Encounters with things past

My partner and I sit on the burlap sacks on the wooden planks as we travel from town uphill to the village. William Least Heat Moon of the Missouri called his pickup a boat on the inland ocean. Pickups, with their molded plastic beds, can seem a little like a motorboat, especially in Guatemala where you ride in the back, holding on to metal pipes welded so twenty people can ride standing up. The larger “camion de veranda”, with wooden planks supporting the cargo area, are more like barges. They cruise slowly along the narrow roads of dirt and gravel, as barges once plied muddy creeks and narrow canals. These carry building materials, fertilizer, and people, especially on market days when they are crammed with baskets of food and flowers, firewood, and the occasional pig. I read a book once that talked about the Erie canal and how it brought development, making New York City great, but also slicing through rural communities and destroying rural folkways. These transportation were built in the nineties, so it is too soon to see what effect they will have on these rural communities

Guatemala gave me a hint of another culture, the Maya peasant culture which still survives in these isolated “backwards” areas. It is in the highlands, where peasants have continued to live most “primitively” as town-dwelling Americans would define it, that the Maya people have best preserved their race, their language, and their culture. I am not saying that all possible forms education and development inevitably lead to assimilation and loss of unique cultural characteristics, but given the assumptions of education for most of the twentieth century, being “backwards” could be seen as a functional bulwark against the values and society of the European conquistadors. Places like Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, and southern Mexico had the most advanced cultures in the centuries before Europeans arrived, but have remained economically under-developed in the centuries since. On the other hand in places like Argentina or the United States, economic development has gone hand in hand with the dilution or disappearance of indigenous blood, language, settlement, and culture.

I watched as a Maya shaman critiqued education for drawing children away from their traditions. In the US this happens too. It is why the Amish went to jail rather than allow their children to go to consolidated High School—or why others have decided to home-school. Even in the 19th century, Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Farmer Boy describes education remaking children. A daughter attending the academy five miles away returns to scoff at the table manners of her backwards father. She was not inculcating the values of a different ethnicity, but education still helped instill the “values of the town.” And at the end of the book, when Almanzo decides to forgo an apprenticeship with a buggy-maker in town for the farming life of his father he is making a cultural choice, even in an ethnically homogenous community like upstate New York.

For me however, Guatemala was also significant because it gave me a hint of some things I was born too late to experience in the US. The intercity transportation system, consisting of irregular buses and pickups, has many more breakdowns than a European rail system, but for many destinations service is frequent enough that you don’t need a schedule, even when making three or four connections. The day after New Years I traveled from Lake Atitlan to the Salvadoran border, about 7 transfers, just on faith that I could encounter a bus. A whole country where you could still travel without a car, where even towns of ten-thousand people have service to the capital every half hour, where in some major cities minibuses go by every minute, was quite an experience for a public transport geek like me.

There are lively markets with hundreds of people selling their wares: everything from pigweed amaranth (generally considered a weed in the US) to Mangos to jeans to CDs, from hand woven baskets, to plastic lawn chairs. I got to experience the thrill of looking forward to a market day, and traveling to markets. And living in town I got a sense of what it might have been like to live in a town without a single stop light, but which was still vibrant enough that you could go to the market square at eight to eat dinner, women selling the corn drink atol under the full moon. To walk through a human settlement that had not been drained of streetlife, or destroyed by the lure of the TV and automobile like so many US small towns. TVs and motor vehicles were still rare enough to build community rather than promote isolation. Dozens of people clustered around the bike repair shops to watch soccer matches—several families ride pickups together.

I was also impressed by the use of natural and biodegradable materials. Tamales are usually wrapped in shiny, smooth banana leaves. Cheese comes wrapped in a different fuzzier leaf from a knee-high plant. Atol, coffee, and other hot drinks are served in hollowed out and painted gourds. But the use of biodegradable materials is primarily a function of necessity rather than conviction. Nowadays many things are put in plastic bags, including things like hot French fries where the plastic does not seem completely appropriate. Entrepeneurs have figured out how to make money serving a latent demand for cheap mass-produced containers—which are currently made out of plastic and styrofoam. I realized how much I appreciated this when I crossed from Guatemala, where filtered water can be bought in sealed plastic bags for 12c to Mexico, where water is sold in bottles for $1. “Agua en bolsa” doesn’t taste as good, but for one-eighth the price per unit, I found it preferable.

These non-biodegradable containers made in factories are treated the same way as the biodegradable containers made by nature were. On buses the driver’s helper sweeps bottles, potato chips bags and plastic bags to the front of the bus and opens the door on the side of the highway to dispose of it. People tell me that in recent years, plastic bags have often gotten caught in drainage systems, causing floods. Even in small villages, you can see ugly messes of colorful plastic bags in ditches, behind houses, or even in the middle of cornfields. There is money to be made in selling plastic items, but so far no one has figure out how to make money gathering it up once they have outlived their usefulnesss, or making people more careful with it.

Of course none of this is new. I live in the highlands of Pennsylvania and often see trash dumped along roadsides or in gullies. My neighbor avoided hauling fees by setting fire to his old couch in his back yard. Lady Bird Johnson had to urge people to work at roadside beautification, because people in the US were no more immediately conscious of the need to treat plastic trash differently when it was first introduced here, than people in Guatemala are today a decade after its introduction. But I can’t help thinking making people more conscious would be a good thing.

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England there was what was known as the “Putting Out System.” People would put off small handicrafts to rural cottages and collect and sell the results. Sometimes after dinner I joined the family despepitando, squeezing squash seeds so they would pop out of the shell, and the green nutty inside would be left. Entrepeneurs give people baskets of pepita and buy back the finished product. I’m not convinced the money earned was all that much for the time it took, but the family talked and laughed and earned some money from being sociable and it was certainly more money than one earns watching TV.

In the US we tend to think of shopping solely as a means of distributing goods. But going to market days in Central America I was struck by the fact that in addition to distributing goods, they provided an excuse to see town, for small scale producers to do some shopping of their own, and social occasions for people in far scattered villages to meet each other. I gave my coins to the vendors and received my change (unlike the checkout clerks at a modern grocery who are essentially appendages to the cash register, vendors in a market exercise their brain to calculate change, practicing mathematics with every purchase). When I spent my coins, I often wondered how often they might be respent. I imagine the coins I spent buying cookies with pepita being used by that vendor to buy cheese, the cheesemaker to buy tomatoes, and so on—the metal occupying various locations and catalyzing a cascade of mutually beneficial exchanges. Thinking of the way the multiplier effect could work, I wonder if an economist could show whether money would be more liquid in this environment, than in a Walmart, where the money in the cash register is credited to an account in Bentonville and very little goes to a cashier or local producers. I suspect that a Walmart could easily distribute with 5 or 6 people, all the goods sold by the 500 or so vendors who thought it worth their while to converge in town for a Sunday morning, “efficiently” eliminating what made it worth their while to travel to town along with the bustle and laugher of the shoppers and vendors

In Guatemala I often found myself thinking of Orwell’s comment that he became a socialist not because he believed in a centrally planned economy, but because the socialists were the only ones interested in doing something about the poor. The appeal of communism in Central America almost certainly stemmed from a similar fact. The government did not care about educating peasants in the 1960s, Marxists did—and the fact that some people who wanted to educate their children allied with communists probably had less to do with a preference for planned economies, atheism, and Stalinist
totalitarianism than with understandable self-interest. Even today the Guatemalan government had to hold a telethon to raise enough money for schools to buy pencils for kids. Like the Communist rulers of my ancestral Chinese homeland I would generally reject the planned economy for the free enterprise system as a means of creating contemporary wealth but I would question whether school children should have to beg for pencils. Education is an investment in the future, and I believe government is better suited to provide the venture capital (given the multi-decade timeline for return)
than poor peasant families. And in China the investment in education which was part of a socialist vision is one of the things credited with their current economic success.

I often hear it said that people in Guatemala, or elsewhere, live on less than $2 a day. However I find myself distrusting that easy soundbite. It implies that if they moved away from their family and the graves of their ancestors to a shack in the city and worked in a factory for $4 a day, they would somehow be twice as well off. And while I don’t question the young fathers who make choices like that on a temporary basis, I question whether everyone in the community should buy into the value system implicit in using
money as an unquestioned proxy for quality of life. It shades into the idea that an investment banker who earns $15,000 a day has a life which is somehow much more worth living, and that if they die in a burning building it is thousands of times more of a tragedy. I earned less than $25,000 during the four years of the first Bush administration (a princely sum by Guatemalan standards). Because of where I went to school, I have friends who earned 100 times as much money as I did. But I would doubt their lives
are 100 times happier than mine. I am not sure they have 100 times as much control over their own lives. That extra money mostly gives them the power to influence OTHER peoples lives for good or for ill, and leverage government and legal machinery to insulate themselves from other people.

They are amazed by everyday things we live without. “You only see your parents once a year!” “You never eat tortillas.” Of course their assumption that we are worse off because we don’t eat tortillas reflects a certain ethnocentrism. But it may be that our reaction to Guatemalan living standards reflects ethnocentrism as well. Rich Bostonians would have clucked at the dirt floor of the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. To me the critical measure of their poverty is not how much money they make but their lack of access to infrastructure necessary for them to secure life and liberty and pursue the goals they choose. The most frequent reason people mentioned to me that they wanted more money was to pay for primary and secondary education their children. Something that a century ago was seen in this country, even by capitalists, as the governments’ duty to provide. They also mentioned water and access to life-saving medicines things which could be provided without dismantling the free enterprise system for goods distribution.

What I see as the critical aspects of their poverty has less to do with money to buy goods than with lack of access to services which could grant them the autonomy of full citizenship. Twenty years ago people in some villages were butchered like dogs and forced to flee into the woods. Others were uprooted from the land of their ancestors to make way for a dam. Today other communities are targeted for mining projects where a small amount of money will go to the government, a large amount to a Canadian corporation, and poisoned runoff will go to the community. Unlike twenty years ago, this conflict is mentioned in the newspaper, along with government responses that people are being unreasonable. These things are not numbers, but I think they do a better job of reflecting the true nature of the inequities in Guatemala. Of course, even in the US, where people make more than two dollars a day, the law may not protect people from the decisions of those who would use eminent domain to dictate what the highest and best use of their land should be.

Seven scenes from Rabinal

In May, before corn planting began I walked out to help prepare the fields. People talk about how the Maya are amazing walkers, but I usually went walking with other foreigners and seldom saw them make the impressive treks to work in their cornfields. This day, however, I followed a boy of about ten to his father’s cornfields. The trail followed the top of a descending ridge for about an hour. There were cornfields on the opposite hillside, irrigated from the creek running in the gully between the ridges. We descended the sloping field towards the gully and begun cutting vegetation with our machetes to clear the ground. Ferns and brushes we sliced like weed-whackers, along with shorter trees. When we came to thicker trees we cut off their limbs. I watched the boy who had guided me climb up a pine tree, cutting off limbs as he climbed. He cut several inches from the trunk so the remaining stubs could serve as a ladder the next time some one climbs the tree. The tree was short and he only climbed about thirty feet, but I have seen men climb much higher. Sometimes people strip the needles from pine branches to carpet their houses or patios in green for birthday parties or religious festivities. Meanwhile his father worked on a deciduous tree, but caught the branches before they fell and hung them from the stubs so the large branches wouldn’t have to be hauled out of the way for planting.

A few hours later the mother came down the trail carrying a large basket on her head. We ate rice and beans with tortillas, sitting on the ground that would provide next years beans and corn. The basket was woven, but the food and drink were in plastic jars. I remember months ago seeing the omnipresent plastic water jugs and being saddened that people had abandoned their traditional pottery. After realizing how much more breakable and more expensive earthenware jugs are I understood why plastic would be favored for everyday use and abuse even if it is disappointing to tourists. And I realized that the earthenware jugs were used because they were available and functional just as plastic jugs are today. And if the colorful plastic tinajes aren’t historical, they are part of contemporary culture in the villages. However while the coffee was transported in plastic, we drank it out of guacales. Guacales are bowls made from the thick fruit of the moro tree, which plays a key role in the Maya foundational legend, the Popol Vuh. The hard globular fruit is cut into hemispheres, hollowed out, painted, and coated with a natural shellac made from a local river-dwelling insect. In the Rabinal area, the red bowls with black and yellow designs are used to drink almost every hot beverage. These drinking bowls are slightly cheaper than modern mugs, not to mention prettier, and functional when you hold a drink and your hand and blow across the wide surface to cool it off. They are less functional around tables, since the rounded bottoms can be difficult to balance on the table when eating a meal, however. Unlike the water jugs this traditional item has not been displaced by a plastic or mass-produced equivalent.

After enjoying lunch we worked on, pausing for a snack of a few sweet mangoes about midday. Then, after weed whacking about an acre, the seven of us started up hill as the chill of evening set in.

I should point out that many families lack access to land, or have fields much farther than the one hour walk I took. These fields were put up for sale about ten years ago and many families in the village bought adjoining parcels. On the other hand, slightly more affluence has its own pitfalls. The family I worked with that day can’t afford chemical sprays. In another community where many people have relatives in the states, and thus nicer houses and disposable income I walked with the women carrying baskets of food to the workers at lunch time. In this one family three of the men were traversing the steep stony fields with backpack sprayers. In a few hours the herbicide eliminates days of machete work. As in much of the third world, chemicals which have been banned in the US for years are available at cut-rate prices in Guatemala. No one was wearing gloves, or goggles, or masks, though everyone carefully rinsed their hands before sitting down to eat the delicious-smelling chicken soup—sitting on the rocks of the cornfield they were spraying.

II
Electrical bills can be a problem, not because people use a lot of electricity, but because the hook up fee is usually six times the marginal usage. This would still arguably be cheaper than buying candles, though of course the money goes to the city. However there are some inconsistencies in the bills: bills for one month were sometimes inexplicably seven times greater than other months. And because there is no mail service in the villages, paying bills often means taking a day off to pay in person. Most of the houses have electricity, but some of the more memorable dinners took place in those which did´t.

We ate our tortillas as darkness fell, our faces painted orange and gray by the dancing flames of the cooking fire. Then the father dipped a small scrap of wood in the fire and set it on a rock. The brightly burning five inch piece of wood illuminated the whole room with an amber glow much brighter than a candle. This was first time I saw ocote, another item mentioned in the Popol Vuh. Ocotes are pieces of pine wood cut from trees heavy in resin, so they burn readily with a great deal of light. They are used to start fires and also as torches, and give a distinctive smell. After an evening of prayer at church, each family group often carries a bundle of ocote. It feels very different than the focused white-yellow beam of a flashlight, and watching sets of orange flames on a far hill moving with the half-illumined family groups can be amazingly beautiful for an observer. That night several shims of ocote, each in their turn, illuminated our dinner, and our conversation.

III
I am halfway down the mountain and sitting on a stool cut from a tree trunk and watching a man twist fibers over an upturned sandal over his knee. Little by little the eighteen inch strands form a rope, which will in turn be woven into a string bag. A generation ago the fibers were made from the leaves of maguey, but few people raise the plant in these parts anymore, and the man is using thin plastic pieces of a modern “burlap sack.” This is another example of evolving tradition, the raw materials have changed, but the process has been preserved. The man complains that few of his sons’ generation know how to make these bags, that few still wear the broad-brimmed hat, that among their peers many prefer to speak Spanish rather than their Maya mother tongue.

IV
I am sitting outside an adobe hut in the valley talking to a woman about the disappointing corn harvest, and the latest episode of pig-stealing. I ask about the sewing machine in the corner. It is an old treadle Singer, with intricate curving ironwork supporting a nicely detailed wooden box and the old black mechanism with shiny inlay. In our country these machines sewed many handmade clothes in our grandparents’ day and now sit in antique stores, perhaps awaiting a new life as a table, but unlikely to ever return to their original purpose. Here in Guatemala not only are old ones still working, I’ve even seen stores with new models. The ironwork supports are much simpler and all the lines are straighter, but they are immediately recognizable. Part of the story of Central America is told when you walk past a store and see a pedal sewing machine being sold next to a large flat screen TV.

“It was that and my azodon which kept my family alive after my husband was killed. I sewed blouses for cash to buy firewood, and used the azodon in my cornfields.” Today she is using the sewing machine to make a long purple skirt to be worn by schoolgirls in the independence day parade of a local school.

V
I once thought I heard the sound of a dot matrix printer as I sat shelling squash seeds by a cooking fire in a dirt-floor adobe house. The next day I wandered inside and found out why. The computer sat on a makeshift wooden table, with the cover off while some one repaired the disk drive. It seemed an odd artifact in a village where the doors don´t have hinges and the few windows have shutters but no glass. It turns out people decided the computer for the local school would be safer in a house full of people than in a school building empty and unguarded at night.

VI
There are few foreigners in Rabinal, but almost all stop off at the internet café at some point. Nonetheless, a majority of the patrons are Guatemalan, some playing games, some sending emails, and some writing on reports for school. (In the anonymous crush of the capital, some patrons of internet cafes are also viewing pornographic movies, but that seldom happens in the close environment of provincial towns). Sitting at the terminal I send emails to friends, read political commentary, google William Morris, and read weblogs from Iraq. Then I walk by the cashier to pay.

A few weeks before a friend saw a man in the café staring at a large black and white photo of a man’s face. You often see these framed in people’s houses—enlargements of photos from old identity documents, made to memorialize those who died in the violence twenty years ago. Some were killed in sudden massacres in the villages, others abducted on the streets of town and never seen again. A recent excavation at the army base on the west side of town uncovered seventy-eight corpses tossed into a well. In most cases their clothes had not rotted although the bodies had. After two decades all that remained of the dead were pieces of cloth and these would be laid out in the town hall in a few days in hopes that people might come to identify their deceased relatives by their clothing. This man is contemplating the photo of his disappeared father and debating whether he dares to go to look for him in this grim exhibition. Many of those responsible for the deaths are still in positions of power and influence and unlikely to look kindly on anything which might lead people to discussions of things they might have been involved in. Witnesses had identified the parts of the base most likely to contain other mass graves, but excavations had to be postponed when the mayor fenced off those areas to graze his cattle. He graciously allowed the forensic team to excavate elsewhere on the base.

At the end of the exhibition the half of the bodies remain unidentified.


VII
Leaving the internet café I walk out into the market square at night. The east side is dominated by the white triangle of the tallest building in town, the Catholic church. Four chapels, Santos Domingo, Sebastian, Pablo Apostol and Pablo Martir flank the stone-paved market at the four corners. I walk past a few brightly lit metal carts with gas grills offering french fries, fried chicken and tacos. Further on another well-lit counter has blenders for smoothies. Along the south edge is a band of twelve foot square shops in the one story market buildng. A few merchants still have their wares set out under florescent lamps. I venture deeper into the market. Most of the light blue wooden tables are empty, but at a few women sell dinners of beans, eggs, or rice, potato turnovers or bowls of chicken soup. Here in the center of the market no one has electricity, so the tables are lit with candles stuck at odd angles between the baskets, bowls and trays. Women move the candles as necessary to get at the bowl of beet salad.

I head for the women selling atol—the traditional drink made from ground corn: a white, creamy beverage which tastes very good drizzled with chili sauce. Like the coffee brought to people working in the fields it is stored in blue plastic jugs insulated with towels. And like that coffee it is drunk from the traditional red guacal, made from the moro fruits which became the talking skull of a deceased hero in the Popol Vuh. The women laughingly exchange with me the few words of Achi I know. “Ah Nayo, Utz a Wach?” The atol is cheap, about 6c, and I am a regular customer. They scoop my atol out with one guacal and pour it into another to cool it down, like the practiced moves of an expert pizza-maker spinning the dough. As the bowls move up and down, the atol pouring between them looks more like white taffy expanding and contracting than the liquid it is. I sit against a table opposite the atol venders, along with a few others enjoying the night. I look above the tarps which stretch above the stalls to protect them from rain, over the one-story shops at the edge of the market and see the half-moon hanging in the sky. Sitting at the computer screen two hundred feet away I was connected to people doing the same in other countries and continents. Sitting here in the candlelit market, sipping atol from a guacal and looking up at the moon, I feel my link with those in this valley who doing the same in other centuries.