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Central American Union or Guatemalan Republic? The National Question in Liberal Guatemala, 1871-1885*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
In his 1884 address to the National Assembly, President Justo Rufino Barrios gave a glowing report of a polity fired by the torch of Liberal progress. “When I see the movement and the animation in everything and everywhere, in our streets, in our plazas, in our roads and in our ports, I cannot repress a feeling of vanity.” He extolled not only commerce and new technology, but model prisons, a disciplined professional army, and “a school in the most miserable town and in the most hidden corner.” This is a world of flowing capital, technological linkages, and the ceaseless penetration of enlightenment into every corner of the Republic, where before there had been only a “dark mansion of apathy, of immobility, of stagnation and silence,” and where now we (Guatemalans) “can say that we have–if not everything–almost everything.” The Utopian rhetoric masked a rather different and sorry reality. Still, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, the succession of possessive plurals in Barrios' speech–our streets, our plazas, our roads–assured the listener of a solid sociological and political entity that can only be Guatemala. Surely Barrios spoke from the solid foundations of a Liberal nationalist certainty?
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1993
Footnotes
*
The author would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generous doctoral and post-doctoral fellowship assistance during the research and writing of this paper. Also, thanks are due to the wonderful staff of the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, to Arely Mendoza of the Biblioteca César Brañas, and to Louise Palmer of Yale University, all for special bibliographical assistance.
References
1 Mensaje que el Presidente de la República de Guatemala, Justo Rufino Barrios, dirije a la Asamblea Nacional Legislativa, 1 de marzo, 1884 (Guatemala: Tipografía de “El Progreso,” 1884), pp. 20–22.
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20 “Ley Orgánica de Instrucción Pública” (1875), reprinted in Rubio, , Biografía del General Justo Rufino Barrios, p. 256 Google Scholar; and for the 1882 revision of the law, see Orellana, González, Historia de la educación en Guatemala, pp. 298–99.Google Scholar
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29 Prospecto del Diario de Centro-América, undated single sheet (probably distributed in the final weeks of July, 1880) [emphasis mine].
30 Prospecto [emphasis mine].
31 While this paper was certainly read by far more Guatemalans than literati of the other capitals, the main point is the identifications and sense of shared space that it created inside Guatemala.
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49 “Editorial,” Diario de Centro-América, October 4, 1884, p. 1.
50 Vela, David, “Don Francisco Lainfiesta,” Introduction to Francisco Lainfiesta, Apuntamientos para la Historia de Guatemala [1886] (Guatemala: Editorial José de Pineda Ibarra, 1975), p. 18;Google Scholar Aycinena and Echeverría were two important conservative oligarchs of the mid nineteenth-century.
51 Indeed, in a ceremony of some symbolic significance, the presidents of both Honduras and El Salvador had come to Guatemala City for the independence celebrations of 1884; Diario de Centro-América, September 16, 1884.
52 Diario de Centro-América, July 26, 1884, p. 1.
53 The main newspaper of this struggle reproduced in 1920 a public address which justified Union in the following terms: “United by the feelings of blood that is one in our veins; by identical customs and religious creeds; by the sonorous tie of language; … by one elevated destiny that must be fulfilled: Union imposes itself. … Let us unite all the dispersed energies of the Isthmus in favor of our ideals.” “Discurso de Eduardo Mayorga,” El Unionista, January 15, 1920, 5.