The Incidental Archive of Spectacular Loss after the Death of Oliverio Castañeda De León

Oliverio Castañeda de León is one of the most famous martyrs of the Guatemalan student movement. Known simply as “Oliverio,” he served as Secretary General of the nation’s most powerful student organization at a time when the university’s relationship to the government was increasingly tense. On 20 October 1978, Oliverio was shot in the middle of an enormous crowd just a block from the National Palace after delivering a speech. The struggle over how to remember his brief life began almost as soon as the life itself ended. In the days after the shooting, the Association of University Students convened a meeting to determine how to respond to their leader’s assassination. Remarkably, the archive of this meeting is replete with scraps of paper on which attendees wrote their recommendations in distinctive handwriting, alongside doodles, rips, and strikethroughs. Some of their ideas included such quotidian remembrances as a chair that would sit empty until Oliverio’s term as General Secretary ended; a daily moment of silence; black armbands worn on the right; and the designation of the red carnation as a universal symbol of the youth’s struggle. Other forms of remembrance connected the death to a broad pan-Central American youth movement against neocolonial incursion by North American (and less-often Soviet) interests. In Guatemalan students’ moral economy, the assassination of beloved Oliverio represented a robbery of fecund youth. They linked this robbery to the theft of natural resources like nickel, petrol, and even bananas, from the Guatemalan subsoil, an act of plunder carried out by North American businesses. In this paper, I will connect archival ephemera recording quotidian memory practices located at the General Archive of the University of San Carlos to larger regional and global anti-colonial politics through the concept of moral economy and, more broadly, cultures of class-making.