This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
linked to human progress, and by extension, the responsibility of students to lead the people. Her words connected San Carlistas to larger claims about a Latin American modernity built on private prosperity and public virtue.28
Less than eleven years after Cabrera’s fall, another dictator challenged the university, once more transforming its political culture. Jorge Ubico y Castañeda (1931–1944) outlawed all student organizations. Like Cabrera, he appointed cronies to high positions within the university and personally supervised its functions. Under this rigid structure the university became known as a “factory of professionals,” churning out credentialed graduates with little of the sense of universitario duty that had motivated the Generation of 1920. Occasionally, Ubico simply closed the university. When he did permit the university to operate, his control was far-reaching. Early in his presidency, Ubico granted himself authority over the University High Council (CSU) and appointed the university’s highest official, the rector, who controlled faculty hiring. Leaving little room for mischief, Ubico even supervised the behavior of students and faculty who were required to conform to certain standards of comportment. The university had become a school of “good manners,” chiefly occupied by the reproduction of credentials for the benefit of a small elite.29
Civil society was divided. Ubico’s dictatorship offered stability that encouraged foreign investment and brought economic prosperity to some. But political parties and most civic organizations were outlawed. Only Ubico’s followers could have successful careers in the professions and the Army. In 1942, a small group of friends from the Faculty of Law set out to change all of that. They took up the banner of the Generation of 1920. They agitated for change and soon, demanded Ubico’s resignation.
EDUCATION, YOUTH, AND THE CITY
San Carlistas would draw on and expand this celebrated history across the next five decades, sometimes as state-makers and in other moments as targets of government repression.30 If being a student was a call to lead the nation at midcentury, by century’s end, it represented the sacrifice of youth in the struggle for justice. But before we move into that history, a brief overview of Guatemala’s education system and students’ backgrounds will help to situate San Carlistas.
For most of the twentieth century, Guatemalan education has been separated into three levels: preprimary and primary education, educación básica (also called educación media), and university. A series of laws passed in the mid-nineteenth century made primary education secular, free, and obligatory for children aged 7–14. As I mentioned above, Mariano Gálvez worked to standardize primary education during his presidency. The liberal reforms of Justo Rufino Barrios provided for the construction of normal schools—one for boys and one for girls—in more than three hundred of the nation’s largest towns. The literacy statistics discussed below suggest that these efforts were largely unsuccessful, but education consistently appeared as a priority of the Liberal presidents. At the turn of the twentieth century, the kindergarten movement helped expand formal preprimary education. However, these programs ranged from expensive multiyear programs to inexpensive accelerated programs of a few weeks’ length. From their first encounters with the school system, children with scant economic resources received limited instruction. Around the mid-twentieth century, primary education was divided into two sections, basic education (educación fundamental) and complementary education (educación complementaria). Each of these sections involved three years of study, and a student progressed from one to the next by passing exams. The complementary education curriculum included classes in social studies, math, grammar and literature, music, physical education, natural history, and the physical sciences.
The next level was educación básica, more or less the equivalent of a U.S. high school. Education at this level was revised significantly during the 1944–1954 revolution. Under the new program, oral exams in front of a panel of teachers were replaced by written tests and three general education grades (called the ciclo de cultura general) were added to the more specialized sequence called the ciclo diversificado, which guided students into careers. The revolution also expanded literacy and prevocational programs in the countryside. After the counterrevolution in 1954, these rural education programs continued, but became contested sites of surveillance, developmentalism, and resistance. I address some of them in the chapters that follow. Students received diplomas in teaching, accounting, secretarial work, or the humanities-focused baccalaureate (bachillerato) in Sciences and Letters. Hundreds of secondary schools or colegios opened during the revolution, but most students were prepared for university study at the more elite schools, like the INCV, the Normal Central Institute for Girls Belén (referred to simply as Belén), and the Liceo Americano. The religious Liceo Javier and Liceo Guatemala, both founded after the counterrevolution overturned the prohibition on religious education, also prepared students for university. Students from all of these secondary schools were involved in the protests outlined in the pages below. Other secondary schools fed into USAC, too, including Rafael Aqueche Institute, the National School of Commercial Sciences, and the Instituto Normal para Señoritas de Centro América (Normal Institute of Central America for Girls [INCA]). Most USAC students came from the capital or had moved there when they were younger to attend one of these colegios. Fewer students came from the countryside and from secondary cities like Quetzaltenango (usually after attending the Instituto Normal para Varones de Occidente [INVO]), Huehuetenango, and Escuintla.
The social category of student included a wide range of ages, from the late teens to the early or midthirties. Often San Carlistas took more than four or five years to graduate. Degree programs routinely required six, nine, or twelve semesters of coursework before exams or a practicum, and many students had work or family responsibilities that prevented them from advancing steadily. Also, it was not uncommon for students to take classes intermittently or to complete coursework, but not the thesis or exams required to be awarded a degree. In few facultades were the majority of students able to forego work and family responsibilities and study as “full-time students.” Programs in medicine and engineering required many semesters of inflexible class schedules, clinicals, service work, and practicums, which made it difficult for students to work while completing a degree. Predictably, these two facultades had reputations for being among the most elite and conservative for much of the twentieth century. Quite the opposite was the Facultad of Law and Juridical Sciences, by far the largest, most flexible, and most vocal in its opposition to the government. In other words, within the already elite sphere of the university, social status affected one’s choice of career. Until a controversial curriculum reform in the 1960s that added general education requirements, USAC students followed specialized programs of study where they attended classes only with others in the same career. This is why the formation of the university-wide AEU in 1920 was so impactful—it united students across facultades. The opening of regional campuses in Quetzaltenango, Cobán, Jalapa, and Chiquimula in the late 1970s and in the Petén in 1987 diversified the upbringing of students who would call themselves San Carlistas. But for most, capital city life, attendance at the main campus, and close friendships with classmates pursuing the same career were fundamental to the universitario experience.
There were other options for young Guatemalans. The Instituto Adolfo V. Hall, founded in 1955 by Carlos Castillo Armas, began instruction after primary education and prepared students for careers in the military. Adolfo V. Hall graduates could attend officers’ school at the Escuela Politécnica. This was the education received by the military presidents who ruled throughout the civil war. Many of them were, in fact, teachers at the Politécnica. The Constitution of 1956 permitted the foundation of private universities, which gave university-bound students still more options. By 1971, there were four additional universities in Guatemala City, each with a particular emphasis or ideological orientation: the Universidad Rafael Landívar (a Jesuit university opened in 1961 and focused on business and science), the Universidad Francisco Marroquín (founded in 1971, known for North American patronage, championing free market capitalism, and even granting an honorary degree to Milton Friedman), the Universidad del Valle (focused on scientific and pedagogical research and opened in 1966), and the Universidad Mariano Gálvez (also opened in 1966 and guided by a school motto from the Gospel of John).
As they navigated these various educational systems, individual students, faculty, journalists, parents, and