What is the relationship between university and society? Students and national politics? These questions occupy current discussions surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, a year when students “rocked the world.” They likewise simmer at the heart of Heather Vrana's This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996, which follows several generations of university students in Guatemala's first, and for many years only, public university, the Universidad de San Carlos (USAC). Yet as Vrana states early on, her study is more about class formation and political culture than a “romantic story of student activism” (p. 2). Through a detailed examination of student political life, Vrana reveals how the university functioned to create the small but influential Guatemalan middle class with a distinctive political ideology, which in turn shaped state formation and the course of national politics from a brief democratic opening through a thirty-six-year civil war.
Vrana accomplishes much in this work. She directs attention away from the usual centers of gravity in two major fields: global student activism and postwar Guatemalan history. While much of the literature in this first field concentrates on the usual places—Paris, New York, Mexico City—Vrana makes a point to embrace a distinctly Central American perspective. For example, unlike students in Germany or the United States, or even Mexico, San Carlistas (as USAC students are known) played an oversized role in state-building, as “nearly everyone with a university degree had attended the school” (p. 1) before 1961, and they continued to play an outsized role in the civic life of a country where the population was largely poor, rural, and 72 percent illiterate in 1950 (p. 47). They were also “not electrified by the ‘Global 1968,’ nor did they mirror or follow those movements” necessarily (p. 21). In line with other recent monographs, such as Jaime Pensado's Rebel Mexico and Victoria Langland's Speaking of Flowers (both 2013), which focus on sixties student politics in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, Vrana complicates the category of “student” and shows how universities function in specific national contexts. A complex interplay of global, regional, and local, This City Belongs to You adds an important chapter to the story of global student movements and challenges the notion that politics necessarily flows from north to south.
Vrana also confronts standard Guatemalan historiography. Much of this literature centers on the country's rural and marginalized Indigenous population and its relationship to the Euro-descended landed oligarchy. Yet Vrana shifts attention to the influential but seldom studied Ladino (mestizo) population in the capital, applying an urban lens to a country long defined as rural. In so doing she adds nuance to a national historiography, but also employs insights from urban history, such as spatial analysis, to add complexity to her study. Furthermore, Vrana adds to the growing literature on the Latin American middle class (building on The Making of the Middle Class, an influential 2012 volume edited by Barbara Weinstein and A. Ricardo López-Pedreros), which she presents not as an a priori category but as a material and cultural process of meaning-making: “what San Carlistas did, and where and how they did it” (p. 17).
Vrana's narrative is captivating and richly sourced. It relies on a bevy of student texts, memoirs, photographs, police reports, and other archival finds. Readers unfamiliar with Guatemalan history may become bogged down in internal political dynamics or lose site of the centrality of the nation's Indigenous experience, though the focus on students is well worth the attention. After a longue durée history of USAC, founded in 1676, chapter 1 begins with students helping to overthrow dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944, ushering in a democratic opening known as the Ten Years Spring. From there, she introduces readers to the San Carlistas’ annual politicized parade, the Huelga de Dolores, their student publication No Nos Tientes, and the origins of a distinctive political ideology, which Vrana terms student nationalism, a way of making political claims on the state as students (p. 96). While originally drawing on a liberal rights discourse, this student nationalism also functioned to embed raced, classed, and gendered notions of citizenship into the Guatemalan nation.
Moving chronologically, chapter 2 considers the political dynamics of students in the 1950s, the decade of the infamous military overthrow of progressive leader Jacobo Árbenz—the first of many such US-backed Cold War interventions in the region. Yet focusing on the influence of domestic actors more than US agents, she sheds light on the role of anti-communist Catholic students, whose Plan Tegucigalpa would serve as the intellectual cornerstone of the counterrevolution and the administration of military leader Carlos Castillo Armas. Vrana therefore demonstrates how student political culture grew from complex internal dynamics between the left, right, and center as well as from more oft-cited global influences.
Chapter 3 analyzes how “political affect was wielded to compel political change” (p. 101) and build cross-class alliances in the 1960s, as students built on long-running political feelings in the face of increased state antagonism. In this context of increasing repression, left radicalization and anti-imperialism, chapter 4 then considers the influence of a nationally tailored dependency theory on the university's intellectual milieu between 1963 and 1977, and the changing nature between students and “the people” (el pueblo) through extension programs. Here the university's development praxis became another site of class-making.
By chapters 5 and 6, which overlap chronologically and cover the late 1970s and 1980s, the San Carlistas’ student nationalism “became a nationalism without a state” (p. 167). Largely giving up on liberalism in the context of military dictatorship and civil war, students—who became targets of state violence—united with workers and rural peasants in the popular movement and employed funeral marches and public spectacle, a “politics of death,” to dispute authority (p. 198). The thoughtful coda brings this history to the present, tracing the lineage of San Carlistas to current universitarios, the politics of memory on campus, and HIJOS, a political group of children of the disappeared.
This City Belongs to You is a welcome addition for those interested in youth movements, university politics, and the role of educational institutions in class formation. Although not her focus, hovering at the edge of the San Carlistas’ protests were also secondary students and teacher unions, marching alongside universitarios at protests and funeral processions. Consequently, Vrana's narrative implicitly raises questions regarding the relationship between K-12 and higher education, begging us to consider how and when these demarcations are and are not helpful. Also lingering beneath the surface is the role of privatization. While USAC was the singular public university until 1961, rivaled only by the conservative military academy, the next few decades witnessed a flurry of private universities offering not only additional options but explicitly “apolitical” ones. This raises key questions about the impact of marketization on student and national political culture—a fruitful avenue of inquiry in the growing literature on neoliberalism and schooling around the globe.
While an important work for Latin Americanists, This City Belongs to You also offers an opportunity for US educational historians to engage with stories outside their borders. Given the rising number of Latinx students in US public schools, it is all the more important for North American educationists to familiarize themselves with the countries and regions from which their students hail, including their rich and varied political and educational traditions.
