Chapter 7 examines how General Jorge Ubico, a strong-arm dictator (1931–44), rapidly expanded the state into the countryside and challenged planter sovereignty in the midst of the rise of German National Socialism. Ubico replaced forced wage labor with vagrancy laws and instituted sanitation and militarized rural education programs. Even as he expanded the repressive state apparatus, Ubico also appealed to the masses through direct intervention in local affairs, particularly on behalf of poor women, and by promising access to civilization in the future via sanitation and eugenic programs. Ubico’s efforts at state centralization, however, were countered by the consolidation of regional identities in Alta Verapaz around Tezulutlán, the name given to the region by the Nahua allies of Pedro Alvarado. This anti-imperialist regional identity expressed growing anti-German nationalism. Ladinos and Germans also sought to possess Maya culture as a source of authenticity and timeless tradition as they competed for claims to the region. These new celebrations of Maya authenticity provided a place for Maya patriarchs to reassert their authority as representatives of rural Mayas.

The 1898 crisis enabled the rapid growth of German-owned plantations and fincas de mozos, where German planters carved out a partial sovereignty that included a judicial system, the appointment of representatives of state authorities, and a combination of violence and patriarchal affection. Q’eqchi’s expressed their interpretation of this new economy through the figure of El Q’eq, a half-man, half-cow, produced from the sexual union between a German coffee planter and a cow. As a hypersexualized beast charged with protecting German plantations and ensuring order, El Q’eq also revealed the territorial limits of Guatemalan state sovereignty and unsettled claims of a linear march toward a liberal nation-state. El Q’eq was also a reflection of plantation discipline, the sexual economy of plantation life, and the perversion of Q’eqchi’ morals and social norms in racial capitalism.

In the aftermath of this political upheaval, Guatemalans embarked on a tenuous democratic experiment across the 1920s. A group of radicalized Q’eqchi’s formed a branch of the Unionist Party and demanded that the state end forced wage labor, abolish debt contracts, and grant citizenship to all Mayas. For the next decade, Q’eqchi’s engaged in labor strikes and land invasions, which articulated another history of time and space based on memories of prior possession and land alienation. At the same time, urban reformers and intellectuals, including Miguel Angel Asturias, increasingly sought to move beyond the failed ladino nation-state that had taken power in 1871. To do so, they looked to Alta Verapaz to imagine a new nation based on modernization through prosperous coffee plantations and European immigration, which had yielded an alternative mestizaje project based on interracial mixing between German immigrants and Mayas. Guatemala’s decade-long democratic experiment came to an end with the Great Depression and Central America’s 1932 Red Scare.

By the time that World War II reached full force, Altaverapacence anti-imperialist nationalisms found further expression in anti-fascism, helping to overthrow Ubico and inaugurate Guatemala’s famed “ten years of spring.” This final chapter illustrates how Guatemala’s entrance into World War II, the nationalization of German properties, and the internment of German citizens ruptured power relations both regionally and nationally, while also generating expectations for land redistribution among rural workers and peasants. Alta Verapaz thus reveals how Guatemala’s 1952 agrarian reform was shaped by the events of World War II. Struggles over Guatemala’s 1952 agrarian reform condensed nineteenth-century histories of landownership and use, violent dispossessions, coerced labor, and disinheritance into bureaucratic struggles over what counted as unproductive and productive land use.