an homage to Francisca Fernández Hall, USAC’s first female civil engineer, celebrated in July 1947. The event began with a speech from president of the Engineering Students’ Union (AEI) Héctor David Torres about the role of women in Guatemalan society. He spoke, “women also build the nation, because hacer patria does not only mean to defend the nation on the field of battle, nor to attain the highest governmental appointments. Hacer patria is to educate the people . . . to acculturate oneself . . . to work loyally and honestly.” Torres acknowledged that women did not currently have a place in national-level leadership, but “if they were capable of facing domestic life as a mother, wife, or sister, then they were capable of successfully confronting the intricate problems of science.” Importantly, only two women were mentioned in the newspaper’s reportage of the event: the woman elected beauty queen of the Engineering facultad and Fernández Hall herself. While the university’s official Boletín Universitario detailed speeches delivered by men in honor of her, of Fernández Hall it reported only that she “expressed her gratitude” on behalf of all Guatemalan women.117 Women remained marginal to the rising chorus of San Carlistas student nationalism, invoked as figures or objects who helped reinforce gendered understandings of valor and responsibility and, ultimately, political authority.
In the same issue of the Boletín Universitario, editors reminded their large readership that university extension was an integral part of national social reform.118 They promoted the Faculty of Humanities’ weekly radio show on TGW, which offered programs on topics as varied as government policy (income tax and agrarian reform), social concerns (consumerism, Guatemala’s leading cause of death, and alcoholism), political rights (rights and responsibilities of the press and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in Guatemalan jurisprudence), and narrower topics like citizens’ satisfaction with USAC and listeners’ favorite Guatemalan writers. One program asked listeners whether they considered Guatemala one unified or many individual nations. Another contemplated the claim that man cannot live without philosophy.119 The program projected the university as far into the pueblo as the Spanish language and radio signal could reach.
At this time, USAC also became involved in transnational academic exchanges. Free from Ubico’s restrictions, the university soon relaunched its lively foreign exchange program and hosted scholars from across the Americas and Europe.120 In 1950, USAC participated in the World Conference of Universities in Nice, France. The following year, AEU students attended the International Conference of Students in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where they met other students from around the world, including Liberia, Cuba, Morocco, Algeria, French West Africa, British East Africa, and England. It is not clear what came out of these travels. Certainly students had adventures and gained new pen pals and a sense of a global student experience. They also began to read a popular international student newspaper entitled The Student (not to be confused with the USAC newspaper of the same title). Notably, through the 1950s, San Carlistas traveled to socialist bloc countries, Western democracies, and colonial African nations. Certainly these travels expanded San Carlistas’ perception of the world, especially regarding the effects of U.S. and European imperialism. The imprint of these connections is evident in some anticolonial writings by San Carlistas, addressed in later chapters.
Martínez Durán also traveled widely. Surprisingly, since the Arévalo and Arbenz governments would soon become their sworn enemies, the U.S. State Department and UFCO hosted Martínez Durán for six weeks in 1948. After the visit, Martínez Durán published a multi-part essay about his travels in the Boletin Unversitario. The entourage toured Tulane University, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, American University, and Georgetown. According to the rector, they avoided political discussions. For Martínez Durán, the tour underscored two crucial differences between Guatemala and the United States: the large indigenous population and rural poverty. Upon his return, he reiterated the importance of national pride and asked San Carlistas to pay special attention to these unique problems. He planned to offer extension programs in the sciences, technology, philosophy, and art to elevate all Guatemalans. He lamented secondary schools students’ poor preparation in the humanities as compared to the United States.121
Martínez Durán also emphasized the proper physical environment for learning. In an essay written for the Boletín Universitario, he imagined a University City where “the finest of honeys will be distilled from the nectar of the youth . . . where life finds fulfillment, and the universal and the national, in a close embrace, will decide the destiny of Guatemala.”122 He envisioned faculty and students living together in a model city where they would be inspired by nearby mountain ranges and could forge new knowledge through neighborliness and sports rivalries.123 In fact, the construction of a model University City was a regular theme in the Boletín Universitario for much of the mid-1940s, as USAC and other Latin American universities began to plan new campuses to promote students’ mental and emotional development.124 The first modest step, a residence hall, was completed in February 1951. According to a special feature story in the Boletín Universitario, the residence hall was intended to eliminate the “great enemies of San Carlistas”: “malnourishment, dangerous living, and isolation.”125 Residents were treated to films, a lecture series, Saturday luncheons with prominent scholars, and a music library filled with Wagner and Chopin records. The residence hall also fostered USAC’s first athletic teams. As advocates of “a sound mind in a healthy body,” Congress heartily approved.126
The new Republic of Guatemala and USAC came of age together. From exile years later, Arévalo referred to these years as a period of “creole nationalist revolution,” invoking nineteenth-century revolutions for independence from Spain and underscoring the revolution’s racial character. Martínez Durán’s plans for the university complemented Arévalo’s efforts to make Guatemala a more fecund environment for the development of national culture.
A REPUBLIC OF SAN CARLISTAS
President Arévalo and Rector Martínez Durán envisioned reciprocal paths toward progress for the nation and the university. A close friendship paralleled their shared professional goals. But their terms ended in 1950, Arévalo’s with the election of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz, and Martínez Durán’s with the election of engineer Dr. Miguel Asturias Quiñonez.127 From this moment, the paths of USAC and the Republic of Guatemala diverged. Asturias Quiñonez represented the many conservatives who were not enthusiastic about the Revolution’s reforms and had continued to exercise influence through daily newspapers, businesses interests, and the Catholic Church during Arévalo’s presidency. Arévalo had prioritized the university, but Arbenz focused elsewhere. Arbenz was a military man, not an educator. Arbenz was inspired by friendships with young Guatemalan communists, including escuilach Fortuny (who served as his speechwriter), Alfredo Guerra Borges, Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, Enrique Muñoz Meany, and Augusto Charnaud MacDonald. With them Arbenz read Marx, Lenin, and Stalin; national history; and agronomy in order to understand Guatemala’s colonial past and structural inequality.128 Some of these young men were San Carlistas, but their focus was on land reform and labor, not education.
The new president’s study of agricultural history and contemporary agronomy helped him to draft a dramatic agrarian reform and significant public works projects. His agrarian reform expropriated and nationalized idle lands so that campesinos could plant and harvest food for sustenance. In turn, his public works projects focused on three large infrastructural developments: a major highway from the capital to Puerto Barrios to rival the North American–owned IRCA train line; the construction of a second port to solve the transport bottleneck caused by inadequate facilities at Puerto Barrios; and the construction of a hydroelectric plant to supplement the expensive and inadequate service provided by the U.S.-owned monopoly Empresa Eléctrica.129 Arbenz’s immediate aim was to promote industrialization while continuing to provide much-needed jobs for Guatemalans in agricultural and manufacturing sectors. He sought to connect Guatemalans to the world through investment in domestic communication and transportation networks. This was also practical, as the United States and the World Bank declined to invest in Guatemala’s structural development after
