Disturbing the Peace: The "Shumo" Underclass and the Creation of Social Space in Contemporary Guatemala City

“Disturbing the Peace” presents a cultural history of neoliberalism, consumerism, and masculinity in Guatemala City.  It charts transnational Latino lower-class cultural formations in Guatemala, the United States, and Mexico.  It tells the story of the construction of a relational social class known in Guatemalan slang as the “shumada,” or dirty ones, an insult gender-coded as male. It expresses the consumer culture that has rapidly arisen in Latin America as well as a homogenizing Latino identity associated with northward Hispanic migrants.  “Shumos” are the poor, the delinquent, the mobile, and the mongrel.

Disturbing the Peace maps the making of the shumada against the creation of contemporary Guatemala in war and peace.  In 1996, after 36 years of civil war, the government and the guerrillas signed Peace Accords.  These visionary Accords delineate an economically just and democratic society that has proved nearly impossible to build. The shumada’s existence belies and stymies the Accords’ vision. Members of the economic lower class can be found in universities, schools, church groups, and sports clubs, but the category of shumo means to spread desmadre, or chaos.

At once uniquely Guatemalan and common to the Hispanic diasporic poor, the shumada evidences popular cultural production arising from an archipelago of slums around the Americas and the world. The ghetto speaks in tongues inflected by Chicano, hip-hop, and Caribbean reggaetón, by Mayan thrash metal, by gospels of prosperity and terror, and by the constellation of digitalized sounds and sights where master narratives used to be. Its space is a dirt-floored hut linked to the Web on a computer purchased by remesas from the United States.  Its body—a repository for society’s desire and shame—is the body of the shumo.  This paper will present these ideas through the life stories of particular individuals in Guatemala City marginal neighborhoods.