This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
and encounters with state bodies and institutions as the first expression of student nationalism, which would become the most enduring feature of Guatemala’s middle class.44
Galich’s memoir recounts a remarkable meeting that was held the following morning. Galich, Mario Méndez Montenegro, and Zachrisson were summoned to Ubico’s chambers. His personal secretary, Ernesto Rivas, received the young men and began the meeting with an offer: Ubico would dismiss his recent Law School dean and secretary appointments if they promised to call off the strike. Galich remembered that the young men responded, “We could comply with this agreement, but we cannot speak to whether our colleagues would approve a decision that is personally ours” and Méndez Montenegro confirmed, “In no way can we decide something for the entire University.”45 The students’ collective-minded response may have been surprising to Rivas, who was accustomed to Ubico’s autocratic style. Negotiations continued, though the young students did not budge. At one point, the telephone rang. It was Ubico. After he hung up, Rivas offered even further concessions to the students. In fact as the morning wore on, he offered concessions to all of the students’ demands: the replacement of the recent appointments, the formation of a Faculty of Humanities, and even Ávila Ayala’s reinstatement at the INCV. At the nearby Paraninfo, students, professors, and teachers waited for news from the meeting. Five hours later, Galich, Méndez Montenegro, and Zachrisson left the National Palace for lunch.46
The three men, all in their early 30s, had been invested with tremendous authority as liaisons between the emergent student movement and the dictator. Now, they had to decide whether to present the assembled crowd with the Ideario, the president’s concessions, or both. Galich remembered that they met with friends at the cafeteria of the judicial office buildings to discuss the situation. They ordered lunch from Miss Chaíto, a woman Galich remembered as the “guardian angel of the students who worked at the courts in those years,” who served the students “not only with efficiency, but also with affection.”47 While fighting for a more just future, Galich and his peers relied upon the manual labor of others, especially the affective labor of women in service positions. We cannot precisely know Miss Chaíto’s motives, but we do know that women whose histories have not become iconic also opposed Ubico. Perhaps Miss Chaíto’s labor was a political act in itself—providing support for the overthrow of Ubico—rather than the act of personal affection that Galich recounted.
Over beef stew, avocado, tortillas, coffee, and bread, the young men argued. Galich advocated for a more restrained approach. He was concerned that the embryonic movement might be unable to sustain a struggle against the dictator. Further, if Ubico had agreed to their demands, why should they continue to fight? Méndez Montenegro disagreed. As long as Ubico remained in power and the university was not autonomous, their demands remained unfulfilled. The movement could only gain momentum. Finally, he lost patience and, according to Galich’s memoir, “stood up and leaned across the table, pointing his finger at me, saying in a decisive tone: ‘If you back out now, escuilach, I am going to punch you!’” Galich, it seems, found new resolve. They would not accept Ubico’s concessions. The young men returned to the National Palace. In Galich’s words, “impulse triumphed over caution; intuition overcame reason.”48
The three students returned to the Paraninfo, which by that time overflowed with “students, teachers, people of all social classes, of all professions, of all of the neighborhoods of the city, who came to witness a accomplishment without precedent in Jorge Ubico’s Guatemala.”49 Applause and cheers erupted as Galich reported how Ubico acceded to all of the group’s demands. Another student stood to read the Ideario. Cries of “Viva!” filled the room and it was unanimously approved. Celso Cerezo Dardón suggested a general strike. Others urged the group to wait and see whether the president would issue a formal response to the Ideario. The meeting dissolved into muddled debates and disagreements. Then, in Galich’s cinematic retelling, a young student, barely out of secondary school, stepped forward and yelled, “If you don’t declare the strike, I will declare my own strike!”50
The strike was on. Over the next few hours, representatives from each facultad made speeches and listed demands. Students in laboratory sciences demanded better equipment, other facultades demanded technical schools for workers and a School of Pedagogy.51 That their demands hardly differed from those pursued by students in the early 1920s confirmed the university’s stasis during the dictatorship. After some debate, the group agreed to give Ubico twenty-four hours to comply. Before the meeting adjourned, a group of young lawyers joined the strike. Now the striking students had support from two important professional sectors, education and law.
After the meeting, the escuilaches assembled at Ávila Ayala’s house to prepare the long list of demands to be delivered to the president. The young men talked, smoked, typed, and copyedited. On breaks, Galich remembers how they retired to a different room to consult a fortune-telling toy. Regrettably, these fortunes are lost to history.52 The following morning of June 22, Cerezo Dardón delivered the demands and the Ideario to Ubico. Galich remembers that he tried to sleep late, but his daughter’s cries woke him. Unable to rest, Galich went to meet with friends in the offices of the Third Court. His sleeplessness was a stroke of luck, as policemen came searching for him soon after he left. Ubico had ordered the arrest of the student leaders. He had also suspended the constitution. Friends smuggled Galich, Ávila Ayala, and Méndez Montenegro into the Mexican Embassy, where they joined nearly all of the students, teachers, and lawyers who had signed the strike declaration.53 The group anticipated arrest, exile, or worse. They waited to see how the rest of the nation would respond. An answer came later that afternoon in a treatise entitled “The Document of the 311.” Named for its three hundred-eleven signatories, including many professionals and high-profile academics, the document called for an end the state of exception and the reinstatement of the Constitution.54
Hand to hand and by word of mouth, the demands, the Ideario, and other declarations, slogans, and plans circulated throughout the capital. Small protests punctuated daily life over the next three days. The Ubico regime responded by sending parapolice forces into neighborhoods to loot and attack residents. The protestors were blamed for damages and injuries.55 On the afternoon of June 25, a group of schoolteachers organized a protest at the Church of St. Francis, located five blocks from the National Palace. Their chants and signs demanded freedom, democracy, and Ubico’s dismissal. Memoirs and journalistic accounts of the protest emphasize that the women were well-dressed, professional, and orderly. This was important to the opposition’s claim that the imminent attack was unjustified. Ubico ordered the military and police to enclose the protestors. Officers fired shots into the crowd and one young teacher, Maria Chinchilla Recinos, was struck and died in the street. For many, this attack against a teacher—a professional woman who nurtured the nation’s children—was unforgiveable. Emboldened, workers’ groups came forward to join the strike and Ubico’s regime lost what little support it had from small business owners who depended on him to curb worker unrest. According to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, by the end of June, Guatemala seemed to be “on the verge of a revolution.”56
Like others who had openly opposed Ubico, Galich, Ávila Ayala, Méndez Montenegro, and Cerezo decided to go into exile in Mexico as the situation deteriorated.57 In fact, they were on a train to Mexico City when the conductor announced Ubico’s resignation.58 Only eight days had passed since the young men had met with Ubico’s secretary. Galich wrote, “It was as if a frenzy overtook us. We hugged. We squeezed one another for a long time. We drank every beer on the train. Some mariachis accompanied our celebration with songs from the Aztec land.”59 The young men’s Mexican exile became a sightseeing holiday. The group went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, visited a secret aguardiente factory, and met with Mexican university students. To Ávila Ayala’s dismay, they even saw a bullfight. He despised the fiesta brava and spoke, Galich wrote, “in the name of some hypothetical society for the protection of animals—‘I don’t know how you can applaud such savagery.’”60 The young men returned to a hero’s welcome. Apparently, Galich was embraced so enthusiastically that his trousers fell off.61
Two weeks