Читать книгу This City Belongs to You - Heather Vrana - Страница 8

PREFACE

Universitario, this city belongs to you. Construct your talent within her, so that future generations can quench their thirst for knowledge here. May your academic life be sacred, fecund, and beautiful. Enter not into this city of the spirit, without a well-proven love of truth.

DR. CARLOS MARTÍNEZ DURÁN

This precept marks the entrance to the Universidad de San Carlos’s main campus in Zone 12, at the southern edge of Guatemala City. It was delivered by renowned Guatemalan physician, professor, and historian Carlos Martínez Durán during his first tenure as rector of the autonomous university after the 1944 revolution, and has been remembered and repeated since. Perhaps it is so enduring because it delimits both the campus and the surrounding capital city as the domain of universitarios. But it also demands an undefined love of truth as a precondition of entrance into this community and reminds all students, faculty, and visitors of their duty to learn and serve.

Martínez Durán’s words give this book its title, for they poignantly augur its fundamental interventions. They signal the history of a city, one that illuminates urban life in a place usually imagined as rural. They also foreshadow the struggles and missteps that will challenge urban students as they attempt to reach out to the countryside. They suggest a history that will extend across generations to defy the chronological frames that usually shape modern Guatemalan history. Too, they recall a student movement that both precedes and survives the eruption of student politics in 1968. They center students, not rural peasants, foreign officials, or military strongmen, as the protagonists of modern Guatemalan history. Spoken in the present indicative mood, these words—“This city belongs to you”—command universitarios to accept their responsibility to future generations.

This City Belongs to You tells one history of students’ thirst, not just for knowledge, but also for justice, and the city of the spirit where they sought to quench it.