This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
finances, lawyers to provide legal counsel and oversee contracts, and engineers to implement technical innovations. Dangerous plantations needed doctors and nurses to staff their hospitals and clinics. Supply shops required more accountants and managers. Children required schoolteachers.
Ubico adapted the National University to fulfill these needs. Like rural banana plantations, the urban university that churned out credentialed graduates was called “the decadent factory of profesionalistas.”15 This description of the university as factory is especially grim given Guatemala’s bleak labor landscape. Yet if the university was a decadent factory, it was so only for those who went along with the boss. Early in his presidency, Ubico granted himself control over the highest governing body at the university, the University High Council (CSU). From this position, he personally supervised all aspects of university life, including the very comportment of students and professors. Behavior and character became important parts of the curriculum. The institution was transformed from a center for scientific investigation and professional formation to a school of good manners. Galich, then a student, wrote that Ubico “wanted to form the minds of all Guatemalans . . . from philosophy to saddlery, and including science, law, ethics, economy, [and] motorcycling.” He joked that Ubico saw himself as “a walking encyclopedia with epaulets.”16
The belief that the university ought to stay out of national politics governed university affairs. As in other areas of government, Ubico hand-selected the university’s rector, deans, and secretaries for their allegiance rather than their proficiency. Deans were rarely experts in the fields that they advised, even though they made hiring and curriculum decisions. The rector retained final say over any faculty hires, but that position was also a presidential appointment. Faculty who opposed Ubico stood little chance of success. Ubico isolated the National University from other Latin American universities, despite interest in international student federations since the 1920s and more recent initiatives by students and faculty to unify Central American courses of study. Outside influence was suspect.17 In his memoir, Galich evoked the “suspicious grunt of the police chiefs when one asked permission to organize a conference, to receive an illustrious houseguest, [or] to form an indigenous institute,” even, he added, “to play chess . . . to coordinate an athletic tournament, to go to a library to read silently.”18
In early 1942, students from the Faculty of Law began to circulate critiques of the government in newspapers and pamphlets.19 Many of these statements were loosely transcribed in Galich’s memoir. The group criticized how the intellectual sector “has frequently been in the service of the dictator, of the autocracy” and “other times it has been rashly divided by differences in caste, religious convictions, by conflicting personal interests.”20 The young men warned of the danger of this disunity that left academics vulnerable to the power of despots. The group itself included brothers Mario and Julio Cesar Méndez Montenegro, Hiram Ordóñez, Manuel María Ávila Ayala, Heriberto Robles, Antonio Reyes Cardona, José Luis Bocaletti, José Manuel Fortuny, Alfonso Bauer Paíz, and Arturo Yaquian Otero. Most of these young men came from similar backgrounds: they were born or had spent most of their lives in the capital city and lived with parents who could afford expensive preparatory schooling for their sons. Ávila Ayala was different. He was about ten years older than his colleagues and was from Jalapa. Despite being a distinguished student, he never achieved the title of Licenciado, so valued in Guatemalan society. His bachillerato degree only certified him to teach handwriting and calligraphy. Like Ávila Ayala, Fortuny was also from the periphery and never graduated with a law degree. Instead, he quit school and worked for a North American business, Sterling Company. By contrast, Bauer Paíz, one of the youngest of the group, graduated from university by the end of 1942. He had attended the especially elite Colegio Preparatorio, unlike his fellows who had mostly attended the INCV. Mario Méndez Montenegro and Ordóñez had studied abroad. None of these young men were indigenous and most claimed some European ancestry. Most had been friends before university, like Bauer Paíz and Yaquian Otero who ran and lifted weights together because they wanted to lose weight before starting college.21
These young men who studied, ate, drank, and worked out together began to expand their conversations beyond the classroom by 1942. They called themselves the escuilaches, a term that lacks a singular history. It may be a reference to Spanish anti-French riots in 1766 or a pun on esquilar (to shear) and esquilador (sheep-shearer). The escuilaches were young men who wanted to shear the wool that Ubico had pulled over the eyes of the Guatemalan people.22 In any case, the escuilaches and their classmates were heirs to the political culture that celebrated the university’s role in Guatemalan political life that I outlined in the Introduction.
However, this history was discordant with their lives in Ubico’s Guatemala. At first, the escuilaches limited their critiques to the university administration. They denounced the appointment of ignorant deans and the dismissal of skilled faculty. They decried the lack of intellectual freedom. Soon they linked these grievances to national political and economic circumstances. They equated the university’s reigning principle of apoliticism to global fascism and blamed apolitical intellectuals for both world wars, arguing that a just society depended on an active university.23
In the middle of the night on May 15, 1942, the escuilaches snuck into the offices of the Third Court of the First Instance, the former home of President José María Reyna Barrios (1892–1898). They gathered to read what Galich calls in his memoir, “The Escuilach Manifesto.” In a romantic passage, Galich recounts the “dim azure light” of the moon where the young men realized their potential: “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 bayonets. These three weapons are our youth, our intelligence, and our unity.”24 Galich’s reverence and hindsight intensifies the intoxicating promise of the moment.
His transcription of the manifesto includes an emotional account of the spiritual suffering Guatemala’s youth as a result of persistent despotism and greed. He writes that “the youth of Guatemala has never had teachers, ideologues, leaders who spoke to them of the destiny of the nation with a true heart, as Sarmiento and Alberdi spoke to the youth of South America, or Martí and Hostos, to the Caribbean youth, or, finally, Ingenieros to those of America.” Galich continues, “We have never known an apostle who did not appear later as a puppet, of a thinker who was not an imposter; . . . And what lessons do these teachers of pillage and assassination leave us? They are too bloody to mention.” The manifesto reflected the students’ transnational intellectual formation by Caribbean and South American positivist forefathers Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Alberdi, José Martí, Eugenio María de Hostos, and José Ingenieros, even as it also asserted their isolation. Galich’s recounting of the manifesto continues, “If we think about this [we will] understand the eagerness with which the young Guatemalan impatiently awaits someone who will tell him the words that he is wanting to hear, the words of inspiration, of truth, of practical science, of legitimate patriotism, backed up by facts and not by lies.”25 In Galich’s retelling, the “young Guatemalan” becomes the figure for the whole of the nation, awaiting someone who can refine him with inspiration, truth, science, and patriotism. Galich writes that the group tiptoed out of the building with “the sensation of new breath in our souls.”26
Despite their enthusiasm, the young men were patient. While they aimed to prepare students to lead “a large popular movement that [would] destroy from the roots the old institutions and bring about a radical transformation,” they estimated that revolution was around ten years away. In the months after the scene described above, the escuilaches began by building support within the Faculty of Law. In October 1943, they revived the defunct Association of Law Students (Asociación de Estudiantes El Derecho [AED]).27 Following the AED’s example, a number of other facultades founded or revived student associations before the 1943 Christmas recess. Soon, several of these groups banded together into university-wide federation. The group took the name of the Association of University Students (Asociación de Estudiantes Universitarios [AEU]), the student federation formed in 1920, an earlier moment of groundswell in student organizing across