Boulevards, Festivities, and Earthquakes: The Making of Guatemala City, 1880–1920

This article examines the socio-political and urban-cultural transformation of space in Guatemala City between 1871 and 1920, spearheaded by the rise of a new political regime known as the liberal reform period. By focusing on the social construction of the new public spaces of power, this study explores how the transformation of the capital city was one of the key instruments of the authoritarian regimes to legitimise their authority, power and new secular values in the urban space. The urban transformation redefined the use of land for capitalist development (expropriation of church properties and privatisation of communal lands), setting up new boundaries and reorganizing the capital in a new dynamic of urban segregation. It also meant the exclusion of the Indigenous population from living in the city. This study pays special attention to the role of three figures as the main protagonists and promoters of the localized urban transformations in Guatemala City during their respective reigns: Justo Rufino Barrios (1873–1885), José María Reyna Barrios (1892–1898) and Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920). Lefebvre’s conception of the social production of space is mobilized to analyze the creation of the material setting and the construction of those new spaces of power carefully planned and embedded with political meaning during the first period of modern urban growth in Guatemala City. Drawing on a variety of primary sources such as official records (Laws and Decrees, Memoirs of Public Works, Municipal records), newspapers, commercial guides, illustrated journals, city plans, postcards and photo albums, the article demonstrate how the new modern urban space was reorganized with clear political and economic interests, setting up a new process of urban segregation. The study also highlights the limitations and contradictions of the selected urban transformations, which ended abruptly with the earthquakes of 1917–18.