leaders delivering speeches to assembled masses. So, too, does the fact that San Carlistas were both architects of government and key figures in the opposition across the second half of the twentieth century. These contradictions reveal complicated negotiations of identity and belief that can teach us more about class and the university than a romantic story of student activism.
This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996 follows several generations of university students at Guatemala’s only public university. Each chapter explores how these students engaged with the university as an institution and Guatemalan and (to a lesser extent) U.S. state apparatuses in the years between 1944 and 1996, a period marked by revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war. Through these encounters, USAC students forged a loose consensus around faith in the principles of liberalism, especially belief in equal liberty, the constitutional republic, political rights, and the responsibility of university students to lead the nation. I call this consensus student nationalism.
Student nationalism was a shared project for identity making, premised on the inclusions and exclusions of citizenship.1 As later chapters demonstrate, student nationalism did not depend on the successful formation of a nation-state or even necessarily a national territory. Nor was ideological or cultural agreement necessary. Instead, student nationalism included many competing discourses that nevertheless provided a more or less coherent way of speaking about power relations. Here, nationalism was less something one had or believed than a way of making political claims. Rhetorics of responsibility, freedom, and dignity brought San Carlistas into an enduring fraternal bond with their classmates. As the civil war progressed and the military and police declared war on the university, San Carlistas used student nationalism to wage culture wars over historical memory.
By the late 1970s, the reactionary forces of the military and police became ever more brutal and student nationalism began to fray at the edges. Some students turned away from oppositional politics and focused on their studies, work, or family life. Some left USAC for one of the newer private universities, which had reputations for apoliticism and were therefore much safer. Others remained involved in USAC-based politics, often seeking support from international human rights organizations. A small number left the university to join the guerrillas, and some of these young people were killed. While San Carlista student nationalism remained a defining feature of urban, middle-class ladino life, in periods of repression it became a nationalism without a legitimate government. What endured in student nationalism across all of its many variations was the premise of citizenship and equality before the law and, most of all, an unwavering belief in the responsibility of San Carlistas to lead the Guatemalan people.
Most histories of student movements focus on the United States and Europe, and less often on Latin America. But This City Belongs to You centers a different place, one overlooked by student movement scholarship until now. It also demonstrates the necessity of a broader chronological frame to fully comprehend the meaning of student movements. When hundreds of students, workers, and military men opposed dictator Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), for example, they sought, in the words of President Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951), to create a “democracy . . . just order, constructive peace, internal discipline, [and] happy and productive work.”2 For the participants in this movement, however, the meanings of terms like “democracy” and “just order” were not obvious, and they evolved considerably over time. Contests over the meaning of democracy would characterize the entire revolutionary era and subsequent counterrevolution. The Committee of Anticommunist University Students (Comité de Estudiantes Universitarios Anticomunistas [CEUA]), which met with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to orchestrate the overthrow of Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Arbenz, in its pursuit of democracy and justice, comes into focus here.
In short, this is a history of many generations of young people: their hopes, their actions, their role in social change; attempts to control them; their struggles against the government; and their encounters with the school as a state apparatus and a crucial site for resistance and celebration. In what follows, I draw out these complex histories across multiple generations and consider how San Carlistas debated the terms of democracy and intellectual life and, over time, the political culture of Guatemala’s middle class itself.
Taken to its conclusion with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 that ended thirty-six years of civil war, this history bears witness to the poignancy of young people’s willingness to die for an idea at the hands of the government. Although numbers are inadequate to this form of ultimate sacrifice, it is important to note that between 1954 and 1996, around 492 USAC students, faculty, and administrators were killed or disappeared by government, military, police, and parapolice forces. Of those killed, 363 were students and 104 were professors. Perhaps some gave their lives because they felt real efficacy in their sacrifice. The historical memory of other San Carlistas who had gone before them was powerful and reassuring. For others, there seemed to be little choice. The growing desperation of the pueblo made such sacrifice necessary. Ultimately, this is a tragic and inspiring history that does not quite escape the mythology and martyrology of the San Carlistas. Nor should it.
THE STATE’S UNIVERSITY
The modern USAC is built on a distinguished history of which San Carlistas are very proud. It was founded on January 31, 1676 after nearly a century of petitions to the Spanish crown, when Charles II issued a royal order establishing the Universidad de San Carlos de Borromeo. Seven faculty chairs corresponded to distinct areas of study: moral theology, scholastic theology, canon law, Roman or civil law, medicine, and, significantly, two chairs of indigenous languages.3 Most students came from the region’s elite families—often descendants of the first Iberians to come to the Kingdom of Guatemala—and ranged in age from twelve to twenty-eight.4 A few poor and indigenous students of exceptional ability were admitted, but matriculation was formally forbidden for African-descendent people. Prohibition also extended to individuals who had been sentenced by the Inquisition, or whose fathers or grandfathers had been so sentenced, though these policies were not always enforced.5
During the eighteenth century, the university developed a lively intellectual culture, despite frequent complaints about the teaching faculty’s erratic attendance. Renowned physician José Felipe Flores, the Kingdom of Guatemala’s first protomédico and an innovator of dissection techniques and anatomical modeling, studied at the university and later became one of its principal teaching physicians.6 Between its foundation and independence in 1821, the university awarded 2,000 bachelor’s degrees, 256 licentiate degrees, and 216 doctorates, 135 of which were in theology. All of this challenges the long-held presumption that intellectual culture in the Spanish colonies was stagnant, in contrast to Europe. In fact, the number of Guatemalan university graduates grew steadily until independence.7 In the Gazeta de Guatemala, published from 1797, intellectuals collected new knowledge in science, medicine, politics, and economics. The Gazeta then circulated, like its authors, throughout Central America, Mexico, and Europe.8
The university was undistinguished in the struggles for independence from Spanish rule and did not transform significantly after Spanish defeat. Students and professors in Law and Medicine had played key roles in governance for centuries and may have been uneager to see their privileges challenged.9 Nor were there many changes at the university in the first decades of federal and later republican rule. In 1821, university rectors instituted a modest reform that scarcely challenged its colonial structure.10 Three years later, a new national constitution charged Congress with organizing basic education, but the power of the Catholic Church actually expanded at the university. Only after USAC alumnus and Liberal Mariano Gálvez was appointed chief of state in 1831 did the university secularize in earnest. Gálvez’s “Rules for the general establishment of Public Instruction” argued that the government ought to oversee the training of professionals and set guidelines for higher education. A system of examinations and titles replaced patronage and cronyism. Like his peers throughout Mexico and Central and South America, Gálvez inaugurated a single academy under the authority of the state, based on the Napoleonic
