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.

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.