"Whichever Poor Devil of a Ladino": Revolutionary Youth and Development Theory in Urban Guatemala, 1965–81

A democratic revolution in 1944 left Guatemala’s national University of San Carlos with two legacies: juridical autonomy and the constitutional duty to solve national problems. The failure of the democratic Ten Years’ Spring in 1954 was especially acute for San Carlos students who had been very much empowered by the revolution’s pedagogical plan for progress. When a guerrilla movement gained momentum in the early 1960s, many students were eager to participate. But some guerrillas charged that the university was intractably bourgeois. At the same time, however, students continued to develop programs for national progress through university extension and literacy programs, and the fierce defense of national self-determination in natural resources. Exemplifying such claims were polemics against the Canadian-owned nickel mining company, Exploraciones y Explotaciones Mineras Izabel S.A. (EXMIBAL), and rural University extension programs that involved the holistic development of the personality, body, spirit, and mind. 

As intellectual elites in a peripheral nation, San Carlos engagements with Latin American development theory were often less vexed than might be expected. They drew on recognizable names, such as Andres Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, but Guatemalans such as Carlos Guzman-Bockler and Severo Martinez Peláez were also extremely influential. Students offered self-conscious representations of the city defined in tutorial relationship to the periphery, often understood as indigenous. This tension between the rural and the urban, also the indigenous and non-indigenous (or ladino), has been a foundational question in Guatemalan national narratives. Armed with the constitutional duty to lead the nation and a vision of progress through autonomy and education, university students generated universality through nationalism, anti-imperialism, and development.

This paper draws on many representational forms, including dramatic performances, comics, and sculpture, where Guatemalan encounters with dependency theory reflected colonial anxieties in an intellectual empire that enabled certain revolutionary futures.