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.