"Saving People, Not Souls": Religious Conversion and Social Activism in Guatemala during the Cold War

• In Event: La Politización de la Religion: Activismo, Conflicto y Criminalizacion

Abstract

Based on archival material and interviews, this paper explores the history of religious activism in Guatemala during the 1960s. It does so by reexamining the history of rural Catholicism, religious conversion, and social activism in the Western highlands of Guatemala. This paper argues that, as Maya parishioners, foreign and Guatemalan clerics, and social activists interacted with each other, Guatemalan Catholicism evolved into unanticipated – and oftentimes progressive – directions during the Cold War. Rural Catholic networks gave laypeople the opportunity to assume increasingly important roles within the Guatemalan Church and advocate for a more just and humane socioeconomic order. They did so by promoting a series of programs of socioeconomic development, including credit and agricultural cooperatives. In the process, the participants of these networks became part of a broader transnational movement of Cold War religious and social activists. This paper, therefore, engages the historiography on the Cold War in Latin America. In particular, it moves beyond the East-West paradigm and gives precedence to the lived religious experiences of rural Catholics in Latin America during the Cold War.

Author

• Bonar L Hernández, Iowa State University