This Day in Resistance History: The Birthday of Miguel Angel Asturias

Many North Americans claim to have known nothing about the insidious control that the United States asserted in Central American countries in the 20^th century. Our insular tendency to only study American and European history and literature is partly to blame. But so is our distaste for the bald truth. Because since the 1930s, we have had the truth in the form of Miguel Angel Asturias’s work as our guide.

On June 19, 1899, Miguel Angel Asturias was born in Guatemala City. His father was the magistrate of the Guatemalan Supreme Court, and his mother was a teacher. Asturias himself became many things: a voice of clarity about the corrupt dictators of Guatemala and U.S. imperialism in his native land; a poet of remarkable skill; an attorney, a professor, and a diplomat; and a novelist of tremendous power. And yet, his work still goes almost completely ignored in the United States.

Asturias attended college and law school in Guatemala, and then, with a group of friends, founded the Popular University of Guatemala, offering courses to citizens who couldn’t afford tuition at the traditional colleges. He later taught at the university. But in 1923, Asturias left to study in Paris, and because of the incendiary nature of his writing, he spent much of the next decade there.

Among the works that Asturias wrote in Paris were beautiful reworkings of Mayan legends, collected under the title Legends of Guatemala; a volume of his poetry; and El Señor Presidente, his first political/social justice novel. It was a thinly veiled indictment of Estrada Cabrera, one in a line of infamous dictators. Both Asturias’s father and mother were arrested and lost their jobs during the Cabrera regime. His whole family, along with the rest of the country, suffered under Cabrera’s harsh policies. It was unsafe for Asturias to even bring his manuscript into Guatemala, so he left it with friends in Paris. Completed in 1933, it was not published until 1946.

Asturias was reluctant to return to Guatemala, and El Señor Presidente makes it clear why. The book portrays the daily fear under which the people of Guatemala lived, never knowing if they would be arrested or shot for some “crime” of which they were ignorant. At one point in the novel, a character says to a military commander, “Whether you’re guilty or innocent is irrelevant, General; what matters is whether you’re in favor or not with the President. It’s worse to be an innocent man frowned on by the government than a guilty one!” The novel closes as the main character watches a group of people he knows being marched away by El Presidente’s soldiers. Then he returns home, where his mother is saying rote Catholic prayers for their leader and also protection for those who are persecuted by the law. The irony of the moment is a bitter conclusion to the book. Clearly, to pray for both is no longer possible in Guatemala.

Asturias returned to Guatemala at the urging of a Parisian friend, who told him, “You are writing about things about which we Europeans don’t even dream,” and said that it was Asturias’s duty to be a truth-teller, reporting on events in his homeland.

Asturias took that duty seriously. In addition to El Señor Presidente, he wrote his famous trilogy (sometimes referred to as the Banana Trilogy) about American imperialism devouring Guatemala. These three novels, Viento Fuerte (1950), El Papa Verde (1954), and Los Ojos de Los Enterrados (1960), show what was happening to Guatemalan farmers when large U.S. companies moved in. They captured land, turned the former farmers into virtual slaves, and burned whole villages down with the approval of the current dictator. The United Fruit Company in these novels stands for all early corporations that invaded Central America and impoverished farmers who had made a living on their land for centuries.

Asturias brilliantly lampoons the American corporate representatives as affable, somewhat slow-witted, but amiable people who initially seem kind and generous to the native workers. But this is a façade that hides their actual agenda to overpower and control. Across four decades, more than 200,000 Guatemalans died just because, as Gabriel Maria Marquez summed it up, some gringos wanted to eat bananas.

Hombres de Maíz, which Asturias originally finished in 1946, is perhaps his best-known work in Central America. It tells the story of a tribe of Indians in Guatemala who begin to rebel as their tribal mountain lands are invaded by U.S. corporations that start planting corn there. The army is sent in to destroy the tribe on the orders of the U.S.-approved dictator in power. Asturias evoked all of his knowledge about Mayan myths and legends and wrote this story as if it were an ancient myth, using the same storytelling devises. The format, familiar to Guatemalans, made the book less accessible to North Americans and Europeans. It was not until after the novelist’s death that the book was understood by these audiences as his masterpiece.

The struggle of the “men of maize” takes on epic proportions, with the Indians led by a populist leader, Gaspar. He represents the voice of truth itself. When he is ultimately silenced as he’s shot by the soldiers, the tribe loses both its land and its former power to do magic. Asturias intended these losses to represent the death of a life that had once nurtured the people of Guatemala before new regimes of puppet dictators and creeping U.S. control replaced it.

Asturias’s politically charged writing came with a price: when Castillo Armas came into power in 1954, the novelist was forced to flee Guatemala. He traveled to Chile, where he lived with poet Pablo Neruda. Later, he moved to Buenos Aires where he wrote for the state newspaper. But another political coup there forced Asturias to move again, this time to Italy. Shortly afterward, the new president Méndez Montenegro of Guatemala named him ambassador to France.

Miguel Angel Asturias was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was honored with the Lenin Peace Prize, the el Primo Galvez Award, the Chavez Prize, and the Sylla Monsegur Prize for his own translation of Legends of Guatemala into French. Asturias died in 1974 while on a lecture tour of Spanish universities.

Asturias’s view on his writing was wholly activist in nature; he once told students in a lecture, “If you write novels merely to entertain…then burn them!” Someday, maybe students in the United States will become more familiar with this great author and voice for social justice. They’ll read, from a Central American viewpoint, about the ugly side of U.S. domination in other countries, routinely presented here in America as our charitable desire “to bring democracy to the world.”

Feliz cumpleaños, Miguel Angel Asturias…que se recuerdan.