year, enrollments rose again to 3,809 students in 1956, and up to 4,336 in 1957.63 To put these numbers in perspective, Honduras counted only 1,107 university students in 1954. The total university enrollment in Nicaragua in 1951 was 897 students, increased to 948 students in 1954, and increased dramatically to 1,718 students by 1961. In El Salvador, the national university had an enrollment of 1,704 students in 1953 and 2,257 in 1960. The University of Costa Rica, which would quickly become an academic leader in the region, still had a relatively low university enrollment of 2,029 students in 1954.64 Meanwhile Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) reported enrollments of 23,000 in 1949 and nearly 80,000 by 1968.65
As I mentioned above, San Carlistas rarely referred to themselves as any particular race or ethnicity, but they expressed racialized identifications in other ways.66 The students of the 1920s’s concern about the so-called Indian problem endured into the revolution and reemerged in debates over whether indigenous people could be granted the right to vote. As participants in the Constitutional Assembly, some San Carlistas expressed their distance from the rural indigenous majority by asserting that illiterate indigenous people needed to be taught the “ABC of civilization” before being granted the right to vote.67 They also expressed racial difference in their plans for literacy campaigns and extension programming in the 1970s and their drawings of Juan Tecú, a fictional rural indigenous man who was popular in student newspapers from the 1950s through the late 1980s. With an exaggerated nose and ripped clothing, Tecú offered pithy jokes or asked impolite questions in phonetic Spanish. His indigeneity was figured through a lack education and urbanity and communicated to readers by his mannerisms and failure to master grammatical Spanish. During the civil war, guerrilla groups and the popular movement struggled to unite people across racial divides, and so San Carlistas were forced to reckon with their indigenous compatriots in new ways. But only in the 1980s did large numbers of self-identifying indigenous people begin to attend USAC, and only much later did Pan-Mayanism begin to challenge the assumed ladinization of being a San Carlista.
University censuses in the mid-1960s recorded that only between 25 percent and 35 percent of San Carlistas came from families who earned less than a “modest income” and just 6.3 percent of enrolled students’ families earned less than the income bracket labeled “of humble origins.” National census data confirm that university attendance remained elusive for all but the elite. Just 14,060 out of 3,174,900 Guatemalans (0.44%) had attended any university-level classes in 1964. Only forty indigenous men had attended some university-level study while more than 1 million indigenous people had not attended any schooling at any level. Meanwhile, illiteracy was about 63.3 percent nationwide and higher in rural areas. When enrollment at the Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango campuses ballooned from 8,171 to 22,861 between 1966 and 1975, less than 4 percent of San Carlistas were “of humble origins.”68
The growing enrollments were probably more noticeable on campus than they were impactful nationwide, but more people had gained access to the tuition, prerequisites, and time necessary for a university-level education. In just four years between 1976 and 1980, university enrollments increased nearly 50 percent from 25,925 to 38,843 students.69 These numbers reflected a large group of students who took a few classes per term at night and worked during the day, taking advantage of new, more flexible programs of study and the opening of regional campuses. By this time, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua-León counted 24,000 students (in 1978). In El Salvador, national figures for university enrollment counted about 35,000 students between two universities (the public University of El Salvador and the private Jesuit Central American University José Simeon Cañas). Honduras had a single national university and, later in the 1980s, three smaller private universities, but enrollments did not exceed 30,000 students between all campuses.70 By comparison, USAC was massive. The multicampus university continued to expand throughout the civil war, and by 1994 counted 77,051 students. In 1999, USAC matriculated 98,594 students, including 19,403 students at the regional campuses and 79,191 at the main campus in the capital city.71
The great majority of San Carlistas were men. Throughout the book, I highlight the reciprocal relationship between San Carlistas’ rhetorics of gender and political authority. Women began to attend USAC in greater numbers throughout the 1960s, but represented only 21 percent of the student body as late as 1976.72 USAC women exercised some limited power in intra- and extramural politics. For instance, an AEU women’s auxiliary group met with Carlos Castillo Armas’s wife after the counterrevolution and Astrid Morales formed the AEU’s women’s commission around 1962. But the first women’s studies course was not offered until 1989 and as late as 2005, only 28 percent of all USAC professors at all ranks and campuses were women.73 Triumphant narratives of fraternity and sacrifice reinforced this imbalance in enrollment, curriculum, and hiring. Women were key to articulations of student nationalism, but usually as figures or objects that reinforced gendered understandings of valor and responsibility and, ultimately, political authority—and rarely as actors or agents. One recurrent image in student-authored texts was the figure of the feminized Guatemalan nation that was acquiescent to the desires of masculine global superpowers and susceptible to North American penetration. The fraternity of San Carlistas was bound to intervene and protect her.
So too did mourning prescribe different roles for men and women. The pan-generational narrative of masculine heroics occasioned the virtual forgetting of women who were killed by the state, with two notable exceptions, María Chinchilla and Rogelia Cruz. These two examples reinforced traditional women’s roles: Chinchilla’s death was remembered for its audaciousness (she was a respectable schoolteacher killed in broad daylight) and Cruz’s for its sexual nature (the rumored rape and torture of the former Miss Guatemala was widely reported in the press). Only infrequently did San Carlista men acknowledge the productive and reproductive labor of their female comrades. As countless moments in the pages below illustrate, San Carlistas’ claims to leadership, responsibility, dignity, valor, and freedom were built on and reinforced strict gendered, classed, and raced understandings of political authority.74
This City Belongs to You expands the frame of student movement scholarship by looking beyond familiar places and chronologies. The political lives of San Carlistas complicate a few commonly held assumptions about student activism. They were not electrified by the “Global 1968,” nor did they mirror or follow those movements. Additionally, San Carlistas were far from the metropoles even as they connected to students from around the world at regional and international meetings and through multilingual publications as early as the mid-1940s. Furthermore, San Carlistas were not only leftist, nor were they necessarily antigovernment.75 Most of all, this is not a book about why or how privileged students came to confront a powerful state, although answers to those questions can certainly be found herein.76 Put differently, this book is not only about what students did, but also what their actions did for urban life and memory cultures in late twentieth-century Guatemala. Yet it looks at just one important locus of middle class formation, the public university. USAC was the cardinal point for middle class formation in the twentieth century and no book-length English-language study has been published about it, so I have started here.77 Subsequent histories will have to examine the political and cultural lives and formulations of working-class and indigenous youth, secondary school students, and students at private universities.78
Student nationalism required resistance, accommodation, and a diversity of ideological positions and expressions, which ultimately shaped life outside of the university. There was no single meaning for estudiante; rather, it became a way for young people, USAC administrators and faculty, national and international politicians, and documents of governance to exert political authority. Over time, the project of student nationalism expanded to accommodate tremendous political change, from promoting statecraft during the Ten Years’ Spring to awakening a kind of nationalism without a state at the most violent moments of the civil war when the government had proven its cruelty. For generations of students, it was an exhilarating institutional connection, an identity, and a mantle of responsibility, all at once.
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