To 37 years
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This past week, PLQ turned 37 years old. That’s a lot longer than I’ve been alive, and it’s hard to imagine the school in those years of 1988-89. As it was just coming into being, PLQ witnessed several events that would come to mark world history: the election of the first Bush presidency; the fall of the Berlin wall; Tiananmen square; the birth of the internet.
Here in Guatemala, the people were facing their own dramatic history unfolding: after over 30 years of US-backed military dictatorships, these years transitioned the state, for the first time since the CIA coup in 1954, to a civilian-led government. Promises of democracy and electoral participation echoed throughout the country, and the horrors of the genocidal Efrain Rios Montt regime only whispered of a recent past best left forgotten. Still, in the Western highlands around Xela, a small faction of guerilla fighters continued to wage the revolutionary struggle: ORPA, the People’s Organization in Arms.
It was this organization that Danilo Alvarado and Rene Leiva organized with on their campus at the University of San Carlos. They were well known student leaders, and in 1987 both became targets of military intelligence for their political activism. Taken off the street, tortured and killed, their bodies appeared two days later as a shocking display of violence by this supposedly “civil” government. Carlos Sanchez, the founder and current director of PLQ, witnessed this violence first-hand as a fellow student organizer.
PLQ was born out of this moment of political violence. By founding the school, Carlos and his fellow organizers sought to honor the memory of Danilo and Rene as they continued to organize in the city. It started underground, working out of a comrade’s apartment and providing instruction in the Spanish language to those tourists who demonstrated solidarity with the Guatemalan people’s struggle. This strategy at once gave an international audience to the crimes being committed here in the country, and gave these activists a real sense of security as they were accompanied by White, wealthy tourists.
Since then, PLQ has become a unique destination for politically-minded people to come and learn about the struggle here in Latin America. To this day, the presence of foreigners in our school allows a certain freedom to speak out and challenge the powerful elite of this country—a freedom not to be taken for granted these days. Yet over these 37 years, the political circumstances surrounding the school have changed dramatically. The revolutionary war is over. PLQ no longer has a direct connection to the people’s struggle, in Guatemala or globally. It remains grounded in its history of political activism, but is not itself a place of radical action.
Throughout this week spent reflecting on the history of this school and its current political disposition, I have been asking myself: what direction are we heading in now? Are we simply serving the tourist economy, with a social-justice edge on the market? Are we stuck in the past of a decades-old revolutionary movement? Or do we truly teach our students a radical history, one that helps us all better understand this contemporary moment? And, is learning the Spanish language enough of a radical act in and of itself? Or do we need more engagement, given the increasing solidarity demanded from our students with their Spanish speaking neighbors?
The questions linger; they are by no means meant to criticize the work we do here. Perhaps, they are better to be thought out by you all, those students who seem affected in one way or another by the school. PLQ seems to have a remarkably outsized impact on the students who come here; something, at least, feels potent about the place—though it is not up to us, the administration or even me, as another passer-through, to decide.
To sum up, the mood here is celebratory. Although it does not come without its complications, we congratulate ourselves on having made it this far, and bring in a live marimba band to play us out. Students and host families and teachers dance together; we eat cake; there’s a conga line. At the end of the day, the school is a place where people connect with each other, whether that be over the hard history that together we reconcile, or over the day-to-day acts that remind us of the simple human joy that is sharing space with each other.
On behalf of all the staff, teachers, and administration here, we extend our gratitude to you as alumni for having been involved, in big or small ways, with the project. We hope to continue to be a place of thoughtful and meaningful connection with the people, struggle and languages here in Guatemala.
Solidaridad,
Manni