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Securing the City

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................................viiAn Introduction Kedron Thomas, Kevin Lewis O'Neill, and Thomas Offit..................................................................................1Living Guatemala City, 1930s–2000s Deborah T. Levenson..........................................................................................25Primero de Julio Urban Experiences of Class Decline and Violence Manuela Camus.......................................................................49Cacique for a Neoliberal Age A Maya Retail Empire on the Streets of Guatemala City Thomas Offit......................................................67Privatization of Public Space The Displacement of Street Vendors in Guatemala City Rodrigo J. Véliz and Kevin Lewis O'Neill.....................83The Security Guard Industry in Guatemala Rural Communities and Urban Violence Avery Dickins de Girón............................................103Guatemala's New Violence as Structural Violence Notes from the Highlands Peter Benson, Kedron Thomas, and Edward F. Fischer..........................127Spaces of Structural Adjustment in Guatemala's Apparel Industry Kedron Thomas.........................................................................147Hands of Love Christian Outreach and the Spatialization of Ethnicity Kevin Lewis O'Neill.............................................................165References.............................................................................................................................................193Contributors...........................................................................................................................................213Index..................................................................................................................................................215

Chapter One

Deborah T. Levenson

Today Guatemala City is infamous as one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in Latin America. Older residents remember lovely neighborhoods and better times under clear skies, but today few would deny that the city edges on uninhabitable. Infrastructure deteriorates, the city has deindustrialized, and crime is everywhere, every day. The working poor are Guatemala City's majority, and the family wage economy that constitutes their time-honored strategy currently depends on the emigration of relatives who send money (now in rapidly decreasing amounts); the "informal economy" of goods and services; and the illegal economy of drugs and black-market clothing, cars, appliances, and other commodities. The last of these sources, however risky, appears to be the most reliable urban employer of youth, an age group that represents the city's future, the greater part of its population, and one half of those designated as poor (see Offit, this volume, for discussion of youth in the informal economy). Unlike Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, there are few myths or colorful narratives about this capital city; it is a literary subject only in Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias's chilling 1930s novel El señor Presidente, where it makes an appearance as the setting for a police state replete with beggars, night prowlers, dark alleys, traps, lies, cells, spies, and corrupt politicians. It is easy to envision Guatemala City as a complete disaster, another rapidly decaying slum on the "planet of slums" (Davis 2006).

My point of departure in this essay, however, is that the city is not dead. Popular culture and the intersections, relationships, and varied activities of the over 2.5 million people who live in the capital make Guatemala City more than a static embodiment of inequalities wherein the rich live in gated communities and the poor in shantytowns of misery. Politics and economics have informed the possibilities available to people as they have moved in and given shape to their surroundings; people are part of the city's infrastructure (Simone 2004). In the 1970s, a large urban movement gave qualities of democracy and popular power to neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and the streets—despite, because of, and in the face of state terrorism. In the 2000s, however, "peace" time, neoliberalism, global financial disaster, unemployment, corruption, and violence frame how people live, with perhaps greater difficulties for viable national life than they have ever experienced.

This essay looks at city life from the late 1930s to the 2000s through the coming-of-age narratives of four people from three generations of the Cruz-López family: its founder, María Cruz, an indigenous woman who arrived in Guatemala City alone at age twelve in 1938; her daughter Isabel; and Isabel's two sons, René and Andrés. All four have been modern protagonists, making their lives in the manners they thought best while still being aware of other options. When they told me their stories, each drew on different yet overlapping aspects of the rich urban repertoire offered by, among other things, Mexican movies and "world" youth culture, progressive movements of workers and women, liberal discourses of success and failure, and Christianity.

This family and the city are both studies in diversity and connections. I once sat in María's small apartment with kin that included a college graduate who works in finance for a multinational company, an unemployed truck driver with a certificate in computer skills, an organizer for a peasant organization, an unschooled vendor whose son works in the Sudan for the United Nations, a domestic worker, and a former guerrilla struggling to start a motorcycle repair shop. Most are Catholics or Evangelicals and one is a nonbeliever. The family is presumably ladino (nonindigenous), as are the majority of the city's residents; however, María is of indigenous descent. In kind with many others in the city, their zone, Zone 7, is heterogeneous. Most of its residents are poor (as are the majority in the López-Cruz family), but middle-class families also live there, and so do the absolutely impoverished who make their homes in and their living from an enormous garbage dump. Although the upper class resides in guarded compounds in Zones 10 and 14–16 of the city's twenty-two zones, there are few demarcated spaces that belong solely to the middle class, lower classes, or extremely poor. More often, they commingle throughout the rest of the city. Zone 12 offers an extreme case in which one of the city's wealthiest private schools borders one of its largest shantytowns. Hardly the result of planning, this variety, like that within the López-Cruz family, speaks to the broader histories of modern change and conflict in and beyond Guatemala City.

María

María's early years unfolded under a liberal dictatorship that maintained a low-wage rural export-oriented economy and used forced Maya labor to build national infrastructure. The Liberal Party dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) had brought his version of modern times to María's hometown of Salamá in Baja Verapaz by financing a bridge over the Río Salamá, a prison, and public schools. By the mid-1930s, under the liberal dictator Jorge Ubico (1931–44),...