Liberalism, Protestantism, and Indigenous Resistance in Guatemala, 1870-1920

Abstract

Protestant missionaries came to Guatemala in the ideological vanguard of Justo Rufino Barrios's Liberal reform in the 1880s. Their work would be intimately linked to Liberal politics through the administration of Guatemala's most enduring dictator, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who stepped down in 1920 after nearly a quarter of a century in power. Liberalism, positivism, Social Darwinism, and Protestantism became the social tools with which the Liberal leadership hoped to craft a modern nation. Protestant missionaries, though always few, were assigned a central role in Estrada Cabrera's vision: the invited guests of a Liberal government, these North Americans came to Guatemala to reform not only the souls but also the minds, bodies and spirits of the indigenous population, making them loyal and productive citizens of the emerging state (El Mensajero, 1908, 3(1): 17).1 The Liberal vision was to create a modern, unified nation from a disparate mix of ethnicities, languages, classes, customs, and conflicting bonds of loyalty and association. As Benedict Anderson (1983) has pointed out in his Imagined Communities, in the 19th century the idea of nationalism was relatively new. The abstract notion of loyalty to a corporate nation or state as opposed to a more tangible fealty to a ruler or to an anthropic god had emerged from the Enlightenment in the late 17th century. By the 19th century nationalism had begun to replace these ancient loyalties. This new relationship created what Anderson calls the imagined community-imagined in the sense that although members of a nation will never know all their fellow members, they believe themselves to be part of a larger whole, a community in the sense that regardless of actual inequality and exploitation ... the

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