Opening Reception Guatemala: In Words and Images
Opening Reception and Brief Talks by David Carey Jr., Chriss Sutherland and Lucas Desmond.
Live Music and Refreshments!
Please join The University of Southern Maine and Special Collections in celebrating the opening of "Guatemala: In Words and Images", an exhibition from The Guatemala Collection: Government and Church Documents for Sacatepéquez: 1587-1991, and the publication of Distilling the Influence of Alcohol.
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As part of the opening there will be brief talks related to the exhibition of materials from The Guatemala Collection: Government and Church Documents for Sacatepéquez: 1587-1991, which culminates four years of work by USM students Chriss Sutherland and Lucas Desmond who were responsible for arranging and describing the collection. Some of the documents from this collection informed the new publication Distilling the Influence of Alcohol, edited by David Carey Jr., USM Professor of History and CAHS Associate Dean. |
If you are unable to attend the opening, the exhibition will be up in the 6th floor Elevator Lobby through May 31st and may be viewed during open Glickman Library hours.
The Guatemala Collection: Government and Church Documents for Sacatepéquez: 1587-1991.
This collection spans an extensive historical period and comprehensively represents the demographic, social, and political reality of one of Guatemala’s most important departments. By providing evidence of the colonial and neocolonial structures of the Guatemalan government and Catholic Church, this collection shines a historic light on the present situation in Sacatepéquez and Guatemala more broadly. Guatemalan scholar and activist Christopher Lutz and two native Guatemalan archivists Eddy Gaytán and Héctor Concohá Ch’et assembled the collection throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. The materials are photocopies of original documents from the Archivo General de Centro América, the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano Francisco de Paula García Pelaez, both located in Guatemala City, and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain.
Distilling the Influence of Alcohol: Aguardiente in Guatemalan History.
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Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce, so much so that researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol. Often illicitly produced and consumed, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) was central to Guatemalan daily life. Alcohol helped build family livelihoods, boost local economies, and forge the nation. It also shaped Guatemala's turbulent categories of ethnicity, race, class, and gender. Drawing from archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic sources, the contributors to this volume investigate aguardiente's role from the colonial era to the twentieth century. Topics include women in the alcohol trade, taverns as places of social unrest, and tension between Maya and State authorities. By tracing Guatemala's past, people, and national development through the channel of an alcoholic beverage, Distilling the Influence of Alcohol opens new directions for Central American historical and anthropological research.
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