Cindy Forster,The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala's October Revolution. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. xi + 287 pp. $32.95 cloth; 19.95 paper.

Forster's work in The Time of Freedom is a worthy contribution to scholarship on collective behavior in Latin America. The work appears largely intended to provide a narrative account of peasant organizing in a specific locale; however, the work implicitly incorporates a more comprehensive theory about bottom-up collective action. The account of bottom-up collective action given by the author is really one of contentious politics involving the simultaneous dynamics of four key groups: rural indigenous, rural ladinos, large landowners, and politicians. The movement is contentious for two reasons. First, the social movement arises from a previous period of relative stability, although under a dictatorship, and it incurs a significant change in elite political ideology. Second, the time frame spans about ten years, from the fall of Ubico in 1944 to the fall of Arbenz in 1954. The author leads the reader through the three stages of initial formation, mass action, and demobilization. The author's account of the 1944 Guatemalan Revolution challenges the traditional interpretation of hierarchical initiation. Historical accounts of the 1944 Revolution portray it as urban in its locale and middle-class in its support. Ignoring the rural indigenous and ladinos leaves a chasm in the understanding of contemporary Guatemalan history and politics. This is of particular importance in understanding the movement towards violence that followed from the failure to institutionalize the hard-earned gains of the collective movement.