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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

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