This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
these types of thinkers who would through their word and their conduct inspire “faith, courage, and self-sacrifice” in the youth.74 Arévalo called on students to lead the people of Guatemala as secular priests.
In these first months of the Revolution, students, faculty, and alumni worked to restructure both the university and the nation in the image of an ideal republic. Their efforts not only revised the laws that governed the university, but also confirmed the presence of a coherent civic block at USAC. The ruling junta, CEC, and daily newspapers consistently referred to students, professors, and administrators as “San Carlistas.”
San Carlistas also joined the Constitutional Assembly, which hurried to write a Constitution before Arévalo’s inauguration on March 15. The Constitutional Assembly united two generations of San Carlistas: elders of the Generation of 1920, who as members of the Unionist Party had aided the overthrow of Estrada Cabrera, and neophytes who had entered national-level politics with the Revolution. The elders included luminaries David Vela, Francisco Villagrán de Leon, José Rölz-Bennett, Clemente Marroquín Rojas, and José Falla. Some escuilaches were among the younger generation. Of the Commission of Fifteen that initially drafted the Constitution, fourteen members were lawyers or law students; one was a medical doctor.75 Unsurprisingly, their chief concerns were universal suffrage, literacy, and federal social reforms, including university extension programs, and the foundation of the National Indigenista Institute (IIN), which sought—in certain terms—to improve government relations with rural indigenous citizens.76
While student-statesmen discussed these concerns within the immediate context of Guatemala, they also engaged with larger ideological debates that circulated throughout much of the world after World War II. The Constitutional Assembly employed the new human rights–based language of organizations like the United Nations. San Carlistas were also early members of the International Union of Students (IUS) in 1946, an organization with consultative status in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).77 Contemporary internationalist ideals were reflected in the Assembly’s invocation of the “democratic spirit” that divided the world into two antagonistic blocs: fascist and democratic. In Guatemala, however, this sweeping call for democracy elided liberal and popular political concerns. This elision enabled a strong governing coalition, albeit one with deep internal divisions.78 Within a decade, conflicts over the precise meanings and practices of democracy would destabilize the revolutionary governments, a topic taken up at length in Chapter 2.
But even in the Revolution’s first months, the tension between liberal political philosophy and popular concerns put intellectual elites at odds with urban workers, rural farmers, and the jobless. Some of these divisions were exposed in the debate over universal suffrage. The ruling junta opposed extending the right to vote to illiterate men and women because they were seen as remnants of feudalism, not modern citizens, and therefore ineligible for the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The junta insisted that restricting the vote to literate citizens would secure the nation for democracy and protect it against fascism because illiterate people were likely to be exploited by politicians, an argument supported by the historical memory of the presidency of Rafael Carrera and other nineteenth-century caudillos. Initially, the AEU and the AED agreed. Contradictory as this may seem, it serves as a reminder that San Carlistas were literate, ladino, mostly urban—in a word, urbane.
The junta, student leaders, ministers, advisors, and members of the Assembly came from the only ethnic, class, and regional background where the ability to read and write in Castilian Spanish was common. In 1950 (the first post-revolutionary census), 73.8 percent of Guatemala City residents were literate, while national figures including the majority-indigenous periphery recorded only 27.8 percent literacy. Many urban intellectuals accepted this evidence of the link between indigeneity and illiteracy. In summary comments in the national census, unnamed statisticians reiterated the implications of these numbers: “Literacy, taken to mean the ability to read and write, has always been considered one of the best means to judge the cultural level of a population . . . while nearly a half of the ladino population (49.1%) is literate, only 10 percent (9.7%) of the indigenous population is [literate].”79 The elite status of professionals is even clearer in terms of national employment statistics. In 1940, Guatemala’s economically active population counted 1,846,977 individuals; of this group of nearly 2 million workers, only 2,145 worked in what were called the “liberal professions” (profesiones liberales) as lawyers, notaries, doctors, surgeons, dental surgeons, pharmacists, midwives, and topographical and civil engineers. That is, less than 0.12 percent of economically active Guatemalans had careers in professional fields. By contrast, 45.8 percent (846,103) of economically active individuals did domestic service work and 42.1 percent (777,509) did agricultural work. Together this nearly 88 percent of the population performed labor that did not require schooling or literacy.80
Moreover, professionals were concentrated in the capital city. In 1940, more than half of Guatemala’s 413 lawyers lived in the capital. A decade later, around 62 percent of Guatemala’s lawyers, doctors, surgeons, dental surgeons, and topographical and civil engineers lived in the Department of Guatemala, where Guatemala City is located. The remaining 38 percent were scattered unevenly throughout the other twenty-one departments. When the 1950 census noted an illiteracy rate (72.2%) that exceeded the recorded indigenous population (53.5%) by nearly 20 percentage points, these data were taken to indicate that there was also a “regular quantity of illiterate ladinos,” which led some social scientists to understand rurality as a factor in illiteracy. The same census recorded that only 22 percent of individuals over the age of seven in Guatemala City had attended “any school or classes whatsoever.” Plainly, to attend university was extremely rare, and to graduate was even rarer. Most San Carlistas had attended the same preparatory schools and known one another for decades by the time they reached university. Professionals and students formed a small, tight-knit, mostly urban, ladino community.81
All of these factors—race, region, and fraternity—weighed heavily on the Constitutional Assembly’s discussion of granting full suffrage to illiterate Guatemalans.82 USAC alumnus and conservative editor of the newspaper La Hora Clemente Marroquín Rojas observed that the debate divided civil society into two sectors: on one side “industrial workers, laborers, and some youths and students,” and the other “pure gentlemen: many students, but all ‘respectable people [gente decente].’”83 North American anthropologist Richard N. Adams looked on and dismissed the revolutionary yearnings of the escuilaches because of their apparent hypocrisy. He wrote, “the Faculty of Law, the locus of such radical student protests, [produced] a population of professionals that is apparently incapable of altering the system and is, instead, deeply involved in its continuity.”84 Adams’s observation certainly echoed the contemporary belief that the middle class ought to exemplify the “ideal of private prosperity and public virtue thought to be crucial to the smooth functioning of modern societies.”85 Actually, as I mentioned above, there was tremendous ideological difference among the escuilaches. Nevertheless, while the ruling junta, the AEU, the AED, and some members of the public opposed the vote for illiterate citizens, the majority of the Constitutional Assembly, many political parties (including president-elect Arévalo’s PAR), and most of the general public favored at least an open ballot for illiterate citizens.
Before long, the AEU changed its position. In their statement about the shift, the AEU leadership declared with confidence that it could not “stand against the interests and ideals of the pueblo.”86 In order to achieve political and social equality, the nation needed all of its citizens to participate. Further, they wrote, the restriction of illiterate citizens’ right to vote “forecloses and annuls the human character of our laborers, most of all of our industrial workers who have given sufficient proof of their patriotism and civility.”87 Still, they favored an open ballot for a short period while illiterate citizens were taught civic literacy, reading, and writing. As the foremost student group, the AEU represented San Carlistas as custodians of the knowledge and skills that were prerequisites to the franchise.
Not everyone was so easily persuaded. One important event must have loomed large in the