Quetzaltenango

Quetzaltenango, second largest city of Guatemala (2002 est. pop. 127,569) and the most important of Los Altos, the western highlands region. It occupies a wide and fertile valley at 7,654 feet above sea level, surrounded by a group of high mountains and volcanoes, one of which, the Santa María, destroyed the city in 1902.

In pre-Columbian times, Quetzaltenango was an important Maya-K'iche' center, known as Xelajú; it still has a sizable Indian population. It is near the site of the battle in which the Spanish army under Pedro de Alvarado defeated the legendary Tecúnumán and his Quiché warriors in 1524. This encounter marked the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the area. A backwater of the Kingdom of Guatemala for most of the colonial period, Quetzaltenango finally obtained the rank of city in 1825. As early as the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, the city had developed into the chief commercial center of Los Altos, home to a sizable Spanish and ladino population.

In the early nineteenth century its principal citizens led Los Altos in a determined campaign to win greater economic and political autonomy from the capital, Guatemala City. This regionalist movement bore fruit for a brief period (1838–1840) when Quetzaltenango became the capital of the state of Los Altos, the sixth of the Central American Federation. The federation collapsed, however, and the region was forcefully reincorporated into Guatemala by the Conservative dictator Rafael Carrera in 1840.

Under the Liberal regimes (1873–1944), Quetzaltenango quickly developed into the financial and marketing center of the expanding coffee industry. The inauguration of the electric railway in 1930 and its dismantling shortly afterward signaled the end of the coffee boom and the onset of less prosperous times for the city. Today Quetzaltenango is a marketing and manufacturing center and the seat of two university faculties.

See alsoGuatemala .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Julio De La Roca, Biografía de un pueblo (1971).

Jorge H. González, "Una historia de Los Altos, el sexto estado de la Federación Centroamericana," M.A. thesis, Tulane University, 1989.

Additional Bibliography

Grandin, Greg. "Everyday Forms of State Decomposition: Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 1954." Bulletin of Latin American Research (July 2000): 303-320.

Grandin, Greg. "Can the Subaltern Be Seen?: Photography and the Affects of Nationalism." Hispanic American Historical Review (February 2004): 83-111.

                                     Jorge H. GonzÁlez