Villacorta Calderón, José Antonio (1879–1964)

José Antonio Villacorta Calderón (b. 1879; d. 22 April 1964), Guatemalan historian, anthropologist, and bibliographer. Villacorta Calderón is particularly noted for his general histories of Guatemala and his important editorial work. Significantly, he edited the Maya sacred book Anales de los Cakchiqueles (1937). He also compiled in his Bibliografía guatemalteca (1944) a complete listing of bibliographic information for all the volumes exhibited at a national exposition in honor of the anniversary of printing in Guatemala in 1939. His most famous and widely read work, Historia de la República de Guatemala (1960), is a detailed survey of Guatemala, from political independence from Spain to 1885, based on extensive research in secondary and archival sources. Often used as a textbook in schools, the book has been influential in shaping the historical views of countless Guatemalans. Villacorta Calderón was one of the most significant and prestigious of the shapers of academic life in twentieth-century Guatemala.

See alsoGuatemala .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

José Antonio Villacorta Calderón, Monografía del departamento de Guatemala (1926); Bibliografía guatemalteca (1944); J. Antonio Villacorta C. en las ciencias y letras americanistas, juzgado por sus contemporáneos (1949); and Historia de la República de Guatemala, 1821–1921 (1960).

                                      Michael F. Fry