This fascinating book deals with the harmful tentacles of Colonial dominance and the way it shapes--more like the ways it "warps" a nation even centuries after the conquest. It presents a strong analysis on how the "criollo" or Creole landowning classes, themselves descendants of Spanish underclasses seeking a better future in conquered lands, managed to marginalize and oppress the indigenous majority into a Feudal-like serf society from the 1500s up into up into the 1940s, while at the same time creating a mestizo underclass that would become the artisans and laborers to serve the upper classes. The growing mestizo class, however, would eventually rise and fuel a politically progressive--relatively speaking--revolutionary movement that would prove to oppress even further the indigenous classes. It also works well in parsing out issues of race and class in Central American society. This book is a classic and works as an MRI into Guatemalan society. No wonder his author was exiled by the military dictatorships of the 1980s! He died in Mexico, a widely- respected scholar, in the late 1990s. ( )