A Generation in Between: Postwar Youth and Memory Politics in Guatemala City

Otto René Castillo, Guatemala’s martyred revolutionary poet, often addressed his works to his patria; none of his poems have struck a deeper chord than “Vámonos patria a caminar,” which presages Castillo’s own death at army hands and invokes his aspirations for the generations that would succeed him.  I will remain blind so that you may see, he wrote; I will remain voiceless so that you may sing….Ay, homeland, the colonels who piss on your walls, we must pull them up by the roots. In his poem, Castillo interpellated the youth of the future, calling upon them to continue fighting tyranny in the land of eternal spring.

It has been a difficult quest.  Young Guatemalans between the ages of 20 and 30 form a generation in transition: not a war cohort, yet neither born into a postbellum reality.  Many have only spotty recollections of the war, encouraged in their forgetting by a page-turning official discourse and a deficient educational system.  Given this, it is all the more remarkable that some young activists have positioned themselves at the forefront of social movement mobilization around questions of memory and history. 

This paper explores the motivations impelling this “in-between” generation’s engagement with war history, focusing on a group of young urban activists who have worked with the landmark human rights initiative to rescue the country’s recently rediscovered police archives.  Eva Hoffman argues that preoccupation with historical memory in a Holocaust context emerged in what she calls the “‘post’ generation” or “the generation ‘after’” – a group for whom the Holocaust was crucially formative, yet not part of their direct lived experience.  The paper considers Guatemala’s ‘post’ generation and its marshalling of historical knowledge in the service of transitional justice.