a series of Conservative Party heads of state who governed from 1844 to 1871 reversed these reforms and returned the university to ecclesiastical oversight.
The university itself became a place where ideas about governance were up for discussion. The university’s curriculum, leadership, and even name changed amid the bitter rivalry between Conservatives and Liberals. Even programs of study could signify shifts in this epistemological battle: fewer students enrolled in theology while programs in medicine and chemistry grew. On several infamous occasions, students led plots to overthrow Conservative president Rafael Carrera (1844–1848 and 1851–1865). In 1871, students’ support was instrumental to Liberal Miguel García Granados’s victory over the last of the Conservatives, the party that had dominated political life since independence. Education reform was a priority for García Granados and his successor, Justo Rufino Barrios, a USAC law graduate. García Granados and Barrios envisioned a plan to modernize education that would purge the university of all markers of its colonial and ecclesiastical past, even changing its name from the Universidad de San Carlos to the Universidad de Guatemala. Barrios’s advisor, Marco A. Soto, instituted a sweeping reform informed by French positivism. He reorganized curricula around sciences, letters, and the professions. This new education system would bolster the economic development anticipated from a set of land reform laws that encouraged privatization of coffee-producing lands, prioritized infrastructure construction, pursued foreign loans, seized indigenous communities’ communal lands, and, ultimately, depended on a ready supply of indigenous labor.12 In no small way, the contradictions of contemporary positivism, which at once proclaimed individual equality before the law and presented scientific distinctions between individuals, set the terms for San Carlistas’ reckonings with Guatemala’s racial codes, a topic that I address at greater length below.
Barrios’s other priority, the formation of a single Central American state with himself at the helm, led him to his death at the hand of Salvadoran troops in Chalchuapa, El Salvador, in 1885. Barrios’s vice-president served for just two days before another Liberal, Manuel Barillas, deposed him in turn. Barillas was himself overthrown by a Liberal rival, José María Reyna Barrios (nephew of Justo Rufino Barrios). Despite this instability at the highest levels of the state, consistent rule by the Liberal party after the 1870s meant that each successive administration promoted secular education as the means by which Guatemala would progress. Educational reforms and the closely related national hygiene plans devised by these governments reflected the Lamarckian and Mendelian understandings of human progress that Guatemalan lawyers, educators, scientists, and physicians, like their peers elsewhere in Latin America, studied in French, the second language of elites.13
While the university was a significant site of state making in these decades, the first of what could be called student movements took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, when students formed university- and facultad-based organizations in order to influence extramural politics. In 1898, Reyna Barrios was assassinated and another national university–educated lawyer, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, asserted himself as successor. A group of students from the School of Medicine formed a group called the Guatemalan Youth (Juventud Guatemalteca) to express their support for Cabrera’s candidacy. Other students and professors denounced this action on the grounds that the group could not claim to represent all Guatemalan youth and that these types of political expressions were inappropriate for a house of learning. In a time when a small number of the capital city’s residents (most of whom had ties to the university) were literate, two newspapers La República and Diario de Centro América published numerous open letters on the question of the students’ and university’s role in national political life. This debate would rage in one form or another for the next century, and beyond.14
Ultimately, Cabrera was elected president and went on to become one of the most controversial leaders in Guatemalan history, surviving many assassination attempts to serve four terms and usher in the ascendancy of the North American–owned United Fruit Company (UFCO) in Guatemala. Two new student organizations, the Juventud Médica and the Law Society, formed in the first months of Cabrera’s presidency. Despite ongoing clashes with these groups, Cabrera presented himself as a great champion of learning and marked his esteem for the university by bestowing upon it his own name, inaugurating the Estrada Cabrera National University.15 Cabrera’s megalomaniacal campaign for education also included the construction of enormous temples to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, poetry, and medicine, and the mandatory celebration of exorbitant Fiestas Minervalias every October. Then, a series of earthquakes wracked Guatemala between November 1917 and January 1918, destroying homes, government buildings, schools, and churches. Thousands of people were left without housing and several hundred were killed. After decades of rule, it was the failure to provide effective relief and related allegations of corruption that were Cabrera’s undoing.
A tide of opposition rose rapidly after the earthquake. While some professors, mostly those Cabrera himself appointed, continued to support the president, other faculty and students opposed his arrogant goodwill. The Central American Unionist Party (PUCA) responded by recruiting students to its alliance of urban workers, Catholics, and professionals. The group’s first objective was to overthrow Cabrera, but they also sought to revive the dream of a united Central America.16 One group of young men from PUCA had opposed Cabrera and the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties since their high school days at the elite National Central Institute for Boys (Instituto Nacional Central para Varones [INCV]). The group’s most famous member, Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, dubbed them the “Generation of 1920.” Among his fellows were David Vela, Horacio Espinosa Altamirano, Carlos Wyld Ospina, César Brañas, Jorge García Granados, Carlos Samayoa Chinchilla, and Ramón Aceña Durán, some of Guatemala’s most famous writers, poets, essayists, and jurists.17 Cabrera surrendered in April 1920. PUCA’s success signaled the emergence of a new intellectual class in the modern Republic of Guatemala, one that viewed itself as the nation’s standard-bearer.
The young men of the Generation of 1920 championed the redemptive power of ideas. They came to see their role in national politics as an extension of their educational pedigree.18 Two years earlier, a group of young Argentine students at the Universidad de Córdoba had successfully demanded co-governance and autonomy and called on their peers across the Americas to join their struggle.19 Cabrera’s overthrow further energized student political life. Inspired by events at home and abroad, several smaller facultad-based groups came together to form the Association of University Students (AEU) in May 1920. From this generation of students, and the leadership role they imagined for themselves, sprang the roots of student nationalism.
Though USAC counted around just four hundred students by the 1920s, students’ preoccupations with their own class, cultural, and national identity provoked a series of new debates. For instance, one of the principal concerns of the intellectual class that was consolidating by the 1920s was national unity, especially after the Mexican Revolution illustrated the dangers of disunion. Guatemala’s indigenous majority represented a significant challenge to ladino students’ dream of a national culture.20 Yet there was little consensus about how to solve what was then referred to as “the Indian problem.” Lamarckism was no longer in vogue, having been replaced by the more deterministic writings of Herbert Spencer and Gustave Le Bon, but students also read work by proponents of mestizaje, including the Mexican theosophist José Vasconcelos.21 Much like the debate over the proper role of the university in society, the debate over “the Indian problem” would occupy students for many decades.
The debated and contentious elitism of ladino universitarios vis-à-vis the indigenous majority was a defining dynamic of the university and its students. The meaning of “ladino,” like that of the middle class, was made and remade through quotidian encounters and flashpoints of violence. But in the most general sense, ladinos are usually people of mixed Spanish, indigenous, and African descent, akin to mestizos in Mexico. As is always the case with racial difference, however, attributes like language, dress, career, and location play a decisive role in determining how labels are assigned or identities convincingly performed.22 Generally, ladinos
