Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition

"This book centers on the lives of young people in the violent aftermath of Guatemala's civil war. Once cast as ambassadors of the postwar peace and democracy, Guatemalan youth are routinely criminalized, feared, and excluded from civic spaces. Comprising a multi-sited ethnography, Bellino documents the ways that adolescents at four schools, embedded in urban and rural communities, learn about and make meaning of their country's history of authoritarianism, while developing their civic identities within a struggling democracy. Through rich ethnographic accounts, she traces youth experiences from schools to their homes and communities in order to understand how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice travel--often contentiously--across public and private spaces, as well as between generations. In doing so, we see how young people respond to educational silences and the rare opportunities to critically examine injustice, while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. Youth draw on histories of ethnic, class, and political marginalization in making everyday choices, as they decide whether to engage with, trust, question, or challenge fellow citizens and the institutional structures that organize their society. The book deepens our understanding of how postwar political processes and global discourses of peace, democracy, and transitional justice influence educational reform and everyday opportunities in and outside of schools to narrate, commemorate, and contest injustice. In a society still marked by legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised. "--