In his new book, J. T. Way takes an unusual and fruitful tack for understanding Guatemala's recent past and present by studying urbanization and youth culture since 1983. A baby boom starting in the 1980s made Guatemala one of the world's youngest countries, and many Guatemalans do not remember the 36-year civil war—though it is still present in their inheritance of grinding extractive poverty and the aftershocks of violence.Way is perfectly equipped to take on this history given his encyclopedic writings on Guatemala, his long-standing connections through both educational projects and friendships, and former work as consulting director of the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, Guatemala's most important archive and research center for contemporary history. Way's previous book was a comprehensive study of the culture of urbanization beginning in the 1930s that revolved around the capital. Continuing to focus on Guatemala's popular classes, in Agrotropolis he expands the lines of that research outward, into the country's hugely important but little-studied smaller cities. Places like Chimaltenango, Sololá, and Huehuetenango, the “agrotropolises” of the title, are “country on one side and city on the other” (p. 4). They may still have been rural at the civil war's end but today are a riot of electrical wires, tuk-tuks, and young people on the make. The milpa is never far, but neither are the Tz'utujil Maya–speaking rappers.One of Way's key insights is that youths living in these areas have reversed a performance of humility enforced from above. Instead, they assert a cosmopolitan and outward-looking form of alternative nationalism through music, clothing, and posts on Facebook, which is wildly popular in Guatemala. No longer does an Indigenous teenager automatically address a ladino (non-Indigenous) boss as señó, a servile expression left over from the colonial period. Way detects in such acts a cheeky form of self-assertion with deep political implications in an often hierarchical, racist society.Chapter 1 traces the urbanization of Guatemala City from 1950 to 1983—which preceded the agrotropolises—emphasizing the working class's economic power and cultural resourcefulness. Chapter 2 analyzes the return to civilian rule from 1986 to 1987, during which Guatemalan anxieties turned toward youth culture. Way sensitively shows that this was not completely misplaced, especially considering the violent attacks launched by privileged young people on break-dancers in the capital—the so-called cacerías often left out of histories of contemporary Guatemala because the violence is part of neither the genocide nor rising gang activity in the usual sense (p. 90). Chapter 3 examines the crucial moment from 1994 to 1998 in which the agrotropolises consolidated, with their contradictions between self-expression and repression.The remainder of the book, in many ways its heart, analyzes the explosion of creativity surrounding “la KY,” internet slang for “the street” (p. 131). Way's treatment of this “real-and-imagined city street” includes a virtuoso section on the ubiquitous tuk-tuks imported from Southeast Asia and a discussion of how the proliferation of cell phones changed cultural life (p. 24). Way is careful to note that this is a celebration not of neoliberalism but rather of the cultural forms that managed to sprout up and flourish in postwar Guatemala's most denuded corners. He convincingly argues that the post-1990s phenomenon of vigilante justice continues to show the ongoing scars of long-term violence and exclusion, but he ends the book on a celebratory note, analyzing the work of Mayan-speaking artists and musicians like Sara Curruchich.As with Way's previous work, the archival research here is a serious feat of fancy footwork in a country that, as he notes, “does not archive its paperwork” (p. 16). Way draws on development-sector documents, hard-to-access municipal archives, guerrilla documentation, press accounts, novels, memoirs, and advertisements, and he even—carefully—makes use of social media posts and YouTube videos. Way also draws on, and extensively credits, cutting-edge work by Guatemalan scholars like Jorge Ramón González Ponciano and Mario Efraín Castañeda Maldonado, among many others.One of the book's most interesting aspects is its extensive use of popular music to understand the everyday life of youth cultures and countercultures. Way provides a fascinating and persuasive reading of everything from death metal to popular rock and rap, much of it produced and enjoyed outside the capital city by those who “were the first in their family's history who could read and write and who were also the first not to work in agriculture or migrate from tiny family plots to the fincas as debt-peons” (p. 14; emphasis in original). These youths, hell-bent on becoming “professionals” but also on enjoying themselves, are the study's subject and protagonists (p. 14). In this sense, the book is a welcome departure from the work, however important, on the gangs that have bedeviled Guatemala since the end of the conflict in 1996, and the youths who decide to or are forced to migrate to the United States. Way mentions the maras, of course, and the migrants, but he rightly shows that they are not the sum total of Guatemalan youth. Here, instead, are the kids who stayed. The book offers a distinctive, convincing, and—dare I say—optimistic look at the young people who will determine Guatemala's future.