the Anillo Periférico, Guatemala City’s Beltway.
Until recently, Guatemala City was little more than a dangerous inconvenience for Guatemalanists on their way to more popular locales, like colonial Antigua, pastoral Lake Atitlán, the Western Highlands, or even the remote Petén. The city can feel polluted, chaotic, and perilous.40 The U.S. State Department perpetuates fear among foreign researchers with its warning that the threat of violent crime is consistently “critical.”41 For this reason, and because of the imperative to document the government’s repression of indigenous peoples in rural regions during and after the war, few researchers conducted long-term research while based in the capital city, and fewer still took the city itself as an object of study, until the end of the war. In something of a reversal of the usual metropole-centric scholarship of nearly every other national context, the city has been almost invisible. Fortunately, this is beginning to change.
Simply put, this difficult city is central to Guatemala’s history, politics, and national imaginaries. In this book, I underscore the exceptional and quotidian histories of everyday capitalinos and how they reflected on, responded to, and impacted events taking place elsewhere in the nation.42
THE MIDDLE CLASS
This brief account of social space in the city reinforces how class is not only an economic attribute determined by occupation or income but is constituted through, and most significant in terms of, interactions among social groups and among individuals.43 By midcentury, Guatemalans, like other Latin Americans, saw the middle class as defined by a number of factors, including professionalization, meritocratic and egalitarian values, consumer culture, labor roles, and market mentalities. USAC was the ultimate institutional expression of middle-class values as a public status-granting institution with an illustrious place in national history. It was free from aristocratic and religious ties, nationalist, relatively inexpensive, and located (at least initially) in the heart of the capital city.
Nevertheless, the middle class was scarcely understood by contemporaries. University students who read Karl Marx in study groups were troubled by the unclear role of university students in social transformation and attempted to locate themselves in a revolutionary project. Less revolutionary sectors also worried over the nation’s middle class. In 1949, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research wrote, “the economic development of [Central American] countries, adapted to the shifting market of the industrial countries of the northern hemisphere and handicapped by a system of landed estates, was so unbalanced as to prevent the emergence of an economically strong and politically conscious middle class.”44 A student survey conducted in February 1950 suggests how mistaken the U.S. State Department officials had been: the survey assumed that students might speak German, French, or English in addition to Spanish and play sports or participate in artistic or literary associations, markers of time for recreation and leisure. It also asked whether the student worked and if they did not, how much money their parents gave them each month in allowance.45 San Carlistas were intellectual elites, but they lived in the periphery of mid-twentieth-century global capitalism. Many parents of USAC students were businessmen, shopkeepers, plantation owners, doctors, teachers, and government officials from the capital city or urban centers in the provinces. They usually were not members of Guatemala’s traditional military and oligarchic elite.
Scholars perpetuate this incomprehension of Guatemala’s middle class because national historiography is most focused on studies of indigeneity, poverty, and rural life. The urban ladino middle class is left largely unexamined, in spite of a seemingly unanimous insistence on its importance. As a result, we know very little about a group that wielded great social, political, and cultural power: the professors who trained scholars and professionals, the state makers who crafted policy and drafted constitutions, the doctors who treated illness and promoted certain visions of health, and the educators who guided young people through adolescence and into adulthood. This is an extraordinary omission. Though doubted, ignored, or overlooked, Guatemala’s middle class did exist.
Unlike other scholars of the middle class, I do not emphasize mass culture, or the purchasing patterns and cultural tastes of an a priori middle class.46 Venues other than the university and the busy streets around the city center—like the throbbing nightclubs where rock ’n’ roll, jazz, hard rock, and disco filled middle-class ears and the incandescent movie theatres where vibrant images of North American, German, Mexican, and French films and television programs delighted their eyes—are mentioned only in passing.47 Nor will I limit my argument to observing that attending university and participating in student activism were what the middle class did.48 Both of these approaches use the middle class an a priori analytical category in order to explain a cultural or political phenomenon, like blue jeans, rock ’n’ roll, radio, or the election of certain political figures. This City Belongs to You does something different. Here, class is discussed as it was formed and reformed through what San Carlistas did, and where and how they did it: their profession, education, interaction with state bodies and institutions, intimate life, ideological explorations, and everyday preoccupations, in a fluid balance of materiality and cultural performance.49 Thus, the middle class is “a working social concept, a material experience, a political project, and a cultural practice—all of which acquire meaning only within specific historical experiences and discursive conditions.”50
It is my hope that explaining this historical and analytical context clarifies the stakes of studying the Latin American middle classes.51 The first historians of the middle class studied Britain and published their work in the very years under examination by this book; for these scholars, the presence of a middle class was a sign of economic and social modernity. Their work informed modernization theory and its derivatives, popular among intellectuals worldwide by midcentury.52 From the perspective of modernization theory, Latin America’s political instability, social backwardness, and lack of a middle class formed a tight tautological knot that condemned the region to premodernity.53 Quite a burden was placed on the middle sectors that thus became barometers of modernity.54 San Carlistas made this shared burden—or duty, as they put it—into a way for the middle classes to identify themselves and explain their political actions.55 Of course for other Guatemalans and their U.S. counterparts, Guatemala’s premodernity justified neocolonial projects of resource extraction, anticommunism, and military governance. Bearing all of this in mind, This City Belongs to You remaps the very question usually asked by scholars of the middle class by proposing that we pursue how these actions made the meaning of the middle class.56 I hope this will stimulate new ways of writing histories of the middle class.57
Student nationalism provided a set of claims for collective identity that revealed contestations and struggles between groups, based on the premises and exclusions of citizenship, ultimately shaping some of what it meant to be middle class in Guatemala.58 Through student nationalism, San Carlistas made an argument for their antagonistic relationship to other classes and articulated a mode of life that was distinct from that of the commercial and military oligarchy and that of the rural indigenous majority.59 The very terms estudiante and San Carlista came to represent an already racialized class. Enrollments statistics can begin to illustrate this point. In 1943, the university counted just 711 students. Between 1943 and 1954, the number of enrollments increased more than 450 percent.60 In just one year between 1950 and 1951, university enrollments grew from 2,373 to 2,824 students.61 According to the 1950 census, 6,048 individuals had attended any university-level schooling in their lifetime; of this number, 6,031 were recorded as ladino and only 17 as indigenous. Just 845 of 6,048 individuals of the entire university-educated population were women. In the same census, 2,148,560 Guatemalan citizens reported that they had no formal schooling whatsoever.62
Even as the university enrolled greater numbers of people, it remained a place for a small number of ladino men. University enrollments increased more than 450 percent during the revolution and they decreased very little after the counterrevolution
