This City Belongs to You

Heather Vrana's This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996 is the first English-language history of student politics in Guatemala and joins a new wave of scholarship on Guatemala City. This fine book focuses on the University of San Carlos (USAC), the country's only public university, the singular hub for relatively open political debates and the crucible for intellectuals, lawyers, and others who have been key in the unfolding of post–World War II Guatemalan history. The school's student activism has played a vital role in urban movements and has been a prominent feature of city life, a symbol of civic engagement, and a significant indicator of the strength of different political outlooks.This City Belongs to You follows generations of USAC students as they developed identities and commitments. It spans the decades of conflict over Guatemala's fate from the reformist 1944 October Revolution and the country's dramatic markers—the 1954 coup, state repression, resistance, and armed struggle—to the war of the 1980s. In her introduction Vrana makes clear that she is writing more than a history of students. Locating USAC as a cornerstone of racialized middle-class formation, she argues that activists united by what she calls “student nationalism,” a loose consensus about liberalism and a sense of responsibility to the nation, shaped the political culture of the middle classes. Underscoring that the middle classes bear the weight of serving as a measure of modernity, she challenges scholars to think about how activism “made the meaning of the middle class” (p. 18).The six chapters of This City Belongs to You offer an intricate chronicle of events, varying ideas, and student engagement. The first two chapters successfully dispute the standard narrative of consistent and unified dedication among USAC students and faculty to the 1944–54 reform governments that followed the October Revolution. The revolution granted USAC autonomy and enlisted students in programs and ministries, in line with the classic liberal notion that the educated would accomplish the task of modernizing and integrating the indigenous majority. This made nation builders out of students who were also immersed in sorting out the dazzling plethora of ideas right, center, and left that circulated internationally. In the early 1950s fundamental ideological trajectories got reconfigured in the context of the Cold War as either socialism, initially exemplified by the communist Guatemalan Labor Party (PGT), or fascism, as represented by the Committee of Anticommunist University Students (CEUA) aligned with the right-wing Roman Catholic Church of that era. It was the CEUA that came to shape university politics before the coup. Vrana makes the important point that nothing could make more vivid the student movements' power than the fact that the CEUA authored the country's pre- and post-1954 anticommunist discourse and bolstered one of the US government's most strategic Cold War victories. The erudite precoup social doctrine of Catholic intellectuals inspired the frenzied ultra-right National Liberation Movement (MLN).The title of chapter 3, “A Manner of Feeling, 1958–1962,” encapsulates Vrana's suggestive claim that the magnetism of affective rhetoric outweighed political definitions in the shift to postcoup adversarial politics. The violence that ended the May–June 1962 urban uprising against the closure of democratic spaces produced an emotional outrage fanned by students' deep sense of moral responsibility for the nation. Set in the volatile context of guerrilla groups, PGT support for elections, repression, and foreign-led investments, chapter 4 charts how USAC students “sought to solve underdevelopment and challenge North American imperialism in the 1960s and 1970s” and thus redefined student nationalism (p. 130). At USAC, cardinal questions of dependency and development and of Mayans' historical character were scrutinized for answers that Vrana links to ladino students' off-campus projects and to their construction of Mayan as a category, represented by the cartoon character Juan Tecú. The book's last two chapters deal with the lightning-paced years between 1976 and 1980, when many USAC students fortified ties with the poor, some students took sides in the divided revolutionary movement, state violence surpassed what everyone thought possible, and activists politicized funerals in what Vrana terms “funereal flânerie” (p. 210). A coda gives readers hope that violence has not shattered critical politics and historical memory.Of course, no one book can encompass everything. The second part of the title, A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944–1996, does not entirely reflect the book's content. The book says little about secondary students, who were often a vanguard in which young women formed a significant part. Perhaps this explains why the book focuses on men, and often those who were leaders. It looks at discourse in movement texts that reproduces normative gender roles, yet it does not explore the fact that there were women activists at USAC. If the author had followed women secondary students into the university, she would have found them and others, including in leadership roles in the faculties of law and journalism. That aside, this is an invaluable, timely, and engaging book that will significantly broaden our thinking about students—especially given its astute attention to how student nationalism changed—and about the making of the middle class, both in Guatemala and elsewhere

Media studies · Middle class · Modernity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America

• The middle class as a culture structure

  Open Access•Celso M Villegas•American Journal of Cultural…•2018

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