This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996

This City Belongs to You

This City Belongs to You

A HISTORY OF STUDENT ACTIVISM

IN GUATEMALA, 1944–1996

Heather Vrana

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2017 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vrana, Heather A., author.

Title: This city belongs to you : a history of student activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996 / Heather Vrana.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017004051 (print) | LCCN 2017006970 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520292215 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520292222 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965720 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Student movements—Guatemala—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC LA453 .V73 2017 (print) | LCC LA453 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/981097281—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004051

Manufactured in the United States of America

26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To every student who dreams of changing the world.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Do Not Mess with Us!

1  •  The Republic of Students, 1942–1952

2  •  Showcase for Democracy, 1953–1957

3  •  A Manner of Feeling, 1958–1962

4  •  Go Forth and Teach All, 1963–1977

5  •  Combatants for the Common Cause, 1976–1978

6  •  Student Nationalism without a

Government, 1977–1980

Coda: Ahí van los estudiantes! 1980–Present

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1.Political Map of Guatemala

2.New Transit Plan for Downtown Guatemala City, 1952

FIGURES

1.Citizens gathered in front of the National Palace, October 20, 1944

2.President Arévalo depicted as a woman before a stereotypical indigenous peasant on a float for the desfile bufo, 1945

3.Lionel Sisniega Otero and Mario López Villatoro broadcasting for Radio de la Liberación, Chiquimula, 1954

4.Cover of the Boletín del CEUAGE, May 22, 1954

5.Carlos Castillo Armas visiting the new University City in September 1954

6.Front page of the No Nos Tientes, 1966

7.Juan Tecú comic depicting the development of a military officer. No Nos Tientes, 1969

8.Go forth and learn from all . . . Mural by Arnoldo Ramírez Amaya, 1973

9.The bloody symbol of the National Liberation Movement. Mural by Arnoldo Ramírez Amaya, 1973

10.Youth spray painting a wall with the slogan, Student Who Listens, Organize and Fight

11.Guatemala ’78: Home of the World Championships of Assassinations

12.Protestors confront National Police on La Sexta, August 3, 1978

13.National Police detain unknown people on La Sexta in Zone 1, Guatemala City, January 31, 1980

14.A scene of political violence in Zone 1, Guatemala City, ca. 1980

15.Mourners carry red carnations and process down La Sexta at the funeral for Oliverio Castañeda de León

16.Iduvina Hernández walks with a comrade at the funeral for a union leader from CAVISA, 1978

17.Funeral for the victims of the Spanish Embassy Fire, Guatemala City, February 1980

18.Memorial for victims of the Spanish Embassy Fire with Gregorio Yujá’s casket, Guatemala City, February 1980

19.Banner of the Asociación de Estudiantes de Humanidades (AEH) at a protest on International Workers’ Day, May 1, 1980

20.Flyer advertising a protest in front of the Guatemalan Embassy in Mexico City, 1982

21.Popular organizations protest while under surveillance, ca. 1980

22.Murals and sculpture commemorating university martyrs in the USAC School of History, July 2016

23.H.I.J.OS. posters and graffiti on La Sexta, July 2016

PREFACE

Universitario, this city belongs to you. Construct your talent within her, so that future generations can quench their thirst for knowledge here. May your academic life be sacred, fecund, and beautiful. Enter not into this city of the spirit, without a well-proven love of truth.

DR. CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DURÁN

This precept marks the entrance to the Universidad de San Carlos’s main campus in Zone 12, at the southern edge of Guatemala City. It was delivered by renowned Guatemalan physician, professor, and historian Carlos Martínez Durán during his first tenure as rector of the autonomous university after the 1944 revolution, and has been remembered and repeated since. Perhaps it is so enduring because it delimits both the campus and the surrounding capital city as the domain of universitarios. But it also demands an undefined love of truth as a precondition of entrance into this community and reminds all students, faculty, and visitors of their duty to learn and serve.

Martínez Durán’s words give this book its title, for they poignantly augur its fundamental interventions. They signal the history of a city, one that illuminates urban life in a place usually imagined as rural. They also foreshadow the struggles and missteps that will challenge urban students as they attempt to reach out to the countryside. They suggest a history that will extend across generations to defy the chronological frames that usually shape modern Guatemalan history. Too, they recall a student movement that both precedes and survives the eruption of student politics in 1968. They center students, not rural peasants, foreign officials, or military strongmen, as the protagonists of modern Guatemalan history. Spoken in the present indicative mood, these words—This city belongs to you—command universitarios to accept their responsibility to future generations.

This City Belongs to You tells one history of students’ thirst, not just for knowledge, but also for justice, and the city of the spirit where they sought to quench it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began this book my first semester of graduate school. I wanted to find a moment when students changed the world. I wound up writing about nationalism, loss, social class, and—yes—many moments when students changed the world. Countless people have nurtured this work and me across a decade. I would like to express my gratitude to the many individuals, institutions, and associations that made this book possible, for this kind of work cannot be done alone.

Thank you—

To Jeff Gould, who has always asked the toughest questions. His insistence on precision and politically engaged scholarship fundamentally shapes my work and raises my expectations of myself and others. Peter Guardino continues to demonstrate the kind of intellectual generosity to which I aspire. His class on nationalisms became foundational to this book.

To Lessie Jo Frazier and Shane Green for their comments on the book’s earlier form. I am also grateful to Judith A. Allen, Wendy Gamber, and Michael McGerr for their support and sense of humor. The estimable Danny James, Jason McGraw, Patrick Dove, and Micol Seigel nurtured this project in different moments, asking formative questions that advanced my thinking on histories of social class, oral history, memory, Marxism, race, and liberalism. Additional thanks go to John French and Patrick Barr-Melej with whom I shared discussions of middle class formation and social movements. Thanks to Greg Grandin for a gesture of generosity and enthusiasm for this project in its very early stages.

To Jo Marie Burt for turning me toward E. P. Thompson many years ago and Matt Karush for early lessons in cultural history. Thank you both for planting the seed.

To the Indiana University Departments of History and Gender Studies, and the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies, which generously supported my research for many years through the Susan O’Kell Memorial Award, the Frederick W. & Mildred C. Stoler Research Fellowship, the Mendel Research Fellowship, Tinker Field Research Grant, and finally, a Foreign Language Area Study grant to study K’iche’ Maya. I am also grateful to the Doris G. Quinn Foundation for its support.

To the Connecticut State University Board of Regents whose generous support funded this research with a Faculty Research Grant from 2014 to 2016. Additional support from the Southern Connecticut State University’s Faculty Creative Activity Grant (2013, 2015) and Faculty Development Grant (Fall 2016) aided in manuscript revision and follow-up research that shaped the Coda.

A Iduvina Hernández, una tremenda ejemplar de una San Carlista comprometida de siempre. Y a lxs jóvenes de H.I.J.O.S.: gracias por su trabajo y ejemplo de lucha y resistencia.

A Thelma Porres Morfín por su apoyo y bondad. Gracias también a Lucrecia Paniagua, Blanca Velásquez, Reyna Pérez, Mónica Márquez, Lucía Pellecer, Anaís García y los demás trabajadores del Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica en Guatemala a lo largo de los años. Y a Amanda López, Anna Carla Ericastilla, Alejandra González Godoy y todas las archivistas del Archivo General de USAC, Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, y la Hemeroteca Nacional.

To the many friends who opened their hearts and homes to me during fieldwork, especially Jared Bibler, Anna Blume, Caroline Elson, Brie Gettleson, Julie Gibbings, Mélanie Issid, Calvin Knutzen, Lauren Lederman, Este Migoya, John Rexer, Chris Siekmann, Chris Sullivan, Mike Tallon, Ashley Todd, and Allyson Vinci. A Álvaro León, gracias, huelguero, for years of friendship. Y a Paulo Estrada, Javier Pancho Figueroa, Iván Guas, Diego Leiva y Allan Reyes Muñoz por su sentido de humor.

To Abigail E. Adams, David Carey, Ricardo Fagoaga, Martha Few, Julie Gibbings, Jim Handy, Michael Kirkpatrick, Deborah Levenson, Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson, Liz Oglesby, Victoria Sanford, Arturo Taracena, J. T. Way, and Kirsten Weld, who graciously welcomed me into a community of Guatemalanists. I am humbled by your kindness and generosity. I could not imagine a better group of co-conspirators.

To engaged audiences at several conferences and workshops for questions from which this book benefitted, especially the Yale University Latin American History Speaker Series, the University of Texas Lozano Long Conference on Latin American Studies, the Yale University Latin American Studies Working Group, the A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala Conference at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, and the Intellectual Cultures of Revolution in Latin America Conference co-hosted by the London School of Economics and Instituto Mora. Daniel J. Walkowitz offered very helpful comments on some of the material discussed in Chapter 6 when it appeared in an earlier version in the Radical History Review. Additionally, writing groups at Indiana University helped me formulate early drafts of these chapters, so my thanks go out to Katie Schweighofer, Nick Clarkson, Sarah Rowley, Laura Harrison, E. Cram, Susan Eckelmann, and Bryan Walsh.

To the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, which has become my intellectual home. At Tepoz, David Sartorius, Elliott Young, Bethany Moreton, Pamela Voekel, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, A. Shane Dillingham, Abel Sierra Madero, and Paolo Vignolo gave especially helpful comments on Chapters 4 and 6. Thank you, too, to the Mazunte-Malaguas Writing Group for sharing the hemisphere’s loveliest and most terrifying terrain.

To Siobhan Carter-David, Joel Dodson, Mary Koch, Cassi Meyerhoffer, Yi-Chun Tricia Lin, and Troy Paddock who have been tremendous colleagues at Southern Connecticut State University. I am grateful for Byron Nakamura and Tom Radice for their collegiality and the Yerba Mate Club. And thank you, always, to my students. A special thanks goes out to the students in my History of Childhood and Youth graduate course in Spring 2017.

To Kate Marshall at the University of California Press, who has nurtured this project with a sense of humor and sharp intellect. Only once did I call her under duress, and she was perfect then and at every other moment. Thank you to Bradley Depew for his work in the project’s final stages. My thanks must also go out to J. T. Way, Diane M. Nelson, Jaime Pensado, and an anonymous reader who read drafts of the manuscript at various stages. Thank you to C. Libby for indexing. Thank you, too, to the Editorial Board at University of California Press.

I am humbly indebted to my friends, family, and kin. Without them there would be no book, and nothing worth thinking or writing, in any case. So, thank you—

To Anne Eller, Dixa Ramírez, Greta LaFleur, Joe Fischel, Megan Fountain, Fabian Menges, Aliyya Swaby, Bench Ansfield, Bruce Braginsky, Siobhan Carter-David, Cassi Meyerhoffer, Owen Meyerhoffer, Aron Meyer, and everyone at Unidad Latina en Acción who made New Haven a place to call home.

To Jennifer Boles, Devi Mays, Tess Hannah, Laura Grover, Chris Sloan, Ponce and Growler Grover-Sloan, Dan Stevenson, Rachel Dotson, David Díaz Arias, Kevin Coleman, Kalani Craig, Erin Corber, Club Kirkwood, Microcosm Publishing, the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, and the Bleeding Heartland Rollergirls who provided moral support during the long years of graduate school.

To the best letter writers, my grandparents Tony and Elaine Vrana, and to Dr. John and Jimmie Miller, whom I miss very much. I must thank my mother and father, Mary and Jon Vrana, for setting formidable examples of hard work, commitment, and love. Thank you for your unremitting encouragement. To my sister, Anna Vrana, thank you for you. Thank you, too, to Samantha Vrana, whom we lost during the book’s final revisions.

To Riedell and Dolly Vrana, who make long days bearable.

To David Kazanjian whose rigorous thinking and fierce commitment to a better world are watermarks on every single page of this book. No expression of gratitude is adequate to the debt I owe him for patiently showing me the meaning of a forgotten umbrella.

To E. Cram and Taylor Dean, who are my home no matter the distance.

Of course, always, already, alongside, and ongoingly, to kidd.

ABBREVIATIONS

MAP 1. Political Map of Guatemala. Based on a map prepared by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

MAP 2. New Transit Plan for Downtown Guatemala City, 1952. Archive of El Imparcial. Fototeca Guatemala, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).

Introduction

DO NOT MESS WITH US!

TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING seemed to be a fine time to start drinking for university students in 1955, at least on Good Friday, about ten months into military rule. A group of two thousand young revelers gathered in front of Lux Theatre on Sixth Avenue in downtown Guatemala City. They passed bottles of Quetzalteca-brand aguardiente. The event was called the Huelga de Dolores, or Strike of Sorrows, though it was neither solemn nor a strike. In fact, it was an annual tradition dating to at least 1898. Year after year at the desfile bufo, students in extravagant costumes paraded alongside decorative floats that portrayed political controversies and pop culture icons. In 1955, one sign read Adiós, Patria y Libertad (Goodbye, Fatherland and Freedom). It was a play on the slogan of the National Liberation Movement (MLN), which vowed Dios, Patria y Libertad (God, Fatherland, and Freedom). Students mercilessly lampooned the MLN’s leader, president and colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had overthrown democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz the year before. Students’ signs called him CACA (a slang term for feces and, conveniently, the president’s initials) and made fun of his large nose. Armas brought a definitive end to the democratic period known as the Ten Years’ Spring (1944–1954), but some students were not easily cowed.

By the beginning of Arbenz’s presidency, San Carlistas, as Universidad de San Carlos (USAC) students, alumni, and faculty came to be known, had both collaborated with and opposed the government for decades. USAC was the only institution of higher learning in Guatemala until 1961, so nearly everyone with a university degree had attended the school. Many of its students became national and international luminaries. Friendships—and enmities—formed there shaped the course of the nation’s history. Sheer impact and influence is one reason to study the history of San Carlistas.

Another is how the students of San Carlos require historians to develop more complex understandings of the power of intellectual elites. While drinking and chatting, the crowd of young revelers described above read from a peculiar newspaper, the No Nos Tientes. The No Nos Tientes exemplifies San Carlistas’ relationship to Guatemalan state power and protest. Published every year since 1898, even through some of the worst years of civil war violence, this satirical paper was written and edited by San Carlistas (anonymously or using playful nicknames) for San Carlistas. Its pages were filled with comics, fictional interviews, inside jokes, crossword puzzles, and scathing editorials that spared no one. Even its title conveys this tone. Tentar, the infinitive of the verb tientes, is difficult to translate into English, but it means, roughly, to mess with, excite, agitate, or disturb. No Nos Tientes—Do Not Mess with Us—is more challenge than plea. It implies putting someone to the test, as in Do not try us, and Do not tempt us. That this warning was uttered with a wry smile confounds the images that predominate scholarship on student politics and protest: rows of students carrying banners and shaking their fists or student leaders delivering speeches to assembled masses. So, too, does the fact that San Carlistas were both architects of government and key figures in the opposition across the second half of the twentieth century. These contradictions reveal complicated negotiations of identity and belief that can teach us more about class and the university than a romantic story of student activism.

This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996 follows several generations of university students at Guatemala’s only public university. Each chapter explores how these students engaged with the university as an institution and Guatemalan and (to a lesser extent) U.S. state apparatuses in the years between 1944 and 1996, a period marked by revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war. Through these encounters, USAC students forged a loose consensus around faith in the principles of liberalism, especially belief in equal liberty, the constitutional republic, political rights, and the responsibility of university students to lead the nation. I call this consensus student nationalism.

Student nationalism was a shared project for identity making, premised on the inclusions and exclusions of citizenship.¹ As later chapters demonstrate, student nationalism did not depend on the successful formation of a nation-state or even necessarily a national territory. Nor was ideological or cultural agreement necessary. Instead, student nationalism included many competing discourses that nevertheless provided a more or less coherent way of speaking about power relations. Here, nationalism was less something one had or believed than a way of making political claims. Rhetorics of responsibility, freedom, and dignity brought San Carlistas into an enduring fraternal bond with their classmates. As the civil war progressed and the military and police declared war on the university, San Carlistas used student nationalism to wage culture wars over historical memory.

By the late 1970s, the reactionary forces of the military and police became ever more brutal and student nationalism began to fray at the edges. Some students turned away from oppositional politics and focused on their studies, work, or family life. Some left USAC for one of the newer private universities, which had reputations for apoliticism and were therefore much safer. Others remained involved in USAC-based politics, often seeking support from international human rights organizations. A small number left the university to join the guerrillas, and some of these young people were killed. While San Carlista student nationalism remained a defining feature of urban, middle-class ladino life, in periods of repression it became a nationalism without a legitimate government. What endured in student nationalism across all of its many variations was the premise of citizenship and equality before the law and, most of all, an unwavering belief in the responsibility of San Carlistas to lead the Guatemalan people.

Most histories of student movements focus on the United States and Europe, and less often on Latin America. But This City Belongs to You centers a different place, one overlooked by student movement scholarship until now. It also demonstrates the necessity of a broader chronological frame to fully comprehend the meaning of student movements. When hundreds of students, workers, and military men opposed dictator Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), for example, they sought, in the words of President Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951), to create a democracy . . . just order, constructive peace, internal discipline, [and] happy and productive work.² For the participants in this movement, however, the meanings of terms like democracy and just order were not obvious, and they evolved considerably over time. Contests over the meaning of democracy would characterize the entire revolutionary era and subsequent counterrevolution. The Committee of Anticommunist University Students (Comité de Estudiantes Universitarios Anticomunistas [CEUA]), which met with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to orchestrate the overthrow of Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Arbenz, in its pursuit of democracy and justice, comes into focus here.

In short, this is a history of many generations of young people: their hopes, their actions, their role in social change; attempts to control them; their struggles against the government; and their encounters with the school as a state apparatus and a crucial site for resistance and celebration. In what follows, I draw out these complex histories across multiple generations and consider how San Carlistas debated the terms of democracy and intellectual life and, over time, the political culture of Guatemala’s middle class itself.

Taken to its conclusion with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 that ended thirty-six years of civil war, this history bears witness to the poignancy of young people’s willingness to die for an idea at the hands of the government. Although numbers are inadequate to this form of ultimate sacrifice, it is important to note that between 1954 and 1996, around 492 USAC students, faculty, and administrators were killed or disappeared by government, military, police, and parapolice forces. Of those killed, 363 were students and 104 were professors. Perhaps some gave their lives because they felt real efficacy in their sacrifice. The historical memory of other San Carlistas who had gone before them was powerful and reassuring. For others, there seemed to be little choice. The growing desperation of the pueblo made such sacrifice necessary. Ultimately, this is a tragic and inspiring history that does not quite escape the mythology and martyrology of the San Carlistas. Nor should it.

THE STATE’S UNIVERSITY

The modern USAC is built on a distinguished history of which San Carlistas are very proud. It was founded on January 31, 1676 after nearly a century of petitions to the Spanish crown, when Charles II issued a royal order establishing the Universidad de San Carlos de Borromeo. Seven faculty chairs corresponded to distinct areas of study: moral theology, scholastic theology, canon law, Roman or civil law, medicine, and, significantly, two chairs of indigenous languages.³ Most students came from the region’s elite families—often descendants of the first Iberians to come to the Kingdom of Guatemala—and ranged in age from twelve to twenty-eight.⁴ A few poor and indigenous students of exceptional ability were admitted, but matriculation was formally forbidden for African-descendent people. Prohibition also extended to individuals who had been sentenced by the Inquisition, or whose fathers or grandfathers had been so sentenced, though these policies were not always enforced.⁵

During the eighteenth century, the university developed a lively intellectual culture, despite frequent complaints about the teaching faculty’s erratic attendance. Renowned physician José Felipe Flores, the Kingdom of Guatemala’s first protomédico and an innovator of dissection techniques and anatomical modeling, studied at the university and later became one of its principal teaching physicians.⁶ Between its foundation and independence in 1821, the university awarded 2,000 bachelor’s degrees, 256 licentiate degrees, and 216 doctorates, 135 of which were in theology. All of this challenges the long-held presumption that intellectual culture in the Spanish colonies was stagnant, in contrast to Europe. In fact, the number of Guatemalan university graduates grew steadily until independence.⁷ In the Gazeta de Guatemala, published from 1797, intellectuals collected new knowledge in science, medicine, politics, and economics. The Gazeta then circulated, like its authors, throughout Central America, Mexico, and Europe.⁸

The university was undistinguished in the struggles for independence from Spanish rule and did not transform significantly after Spanish defeat. Students and professors in Law and Medicine had played key roles in governance for centuries and may have been uneager to see their privileges challenged.⁹ Nor were there many changes at the university in the first decades of federal and later republican rule. In 1821, university rectors instituted a modest reform that scarcely challenged its colonial structure.¹⁰ Three years later, a new national constitution charged Congress with organizing basic education, but the power of the Catholic Church actually expanded at the university. Only after USAC alumnus and Liberal Mariano Gálvez was appointed chief of state in 1831 did the university secularize in earnest. Gálvez’s Rules for the general establishment of Public Instruction argued that the government ought to oversee the training of professionals and set guidelines for higher education. A system of examinations and titles replaced patronage and cronyism. Like his peers throughout Mexico and Central and South America, Gálvez inaugurated a single academy under the authority of the state, based on the Napoleonic university: centralized, secular, and national.¹¹ Soon thereafter, however, a series of Conservative Party heads of state who governed from 1844 to 1871 reversed these reforms and returned the university to ecclesiastical oversight.

The university itself became a place where ideas about governance were up for discussion. The university’s curriculum, leadership, and even name changed amid the bitter rivalry between Conservatives and Liberals. Even programs of study could signify shifts in this epistemological battle: fewer students enrolled in theology while programs in medicine and chemistry grew. On several infamous occasions, students led plots to overthrow Conservative president Rafael Carrera (1844–1848 and 1851–1865). In 1871, students’ support was instrumental to Liberal Miguel García Granados’s victory over the last of the Conservatives, the party that had dominated political life since independence. Education reform was a priority for García Granados and his successor, Justo Rufino Barrios, a USAC law graduate. García Granados and Barrios envisioned a plan to modernize education that would purge the university of all markers of its colonial and ecclesiastical past, even changing its name from the Universidad de San Carlos to the Universidad de Guatemala. Barrios’s advisor, Marco A. Soto, instituted a sweeping reform informed by French positivism. He reorganized curricula around sciences, letters, and the professions. This new education system would bolster the economic development anticipated from a set of land reform laws that encouraged privatization of coffee-producing lands, prioritized infrastructure construction, pursued foreign loans, seized indigenous communities’ communal lands, and, ultimately, depended on a ready supply of indigenous labor.¹² In no small way, the contradictions of contemporary positivism, which at once proclaimed individual equality before the law and presented scientific distinctions between individuals, set the terms for San Carlistas’ reckonings with Guatemala’s racial codes, a topic that I address at greater length below.

Barrios’s other priority, the formation of a single Central American state with himself at the helm, led him to his death at the hand of Salvadoran troops in Chalchuapa, El Salvador, in 1885. Barrios’s vice-president served for just two days before another Liberal, Manuel Barillas, deposed him in turn. Barillas was himself overthrown by a Liberal rival, José María Reyna Barrios (nephew of Justo Rufino Barrios). Despite this instability at the highest levels of the state, consistent rule by the Liberal party after the 1870s meant that each successive administration promoted secular education as the means by which Guatemala would progress. Educational reforms and the closely related national hygiene plans devised by these governments reflected the Lamarckian and Mendelian understandings of human progress that Guatemalan lawyers, educators, scientists, and physicians, like their peers elsewhere in Latin America, studied in French, the second language of elites.¹³

While the university was a significant site of state making in these decades, the first of what could be called student movements took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, when students formed university- and facultad-based organizations in order to influence extramural politics. In 1898, Reyna Barrios was assassinated and another national university–educated lawyer, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, asserted himself as successor. A group of students from the School of Medicine formed a group called the Guatemalan Youth (Juventud Guatemalteca) to express their support for Cabrera’s candidacy. Other students and professors denounced this action on the grounds that the group could not claim to represent all Guatemalan youth and that these types of political expressions were inappropriate for a house of learning. In a time when a small number of the capital city’s residents (most of whom had ties to the university) were literate, two newspapers La República and Diario de Centro América published numerous open letters on the question of the students’ and university’s role in national political life. This debate would rage in one form or another for the next century, and beyond.¹⁴

Ultimately, Cabrera was elected president and went on to become one of the most controversial leaders in Guatemalan history, surviving many assassination attempts to serve four terms and usher in the ascendancy of the North American–owned United Fruit Company (UFCO) in Guatemala. Two new student organizations, the Juventud Médica and the Law Society, formed in the first months of Cabrera’s presidency. Despite ongoing clashes with these groups, Cabrera presented himself as a great champion of learning and marked his esteem for the university by bestowing upon it his own name, inaugurating the Estrada Cabrera National University.¹⁵ Cabrera’s megalomaniacal campaign for education also included the construction of enormous temples to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, poetry, and medicine, and the mandatory celebration of exorbitant Fiestas Minervalias every October. Then, a series of earthquakes wracked Guatemala between November 1917 and January 1918, destroying homes, government buildings, schools, and churches. Thousands of people were left without housing and several hundred were killed. After decades of rule, it was the failure to provide effective relief and related allegations of corruption that were Cabrera’s undoing.

A tide of opposition rose rapidly after the earthquake. While some professors, mostly those Cabrera himself appointed, continued to support the president, other faculty and students opposed his arrogant goodwill. The Central American Unionist Party (PUCA) responded by recruiting students to its alliance of urban workers, Catholics, and professionals. The group’s first objective was to overthrow Cabrera, but they also sought to revive the dream of a united Central America.¹⁶ One group of young men from PUCA had opposed Cabrera and the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties since their high school days at the elite National Central Institute for Boys (Instituto Nacional Central para Varones [INCV]). The group’s most famous member, Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, dubbed them the Generation of 1920. Among his fellows were David Vela, Horacio Espinosa Altamirano, Carlos Wyld Ospina, César Brañas, Jorge García Granados, Carlos Samayoa Chinchilla, and Ramón Aceña Durán, some of Guatemala’s most famous writers, poets, essayists, and jurists.¹⁷ Cabrera surrendered in April 1920. PUCA’s success signaled the emergence of a new intellectual class in the modern Republic of Guatemala, one that viewed itself as the nation’s standard-bearer.

The young men of the Generation of 1920 championed the redemptive power of ideas. They came to see their role in national politics as an extension of their educational pedigree.¹⁸ Two years earlier, a group of young Argentine students at the Universidad de Córdoba had successfully demanded co-governance and autonomy and called on their peers across the Americas to join their struggle.¹⁹ Cabrera’s overthrow further energized student political life. Inspired by events at home and abroad, several smaller facultad-based groups came together to form the Association of University Students (AEU) in May 1920. From this generation of students, and the leadership role they imagined for themselves, sprang the roots of student nationalism.

Though USAC counted around just four hundred students by the 1920s, students’ preoccupations with their own class, cultural, and national identity provoked a series of new debates. For instance, one of the principal concerns of the intellectual class that was consolidating by the 1920s was national unity, especially after the Mexican Revolution illustrated the dangers of disunion. Guatemala’s indigenous majority represented a significant challenge to ladino students’ dream of a national culture.²⁰ Yet there was little consensus about how to solve what was then referred to as the Indian problem. Lamarckism was no longer in vogue, having been replaced by the more deterministic writings of Herbert Spencer and Gustave Le Bon, but students also read work by proponents of mestizaje, including the Mexican theosophist José Vasconcelos.²¹ Much like the debate over the proper role of the university in society, the debate over the Indian problem would occupy students for many decades.

The debated and contentious elitism of ladino universitarios vis-à-vis the indigenous majority was a defining dynamic of the university and its students. The meaning of ladino, like that of the middle class, was made and remade through quotidian encounters and flashpoints of violence. But in the most general sense, ladinos are usually people of mixed Spanish, indigenous, and African descent, akin to mestizos in Mexico. As is always the case with racial difference, however, attributes like language, dress, career, and location play a decisive role in determining how labels are assigned or identities convincingly performed.²² Generally, ladinos are defined by speaking Spanish, wearing Western clothes rather than traditional hand-woven huipil, owning farms or working professional or industrial jobs, and living in certain regions of the country or cities. But apart from national censuses, San Carlistas did not use the word ladino to describe themselves. Instead, they signaled their racial difference from indigenous people in debates over culture and literacy, educational plans, and even cartoons, which I discuss at greater length in the chapters to come.

By their own estimation superior to Guatemala’s indigenous population and the rest of Central America in terms of arts and learning, Guatemalan intellectuals were also self-conscious of how they compared to Mexico and the rest of the world. In 1921 as representatives of the AEU, Vela, Marroquín Rojas, and Orantes attended a meeting of the International Federation of Students in Mexico City. There they joined Vasconcelos and fellow students in celebration of a new hemispheric student culture and "ser universitario" (university identity or even student being).²³ This was just one of many instances when the recent Mexican and Russian Revolutions, and the new state formations that they proposed, informed Guatemalan intellectuals’ understandings of political culture, the nation-state, and revolution.²⁴

Inaugurating an effort to build national unity, USAC changed its motto from University of Guatemala—Among the World’s Great Universities to Go Forth and Teach All in 1922 and developed its first extension programs the following year.²⁵ These programs varied widely, but they promoted the same vision: the creation of a more literate Guatemalan pueblo, united by a national culture, and prepared for the future. Universitarios would direct expertise from the university out into a deprived pueblo, and this would help the nation unite and move forward into modern life. This way of thinking reflected broader intellectual trends. In 1931, Chilean writer and educator Gabriela Mistral visited Guatemala and delivered a speech on the importance of education for Latin America. She said, The University, for me, would be the moral double of a territory and would have a direct influence, from agriculture and mining to night school for adults, including under its purview schools of fine arts and music.²⁶ Mistral affirmed that the goals of the nation-state and the university were linked. As the state attended to the citizenry’s social needs, the university attended to its moral needs.²⁷ Her words also captured the basic premises of emergent student nationalism: the belief that formal education was intimately linked to human progress, and by extension, the responsibility of students to lead the people. Her words connected San Carlistas to larger claims about a Latin American modernity built on private prosperity and public virtue.²⁸

Less than eleven years after Cabrera’s fall, another dictator challenged the university, once more transforming its political culture. Jorge Ubico y Castañeda (1931–1944) outlawed all student organizations. Like Cabrera, he appointed cronies to high positions within the university and personally supervised its functions. Under this rigid structure the university became known as a factory of professionals, churning out credentialed graduates with little of the sense of universitario duty that had motivated the Generation of 1920. Occasionally, Ubico simply closed the university. When he did permit the university to operate, his control was far-reaching. Early in his presidency, Ubico granted himself authority over the University High Council (CSU) and appointed the university’s highest official, the rector, who controlled faculty hiring. Leaving little room for mischief, Ubico even supervised the behavior of students and faculty who were required to conform to certain standards of comportment. The university had become a school of good manners, chiefly occupied by the reproduction of credentials for the benefit of a small elite.²⁹

Civil society was divided. Ubico’s dictatorship offered stability that encouraged foreign investment and brought economic prosperity to some. But political parties and most civic organizations were outlawed. Only Ubico’s followers could have successful careers in the professions and the Army. In 1942, a small group of friends from the Faculty of Law set out to change all of that. They took up the banner of the Generation of 1920. They agitated for change and soon, demanded Ubico’s resignation.

EDUCATION, YOUTH, AND THE CITY

San Carlistas would draw on and expand this celebrated history across the next five decades, sometimes as state-makers and in other