Pedagogy or Violence: University Extension Programming during Guatemala’s Civil War

• In Event: Education and Citizen Formation in Central America

Abstract

In 1944, a democratic revolution bestowed upon Guatemala’s national University of San Carlos (USAC) two legacies: autonomy and the duty to solve national problems. Ten years later, the failure of the revolution was especially acute for San Carlos students (San Carlistas), who had been so empowered by the revolution. When a guerrilla movement gained momentum in the early 1960s, some students were eager to participate, but others instead developed programs for national progress, often informed by ongoing debates in Latin American dependency theory. University Extension Programs exemplified the dependency-influenced response to social inequality and promoted the “holistic development of the personality, body, spirit, and mind.” This paper examines the effect of successful (and failed) applications of these theories in the context of post-World War II integrationism, student nationalism, and new counterrevolutionary state violence. But rather than gauge the effect or effectiveness of these programs on poor rural and urban communities, this paper emphasizes how extension programs changed the university students and faculty who organized them.
I argue that extension programming was a key way in which university students (urban, elite, non-indigenous) reimagined their relationship to the countryside. I argue that San Carlistas’s practices revealed class- and race-disciplined vision of progress—an essence of the pueblo of Guatemala—that pictured peaceful Mayan communities in a fecund landscape. At times this vision affirmed guerrillas’ suspicions that the university could only ever be bourgeois. Indeed, San Carlistas inhabited an ambivalent status as intellectual elites in a peripheral nation. Along the way, San Carlistas reworked dependista theory to suit their needs: they offered counter readings that emphasized music and arts programs as political and found their way into meaningful solidarities with rural Guatemalans in the precise years when a series of military presidents worked to forbid such alliances at all costs. I close with an especially interesting event – a return to the familiar USAC motto (Id y enseñad a todos!), only this time inverted and painted three stories tall on the side of the history building by a roguish USAC muralist in 1973 (Id y aprended de todos, o si no, comed caca!).

Author

• Heather Vrana, Southern Connecticut State University