This book explores the articulation between accent and ethnic identification in K ichee, a Mayan language spoken by more than one million people in the western highlands of Guatemala. Basedon years of ethnographic work, it is the first anthropological examination of the social meaning of dialectal difference in any Mayan language. Romero deconstructs essentialist perspectives on ethnicity in Mesoamerica and argues that ethnic identification among the highland Maya is multiple and layered, the result of a diverse linguistic precipitate created by centuries of colonial resistance.

In K...