Welcome to Agrotropolis! Where am I? you might ask. Well, you might be in a lovely lakeside town surrounded by volcanoes, where kids, whose parents survived genocide, are fashioning hip-hop beats in Maya-Tzutujil and are entirely savvy with TikTok. You might be at a heavy metal concert organized by the nation's first lady, where bands that might be promoted by the regnant counterinsurgent military also offer trenchant critiques of state and bourgeois power. You might be in any place where the basic structures that feed and clothe people are impacted by Global Ag, but remain resolutely local and household-based. It could be any place where youth demographics are exploding and the nation-state no longer offers anything approaching an enticing future. It could be any place where the cosmopolitan “street” (calle or KY in the potent abbreviation of text slang)—that energetic promise-laden space in between—is alive with promise and danger.

In this extraordinary book by historian J. T. Way, you are deeply embedded in Guatemala 40 years after the genocide, a place enmeshed in drug traffic and transnational gangs, bubbling with Mayan resurgence and queer activism, both desanguinated by youth migration and sustained by the IV drip of remittances. But it is also full of the vibrant, searching ways that young, mostly non-white and poor people are making to exist in the corrupt, crappy world that elites and the Cold War military machine have made for them. This is no postmodern pastiche, video nights in Katmandu, bricolage a traveler might enjoy with a frisson of the “new” (read Western) cohabiting with tradition. This is a world that has been fundamentally transformed in the past 40 years—as much from the periphery as from the core—and in compelling stories and deep-dive contextualization, Way brings it powerfully alive. The book draws on an awesomely creative and nimble archive and offers a humble, genuine attention to people who are generally not attended to, because they are not authentic Indians, or clearly revolutionary actors, or elites. It shows that—nonetheless—they are world makers.

This is a brilliantly intellectual and deeply felt history of the now. Through their art, music, literature, and political analyses, Way brings to life the smart, creative kids who tried to make revolution in Guatemala in the 1970s and those bequeathed the aftershocks of genocide and neoliberal poverty who are nonetheless also makers and dreamers, complex humans irreducible to stereotypes of victims, migrants, or monstrous gangbangers. Way carefully engages not only the effects on everyday life of the massive displacement from the countryside of indigenous people caused by the war and neoliberal assaults on sustainable communities, but also, perhaps more importantly, the effects on people who stayed put while what it meant to be “rural” and agricultural transformed around them. It evokes the power of the urban while skillfully deconstructing it and, as the “Agro” of the title makes clear, refuses it as telos. Way boldly conjures agrarian worlds that are not destined for the dustbins of history, but instead form vibrant cores of emerging cosmopolitanism.

The book explores youth culture and the remnants of revolutionary dreams, and it struggles to make a compelling argument about an emerging class/ethnicity formation: that the post-peace second generation is now a new kind of ethnic person that has created a distinct form of national identification, radically different from the servility-inducing, caste-based social organization that led to the war. As an anthropologist, I enjoy Way's work for its ethnographic feel and heft and its lyrical writing. But given the dreadful situation of archives in Guatemala, I also treasure the deep historicity of his methods, focus, and passion. His creativity and drive in seeking out and engaging with unusual and—until he discovers them—overlooked forms of reaching into the past and drawing out events, meaning, and life worlds is extraordinary, as is his subtle and rigorous weaving of past and present. Way's decades of deep and wide engagement with Guatemala are amply evident here. The way he mixes music, literature, art, and performance with political and economic transformations is an exciting and very rare synthesis.

So where am I? In Way's hands, we are in a Guatemala that exuberantly and painfully refuses the concepts and theories used to think about it—thus gestating a new word like ‘agrotopolis’ to describe it. But we are also in any place where postcolonial development, disaster capitalism, and the global war machine have horrifyingly screwed people and their ecosystems over, but where somehow those people continue to insist on their own dignity and right not only to survive but to thrive, and to groove to a sinuous beat and in their own languages.