City Streets in Rural Places: Emerging Cities, Youth Cultures, and the Neoliberalization of Guatemala

Abstract

Abstract This article traces the emergence of “agro-urban” cities in rural Guatemala from the genocide of 1981–83 to the end of the millennium, paying special attention to the multilingual Mayan highlands. It weaves together a study of changes in the political economy and the built environment with an examination of the cultural transformations associated with urbanization, ethnic politics, and youth countercultures, including an outbreak of small Maya street gangs in the highlands in the late 1990s. It argues that one of the most “rural” regions on earth became home to a new, agrarian modality of the global city as the result of a stepwise process of neoliberalization and that, as part of this process, youth street cultures moved to the fore as a site of contested cultural production. Behind this surprising urbanization and cultural cosmopolitanism was massive public investment that worked to neoliberalize military structures of counterinsurgency and change the nation’s agricultural portfolio in the midst of a war that lasted until 1996. Organizations such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID, scores of NGOs, and the United Nations all played roles in these processes, just as they promoted a burgeoning Mayan Movement and helped to foment “neoliberal multiculturalism” as the politics of race came to overshadow the politics of class. In neoliberalizing Guatemala, the globally inflected city “street,” once a territory almost exclusively restricted to the capital city, took on national dimensions. It became a national commons, a social space in which youth negotiated the terms of their belonging.