of everyone.”96 Dictatorship, or order “based on injustice and humiliation,” was abolished. Yet real democracy required “internal discipline, happy and productive work,” and men who had been “revalorized.” Later in the address Arévalo confirmed, “we are [working] directly for a transformation of the spiritual, cultural, and economic life of the republic.” The speech was a vow to teach civic values to all citizens who had lost or not yet acquired them. Arévalo added that Guatemalan democracy would become “a permanent, dynamic system of projections into society [by] tireless vigilance.”97 Some of Arévalo’s populist contemporaries, like Victor Haya de la Torre in Peru and Juan Perón in Argentina, had made similar claims, occasionally inspiring the support and at other times the ire of the middle class.98
FIGURE 2. President Arévalo depicted as a woman before a stereotypical indigenous peasant on a float for the desfile bufo, 1945. Anonymous Photograph. Collection of Juan José Arévalo Bermejo. Fototeca Guatemala, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).
Once in office, Arévalo called on San Carlistas to design the tax reform and new social security program, and to lead teams of doctors, lawyers, and engineers into the countryside to organize free clinics. Arévalo and his advisors also promoted national culture through fiction, poetry, music composition, and fine art contests.99 His democratic vision fused Rooseveltian social liberalism with Lockeian liberalism, the legacy of late nineteenth-century Central American Liberalism, and the populist political style that was en vogue across Latin America.100 His populism empowered intellectuals, experts, and policymakers through interwoven projects of economic development, human welfare, and political tutelage. Before long, advisors and funders from the United States would utilize these networks to implement a kind of soft imperialism in the context of the Cold War.101
The Arévalo government designed comprehensive reforms for every level of the educational system. The reforms ushered in a new period of openness. Professors and students returned from exile and brought with them experiences gained in Mexico and further afield.102 Schoolteachers were encouraged to restructure professional credentialing and rethink their teaching methods. Hundreds of new primary and secondary schools were built with government subsidies. The new Instituto Normal Nocturno, a night school, enabled workers to have access to the nationalist positivist curriculum of the highly regarded “cultura normalista.”103 At USAC, administrative reform crafted a republican government for the university: a legislature, the University High Council (CSU); an electoral college, the University Electoral Body; and an executive, the rector. The rector presided over the CSU, but its membership included the deans of all academic units, a professional delegate from every colegio, and a student delegate from each academic unit.104 Elections by secret ballot in the University Electoral Body replaced the personal appointment of the rector. Colegios, like guilds, regulated professionals’ training, examinations, and licensure; they served as a political bloc and social organization for members. The inclusion of colegios in university governance meant that although San Carlistas changed phases, from student to professional, and frequently, from professional to professor, their obligation to USAC endured.105
Education reforms progressed quickly, but Arévalo had more difficulty launching reforms in other areas. His economic policy based on a system of capitalist growth through agricultural export of coffee, cotton, and petroleum and moderate labor and finance reforms suggests he was cautious about impacting export production. The 1947 Labor Code restored the right to unionize to urban unions, but placed limitations on agricultural unions.106 Two of Arévalo’s most lasting reforms were the formation of the National Institute for the Promotion of Production (INFOP) and the Guatemalan Social Security Institute (IGSS) in 1948. These institutes sought to expand and diversify industry and agriculture, and focused on industrialization, credit, home construction, the indigenous economy, and cooperatives.107 San Carlistas advised both institutes.
But Arévalo was an educator, and not an economist or agronomist.108 His uneven policies and their consequences fueled debate over the meaning of the revolution. Historian Piero Gleijeses has argued that Arévalo’s economic reforms failed because they did not transform Guatemalan economic structure; the reforms actually reinforced the inequalities that his educational and cultural programming attempted to mitigate.109 For his part, Arévalo himself wrote in 1939 that any education reform would fail in Guatemala without structural reform.110 Nevertheless, as president, he pursued precisely the opposite policy. School attendance removed children from the household where they could have learned useful skills and contributed to the family’s economic activities. Making matters worse, the government could only afford to send empíricos to rural schools. Empíricos were a category of teacher who lacked regular credentials. They had not attended a Normal School and were scarcely more educated than their pupils. Worse, they were usually ladino and tackled a difficult job for which they were unprepared: teaching indigenous rural students with scant support and supplies.111
Yet the authors of these new plans and programs lived in the capital city where only 7.8 percent of the population was indigenous in 1950. The indigenous citizen-to-be was a stranger, someone known through literature and legend. Despite victorious assertions of national unity that affirmed indigenous Guatemalans’ full citizenship in the revolutionary government, chauvinism and misunderstanding endured. Take the words of Antonio Goubaud Carrera, an USAC professor of anthropology and the first director of the IIN: “Indigenismo, a word that seems as if it were of recent use, meant ‘the protection of the indigenous’ at the beginning of the colonial period . . . [Now] indigenismo denotes a consciousness of social problems that ethnic aspects of indigeneity present, relative to western civilization . . . the manifestation, the symptom, of a particular social unease.” The gravest problem was how indigenous people lacked a national perspective, and spoke “strange languages,” wore “fantastical costumes that set them apart from the rest of the population,” were “tormented by beliefs that a simple drawing would eliminate” and “bound by technologies that date to thousands of years before.”112 The IIN’s objectives were research and data collection. Its experts began by defining who was “an Indian.”113 Writer and San Carlista Luis Cardoza y Aragón observed in 1945, “The nation is Indian. This is the truth that first manifests itself with its enormous, subjugating, presence.” “Yet we know,” he continued, “that in Guatemala, as in the rest of America, it is the mestizo who possesses leadership throughout society. The mestizo: the middle class. The revolution of Guatemala is a revolution of the middle class . . . What an inferiority complex the Guatemalan suffers for his indian [sic] blood, for the indigenous character of his nation!”114 In other words, to deliver the middle class—here a synonym for mestizo or ladino—revolution, urban professionals had to venture into the countryside to study the exalted past and teach the retrograde.
There was no bigger advocate of this type of university extension than President Arévalo’s good friend, respected surgeon Dr. Carlos Martínez Durán. In August 1945, Martínez Durán was elected as the first rector of the autonomous university. He was a great admirer of John Locke, Max Scheler, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Martí, and when he could, he implemented their ideals at USAC. At his inauguration, he proudly proclaimed, “The student is the pueblo in the classroom!”115 He famously said, “Universitario, this city belongs to you. Construct within her your talent, 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.”116 Thus charged, AEU students went out into their city with their “sacred, fecund, and beautiful” intellects. Although these efforts were complex and mediated by regional and ethnic prejudices, to say nothing of students’ inflated sense of duty, the university’s gaze outward toward the pueblo outlasted the Ten Years’ Spring. It became a treasured aspect of San Carlista student nationalism, sometimes referred to as “nation building” or “hacer patria.”
