six chapters below follow the lives and deaths of San Carlistas from 1942 through the civil war. They outline students’ political cultures and strategies of resistance in a captivating interplay between the everyday and the extraordinary. While these young people ate and drank and debated everything from political right to sports teams, they built friendships and an enduring class ideology. The archive of San Carlistas includes pamphlets, manifestos, meeting minutes, police reports, photographs, daily newspapers, memos, memoirs, theses and dissertations, and long Boletines written for the Huelga de Dolores, which were meant to be read aloud. Each chapter opens with the No Nos Tientes, a newspaper printed for the Huelga de Dolores.
Chapter 1 begins as law students publicly questioned dictator Jorge Ubico’s rule, and then expands to assess the political, social, and economic changes that occurred between 1942 and 1952 from the perspective of USAC students and professors. The close relationship between USAC and the revolutionary governments and the political philosophy of the university as a “Republic of Students” enabled the emergence of the San Carlista as a social and cultural identifier. I discuss debates over the meaning and practice of democracy, including voting rights, literacy, and social welfare programs, as well as research into national concerns such as indigenous communities and poverty that contributed to the rise of a certain idea of the Guatemalan nation and its citizenry. The Constitution of 1945 called on teachers and students to become caretakers of the pueblo. They were to protect and expand culture, promote ethnic improvement (promover el mejoramiento étnico), and supervise civic and moral formation; in effect, they were to make the people fit for self-government.79 By the administration of Jacobo Arbenz, this democratic awakening and the invigoration of terms like “democracy” (democracia), “fatherland” (patria), and “freedom” (libertad) enabled the rise of anticommunism within some university sectors.
Chapter 2 tracks the rise of anticommunism at the university and the concomitant fragmentation of student nationalism. I consider a lengthy anticommunist text, The Plan of Tegucigalpa, a proposal for government written by Catholic anticommunist students in exile in late 1953. After the 1954 coup, The Plan became the founding document of the counterrevolutionary state. Many of the principles of the Revolution endured in the brief period between the counterrevolution and the first rumblings of civil war. Some, like free market capitalism, personal property rights, and political freedoms, guided Catholic pro-Castillo Armas anticommunists and anti-Castillo Armas Arbencistas (supporters of Arbenz) alike. Civil freedoms and electoral democracy, on the other hand, bolstered the Arbencistas alone. Most histories of the period emphasize the determinant role of foreign economic and diplomatic intervention, but this chapter underscores the complex interplay of internal and external factors prior to and after the counterrevolution. To this end, I follow negotiations between university staff and faculty, students, and the Castillo Armas regime and their impact on civic life in Guatemala City. Initially, Castillo Armas tried to win over the university by meeting with students and promoting professors sympathetic with the counterrevolution. Only with the May Day and June 1956 protests did relations between the government and USAC become intractably antagonistic.
Chapter 3 focuses on just five years of university life to show how this antagonism became a defining feature of San Carlista student nationalism. Some students and student groups reworked historic values, like service to one’s community and a belief in the university’s special role in society, into a new political language built around fraternity, mistrust of the government, anti-imperialist nationalism, and renewed pride in the universitarios’ duty to lead the nation. This political affect undergirded the sense that the university—as arbiter of justice and defender of freedom—was under attack. Popular histories, events, and whole commemorative calendars drew on these historic values to give meaning to the experience of teaching or studying at USAC. Idioms of fraternity, mistrust, and valor began to define student nationalism explicitly against the government while they strengthened an individual’s relationship to the university. This was especially important when steeply rising enrollments might have weakened universitario unity. San Carlistas no longer derived legitimacy from the government or the Constitution. Instead, they argued for their duty to lead the people and the nation toward progress.
Chapter 4 addresses some of the ways that San Carlistas attempted to put these ideals into practice through the 1970s. Students and faculty set out on the march against underdevelopment in the city and the countryside. Yet the political context of the 1970s transformed the rhetorics of freedom, responsibility, dignity, and duty that had formed the base of student nationalism since the Revolution. For instance, anti-imperialist nationalism inspired new university extension programs, but personal encounters with indigenous, rural, and poor citizens in the practice of these programs compelled San Carlistas to reevaluate the university’s orientation vis-à-vis the pueblo. Academic debates about development and dependency theory also challenged these attitudes. Development theory, especially dependency theory, helped USAC social scientists to understand why underdevelopment seemed endemic in Latin America even after foreign businesses expanded their investments in the region. Development praxis became the crux of class making for urban ladino intellectuals. For the most part, San Carlistas continued to position themselves as advocates for the periphery and ambassadors of progress, yet their knowledge of the periphery became more intimate. As the civil war deepened, San Carlistas had to reexamine their relationship to the pueblo in order to simply survive the government’s vicious, bloody counterinsurgency efforts.
Chapters 5 and 6 discuss these difficult years, but from distinct perspectives. Chapter 5 outlines the creation of a broader popular movement through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Chapter 6, in turn, focuses on how the popular movement developed a new politics of death and urban space in response to a series of violent acts. These acts included the spectacular 1976 earthquake, the massacre at Panzós, and the Spanish Embassy fire, alongside more subtle repression like surveillance at the university. I have separated these two chapters in order to resist the tendency to see resistance and repression as an almost hydraulic system, which obscures the real gains made by the popular left. I argue that as the state expanded its use of violence against San Carlistas, so did San Carlistas expand their resistance, drawing on funereal practices, political feelings, and basic ethical assumptions. Key to this change was a critical reevaluation of the politics of advocacy and representation that had characterized San Carlistas’ relations to nonstudents in previous decades. No longer mere acolytes of knowledge as in the 1940s and 1950s, or advocates for periphery as in the 1960s, San Carlistas increasingly understood their political freedom to be intimately bound up with that of the urban and rural poor. In part, students had learned this through their participation in protest campaigns led by these groups. Certain student and faculty leaders like Oliverio Castañeda de León and Mario López Larrave made popular coalition their cause and, ultimately, died for it.
The gradual foreclosure of peaceful opposition invigorated the power of spectacular mourning as a protest strategy. Political funerals changed the space of downtown Guatemala City. When well-known San Carlistas like Castañeda de León and López Larrave were killed, students organized grand funeral processions that led from the university campus through downtown to the General Cemetery. As students staged political funerals and other ritual protests, they created a many-layered space of mourning and memory. Using claims to kinship, fear, trauma, and responsibility, students and professors exhorted the citizenry to take political action. Some Guatemalans questioned the legitimacy of liberalism and its social contract in the midst of such loss and uncertainty. Discarding the reformist possibility that characterized student nationalism since the 1954 coup, some San Carlistas turned to millenarian futures. Political funerals were only the most visible of these acts whereby young people and their teachers dreamed of a future beyond the struggle where young people could live and study freely. Because this politics of death also appealed to human rights law, it helped San Carlistas build new relationships with international organizations. By 1980, student nationalism extended beyond justice, rights, and fraternity, which had characterized previous decades. It became a nationalism without a state.
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