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      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

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