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.

Chapter 1 opens with an 1865 rebellion led by the elderly Q’eqchi’ commoner Jorge Yat, who was charged with wanting to return to an era of republican democracy and dissolve caste hierarchy. The chapter uses that event as a window into the social, economic, and cultural worlds of nineteenth-century Alta Verapaz on the eve of coffee capitalism and the 1871 liberal revolution. In particular, it demonstrates how indigenous communities distant from the centers of state power maintained a political and territorial autonomy. It further demonstrates how Q’eqchi’ society was composed of tensions between republican values of representative government and caste hierarchy, between solidarity and individualism, and how Q’eqchi’ patriarchs faced democratic challenges from below.