More than 12 years have passed since the Zapatista Army of National Liberation uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, on January 1, 1994. Many academics and news-media specialists have assessed the Zapatista revolt and its impact on Mayas and Mestizos. Although the Zapatistas have faded from front-page news, they still maintain strongholds in the countryside and resist the Mexican national army. Mayas and Mestizos—whether sympathetic or not to the Zapatistas—continue to be affected by this conflict. The publishing blitz to explain the Zapatistas and the cultlike obsession with Subcomandante Marcos, the ski-masked, Mestizo intellectual guerrilla, have resulted in a quagmire that only specialists can wade through and comprehend.

From my perspective as an ethnographer interested in Mesoamerican indigenous life, political economy, and power, monograph-length, detailed ethnographic research on contemporary Mayas of Chiapas since the Zapatista uprising is sparse and heavily dependent on mass-media reports. Worse yet, the authors of these reports tend to disregard the wealth of ethnographic research already conducted in the region that could add depth to their media-oriented analyses. With Mayan Voices for Human Rights: Displaced Catholics in Highland Chiapas, Christine Kovic has written a well-researched and very readable book that helps make highland Chiapas politics comprehendible. Furthermore, Kovic firmly situates her research within Maya ethnography and makes an important contribution to one of the most ethnographically studied regions of the world.

For the ten years of research on which Mayan Voices for Human Rights rests, Kovic lived, walked, and worshipped with Catholic Mayas from the community of Guadalupe, located near San Cristóbal de Las Casas. This community of Tzotzil Mayas was formed by Catholics expelled from the ethnographically well-known community of San Juan Chamula. Little has been written about expelled Catholics in highland Chiapas, with most research focusing on the expulsion of Protestants and conflicts between them and traditionalists, those who subscribe to a fusion of pre-Columbian and Catholic practices. Much of the writing on the Protestant–traditionalist conflict uses conflicts of faith to explain the expulsions. Kovic, in contrast, takes a political-economy approach to look at the struggle for power and limited resources among Chamulas, paying close attention to how state policies and local economic, ideological, political, and economic conditions have led the consolidation of power among a small group of traditionalists in Chamula. She shows how Chamulas who do not have access to economic resources must conform to an ideology of “being of one soul” or face expulsion, as occurred in the case of the Catholics who formed Guadalupe.

In documenting conflicts over the control of the material base and political power, Kovic does not gloss over Mestizo and state institutional forms of discrimination and racism that, for nearly 500 years, have helped shape how Mayas live with each other. Her extensive knowledge and use of the ethnographic literature of the region further informs the monograph, but her vivid descriptions of the people, which are interwoven with their own explanations of their struggles and faith, make the book interesting to read and an important ethnographic contribution.

Aside from untangling the politics of highland Chiapas and contributing to a better understanding of expulsion, Kovic also illustrates how faith is interwoven with the economic and political conditions with which the residents of Guadalupe contend. The community that she describes provides an alternative image of Chiapas, where residents have forged positive social relationships that are based on their concepts of human rights, respect, and dignity.

The theoretical heart—not to imply Kovic’s linkage of faith and political economy is not a contribution—is her sustained argument throughout the book about what “human rights” means. First, she uses four chapters to describe the history of Chamulan expulsions and Catholic missionization. Then, over two chapters, she defines and explains legal, Catholic, and anthropological concepts of human rights, which are contrasted with the perspectives of Tzotzil from Guadalupe. In the remaining three chapters, she illustrates how expelled Mayas struggle for respect, to practice their faith, and for their livelihoods—to gain and maintain human rights as they define them.

Kovic has written a sympathetic book, which demonstrates how expelled Mayas build supportive faith-based communities and form alliances across faiths, alliances that do not conform to either traditionalist or Zapatista models. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking that Guadalupe comprises economically and politically marginalized people who have very clear conceptions of what constitutes their human rights. For this reason, students of Maya ethnography, human-rights scholars, policy makers, and those interested in religious studies would benefit from reading Mayan Voices for Human Rights.