Shortly before noon on 6 July 1894, the bell of Guatemala City's National Institute for Boys – Central America's leading secondary school – began to ring incessantly. Unbeknownst to the school's director, Santos Berdúo Toruño, and other instructors, the bell signalled a largely improvised uprising of students. A group of approximately 10 adolescent malcontents gathered and destroyed a fence on school property. From there, they marched to the residence of President José María Reyna Barrios several blocks away where they yelled obscenities at the president. The perpetrators were soon arrested. In the days after the students vented their anger, the local press debated the causes of the protest. Curiously, the official government newspaper, El Guatemalteco, used the incident to argue that anarchism was rife in Guatemala City.Footnote 1 The accusation of anarchism was not a singular occurrence in this instance; rather, it was part of a larger attempt to understand local politics, social disturbances and personal feuds through modern cosmopolitan currents emanating principally from western Europe. Understood in these terms, the incident at the National Institute was one episode of an anarchist furor that intrigued the gente decente of Guatemala City throughout 1894.Footnote 2
In 1894, many capitalinos (residents of the city) obsessed about anarchism, especially in the wake of the assassination of French President Marie François Sadi Carnot by an Italian anarchist that June. The press corps published dozens of articles on the threats of anarchism, its ideological tenets and the psychological profiles of anarchists. Before long, many urban Guatemalans began to believe that anarchists lurked in the shadows of their rapidly modernizing city. Importantly, though, police and government publications confirm that there were no anarchists in Guatemala City in 1894.Footnote 3 Despite claims that anarchists haunted the streets of the capital, the anarchist furor was merely a figment of the gente decente’s collective imagination.
This article argues that the history of the 1894 anarchist furor was a reflection of the history of Guatemala City itself, characterized by two contradictory strands of urban life in the 1890s: modernizing cosmopolitan desire and anxieties about the phantoms of modernity that ostensibly destabilized the liberal project.Footnote 4 The uncertainty generated by these two tendencies manifested during the anarchist furor, communicating the ambivalence of the gente decente towards modern experience.Footnote 5 The idea of a furor best communicates this ambivalence as a multifaceted expression. Invoking anarchism was faddish or vogue, something that generated excitement amongst people hell-bent on cultural modernization. Yet a furor possesses equally sinister components, signalling forces beyond one's control. The origins of the 1894 anarchist furor and the ambivalence of the gente decente lay in the early 1870s when market-oriented coffee-producers from the Western Highlands seized control of the Guatemalan state and initiated the Liberal Reforms. Over the ensuing decades, a series of legal, social, economic and political measures were enacted to aid the production of coffee and its export to foreign markets. These broad changes had a transformative effect on Guatemalan City. While mid-century accounts commented on the city's backwardness, by the 1890s, urban life had decidedly modernized.Footnote 6 The evolution of the downtown business district reflected the capitalist imperative of consumer culture; but it also mirrored the conscious efforts of the city's bourgeoisie to emulate trends from North America and western Europe, especially Paris. Yet the push towards economic and cultural modernization set other processes into motion – equally constitutive of modernity – that threatened to undermine the goals of liberal proponents. The Guatemalan gente decente shared deeper anxieties about social disorder and the menaces of the modern city. These fears arose from alterations in political economy, labour requirements and urban culture. The manner in which the modern city generated both cosmopolitan desire and anxiety about social precariousness is embodied by the 1894 anarchist furor. Understanding the intrigue with anarchism, despite the absence of anarchists in the city, speaks to the complexities of urban modernization in late nineteenth-century Central America.Footnote 7
The wide range of responses to the anarchist discussion in Guatemala City – from vulgar incitation and humour to personal denunciations and fear-mongering – is suggestive. As will become apparent, the gente decente’s construction of the anarchist figure as a phantom of modernity was confused. Anarchism in Europe and the Americas was comprised of both social movements as well as a menacing social construct that reflected social anxieties. Frequently, the spectre of anarchism weighed more heavily on elite minds than the actual actions of anarchists.Footnote 8 Raymond B. Craib's recent work on students and anarchists in Chile during the late 1910s and early 1920s, for example, highlights the tendency by the state to re-categorize working-class dissent as ‘subversive’ in light of anarchist organizing in the Chilean Student Federation.Footnote 9 In Guatemala City during the 1890s, however, the urban working class was not viewed as a threat to the social order. While proletarian newspapers challenged the political consensus of the gente decente, working-class organizations were paternalistically overseen by the president. Indeed, there was an inability or unwillingness to distinguish between anarchism as a political ideology and movement that emphasized a stateless society and anarchy as chaos. Both were certainly anathema to the liberal state and the export economy but, during the 1894 anarchist furor, the gente decente came to identify anarchism with disorder. Thus, malcontents who caused public commotions were likely to be viewed as anarchists, such as the youths at the National Institute. Equally threatening were members of the urban poor – vagrants, idlers and itinerant workers – who variably engaged with the wage economy and frequented public spaces and taverns.Footnote 10 Collectively, these people were the true anarchists in the minds of many urban Guatemalans. By discussing the anarchist furor in part as a broader concern with criminality, this article places Guatemala City into conversation with the plethora of works that have examined criminality in regional urban histories.Footnote 11
In addition to tying anarchism to concerns about disorder in the liberal era, this article also speaks to the ways in which cosmopolitan desire provided a new lexicon to describe and understand modern urban life. Mariano Siskind argues that Latin American intellectuals seized the notion as ‘elsewhere’ – whether Paris or the North Atlantic urban world – as a cultural signifier through which ‘cosmopolitan writers projected their aesthetic desires and their longing to participate in the actualization of modernity’.Footnote 12 Similarly, the language of anarchism provided the gente decente with a vocabulary to describe their modern condition. Cosmopolitan desire was facilitated by ‘bridge figures’ such as Enrique Gómez Carrillo, a Guatemalan man-of-letters who penned articles about fin-de-siècle Parisian life.Footnote 13 These bridge figures helped translate the ideas of modern metropoles into a local vernacular, thus framing conversation about the nature of modern experience in areas considered peripheral to capitalist development. With borrowed ideas like anarchism, I contend that cosmopolitan desire fed into a discursive reservoir for Guatemala's gente decente to describe real or imagined social phenomenon.
The Liberal Reforms and the making of modern Guatemala City
Modern Guatemala City was a product of measures introduced by the Liberal Reforms of the 1870s. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Guatemalan capital consisted of 40,000 people and was characterized by its provincial disposition.Footnote 14 Foreign travel writers complained about the city's lack of amenities, with Arthur Morelet commenting in the 1850s: ‘The city is without a public promenade; it has no cafés, no reading room; nor, in fact, any places for reunion or for pleasure. It is equally destitute of a theatre, the lack of which is supplied by a kind of arena for bull fights.’Footnote 15 The pace of urban life began to accelerate with the collapse of the conservative government. In 1871, liberal rebels seized state power and inaugurated an extensive programme of judicial, commercial and social reforms similar to elsewhere in Latin America. Known regionally as the Export Age,Footnote 16 various Latin American economies were steered towards the production of agricultural goods destined for export, relying on liberal governments to coerce labour, enclose community lands and promote export-related infrastructure. To this end, Argentine maize and wheat production expanded, Uruguayan beef and leather industries widened and Mexican sugar and cotton joined silver and copper destined for foreign markets. In Guatemala, as with Colombia, Costa Rica and Brazil, coffee reigned supreme.Footnote 17 There, the Liberal Reforms gradually transformed political economy and society, generating periods of social unease in the Guatemalan capital alongside excitement for future possibilities.
These twin tendencies characterized the urban experience of the bourgeoisie, as reflected in changing property relations and concerns with criminality. The liberal government of Justo Rufino Barrios from 1873 until 1885 oversaw a transfer of property holdings to private individuals and the state. Commonly held lands that bordered the capital, for example, were privatized. Individuals like Carlos Klée, the son of the German-born capitalist and proprietor of pharmacies in Guatemala City, applied to the state to have ejido land transferred to their private possession.Footnote 18 Already by the mid-1870s, government reports boasted that the dull plains around the city were being turned into fruitful coffee plantations through the application of private capital to the land.Footnote 19 Elsewhere in the city, many religious properties were converted into government buildings, reflecting the anti-clerical sentiments of many liberals. The Santa Catarina and Santa Teresa convents, for example, became a penal facility for drunks, idlers and vagrants and a women's corrections facility, respectively.Footnote 20
Unsurprisingly, concern for law and order accompanied changes in property relations. To protect property as well as individuals, night watchmen were professionalized in the early 1870s and were joined by daylight counterparts within a couple of years. At the same time, public lighting moved outwards from the core of the city and business district to middle-class and then working-class neighbourhoods. The enclosure of community lands, renovation of religious properties into corrections institutions and heightened security concerns should not be viewed independently of one another. Moreover, they should be placed alongside the conscious effort to cultivate a bourgeois culture in the city. With the assumption of power by José María Reyna Barrios in 1892, the gente decente reached the apogee of their decadence, which lasted until the coffee market collapsed in 1897.
The aforementioned factors shaped urban space. But, increasingly, in the late 1880s, Guatemalan state officials and the bourgeoisie looked to the metropoles of western Europe and the United States for cultural inspiration. The obsession with western modernity was not simply one of infatuation. Rather, it had a transformative effect on urban space in Guatemala City, especially under the rule of Reyna Barrios. As a young man, Reyna Barrios travelled extensively through Europe and was eager to modernize Guatemala. He was not alone in this regard. Beset by a compelling cosmopolitan desire, the Guatemalan gente decente aimed to create ‘a world after its own image’, emulating modern spaces, spectacles and behaviours of western modernity.Footnote 21 Newspapers, periodicals and especially cosmopolitan bridge figures forged the cultural linkages that aided this familiarity. By the 1880s and 1890s, travel times across the Atlantic had greatly diminished and wealthy capitalinos increasingly travelled between Europe and Central America. These cosmopolitan bridge figures were responsible for translating their perceptions of modern European life into terms understood by Central American observers. Their impressions of life abroad modelled urban space, trends and fashions. And there were no shortage of these cosmopolitan bridge figures to fuse the bonds of enchantment with Europe to the Guatemalan bourgeoisie's modernizing aspirations.
Influenced by cosmopolitan bridge figures, the Ministry of Development began promoting modern culture in the late 1880s. The lines between the state and the bourgeoisie in fostering European bourgeois culture were often indistinguishable. Both the national government and Municipality provided much of the infrastructure for cultural spectacles while the city's bourgeoisie facilitated the process. Consider the Columbus Theatre: the Ministry of Development negotiated contracts with foreign zarzuela, dance and opera companies to perform at the national theatre, intermediated by local businessmen like Angel Muttini, a prominent member of the city's Italian community and cosmopolitan bridge figure.Footnote 22 In addition, the state continuously repaired and renovated the theatre, which was attended by state officials and prominent members of the bourgeoisie. For example, in October 1893, balcony seats to performances at the theatre were purchased by figures such as Muttini, the surgeon Dr Juan Ortega, landowner José María Samayoa, importer A. Rosenthal, self-styled bohemian Valero Pujol, engineer Manuel Ayau and the minister of Spain.Footnote 23 The fraternizing between state officials and members of the bourgeoisie went beyond rubbing shoulders at the theatre but included business collusion such as Manuel Ayau's commission by the director of Public Works to construct kiosks in the central plaza months later.Footnote 24
Whereas the Municipality was preoccupied with drainage and sewage in the 1870s, new pursuits motivated urban planners by the 1880s. More pathways and sidewalks were constructed to encourage strolling, public life and window-shopping. The bourgeoisie, for their part, were captivated by foreign commodity culture as they responded to the cultural logic of late nineteenth-century consumer capitalism. The proliferation of export and import houses accompanied an increase in commodities and disposable income for the city's oligarchy, merchants and middle class. Sixth and Seventh Avenues and Ninth Street were sites of consumer pomp. Catering to these desires were dozens of specialized stores filled with goods imported from North America and Europe. Stores, like The City of Paris, opened in 1894 in the capital's business vestibule with elegant European wear for gentlemen.Footnote 25 On the reverse side of the vestibule, the Pasaje Aycinena was inaugurated the same year.Footnote 26 The Pasaje was intended to recall Parisian-style shopping arcades. These spaces were to be the sites of consumer modernity, to place Guatemala into conversation with the commodity-fuelled dream worlds of plenty that were perceived to exist in cosmopolitan centres in Western Europe and the US.Footnote 27
The fashion and urban space of Paris – the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’Footnote 28 – was the greatest source of inspiration for the gente decente. The Parisian Exposition of 1889 was a singular cultural event. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo has written about the Mexican state's participation in the 1889 Expo and how their pavilion reified the ideal Mexican nation.Footnote 29 The event certainly had similar influences in Guatemala. As state planners noted, the Parisian Expo afforded the opportunity to introduce liberal-era Guatemala to international fair-goers.Footnote 30 Gustavo E. Guzmán headed the Guatemalan commission to the Expo and subsequently was placed in charge of the national pavilion at the Chicago Columbian Exposition in 1893. Insofar as Guatemala City is concerned, such events served to enrapture the imaginations of the gente decente with the cultural possibilities of the modern world. Indeed, as the Ministry of Development noted in 1890, Paris is ‘the capital of the civilized world’.Footnote 31 But, more significantly, it contributed to a re-envisioning of urban space in the Guatemalan capital.
The overwhelming response of the press and bourgeoisie to Guatemala's participation in the 1889 Parisian Exposition prompted government visionaries to undertake two major initiatives with the intention of replicating Parisian aesthetics. To this end, plans were made in April 1890 for the creation of a new subdivision in the city's south, christened Canton of the Exposition. The neighbourhood's centrepiece was a replica of the Guatemalan pavilion that showcased the art, machinery, medals and other memorabilia from the Paris Expo. One notable feature of the neighbourhood was that it abandoned the city's predominant north–south grid systems of streets and avenues. Instead, diagonal streets – designated as ‘routes’ and ‘ways’ – were constructed that sought to recall urban planning in Paris.Footnote 32 In 1894, President Reyna Barrios announced that the Canton of the Exposition was to be the site of what was arguably the most culturally significant event of the decade: the 1897 Central American and International Exposition. The neighbourhood remained the greatest site of Parisian influence in Guatemala for decades afterward.
The second major state effort to foster modern culture and enjoyment was the construction of a Parisian-style boulevard in the city's southern limit leading from the Canton of the Exposition to a grandiose public park. Bolstered by relatively stable growth in coffee production during the early years of his rule, President Reyna Barrios decreed the creation of the park in July 1892. The park bore the name Reform ‘to commemorate the glorious revolution’ of 1871 and it was to be similar to parks in Europe.Footnote 33 By 1894, the Ministry of Development was busy trying to complete Reform Park, expropriating lands belonging to José María Samayoa, while final steps were being taken to construct artesian wells and plant foliage prior to its opening.Footnote 34 The press compared the park to Champs Élysées and Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and New York City's Central Park. They suggested that modern cities needed such spaces for the well-being of inhabitants, as capitalinos flocked to Reform Park in carriages, on horseback and on foot for fresh air.Footnote 35
Adjoining the park's promenade to the Canton of the Exposition was a Parisian-inspired boulevard.Footnote 36 Denominated June 30th Boulevard, the tree-lined thoroughfare was named in honour of the day liberal forces marched into Guatemala City in 1871 to inaugurate the Liberal Reforms.Footnote 37 Observers praised the boulevard, which had lanes for both carriages and pedestrians, and was bordered by hedges and chestnut trees similar to ‘the great boulevards of Paris.’Footnote 38 The June 30th Boulevard was one of Reyna Barrios’ crowning urban achievements. It served as a site of bourgeois spectacle, a place in which the liberal elite strolled on Sundays in their finest clothes or slowly rode along in carriages. It also was a popular destination for cyclists by the mid-1890s.
The anarchist furor of 1894 as cosmopolitan desire
The 1894 anarchist furor must be placed into the context of this bourgeois culture of cosmopolitan desire. It is hardly surprising that when anarchists began conducting ‘propaganda of the deed’ by detonating explosives and assassinating public officials in France, Spain and Italy, many urban Guatemalans took interest in the phenomenon. Indeed, the gente decente began to see the spectre of anarchism in their own midst. The 1894 anarchist furor should be understood as an occurrence as modern as boulevards, shopping arcades and commodities, deriving from a wider cosmopolitan conversation about the nature of life in the modern world. Fed by bridge figures like Enrique Gómez Carrillo and insofar as it concerned cosmopolitan desires, the anarchist furor was jestful posturing, a way to appear modern, and, at worst, a manner of denouncing opponents using a cosmopolitan lexicon; however, it will also become clear that interest in anarchism reflected deeper misgivings about modernity.
Analysis of anarchism proliferated in Guatemala City during late 1893 and early 1894 after a spate of bombing in Paris and Barcelona. French anarchists hoped to spark popular uprisings in urban centres after being frustrated by the violence of the authorities in repressing working-class militancy. In response, individual anarchists initiated an uncoordinated series of bombings. Ravachol (François Claudius Koenigstein) was one such anarchist who responded to police repression in this manner. His execution in July 1892 triggered a blood feud between the French state and vengeful anarchists. Anarchists Émile Henry and Auguste Vaillant, in separate incidents, set off bombs in 1893, targeting a café and the French Chamber of Deputies, respectively.Footnote 39 Ultimately, however, the assassination of French President Marie François Sadi Carnot by Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio in late June 1894 was the denouement of anarchist violence during the fin-de-siècle.Footnote 40 The subsequent trial and execution of Caserio during the summer of 1894 ignited a firestorm of discussion about anarchism in the Guatemalan press.
Many capitalinos were enthralled when Vaillant and Caserio called for death to the bourgeoisie prior to their beheading by guillotine, intrigued by their unrepentant faith.Footnote 41 Many writers unleashed a torrent of disdain upon the anarchists. Salvadoran poet Vicente Acosta had his poem ‘Anarchy’ published in Guatemala City, writing in part:
Another article from La Nueva Era concluded, ‘And do not forget that anarchy incites the mob, and that there is no enemy more implacable than those disillusioned by spite.’Footnote 43 Elsewhere, cautionary reports appeared warning that European anarchists were researching bacteriology with a plan to exterminate the bourgeoisie through epidemic illnesses.Footnote 44 In many sectors, anarchists were portrayed as fanatics, calling on civilized countries to unite against the scourge of anarchism: ‘The violent death of Sadi Carnot has just discredited anarchism and raised the clamour of irate voices from all generous chests.’Footnote 45 Editor Juan P.F. Padilla followed suit, writing, ‘Anarchism is a social woodworm’, invoking the madness believed to be caused by absinthe consumption.Footnote 46
Cosmopolitan desire did not appear spontaneously in Guatemala but was consciously nurtured by elements of the gente decente. As it concerned the 1894 anarchist furor, Guatemalan man-of-letters Enrique Gómez Carrillo functioned as the most important bridge figure between the French capital and Guatemala City. In 1890, the teenaged Gómez Carrillo was able to secure a pension from Guatemalan President Manuel Lisandro Barillas to publish crónicas (features) from Europe. He was the most widely read Latin American writer of his generation in Paris, and his works were regularly published in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Madrid, Caracas and, naturally, Guatemala City.Footnote 47
Gómez Carrillo was an enormously important cosmopolitan writer not only in Guatemala but also throughout the Atlantic World. He was commercially successful partly because his writings bordered on hedonistic taboo. His writings of life in Paris spoke of Bohemian excesses and sexual self-indulgence: sadism, masochism, fetishism and lesbianism filled his crónicas.Footnote 48 Despite the fact that many of his contemporaries mocked Gómez Carrillo's superficiality, Mariano Siskind insists that, like many modernists, he aimed to universalize the Parisian experience of bourgeois modernity.Footnote 49 If Paris was a universal cultural currency, it was incumbent upon Gómez Carrillo to share his experiences in order to incorporate the particularities of Latin America into a global cultural exchange. Herein lies his importance as a cosmopolitan bridge figure for the Guatemalan capital.
In early 1894, Gómez Carrillo's attention turned to anarchism. He claimed: ‘The year 1893 could be called the year of the bombs’ owing to the numerous explosions that shook Spain and France. And 1894 was to be no different. The young Guatemalan reported on European anarchism, viewing it as the ideal of a generation with ‘anarchism in our veins’. Bourgeois society alienated many and what united anarchists was a shared belief that ‘modern society is odious’.Footnote 50 In such a maelstrom, the results were predictable: when Auguste Vaillant was executed for bombing the French Chamber of Deputies in February 1894, his comrades vowed that his death would be avenged. Within days, bombs shook Paris. Before long, twenty-one-year-old Émile Henry was apprehended for detonating a bomb at Café Terminus in Paris – supposedly a site of bourgeois vanity – killing one person and wounding dozens. What troubled many observers about Henry was that he came from an aristocratic family and was not a disenchanted worker. Gómez Carrillo writes: ‘He is, however, an anarchist, and the most ardent of the anarchists. When he was barely sixteen, he started to predict social revolution; at the age of eighteen, he frequented anarchist clubs.’Footnote 51 Nevertheless, Gómez Carrillo empathized with Henry and anarchists like him, seeing them as restless souls instead of vile bandits and a part of the contemporary spirit: ‘their word is serious, their acts are apostolic’.Footnote 52 Ultimately, though, while seeking to understand their motivations, Gómez Carrillo could not support their ‘propaganda of the deed’, writing: ‘The true victor shall be he who brings us a platform to change society without burning down its cities.’Footnote 53
Given interest in anarchism, fed by cosmopolitan bridge figures like Gómez Carrillo, it is not surprising that the Guatemalan gente decente began to see anarchist influences in their own city. As it concerns the anarchist furor of 1894, the desire for cosmopolitan modernity manifested through hyperbole, spectacle and, often, in comical ways. When lightning struck the national telegraph building in Guatemala City, for example, the loud explosion caused members of the neighbouring Legislative Assembly to jump from their seats and cry out, ‘anarchists!’ as they trembled and crossed themselves, according to one tongue-in-cheek report.Footnote 54 Reports emerged of similar responses when, for example, accidental celluloid contamination caused a brand of Parisian cigars to explode when lit.Footnote 55
As discussion of anarchism became a daily event within Guatemalan newspapers, sectors of the bourgeoisie seized the fascination as a marketing opportunity. Thus emerged a series of deft newspaper advertisements. José Herrera's patisserie published an announcement reading ‘Anarchists. . .are those who don't enjoy the famous wedding tamales’ from the businessman's shop, before reminding would-be customers that they have tasty raisins and almonds in them.Footnote 56 Elsewhere, one ad ran: ‘Anarchists in Guatemala!! Horrific conspiracy!!’ before advertising a performance by live musicians at Herrera's confectionary.Footnote 57 Another advertiser, while not specifically invoking anarchism, sought to draw the public's gaze to their announcement of a room for rent with the headline proclamation of ‘Revolution!’Footnote 58
The absurdity of invoking anarchism reached farcical levels in mid-July 1894 when a confrontation occurred near the Union Hotel on Eighth Street in downtown Guatemala City. Although conflicting testimonies quickly emerged, all agreed on the outcome: Juan P.F. Padilla – former mayor of Guatemala City, member of the Legislative Assembly and the editor of the afternoon newspaper La Nueva Era – was left bruised and bloodied by a police officer named Colonel José Montúfar. Speculation abounded about the source of the row between the two men as gossip spread. One leaflet conjectured that Montúfar assaulted Padilla after the newspaper director published a criticism of the police officer.Footnote 59 Elsewhere, it was suggested that the colonel had been the victim of continued slander by Padilla and that a brief skirmish spiralled when Padilla attempted to draw his rapier and revolver. In the days after the conflict, Padilla used La Nueva Era as a platform to decry Montúfar's cowardice.Footnote 60 Rather than viewing the dispute as an escalation of an everyday disagreement between two men, it was curiously labelled an ‘anarchist episode’. Padilla's newspaper and others criticized Montúfar's actions using similar language.Footnote 61 The lexicon of anarchism provided a cosmopolitan means of denouncing political and personal adversaries.
An essential facet of the Guatemalan experience of modernity during the fin-de-siècle was a desire to participate in cosmopolitan discussions about the nature of modern life. To this end, the bourgeoisie, the national government and the Municipality created spaces for consumerism, as well as modern culture and fashion based on their perceptions of life in modern metropoles. The 1894 anarchist furor should be viewed in light of these other trends. If commodities, shopping arcades and boulevards were markers of modernity, then so too were anarchists. Cosmopolitan bridge figures like Gómez Carrillo fulfilled a vital function in framing urban discussion in Central America by translating the modern experience from abroad.
The anarchist furor of 1894, the urban poor and malcontents
The 1894 anarchist furor was not simply about being fashionably cheeky or a cosmopolitan manner of criticizing personal foes. It also registered the unease of the gente decente with perceived threats to the liberal order. But these perils did not come from a militant working class devoted to social revolution, as was sometimes the case elsewhere in the Americas and Europe. Instead, malcontents and individuals who refused their role as labourers in the liberal order generated the menace. In 1894, Guatemala City, anarchism became the byword for disorder. Amidst the furor, the leading newspapers carried an article from the Parisian publication Fígaro in which readers had been encouraged to submit definitions of anarchism. The prize-winning entry described anarchism as a stateless society in which people freely associated for the benefit of all and where public services continued to dispense their services. Certainly, such a definition did not resonate with the Guatemalan gente decente owing to the relative passivity of the local working class. But other definitions from Fígaro conflated anarchism and anarchy, associating anarchists with laze, madness and disorder with one entry proclaiming, ‘Anarchism: the Gospel of the lazy.’Footnote 62 Such interpretations more closely mirrored the social moralizing of the gente decente. From these discussions, they developed a conception of anarchism – disassociated from working-class movements – that viewed anarchists as conspiratorial nihilists who aimed to destroy the cement that bound modern society.Footnote 63 The true purveyors of anarchism were the urban poor and malcontents who spread disorder through their laze, criminality and public commotions.
The year 1894 was one of great transition. Within the span of a few months, questions were raised about the nature of labour, urban life, criminality and the incompetency of law enforcement stemming from new social relations specific to the liberal era. In such a context, anarchism not only fulfilled cosmopolitan desire but provided a language for the seeming precariousness of the social order. Traces of disarray evidenced by the urban poor, unsolved acts of arson and theft – such as the devastating Sixth Avenue fire – suggested that lawlessness was rife.
The Liberal Reforms altered labour relations in Guatemala. To the extent that working-class consciousness existed, it emerged from state-sponsored labour associations. These organizations were artisanal in nature, often consisting of workers who conducted independent labour or executed their trades in small workshops consisting of a few employees. For the most part, these guilds engaged in mutual aid but did not generate a sense of class struggle.Footnote 64 Rather, they struggled to ensure that governmental labour decrees were enforced to protect workers. One of the most prominent of these mutual aid organizations was the Future of the Workers Society.Footnote 65 It represented urban labourers such as cobblers, carpenters, tailors, jewellers and mechanics. By and large, such organizations shared the liberal vision for the future, arguing through public letters that liberal progress was in the best interests of Guatemala's lower classes.Footnote 66 Nevertheless, there was an increased sense of class-consciousness among skilled urban workers in the capital, however limited. In the early 1890s, two workers’ newspapers, El Eco de Trabajo and El Obrero, came into existence. Later, in late June 1894, La Voz del Obrero was first published with the participation of carpenter Bernardo Argueta who had been the administrator of the two previous publications.Footnote 67 La Voz del Obrero commented on local events, called for meaningful reforms for the working class like education and decried abuses of the state.Footnote 68
Overall, the growth of the urban working class was not the concern of the gente decente. More problematic was the question of how to transform people into wage earners. New legislation was written that reconsidered criminality in light of the spread of private property, enclosure of common land and modern social relations of production. The state drew on various measures to ensure that the urban and rural poor contributed to the economy. Yet the state seemed oblivious to the causality inherent in modern social relations. It passed without comment in Municipal reports in 1888 that public lands around the capital had been privatized and that the city had experienced a marked increase in vagrancy and unemployment.Footnote 69 Instead, efforts were undertaken in the late 1880s to combat shiftless persons who refused to conduct honourable work. In September 1888, the National Palace instructed departmental governors to combat an increase in idlers, vagrants and other lawbreakers. Every Monday, for example, proprietors of workshops were required to submit a list of employees who were absent from work the week before. In order to avoid vagrancy charges, those found to be idlers were then required to present themselves bi-weekly to government offices with a certificate from their employers confirming their employment.Footnote 70
In liberal Guatemala, order was a euphemism for the smooth functioning of coercive labour regimes built on exploitative social relations, often predicated on systems of forced labour. Coffee requires intense labour at particular times of the growing cycle. For nearly two decades of liberal rule, there were two primary methods for securing principally indigenous labour. The first was debt servitude involving an army of labour contractors in the employ of coffee estates who compelled would-be labourers to sign labour contracts after indebting them using various means including plying them with rum. Local militias were used to ensure labourers fulfilled their debt obligations, the conditions of which were often so onerous that workers were unable to release themselves from servitude. The second manner was through mandamientos or forced labour drafts, formally institutionalized in 1876. As it concerned coffee, planters petitioned local governments for labour. Primarily indigenous communities were then required to provide requisitioned labour to coffee estates for set periods of time.Footnote 71 Tensions arose between competing elite interests due to these means of procuring labour. Importers in particular were frustrated by the inability to transform workers into consumers because compensation was minimal at best and enclosure had created a class of perennially underemployed labour that loitered in the capital city, subsisting through short-term employment and charity.Footnote 72
Matters finally came to a head in 1893 and 1894 when the administration of Reyna Barrios enacted two major pieces of legislation, abolishing the mandimientos and redefining the status of labour.Footnote 73 Together, they aimed to stimulate labour, and to avoid vagrancy and other problems for agriculture as the country transitioned from coerced to free waged labour. To a large degree, the new labour code allowed the state the flexibility of using coerced labour by drafting idlers and vagrants into military service or to conduct sapper labour on public works projects like the Reform Park and the June 30th Boulevard. Changes in the social relations of production met with mixed reviews from the press because of continued reliance on sappers.Footnote 74 But, more importantly, it generated discussion about the urban poor who continued to proliferate in public spaces and on the outskirts of the city.
The press spilled great amounts of ink reporting on the on-goings of the city's poor. So-called degenerates and retrogrades were denounced for frequenting taverns during working hours, and those perceived to be idlers and vagrants were arrested in police sweeps in the city.Footnote 75 Mass arrests of vagrants led one newspaper to exclaim ‘What a society!’ and insist that ‘Laziness and vagrancy are the root of all the vices.’Footnote 76 Certainly such sentiments resonated with Father Francisco Javier Torres who denounced drunkenness as the gangrene of society. Tired of hearing blasphemy and scandalous songs in the city's taverns, the priest wrote that alcohol abuse was the source of social discord, a type of leprosy that corrupts the youth, and hinders progress.Footnote 77
Compounding the issue of criminality, through the 1880s and 1890s, the city grew both spatially and demographically. Small neighbouring working-class municipalities such as San Pedro las Huertas, Ciudad Vieja and Villa de Guadalupe, which had once existed outside the gates of the city, were incorporated into the capital.Footnote 78 These had been principally working-class communities, whose inhabitants made clothes, bricks and adobe, as well as supply day-labourers to the capital city.Footnote 79 To monitor the growing city better, the Ministry of Governance and Justice create a mounted police unit in 1892 for newly incorporated neighbourhoods and cantons at a distance from the city centre.Footnote 80
The creation of a mounted police was part of a broader effort undertaken by the government to professionalize further law enforcement. There had been long-standing charges of incompetence and abuse of power in the city's police force. Typical complaints suggested that the department spread corruption, malice and discontent.Footnote 81 For example, at the end of May 1894, agent Ildefonzo Bolaños of the mounted police unit was arrested for using his official station in the department to prevent the incarceration of Soledad Flores for clandestine prostitution.Footnote 82 In a memo to the minister of governance and justice, Police Chief Roque Morales argued that police agent pay was so pitiful that the department could not attract well-qualified applicants and instead easily corruptible officers who jeopardized public order filled the vacancies.Footnote 83
The effects of measures taken by the state and law enforcement are difficult to ascertain from anecdotal and statistical evidence. By August 1894, newspapers reported that criminality was growing out of control owing in part to shyster lawyers who took advantage of loopholes within the legal system. With the failures of the law, criminality was multiplying in the capital's cantinas, taverns and gambling dens as vagrants and criminal playboys defied civil virtues and boycotted honourable work.Footnote 84 Or so the argument went. The numbers of arrests for vagrancy or public inebriation varied from year to year, perhaps reflecting funding to police services as much as actual levels of crime. Within the context of the anarchist furor of 1894, though, what mattered more was the perception of heightened crime.
Contributing to this belief in spreading lawlessness were a series of high-profile crimes, variably linked to anarchism in some instances. Would-be thieves attempted to break into the safe of Ricardo S. Klée in early July.Footnote 85 Equally concerning was the theft of the prominent civil servant Emilio Ubico's residence.Footnote 86 In early May, Ubico and his young family visited the city of La Antigua. In his absence, Ubico's home was robbed of several silk dresses and $1,000. The young man responsible for watching the premises had the door to his room tied shut by the thieves.Footnote 87 More significantly, a terrible fire in the downtown district in late March 1894 destroyed several businesses and the home of Mateo Gómez, the one-time home of former presidents Justo Rufino Barrios and Manuel Lisandro Barillas. Sworn witness José Bonifacio Alvarez claimed that as he was walking home in the early morning hours of 30 March, he saw a column of smoke coming from the residence of Mateo Gómez. He alerted nearby police officers and alarms were sounded which drew a crowd from nearby taverns, restaurants and other establishments. Given the direction the wind was blowing, it was quickly ascertained that the fire likely started at Dr Pablo Salles de Micquelle's pharmacy, Farmacia Francesa. From there, it spread to the residence of Mateo Gómez and reduced a number of other businesses to ash including Fischer & Wiessman's tobacco shop, La Perla jewelry store and the printer Tipografía El Porvenir, and others.Footnote 88 Interestingly, José Herrera confectionary was also burned down in the blaze, contextualizing his later invocation of anarchism as he advertised his new shop months later.Footnote 89 The fire was brought under control before sunrise owing to the work of police and concerned citizens.Footnote 90 The question of who was responsible, however, was not so easily resolved despite calls from the newspaper to apprehend the culprits and apply the full weight of the law.Footnote 91
In January 1894, a conflagration erupted after a group of workers damaged a building belonging to the Municipality.Footnote 92 The warehouse held garden equipment and other supplies while some adjacent stores were rented out. The national government had repeatedly requested ownership of the building from the Municipality and workers were sent to knock down the door and clean the space out.Footnote 93 The workers were eventually ordered to cease but ‘drunk on courage and enthusiasm’ continued to demolish the building. One capitalino, who had witnessed the bombing of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona by anarchists a couple months earlier, cried out upon hearing the explosion of Roman candles intended to disperse the workers, ‘the anarchists of Barcelona, Holy Mother, Lord have mercy!’Footnote 94
A month and a half later, the newspaper La República ran a story that began: ‘Beyond the violent crime, assaults, theft, the breaking of doors, etc., we now have fires on rustic properties to top it all off. What good fortunes we have!’ The article spoke of a fire that almost ravaged a farm south-west of the capital. Editors of the newspaper demanded that the arsonists responsible be severely reprimanded. Failing to respect private property would bring Guatemala closer to anarchism, ‘this scourge of humanity’. If anarchism is allowed to take hold, the article warned, civilization would degenerate into an unstoppable barbarism.Footnote 95
Perhaps the most significant anarchist incident, however, involved the uprising of malcontents that occurred at the National Institute that opened this article. In early July 1894, there was debate in Guatemala City's newspapers about the nature of examinations, pedagogy and administration at the National Institute. The editors of La República suggested, for example, that the school's director Dr Santos Toruño exercised autocratic control over the institution, operating independently of the Ministry of Public Education.Footnote 96 The director's defenders, however, insisted that he was the subject of a smear campaign that was damaging the reputation of the most prestigious educational institution in Central America.Footnote 97 Amidst the bickering of the press, on 6 July, a young Honduran student named Octavio Augusto Masier began ringing the Institute's bell to signal a protest against the school's administration. Most of the students who had agreed to participate refrained from doing so after being intimidated by the teaching staff. Nevertheless, a small group of boys assembled, broke a gate and marched to the presidential residence. President Reyna Barrios briefly scolded the youths before they were arrested. Ten adolescents including Masier were taken into custody, charged with launching a rebellion and then causing a commotion at the president's home.Footnote 98 They were transported back to the National Institute for interrogation by faculty, government officials and the president.
Reports in the media suggested that the students were discontent with the quality of food, housing and the infirmary.Footnote 99 One of the students arrested, however, was 15-year-old Salvador Mendieta from El Salvador, the future leader of the Unionist Movement.Footnote 100 In his memoirs published decades later, Mendieta recalls that the motivations of the students were political in nature. He claims the ideology of Unionism informed his criticism of the Institute's administration which Mendieta perceived as failing the youth of Central America.Footnote 101 Regardless of their inspiration, the students were expelled for their actions.Footnote 102
While an extremely minor protest in the annals of Guatemalan history, the uprising acquired greater significance because of its relationship to the 1894 anarchist furor. Some of the press simply dismissed the students as delinquents who needed to be taught to respect order and authority.Footnote 103 The conversation transformed several days later when El Guatemalteco, the official government newspaper, argued that the students at the National Institute were duped by an anarchist conspiracy led by ‘true criminals’ comprised of ‘the eternal enemies of progress’.Footnote 104 ‘They are the same anarchists who assassinated Carnot, the same fanatics who killed Cirilo Flores’, the piece contends, for whom nothing is sacred.Footnote 105 Unable to tolerate the achievements of liberalism, these extremists thus concocted a diabolical scheme to corrupt the gullible youths of the National Institute, ‘sowing in their innocent hearts the pestilent seed of insurrection and anarchism’. In particular, the article singled out the two principal daily newspapers – La República and Diario de Centro-América – which had complained about the school's administration in the days leading up to the revolt.
The editor of the Diario de Centro-América – and prominent civil servant – Francisco Lainfiesta responded to these charges by republishing the article from El Guatemalteco and illustrating discrepancies in its impassioned accusations.Footnote 106 A month later, the newspaper again made light of the accusations of anarchism.Footnote 107 For his part, the director of La República, Daniel Amaya published an annotated version of the El Guatemalteco article that mocked the charges and suggested that the official organ of the government should not stoop to the level of gratuitous insults. To the charge that the culprits were the ‘same anarchists’ who killed French President Marie François Sadi Carnot, the paper editorialized that this included Carnot's assassin Sante Geronimo Caserio ‘who arrived by cable’.Footnote 108 They thus dismissed the charge of anarchism.
The working-class weekly La Voz del Obrero reached a similar conclusion. A simple student protest, the paper explained, had given rise to nonsensical conjecture about anarchism. The evidence suggested that the students were looking for new horizons to expand their minds and instead encountered a director of the school with an air of infallibility. The uprising did not require the ‘importation of anarchists’ nor were the students hoodwinked by anarchist ambitions.Footnote 109 ‘Here, there is not the disease of anarchism’, another article concluded, ‘what exists is the illness of moral bankruptcy.’Footnote 110
Conclusion
During the course of 1894, the spectre of anarchism humoured, intrigued and frightened elements of the gente decente in Guatemala City. As a concept, anarchism fulfilled several functions that hinted at both the appeals of cosmopolitan modernity and the phantoms that lurked in its shadows. By the early to mid-1890s, Guatemala City was eminently more modern than it had been two decades earlier. Enriched by the production and export of coffee, the state and bourgeoisie strove to manufacture a modern city. And Paris was their muse. The obsession with France and its capital was succinctly summarized in the days after an Italian anarchist stabbed French President Sadi Carnot to death. An editorial in La República called France the ‘mind of humanity’, explaining that all countries followed the French lead because it was the well-spring of new ideas. But if France inaugurated beautiful, new concepts, it also spawned the most monstrous cataclysms as well. ‘Anarchism in France’, the piece suggests, ‘is not only a phantom that terrorizes the faint-hearted but is also a reality that threatens the calmest of souls.’Footnote 111 And herein lay the essence of the 1894 anarchist furor in Guatemala City.
This article has argued that the invocation of anarchism became a fashionable way to demonstrate one's modernity. Seeing anarchists in their city allowed the gente decente to participate in a cosmopolitan conversation about modern urban life. Such conversations were fostered by intellectual connections that tied Guatemala to European capitals. Stimulated by writings from abroad, the Guatemalan bourgeoisie and press began to emulate the language of modernity, including talk of anarchism.
But this cosmopolitan desire alone does not explain the furor. The national government by the 1890s had undertaken great efforts to compel individuals to engage in honourable work and to ensure the smooth operations of the liberal order. For the gente decente in 1894, anarchism was often conflated with anarchy. As such, the principal threat came not from the working class but from those perceived to disrupt the order of urban life. Anarchism was part of a lexicon used to besmirch those who shirked wage labour, who engaged in criminal behaviour and malcontents such as the youths of the National Institute. Ultimately, however, no anarchists existed in Guatemala City in 1894 and the imaginations of the gente decente were merely haunted by the phantoms of modernity.
