Woman on the Windowsill

Sylvia Sellers-García is associate professor of history at Boston College. Her previous books include Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery and When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep.

Received honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk PrizeWinner of the James P. Hanlan Book Prize, sponsored by the New England Historical AssociationWinner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize, sponsored by the Conference on Latin American History“The Woman on the Windowsill is that rare history book that will keep you on the edge of your seat. At the book’s core is the paired drama of an unfolding crime with the historian’s measured discovery of a puzzling and at times inscrutable past.”— Kris Lane, Tulane University“An exquisite book. It is at once scholarly and popular, learned and accessible, challenging and inviting. The beauty is in the understated elegance, the pacing, and the care with which Sellers-Garciá approaches the pleasures and the problems of the archive.”— Raymond Craib, Cornell University“Every historian dreams about finding a spellbinding old case or an irresistible cache of documents. Sellers-García has found such a case and used it to give us a grand tour of colonial Guatemala City, showing us its cobblestone streets, nearby ravines, hospitals and medical procedures, families from various walks of life, city leaders, victims, and villains.”—Andrés Reséndez, author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America