Tamalitos

Guatemala has a rich cultural history and is a centre of origin and diversity for cultivated plants. This case study seeks to examine the role of human culture in the evolution of plant resources and the dynamic relationship between people and their natural environment. It focuses on the agricultural production of maize in Guatemala and looks at the role that women have played in its genetic conservation.

In the delightful Mayan folktale The Dog Who Spoke, we learn what happens when a dog’s master magically transforms into a dog-man who reasons like a man but acts like a dog. This and the other Mayan folktales in this bilingual collection brim with the enchanting creativity of rural Guatemala’s oral culture. In addition to stories about ghosts and humans turning into animals, the volume also offers humorous yarns. Hailing from the Lake Atitlán region in the Guatemalan highlands, these tales reflect the dynamics of, and conflicts between, Guatemala’s Indian, Ladino, and white cultures. The animals, humans, and supernatural forces that figure in these stories represent Mayan cultural values, social mores, and history. James D. Sexton and Fredy Rodríguez-Mejía allow the thirty-three stories to speak for themselves—first in the original Spanish and then in English translations that maintain the meaning and rural inflection of the originals. Available in print for the first time, with a glossary of Indian and Spanish terms, these Guatemalan folktales represent generations of transmitted oral culture that is fast disappearing and deserves a wider audience.

"In her book, Silent Looms: Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town, Tracy Bachrach Ehlers captures the paradox of gender relations in a society that accords power and authority to men yet leaves the major burden of child care and economic maintenance of the family to women. Most monographs on Maya populations have either ignored women's contributions to the indigenous economy or, when they have included women's work, have ignored the contradiction between patriarchal ideology and observed behavior that is increasingly sharpened by the political and economic transformations taking place. "

Winner, James Beard Foundation Best Cookbook of the Year Award, 2015 James Beard Foundation Best International Cookbook Award, 2015 The Art of Eating Prize for Best Food Book of the Year, 2015 The Yucatán Peninsula is home to one of the world's great regional cuisines. With a foundation of native Maya dishes made from fresh local ingredients, it shares much of the same pantry of ingredients and many culinary practices with the rest of Mexico. Yet, due to its isolated peninsular location, it was also in a unique position to absorb the foods and flavors of such far-flung regions as Spain and Portugal, France, Holland, Lebanon and the Levant, Cuba and the Caribbean, and Africa. In recent years, gourmet magazines and celebrity chefs have popularized certain Yucatecan dishes and ingredients, such as Sopa de lima and achiote, and global gastronomes have made the pilgrimage to Yucatán to tantalize their taste buds with smoky pit barbecues, citrus-based pickles, and fiery chiles. But until now, the full depth and richness of this cuisine has remained little understood beyond Yucatán's borders. An internationally recognized authority on Yucatecan cuisine, chef David Sterling takes you on a gastronomic tour of the peninsula in this unique cookbook, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition. Presenting the food in the places where it's savored, Sterling begins in jungle towns where Mayas concoct age-old recipes with a few simple ingredients they grow themselves. He travels over a thousand miles along the broad Yucatán coast to sample a bounty of seafood; shares "the people's food"at bakeries, chicharronerías, street vendors, home restaurants, and cantinas; and highlights the cooking of the peninsula's three largest cities—Campeche, Mérida, and Valladolid—as well as a variety of pueblos noted for signature dishes. Throughout the journey, Sterling serves up over 275 authentic, thoroughly tested recipes that will appeal to both novice and professional cooks. He also discusses pantry staples and basic cooking techniques and offers substitutions for local ingredients that may be hard to find elsewhere. Profusely illustrated and spiced with lively stories of the region's people and places, Yucatán: Recipes from a Culinary Expedition is the long-awaited definitive work on this distinctive cuisine.

An exemplary story of solidarity in action, Cultivating a Revolutionary Spirit conveys the exhilarating experience of being part of paradigm-changing revolutions. Bill Lankford visited Nicaragua in 1984 to see the Sandinista revolution for himself. What he found led this physics professor to volunteer his skills teaching at the Central American University in Managua. There, he and his students developed a solar cooking project which took on a life of its own, spreading throughout the five countries of Central America. In Cultivating a Revolutionary Spirit, Bill describes how local women used the tools of carpentry to build solar ovens and how they used the tools of feminism to take more control over their own lives and their communities. Bill leveraged his personal resources as a white North American man—professionally educated, fluent in English, with access to money and connections—to facilitate the work of Central American women who started by building ovens and went on to create an array of projects to meet basic needs, improve health, and increase access to educational and leadership opportunities for women.

The Maya—the Indians who inhabited part of Mexico and Central America in pre-Hispanic times—left the modern world a legacy of remarkable cooking that is still practiced in cliffside huts and middle-class haciendas. Copeland Marks has traveled widely throughout Guatemala and other countries that carry the Mayan heritage, in order to introduce us to the everyday pleasures of this little-known cuisine. For anyone who loves the taste of tamales, tortillas, and pungent sauces, this book will provide a rich adventure that begins with—but goes far beyond—those staples of the corn kitchen. The recipes reveal a delightful and accessible cuisine that, in addition to showcasing traditional Mayan flavor profiles, combines culinary ideas from India, Africa, the Caribbean, Great Britain and Spain.

The myth and ceremony of Maya beliefs have been sustained for over five hundred years in spite of massacres, persecution, and discrimination.