Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. T. Way is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Georgia State University.

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THE MAYAN IN THE MALL

Duke University Press

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION. Grand Tikal Futura: "Putting the Mayan in the Mall"............................................1ONE. "Like Sturdy Little Animals": Making the Modern Anti-Modern, 1920s–1944...........................13TWO. Chaos and Rationality: The Dialectic of the Guatemalan Ghetto...........................................41THREE. Oficios de su Sexo: Gender, the Informal Economy, and Anticommunist Development.......................67FOUR. Making the Immoral Metropolis: Infrastructure, Economics, and War......................................94FIVE. Executing Capital: Green Revolution, Genocide, and the Transition to Neoliberalism.....................124SIX. A Society of Vendors: Contradictions and Everyday Life in the Guatemalan Market.........................152SEVEN. Cuatro Gramos Norte: Fragmentation and Concentration in the Wake of Victory...........................181APPENDIX. A Grass-roots List of Transnationals in Guatemala, circa 1978......................................210NOTES........................................................................................................217GLOSSARY.....................................................................................................277BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................279INDEX........................................................................................................301

Chapter One

Making the Modern Anti-Modern, 1920s–1944

Guatemalan modernity is paradoxical. The nation's landscape embraces malls like Grand Tikal Futura and mountain villages where no light bulb has ever shone. Its labor and wage structures are at once futuristic and anachronistic, showing where transnational corporate capital, if unchecked, is headed but simultaneously reproducing racist, colonial peonage. Guatemala, enigmatic, cutting-edge, and caught in time like a bug in amber, is the land of the modern anti-modern.

Even the busiest urban spaces can seem anti-modern in Guatemala. In part this is thanks to their chaotic organization. Mostly, though, it's due to race—to the presence of the ethnic other, the Maya, whose very bodies stand emblematically for the past. Consider La Sexta, or Sixth Avenue, the main commercial boulevard of zone 1, the city's historic center. In the early twentieth century, La Sexta was the city's most luxurious strip—a history that an urban remodeling project in 2010 and 2011 has tried to recapture. Before its facelift in the new millennium, La Sexta had been an iconic lowbrow street market for decades. Its sidewalks were lined with vendors' kiosks, each equipped with blasting boombox and offering cheap Asian Walkmans, fake Duracells, knockoff Nikes, bootlegged cds, and maquiladora-made clothes. Only a footpath separated the stalls and the storefronts, and it overflowedwith humanity.

The stores, like the vendors, did a bustling business, even those that sold exactly the same chafa (junk) that those outside were hawking, their fluorescent interiors adding value in the form of distinction. Other commercial fixtures included Payless Shoes, McDonald's, and Burger King. The portal of Electra Stereo served as a shelter for homeless paupers addicted to sniffing glue. There were several centros comerciales, precursors to the modern mall, and cinemas with Hollywood's latest. One porn theater featured b-grade Italian smut. Cantinas abounded, and in some of them the neighborhood drag queens could be heard bragging about how many of the vending campesinos they had bagged. And rounding out the local commerce were retailers on foot: shoeshine boys, gum and candy sellers, and men pushing Coke and ice cream carts as they hollered promotions for their wares.

Before a team of Guatemalans had managed to "rescue" the historic center and Sexta Avenida, I asked one rich man what was so wrong with the area. He gestured widely: "Them." The street vendors. "Indians," the gesture said. "They're why no one goes there," this man told me.

In fact, no one went there at night. When the vendors rolled their boxes off on dollies toward the shantytowns at sundown, La Sexta died a sudden death. Only the sounds of street fights and occasional pops of gunfire broke the stillness. By day, however, the area provided entertainment and low-cost shopping for thousands of lower- and middle-class families. Many of the postmodern planners who were clamoring to remake the district and who continue to opine on urban development overlook the culture and commerce of the "popular class," envisioning instead a future exemplified by Grand Tikal Futura. Theirs is a first-world future that effaces the local and enshrines the global. They see the Mayan in the mall, a commercial universe in which Sexta Avenida's brown-skinned "them" couldn't hope for a better job, ever, than starvation-wage service work. Their racism, their U.S.-influenced vision of the future, and even the shape of the social landscape they seek to transform are all elements of specific modernist, internationally influenced developments in Guatemala.

Race, just as much as Guatemala's adherence to its status as agroexporter, conditioned the nation's modernism and affected its culture of development. Race serves as the thread that connects the national imaginary that emerged from the 1920s and the new labor movement, born in the same decade, that has had cultural and political impact ever since. Notions of race affected the nation's marketing of itself abroad, its relationship with other countries and international movements, and even its perceived position in a burgeoning hemispheric system dominated by the United States. Finally, racial ideas, labor patterns, and demographics were integral to Guatemala's institution-building and infrastructure-building projects and help in part to illuminate the underlying continuity behind the shocking swings in the style of modernism from the 1920s to the end of the Second World War.

Sea changes in Guatemalan modernism were marked by outbreaks of violence. The years from 1920 to 1944, key in Guatemala's process of globalization, began and ended with democratic revolutions. Overall, these years show a trajectory from romantic to reactionary modernism. In 1920 a cross-class popular movement dating to devastating earthquakes in late 1917 and early 1918 overthrew the dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920). This democratic movement heralded an era of ebullient and idealistic romantic modernism that lasted through the presidencies of Carlos Herrera (1920–21), José María Orellana (1921–26), and Lázaro Chacón (1926–30). Political chaos ensued when Chacón fell ill, and, ultimately, Jorge Ubico (1931–44) was elected. At the end of the first year of his term, Ubico began establishing himself as dictator. The nation moved into an age of "reactionary modernism," a term I borrow, as noted, from Jeffrey Herf's book on Germany during Weimar and the Third Reich. Herf argues that the Germans combined antimodernist "inwardness" with modernist "means-end rationality" and technology, a phenomenon also seen in Guatemala as the oppressive Ubico state appropriated and...