Mid-twentieth-century Guatemalan modernism and the anesthetic of progress

Abstract

This article uses Guatemala City’s Centro Cívico as a point of departure to consider the wider implications of shared Western epistemological assumptions during the Cold War. It argues that an “esthetic of progress”, based on notions of economic development as well as teleological beliefs about historical change, became a dominant artistic motif in mid-twentieth-century Guatemalan modernism, emblematic of the artists belonging to the Generation of 1940. Owing to the homogenizing tendencies of the idea of progress and its universality within Guatemalan politics, however, the article suggests that the esthetic of progress also possessed anesthetic qualities that muted its political importance. In so doing, the work of the Generation of 1940 appealed to a wide variety of political actors and the “anesthetic of progress” helps to explain why the Centro Cívico project was conceived and constructed by governments of opposing ideological convictions.

Prenant à témoin le centre civique de la ville de Guatemala, conçu et construit durant la guerre froide, cet article s’intéresse à l’impact général des prémisses épistémologiques occidentales de l’époque. Il soutient qu’une “esthétique du progrès” (fondée sur des notions de développement économique et une vision téléologique des changements historiques) a dominé le modernisme guatémaltèque du milieu du 20e siècle, l’emblème des artistes de la Génération de 1940. L’omniprésence de l’idée de progrès dans la politique guatémaltèque, de même que son caractère homogénéisant nous amènent toutefois à considérer l’esthétique du progrès comme porteuse de qualités anesthésiantes, lesquelles ont miné son importance politique. Ces forces contradictoires à même le travail de la Génération de 1940 lui ont valu d’être apprécié d’une grande variété d’acteurs politiques. Ainsi, ‘l’anesthésie du progrès’ permet de comprendre pourquoi les gouvernements qui se sont succédé à cette époque ont tous, malgré leurs divergences idéologiques, participé à la conception et à la construction du centre civique.

Keywords:

• modernism
• architecture
• esthetics and anesthetics
• Cold War
• markers of modernity
• Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne
• progress

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the participants at the February 2012 PhD Workshop at the University of Saskatchewan for their feedback on this paper. Particular thanks are owed to Jim Handy, Erika Dyck, Patrick Chasse, and Kelly Butler for their insights and encouragement.

Notes

1. Susan Buck-Morss argues that mass utopia was a shared vision and collective dream of both socialist and capitalist projects during the course of the twentieth century. She writes: “The dream was itself an immense material power that transformed the natural world, investing industrially produced objects and built environments with collective, political desire” (Buck-Morss 2002, ix).

2. John Beverley, for example, has argued – akin to scholars of South-East Asian Subaltern Studies – that the competing Cold War camps all adhered to a desire for modernity (Beverley 2001).

3. French philosopher Auguste Comte had argued that in the mid-nineteenth century theologies never succeeded in asserting full domination over all aspects of everyday life and that the positive philosophy (as he called positivism) was a manner of assuming more penetrating social control through its motto of “Love, Order, Progress” in the face of “subversive schemes that are growing every day more dangerous to all the relations of domestic and social life” (Comte 1975, 319). For positivism’s applicability to Latin America, see Hale (1996). For the Guatemalan context, please see Aguilar (1960).

4. For more on the transition to coffee production, please see McCreery (1994).

5. Ricardo Casanova, “Segunda Carta al Señor Licenciado Don Magin Lláven” and “Tercera Carta”, Colección Valenzuela, Biblioteca Nacional, [Hojas Sueltas no. 1984, Year 1882].

6. To borrow E. Bradford Burns’ phrase. See Burns (1980).

7. “Cabrerismo y Liberalismo, El Estudiante”, 11 March 1920, 2–3. The mass support for the Unionist Movement in Guatemala City eventually led to the collapse of Estrada Cabrera’s two-decade long rule. The name is derived from the long-held desire, particularly among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberals, for Central American unity.

8. “A Los Guatemaltecos”, 29 April 1920, Colección Valenzuela, Biblioteca Nacional, [Hojas Sueltas no. 2003, Year 1920].

9. For contrasting accounts of the overthrow of Arbenz, please see Handy (1994), Gleijeses (1991), Schlesinger and Kinzer (1982).

10. See Galich (1968). After Turcios Lima’s untimely death in an automobile accident in October 1966, César Montes was promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the FAR. He, too, spoke in a similar lexicon, drawing correlations between the Arbenz period and the guerrilla insurrection and promoting a programme of progress.

11. Nelson (2009). In discussions of counterinsurgency, it is particularly revealing that the most vicious and repressive administration during the first 15 years of the counterrevolution was that of Julio César Méndez Montenegro (who proclaimed that his was the “Third Government of the Revolution”), the only civilian President until the 1985 Constitution forbade military officers from the presidency.

12. Historian Peter Gay has argued that Pound’s rallying call best summed up the aspirations of the European modernist movement (Gay 2008, 4).

13. Without negating objective realities, Timothy Mitchell has argued that the modern is often staged through representation, thus confirming its inclination towards performance (Mitchell 2000).

14. For more on ontology within Latin American cultural studies, please see Blaser (2009).

15. Naturally, the precepts of CIAM shifted over time, reflecting debates within the organization, as the widely heralded architects and urban planners that composed the organization’s ranks and executive rejected some of their earlier avant-garde militancy. While austere functionalism, for example, dominated early discussion – the spirit of which was best captured in Le Corbusier’s oft-quipped suggestion from Vers une architecture that “the house is a machine for living in” – after the Second World War, the International Style was no longer characterized by a strict rejection of ornamentality. Yet, nevertheless, the transcendental universality of CIAM’s project persisted (Le Corbusier 2008, 87).

16. CIAM’s lack of concern for ideological and geopolitical divides found expression in the Caribbean. The Catalan President of CIAM, Josep Lluís Sert, spent much of the 1950s working alongside his partners, Paul Lester Wiener and Paul Schulz, designing city plans throughout Latin America, including Cuba, Brazil, and Peru. Sert practiced his trade while in exile, having been deemed unfit to practice architecture in Spain by General Francisco Franco because of his socialist sympathies. Yet, amongst their Latin American works, the trio of architects designed an unrealized Pilot Plan for Havana from 1952 until 1959, a period during which time Fulgencio Batista consolidated then lost his grasp on power over the island nation. Their ambitions for using urban space to promote social progress was contradicted by the proposed removal of Batista’s presidential palace from the populace, affording the President security through the state’s segregation from the rest of the city. Nevertheless, the politics of the Batista regime did not deter the architects from attempting to impose their vision of urban progress upon Havana. See Timothy Hyde, “Planos, Planes, and Planificación: Josep Lluís Sert and the Idea of Planning,” in Mumford and Sarkis (2008).

17. For a complete explanation of Gramscian hegemony and its applicability, see Lears (1985); for an example from Latin American studies, please see Mallon (1995). In speaking of the “anesthetic of progress”, I don’t believe that modernist works that embodied progress lacked esthetic qualities; in fact, I view them as extremely politically-charged, particularly in discussions of monumentality and nationalism. Rather, I wish to imply that their esthetics were ideologically diluted because the “anesthetics of progress” aspire to universal themes. Anesthetics are not a wholesale negation but rather a dulling of sensory perception.

18. “Piden el Retorno de un Artista”, El Imparcial, 8 April 1957, CIRMA Archivo Histórico.

19. For collections of Vásquez’s work, please see Monsanto, Vásquez, and Escribá (1998).

20. Guillermo Monsanto, “Dagoberto Vásquez, una vida coherente”, in Monsanto, Vásquez, 48. Elsewhere, it has been argued that the Centro Cívico “has its origin in the artistic aperture initiated and developed in the revolutionary decade” (Campo 2006, 242).

21. Martínez, El Banco, pp. 233–234; also see Paula Monzón Sierra (1998, 2).

22. The verticality of the Bank of Guatemala building has been the subject of recent scholarly discussion. I have argued elsewhere that the building’s verticality mirrored the esthetic production of Dagoberto Vásquez, which in the post-1954 period came to privilege the vertical axis over the horizontal. Please see Kirkpatrick (2013). For further discussion of verticality in Guatemala City, see O’Neill and Fogarty-Valenzuela (2013).

23. Diario de Centro-América, 28 May 1966, p. 1; Ramón Blanco, “Galera”, El Imparcial, 3 June 1966, 2; “Conceptuoso Discurso de Monseñor Casariego al Bendecir el Edificio”, Diario de Centro-América, 30 May 1966, 1.

24. For a full discussion of both murals, see Campo (2006) and Martínez Aldana (2006).

25. “Identifica a su hijo,” Prensa Libre, 3 December 1966, 8 and “2 Killed in Gun Battle”, The New York Times, 4 December 1966, 25. The New York Times incorrectly identifies the dead as Arsenio Méndez Maldonado and José de Jesús Sánchez.

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Michael D. Kirkpatrick

Michael D. Kirkpatrick is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. His doctoral dissertation, “Optics and the Culture of Modernity in Guatemala City Since the Liberal Reforms”, was honored with the 2014 Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Outstanding Dissertation Award. His research interests include urban history in Central America, commodity culture, and the bourgeoisie during the Guatemalan Belle Epoque.