revolution are enough to call this unity into question. Nevertheless, the text offers insight into the hopes, dreams, and flaws of Galich’s generation. His nostalgic playfulness evokes the spirit of student nationalism.
In the first years of the Revolution, universitarios built a sense of fraternity, a political kinship, defined by affinities and exclusions. Women were important to the young men as wives, sisters, cleaners, cooks, and secretaries, but they were rarely classmates. Although women had attended the university since the 1920s, they were denied the fellowship and opportunities of male students.7 Likewise, indigenous students had never been excluded from the university, but they usually appeared in student papers as objects of ridicule or patronizing care because of their presumed lack of education. The impact of these exclusions expanded as the university’s influence over urban life extended. The reformed Constitution of 1945 bestowed new rights and responsibilities upon the whole education system. Teachers and students were to protect and expand culture, promote ethnic improvement (“promover el mejoramiento étnico”), and supervise civic and moral formation; in effect, to make the people fit for self-government.8
UBICO’S DECADENT FACTORY OF PROFESIONALISTAS
President Ubico lived and ruled in the manner of his idol, Napoleon Bonaparte. He dressed exclusively in military regalia, enjoyed motorcycle tours of the countryside and city, and hosted opulent dinners. Famously unpredictable, Ubico threw vicious tantrums as regularly as he threw galas.9 Politics at all levels operated under his control. Ministerial appointments reflected the interests of wealthy landowners, foreign investors, and Ubico’s friends and allies. At the local and regional level, Ubico eliminated challenges to his authority by hand-selecting intendentes to replace elected mayors in towns nationwide. Lest these intendentes become loyal to their communities, Ubico regularly moved them from place to place.10 Even Ubico’s nominally beneficent labor reform, which replaced debt peonage with vagrancy laws, empowered intendentes.11 The extraction of labor from poor men and women was crucial in years when global economic depression drove coffee prices so low that the commodity was scarcely profitable to produce and difficult to sell abroad. At the same time, Ubico deftly allied poor ladino and indigenous citizens to his government through powerful discourses of nation making and progress.12 Within the Army, Ubico based promotions on loyalty rather than competence. Over time, the officer class grew to resent these appointments and their incompetent superiors. Those who offended Ubico were punished and those who praised him lived well. These limitations paired with economic and infrastructural growth created the conditions for growing antipathy toward Ubico’s rule, especially among a small group of educated urban professionals and Army officers.13
The only sector that escaped Ubico’s punishing hand was Guatemala’s agricultural elite, especially UFCO, a Boston-based company formed in the last decades of the nineteenth century by the merger of banana production, distribution, and communication networks. UFCO agreed to build infrastructure in exchange for enormous land grants and preferential treatment: the company that would control one-third of the world’s banana trade by the 1950s paid very little in taxes to the Guatemalan government and was permitted to manage its workers with impunity. Of course, growth in export production and distribution networks required a large and skillful middle class.14 Huge companies required managers to organize workers, accountants to administer finances, lawyers to provide legal counsel and oversee contracts, and engineers to implement technical innovations. Dangerous plantations needed doctors and nurses to staff their hospitals and clinics. Supply shops required more accountants and managers. Children required schoolteachers.
Ubico adapted the National University to fulfill these needs. Like rural banana plantations, the urban university that churned out credentialed graduates was called “the decadent factory of profesionalistas.”15 This description of the university as factory is especially grim given Guatemala’s bleak labor landscape. Yet if the university was a decadent factory, it was so only for those who went along with the boss. Early in his presidency, Ubico granted himself control over the highest governing body at the university, the University High Council (CSU). From this position, he personally supervised all aspects of university life, including the very comportment of students and professors. Behavior and character became important parts of the curriculum. The institution was transformed from a center for scientific investigation and professional formation to a school of good manners. Galich, then a student, wrote that Ubico “wanted to form the minds of all Guatemalans . . . from philosophy to saddlery, and including science, law, ethics, economy, [and] motorcycling.” He joked that Ubico saw himself as “a walking encyclopedia with epaulets.”16
The belief that the university ought to stay out of national politics governed university affairs. As in other areas of government, Ubico hand-selected the university’s rector, deans, and secretaries for their allegiance rather than their proficiency. Deans were rarely experts in the fields that they advised, even though they made hiring and curriculum decisions. The rector retained final say over any faculty hires, but that position was also a presidential appointment. Faculty who opposed Ubico stood little chance of success. Ubico isolated the National University from other Latin American universities, despite interest in international student federations since the 1920s and more recent initiatives by students and faculty to unify Central American courses of study. Outside influence was suspect.17 In his memoir, Galich evoked the “suspicious grunt of the police chiefs when one asked permission to organize a conference, to receive an illustrious houseguest, [or] to form an indigenous institute,” even, he added, “to play chess . . . to coordinate an athletic tournament, to go to a library to read silently.”18
In early 1942, students from the Faculty of Law began to circulate critiques of the government in newspapers and pamphlets.19 Many of these statements were loosely transcribed in Galich’s memoir. The group criticized how the intellectual sector “has frequently been in the service of the dictator, of the autocracy” and “other times it has been rashly divided by differences in caste, religious convictions, by conflicting personal interests.”20 The young men warned of the danger of this disunity that left academics vulnerable to the power of despots. The group itself included brothers Mario and Julio Cesar Méndez Montenegro, Hiram Ordóñez, Manuel María Ávila Ayala, Heriberto Robles, Antonio Reyes Cardona, José Luis Bocaletti, José Manuel Fortuny, Alfonso Bauer Paíz, and Arturo Yaquian Otero. Most of these young men came from similar backgrounds: they were born or had spent most of their lives in the capital city and lived with parents who could afford expensive preparatory schooling for their sons. Ávila Ayala was different. He was about ten years older than his colleagues and was from Jalapa. Despite being a distinguished student, he never achieved the title of Licenciado, so valued in Guatemalan society. His bachillerato degree only certified him to teach handwriting and calligraphy. Like Ávila Ayala, Fortuny was also from the periphery and never graduated with a law degree. Instead, he quit school and worked for a North American business, Sterling Company. By contrast, Bauer Paíz, one of the youngest of the group, graduated from university by the end of 1942. He had attended the especially elite Colegio Preparatorio, unlike his fellows who had mostly attended the INCV. Mario Méndez Montenegro and Ordóñez had studied abroad. None of these young men were indigenous and most claimed some European ancestry. Most had been friends before university, like Bauer Paíz and Yaquian Otero who ran and lifted weights together because they wanted to lose weight before starting college.21
These young men who studied, ate, drank, and worked out together began to expand their conversations beyond the classroom by 1942. They called themselves the escuilaches, a term that lacks a singular history. It may be a reference to Spanish anti-French riots in 1766 or a pun on esquilar (to shear) and esquilador (sheep-shearer). The escuilaches were young men who wanted to shear the wool that Ubico had pulled over the eyes of the Guatemalan people.22 In any case, the escuilaches and their classmates were heirs to the political culture that celebrated the university’s role in Guatemalan political life that I outlined in the Introduction.
However,
