Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Latino/Latina Studies. Jewish Studies. RITES is Perera's powerful portrait of growing up as a Jewish boy in the exotic and violent world of Guatamala in the forties. "Victor Perera is one of those rare writers who need never suffer the uncertainties of translation, for besides his fluency in both English and Spanish, he has both a Latin American and a North American sensibility. RITES is another fine example of how affectingly he can cross from one to the other, bringing all his insights with him"--Alastair Reid.

Spanning the years of civil war in Guatemala, Unfinished Conquest portrays an embattled country facing the third cycle of a conquest that began when the conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century. As personal narrative weaves with reportage and oral testimony, we meet the victims, champions, and villains of a society torn apart by violence and injustice.

A sweeping journey of self-discovery as a Sephardic Jew probes the history of his family, one of the oldest and most distinguished in his culture. A story of persecution, survival, and flight unfolds as the author takes us from the Iberian Peninsula across the borders of Europe to Central America and the Holy Land to trace the diaspora created by the Inquisition and the Expulsion.

"The Last Lords of Lalenque" is an extraordinary firsthand account of life among the Lacandon Indians of Naha in southern Mexico. A community of 250 whose genealogy has been obscured by the absence of a written tradition, the Lacandones may nevertheless be traced back linguistically and culturally to the great Maya civilization. They are the sole inheritors of an oral tradition that preserves - more than 400 years after the Spanish Conquest - a cosmology, a morality and a psychology as sophisticated as our own. Journalist and novelist Victor Perera and linguist Robert Bruce have lived among the Lacandones, chronicling their imperiled Mayan culture.