6 - Freedom of the Indian

Summary

In the aftermath of this political upheaval, Guatemalans embarked on a tenuous democratic experiment across the 1920s. A group of radicalized Q’eqchi’s formed a branch of the Unionist Party and demanded that the state end forced wage labor, abolish debt contracts, and grant citizenship to all Mayas. For the next decade, Q’eqchi’s engaged in labor strikes and land invasions, which articulated another history of time and space based on memories of prior possession and land alienation. At the same time, urban reformers and intellectuals, including Miguel Angel Asturias, increasingly sought to move beyond the failed ladino nation-state that had taken power in 1871. To do so, they looked to Alta Verapaz to imagine a new nation based on modernization through prosperous coffee plantations and European immigration, which had yielded an alternative mestizaje project based on interracial mixing between German immigrants and Mayas. Guatemala’s decade-long democratic experiment came to an end with the Great Depression and Central America’s 1932 Red Scare.