This City Belongs to You. Heather Vrana
youth. In Guatemala, the words joven or jóvenes, estudiante, and San Carlista were used to denote age, but also institutional and political affiliations.31 I distinguish between these terms throughout. Like the archival sources I draw on, I use the term “youth” (joven) or “youths” (jóvenes) to refer to individuals or groups of young people, especially when the group under discussion comprised students from different universities and secondary schools or when the group’s makeup was unclear. In later chapters of the book, I use the term youth most often when referring to culture or counterculture, as this mirrors contemporary usage. In fact, by 1960, the terms joven and jóvenes gave way to estudiante or more specific descriptors like San Carlista, Normalista, and Belenista when referring to protests or other political actions. Student (estudiante) remained the most general and common term, employed as adjective and noun in daily newspapers and university-based publications. Sometimes journalists did not specify or could not know whether students were actually enrolled in classes at the secondary or university level. When this was the case, they often still used the word estudiante. In this way, the term estudiante came to signify an oppositional group of young people. I use it when the text I am reading does and, too, to delimit social sectors and organizing strategies. Similarly, I use San Carlista when a source does, and also when discussing student, faculty, staff, administrative or alumni bodies at USAC. Interestingly, USAC alumni continue to use the term, even years after graduation. I discuss this attachment throughout the book and revisit it in the Coda. The term intellectual is even more general, but I generally use it to link students and faculty to their peers around the world and to position their labor within global networks of production and consumption. That the meanings associated with each of these groups—jóvenes, San Carlistas, estudiantes, and intellectuals—changed over time is a basic assumption guiding this book. Indeed, part of the work of my research has been to trace these meanings and to discuss the implications of these changes for social class and nation making in Guatemala and the region. All of these shifting identities informed the meaning and remaking of the middle class in Guatemala City.
The city, too, shaped the meaning of being a San Carlista. Profits from exports and banking had turned the capital into a bustling commercial center by the late nineteenth century. New boulevards, theatres, and public gardens and a wave of European immigrants lent the city a cosmopolitan air.32 North American capital investment soon followed, then a railway that linked Guatemala City to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and the Western highlands, built by African American and West Indian laborers.33 The city swelled with migrants from the countryside, its population doubling between 1880 and 1921 (from 55,728 to 112,086).34 But it was during the presidency of Ubico that urbanization took off. Ubico oversaw the construction of the city’s grand National Palace, police headquarters, and Post Office building. Because UFCO and other North American export businesses often financed infrastructural improvement, roads, rail lines, electricity, and water services were developed in some areas and abandoned in others. Elite capitalinos countered the reality that the majority of their nation was rural and indigenous with their self-styled cosmopolitanism. Guatemala City’s only rival was Quetzaltenango, urban, technologically advanced, and connected to global capital flows, but much smaller and located in the distant Western highlands. By comparison, other cities like Chimaltenango, Huehuetenango, and ports like Puerto Barrios populated by UFCO workers were very small.35 In material terms, then, an emerging middle class was created through the urbanization, industrialization, and population growth that characterized the Ubico era.36
The city’s population rose steadily from the 1940s to the end of the civil war, but it doubled during the most intense years of the armed conflict as war refugees fled violence in the countryside.37 New suburbs and peripheral neighborhoods expanded where they could, though deep ravines at the northern and western edges of the city limited its horizontal expansion. The ever-present threat of earthquakes limited its vertical rise. Some of the city’s first elite neighborhoods, like the estates along Simeón Cañas Avenue in Zone 2, and its first slums, like Gallito, Abril, and Recolección, have remained home to the same families since the 1880s.38 Wealthy businessmen, bureaucrats, and professionals lived in Zones 1 and 2, near their offices and USAC in the city center until gated communities were built in the 1980s and 1990s.39 Class mixing was common in these central neighborhoods, which proved to be extraordinarily important during protests and natural disasters in the 1960s and 1970s.
Another innovation in urban space shaped student activism and the meaning of being a San Carlista: the University City. For decades, rectors and planners proposed the construction of a separate space for study that would unify the student body and create a studious atmosphere for intellectual exchange far from the hectic city center. The results were mixed. The University City in Zone 12 was built several kilometers from the city center, surrounded by a ring road with just two entrances and one major access road, Petapa Avenue. This became an asset and a liability for student protestors: an asset because they could claim territorial sovereignty, which made any police or military incursion an extreme and illegitimate act; and a liability because the delimited campus made protestors somewhat easier to contain. The relocation also removed students from the mixed-class downtown where they regularly crossed paths with workers, teachers, and others. It reinforced the sense that estudiantes were cloistered elites, distant from the pueblo. Yet it also meant that the guerrilla could potentially recruit and even train students within university buildings without being detected. San Carlistas were savvy about spatial politics and knew their city well. The chapters below demonstrate how they skillfully manipulated urban public spaces like the Central Plaza, commercial enclaves like Sixth Avenue (called “La Sexta”), and transportation hubs like the Anillo Periférico, Guatemala City’s Beltway.
Until recently, Guatemala City was little more than a dangerous inconvenience for Guatemalanists on their way to more popular locales, like colonial Antigua, pastoral Lake Atitlán, the Western Highlands, or even the remote Petén. The city can feel polluted, chaotic, and perilous.40 The U.S. State Department perpetuates fear among foreign researchers with its warning that the threat of violent crime is consistently “critical.”41 For this reason, and because of the imperative to document the government’s repression of indigenous peoples in rural regions during and after the war, few researchers conducted long-term research while based in the capital city, and fewer still took the city itself as an object of study, until the end of the war. In something of a reversal of the usual metropole-centric scholarship of nearly every other national context, the city has been almost invisible. Fortunately, this is beginning to change.
Simply put, this difficult city is central to Guatemala’s history, politics, and national imaginaries. In this book, I underscore the exceptional and quotidian histories of everyday capitalinos and how they reflected on, responded to, and impacted events taking place elsewhere in the nation.42
THE MIDDLE CLASS
This brief account of social space in the city reinforces how class is not only an economic attribute determined by occupation or income but is constituted through, and most significant in terms of, interactions among social groups and among individuals.43 By midcentury, Guatemalans, like other Latin Americans, saw the middle class as defined by a number of factors, including professionalization, meritocratic and egalitarian values, consumer culture, labor roles, and market mentalities. USAC was the ultimate institutional expression of middle-class values as a public status-granting institution with an illustrious place in national history. It was free from aristocratic and religious ties, nationalist, relatively inexpensive, and located (at least initially) in the heart of the capital city.
Nevertheless, the middle class was scarcely understood by contemporaries. University students who read Karl Marx in study groups were troubled by the unclear role of university students in social transformation and attempted to locate themselves in a revolutionary project. Less revolutionary sectors also worried over the nation’s middle class. In 1949, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research wrote, “the economic development of [Central American] countries, adapted to the shifting market of the industrial countries of the northern hemisphere and handicapped by a system of landed estates, was so unbalanced as to prevent