"For its intelligence and humanitarian achievements, for its political honesty, for its power and its beauty (there is no other word), this book deserves to be called a masterpiece." —American Ethnologist

Jerome R. Mintz's classic study of the lives of Andalusian campesinos who were swept up by one of the 20th century's pivotal social movements provided a new framework for understanding the tragic events that tilted Spain toward civil war. In a new foreword, James W. Fernandez reflects on the fieldwork that led to the book and its contribution to subsequent developments in the ethnography of Europe and the historiography of modern Spain.