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Introduction

“DO NOT MESS WITH US!”

TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING seemed to be a fine time to start drinking for university students in 1955, at least on Good Friday, about ten months into military rule. A group of two thousand young revelers gathered in front of Lux Theatre on Sixth Avenue in downtown Guatemala City. They passed bottles of Quetzalteca-brand aguardiente. The event was called the Huelga de Dolores, or Strike of Sorrows, though it was neither solemn nor a strike. In fact, it was an annual tradition dating to at least 1898. Year after year at the desfile bufo, students in extravagant costumes paraded alongside decorative floats that portrayed political controversies and pop culture icons. In 1955, one sign read “Adiós, Patria y Libertad” (Goodbye, Fatherland and Freedom). It was a play on the slogan of the National Liberation Movement (MLN), which vowed “Dios, Patria y Libertad” (God, Fatherland, and Freedom). Students mercilessly lampooned the MLN’s leader, president and colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had overthrown democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz the year before. Students’ signs called him “CACA” (a slang term for feces and, conveniently, the president’s initials) and made fun of his large nose. Armas brought a definitive end to the democratic period known as the Ten Years’ Spring (1944–1954), but some students were not easily cowed.

By the beginning of Arbenz’s presidency, San Carlistas, as Universidad de San Carlos (USAC) students, alumni, and faculty came to be known, had both collaborated with and opposed the government for decades. USAC was the only institution of higher learning in Guatemala until 1961, so nearly everyone with a university degree had attended the school. Many of its students became national and international luminaries. Friendships—and enmities—formed there shaped the course of the nation’s history. Sheer impact and influence is one reason to study the history of San Carlistas.

Another is how the students of San Carlos require historians to develop more complex understandings of the power of intellectual elites. While drinking and chatting, the crowd of young revelers described above read from a peculiar newspaper, the No Nos Tientes. The No Nos Tientes exemplifies San Carlistas’ relationship to Guatemalan state power and protest. Published every year since 1898, even through some of the worst years of civil war violence, this satirical paper was written and edited by San Carlistas (anonymously or using playful nicknames) for San Carlistas. Its pages were filled with comics, fictional interviews, inside jokes, crossword puzzles, and scathing editorials that spared no one. Even its title conveys this tone. Tentar, the infinitive of the verb tientes, is difficult to translate into English, but it means, roughly, “to mess with,” “excite,” “agitate,” or “disturb.” No Nos Tientes—Do Not Mess with Us—is more challenge than plea. It implies putting someone to the test, as in “Do not try us,” and “Do not tempt us.” That this warning was uttered with a wry smile confounds the images that predominate scholarship on student politics and protest: rows of students carrying banners and shaking their fists or student leaders delivering speeches to assembled masses. So, too, does the fact that San Carlistas were both architects of government and key figures in the opposition across the second half of the twentieth century. These contradictions reveal complicated negotiations of identity and belief that can teach us more about class and the university than a romantic story of student activism.

This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996 follows several generations of university students at Guatemala’s only public university. Each chapter explores how these students engaged with the university as an institution and Guatemalan and (to a lesser extent) U.S. state apparatuses in the years between 1944 and 1996, a period marked by revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war. Through these encounters, USAC students forged a loose consensus around faith in the principles of liberalism, especially belief in equal liberty, the constitutional republic, political rights, and the responsibility of university students to lead the nation. I call this consensus student nationalism.

Student nationalism was a shared project for identity making, premised on the inclusions and exclusions of citizenship.¹ As later chapters demonstrate, student nationalism did not depend on the successful formation of a nation-state or even necessarily a national territory. Nor was ideological or cultural agreement necessary. Instead, student nationalism included many competing discourses that nevertheless provided a more or less coherent way of speaking about power relations. Here, nationalism was less something one had or believed than a way of making political claims. Rhetorics of responsibility, freedom, and dignity brought San Carlistas into an enduring fraternal bond with their classmates. As the civil war progressed and the military and police declared war on the university, San Carlistas used student nationalism to wage culture wars over historical memory.

By the late 1970s, the reactionary forces of the military and police became ever more brutal and student nationalism began to fray at the edges. Some students turned away from oppositional politics and focused on their studies, work, or family life. Some left USAC for one of the newer private universities, which had reputations for apoliticism and were therefore much safer. Others remained involved in USAC-based politics, often seeking support from international human rights organizations. A small number left the university to join the guerrillas, and some of these young people were killed. While San Carlista student nationalism remained a defining feature of urban, middle-class ladino life, in periods of repression it became a nationalism without a legitimate government. What endured in student nationalism across all of its many variations was the premise of citizenship and equality before the law and, most of all, an unwavering belief in the responsibility of San Carlistas to lead the Guatemalan people.

Most histories of student movements focus on the United States and Europe, and less often on Latin America. But This City Belongs to You centers a different place, one overlooked by student movement scholarship until now. It also demonstrates the necessity of a broader chronological frame to fully comprehend the meaning of student movements. When hundreds of students, workers, and military men opposed dictator Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), for example, they sought, in the words of President Juan José Arévalo (1945–1951), to create a “democracy . . . just order, constructive peace, internal discipline, [and] happy and productive work.”² For the participants in this movement, however, the meanings of terms like “democracy” and “just order” were not obvious, and they evolved considerably over time. Contests over the meaning of democracy would characterize the entire revolutionary era and subsequent counterrevolution. The Committee of Anticommunist University Students (Comité de Estudiantes Universitarios Anticomunistas [CEUA]), which met with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to orchestrate the overthrow of Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Arbenz, in its pursuit of democracy and justice, comes into focus here.

In short, this is a history of many generations of young people: their hopes, their actions, their role in social change; attempts to control them; their struggles against the government; and their encounters with the school as a state apparatus and a crucial site for resistance and celebration. In what follows, I draw out these complex histories across multiple generations and consider how San Carlistas debated the terms of democracy and intellectual life and, over time, the political culture of Guatemala’s middle class itself.

Taken to its conclusion with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996 that ended thirty-six years of civil war, this history bears witness to the poignancy of young people’s willingness to die for an idea at the hands of the government. Although numbers are inadequate to this form of ultimate sacrifice, it is important to note that between 1954 and 1996, around 492 USAC students, faculty, and administrators were killed or disappeared by government, military, police, and parapolice forces. Of those killed, 363 were students and 104 were professors. Perhaps some gave their lives because they felt real efficacy in their sacrifice. The historical memory of other San Carlistas who had gone before them was powerful and reassuring. For others, there seemed to be little choice. The growing desperation of the pueblo made such sacrifice necessary. Ultimately, this is a tragic and inspiring history that does not quite escape the mythology and martyrology of the San Carlistas. Nor should it.

THE STATE’S UNIVERSITY

The modern USAC is built on a distinguished history of which San Carlistas are very proud. It was founded on January 31, 1676 after nearly a century of petitions to the Spanish crown, when Charles II issued a royal order establishing the Universidad de San Carlos de Borromeo. Seven faculty chairs corresponded to distinct areas of study: moral theology, scholastic theology, canon law, Roman or civil law, medicine, and, significantly, two chairs of indigenous languages.³ Most students came from the region’s elite families—often descendants of the first Iberians to come to the Kingdom of Guatemala—and ranged in age from twelve to twenty-eight.⁴ A few poor and indigenous students of exceptional ability were admitted, but matriculation was formally forbidden for African-descendent people. Prohibition also extended to individuals who had been sentenced by the Inquisition, or whose fathers or grandfathers had been so sentenced, though these policies were not always enforced.⁵

During the eighteenth century, the university developed a lively intellectual culture, despite frequent complaints about the teaching faculty’s erratic attendance. Renowned physician José Felipe Flores, the Kingdom of Guatemala’s first protomédico and an innovator of dissection techniques and anatomical modeling, studied at the university and later became one of its principal teaching physicians.⁶ Between its foundation and independence in 1821, the university awarded 2,000 bachelor’s degrees, 256 licentiate degrees, and 216 doctorates, 135 of which were in theology. All of this challenges the long-held presumption that intellectual culture in the Spanish colonies was stagnant, in contrast to Europe. In fact, the number of Guatemalan university graduates grew steadily until independence.⁷ In the Gazeta de Guatemala, published from 1797, intellectuals collected new knowledge in science, medicine, politics, and economics. The Gazeta then circulated, like its authors, throughout Central America, Mexico, and Europe.⁸

The university was undistinguished in the struggles for independence from Spanish rule and did not transform significantly after Spanish defeat. Students and professors in Law and Medicine had played key roles in governance for centuries and may have been uneager to see their privileges challenged.⁹ Nor were there many changes at the university in the first decades of federal and later republican rule. In 1821, university rectors instituted a modest reform that scarcely challenged its colonial structure.¹⁰ Three years later, a new national constitution charged Congress with organizing basic education, but the power of the Catholic Church actually expanded at the university. Only after USAC alumnus and Liberal Mariano Gálvez was appointed chief of state in 1831 did the university secularize in earnest. Gálvez’s “Rules for the general establishment of Public Instruction” argued that the government ought to oversee the training of professionals and set guidelines for higher education. A system of examinations and titles replaced patronage and cronyism. Like his peers throughout Mexico and Central and South America, Gálvez inaugurated a single academy under the authority of the state, based on the Napoleonic university: centralized, secular, and national.¹¹ Soon thereafter, however, a series of Conservative Party heads of state who governed from 1844 to 1871 reversed these reforms and returned the university to ecclesiastical oversight.

The university itself became a place where ideas about governance were up for discussion. The university’s curriculum, leadership, and even name changed amid the bitter rivalry between Conservatives and Liberals. Even programs of study could signify shifts in this epistemological battle: fewer students enrolled in theology while programs in medicine and chemistry grew. On several infamous occasions, students led plots to overthrow Conservative president Rafael Carrera (1844–1848 and 1851–1865). In 1871, students’ support was instrumental to Liberal Miguel García Granados’s victory over the last of the Conservatives, the party that had dominated political life since independence. Education reform was a priority for García Granados and his successor, Justo Rufino Barrios, a USAC law graduate. García Granados and Barrios envisioned a plan to modernize education that would purge the university of all markers of its colonial and ecclesiastical past, even changing its name from the Universidad de San Carlos to the Universidad de Guatemala. Barrios’s advisor, Marco A. Soto, instituted a sweeping reform informed by French positivism. He reorganized curricula around sciences, letters, and the professions. This new education system would bolster the economic development anticipated from a set of land reform laws that encouraged privatization of coffee-producing lands, prioritized infrastructure construction, pursued foreign loans, seized indigenous communities’ communal lands, and, ultimately, depended on a ready supply of indigenous labor.¹² In no small way, the contradictions of contemporary positivism, which at once proclaimed individual equality before the law and presented scientific distinctions between individuals, set the terms for San Carlistas’ reckonings with Guatemala’s racial codes, a topic that I address at greater length below.

Barrios’s other priority, the formation of a single Central American state with himself at the helm, led him to his death at the hand of Salvadoran troops in Chalchuapa, El Salvador, in 1885. Barrios’s vice-president served for just two days before another Liberal, Manuel Barillas, deposed him in turn. Barillas was himself overthrown by a Liberal rival, José María Reyna Barrios (nephew of Justo Rufino Barrios). Despite this instability at the highest levels of the state, consistent rule by the Liberal party after the 1870s meant that each successive administration promoted secular education as the means by which Guatemala would progress. Educational reforms and the closely related national hygiene plans devised by these governments reflected the Lamarckian and Mendelian understandings of human progress that Guatemalan lawyers, educators, scientists, and physicians, like their peers elsewhere in Latin America, studied in French, the second language of elites.¹³

While the university was a significant site of state making in these decades, the first of what could be called student movements took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, when students formed university- and facultad-based organizations in order to influence extramural politics. In 1898, Reyna Barrios was assassinated and another national university–educated lawyer, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, asserted himself as successor. A group of students from the School of Medicine formed a group called the Guatemalan Youth (Juventud Guatemalteca) to express their support for Cabrera’s candidacy. Other students and professors denounced this action on the grounds that the group could not claim to represent all Guatemalan youth and that these types of political expressions were inappropriate for a house of learning. In a time when a small number of the capital city’s residents (most of whom had ties to the university) were literate, two newspapers La República and Diario de Centro América published numerous open letters on the question of the students’ and university’s role in national political life. This debate would rage in one form or another for the next century, and beyond.¹⁴

Ultimately, Cabrera was elected president and went on to become one of the most controversial leaders in Guatemalan history, surviving many assassination attempts to serve four terms and usher in the ascendancy of the North American–owned United Fruit Company (UFCO) in Guatemala. Two new student organizations, the Juventud Médica and the Law Society, formed in the first months of Cabrera’s presidency. Despite ongoing clashes with these groups, Cabrera presented himself as a great champion of learning and marked his esteem for the university by bestowing upon it his own name, inaugurating the Estrada Cabrera National University.¹⁵ Cabrera’s megalomaniacal campaign for education also included the construction of enormous temples to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, poetry, and medicine, and the mandatory celebration of exorbitant Fiestas Minervalias every October. Then, a series of earthquakes wracked Guatemala between November 1917 and January 1918, destroying homes, government buildings, schools, and churches. Thousands of people were left without housing and several hundred were killed. After decades of rule, it was the failure to provide effective relief and related allegations of corruption that were Cabrera’s undoing.

A tide of opposition rose rapidly after the earthquake. While some professors, mostly those Cabrera himself appointed, continued to support the president, other faculty and students opposed his arrogant goodwill. The Central American Unionist Party (PUCA) responded by recruiting students to its alliance of urban workers, Catholics, and professionals. The group’s first objective was to overthrow Cabrera, but they also sought to revive the dream of a united Central America.¹⁶ One group of young men from PUCA had opposed Cabrera and the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties since their high school days at the elite National Central Institute for Boys (Instituto Nacional Central para Varones [INCV]). The group’s most famous member, Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias, dubbed them the “Generation of 1920.” Among his fellows were David Vela, Horacio Espinosa Altamirano, Carlos Wyld Ospina, César Brañas, Jorge García Granados, Carlos Samayoa Chinchilla, and Ramón Aceña Durán, some of Guatemala’s most famous writers, poets, essayists, and jurists.¹⁷ Cabrera surrendered in April 1920. PUCA’s success signaled the emergence of a new intellectual class in the modern Republic of Guatemala, one that viewed itself as the nation’s standard-bearer.

The young men of the Generation of 1920 championed the redemptive power of ideas. They came to see their role in national politics as an extension of their educational pedigree.¹⁸ Two years earlier, a group of young Argentine students at the Universidad de Córdoba had successfully demanded co-governance and autonomy and called on their peers across the Americas to join their struggle.¹⁹ Cabrera’s overthrow further energized student political life. Inspired by events at home and abroad, several smaller facultad-based groups came together to form the Association of University Students (AEU) in May 1920. From this generation of students, and the leadership role they imagined for themselves, sprang the roots of student nationalism.

Though USAC counted around just four hundred students by the 1920s, students’ preoccupations with their own class, cultural, and national identity provoked a series of new debates. For instance, one of the principal concerns of the intellectual class that was consolidating by the 1920s was national unity, especially after the Mexican Revolution illustrated the dangers of disunion. Guatemala’s indigenous majority represented a significant challenge to ladino students’ dream of a national culture.²⁰ Yet there was little consensus about how to solve what was then referred to as “the Indian problem.” Lamarckism was no longer in vogue, having been replaced by the more deterministic writings of Herbert Spencer and Gustave Le Bon, but students also read work by proponents of mestizaje, including the Mexican theosophist José Vasconcelos.²¹ Much like the debate over the proper role of the university in society, the debate over “the Indian problem” would occupy students for many decades.

The debated and contentious elitism of ladino universitarios vis-à-vis the indigenous majority was a defining dynamic of the university and its students. The meaning of “ladino,” like that of the middle class, was made and remade through quotidian encounters and flashpoints of violence. But in the most general sense, ladinos are usually people of mixed Spanish, indigenous, and African descent, akin to mestizos in Mexico. As is always the case with racial difference, however, attributes like language, dress, career, and location play a decisive role in determining how labels are assigned or identities convincingly performed.²² Generally, ladinos are defined by speaking Spanish, wearing “Western clothes” rather than traditional hand-woven huipil, owning farms or working professional or industrial jobs, and living in certain regions of the country or cities. But apart from national censuses, San Carlistas did not use the word ladino to describe themselves. Instead, they signaled their racial difference from indigenous people in debates over culture and literacy, educational plans, and even cartoons, which I discuss at greater length in the chapters to come.

By their own estimation superior to Guatemala’s indigenous population and the rest of Central America in terms of arts and learning, Guatemalan intellectuals were also self-conscious of how they compared to Mexico and the rest of the world. In 1921 as representatives of the AEU, Vela, Marroquín Rojas, and Orantes attended a meeting of the International Federation of Students in Mexico City. There they joined Vasconcelos and fellow students in celebration of a new hemispheric student culture and “ser universitario” (university identity or even student being).²³ This was just one of many instances when the recent Mexican and Russian Revolutions, and the new state formations that they proposed, informed Guatemalan intellectuals’ understandings of political culture, the nation-state, and revolution.²⁴

Inaugurating an effort to build national unity, USAC changed its motto from “University of Guatemala—Among the World’s Great Universities” to “Go Forth and Teach All” in 1922 and developed its first extension programs the following year.²⁵ These programs varied widely, but they promoted the same vision: the creation of a more literate Guatemalan pueblo, united by a national culture, and prepared for the future. Universitarios would direct expertise from the university out into a deprived pueblo, and this would help the nation unite and move forward into modern life. This way of thinking reflected broader intellectual trends. In 1931, Chilean writer and educator Gabriela Mistral visited Guatemala and delivered a speech on the importance of education for Latin America. She said, “The University, for me, would be the moral double of a territory and would have a direct influence, from agriculture and mining to night school for adults, including under its purview schools of fine arts and music.”²⁶ Mistral affirmed that the goals of the nation-state and the university were linked. As the state attended to the citizenry’s social needs, the university attended to its moral needs.²⁷ Her words also captured the basic premises of emergent student nationalism: the belief that formal education was intimately 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 even government officials contested the meaning of 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 the emergence of an economically strong and politically conscious middle class.”⁴⁴ A student survey conducted in February 1950 suggests how mistaken the U.S. State Department officials had been: the survey assumed that students might speak German, French, or English in addition to Spanish and play sports or participate in artistic or literary associations, markers of time for recreation and leisure. It also asked whether the student worked and if they did not, how much money their parents gave them each month in allowance.⁴⁵ San Carlistas were intellectual elites, but they lived in the periphery of mid-twentieth-century global capitalism. Many parents of USAC students were businessmen, shopkeepers, plantation owners, doctors, teachers, and government officials from the capital city or urban centers in the provinces. They usually were not members of Guatemala’s traditional military and oligarchic elite.

Scholars perpetuate this incomprehension of Guatemala’s middle class because national historiography is most focused on studies of indigeneity, poverty, and rural life. The urban ladino middle class is left largely unexamined, in spite of a seemingly unanimous insistence on its importance. As a result, we know very little about a group that wielded great social, political, and cultural power: the professors who trained scholars and professionals, the state makers who crafted policy and drafted constitutions, the doctors who treated illness and promoted certain visions of health, and the educators who guided young people through adolescence and into adulthood. This is an extraordinary omission. Though doubted, ignored, or overlooked, Guatemala’s middle class did exist.

Unlike other scholars of the middle class, I do not emphasize mass culture, or the purchasing patterns and cultural tastes of an a priori middle class.⁴⁶ Venues other than the university and the busy streets around the city center—like the throbbing nightclubs where rock ’n’ roll, jazz, hard rock, and disco filled middle-class ears and the incandescent movie theatres where vibrant images of North American, German, Mexican, and French films and television programs delighted their eyes—are mentioned only in passing.⁴⁷ Nor will I limit my argument to observing that attending university and participating in student activism were what the middle class did.⁴⁸ Both of these approaches use the middle class an a priori analytical category in order to explain a cultural or political phenomenon, like blue jeans, rock ’n’ roll, radio, or the election of certain political figures. This City Belongs to You does something different. Here, class is discussed as it was formed and reformed through what San Carlistas did, and where and how they did it: their profession, education, interaction with state bodies and institutions, intimate life, ideological explorations, and everyday preoccupations, in a fluid balance of materiality and cultural performance.⁴⁹ Thus, the middle class is “a working social concept, a material experience, a political project, and a cultural practice—all of which acquire meaning only within specific historical experiences and discursive conditions.”⁵⁰

It is my hope that explaining this historical and analytical context clarifies the stakes of studying the Latin American middle classes.⁵¹ The first historians of the middle class studied Britain and published their work in the very years under examination by this book; for these scholars, the presence of a middle class was a sign of economic and social modernity. Their work informed modernization theory and its derivatives, popular among intellectuals worldwide by midcentury.⁵² From the perspective of modernization theory, Latin America’s political instability, social backwardness, and lack of a middle class formed a tight tautological knot that condemned the region to premodernity.⁵³ Quite a burden was placed on the middle sectors that thus became barometers of modernity.⁵⁴ San Carlistas made this shared burden—or duty, as they put it—into a way for the middle classes to identify themselves and explain their political actions.⁵⁵ Of course for other Guatemalans and their U.S. counterparts, Guatemala’s premodernity justified neocolonial projects of resource extraction, anticommunism, and military governance. Bearing all of this in mind, This City Belongs to You remaps the very question usually asked by scholars of the middle class by proposing that we pursue how these actions made the meaning of the middle class.⁵⁶ I hope this will stimulate new ways of writing histories of the middle class.⁵⁷

Student nationalism provided a set of claims for collective identity that revealed contestations and struggles between groups, based on the premises and exclusions of citizenship, ultimately shaping some of what it meant to be middle class in Guatemala.⁵⁸ Through student nationalism, San Carlistas made an argument for their antagonistic relationship to other classes and articulated a mode of life that was distinct from that of the commercial and military oligarchy and that of the rural indigenous majority.⁵⁹ The very terms estudiante and San Carlista came to represent an already racialized class. Enrollments statistics can begin to illustrate this point. In 1943, the university counted just 711 students. Between 1943 and 1954, the number of enrollments increased more than 450 percent.⁶⁰ In just one year between 1950 and 1951, university enrollments grew from 2,373 to 2,824 students.⁶¹ According to the 1950 census, 6,048 individuals had attended any university-level schooling in their lifetime; of this number, 6,031 were recorded as ladino and only 17 as indigenous. Just 845 of 6,048 individuals of the entire university-educated population were women. In the same census, 2,148,560 Guatemalan citizens reported that they had no formal schooling whatsoever.⁶²

Even as the university enrolled greater numbers of people, it remained a place for a small number of ladino men. University enrollments increased more than 450 percent during the revolution and they decreased very little after the counterrevolution to 3,245 from 3,368 between 1954 and 1955. The following year, enrollments rose again to 3,809 students in 1956, and up to 4,336 in 1957.⁶³ To put these numbers in perspective, Honduras counted only 1,107 university students in 1954. The total university enrollment in Nicaragua in 1951 was 897 students, increased to 948 students in 1954, and increased dramatically to 1,718 students by 1961. In El Salvador, the national university had an enrollment of 1,704 students in 1953 and 2,257 in 1960. The University of Costa Rica, which would quickly become an academic leader in the region, still had a relatively low university enrollment of 2,029 students in 1954.⁶⁴ Meanwhile Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) reported enrollments of 23,000 in 1949 and nearly 80,000 by 1968.⁶⁵

As I mentioned above, San Carlistas rarely referred to themselves as any particular race or ethnicity, but they expressed racialized identifications in other ways.⁶⁶ The students of the 1920s’s concern about the so-called Indian problem endured into the revolution and reemerged in debates over whether indigenous people could be granted the right to vote. As participants in the Constitutional Assembly, some San Carlistas expressed their distance from the rural indigenous majority by asserting that illiterate indigenous people needed to be taught the “ABC of civilization” before being granted the right to vote.⁶⁷ They also expressed racial difference in their plans for literacy campaigns and extension programming in the 1970s and their drawings of Juan Tecú, a fictional rural indigenous man who was popular in student newspapers from the 1950s through the late 1980s. With an exaggerated nose and ripped clothing, Tecú offered pithy jokes or asked impolite questions in phonetic Spanish. His indigeneity was figured through a lack education and urbanity and communicated to readers by his mannerisms and failure to master grammatical Spanish. During the civil war, guerrilla groups and the popular movement struggled to unite people across racial divides, and so San Carlistas were forced to reckon with their indigenous compatriots in new ways. But only in the 1980s did large numbers of self-identifying indigenous people begin to attend USAC, and only much later did Pan-Mayanism begin to challenge the assumed ladinization of being a San Carlista.

University censuses in the mid-1960s recorded that only between 25 percent and 35 percent of San Carlistas came from families who earned less than a “modest income” and just 6.3 percent of enrolled students’ families earned less than the income bracket labeled “of humble origins.” National census data confirm that university attendance remained elusive for all but the elite. Just 14,060 out of 3,174,900 Guatemalans (0.44%) had attended any university-level classes in 1964. Only forty indigenous men had attended some university-level study while more than 1 million indigenous people had not attended any schooling at any level. Meanwhile, illiteracy was about 63.3 percent nationwide and higher in rural areas. When enrollment at the Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango campuses ballooned from 8,171 to 22,861 between 1966 and 1975, less than 4 percent of San Carlistas were “of humble origins.”⁶⁸

The growing enrollments were probably more noticeable on campus than they were impactful nationwide, but more people had gained access to the tuition, prerequisites, and time necessary for a university-level education. In just four years between 1976 and 1980, university enrollments increased nearly 50 percent from 25,925 to 38,843 students.⁶⁹ These numbers reflected a large group of students who took a few classes per term at night and worked during the day, taking advantage of new, more flexible programs of study and the opening of regional campuses. By this time, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua-León counted 24,000 students (in 1978). In El Salvador, national figures for university enrollment counted about 35,000 students between two universities (the public University of El Salvador and the private Jesuit Central American University José Simeon Cañas). Honduras had a single national university and, later in the 1980s, three smaller private universities, but enrollments did not exceed 30,000 students between all campuses.⁷⁰ By comparison, USAC was massive. The multicampus university continued to expand throughout the civil war, and by 1994 counted 77,051 students. In 1999, USAC matriculated 98,594 students, including 19,403 students at the regional campuses and 79,191 at the main campus in the capital city.⁷¹

The great majority of San Carlistas were men. Throughout the book, I highlight the reciprocal relationship between San Carlistas’ rhetorics of gender and political authority. Women began to attend USAC in greater numbers throughout the 1960s, but represented only 21 percent of the student body as late as 1976.⁷² USAC women exercised some limited power in intra- and extramural politics. For instance, an AEU women’s auxiliary group met with Carlos Castillo Armas’s wife after the counterrevolution and Astrid Morales formed the AEU’s women’s commission around 1962. But the first women’s studies course was not offered until 1989 and as late as 2005, only 28 percent of all USAC professors at all ranks and campuses were women.⁷³ Triumphant narratives of fraternity and sacrifice reinforced this imbalance in enrollment, curriculum, and hiring. Women were key to articulations of student nationalism, but usually as figures or objects that reinforced gendered understandings of valor and responsibility and, ultimately, political authority—and rarely as actors or agents. One recurrent image in student-authored texts was the figure of the feminized Guatemalan nation that was acquiescent to the desires of masculine global superpowers and susceptible to North American penetration. The fraternity of San Carlistas was bound to intervene and protect her.

So too did mourning prescribe different roles for men and women. The pan-generational narrative of masculine heroics occasioned the virtual forgetting of women who were killed by the state, with two notable exceptions, María Chinchilla and Rogelia Cruz. These two examples reinforced traditional women’s roles: Chinchilla’s death was remembered for its audaciousness (she was a respectable schoolteacher killed in broad daylight) and Cruz’s for its sexual nature (the rumored rape and torture of the former Miss Guatemala was widely reported in the press). Only infrequently did San Carlista men acknowledge the productive and reproductive labor of their female comrades. As countless moments in the pages below illustrate, San Carlistas’ claims to leadership, responsibility, dignity, valor, and freedom were built on and reinforced strict gendered, classed, and raced understandings of political authority.⁷⁴

This City Belongs to You expands the frame of student movement scholarship by looking beyond familiar places and chronologies. The political lives of San Carlistas complicate a few commonly held assumptions about student activism. They were not electrified by the “Global 1968,” nor did they mirror or follow those movements. Additionally, San Carlistas were far from the metropoles even as they connected to students from around the world at regional and international meetings and through multilingual publications as early as the mid-1940s. Furthermore, San Carlistas were not only leftist, nor were they necessarily antigovernment.⁷⁵ Most of all, this is not a book about why or how privileged students came to confront a powerful state, although answers to those questions can certainly be found herein.⁷⁶ Put differently, this book is not only about what students did, but also what their actions did for urban life and memory cultures in late twentieth-century Guatemala. Yet it looks at just one important locus of middle class formation, the public university. USAC was the cardinal point for middle class formation in the twentieth century and no book-length English-language study has been published about it, so I have started here.⁷⁷ Subsequent histories will have to examine the political and cultural lives and formulations of working-class and indigenous youth, secondary school students, and students at private universities.⁷⁸

Student nationalism required resistance, accommodation, and a diversity of ideological positions and expressions, which ultimately shaped life outside of the university. There was no single meaning for estudiante; rather, it became a way for young people, USAC administrators and faculty, national and international politicians, and documents of governance to exert political authority. Over time, the project of student nationalism expanded to accommodate tremendous political change, from promoting statecraft during the Ten Years’ Spring to awakening a kind of nationalism without a state at the most violent moments of the civil war when the government had proven its cruelty. For generations of students, it was an exhilarating institutional connection, an identity, and a mantle of responsibility, all at once.

• • •

The six chapters below follow the lives and deaths of San Carlistas from 1942 through the civil war. They outline students’ political cultures and strategies of resistance in a captivating interplay between the everyday and the extraordinary. While these young people ate and drank and debated everything from political right to sports teams, they built friendships and an enduring class ideology. The archive of San Carlistas includes pamphlets, manifestos, meeting minutes, police reports, photographs, daily newspapers, memos, memoirs, theses and dissertations, and long Boletines written for the Huelga de Dolores, which were meant to be read aloud. Each chapter opens with the No Nos Tientes, a newspaper printed for the Huelga de Dolores.

Chapter 1 begins as law students publicly questioned dictator Jorge Ubico’s rule, and then expands to assess the political, social, and economic changes that occurred between 1942 and 1952 from the perspective of USAC students and professors. The close relationship between USAC and the revolutionary governments and the political philosophy of the university as a “Republic of Students” enabled the emergence of the San Carlista as a social and cultural identifier. I discuss debates over the meaning and practice of democracy, including voting rights, literacy, and social welfare programs, as well as research into national concerns such as indigenous communities and poverty that contributed to the rise of a certain idea of the Guatemalan nation and its citizenry. The Constitution of 1945 called on teachers and students to become caretakers of the pueblo. They were to protect and expand culture, promote ethnic improvement (promover el mejoramiento étnico), and supervise civic and moral formation; in effect, they were to make the people fit for self-government.⁷⁹ By the administration of Jacobo Arbenz, this democratic awakening and the invigoration of terms like “democracy” (democracia), “fatherland” (patria), and “freedom” (libertad) enabled the rise of anticommunism within some university sectors.

Chapter 2 tracks the rise of anticommunism at the university and the concomitant fragmentation of student nationalism. I consider a lengthy anticommunist text, The Plan of Tegucigalpa, a proposal for government written by Catholic anticommunist students in exile in late 1953. After the 1954 coup, The Plan became the founding document of the counterrevolutionary state. Many of the principles of the Revolution endured in the brief period between the counterrevolution and the first rumblings of civil war. Some, like free market capitalism, personal property rights, and political freedoms, guided Catholic pro-Castillo Armas anticommunists and anti-Castillo Armas Arbencistas (supporters of Arbenz) alike. Civil freedoms and electoral democracy, on the other hand, bolstered the Arbencistas alone. Most histories of the period emphasize the determinant role of foreign economic and diplomatic intervention, but this chapter underscores the complex interplay of internal and external factors prior to and after the counterrevolution. To this end, I follow negotiations between university staff and faculty, students, and the Castillo Armas regime and their impact on civic life in Guatemala City. Initially, Castillo Armas tried to win over the university by meeting with students and promoting professors sympathetic with the counterrevolution. Only with the May Day and June 1956 protests did relations between the government and USAC become intractably antagonistic.

Chapter 3 focuses on just five years of university life to show how this antagonism became a defining feature of San Carlista student nationalism. Some students and student groups reworked historic values, like service to one’s community and a belief in the university’s special role in society, into a new political language built around fraternity, mistrust of the government, anti-imperialist nationalism, and renewed pride in the universitarios’ duty to lead the nation. This political affect undergirded the sense that the university—as arbiter of justice and defender of freedom—was under attack. Popular histories, events, and whole commemorative calendars drew on these historic values to give meaning to the experience of teaching or studying at USAC. Idioms of fraternity, mistrust, and valor began to define student nationalism explicitly against the government while they strengthened an individual’s relationship to the university. This was especially important when steeply rising enrollments might have weakened universitario unity. San Carlistas no longer derived legitimacy from the government or the Constitution. Instead, they argued for their duty to lead the people and the nation toward progress.

Chapter 4 addresses some of the ways that San Carlistas attempted to put these ideals into practice through the 1970s. Students and faculty set out on the march against underdevelopment in the city and the countryside. Yet the political context of the 1970s transformed the rhetorics of freedom, responsibility, dignity, and duty that had formed the base of student nationalism since the Revolution. For instance, anti-imperialist nationalism inspired new university extension programs, but personal encounters with indigenous, rural, and poor citizens in the practice of these programs compelled San Carlistas to reevaluate the university’s orientation vis-à-vis the pueblo. Academic debates about development and dependency theory also challenged these attitudes. Development theory, especially dependency theory, helped USAC social scientists to understand why underdevelopment seemed endemic in Latin America even after foreign businesses expanded their investments in the region. Development praxis became the crux of class making for urban ladino intellectuals. For the most part, San Carlistas continued to position themselves as advocates for the periphery and ambassadors of progress, yet their knowledge of the periphery became more intimate. As the civil war deepened, San Carlistas had to reexamine their relationship to the pueblo in order to simply survive the government’s vicious, bloody counterinsurgency efforts.

Chapters 5 and 6 discuss these difficult years, but from distinct perspectives. Chapter 5 outlines the creation of a broader popular movement through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Chapter 6, in turn, focuses on how the popular movement developed a new politics of death and urban space in response to a series of violent acts. These acts included the spectacular 1976 earthquake, the massacre at Panzós, and the Spanish Embassy fire, alongside more subtle repression like surveillance at the university. I have separated these two chapters in order to resist the tendency to see resistance and repression as an almost hydraulic system, which obscures the real gains made by the popular left. I argue that as the state expanded its use of violence against San Carlistas, so did San Carlistas expand their resistance, drawing on funereal practices, political feelings, and basic ethical assumptions. Key to this change was a critical reevaluation of the politics of advocacy and representation that had characterized San Carlistas’ relations to nonstudents in previous decades. No longer mere acolytes of knowledge as in the 1940s and 1950s, or advocates for periphery as in the 1960s, San Carlistas increasingly understood their political freedom to be intimately bound up with that of the urban and rural poor. In part, students had learned this through their participation in protest campaigns led by these groups. Certain student and faculty leaders like Oliverio Castañeda de León and Mario López Larrave made popular coalition their cause and, ultimately, died for it.

The gradual foreclosure of peaceful opposition invigorated the power of spectacular mourning as a protest strategy. Political funerals changed the space of downtown Guatemala City. When well-known San Carlistas like Castañeda de León and López Larrave were killed, students organized grand funeral processions that led from the university campus through downtown to the General Cemetery. As students staged political funerals and other ritual protests, they created a many-layered space of mourning and memory. Using claims to kinship, fear, trauma, and responsibility, students and professors exhorted the citizenry to take political action. Some Guatemalans questioned the legitimacy of liberalism and its social contract in the midst of such loss and uncertainty. Discarding the reformist possibility that characterized student nationalism since the 1954 coup, some San Carlistas turned to millenarian futures. Political funerals were only the most visible of these acts whereby young people and their teachers dreamed of a future beyond the struggle where young people could live and study freely. Because this politics of death also appealed to human rights law, it helped San Carlistas build new relationships with international organizations. By 1980, student nationalism extended beyond justice, rights, and fraternity, which had characterized previous decades. It became a nationalism without a state.

Young people were left to imagine new futures in its wake. In some sense, political violence against the university was a return to a previous pattern. The incomplete project of national Liberal reform in the late nineteenth century and the failed Central American union in 1920 were both punctuated by violent executive incursions into university life. But what had changed was the magnitude of violence and the students’ willingness to resist. The book closes with a Coda that revisits student nationalism through Guatemala City’s palimpsestic memoryscape where the past interrupts the present on street corners and school buildings covered with commemorative placards, graffiti, and memorials. In this final section, I turn to the young people involved in ongoing movements for memory in the 2000s and 2010s, who draw on the legacies of San Carlista student activism in order to imagine new political futures for Guatemala.

• • •

What idea was worth dying for, for a twenty-year-old? In students’ writings, it would seem that ideas like democracy, justice, nation, freedom, honor, conscience, duty, independence, and progress were enough. But how could these abstract ideals inspire the ultimate sacrifice? Student nationalism connected these principles to San Carlistas’ daily struggles, hopes, and dreams. For some students, democracy meant voting rights, literacy, and social welfare programs; for them, student nationalism was a social contract. For others like the Catholic CEUA, democracy meant the eradication of communist threat in the Americas and so student nationalism was an almost ecclesiastical law. As the civil war drew on, student nationalism became inflected with Marxism and anti-Americanism. To be a San Carlista came to signify opposition to the government, giving new meaning to the old cry: “Do Not Mess with Us!” Regardless of their political beliefs and whether they survived intact, fled to exile, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed or disappeared, all San Carlistas were indelibly marked by the legacy of student nationalism. This City Belongs to You seeks to clarify the interrelation of university political culture and social class. While this is a history of youth and ideals, it is also a history of how these young people shaped a university, a city, and a nation.