Imagining the Nation from Abroad: Transnationalism and Historical Memory after the Guatemalan Spring

In the summer of 1954, a CIA-sponsored coup brought the fall of President Jacobo Arbenz and the end of Guatemala’s decade-long experiment with social democracy. The end of the Guatemalan Spring triggered a wave of political exile, as members of the country’s fragmented left scattered throughout Latin America. Among those who fled were politicians and intellectuals—often one and the same—who continued to engage in national politics from outside the bounds of the nation-state. In the wake of the coup, their most pressing concern was to write the history of Guatemala’s failed revolution, to dissect their failure in the hopes that they might prevent such a tragedy from happening again—not only in Guatemala but throughout Latin America.

This paper traces the efforts of political exiles to write the history of the Guatemalan Spring. Using published works alongside correspondence between two of the country’s most notable figures, former President Juan José Arévalo and literary luminary Luís Cardoza y Aragón, I examine their struggle to define historical memory as an act of nation-making from abroad. Not only did Guatemalans engage in this project from outside the bounds of the nation-state, but they wrote from spaces of exile—cosmopolitan, transnational spaces that indelibly shaped their telling of history. Guatemalan exiles were aided in their efforts by a network of exiles and ex-patriates from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and they wrote to an audience that was regional in scope, using their national tragedy to convey lessons for the left writ large. Their work provides a rich example of the ways in which national projects evolve in response to transnational forces, and points, furthermore, to the potential of exile as a framework for understanding the convergence of the national and the transnational.