rest of the book focuses on how military-led governments after 1954 pursued ‘de-Indianization’ and modernisation to ‘contain the appeal of leftist politics’ while defining deviations from the permitted model of indigeneity as subversive (p. 109). The United States funded and closely monitored the ‘authoritarian regime it had helped install’ and which often showed little initiative in rural development (p. 112).
A top-down, technical, depoliticising and controlling approach to anti-communist development offered far less space for local agency than the IING's previous work. Foss describes this shift through analysis of the Programa de Mejoramiento Integral de Tactic (Tactic's Integrated Improvement Programme, PMIT), a pilot community development initiative in Alta Verapaz – the IING's last major programme. Foss describes how residents of Tactic welcomed PMIT's non-assimilative approach, which ‘allowed them to further solidify their position as Indigenous citizens, on their own terms’ (p. 126), and objected when the state abruptly closed the programme in 1958, a decision Foss attributes to villagers creating ‘alternatives to the state's permitted Indian model’ and ‘upsetting existing social relations’ (pp. 132–3).
After Tactic, the state defunded the IING as they pursued more centralised planning through the Desarrollo Comunitario (Community Development, DESCOM) national programme. State planners, more zealous in their anti-communism after the Cuban Revolution, hoped that through infrastructure, promoting community self-help, and agricultural modernisation, DESCOM would provoke the ‘mental transformations necessary for forging political stability’ (p. 144), and enable them to ‘socially engineer predictable, controllable and modernized citizens’ without upsetting social hierarchies (p. 151). But these overtly racist counter-insurgency objectives were not shared by programme agents, staff or rural communities, who welcomed and sometimes competed for limited resources, while resisting school attendance and some new agricultural techniques.
Foss revisits the ill-fated state colonisation programmes in the Ixcán led by progressive Maryknoll priests, arguing that local challenges to army resource grabs strayed beyond the state's narrow racialised confines of development and provoked extreme violence. Chapter 7 analyses photographic evidence to contrast intensive counter-insurgency development in army-led refugee resettlement camps (development poles) to development in internally displaced Comunidades de Población en Resistencia (Communities of Populations in Resistance, CPRs).
More could be said about the tension between critiques of modernisation as a racist civilising mission and evidence that Indigenous communities and leaders embraced modernisation as a solution to imposed backwardness. It would have been helpful to locate DESCOM in relation to other counter-insurgency development initiatives in the 1970s led by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Although in part a limit of the archival data, the book could have engaged more closely with scholarship on the transformation of Indigenous political consciousness and agency in this period, to ask how experiences with contradictory state approaches to development (promoting and constraining) informed shared understandings of advancement in the context of political violence and guerrilla organising. Readers might wonder whether it was indeed villagers’ deviation from the state's permitted model of development in the context of the guerrilla that led to repression in the Ixcán, or whether villagers turned to the guerrilla rather than ‘remaining neutral’ (p. 189) because they came to understand that taking up the Guatemalan state's meagre offer for development without land reform in difficult conditions with insufficient funds would still land them in the subversive category, as such accusations began well before the guerrilla's arrival. More could also be said about the dance between USAID and the Guatemalan state. Indeed, the evidence presented could support the conclusion that by the 1970s, if not before, the Guatemalan government eyed any Indigenous development with suspicion, and only maintained a pretence of development to placate their benefactor, finally merging development with extreme violence to quell widespread support for the guerrilla. Foss’ description of the multicultural vision of the 1996 peace accords as presenting ‘exciting possibilities for the pursuit of a new development model’ (p. 240) seems insufficiently critical of their narrow market-orientation and exclusion of long-standing Indigenous and revolutionary demands. One could argue that the resonance of the guerrilla's message, the pathological nature of post-accords electoral politics, the elite capture of post-peace democracy, and more recent resistance to extractive industries, stem from the fact that Guatemala's Indigenous communities have never had the opportunity to pursue development on their own terms.
