This book examines the cultural basis of an agrarian insurgency between 1977 and 1984 in Huitzilan, located in the northern mountains of Puebla, Mexico. By examining Nahua rituals and mythical stories about rain gods, James Taggart compellingly argues that Nahua cultural values radicalized Nahuas to take political action against mestizo elites. This led to the insurgency known locally as the UCI, which stands for the Unión Campesina Independiente (Union of Independent Farmers).A history of community strife between mestizos and Nahuas helped the UCI organizers to turn fantasies of rebellion into a reality, but it was the stories of rain gods that served as a blueprint for how to do so. At the heart of this study are stories of rain gods who collectively organized to attack water-dwelling animals (achane), the nonhuman companions of non-Nahua settlers and local authorities who violated deeply held Nahua cultural values. The majority of chapters center around eight stories told before, during, and after the insurgency, the periods during which Taggart undertook his three stages of fieldwork (in 1968–75, 1978, and 2003–12, respectively). All the narrators who contributed the stories in the book were native Nahuat speakers who knew participants in the rebellion but were not directly involved themselves. These stories are placed in conversation throughout the book.The evidence presented in this study invaluably contributes to a growing body of literature examining the relationship between collective memory and cultural-based rebellions. Rather than focus on the precipitants of rebellion, Taggart emphasizes collective memories told through stories of rain gods and Nahua rituals, which demonstrates the importance of examining how shared cultural values catalyze rebellion. This approach is evident in his interpretation of “The President and the Priest,” told by Miguel Ahuata de los Santos in 1975. This story explains how a rain god's human companion organizes other rain gods to attack and kill the animal companion spirit of the municipal president because he refused to feed the priest in reciprocation for giving mass. Taggart interprets this story in light of the fact that Nahuas value positive reciprocity, which he shows through the example of flower and bead necklaces exchanged during wedding rituals. The failure to reciprocate, represented in the story by the municipal president's actions, served the Nahuas as ideological justification for taking measures to prevent negative reciprocity and eventually turned such measures into radical action. More importantly, Taggart shows how Nahuas positioned themselves in relation to the church and mestizos through stories about their ancestors.However, not all Nahua rain god stories were models for rebellion. During the early phase of the rebellion, Taggart found that while Nahuas in Huitzilan told stories of rain gods who organized to kill municipal presidents' animal companion spirits, the monoethnic Nahua community of Santiago Yaonáhuac did not. According to Taggart, this shows that ethnic stratification was a necessary condition for Nahuas' radicalization in Huitzilan.The central question that this book asks is, How do local Nahua fantasies of revenge get translated into a full-scale rebellion? Drawing on James C. Scott's highly influential works on the cultural theory of peasant unrest, Taggart demonstrates how Nahuas in Huitzilan were inspired to resistance because they lived in an ethnically stratified community under mestizo domination, which stifled Nahua attempts to obtain land for growing corn. Taggart connects to the insurgency's aims a phrase he encountered during the first stage of his fieldwork, prior to the rebellion: “working as one,” which expresses a Nahua value of cooperation in extended families and corn-farming culture. The rebellion broke out in late 1977, when a UCI activist encouraged 30 to 40 armed Nahuas to invade Talcuaco and Taltempan, two cattle pastures that were part of a dispute between two elite mestizo families, and plant them with corn. They succeeded in doing so and divided the subsequent corn crop, following their values of cooperative work.Nevertheless, according to Taggart “a comparison of narratives recorded” before and after the insurgency “revealed how beliefs about rain gods, water-dwelling animals, and weather had changed as more Nahuas turned away from corn-farming and toward wage labor” (p. 8). The narrator of the “The Achane of Apohpocayan” expresses this change, revealing what it meant to stop “working as one” on the milpa. The rebellion would last until 1984, when the Antorcha Campesina (Torch of the Farmer), a political group comprised of mestizos connected to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), displaced local mestizo elites and their political dominance. Nonetheless, Taggart ends the book with optimism, as he interprets the story “The Storm,” about surviving a devastating rainstorm by conquering one's fear, as a collective memory of living through the rebellion.This study will be of use to students and scholars of cultural history, anthropology, collective memory, Indigenous studies, rebellions, and linguistic anthropology. Additionally, the book includes English and Nahuat transcriptions of the rain god stories, making them accessible to a broadly diverse audience.