This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
the inequalities that his educational and cultural programming attempted to mitigate.109 For his part, Arévalo himself wrote in 1939 that any education reform would fail in Guatemala without structural reform.110 Nevertheless, as president, he pursued precisely the opposite policy. School attendance removed children from the household where they could have learned useful skills and contributed to the family’s economic activities. Making matters worse, the government could only afford to send empíricos to rural schools. Empíricos were a category of teacher who lacked regular credentials. They had not attended a Normal School and were scarcely more educated than their pupils. Worse, they were usually ladino and tackled a difficult job for which they were unprepared: teaching indigenous rural students with scant support and supplies.111
Yet the authors of these new plans and programs lived in the capital city where only 7.8 percent of the population was indigenous in 1950. The indigenous citizen-to-be was a stranger, someone known through literature and legend. Despite victorious assertions of national unity that affirmed indigenous Guatemalans’ full citizenship in the revolutionary government, chauvinism and misunderstanding endured. Take the words of Antonio Goubaud Carrera, an USAC professor of anthropology and the first director of the IIN: “Indigenismo, a word that seems as if it were of recent use, meant ‘the protection of the indigenous’ at the beginning of the colonial period . . . [Now] indigenismo denotes a consciousness of social problems that ethnic aspects of indigeneity present, relative to western civilization . . . the manifestation, the symptom, of a particular social unease.” The gravest problem was how indigenous people lacked a national perspective, and spoke “strange languages,” wore “fantastical costumes that set them apart from the rest of the population,” were “tormented by beliefs that a simple drawing would eliminate” and “bound by technologies that date to thousands of years before.”112 The IIN’s objectives were research and data collection. Its experts began by defining who was “an Indian.”113 Writer and San Carlista Luis Cardoza y Aragón observed in 1945, “The nation is Indian. This is the truth that first manifests itself with its enormous, subjugating, presence.” “Yet we know,” he continued, “that in Guatemala, as in the rest of America, it is the mestizo who possesses leadership throughout society. The mestizo: the middle class. The revolution of Guatemala is a revolution of the middle class . . . What an inferiority complex the Guatemalan suffers for his indian [sic] blood, for the indigenous character of his nation!”114 In other words, to deliver the middle class—here a synonym for mestizo or ladino—revolution, urban professionals had to venture into the countryside to study the exalted past and teach the retrograde.
There was no bigger advocate of this type of university extension than President Arévalo’s good friend, respected surgeon Dr. Carlos Martínez Durán. In August 1945, Martínez Durán was elected as the first rector of the autonomous university. He was a great admirer of John Locke, Max Scheler, Miguel de Unamuno, and José Martí, and when he could, he implemented their ideals at USAC. At his inauguration, he proudly proclaimed, “The student is the pueblo in the classroom!”115 He famously said, “Universitario, this city belongs to you. Construct within her your talent, so that future generations can quench their thirst for knowledge here. May your academic life be sacred, fecund, and beautiful. Enter not into this city of the spirit without a well-proven love of truth.”116 Thus charged, AEU students went out into their city with their “sacred, fecund, and beautiful” intellects. Although these efforts were complex and mediated by regional and ethnic prejudices, to say nothing of students’ inflated sense of duty, the university’s gaze outward toward the pueblo outlasted the Ten Years’ Spring. It became a treasured aspect of San Carlista student nationalism, sometimes referred to as “nation building” or “hacer patria.”
Building the nation was, curiously, the theme of an homage to Francisca Fernández Hall, USAC’s first female civil engineer, celebrated in July 1947. The event began with a speech from president of the Engineering Students’ Union (AEI) Héctor David Torres about the role of women in Guatemalan society. He spoke, “women also build the nation, because hacer patria does not only mean to defend the nation on the field of battle, nor to attain the highest governmental appointments. Hacer patria is to educate the people . . . to acculturate oneself . . . to work loyally and honestly.” Torres acknowledged that women did not currently have a place in national-level leadership, but “if they were capable of facing domestic life as a mother, wife, or sister, then they were capable of successfully confronting the intricate problems of science.” Importantly, only two women were mentioned in the newspaper’s reportage of the event: the woman elected beauty queen of the Engineering facultad and Fernández Hall herself. While the university’s official Boletín Universitario detailed speeches delivered by men in honor of her, of Fernández Hall it reported only that she “expressed her gratitude” on behalf of all Guatemalan women.117 Women remained marginal to the rising chorus of San Carlistas student nationalism, invoked as figures or objects who helped reinforce gendered understandings of valor and responsibility and, ultimately, political authority.
In the same issue of the Boletín Universitario, editors reminded their large readership that university extension was an integral part of national social reform.118 They promoted the Faculty of Humanities’ weekly radio show on TGW, which offered programs on topics as varied as government policy (income tax and agrarian reform), social concerns (consumerism, Guatemala’s leading cause of death, and alcoholism), political rights (rights and responsibilities of the press and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in Guatemalan jurisprudence), and narrower topics like citizens’ satisfaction with USAC and listeners’ favorite Guatemalan writers. One program asked listeners whether they considered Guatemala one unified or many individual nations. Another contemplated the claim that man cannot live without philosophy.119 The program projected the university as far into the pueblo as the Spanish language and radio signal could reach.
At this time, USAC also became involved in transnational academic exchanges. Free from Ubico’s restrictions, the university soon relaunched its lively foreign exchange program and hosted scholars from across the Americas and Europe.120 In 1950, USAC participated in the World Conference of Universities in Nice, France. The following year, AEU students attended the International Conference of Students in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where they met other students from around the world, including Liberia, Cuba, Morocco, Algeria, French West Africa, British East Africa, and England. It is not clear what came out of these travels. Certainly students had adventures and gained new pen pals and a sense of a global student experience. They also began to read a popular international student newspaper entitled The Student (not to be confused with the USAC newspaper of the same title). Notably, through the 1950s, San Carlistas traveled to socialist bloc countries, Western democracies, and colonial African nations. Certainly these travels expanded San Carlistas’ perception of the world, especially regarding the effects of U.S. and European imperialism. The imprint of these connections is evident in some anticolonial writings by San Carlistas, addressed in later chapters.
Martínez Durán also traveled widely. Surprisingly, since the Arévalo and Arbenz governments would soon become their sworn enemies, the U.S. State Department and UFCO hosted Martínez Durán for six weeks in 1948. After the visit, Martínez Durán published a multi-part essay about his travels in the Boletin Unversitario. The entourage toured Tulane University, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, American University, and Georgetown. According to the rector, they avoided political discussions. For Martínez Durán, the tour underscored two crucial differences between Guatemala and the United States: the large indigenous population and rural poverty. Upon his return, he reiterated the importance of national pride and asked San Carlistas to pay special attention to these unique problems. He planned to offer extension programs in the sciences, technology, philosophy, and art to elevate all Guatemalans. He lamented secondary schools students’ poor preparation in the humanities as compared to the United States.121
Martínez Durán also emphasized the proper physical environment for learning. In an essay written for the Boletín Universitario, he imagined a University City where “the finest of honeys will be distilled from the nectar of the youth . . . where life finds fulfillment, and the universal and the national,