A Social Education: Contesting Campesino Citizenship in the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944–54

The Guatemalan Revolution was a period of profound and unprecedented social democracy, in which many sectors of society—most especially the campesinos, or country people—had their first meaningful experience of social citizenship.  At the same time, the Revolution was a top-down, plan-rational experiment in social engineering.  Even as its leaders sought to enfranchise the nation’s poor majority, it also worked to remake, “improve,” and integrate the population.  Reminted campesino citizens were to be the engine of national progress.  They would diversify the country’s agro-export portfolio with scientific farming methods and generate the revenue that was needed to build an infrastructure grid and to fuel industrial development.  This idea came to a head in the Agrarian Reform of 1952 for which the period is remembered, but its history dates back to the Revolution’s earliest days.

“A Social Education” uses the Revolution’s burgeoning cooperative movement as a case study of the slippages, contradictions, and contestation involved in shaping campesino citizenship from above and below.  Part of a government plan known as “Socio-Educational Rural Development” (Desarrollo Socio-Educativo Rural), cooperatives formed in a landscape marked by the recent entry of “campesino scholarship centers” (núcleos escolares campesinos), scientific farming projects, and new waves of military commissioners.  Campesinos began to organize and demand citizenship on their own terms, and the first task of the post-invasion state in 1954 would be to eradicate their efforts.  To do so, the anticommunist state used many of the same technologies of citizenship developed during the Revolution, with little success.  Later, in the 1970s, the same constituencies would meet in a countryside torn by war.