I Ask for Justice, as its title states, aims to channel the voices of Maya women during a period in which those voices have been difficult to hear in traditional histories. David Carey's study considers the 1898 to 1944 period in Guatemala, ending before the election of Juan José Arévalo. Pairing Maya women with dictators might seem a losing proposition, for the dictatorships of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and General Jorge Ubico (1931–44) were notoriously oppressive, and in a society that Carey describes as patriarchal, classist and racist, surely Maya women were offered few advantages. Yet despite the staggering imbalance of power, Carey demonstrates that Maya women and others, who at first glance might seem wholly crushed by the Guatemalan state, in fact had voice and more, a shaping influence in the state itself.Carey examines criminal cases partly because ‘more than any other institution–including schools and the military – courts were where competing views of nation, identity, and citizenship were contested’ (p. 27). A first chapter succinctly lays the groundwork, explaining not only the judicial process, but the constructs of race and criminality that allowed the legal system to function as it did. During the dictatorships of Estrada Cabrera and Ubico (and earlier, for that matter), Indianness connoted criminality as easily as it suggested ignorance and poverty. At the same time, certain qualities of ‘the indigenous race’ (purity, charm, honesty, and hard work) were celebrated (p. 55). The courts provided a forum for the negotiation and sometime exploitation of these characterisations.

Chapter 2 considers the clandestine liquor market, one of the few Maya women could engage in without upsetting gender norms. Alcohol sales were essential to the Guatemalan economy, and the prosecution of clandestine producers became a way to both capture streams of revenue and incorporate indígenas into the national economy. Here, as in later chapters, Carey scrutinises the women's legal defences, considering how they exploited stereotypes of poverty, ignorance and illiteracy (often showing despite them substantial knowledge of the law) while drawing on more positive discourses of motherhood and domesticity. The argument about nation-formation, built throughout the book, comes into sharp focus here as Carey demonstrates that ‘the alcohol economy helped to shape the nation by bringing disparate parties together through exchanges that were both confrontational and cooperative’ (p. 86). In chapter 3, a similar dynamic of confrontation and cooperation emerges in Guatemalan highland markets, where ‘the state asserted its power and where indígenas contested that power’ (p. 91).

Power, in Carey's conception, draws on the Foucaultian notion of ‘power as actions that act upon the actions of others’ (p. 227). And in the marketplace in particular, women's disobedience reflects the ‘lack of deference and their contestation of authority’ articulated by E. P. Thompson (p. 111). ‘Insolent indígenas’ were able to wield power through their actions of insubordination in the marketplace. Claiming power was more challenging in cases of infanticide, abortion, and cross-dressing, addressed in chapter 4. Abortion and infanticide were gendered crimes; both carried heavy social stigma, and violence, particularly drunken violence, was a legitimate form of expression for men made largely unavailable to women. Cases of infanticide and abortion allowed the Guatemalan police and journalists to create ‘the new social category’ of unnatural mothers or ‘soulless’ mothers, categories of deviance that could be challenging to refute (p. 137). The cases in this chapter, made especially vivid with photographs from La Gaceta, are ciphers that beg to be explained or re-imagined: a woman forced to hold the unearthed body of the baby she was accused of strangling; a grandmother posed with the shoebox of the exhumed foetus she helped to bury. As Carey demonstrates, ‘expectations surrounding motherhood could confine women's possibilities’ in the courtroom, and it took particular ingenuity to draw on narratives of poverty and male violence in order to undo these expectations (p. 150).

And male violence was familiar to the court, so familiar, in fact, that it was largely overlooked if not ignored. In chapter 5, which considers women as targets and perpetrators of violence, Carey finds that ‘the systematic impunity that accompanied the pervasive and myriad forms of violence against women speaks to the state's violation of women's rights’ (p. 153). The introduction establishes an unwillingness to see women as victims of either Guatemalan men or the Guatemalan state, and yet it would be inaccurate to overlook the gender-based violence that is so evident in criminal cases. Even here, however, Carey emphasises how women could manipulate gendered assumptions, so that, for example, ‘victims emphasised their integrity and productivity’ even as they drew attention to physical weakness (p. 175).

It is particularly notable in this book, with its fine-grained depiction of people and contexts, that Carey finds stories of affection, compassion and even love to interrupt or complicate the hundreds of cases of abuse, exploitation and discrimination: in chapter 5, a father rushes to the aid of an injured daughter; in chapter 6, which considers insults and family feuds, an indigenous widow takes in a ladina woman after she is raped, caring for her over the course of three days. Also notable is the deft treatment of agency. It can be tricky to describe women as agentive in an oppressive regime: on the one hand, it must be acknowledged that the state is dominant; on the other, the author wishes to cast the women as genuinely powerful. How are the two to be reconciled? Carey concludes, in satisfying ways, that even when women did not escape their marginalisation, they addressed it in Guatemalan courtrooms. And he acknowledges that ‘power was everywhere, but people were not always obsessed with attaining, maintaining, or expanding it’ (p. 236). This makes his conclusion that ‘poor indígenas influenced the criminal justice system as mediators’ especially convincing (p. 231). The Guatemalan state was, indeed, dominant, and both because and despite it, Guatemalan women asked the state for justice.