LITMIR.BIZ

MAP 2. New Transit Plan for Downtown Guatemala City, 1952. Archive of El Imparcial. Fototeca Guatemala, Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA).

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

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