This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
on civic life in Guatemala City. Initially, Castillo Armas tried to win over the university by meeting with students and promoting professors sympathetic with the counterrevolution. Only with the May Day and June 1956 protests did relations between the government and USAC become intractably antagonistic.
Chapter 3 focuses on just five years of university life to show how this antagonism became a defining feature of San Carlista student nationalism. Some students and student groups reworked historic values, like service to one’s community and a belief in the university’s special role in society, into a new political language built around fraternity, mistrust of the government, anti-imperialist nationalism, and renewed pride in the universitarios’ duty to lead the nation. This political affect undergirded the sense that the university—as arbiter of justice and defender of freedom—was under attack. Popular histories, events, and whole commemorative calendars drew on these historic values to give meaning to the experience of teaching or studying at USAC. Idioms of fraternity, mistrust, and valor began to define student nationalism explicitly against the government while they strengthened an individual’s relationship to the university. This was especially important when steeply rising enrollments might have weakened universitario unity. San Carlistas no longer derived legitimacy from the government or the Constitution. Instead, they argued for their duty to lead the people and the nation toward progress.
Chapter 4 addresses some of the ways that San Carlistas attempted to put these ideals into practice through the 1970s. Students and faculty set out on the march against underdevelopment in the city and the countryside. Yet the political context of the 1970s transformed the rhetorics of freedom, responsibility, dignity, and duty that had formed the base of student nationalism since the Revolution. For instance, anti-imperialist nationalism inspired new university extension programs, but personal encounters with indigenous, rural, and poor citizens in the practice of these programs compelled San Carlistas to reevaluate the university’s orientation vis-à-vis the pueblo. Academic debates about development and dependency theory also challenged these attitudes. Development theory, especially dependency theory, helped USAC social scientists to understand why underdevelopment seemed endemic in Latin America even after foreign businesses expanded their investments in the region. Development praxis became the crux of class making for urban ladino intellectuals. For the most part, San Carlistas continued to position themselves as advocates for the periphery and ambassadors of progress, yet their knowledge of the periphery became more intimate. As the civil war deepened, San Carlistas had to reexamine their relationship to the pueblo in order to simply survive the government’s vicious, bloody counterinsurgency efforts.
Chapters 5 and 6 discuss these difficult years, but from distinct perspectives. Chapter 5 outlines the creation of a broader popular movement through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Chapter 6, in turn, focuses on how the popular movement developed a new politics of death and urban space in response to a series of violent acts. These acts included the spectacular 1976 earthquake, the massacre at Panzós, and the Spanish Embassy fire, alongside more subtle repression like surveillance at the university. I have separated these two chapters in order to resist the tendency to see resistance and repression as an almost hydraulic system, which obscures the real gains made by the popular left. I argue that as the state expanded its use of violence against San Carlistas, so did San Carlistas expand their resistance, drawing on funereal practices, political feelings, and basic ethical assumptions. Key to this change was a critical reevaluation of the politics of advocacy and representation that had characterized San Carlistas’ relations to nonstudents in previous decades. No longer mere acolytes of knowledge as in the 1940s and 1950s, or advocates for periphery as in the 1960s, San Carlistas increasingly understood their political freedom to be intimately bound up with that of the urban and rural poor. In part, students had learned this through their participation in protest campaigns led by these groups. Certain student and faculty leaders like Oliverio Castañeda de León and Mario López Larrave made popular coalition their cause and, ultimately, died for it.
The gradual foreclosure of peaceful opposition invigorated the power of spectacular mourning as a protest strategy. Political funerals changed the space of downtown Guatemala City. When well-known San Carlistas like Castañeda de León and López Larrave were killed, students organized grand funeral processions that led from the university campus through downtown to the General Cemetery. As students staged political funerals and other ritual protests, they created a many-layered space of mourning and memory. Using claims to kinship, fear, trauma, and responsibility, students and professors exhorted the citizenry to take political action. Some Guatemalans questioned the legitimacy of liberalism and its social contract in the midst of such loss and uncertainty. Discarding the reformist possibility that characterized student nationalism since the 1954 coup, some San Carlistas turned to millenarian futures. Political funerals were only the most visible of these acts whereby young people and their teachers dreamed of a future beyond the struggle where young people could live and study freely. Because this politics of death also appealed to human rights law, it helped San Carlistas build new relationships with international organizations. By 1980, student nationalism extended beyond justice, rights, and fraternity, which had characterized previous decades. It became a nationalism without a state.
Young people were left to imagine new futures in its wake. In some sense, political violence against the university was a return to a previous pattern. The incomplete project of national Liberal reform in the late nineteenth century and the failed Central American union in 1920 were both punctuated by violent executive incursions into university life. But what had changed was the magnitude of violence and the students’ willingness to resist. The book closes with a Coda that revisits student nationalism through Guatemala City’s palimpsestic memoryscape where the past interrupts the present on street corners and school buildings covered with commemorative placards, graffiti, and memorials. In this final section, I turn to the young people involved in ongoing movements for memory in the 2000s and 2010s, who draw on the legacies of San Carlista student activism in order to imagine new political futures for Guatemala.
• • •
What idea was worth dying for, for a twenty-year-old? In students’ writings, it would seem that ideas like democracy, justice, nation, freedom, honor, conscience, duty, independence, and progress were enough. But how could these abstract ideals inspire the ultimate sacrifice? Student nationalism connected these principles to San Carlistas’ daily struggles, hopes, and dreams. For some students, democracy meant voting rights, literacy, and social welfare programs; for them, student nationalism was a social contract. For others like the Catholic CEUA, democracy meant the eradication of communist threat in the Americas and so student nationalism was an almost ecclesiastical law. As the civil war drew on, student nationalism became inflected with Marxism and anti-Americanism. To be a San Carlista came to signify opposition to the government, giving new meaning to the old cry: “Do Not Mess with Us!” Regardless of their political beliefs and whether they survived intact, fled to exile, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed or disappeared, all San Carlistas were indelibly marked by the legacy of student nationalism. This City Belongs to You seeks to clarify the interrelation of university political culture and social class. While this is a history of youth and ideals, it is also a history of how these young people shaped a university, a city, and a nation.
ONE
The Republic of Students, 1942–1952
We have weapons that our forebears did not want, or were unable or were unwilling to wield . . . Three weapons that, well-used, can transform a group of guys . . . into a formidable force, capable of opposing and overthrowing those with the bayonets. These three weapons are our youth, our intelligence, and our unity.
“The Escuilach Manifesto”1
BANANAS—ON THE STALK, by the bunch, peeled, held aloft, all of them long Cavendish bananas grown for export by the United Fruit Company (UFCO)—formed the masthead of the No Nos Tientes in 1949. The anonymous artist was probably Mario López Larrave, a law student who drew most of the newspaper’s cheeky cartoons for many decades. The letters offered a visual complement to the pages of tongue-in-cheek text that appeared below them. After an “N” made of Guatemalan bananas destined for North American stomachs, a portrait of Francisco Javier Arana formed the “O” of Nos and two interlocking