Abstract

Abstract:

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, certain Guatemalan intellectual elite of La Generación del 20 maintained a public dialogue in newspapers and journals that impressed upon their readers a racist ideology with which to imagine the nation. In this article, I propose that Flavio Herrera contributed to this project by writing a criollista novel to document a historical moment upon which to construct the future. To begin, I historically situate the author and his work before outlining the relevance of the characteristics of criollismo to the analysis of the text. Then, I delineate the steps Herrera takes to echo and so carry forward the vision espoused by his intellectual contemporaries in order to conclude by identifying his as yet another voice contributing to the present-day hegemonic discourse that Marta Casaús directly links to this group, and that has consistently legitimized the institutional violence and social marginalization that the Maya communities continue to actively resist today.

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