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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Guatemaltequidad : Indians and Ladinos in the Guatemalan national imaginary Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q5542bn Author Montepeque, Axel O. Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Guatemaltequidad: Indians and Ladinos in the Guatemalan National Imaginary A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literature Axel O. Montepeque Committee in charge: Professor Rosaura Sánchez, Chair Professor John D. Blanco Professor Jaime Concha Professor David Gutiérrez Professor Milos Kokotovic 2011 Copyright Axel O. Montepeque, 2011 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Axel O. Montepeque is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2011 iii DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my family in the U.S. and Guatemala, especially my mother, Aura Marina Ovares Mendizabal, whose support throughout the years has made my writing possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page………………………………………………………………… iii Dedication……………………………………………………………………… iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………. v Vita…………………………………………………………………………….. vi Abstract………………………………………………………………………... vii I. Formation of the Ladino Imagined Community………………………. 1 II. Guatemala 1940s: Revolutionary Nationalisms………………………. 66 III. Guatemala 1960s: Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Ideology…….. 121 IV. Rearticulating the Homeland: Memory, Forgetting, and Identity in U.S.-Guatemalan Literature………………………………………… 182 V. Conclusion…………………………………………………………….. 218 Works Cited…………………………………………………………… 224 v VITA 2001 Bachelor of Arts, Occidental College 2002-2010 Teaching Assistant, Department of Literature University of California, San Diego 2005 Master of Arts, University of California, San Diego 2011 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego AWARDS Dissertation Research Fellowship, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity University of California, San Diego, 2007 Dissertation Research Fellowship, Latino Studies Research Initiative University of California, San Diego, 2008 FIELDS OF STUDY Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Latin American Literature Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Central American Literature Colonial Central American Literature U.S. Latino Literature Race Theory and Ethnic Studies vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Guatemaltequidad: Indians and Ladinos in the Guatemalan National Imaginary by Axel O. Montepeque Doctor of Philosophy in Literature University of California, San Diego, 2011 Professor Rosaura Sánchez, Chair This dissertation examines representations of Guatemaltequidad (Guatemalan national identity) in Guatemalan and U.S.-Guatemalan literature. It proposes that the dominant construction of Guatemala as a Ladino nation has functioned to silence, marginalize, and exploit the Mayan population and that Guatemalan authors have at critical historical moments used literature to reimagine the nation in order to rearticulate the place of the indigenous majority. The first chapter argues that 19 th vii century Ladinos rejected the Creole national identity of Guatemala, as articulated by Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, and deployed an anti-indigenous discourse to reconfigure Guatemala as a Ladino nation. The following two chapters analyze how Guatemalan authors during critical moments in the 20 th century produce transculturated literature to reformulate the national identity. The second chapter focuses on the democratic aperture that lasted from 1944 to 1954. Specifically, I compare and contrast Mario Monteforte Toledo’s novel, Entre la piedra y la cruz , and Miguel Ángel Asturias’s, Hombres de maíz . While both novels are critical of the marginalization of the indigenous population, I argue that the transculturated form of Hombres de maíz reconfigures the positionality of the indigenous majority within the nation. The third chapter focuses on the first period of armed conflict in the 1960s. I argue that while critical of the dictatorship and U.S. imperialism, Marco Antonio Flores’s Los compañeros reproduces the dominant indofobia. Luis de Lión’s transculturated novel, El tiempo principia en Xibalbá , on the other hand, suggests that a revolutionary ideology particular to Guatemala must be founded in part upon a Mayan cosmology. In the fourth chapter, I turn to analyze U.S.-Guatemalan literature produced in the 1990s. By analyzing Francisco Goldman’s, The Long Night of White Chickens , and Héctor Tobar’s, The Tattooed Soldier , I argue that these novels reproduce the dominant construction of Guatemala as a Ladino nation, a representation that contributes to the minimization or erasure of the U.S. role in the Guatemalan armed conflict. viii I Formation of the Ladino Imagined Community In this dissertation, Guatemaltequidad: Indians and Ladinos in the Guatemalan National Imaginary , I draw attention to the Ladino imagined community that was formed during the period of wars fought between Creoles, Ladinos, and Indians 1 in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. By the late 19 th , elite Liberal Ladinos emerged victorious from the wars and they established a national project in which Ladino signified a modern Westernized Castilian speaking subject and Indian a “pre-modern” “relic” of Spanish colonialism. Having established Indians as an obstacle to modernization, the Ladinos now embarked on a campaign to enclose the Indian commons and to convert Indians into servile laborers on coffee plantations. The Ladino imagined community, then, was critical in legitimizing a division of labor that remained in place well into the 20 th century. Historians, sociologists, and ethnographers have analyzed the 1944 Revolution, the ten years of democratic rule (1944-1954), and the successive armed insurrections, all important challenges to the dictatorship and the Ladino controlled state. My aim, however, is to analyze how Guatemalan authors have utilized literature during these critical historical moments to not only criticize the exploitative conditions in Guatemala but also the Ladino national project. While many authors have produced texts critical of the exploitative social conditions in Guatemala, I propose that certain authors have drawn on the Quiché-Mayan cosmology to produce transculturated 1 I use the term Indian to refer to an indigenous person post-Conquest. If I refer to an indigenous person before the Conquest, I will specify whether that person is Quiché, Cakchiquel, Zutuhil, Mexica, and so on. 1 2 novels that in their very form demonstrate that a more inclusive national project is not only possible but also a necessity. In short, I will argue that some Guatemalan authors have utilized literature, an elite form of cultural production, not only to criticize the dictatorship but also to suggest alternative nationalisms. In this chapter, I will first explain why Guatemalan and U.S. scholars have not provided an adequate analysis of the formation of the Ladino imagined community. Continuing with this explanation, I will demonstrate that scholars who use the “theory of coloniality” and “world system analysis” in their study of the economic and political conditions in Latin America overemphasize the Spanish Conquest, minimize U.S. imperialism, negate the existence of non-capitalist modes of production, and reject the nation-state as a unit of analysis. While recognizing the importance of the Spanish Conquest and ensuing three hundred years of colonialism, I will argue that in the case of Guatemala the late 18 th and 19 th century struggles between Creoles, Ladinos, and Indians were critical in the formation of the Ladino national project, the Liberal dictatorship, and the division of labor, one based on an intensified feudal mode of production. After demonstrating the validity of the nation-state as a unit of analysis, I will analyze the transition from the Creole imagined community of the 17 th century to the Ladino one of the late 19 th . I will then provide a brief overview of the individual chapters to follow. By doing the foregoing, I will demonstrate that the Ladino imagined community merits analysis as does the literature that has been used to contest it. Scholarly Works on the Ladino Imagined Community 3 I attribute the lack of Guatemalan scholarship on the formation of the Ladino imagined community during the late colonial and post-colonial periods to the dominance of the official State narrative that equates Ladinoness with modernity and democracy, one which a majority of Ladino-Guatemalan scholars do not question. Another reason is that for most of the 20 th century Guatemalan scholars were unable to produce scholarly works that were critical of the dominant power structures. When the production of critical works accelerated in the latter half of the 20 th century, scholars focused on individual historical events such as the 1944 Revolution, the 1954 coup, or the armed conflict that began in the 1960s. It is understandable that they would do so given the enormous political, economic, and social cost that these events have had on Ladinos and Indians; but, unfortunately, they have not seen those critical historical moments as challenges to the construction of the Ladino imagined community. However, Guatemalan scholars are not alone in failing to understand this foundational period

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