population (49.1%) is literate, only 10 percent (9.7%) of the indigenous population is [literate].”79 The elite status of professionals is even clearer in terms of national employment statistics. In 1940, Guatemala’s economically active population counted 1,846,977 individuals; of this group of nearly 2 million workers, only 2,145 worked in what were called the “liberal professions” (profesiones liberales) as lawyers, notaries, doctors, surgeons, dental surgeons, pharmacists, midwives, and topographical and civil engineers. That is, less than 0.12 percent of economically active Guatemalans had careers in professional fields. By contrast, 45.8 percent (846,103) of economically active individuals did domestic service work and 42.1 percent (777,509) did agricultural work. Together this nearly 88 percent of the population performed labor that did not require schooling or literacy.80
Moreover, professionals were concentrated in the capital city. In 1940, more than half of Guatemala’s 413 lawyers lived in the capital. A decade later, around 62 percent of Guatemala’s lawyers, doctors, surgeons, dental surgeons, and topographical and civil engineers lived in the Department of Guatemala, where Guatemala City is located. The remaining 38 percent were scattered unevenly throughout the other twenty-one departments. When the 1950 census noted an illiteracy rate (72.2%) that exceeded the recorded indigenous population (53.5%) by nearly 20 percentage points, these data were taken to indicate that there was also a “regular quantity of illiterate ladinos,” which led some social scientists to understand rurality as a factor in illiteracy. The same census recorded that only 22 percent of individuals over the age of seven in Guatemala City had attended “any school or classes whatsoever.” Plainly, to attend university was extremely rare, and to graduate was even rarer. Most San Carlistas had attended the same preparatory schools and known one another for decades by the time they reached university. Professionals and students formed a small, tight-knit, mostly urban, ladino community.81
All of these factors—race, region, and fraternity—weighed heavily on the Constitutional Assembly’s discussion of granting full suffrage to illiterate Guatemalans.82 USAC alumnus and conservative editor of the newspaper La Hora Clemente Marroquín Rojas observed that the debate divided civil society into two sectors: on one side “industrial workers, laborers, and some youths and students,” and the other “pure gentlemen: many students, but all ‘respectable people [gente decente].’”83 North American anthropologist Richard N. Adams looked on and dismissed the revolutionary yearnings of the escuilaches because of their apparent hypocrisy. He wrote, “the Faculty of Law, the locus of such radical student protests, [produced] a population of professionals that is apparently incapable of altering the system and is, instead, deeply involved in its continuity.”84 Adams’s observation certainly echoed the contemporary belief that the middle class ought to exemplify the “ideal of private prosperity and public virtue thought to be crucial to the smooth functioning of modern societies.”85 Actually, as I mentioned above, there was tremendous ideological difference among the escuilaches. Nevertheless, while the ruling junta, the AEU, the AED, and some members of the public opposed the vote for illiterate citizens, the majority of the Constitutional Assembly, many political parties (including president-elect Arévalo’s PAR), and most of the general public favored at least an open ballot for illiterate citizens.
Before long, the AEU changed its position. In their statement about the shift, the AEU leadership declared with confidence that it could not “stand against the interests and ideals of the pueblo.”86 In order to achieve political and social equality, the nation needed all of its citizens to participate. Further, they wrote, the restriction of illiterate citizens’ right to vote “forecloses and annuls the human character of our laborers, most of all of our industrial workers who have given sufficient proof of their patriotism and civility.”87 Still, they favored an open ballot for a short period while illiterate citizens were taught civic literacy, reading, and writing. As the foremost student group, the AEU represented San Carlistas as custodians of the knowledge and skills that were prerequisites to the franchise.
Not everyone was so easily persuaded. One important event must have loomed large in the newspaper debates over universal suffrage: the violent conflict between ladinos and Kaqchikels in Patzicía on October 22, 1944. Capital city newspapers described the aggression of the Kaqchikels and used the events to demonstrate how rural indigenous Guatemalans were unprepared for full citizenship.88 They did not report the fatal mismatch of machetes versus guns that placed indigenous combatants at a deadly disadvantage. Flashpoints such as these provided opportunities for middle-class professionals and students to demonstrate their own cultural and political difference, to celebrate their urbanity, and articulate a “dialectical brew of optimism, anxiety, and contradiction” that promoted certain manners as requisite for citizenship.89
In El Imparcial, just a few months later, illustrious journalist Rufino Guerra Cortave echoed this view when he wrote, “the rural man, the illiterate, the laborer, Indian or ladino, continues in his ignorance and, consequently, continues to be a danger, to be manipulated by the perverse maneuvering of the enemy.”90 For Cortave, the indigenous citizen was not to be faulted for his ignorance, but rather “four centuries of oppression, cruelty, and systematic brutalization of the native” had “made him so indolent and apathetic,” and “resigned to his lot.”91 Ongoing oppression rendered the indigenous community (and illiterate ladinos) incapable of participating in the social contract. Cortave continued, “To beings whose lack of consciousness is a cloud in our sky of democratic liberties . . . we must take reason . . . we must infuse the ABC of civilization.” After all, if one had not learned more than the most rudimentary reading, he “is not guilty if he cannot discern good from evil and it is the duty of the rest of the Guatemalans of conscience to show them the path of their own best interest if they are to be part of this society.” This task could be achieved “with reason and patriotic honesty as guides.”92 Cortave’s quasi-expert discourse declared that only with literacy could one have reason, discern good from evil, and be counted upon to act in their own best interest. The process of coming to consciousness by those blameless for their lack of it required a certain submission to a course of treatment by the more wise.
In La Hora, Jorge Schlesinger argued that the “Indian” was an “irresponsible subject” because of “his lack of education and inadaptability.” Like Cortave, he encouraged the incorporation of the indigenous as citizens in the national community. But for Schlesinger, inclusion was owed because “he is the pillar of the national economy which is based mainly on agriculture” not because inclusion was “necessary to unify the national conscience,” as Cortave had written.93 In fact, the government was duty-bound to look after the indigenous, if only so “that he may be useful to the fatherland.”94 Cortave, Schlesinger, and the AEU agreed on the conclusion if not on the rationale: illiterate rural indigenous laborers and their ladino counterparts must be enfranchised.
Suffrage became “obligatory and secret” for literate men; “optional and secret” for literate women; and “optional and public” for illiterate men. Illiterate women were not mentioned at all in the Constitution.95 A woman thusly located in the assemblymen’s understanding of political authority could not possibly properly exercise citizenship. The question was settled in the Constitutional Assembly, but it revealed a rift that was not easily mended. Civil society was the precondition of democracy, but education was the precondition of civil society. San Carlistas were charged to infuse the “ABCs of civilization,” and in so doing enact the most enduring feature of the new student nationalism: the responsibility of the students to lead the nation.
The new constitution was completed in time for Arévalo’s inauguration. On March 15, 1945, President Arévalo stood before a crowd in the congressional chambers. He declared, “We are going to equip humanity with humanity. We are going to rid ourselves of guilt-ridden fear through unselfish ideas. We are going to add justice and happiness to order, because order does not serve us if it is based on injustice and humiliation.” He continued, “We are going to revalorize, civically and legally, all of the men of the Republic . . . Democracy means just order,
