W. George Lovell | A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala
Oct. 10, 2023
4:00p.m.
Northrop Frye Centre (VC 102)
91 Charles St West Toronto, ON M5S1K5
We are pleased to invite you to a fall reading by Professor W. George Lovell from his book A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala.
About the talk...
Between 1960 and 1996, armed conflict in Guatemala claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 people, over 80% of whom, according to a U.N. Commission for Historical Clarification (1999), were Indigenous Mayas. The experience of one Maya household, whose story I narrate, focuses on Magdalena González, an elderly woman and family matriarch. Fieldwork findings, many of which feature in my memoir of Guatemala (Lovell 2019/2022), raise harrowing questions that pertain to continued insecurity, lack of justice, and the trauma of uninvestigated crimes, the combined impact of which still haunt and charge community life throughout Guatemala -- Doña Magdalena’s family but one among thousands of those affected. Narrating what happened to her, her husband, and her son also throws into perspective how fieldwork among the Maya can, on occasion, yield unanticipated but heart-warming returns.
About the speaker...
A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, W. George Lovell is professor of geography at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and visiting professor in Latin American history at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, Spain. Central America, Guatemala in particular, has been the regional focus of much his research. In 1995, the Conference of Latin American Geography honoured him with its Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award and, in 2018, with its Preston E. James Eminent Career Award. He has sixteen book titles to his credit, several of them pertaining to Guatemala’s troubled past and the country’s continuing present woes.