"DO NOT MESS WITH US!" Students & the State in Guatemala, 1944-1996
A lunch talk with Dr. Heather Vrana, Assistant Professor of History, Southern CT State, author of This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996
Location
Class of 1930 Room, Rockefeller Center
Sponsored by
Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program (LALACS)
Audience
Public
What is the relationship between youth, social class, and the nation-state? Reading across student newspapers, oral histories, and archival ephemera, this talk demonstrates how students and professors at Guatemala’s only public university, the University of San Carlos (USAC), shaped the meaning of the middle class through their encounters with the university and Guatemalan and United States governments between 1944 and 1996, a period that included a revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war. USAC students, called San Carlistas, formed a loose political consensus around faith in the principles of liberalism and their responsibility to lead the nation. This consensus—student nationalism—came to mediate contradictory understandings of the nation-state across the later twentieth century. By centering an often-marginalized region and period, this talk reveals how more expansive geographical and chronological frames complicate extant understandings of the relationship between class, politics, and protest, as well as articulations between the national and the global.
Heather A. Vrana is Assistant Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University. Her monograph, This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996, is forthcoming in July 2017 from the University of California Press. She is also editor of Anti-Colonial Texts from Central American Student Movements, a collection of primary sources from Central American student movements written between the 1920 and 1982 published by Edinburgh University Press. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Radical History Review, Journal of Genocide Research, Ethnohistory, e-misférica, and Journal of Latin American Geography. Vrana is a member of the Tepoztlán Collective and co-editor of Revisiting the Guatemalan Revolution, a multimedia digital history project.
***Please RSVP: Sheila.C.Laplante@dartmouth.edu
Location
Class of 1930 Room, Rockefeller Center
Sponsored by
Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Program (LALACS)
Audience
Public
