Furthermore, changing property relations and labor regime are splitting into diverse rural classes of labor29 the rather homogeneous middle peasantry originated during the agrarian colonization. Most legally-dispossessed Q’eqchi’ peasant families received a payment for their land which generally neither allowed them to boost a non-farm livelihood, nor to regain land ownership elsewhere as land prices keep rising. Often, those who remained in their communities swelled the ranks of the landless to work as piecework-wage laborers, occasionally farming in leased or borrowed land. Families under colonato regime who were expelled from control-grabbed traditional estates and ranches face a similar condition as that of the dispossessed families, as also do the landless youth which became surplus workforce in their parents’ squeezed family labor farms. Indeed, individual freehold land ownership brought about a system of partible inheritance among Q’eqchi’ families. This has accelerated land tenancy atomization among the