The history of Latin America has been written principally with a top-down approach that focuses on the leaders and the privileged. Hernan Horna brings us a history that centers on the experience of Native Americans, blacks, and the poor, and examines the ongoing projects of identity and unity in Latin America through the lens of ethnicity, culture, politics, and economics, from the ancient cultures of the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs to the 21st century.

Among the few historical documents by or about early Native American history are pre-Columbian Mayan manuscripts and stone graphs, documents written by Indians and Mestizos from the Andes and Mesoamerica in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish. The Spanish texts beginning with Father Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566) reflect a Eurocentric view that was carried on by the colonialists and criollos, the white elites after independence. The indigenista movement, which urged a revival of Indian culture, did not begin until the twentieth century. Because so many sources were destroyed over the centuries, and memories suppressed, an ethno-history of the Amerindians needs to gather information from many sources and disciplines including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, agriculture, migration studies, and religion. The author provides an indigenous history without bypassing westem historiography. In the pre-Columbian period the author concentrates on the Aztecs, Incas and Mayas, but broadens out to an analysis of all Amerindians. The second part includes post-conquest indigenous adaptations, co-existence and struggle against colonial rule and subjugation by the Catholic Church and states.

The history of Latin America has been written principally with a top-down approach that focuses on the leaders and the privileged. Hernan Horna brings us a history that centers on the experience of Native Americans, blacks, and the poor, and examines the ongoing projects of identity and unity in Latin America through the lens of ethnicity, culture, politics, and economics, from the ancient cultures of the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs to the 21st century.