Arriving in Rabinal

Rabinal is the name of a town of about 10,000 people, and of the land surrounding it, an administrative district analogous to a county in the US, albeit smaller in size. Winding up the steep red dirt roads into the hills looming over the town you get a view of dusty hillside pastures marked by waist-high stone walls. As you continue you can look back on the green of irrigated cornfields and banana trees near the streams, the grid of town dominated by the white cathedral, a few clusters of adobe houses in villages outside town, and a few patches of trees. As you rise towards the clouds, the hills which loomed at the edge of town shrink into insignificance far below you, and you can look across the bowl of the valley to the mountains which enclose it on all sides. Five centuries ago, this valley was the land of a people called Achi. Their battles with surrounding kingdoms before the
arrival of the Spaniards are documented in the Rabinal Achi, a collection of speeches by warriors and kings from warring kingdoms that has been called the preColumbian Beowulf.

Because of the change in altitude the communities in the “county” are very different. The valley is much warmer, many plants like cotton, papaya, and mangos grow in the valley, but in the mountains they grow they are limited to things like broccoli, peaches, as well as many interesting fruits like matazans, granadillas, and jocote that I had never heard of before. I haven’t seen official statistics, but I know that I have gone from trying to
sleep in as little as possible in the valley, to putting a blanket over my sleeping bag and flannel pajamas next night in the mountains. Of course, I do not have a winter-ready sleeping bag, but it also illustrates the substantial differential in climate which can occur in six miles, when one rises almost 2000 feet.

It has also been interesting to compare the two areas I have worked in. The distance, 30 miles as the crow flies, belies clear differences in the way of life. The conflict in the Rabinal Achi is not with the Kakchiquels of Chimaltenango, but they were a rival group. Nowadays a visitor is likely to be struck by the smaller number cement houses in the villages of Rabinal. In Chimaltenango in the past few years, many families have built new houses of grey cinderblock, usually with money sent home by men working in the
United States. In Rabinal many young men express interest in going to the United States, but few have actually gone. I am much more aware of people struggling to participate in the local economy. Young fathers like those who go to the US if they lived in Chimaltenango, stack firewood or construction timber at roadside, negotiating with passing pickup drivers to carry it into town. Some journey to jobs in the capital, which allow them to see their family perhaps 2-3 days a month. One man worked on a large
construction project there to buy supplies so his brother could build him an adobe house in his hometown, and his family of seven could move from a house about 120 square feet to one of 450 square feet.

Adobe construction is still going on in Rabinal. In Chimaltenango, however, very few recently constructed houses are built wholly out of adobe: one of the few adobe house I remember had survived the 1976 earthquake. In contrast three of the two dozen families we work with in Rabinal built adobe houses this spring. In Chimaltenango there are many houses which incorporate knee-high adobe walls with cornstalks as “siding” up to the roof line. There, cornstalks tied together are a very common building material
and are also used for fences, or to protect young plants from chickens. In Rabinal cornstalks may be fed to animals, but I never saw anything built with them. This may reflect a different precolumbian tradition, or it may be an adaptation to poorer soils. I had few opportunities to compare them scientifically, but the few remaining cornstalks I standing when I arrived in Rabinal seemed thin, scarcely worth the trouble to cut, collect, and bind together. People in both communities proudly hang their seed corn from
the ceilings, but the cobs in Rabinal seem to average 8-10 inches, while they were nearly twice as long in Chimaltenango.

While the men in Rabinal still build with adobe bricks and red roof tiles as opposed to cinderblocks and corrugated aluminum, the women of Chimaltenango have conserved other traditions. There it is common to see mothers and daughters, or even three generations of women, seated around the house with the threads of a loom attached to a belt around their waist to weave the traditional top, called a huipil. In Rabinal few women know how to weave. Many wear machine-made blouses, and those with handwoven tradional tops have usually bought them.

One experience which most Guatemalan villages do share is planting corn. A few places with irrigation already have plants as tall as a person, but most of the communities we work with rely on the rains which began in mid May. I have witnessed much of the process of sowing corn, and even participated a little. One Tuesday most of the men in the village had gone to work on the water system: to clean the reservoir and see why the water ran only every four days instead of every other day. I showed up at the house of Don Joaquin to find his sons juggling a soccer ball in the small patio of hardened earth in front of his house. I wondered about our discussion about going to work in his fields as the boys playfully kicked the ball high. Suddenly the two oldest boys left the game, picked up azodons and headed out to the field. The English word for azodon is mattock, but if, like me, you have no idea what that is either, imagine an exremely large hoe. The metal blade was almost a foot wide and eight inches deep. Like a hoe, it is used to remove weeds from around growing plants, unlike a hoe, it is also used to remove weeds before planting.

Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of cutting cornstalks with a machete. The blade cuts the stalks as easily as a jedi lightsabre: once to cut the stalks, once to trim the tops to a uniform length, and you throw them on a pile. That is the type of physical labor it is easy to enjoy. Working with an azodon is not. The azodon was heavy, the movements awkward, dust assaulted my nose, I sweated in the heat, the field was steeply sloped and I kept falling downhill, I wanted to quit. Only the shame of being outworked by two boys who between them had spent fewer than 25 years on the planet kept me going. After an hour the younger boys came by the bring water and joke, then headed downhill toward the stream. After two more hours, we headed in. The nine year old came up from the creek carrying an adult's load of 20-30 pounds of firewood on his back. I thought about the contrast between the way kids seemed with the soccer ball, and now seriously returning from work.

Another experience I got to observe was the dances for the festivities of the Santa Cruz. First I saw it in a village The dancers wore masks of a bull, a monkey, and various human faces colored red, blue, or pink, and enacting scenes to the music of a marimba, the huge wooden xylophone which is traditional to Guatemala. It was enjoyable experience, but it left me unsure of the strength of cultural traditions. There were three dozen people watching the dozen dancers, and an inescapable part of the experience was people taking pictures: both outsiders like me, and members of the community, including one of the dancers. One man explained the names of the masks, how the theme related the conquest, and how people had grown less serious and less willing to participate since his grandfather’s day.

Two days later, we went to another performance, not in a village, but at a crossroads, where four to five hundred people from the various hamlets within four or five miles crowded around to watch three different sets of masked dancers and marimba players. One set did the same dance with the bull, and two enacted a different masked dance involving Spaniards and Moors, Gilbert and Sullivan type hats, and much swordfighting. There were people selling snacks and drinks from baskets, hordes of people milling around four or five thick around the dancers, all enjoying a tradition which here seemed very alive. My camera’s batteries had run out and in a way I’m glad: I didn’t see a single camera, and though I couldn’t help being an outsider it felt good to be experiencing
it rather than frantically recording it so I and other outsiders could gawk
at it later. This was clearly a spectacle, but one which remained an integral and eagerly supported part of the cultural life—so much so that there were people selling snacks from baskets—admittedly some of them were bags of chips.

At the end of the dances two processions set off for the religious component of the festivities carrying the “ark” of the Santa Cruz. Later that afternoon we saw the end of a procession, a room full of people kneeling on a carpet of pine needles were reciting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I was standing near Don Joaquin, and as people made their personal prayers I heard his prayer, that what had happened to him would not happen to his children

I thought about his kids, at work and at play. I also thought about the story he had told us several weeks before. When the army came twenty years ago, they left almost 200 people dead, including most of the women of the town: dumped in ravines or incinerated in their homes. It was a market day and many passing through the village were also killed, including those from many of the hamlets I had seen dancing and celebrating at the festival ofthe Santa Cruz. The details of what happened on the day of the massacre horrifying, but he talked about what he faced for the next few years as a survivor who had evaded the army. His home was destroyed, his crops torched in the fields, his chickens and other animals stolen he was left, “without a half a plate.” They may not have had much by our standards, but they had worked hard to obtain what they needed to live like human beings. Now instead of the roof in the houses they had built, they had to sleep in a cave or under a leaky sheet of plastic. Instead of eating their own store of corn and beans, wrung through weeks of the work which broke my back that day, they had to scrounge the woods, or send a child to town, to beg from monks, or a sympathetic townsperson. If the child wrangled a tortilla the food had to stretch a long way. They woke before dawn to sneak back to replant their burned fields. Lookouts wouldn’t do much good with the roads which bring pickups through the villages today, but in those years there were only narrow mountain trails and lookouts could warn of the approach of a platoon on foot. After three years the survivors did come out of the mountains, and Don Joaquin turned himself in for compulsory military service. After being beaten because his name was on a list of suspected guerillas, he was eventually sent to the coast to complete his term of service, and he returned to rebuild his life five and a half years after everything went up in flames. He married, his first child died. One row of adobe at a time, he saved to build a house that wasn’t full of draughts. He and the other villagers worked to get back what they had had before: they built houses, they planted fields, they found pasture for their cows, they saved money to buy plates, and chairs, and beds. A long struggle to stand still any parent would hope to spare their children

Ironically one justification for the destruction of their minimal possessions was was the protection of private property. In Central America giving poor campesinos the rights they needed to participate in capitalist society as anything other than serfs has always been called communism, beginning with struggles to end obligatory unpaid labor for landowners. It is interesting to observe that in both regions I have been, the village that suffered the most because of the touted communist presence is the one which has organized to provide secondary education for their children, paying the teachers when the government won’t. The fight against communism in the eighties involved speeches with moral clarity in against the brutal communist governments in Eastern Europe. But it also involved eliminating Carter’s restrictions on sending arms to the brutal non-communist governments in Central America. It also involved massacres of women and children, rapes, assassination, forced disappearances, and wanton disrespect for the private property of poor people. The guerrillas did receive support from Cuba, but the guerrillas numbered a few thousand and the dead almost 200,000, with fewer than 10% of the massacres and similar crimes committed by the guerrillas. The bloodletting that followed Communist victories in Russia, or Cambodia, are always cited by those seeking to justify Washington's policy in Central America. In Guatemala, however, massacres committed by our adversaries in the Cold War are hypothetical, the violence and brutality which actually occurred was committed by military forces allied with Washington DC. Of course brutalization of peasants has a long history, and scorched earth tactics and all that goes along with it have been taking place since long before the Cold War.

But for now, may the dead rest in peace—and there is hope that Don Joaquin’s children will face only the burden of hard work and few resources rather than watching the results of that work go up in flames. The corn is growing, traditional Dances and Mayan language are easy to find, and kids are free-spirited kids when they have a soccer ball to kick around. Thank those of you who helped me be here, and I hope you have a productive growing season up north.