sense, political violence against the university was a return to a previous pattern. The incomplete project of national Liberal reform in the late nineteenth century and the failed Central American union in 1920 were both punctuated by violent executive incursions into university life. But what had changed was the magnitude of violence and the students’ willingness to resist. The book closes with a Coda that revisits student nationalism through Guatemala City’s palimpsestic memoryscape where the past interrupts the present on street corners and school buildings covered with commemorative placards, graffiti, and memorials. In this final section, I turn to the young people involved in ongoing movements for memory in the 2000s and 2010s, who draw on the legacies of San Carlista student activism in order to imagine new political futures for Guatemala.
• • •
What idea was worth dying for, for a twenty-year-old? In students’ writings, it would seem that ideas like democracy, justice, nation, freedom, honor, conscience, duty, independence, and progress were enough. But how could these abstract ideals inspire the ultimate sacrifice? Student nationalism connected these principles to San Carlistas’ daily struggles, hopes, and dreams. For some students, democracy meant voting rights, literacy, and social welfare programs; for them, student nationalism was a social contract. For others like the Catholic CEUA, democracy meant the eradication of communist threat in the Americas and so student nationalism was an almost ecclesiastical law. As the civil war drew on, student nationalism became inflected with Marxism and anti-Americanism. To be a San Carlista came to signify opposition to the government, giving new meaning to the old cry: “Do Not Mess with Us!” Regardless of their political beliefs and whether they survived intact, fled to exile, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed or disappeared, all San Carlistas were indelibly marked by the legacy of student nationalism. This City Belongs to You seeks to clarify the interrelation of university political culture and social class. While this is a history of youth and ideals, it is also a history of how these young people shaped a university, a city, and a nation.
ONE
The Republic of Students, 1942–1952
We have weapons that our forebears did not want, or were unable or were unwilling to wield . . . Three weapons that, well-used, can transform a group of guys . . . into a formidable force, capable of opposing and overthrowing those with the bayonets. These three weapons are our youth, our intelligence, and our unity.
“The Escuilach Manifesto”1
BANANAS—ON THE STALK, by the bunch, peeled, held aloft, all of them long Cavendish bananas grown for export by the United Fruit Company (UFCO)—formed the masthead of the No Nos Tientes in 1949. The anonymous artist was probably Mario López Larrave, a law student who drew most of the newspaper’s cheeky cartoons for many decades. The letters offered a visual complement to the pages of tongue-in-cheek text that appeared below them. After an “N” made of Guatemalan bananas destined for North American stomachs, a portrait of Francisco Javier Arana formed the “O” of Nos and two interlocking sickles formed the “S.” In April 1949, the young illustrator could not have known the prescience of his figures; rather, he drew from the anti-imperial spirit of the 1944 revolution that had been so crucial to his own academic and political formation. Within months, however, one member of the revolutionary junta would be assassinated and anticommunist hysteria would begin to ferment and, ultimately, alter the course of the nation.
López Larrave was just fifteen years old when M41 bulldog tanks closed in on the National Palace and finally deposed dictator Jorge Ubico y Castañeda (1931–1944).2 If school had not been cancelled, López Larrave and his classmates might have watched the action from the window of their classroom at the National Central Institute for Boys (INCV), just a few blocks away. Months earlier, a broad movement of university students, young military officers, teachers, workers, and women’s organizations had forced Ubico to end his thirteen-year dictatorship. For as long as many could remember, the pleasures of daily life, like intellectual exchange, art, music, politics, and even social gatherings, had been strictly regulated. Ubico, an alumnus, even influenced the boys’ INCV curriculum through his friendship with the school’s principal. Protests continued while Ubico’s handpicked successor, Juan Federico Ponce Vaides, remained in power. The city was seized by democratic fervor, inspired by Rooseveltian democracy and Central America’s unique historical moment.
Seen from the windows of INCV, the National Palace was a symbol of Ubico’s absolute power and utter decadence: an imposing baroque structure with a grand entryway, dozens of porticos, 350 rooms, numerous patios, and expansive hallways. Nearby, Guatemala’s urban poor suffered under laws that demanded their labor for export production and infrastructure construction. The 1934 vagrancy law required all men who lacked an “adequate profession” or proof of landownership to work between 100 and 150 days on massive rural plantations. Another law required all men—except those who could pay a fee—to work for two weeks per year building and maintaining roads. In business and politics, Ubico promoted his friends and family while he limited the opportunities available to others. A growing number of professionals and military officers were unable to advance in the careers for which they had trained.
Outgoing, earnest, and generous, López Larrave was a leader among his peers at INCV. The political opening that came with Ubico’s overthrow gave López Larrave’s enthusiasm a certain direction. At INCV, he met an outspoken university student leader named Manuel Galich who replaced Ubico’s crony as school principal. For the boys, Galich was larger than life. López Larrave’s classmate Roberto Díaz Castillo remembered, “the first time I heard him . . . the first time that his words—the Word of the revolution—shook that patio filled with adolescents who did not wear the military uniform, we saw in Galich our archetype of a popular hero.”3 For López Larrave, Díaz Castillo, and others of their generation, the revolution offered opportunities that had been foreclosed for many decades.
This chapter begins with Galich, and then expands to examine the political, social, and economic changes brought by the Revolution and their impact on university students and faculty. Throughout, I emphasize how San Carlistas’ debates over the meaning and practice of democracy reveal a particular understanding of cultural fitness as the engine of national progress. These conversations helped to define urban ladino intellectuals as they limited the civic participation of Guatemala’s indigenous majority. Constitutional reforms extending the franchise, education and social welfare reforms, and university research on indigenous communities and poverty were notable moments when these discussions came to the fore. Simply put, universitarios saw themselves as the Guatemalans most fit to determine the direction of the nation even as they fiercely debated the role that the university ought to play in society. Both on campus and off, terms like patria and libertad came to signify society’s most important qualities. Over time, this attitude became a signature of the Guatemalan middle class, as much as discretionary spending, leisure time, and social prestige in the community. For Guatemalans, as for other Latin Americans in the twentieth century, the middle class was celebrated as the key to a redemptive future, as it was critical to modern prosperity and a model of public virtue.4 During the revolutionary decade, discussions about the meaning and practice of democracy set the stage for the emergence of fierce anticommunist opposition and, soon, counterrevolution.
This chapter also captures some of the texture of daily student life in the 1940s. Student newspapers that printed satire, silly jokes, song lyrics, and comics remind us that in addition to adeptly discussing matters of state, San Carlistas were also pretty funny. Memoirs also fill in some detail—the elation of boyhood, teenage levity, and the self-consciousness of one’s later adult years—in a period that has left relatively little to the archival record.5 Much of this chapter draws on Del pánico al ataque by Manuel Galich. Galich published his memoir in 1949, five years after the success of the revolution and five years before counterrevolutionary forces would depose Jacobo Arbenz, who had not yet been elected. Like so many memoirs, it is uncritically inflected with triumphal hindsight.6 Galich presents himself and his friends
