Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954

Abstract

In her beautifully researched Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954, historian Patricia Harms opens the windows wide on the world of ladina women's organizations from the outset of the Liberal Party's consolidation of power to the overthrow of the October Revolution's reformist government. The book is primarily an analytical narrative that restores to the historical record the ideas and actions of urban, mainly middle-class ladina women who created maternalist feminist circles. The book, in its introduction, seven chapters, epilogue, informative notes, and useful appendixes with brief biographies of the largely unknown women who formed the core of the women's movement, looks at Guatemala City's ladina women–centered literary circles, journals, and organizations. Above all, Harms examines the intense dynamics of ladina women's mobilizations and ideologies during the period of the reformist October Revolution, from 1944 to 1954. In her introduction, Harms underscores that knowledge of women's history—making visible the invisible—is a prerequisite to, not a substitute for, gender analysis.Harms looks at three broad periods: the development of the Liberal Party and its discourses of progress, order, and secularism between 1871 and 1930; the Jorge Ubico dictatorship between 1930 and 1944; and the ten years of the October Revolution, from 1944 to 1954. The first of these periods saw the birth of a protofeminist consciousness that was articulated in two journals, La Voz de la Mujer and El Ideal, directed to literate urban ladina women and edited by the Lappara sisters, two fascinating women from a poor ladino family in Quetzaltenango. They advocated for a reimagined Liberal Party modernization that included women, poor people, and Catholic workers, and they created a space in which women intellectuals were legitimized to speak and write about civic issues. This important legacy surfaced after the fall of the Manuel Estrada Cabrera dictatorship, when in the 1920s women formed an overtly feminist group, the Sociedad Gabriela Mistral. Although gender roles were not challenged and maternalism remained the unquestioned avenue for women's roles outside the home in moral education and social welfare, the 1920s had many dynamics. Alberto Masferrer's social justice Vitalism and Mistral-inspired theosophy joined in the ideological crucible of maternalism, Catholicism, and liberalism. Out of this came women educators such the remarkable and prolific Luz Valle, who even under the Ubico dictatorship pushed maternal feminist thought to make materialist critiques of social and economic structures.The bulk of the book is devoted to the intense reform years of the October Revolution. The male leadership of the revolution marginalized women, and so has most literature on this period. Harms's important intervention demonstrates women's centrality in the trajectories of both reformism and its opposition. On the progressive side, gains that women made were largely the result of their own activism. They created communal kitchens and day-care centers vital to women workers even before Juan José Arévalo's election, they advocated for and won suffrage for literate women, and in 1947 they organized the first Inter-American Congress of Women, which drew the US State Department's direct attention because of its outspoken opposition to Cold War politics. Harms fascinatingly casts new light on the initiatives of the Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca, known primarily as a women's group formed in 1951 by socialist-leaning urban ladina professionals and artists who supported the revolution. Harms shows that the Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca tried to radicalize the revolution in ways that other progressive groups did not. The group initiated a cross-class alliance that came to include thousands of mainly poor rural and working-class women. Its members sought—without success—to extend suffrage to illiterate Guatemalans, amend the 1947 Labor Code to include domestic workers and pieceworkers, alter the 1952 land reform in the interest of landless rural workers, and arm themselves against the 1954 coup. The Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca stands as a tribute to what could have happened.Sidelining women was the Achilles' heel of reformism, and the absence of a feminist challenge to gender roles left maternal feminism vulnerable to the opposition. The counterrevolutionary movement, and especially the Catholic Church hierarchy, paid close attention to urban women and sought their support as a key part in its strategy. The movement animated a conservative maternalism by claiming that under communism the state would replace the family and the church. Its unmatched hymn was the protection of the traditional woman and of God.Ladina Social Activism in Guatemala City, 1871–1954 is an important book full of exciting information. What Harms leaves unexplored are the serious implications of her observation that ladina feminists turned a blind eye to ethnicity. Throughout these over six decades Mayas formed the demographic majority in Guatemala, the discourse of “el problema del indio” was current, and Mayas worked in the city. Urban ladinas no doubt saw Maya women who worked as maids everyday. Harms's work invites us to consider how feminism can square with racism.