The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala's October Revolution

The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala's October Revolution. By Cindy Forster. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 287. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $34.95 cloth.

Cindy Forster's excellent book is a page-turning account of the lives

and social struggles of Mayan and ladino poor people in the towns and countryside of the department of San Marcos and at the United Fruit Company in Tiquisate during Guatemala's 1944-1954 revolutionary decade, the famed "ten years of springtime in the land of eternal dictatorship" led Juan Jos? Ar?valo and Jacobo Arbenz. Perhaps it is not surprising that most scholars have concentrated on the ideas and actions of national and international leaders, events and organizations to explain the drama of an inspiring decade that the Cold War destroyed. But few historians have looked closely at what the majority of Guatemalans, indigenous and ladino peasants and rural workers, said and did in the 1940s and 1950s. Forster looked closely and as a result her work puts to rest the common view that the October revolution of 1944 was, as one scholar has dubbed it, "an urban revolution in a rural country," an intellectuals' creation that had aims beyond the grasp of most Guatemalans, especially the Mayan poor. What Forster suggests is these people of the countryside were part of the heart of a history that had one of Latin America's important land reforms as its centerpiece.