At the end of Our Time Is Now we see the author moving Cobán's municipal records out of a musty basement. The rescue of an endangered Guatemalan archive aptly symbolizes Julie Gibbings's work, which excavates interethnic politics and socioeconomic change in Cobán and San Pedro Carchá—Q'eqchi’-speaking municipalities in Alta Verapaz—from the mid-1800s to the mid-twentieth century. Insisting that Q'eqchi's made innovative claims to modernity, Our Time Is Now is an invaluable addition to the literature on Native intermediaries, grassroots experiences of liberalism, and the transition to capitalism.
Central to the work are Q'eqchi’ patriarchs, whose relationships with Maya commoners, middle-class and elite ladinos, German coffee planters, and the state evolved in dialogue with the political economy, a story elaborated in two four-chapter sections. Strategically drawing on colonial hierarchies, Maya ontologies of time and space, and liberal discourses of citizenship and progress, Q'eqchi’ actors—both the patriarchs and the commoners with whom...
