3 - Indolence Is the Death of Character

Summary

In 1886, a frost unleashed by the region’s most powerful mountain deity, Tzuultaq’a Xucaneb, to seek revenge for coffee production and private property set off a millennial revolt. In the wake of this moral and spiritual crisis, Q’eqchi’s searched for new intermediaries and forged cross-racial alliances. In the wake of the frost, some rural Q’eqchi’s expressed another time, deeply inflected by the belief that mountain spirits were themselves historical agents. Others opened a national debate over the place of “slavery” in a modernizing nation in alliance with ladino indigenistas. Despite the temporary abolition of coerced labor, however, a political and economic crisis in 1897 drove the return to coerced labor and set the stage for a new plantation economy.