Authors Amplified Series: J. T. Way’s Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala

Global Atlanta’s Authors Amplified series highlighting Georgia voices continues with an in-person interview with J.T. Way, professor of history at Georgia State University, on his recently released book, Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala.

Note: Space for the in-person event at the Global Atlanta offices, is limited to the first 20 guests. Tickets are $15. A meet and greet with the author will begin at 11 a.m., followed by an in-person interview starting at 11:30.

For public health and safety reasons, everyone attending in person must be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and wear masks during the event.

Can’t make it? This event will also be broadcasted and viewable free of charge via Zoom. Please select your preferred option when registering.

Hosted by Constellations, home to the Global Atlanta offices: 

About the Book

As a scholar whose research applies directly as testimony in asylum cases, J.T. Way is well-versed in why thousands of Guatemalans are fleeing for their lives. He explains many of these realities in his new book, Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala. A fragile democracy in a country torn up by war and genocide gets gutted in its infancy as neoliberal policies shrink the state. Local thugs make towns their fiefdoms as lawlessness, corruption, and common and organized crime sweep the landscape. Neighborhood watch patrols become vigilante lynch mobs. Gender-based violence rises to the level of femicide. Youngsters make it through high school but find no work in an extractive economy propped up by migrants’ remittances and aptly symbolized by unregulated offshore banks. Hopes for a better life around the end of the war in 1996 fade in the next two decades as a “war of all against all” brings more violence and despair.

Agrotropolis draws on a varied archive of primary sources, as well as Way’s ethnographic field work in a nation he’s explored since 1991 and lived in from 2002 to 2012. It maps documents on politics, economics, and development against a kaleidoscopic array of cultural productions. It’s the first book to tell the story of Guatemalan rock nacional, with genres ranging from death metal to grunge to Maya rock-folk fusion and Spanish and Mayan-language rap. Way examines ad campaigns and pop-culture websites, blogs, and Facebook and YouTube posts and comments. The book also traces a florescence of new novels and films and an explosion in photography, painting, wild-style graffiti and break-dancing. All of these art forms arose in fertile dialogue with a “Maya power” movement that spearheaded a cultural sea-change in the nation. Street art, slang, style and fashion, leisure activities, and even the postures and gestures wrapped up in people’s “forma de ser” (way of being) all find a place in this history.

About the Author

J. T. Way is an Associate Professor who teaches and researches Latin American history at Georgia State University. A Central Americanist, his main area of specialty is 20th- and 21st-century Guatemala, about which he has published various articles and two scholarly books. The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala (Duke, 2012) maps the transnational project of development against the activities of the working poor in Guatemala City from 1920 to the new millennium, showing how the largest city in Central America—where shantytowns and humble municipal and street markets abut luxurious malls and wealthy neighborhoods—came to have such stunning contrasts. Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala (University of California, 2021) teams an examination of the rapid urbanization of the agrarian countryside with the history of popular youth culture from 1983 to the 2010s. It shows how youth have used ethnic pride, tradition, pop culture, and “street culture” to challenge the nation’s system of castes and create a popular alternative nationalism, despite—and in dialogue with—the horrible conditions that confronted them.

J. T. has extensively traveled in Latin America since he first explored the region in a 14-month-long backpacking trip in 1991 and 1992, later earning an MA in Latin American History at Tulane University, and a second MA and his Ph.D. (2006) from Yale. He likes to joke that he left to do his doctoral research in Guatemala in 2002 and “never came back,” since he ended up residing in the country until he joined the GSU faculty in 2012. During that time, he founded and led a U.S.-international school and was a Faculty Affiliate of the University of Arizona, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on Guatemala at CIRMA, the Center for Mesoamerican Research (Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, a prestigious social science archive and research center in Antigua, Guatemala). At the time he joined the GSU faculty, J. T. was serving as CIRMA’s Director, a position he held from abroad through the first trimester of 2013. When global health conditions permit, he still spends several months a year in Guatemala, and is currently working on a book on the root causes of the flood of refugees from the Northern Triangle seeking asylum in the United States. He also regularly serves as an expert witness in asylum hearings for Guatemalans and Hondurans.

About the Series

Georgia’s deep pool of international expertise is sometimes hidden in the ivory towers of academia or overshadowed by looming national figures. Sought-after thought leaders sometimes shine globally while being ignored in their own backyard.

With Authors Amplified, a monthly series of book talks open to subscribers and the public, Global Atlanta showcases authoritative local voices in foreign affairs and international business while highlighting the state’s intellectual contributions to important global conversations.

The Authors Amplified series is presented by the Atlanta Global Studies Center (AGSC), a partnership of Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University, funded in part by a US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center grant, with a mission to empower the metro region’s global agenda.