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The Good Road

A K’iche’ Revolutionary Theopolitics

Book

Pages: 294

Release Date: December 01, 2026

Subjects
Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Native and Indigenous Studies

The Good Road situates Guatemala’s early 1980s Indigenous uprising and the genocide that crushed it in a five-hundred-year history of Indigenous resistance to colonization and exploitation. Drawing on decades of archival and ethnographic research, Carlota McAllister traces the emergence of conciencia, a Spanish word meaning both consciousness and conscience, in a Maya-K’iche’-speaking community called Chupol after the Pan-American highway was built through it in 1956. Foregrounding the role of the Catholic Church in mediating state-Indigenous relations and promoting rural transformation in Cold War Guatemala, McAllister shows how Chupolenses came to embrace revolutionary armed struggle as both a moral and political imperative. She argues that Chupol’s participation in revolution unfolded through Indigenous organizational processes and political concepts animated by longstanding Indigenous theopolitical critiques of the organization of power in the Americas. The Good Road shows how, despite the uprising’s bloody defeat, the theopolitical imperative to build a “good road” forward continues to animate Indigenous politics in twenty-first-century Guatemala.

Praise

“The Good Road is a powerful, deeply original account of the rise and afterlives of Indigenous revolutionary consciousness in Guatemala. Carlota McAllister draws from decades of extraordinary fieldwork and archival research to bring to light a ‘K’ich’e revolutionary theopolitics’ propelled by Catholic Liberation Theology and Maya cosmology and that, despite having endured genocidal violence, lives on today. This brilliant book reshapes our understanding of religiosity amid revolution and genocide.” - Gastón Gordillo, author of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction

“In this beautifully written book, reflective of the author’s intellectual and affective commitment to survivors of the Guatemala genocide, McAllister weaves together gender studies, religion, peace and conflict studies, theology and the literature on civil war to produce a richly textured work.” - Kimberly Theidon, author of Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin

“Like the histories of Indigenous mobilizing and counterrevolutionary annihilation it reconstructs, The Good Road is at once devastating and luminous. By gazing into the seeming void of genocide and unfurling from it whole worlds of meaning, Carlota McAllister offers us a model of ethnographic attunement: to silences filled with sound, to how revolutionary consciousness endures the most shattering of defeats, and to Maya subjectivities that have long refused sublimation into an ontology of victimhood. A landmark contribution and a profound reminder that the journey toward liberation can take paths both secular and divine.” - Kirsten Weld, Harvard University

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Carlota McAllister is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. She is the coeditor of War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala, also published by Duke University Press.

List of Abbreviations ix
Note on Terminology xi
Introduction. The Good Road 1
1. Centering Chupol and Birthing Conciencia 25
2. Clear Heads, Solidary Hearts, Combative Fists 64
3. The Rise and Fall of a New Iximche’ 98
4. The Sovereignties of the Dead 138
5. Gender and Generativity After Revolution 171
Epilogue. Don’t Get Angry When We March 205
Acknowledgments 213
Glossary of K’iche’ Terms 217
Notes 219
Bibliography 243
Index 267

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3936-5 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3440-7 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6299-8 /