organizations protest while under surveillance, ca. 1980
22.Murals and sculpture commemorating university martyrs in the USAC School of History, July 2016
23.H.I.J.OS. posters and graffiti on La Sexta, July 2016
PREFACE
Universitario, this city belongs to you. Construct your talent within her, 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.
DR. CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DURÁN
This precept marks the entrance to the Universidad de San Carlos’s main campus in Zone 12, at the southern edge of Guatemala City. It was delivered by renowned Guatemalan physician, professor, and historian Carlos Martínez Durán during his first tenure as rector of the autonomous university after the 1944 revolution, and has been remembered and repeated since. Perhaps it is so enduring because it delimits both the campus and the surrounding capital city as the domain of universitarios. But it also demands an undefined love of truth as a precondition of entrance into this community and reminds all students, faculty, and visitors of their duty to learn and serve.
Martínez Durán’s words give this book its title, for they poignantly augur its fundamental interventions. They signal the history of a city, one that illuminates urban life in a place usually imagined as rural. They also foreshadow the struggles and missteps that will challenge urban students as they attempt to reach out to the countryside. They suggest a history that will extend across generations to defy the chronological frames that usually shape modern Guatemalan history. Too, they recall a student movement that both precedes and survives the eruption of student politics in 1968. They center students, not rural peasants, foreign officials, or military strongmen, as the protagonists of modern Guatemalan history. Spoken in the present indicative mood, these words—“This city belongs to you”—command universitarios to accept their responsibility to future generations.
This City Belongs to You tells one history of students’ thirst, not just for knowledge, but also for justice, and the city of the spirit where they sought to quench it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began this book my first semester of graduate school. I wanted to find a moment when students changed the world. I wound up writing about nationalism, loss, social class, and—yes—many moments when students changed the world. Countless people have nurtured this work and me across a decade. I would like to express my gratitude to the many individuals, institutions, and associations that made this book possible, for this kind of work cannot be done alone.
Thank you—
To Jeff Gould, who has always asked the toughest questions. His insistence on precision and politically engaged scholarship fundamentally shapes my work and raises my expectations of myself and others. Peter Guardino continues to demonstrate the kind of intellectual generosity to which I aspire. His class on nationalisms became foundational to this book.
To Lessie Jo Frazier and Shane Green for their comments on the book’s earlier form. I am also grateful to Judith A. Allen, Wendy Gamber, and Michael McGerr for their support and sense of humor. The estimable Danny James, Jason McGraw, Patrick Dove, and Micol Seigel nurtured this project in different moments, asking formative questions that advanced my thinking on histories of social class, oral history, memory, Marxism, race, and liberalism. Additional thanks go to John French and Patrick Barr-Melej with whom I shared discussions of middle class formation and social movements. Thanks to Greg Grandin for a gesture of generosity and enthusiasm for this project in its very early stages.
To Jo Marie Burt for turning me toward E. P. Thompson many years ago and Matt Karush for early lessons in cultural history. Thank you both for planting the seed.
To the Indiana University Departments of History and Gender Studies, and the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies, which generously supported my research for many years through the Susan O’Kell Memorial Award, the Frederick W. & Mildred C. Stoler Research Fellowship, the Mendel Research Fellowship, Tinker Field Research Grant, and finally, a Foreign Language Area Study grant to study K’iche’ Maya. I am also grateful to the Doris G. Quinn Foundation for its support.
To the Connecticut State University Board of Regents whose generous support funded this research with a Faculty Research Grant from 2014 to 2016. Additional support from the Southern Connecticut State University’s Faculty Creative Activity Grant (2013, 2015) and Faculty Development Grant (Fall 2016) aided in manuscript revision and follow-up research that shaped the Coda.
A Iduvina Hernández, una tremenda ejemplar de una San Carlista comprometida de siempre. Y a lxs jóvenes de H.I.J.O.S.: gracias por su trabajo y ejemplo de lucha y resistencia.
A Thelma Porres Morfín por su apoyo y bondad. Gracias también a Lucrecia Paniagua, Blanca Velásquez, Reyna Pérez, Mónica Márquez, Lucía Pellecer, Anaís García y los demás trabajadores del Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica en Guatemala a lo largo de los años. Y a Amanda López, Anna Carla Ericastilla, Alejandra González Godoy y todas las archivistas del Archivo General de USAC, Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, y la Hemeroteca Nacional.
To the many friends who opened their hearts and homes to me during fieldwork, especially Jared Bibler, Anna Blume, Caroline Elson, Brie Gettleson, Julie Gibbings, Mélanie Issid, Calvin Knutzen, Lauren Lederman, Este Migoya, John Rexer, Chris Siekmann, Chris Sullivan, Mike Tallon, Ashley Todd, and Allyson Vinci. A Álvaro León, gracias, huelguero, for years of friendship. Y a Paulo Estrada, Javier Pancho Figueroa, Iván Guas, Diego Leiva y Allan Reyes Muñoz por su sentido de humor.
To Abigail E. Adams, David Carey, Ricardo Fagoaga, Martha Few, Julie Gibbings, Jim Handy, Michael Kirkpatrick, Deborah Levenson, Carlota McAllister, Diane M. Nelson, Liz Oglesby, Victoria Sanford, Arturo Taracena, J. T. Way, and Kirsten Weld, who graciously welcomed me into a community of Guatemalanists. I am humbled by your kindness and generosity. I could not imagine a better group of co-conspirators.
To engaged audiences at several conferences and workshops for questions from which this book benefitted, especially the Yale University Latin American History Speaker Series, the University of Texas Lozano Long Conference on Latin American Studies, the Yale University Latin American Studies Working Group, the “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala” Conference at the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, and the “Intellectual Cultures of Revolution in Latin America” Conference co-hosted by the London School of Economics and Instituto Mora. Daniel J. Walkowitz offered very helpful comments on some of the material discussed in Chapter 6 when it appeared in an earlier version in the Radical History Review. Additionally, writing groups at Indiana University helped me formulate early drafts of these chapters, so my thanks go out to Katie Schweighofer, Nick Clarkson, Sarah Rowley, Laura Harrison, E. Cram, Susan Eckelmann, and Bryan Walsh.
To the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, which has become my intellectual home. At Tepoz, David Sartorius, Elliott Young, Bethany Moreton, Pamela Voekel, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, A. Shane Dillingham, Abel Sierra Madero, and Paolo Vignolo gave especially helpful comments on Chapters 4 and 6. Thank you, too, to the Mazunte-Malaguas Writing Group for sharing the hemisphere’s loveliest and most terrifying terrain.
To Siobhan Carter-David, Joel Dodson, Mary Koch, Cassi Meyerhoffer, Yi-Chun Tricia Lin, and Troy Paddock who have been tremendous colleagues at Southern Connecticut State University. I am grateful for Byron Nakamura and Tom Radice for their collegiality and the Yerba Mate Club. And thank you, always, to my students. A special thanks goes out to the students in my “History of Childhood and Youth”
