Symbolic Violence and Irreverent Discourse: Architecture and Graphic Design, 1993.

Abstract

Amid Guatemala’s pursuit of peace, the USAC campus witnessed its own internal conflict: Architecture and Graphic Design were engaged in a bitter confrontation that had been building for years and became especially visible in the bulletins of the Huelga de Dolores, where incendiary satire, heroic memory, and demands for dignity converged. This article revisits that pivotal year of 1993 through a dual lens: phenomenology, which exposes the affective charge behind each insult, mockery, or verse; and critical hermeneutics, which reveals how student discourse reproduced, in miniature, the broader national logics of power, exclusion, and confrontation.

Drawing on four mimeographed bulletins, the study examines the transformation of the classroom into a symbolic battleground, the use of humor as a strategy of visibility, and the satirical prophecy that anticipated the adversary’s expulsion. Read publicly every Friday leading up to the Declaratory Act of the Huelga, these texts functioned simultaneously as devices of collective reparation and as popular tribunals where legitimacy was contested. A key contribution of this study lies in its double reading—experiential and critical, subjective and contextual—which distinguishes it from purely descriptive or normative approaches to student rituals.

The analysis shows that...