The ascendancy of a free labor market did not occur until recently. Even by the middle of the twentieth century, money was an important part of life, but it had not become holy or almighty. Money appeared in rural tales of the period as the provenance of tall white strangers from whom villagers obtained it only at the cost of trouble, and in the oral tradition of the lower-class barrios of Guatemala City, it had a fiendish quality.³ By the 1940s, in Guatemala City— with a population of 170,000 and the country’s sole political, commercial, cultural, and financial center—several thousand artisans in over seven hundred small and medium-sized workshops dominated manufacturing.⁴ Modern industry was there but it was scarce: a few factories produced textiles, rubber shoes, soft drinks, beer, and cement. At the same time that large-scale capitalist relations of production based on wage labor were present in both the city and the countryside, they had not come to dominate life and they were not recognized as right, natural, or necessary.

By mid-century no cultural hegemony existed. The ruling Liberals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had not formulated a national discourse that articulated the enormous distinctions of class and culture into a relatively coherent whole. Guatemala was (and is) comprised of impoverished Maya Indians who were a majority speaking twenty-three languages, impoverished ladinos (non-Indians although often of mixed heritage), a small ladino middle class, and a wealthy minority that described itself in several different ways, including blanco, ladino, and español.⁵ Oligarchic Liberal party leaders such as Justo Rufino Barrios and Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the latter immortalized as the archetypal Latin American dictator in Miguel Angel Asturias’s El Señor President, believed in science, private property, progress, and individual achievement. The Liberals gave currency to notions of citizens’ rights and then constructed a despotic state that negated the liberties of which the Liberals spoke. Simultaneously nationalist and ardently North Atlantic-centric, the Liberals planned to re-create the Guatemalan population by “civilizing”—as they understood that—ladinos and Maya Indians through an extensive school system and by importing Europeans. But their educational projects and their schemes to attract European immigrants were implemented only minimally.⁶ Indians and lower-class ladinos remained as the majority, without cultural reformation and without developing a sense of cohesion with the urban and rural elites. The Liberals increased the state’s strength dramatically between the 1870s and the 1920s, but they did not legitimize it to most Guatemalans and they were inattentive to awakening grass roots democratic sentiment.

Although the Liberals courted urban artisans, an intellectual and mobilized group that articulated its views through brotherhoods, cooperatives, and mutual aid societies, they ultimately refused to incorporate artisans into national political life.⁷ Adopting aspects of Liberal ideology, these artisans were patriotic democrats who thought that “the working classes” should have rights; they were also Catholic militants who hated Liberal party anticlericalism. Disappointed in the Liberals, they organized against President Estrada Cabrera in the late 1910s to protest inflation and periodic forced urban labor on public works; as a teenager and already a carpenter, Antonio Obando Sánchez recalled being snatched off the street, “kidnapped” to dig graves and bury the dead in the city’s General Cemetery. Led by tailor Silverio Ortíz, artisans formed the Workers’ League and allied with the conservative, prochurch Unionist party in 1920 to overthrow Estrada Cabrera three years after an earthquake had devastated the city.⁸ Obando Sánchez fought with a Remington rifle alongside hundreds of young men and women from the urban popular classes. Artisans felt empowered by the 1920 uprising; Obando Sánchez remembered that “after what we did, there was not going to be this lowering of brows and taking off hats when we walk down the street and pass a señor... because now we are equals!” And a few years later, disillusioned by the Unionists and dismayed that “misery and poverty remained common and unchanged,” he and other artisans such as Antonio Cumes had enough freedom in the post-Estrada Cabrera 1920s to form the Guatemalan section of the Central American Communist party. Small, vocal, and very active, the party’s life ended in late 1931 after Liberal Jorge Ubico took power. Obando Sánchez and many others were jailed, unions and parties were abolished, most newspapers were closed, and even particular words, such as strike and worker, were banned.⁹

Obando Sánchez got out of jail in Guatemala City in July 1944, freed by uprisings that led to a popular revolution in October 1944 as the Allies were triumphantly ending World War II. He felt confidant of the victory of democratic capitalists and Communists over tyranny everywhere on earth, and he thought that humanity, armed with conscience and science, would soon “end forever war, hatred, prejudice, poverty, injustice and disease.”¹⁰ Consumed by the power of this promise, he spent the next forty years trying to make it come true in Guatemala, but he could not.

Artisans, teachers, and railroad workers were critical to the 1944 revolution, and during the next ten years they built a dynamic urban labor movement that vigorously advocated broad social change.¹² A euphoric spirit of being in the forefront of a heroic epoch pervaded the urban unions. ”Brothers: Your work is the art of printing life!,” read a line of poetry in a printer’s newspaper.¹³ Urban trade unionists were visionary modernists calling for industrial development and spending their Sundays in the countryside exhorting peasants to agitate for land reform. They fought for and achieved much, including higher wages, social security, minimal day-care, a working-class press, cultural circles, and a fair degree of organization; trade unionism flourished as never before or since. By 1954 10 percent of the urban and rural labor force was unionized and belonged to a national alliance, the General Confederation of Guatemalan Workers (CGTG), established in 1951. Forming the backbone of the confederation were unions of tailors, printers, barbers, bakers, textile workers, carpenters, and shoemakers; teachers in the Union of Guatemalan Educational Workers (STEG); and railroad workers organized in the Railroad Workers’ Mutual Aid Union (SAMF).¹⁴ The achievement of a unified central signaled the victory of members of a new Guatemalan Communist party and independent militants over a less effective group of openly anticommunist union leaders, who were primarily from the railroad workers’ SAMF, the only urban union where Communist participation in leadership was seriously contested.¹⁵

The Communist party, named the Guatemalan Labor party (PGT), evolved from a closely woven milieu of artisans and intellectuals drawn to the task of elaborating a just society and an authentic national culture. Its leaders included writer Huberto Alvarado (immersed in literary circles, he was the son of a printer involved in the 1920 overthrow of Estrada Cabrera and in the 1944 revolution), journalist and law student José Manuel Fortuny, printer José Alberto Cardoza, university student Bernardo Alvarado Monzón, schoolteacher Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez, who became the party’s most prominent spokesperson, and Salvadoran Communists living in Guatemala City such as feminist trade unionist Graciela García and shoemaker Miguel Mármol. After lengthy debates over the nature of the Arévalo government and of progress, they constituted the party in 1949.¹⁶

PGT, like Communist parties elsewhere in Latin America, identified feudalism and not capitalism as the principal cause of poverty and stagnation, and it supported an alliance with the native bourgeoisie to construct nationally owned capitalism; land reform would destroy the “feudal” landed oligarchy, create an internal market, and thus “open the path to industrialization of the country, prosperity, and national economic independence.”¹⁷ In line with world Communist thinking in the post-World War II years, PGT at times projected national capitalism as a good means for reaching socialism and at times as simply good. In either case, it did not propagandize for workers’ power over production or for the abolition of wage labor. Nevertheless, constantly redbaited and violently attacked because it demanded benefits and higher wages for workers and land reform for peasants, PGT protected itself by building a consensus in the labor movement and among many government officials that anticommunism was a weapon against nationalism and democracy. Belittling anticommunism—and not an awareness of, or interest in, an alternative to capitalism—emerged as a major theme in cartoons and articles in the over forty newspapers published in this brief era by unions and by groups of students, artists, women, and peasants.¹⁸

It is necessary to recognize the importance of Communists, especially in the Arbenz years (1951–54). The Guatemalan Labor party enthusiastically generated support for Arbenz through organizations such as unions and peasant leagues, and PGT intellectuals became vanguard planners of national capitalist growth; they coauthored the Land Reform of 1952 and read about Soviet agriculture to help them develop small-scale capitalist farming in the Guatemalan countryside.¹⁹ The robust, influential artists and writers in Saker-Ti, the period’s main cultural group, were usually also members of PGT or, if not, independent Marxists.²⁰ No ideology was as explanatory, nationalistic, developmentalistic, optimistic, or emotionally powerful as world Marxism in mid-century Guatemala, even though, and in part because, it was not decidedly anticapitalistic. But as vital as PGT was and as much leadership as it gave, it did not single-handedly direct unions (no one did), and, in any case, it gave no clear directions about how to reconcile supporting capitalist growth and defending workers.

To a certain extent the urban unions were captivated by the logic of the Communists’ dramatic strategy of promoting national capitalism as a road to social justice. Many labor activists saw the modern world, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s United States to Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, as a promising one of gains and rights for workers, one that abolished everything that was “backward.” The General Confederation of Guatemalan Workers confirmed that “a pact or agreement must be made between the organized proletariat of Guatemala and the progressive capitalist classes to develop a plan of industrialization which will bring economic independence to the country, economic development and the national and cultural elevation of the masses of workers.”²¹ Wage labor was theorized as progressive, and artisans portrayed artisans in their own union press as “belonging to the Middle Ages because they do not accept the introduction of machines and become reactionary in the face of progress.”²² With notions of development common to Communists and reformers alike, trade unionists upheld the call to create a new Guatemala. The remarkable artisans who were an essential part of the urban labor movement’s leadership could write about artisans as retrograde, and they imagined a better world as one without them. Inhibited by the social relations that surrounded them, these artisans wished to burst loose and achieve something new, and watching the way the new sometimes fell out, they fought to retain what they had and remain artisans.

No progressive bourgeoisie rallied to the cause of bourgeois democracy: Guatemalan industrialists, such as the Novella family which owned the city’s oldest factory, Cementos Novella y Cía, and the Abularach family, which threatened to close its textile factory, Nueva York, when a union began there in 1953, turned out to be among reformism’s worst enemies. And no matter what it said, the labor movement did not try to do away with artisans. Craft unions defended artisans against machines and aspired to accommodate machines as well, struggling with self-defense and the promotion of a paradigm of progress. In this context artisans often gave land reform and industrialization greater thought than did many government functionaries. When the Guatemalan-owned INCATECU rubber shoe factory won the right to import machinery to produce leather shoes in 1946, the shoemakers’ union successfully opposed the r...