This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
years between 1943 and 1954, the number of enrollments increased more than 450 percent. In a single year between 1950 and 1951, university enrollments grew 19 percent, from 2,373 to 2,824 students.136 This rapid growth taxed the university infrastructure and created overcrowded classrooms and registration bottlenecks. Greater enrollment reflected the presence of some less elite students at the university. Of course, this was Arévalo’s objective when he expanded the public school system, but in practice the widened enrollments challenged some San Carlistas’ egalitarian idealizations. Suddenly, San Carlistas found themselves sharing classrooms with strangers, not just familiar compañeros from the capital city’s few elite high schools.
These changes created a charged atmosphere for social debate and disagreement. The student-authored editorials, memoirs, and reportage discussed in this chapter and the next suggest that political fracture at the university was precisely the product of the atmosphere of free thinking that the revolution had affirmed was so important to the democratic project. At the same time, San Carlistas’ involvement in statecraft during the Ten Years’ Spring demanded a certain investment in democratic fitness that upheld students and faculty as democracy’s defenders as it excluded people who were uneducated—an exclusion that, as I have shown above, especially affected indigenous people. Student nationalism championed individual rights, civil freedoms, and electoral democracy for the educated elite while the indigenous majority awaited democratic tutelage. Surely not all students and faculty shared these beliefs, but they were common enough to make the San Carlista a coherent political and social subject. In other words, the identities of these urban intellectuals were far from self-evident or a priori; instead, they were formed in dialogue with national debates about the meaning of the nation and of democracy. As Victoria Langland has noted in Brazil, university students negotiated difficult and conflicting identities as intellectual elites in peripheral places.137 The identifier San Carlista became a palimpsest of the institution’s celebrated colonial past, the glory of the revolution, and ongoing debates over the meaning of democracy. It reflected a social consciousness built on a raced and classed definition of citizenship.
Clearly, the revolution’s consequences at the university were manifold. During the Ten Years’ Spring, university enrollments soared and the ranks of the urban bureaucracy expanded. Professors were no longer anonymous workers and students were no longer mass-manufactured products of Ubico’s factory of professionals, lacking collegiality and responsibility. As one student journalist wrote in an essay published in the Boletín Universitario in observance of the anniversary of the revolution, “For many years, the word ‘universitario’ was used exclusively to denote students and teachers. The graduate was the ‘egresado,’ the professional who was submerged in the hustle and bustle of his career and who more or less lost his connection to the Alma Mater.”138 The revolution required more of San Carlistas. The journalist continued, “the word ‘egresado’ has been banished from the lexicon of the university . . . the professional does not ‘graduate’ from the university but instead enters . . . the Professional Colegio.”139 As part of the colegio, the San Carlista remained tied to USAC by service commitments and licensure requirements.
The revolution also obliged San Carlistas to build new relationships with the pueblo. No longer mindless products of a “decadent factory of professionals,” San Carlistas were to be conscientious leaders who would make the pueblo (understood to be mostly rural, indigenous, and illiterate) fit for self-government. In 1945, Congress considered that “one of the most legitimate longings of the nation’s intellectuals has been the organization of a National University” framed by the “nation’s own authentic culture” and the community’s expectations.140 Their efforts had mixed results for recipients—remember the stagnant national literacy rates between 1940 and 1950 and the shortcomings of the empíricos—but they were generative for San Carlistas.
This chapter has encountered students in a singularly transformative moment when they had come to call themselves San Carlistas and articulate a social consciousness that relied upon raced and gendered difference as conditions of possibility for the formation of a republic. This history is significant, for we know little about the historical processes by which powerful urban, middle-class ladino identities were recognized, resisted, or welcomed.141 This City Belongs to You argues that the contested relationship between students, the university, and the Guatemalan and U.S. governments shaped what it meant to be an urban middle-class ladino, largely through the loose consensus around principles of liberalism and the responsibility of students to lead the nation. Students became state makers, and student nationalism was the spirit of the law.
By the early 1950s, the student had become a coherent and powerful political, social, and economic identity. It was so coherent, and so powerful, that it buttressed one of the U.S. government’s most successful campaigns in its war on communism in the Western Hemisphere, the overthrow of Arbenz. When San Carlista cohesion did begin to fracture, it did so precisely along the fault lines of individual rights and free market capitalism, which articulated with status anxiety and racial ambivalence as Guatemalan urban middle-class sectors revitalized conservative social and political thought in the context of the global Cold War. In the early 1950s, anticommunist students emerged from this growing dissensus and took up the mantle of democracy’s true defenders, using the language of liberal democracy.
In fact, the revolutionary Ten Years’ Spring gave the young anticommunists their most convincing rallying cry: “Dios, Patria y Libertad.” Under the Ubico dictatorship, “patria” and “libertad” were weak calls to action. But populist nationalism and the cultural and economic reforms of the Arévalo and Arbenz governments breathed life into Fatherland and freedom. Of course, when young anticommunists of the CEUA cheered “Dios, Patria y Libertad,” they had a different national project in mind.
TWO
Showcase for Democracy, 1953–1957
Dios—Patria—Libertad
God, Fatherland, and Freedom
Slogan of anticommunist students and the Armas regime
Adiós—Patria—Libertad
Goodbye, Fatherland and Freedom
Banners at the Huelga de Dolores, 1955
WHILE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE of Anticommunist University Students (CEUA) cheered “Dios, Patria y Libertad,” students at the 1955 Huelga de Dolores waved a different banner: “Adiós, Patria y Libertad.” The students bade a scathing farewell to the free and democratic nation constructed during the Ten Years’ Spring (1944–1954). In fact, this turn of events had been foretold in the previous year’s celebration. The 1954 No Nos Tientes featured a playful editorial entitled “An Open Letter to Close-Minded Readers.” It read, “We Guatemalans have had frankly wretched luck throughout history: for many decades a group of patriots . . . have handed us over to the gringos so that they could steal banana[s].” But the other agents of imperial expansion, the Soviets, were equally problematic. The editorial continued, “now what is happening is that we want to throw away the sickle even if it’s with the hammer, thanks to our sorry luck to be the chosen victims of such foreign-looking, always purgative, leaders.” In such a situation, they wrote, “the only one who is not gripped by this idiocy is the student.”1
In the early years of the revolutionary governments, San Carlistas had been bureaucrats-in-training who worked with the government to build a better nation. But the university, its students, and the meaning of the middle class had begun to change. By the mid-1950s, only San Carlistas could be trusted to resist advances made by Yankee and Soviet imperialists who sought to exploit Guatemala’s vulnerability and value. An elaborate float in the satirical parade (desfile bufo) also reflected this belief. It depicted Guatemala as an indigenous woman in traditional huipil. Two suitors, “Soviet Paradise” and “North American gold,” flirted while Guatemala moved listlessly between them.2 While the float explicitly critiqued the exploitative politics of neocolonialism, it implicitly disdained women’s subservience. Perhaps unintentionally, it revealed how gender, race, and class shaped San Carlistas’ understandings of political authority. Feminized