Optics and the Culture of Modernity in Guatemala City Since the Liberal Reforms

OPTICS AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNITY IN GUATEMALA CITY SINCE THE LIBERAL REFORMS A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of History University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By MICHAEL D. KIRKPATRICK © Michael D. Kirkpatrick, September 2013. All rights reserved. Permission to Use In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the department Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copy or publication use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any use which may be made of any material in my thesis. i ABSTRACT In the years after the Liberal Reforms of the 1870s, the capitalization of coffee production and buttressing of coercive labour regimes in rural Guatemala brought huge amounts of surplus capital to Guatemala City. Individual families—either invested in land or export houses—and the state used this newfound wealth to transform and beautify the capital, effectively inaugurating the modern era in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This dissertation considers the urban experience of modernity in Guatemala City since the 1870s. It argues that until the 1920s and 1930s, modernity in the city was primarily influenced by aesthetic modernism in the form of shopping arcades and department stores with their commodities, sites of bourgeois pleasure and pomp such as the hippodrome and Temple to Minerva, society dances, expositions, and fairs. After this point, the social fallout of economic modernization increasingly defined the experience of urban modernity in Guatemala City. Capitalist development altered the social relations of production in the countryside, precipitating massive urbanization that characterized urban life in the second half of the twentieth century. My analysis helps to account for shifting perceptions of Guatemala City; regarded during the fin-de-siècle as the “Paris of Central America”—owing to its wide boulevards, dawning consumer culture, and cosmopolitan nature—the capital today is considered one of the most dangerous cities in the Americas. I argue that, since the Liberal Reforms, urban Guatemalans learned to see, act, and think as modern subjects. The idea of the “optics of modernity” is introduced to understand epistemological shifts in perception associated with technological, scientific, religious, social, economic, and cultural changes. The optics of modernity denote both the markers of modernity (such as trains, ii department stores, and new social types like dandies) and new subject positions that altered the experience of the modern world. With these optics of modernity, I argue that urban Guatemalans learned to acclimatize themselves to living in a modern city. The culture of modernity during the Guatemalan Belle Époque (roughly from 1892 until 1917) is of particular interest. This dissertation proposes that the economic expansion of the period was frequently punctuated by recessions and depressions as the prices of export agricultural commodities dropped and rebounded on global markets. These economic crises constrained the bourgeoisie’s visions of liberal utopia. A unique cultural phenomenon known as the cultura de esperar (the culture of expecting, hoping, and waiting) is introduced in this work to describe the epistemological predicaments that arose when the hopes and expectations of modernity were stifled by economic gluts. The analysis explores a wide variety of topics from nineteenth-century séance culture, bull fighting in cinema, the modernist avant-garde, and the dawning of consumer culture to the contrast between verticality in urban architecture and the expansion of urban slums. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Acknowledgments amount to a genealogy of the academic thought and personal relationships that spawn creativity and insight. I am grateful to so many people for their assistance and support. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Jim Handy, who never lost faith in my project even when it appeared to wander aimlessly like sleepwalkers through the streets of Parroquia Vieja. Jim taught me that cultural history can and should be messy but that this should neither discourage nor dissuade us from attempting to write it. I am similarly indebted to my doctoral committee—Drs. Erika Dyck, Mark Meyers, and Kalowatie Deonandan, as well as my external examiner, Dr. Virginia Garrard-Burnett—who have provided me with endless support, insights, and confidence. In the History Department, I wish to thank Nadine Penner, Ingrid McGregor, Linda Dietz, and Dr. Geoff Cunfer. I would also like to acknowledge the staff at Murray Library at the University of Saskatchewan—especially Donna Canevari de Paredes, Jennifer Murray, and David Smith—who acquired suggested resources for the library collection and hunted down rare items from across North America through Interlibrary Loan. At the Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales at the Universidad de San Carlos, I would like to thank Oscar Peláez Almengor and Eduardo Antonio Velásquez Carrera. Thanks to the director of the Hemeroteca Nacional de Guatemala, María Eugenia Gordillo, and her staff, as well as the head of the Sala Fondo Antiguo at the Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala, Victoria Gómez, who made dozens of trips up iv countless flights of stairs to bring me rare documents from the Colección Valenzuela. Thanks to Gilberto Rodríguez Quintana at the Academia de Geografía é Historia de Guatemala, the staff at the Archivo General de Centro América in Guatemala City, and Thelma Porres and the staff at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica in Antigua. Conducting research far away from home can often be an alienating experience, so I would like to express my gratitude to my friends for their camaraderie and support in both Guatemala City and Quetzaltenango: Claudia Ramírez, Magda Toc, Abelina Osorio, Sergio Velásquez Calderón and his family, Elvia Hernández from Rey Sol, and Don Chilo Dumas (the closest embodiment of Juan Chapin that I can possibly imagine). José Manuel Mayorga’s love for Guatemala City was always refreshing and reinvigorating, and I greatly treasured my run-ins with him in Zona 2 and the Centro Histórico. Julie Gibbings and Robbie Scott deserve special recognition for helping me find my bearings in Guatemala City and its research institutions—without them I would have been lost for longer than I care to admit. Meals and conversation at Simon and Becca Granovsky- Larsen’s apartment in Xela were always welcome and plenty of fun, even when Tyler Shipley was in attendance. As well, I’d like to acknowledge my fellow investigadores extranjeros: Paola Reyes, Ricardo Fagoaga, Owen Jones, Heather Vrana, Lisa Munro, Martha Few, and Patti Harms. I value our many conversations both in Guatemala, at conferences, and elsewhere. I am forever indebted to the friends and colleagues in Canada who were the ticks and tocks of my working day, those with whom I shared meals and small-talk, deep conversation and beer: Marc Roy, Adam Grieve, Matt Gravlin, Scott Silver, Lenore v Maier, Erin Wolfson, Matt Todd, Sara and Haylee Hansvall, Paul Burrows, Rob Morley, Marc MacDonald, Camie Augustus, Scott Rutherford, Kurt Korneski, Colleen Krushelinski, Heather Stanley, Jon Clapperton, Liam Haggarty, AERV, my rhymes-with- magical sports team, and Lilith. Very special thanks to my fellow doctoral candidates at the University of Saskatchewan, who—through their research—have come to understand the paces and rhythms of la ciudad capital by my side: Kelly Anne Butler, Marie-Christine Dugal, Rachel Hatcher, Patrick Chasse, and Carla Fehr. Your friendship and constructive criticism mean very much to me. Thanks for all the tomfoolery and associated giggles. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents, Malcolm and Charlotte Kirkpatrick, my sisters Jennifer and Kimberly, and their families. Your understanding and patience has been saintly. And your thoughtfulness at all the right times always moved me. Thank you for being my pillar. Funding for this dissertation came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the University of Saskatchewan College of Graduate Studies and Research, and the Department of History. vi DEDICATION Much to my pleasure, living in Saskatoon placed me approximately one hundred kilometers to the east of the homestead where my grandparents lived and where my mother was raised, just north of the small hamlet of Ruddell, Saskatchewan. In the early days of my doctorate, I frequently visited my grandparent’s farm for long weekends and holidays, and they always welcomed me with love and offered me respite from my academic work. My grandfather, David Rowland Wood—or simply Rollie—passed away in 2009 while I was researching this dissertation. His everyday life speaks to the tensions described within this work, even though he lived worlds apart from Guatemala. But, as I argue, the experience of modernity is a global phenomenon with which we are all forced to contend. My grandfather always had an uneasy relationship with change: in anticipation of rural electrification, he purchased electric kitchen appliances for my grandmother before their house had electric power. He also liked new trucks. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to bear witness to the decomposition of old buildings on his small homestead and would patch holes in roofs to slow the rotting of his farm. He passed innumerable hours trying to get the rusted engines of his old tractors to turn over.

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