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 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.

The conclusion illustrates the uneven and nonlinear nature of Guatemalan nation-state expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also highlights the important role played by Q’eqchi’ patriarchs, the legacies of colonialism, and the centrality of race and time to political struggles. The Conclusion also illustrates how the historical debris of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century histories shaped Guatemala’s post-1954 descent into civil war. It shows the longer historical genealogy of the Guatemalan military’s doctrine that Mayas were dangerous because they were “alien to modernity” and how the legacies of coerced labor and planter sovereignty reemerged with new meaning and contours during the scorched-earth campaign.

Chapter 2 examines how Q’eqchi’ patriarchs addressed the challenges posed by popular pressures from below and new state efforts to modernize by privatizing property, institutionalizing coerced wage labor, and expanding state authority after the 1871 Liberal revolution. Q’eqchi’ patriarchs’ efforts included culturally translating communal properties into coffee plantations, engaging in the scientific cartography, and converting the spatial markers of mountain spirits into boundary markers. Ultimately, however, the efforts of Q’eqchi’ patriarchs to forge coffee plantations was limited because of internal pressures within indigenous communities, predatory capitalists, and state officials unwilling to recognize their plantations and grant labor exceptions to their workers.

The introduction highlights how Guatemalan state-building in the nineteenth century continually rendered Mayas as anachronistic subjects rather than agents of the future. Guatemalan state officials and coffee planters labeled certain forms of difference uncivilized or anachronistic to justify denying citizenship rights and to legitimize the application of coerced labor laws to individuals deemed not yet civilized. However, as the Introduction highlights, Q’eqchi’ Mayas continually undermined these strategies and built innovative political modernities based on a combination of radical liberalism and Q’eqchi’ cosmologies. The Introduction provides an overview of how modern notions of linear, measurable time and space and racial-capitalism–based political modernities and colonialism interact. Finally, it provides a methodology for reading along and against the archival grain and for dialoguing with disparate visual, textual, and oral sources.