The Kekchi Indians of the Alta Verapaz are a resilient and tenacious people. Despite Spanish conquest, Christian proselytization, the introduction of European laws and institutions, and nineteenth-century Liberal land and labor reforms, the Kekchi maintained the underpinnings of their distinct culture, religion, and society. Between 1880 and 1930 a new generation of ladinos, foreigners, investors, and speculators arrived in the Alta Verapaz to integrate the region into the nation's expanding and lucrative coffee economy. A small number of foreign entrepreneurs, especially Germans like Erwin P. Dieseldorff, Richard Sapper, and Federico Gerlach, accumulated land titles and created vast estates in the Alta Verapaz wilderness. Nevertheless, the department's demographic, geographic, cultural, and historical landscape precluded the incipient planter elite from dismantling the traditional Kekchi way of life, values, beliefs, and traditions. Kekchi communities distant from the municipal seats of San Pedro Carcha, Coban, and San Juan Chamelco, frequently rejected ladino and planter authority and resorted to land invasions, litigation, strikes, and even rebellion to protect their inalienable rights to the land. Within and beyond the confines of the plantation, the pillars of Kekchi civilization, milpa agriculture, syncretic Maya-Christian rituals, ceremonies, and fiestas, and collective, usufruct attitudes toward land tenure survived as indelible components of Alta Verapaz society. Rather than perceive the Kekchi majority as faceless bystanders or victims in the nation's historical development, this work contends that a vibrant and malleable Indian culture conditioned the economic and social character of the modern Alta Verapaz. This study, based on research of previously unexplored departmental, legal, and land records in the Archivo General de Central America in Guatemala City, anthropological field notes, religious chronicles, and the Dieseldorff Collection in the United States, propounds a regional approach to understand the cultural, economic, and social discourse between postcolonial peoples and the institutions spawned by the nation-state, agro-export economies, and a Europeanized, capitalistic elite