Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-peace Guatemala

Abstract

The Guatemalan Revolution (1944–54) looms disproportionately large within twentieth-century scholarship. This pivotal democratic period stands alone, bookended by military dictatorships and the 36-year civil war (1960–96), with its genocidal violence against Indigenous peoples. Precisely why and how this brief era of democracy, referred to as the Ten Years of Spring, continues to resonate within Guatemalan national memory is the fundamental question asked by the edited collection Out of the Shadow. The contributors ask how and why this brief era of democracy has reverberated in the 1996 peace accords' aftermath, out of the shadow of the 1954 coup and Cold War counterrevolution. These scholars excavate internal, political, cultural, social, racial, and geographic dynamics to present a more nuanced panorama indicative of the often contradictory aims of many revolutions in many places.This collection situates itself within a monumental historiography, scholarly trends that the editors identify as overlapping strands of interpretation and justification. The first strand identifies US foreign intervention as critical to the military coup that deposed the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. The second strand emphasizes the revolution's untimely end and the internal barriers to change that emerged, intertwining with the first strand to either defend or condemn the 1954 overthrow. The third strand, highlighting Guatemala's historical racism, emerged within the truth and reconciliation commission's indictment of the genocide against Maya Indigenous communities. Out of the Shadow proposes a fourth strand that builds on previous insights from twenty-first-century postpeace Guatemala by accentuating “the shifting memory and meaning of Guatemala's ‘Ten Years of Spring’ in the present and the past” and thereby identifying sociopolitical continuity and change over the past 60 years (p. 9). The collection's contributors bring decades of archival expertise, historical analysis, personal lived experience, and solidarity with a variety of Guatemalan communities.The book's four parts highlight regions, frameworks, and actors that challenge the dominant historical revolutionary narrative. Part 1 examines the revolution's sociopolitical policies by focusing on “new regions.” Chapter 1 explores the activism of Black and mixed-race labor leaders in Izabal as they embraced key social and political transformations within the banana workers' union. Chapter 2 reveals how the 1952 agrarian reform was transformed by Indigenous communities, who forced the state to adopt a more holistic model of agricultural development that tried to balance productivity, environmental health, and social well-being. This chapter demonstrates how empowered campesinos could quickly reduce inequality, improve productivity, and address environmental problems (p. 59). Chapter 3 focuses on Poptún, a little-known frontier agricultural settlement initiated by President Juan José Arévalo (1945–50) that sought to prove that the jungle landscape could be controlled scientifically and that also played a strategic role in Guatemala's political posturing against both Belize and Mexico.Part 2, “New Frames,” examines the revolution via new themes. Chapter 4 traces the historical trajectory of Guatemala's “indigenous problem” and the historic use of racism in state making. Here the unstable categories of ethnic and national identity are linked to Cold War geopolitics and binaries, which the author suggests obscure the ethnic fluidity and transculturality present throughout Guatemalan history. Chapter 5 explores the youth organizations that secretly coalesced as the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajadores in 1949. Chapter 6 addresses the traditional representation and periodization of the revolutionary democratic decade to question how radical it was. Disrupting monolithic conclusions, this chapter uncovers a variety of experiences dependent on social or ethnic identity and concludes that a multiplicity of historical narratives contributes to a more just, democratic nation (p. 166).Part 3, “New Actors,” uncovers critical pieces of the revolutionary story. Chapter 7 asks how medical experimentation by US doctors, with the full knowledge of President Arévalo, could have occurred within a revolutionary context. The authors expose key continuities with prerevolutionary history, including racism, oppression, and compromise. Chapter 8 examines the Instituto Indigenista Nacional de Guatemala (IING) as a neocolonial institution. While well-intentioned, IING employees ultimately were part of a larger process that continued to replicate hierarchy and racist relationships.Part 4 focuses on “new memories.” Chapter 9 reveals links across the 1980s and 1990s between communities of resistance, self-determination efforts, and state repression, including questions of gender roles, religious identity, and social justice. Chapter 10 explores the current resurgence of revolutionary ideals in the devastating civil war's aftermath, which includes continued social violence, political and legal impunity, corruption, and ever-deepening poverty.As Guatemalans face neoliberalism, corruption, and dashed hopes following the peace accords, Out of the Shadow demonstrates that revolutionary ideals continue to resonate across the decades. These essays illuminate sociopolitical continuity and disruption, shifting memories, and new stories. The complexity offered here suggests that the revolution reformed existing institutional structures rather than replacing them. This critical volume excavates the forgotten revolutions while also attending to their enduring legacies and potency within the present, which suggest that revolutionary ideals remain even more urgent.