This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
the prescience of his figures; rather, he drew from the anti-imperial spirit of the 1944 revolution that had been so crucial to his own academic and political formation. Within months, however, one member of the revolutionary junta would be assassinated and anticommunist hysteria would begin to ferment and, ultimately, alter the course of the nation.
López Larrave was just fifteen years old when M41 bulldog tanks closed in on the National Palace and finally deposed dictator Jorge Ubico y Castañeda (1931–1944).2 If school had not been cancelled, López Larrave and his classmates might have watched the action from the window of their classroom at the National Central Institute for Boys (INCV), just a few blocks away. Months earlier, a broad movement of university students, young military officers, teachers, workers, and women’s organizations had forced Ubico to end his thirteen-year dictatorship. For as long as many could remember, the pleasures of daily life, like intellectual exchange, art, music, politics, and even social gatherings, had been strictly regulated. Ubico, an alumnus, even influenced the boys’ INCV curriculum through his friendship with the school’s principal. Protests continued while Ubico’s handpicked successor, Juan Federico Ponce Vaides, remained in power. The city was seized by democratic fervor, inspired by Rooseveltian democracy and Central America’s unique historical moment.
Seen from the windows of INCV, the National Palace was a symbol of Ubico’s absolute power and utter decadence: an imposing baroque structure with a grand entryway, dozens of porticos, 350 rooms, numerous patios, and expansive hallways. Nearby, Guatemala’s urban poor suffered under laws that demanded their labor for export production and infrastructure construction. The 1934 vagrancy law required all men who lacked an “adequate profession” or proof of landownership to work between 100 and 150 days on massive rural plantations. Another law required all men—except those who could pay a fee—to work for two weeks per year building and maintaining roads. In business and politics, Ubico promoted his friends and family while he limited the opportunities available to others. A growing number of professionals and military officers were unable to advance in the careers for which they had trained.
Outgoing, earnest, and generous, López Larrave was a leader among his peers at INCV. The political opening that came with Ubico’s overthrow gave López Larrave’s enthusiasm a certain direction. At INCV, he met an outspoken university student leader named Manuel Galich who replaced Ubico’s crony as school principal. For the boys, Galich was larger than life. López Larrave’s classmate Roberto Díaz Castillo remembered, “the first time I heard him . . . the first time that his words—the Word of the revolution—shook that patio filled with adolescents who did not wear the military uniform, we saw in Galich our archetype of a popular hero.”3 For López Larrave, Díaz Castillo, and others of their generation, the revolution offered opportunities that had been foreclosed for many decades.
This chapter begins with Galich, and then expands to examine the political, social, and economic changes brought by the Revolution and their impact on university students and faculty. Throughout, I emphasize how San Carlistas’ debates over the meaning and practice of democracy reveal a particular understanding of cultural fitness as the engine of national progress. These conversations helped to define urban ladino intellectuals as they limited the civic participation of Guatemala’s indigenous majority. Constitutional reforms extending the franchise, education and social welfare reforms, and university research on indigenous communities and poverty were notable moments when these discussions came to the fore. Simply put, universitarios saw themselves as the Guatemalans most fit to determine the direction of the nation even as they fiercely debated the role that the university ought to play in society. Both on campus and off, terms like patria and libertad came to signify society’s most important qualities. Over time, this attitude became a signature of the Guatemalan middle class, as much as discretionary spending, leisure time, and social prestige in the community. For Guatemalans, as for other Latin Americans in the twentieth century, the middle class was celebrated as the key to a redemptive future, as it was critical to modern prosperity and a model of public virtue.4 During the revolutionary decade, discussions about the meaning and practice of democracy set the stage for the emergence of fierce anticommunist opposition and, soon, counterrevolution.
This chapter also captures some of the texture of daily student life in the 1940s. Student newspapers that printed satire, silly jokes, song lyrics, and comics remind us that in addition to adeptly discussing matters of state, San Carlistas were also pretty funny. Memoirs also fill in some detail—the elation of boyhood, teenage levity, and the self-consciousness of one’s later adult years—in a period that has left relatively little to the archival record.5 Much of this chapter draws on Del pánico al ataque by Manuel Galich. Galich published his memoir in 1949, five years after the success of the revolution and five years before counterrevolutionary forces would depose Jacobo Arbenz, who had not yet been elected. Like so many memoirs, it is uncritically inflected with triumphal hindsight.6 Galich presents himself and his friends as unified underdogs chasing fate, even as their diverse paths after the revolution are enough to call this unity into question. Nevertheless, the text offers insight into the hopes, dreams, and flaws of Galich’s generation. His nostalgic playfulness evokes the spirit of student nationalism.
In the first years of the Revolution, universitarios built a sense of fraternity, a political kinship, defined by affinities and exclusions. Women were important to the young men as wives, sisters, cleaners, cooks, and secretaries, but they were rarely classmates. Although women had attended the university since the 1920s, they were denied the fellowship and opportunities of male students.7 Likewise, indigenous students had never been excluded from the university, but they usually appeared in student papers as objects of ridicule or patronizing care because of their presumed lack of education. The impact of these exclusions expanded as the university’s influence over urban life extended. The reformed Constitution of 1945 bestowed new rights and responsibilities upon the whole education system. Teachers and students were to protect and expand culture, promote ethnic improvement (“promover el mejoramiento étnico”), and supervise civic and moral formation; in effect, to make the people fit for self-government.8
UBICO’S DECADENT FACTORY OF PROFESIONALISTAS
President Ubico lived and ruled in the manner of his idol, Napoleon Bonaparte. He dressed exclusively in military regalia, enjoyed motorcycle tours of the countryside and city, and hosted opulent dinners. Famously unpredictable, Ubico threw vicious tantrums as regularly as he threw galas.9 Politics at all levels operated under his control. Ministerial appointments reflected the interests of wealthy landowners, foreign investors, and Ubico’s friends and allies. At the local and regional level, Ubico eliminated challenges to his authority by hand-selecting intendentes to replace elected mayors in towns nationwide. Lest these intendentes become loyal to their communities, Ubico regularly moved them from place to place.10 Even Ubico’s nominally beneficent labor reform, which replaced debt peonage with vagrancy laws, empowered intendentes.11 The extraction of labor from poor men and women was crucial in years when global economic depression drove coffee prices so low that the commodity was scarcely profitable to produce and difficult to sell abroad. At the same time, Ubico deftly allied poor ladino and indigenous citizens to his government through powerful discourses of nation making and progress.12 Within the Army, Ubico based promotions on loyalty rather than competence. Over time, the officer class grew to resent these appointments and their incompetent superiors. Those who offended Ubico were punished and those who praised him lived well. These limitations paired with economic and infrastructural growth created the conditions for growing antipathy toward Ubico’s rule, especially among a small group of educated urban professionals and Army officers.13
The only sector that escaped Ubico’s punishing hand was Guatemala’s agricultural elite, especially UFCO, a Boston-based company formed in the last decades of the nineteenth century by the merger of banana production, distribution, and communication networks. UFCO agreed to build infrastructure in exchange for enormous land grants and preferential treatment: the company that would control one-third of the world’s banana trade by the 1950s paid very little in taxes to the Guatemalan government and was permitted to manage its workers with impunity. Of course, growth in export production and distribution networks required a large