As you walk past the buildings: white plaster walls, red tile roofs, iron bars bulging out from the occasional window, a tree-filled town square lined by one story arched buildings, you are clearly in Latin America. But up close the shops and cafes inside the buildings feel like they wouldn´t be out of place someplace like Burlington or Boulder. The furniture and decorating varies: brushed stainless steel in one cafe, distressed wood in a clothing store, a subtly carved wooden sign with a compass image. There is a certain aesthetic of taste here: reminiscent of Pottery Barn catalogs or Soho. I have to admit it is an aesthetic which appeals to me, as it does to so many other tourists. But sometimes I worry that these cities have turned into a backpacker’s version of disneyland’s Main Street where the facades of colonial buildings have been preserved, but what is inside is anywheresville. Adaptive reuse is appealing: A Gap in an old warehouse on Haight Street is still better than a Gap in a greenfields development in a suburban mall. And these types of places, like their counterparts in the US, incorporate taste for the local and funky. In San Cristobal de Las Casas, the fancy wine bar in a old colonial building with a covered courtyard had a banana tree in the center.
Of course it is easy for me to fixate on all the white faces. Antigua, Guatemala is often seen as being the most tourist-dominated of Central American cities. One morning however, I realized that there actually were still a lot of Guatemalans: walking in their school uniforms, ducking into rear storefronts, going about their business in side alleys. There are even a few women in traditional dress selling lunches at the entrance to the ruined Cathedral. Their presence was simply less ostentatious than the tall caucasians with large backpacks and the stores geared to them were in the less obvious real estate. It reminded me of Harvard Square during the early nineties when stores and shops catering to yuppies and people who, like me were absurdly dressed students from away. But in the side alleys and less appealing streets where real estate was cheaper, there were shoe repair places and diners frequented by the Boston-born folks I put on a uniform and waited tables with.
And I suspect the aesthetic may appeal to more than just westerners. It may be faddish for a subset of educated Westerners to react against the commodity fetish of mass production by fetishizing the local and funky, but it strikes me as a better thing to globalize than the fad of franchises and mass production. Certainly many Mexican university towns have the same aesthetic, though the bakeries and artesanal ice cream stores in Xalapa or Zacatecas could not be supported solely by tourists. The lakefront town of Suchitoto in El Salvador the internet café had sepia photographs of local streetscapes and locally grown coffee. A Guatemalan I hung out with who now lives in San Diego stopped off at the health food store in Antigua to buy yoghurt and freshed baked bread.
In San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua I took a surfing lesson from a Nicaraguan who boasted he’d been surfing for nine years, but never had to pay for a board, receiving a succession as gifts from gringos. We piled into the car, strapped the boards to the roof, and as we drove to the beach, he put on a tape of Bob Marley. I heard Bob Marley a lot in Central American waterfront communities geared to tourists. Does Latin Americans listening to black Jamaicans sing about their oppresion represent a gringo invasion or something more complicated? We pass a group of boys in front of the Cathedral skateboarding on park benches, then pick up two blonde girls who have come to the beach for a few weeks to learn to surf.
While the older parts of these towns are use their cobblestone streets and colonial architecture to attract tourists, parts of town where tourists seldom go are copying the sprawl of the United States. Four lane roads full of traffic, White Metro Centro malls with food courts, freeways lined with hastily constructed warehouses, Walmart style big box stores, acres of identical two story townhouses in the hills at the edge of town, gated communities with cul de sacs. In Boston I had two roommates from Chihuahua, Mexico. They commented that Boston was amazing to them because people got around without cars—something they never could have done back in Mexico. They had jobs selling t-shirts and lived in crowded apartments, but they were children of engineers in the US to study English to improve their business opportunities. I never rubbed shoulders with their central American equivalents—but I suspect there were affluent kids in the big cities for whom a car is just as essential to life as the kids I went to High School with in Virginia suburbs. And of course even my Nicaraguan host family, in their tin shack with walls of plastic went occasionally to the malls.
And so two types of global homogenization are visible in Latin America. One is that of malls, walmarts, and freeways outside of town, another is the spread of cafes and juice bars in funky small towns where you can count on a little money from tourists and even local yuppies. And it is encouraging to think that while both are driven by foreign capital, one is driven by large corporations, the other by individual entrepeneurs and tourists. And given the disproportional impetus behind big box stores, it is impressive that the latter is spreading at all.
Alongside the built environment other parts of American culture are proliferating, like surfing and pizza, Reggae music, or DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters being sold on the streetcorner. But surfing originally comes from Hawaii, pizza from Italy and some of the DVDs star Jackie Chan. US culture borrows from so many different sources, it has in some ways become a medium for the cultures to diffuse and interact with each other. Like Bob Marley music, it might be seen as a concession to gringo tastes, but those tastes have already incorporated ideas developed by non-whites.
Sunday 30 January 2005
Tuesday 25 January 2005
Postcard from a barbecue overlooking Tegucigalpa
I had not been to impressed with Tegucigalpa and had resolved to leave town if Honduras couldn’t “show me” something. I wandered into a bar with a guy playing a guitar. It wasn´t a concert, and he wasn´t a mariachi musician, just a guy with a guitar playing songs, everybody knew the words to. There is a tremendous charge from a small roomful of people shouting along to songs they've loved for years. It was one of the things which impressed me when I went out with my Mexican roommates in Boston: dozens of impassioned voices chanting together. I didn´t recognize the Spanish songs, but every so often he would throw in something by the Beatles. There was a woman at the bar who looked familiar, and indeed turned out to be a coworker from Guatemala. She introduced me to Roberto, a Honduran with charm and a cap with a single metal spike stuck like a horn on the bill. We talked about punk music and I ended up accompanying him and two Quebecois aide workers to a series of bars: one playing meringue, one playing US heavy metal like Metallica and Guns and Roses, and one playing funky electronica. I ended the night grabbing a burrito from the Quickie mart. Roberto invited me to a barbecue at his house the next night.
The next day I hung out with my colleague from Guatemala and went to a park with a giant statue of Jesus and a smaller one of Confucius. Back at the aide workers dorm the Quebecois girls were watching Sex and the City on DVD and talking about their night with Roberto. Then we walked over to Roberto’s, on a hillside next to a former president's house. His ability to barbecue was not great, but we sat around the bonfire looking down on the lights of the city below. Some came from skyscrapers and some came from shantytowns.
Roberto´s laptop blared out Juana’s Addicion as the Hondurans, mostly upper middle class university students studying business, discussed the new Che Guevara movie. The capitalists seemed very impressed with the socialist revolutionary his ideas and passion. I chatted up a girl whose parents owned an auto repair shop and was studying pharmacology. Her eyes lit up when she talked about her trip to Mexico City and seeing theatre, and how people here in the provincial capital of Tegucigalpa didn’t seem to think about art. Then her friend dragged her off. Roberto’s parents’ house had a beautiful glass deck, leather sofa, and a kitchen with all the modern conveniences. though all this paled in comparison to the yellow mansion next door. This was the side of the hill with the view of the city. Rich people had moved into this area after the last earthquake destroyed the homes which had been here. And across the street and sixty feet away was an adobe shack with no glass in the windows.
The next day I hung out with my colleague from Guatemala and went to a park with a giant statue of Jesus and a smaller one of Confucius. Back at the aide workers dorm the Quebecois girls were watching Sex and the City on DVD and talking about their night with Roberto. Then we walked over to Roberto’s, on a hillside next to a former president's house. His ability to barbecue was not great, but we sat around the bonfire looking down on the lights of the city below. Some came from skyscrapers and some came from shantytowns.
Roberto´s laptop blared out Juana’s Addicion as the Hondurans, mostly upper middle class university students studying business, discussed the new Che Guevara movie. The capitalists seemed very impressed with the socialist revolutionary his ideas and passion. I chatted up a girl whose parents owned an auto repair shop and was studying pharmacology. Her eyes lit up when she talked about her trip to Mexico City and seeing theatre, and how people here in the provincial capital of Tegucigalpa didn’t seem to think about art. Then her friend dragged her off. Roberto’s parents’ house had a beautiful glass deck, leather sofa, and a kitchen with all the modern conveniences. though all this paled in comparison to the yellow mansion next door. This was the side of the hill with the view of the city. Rich people had moved into this area after the last earthquake destroyed the homes which had been here. And across the street and sixty feet away was an adobe shack with no glass in the windows.
Saturday 22 January 2005
Postcard from Ciudad Sandino
I am standing in a metal transmission tower with a boy named Moses on a hill which slopes down rapidly below us to Lake Managua. On the left a series of dark hills rises from the lake shore, on the right the lights of the city of Managua. Behind us a sliver of a moon hangs in the darkening turquoise sky above the hills that rim the valley of Managua’s Western suburbs. We have climbed about thirty feet among the metal support and the wind from off the lake blows strong in our faces as we savor the view.
I met Moses and his family this morning. Wandering around Managua’s old center I saw the Cathedral with the collapsed roof, and the old congress building which has been made into a museum. There are rooms about the environment, pre-Columbian artifacts, the national tree and anthem. Except for one mural comparing Sandino and Zapata to Prometheus, however, twentieth century history is strikingly absent. In the second floor meeting hall, my guide does point out that the Sandinistas staged a coup when the congress met here. I wander out, down to the empty waterfront plaza which somehow reminds me of Chicago. I eat dinner at an open-air Comedor: a few wooden tables and plastic stools under a tree, food cooking on a few homemade aluminum grills spraypainted silver, another table where some one cuts up vegetables for a stew. There is a red wooden box slightly larger than a phone booth which advertises Coke and houses the coolers for drinks. I talk to the woman running the comedor about my loneliness and she asks if I want to see where they live. I say no, I should see more of town and get some money, so the son offers to show me where to find an ATM machine.
The only ATM machine is at the edge of downtown, in a three story mall filled with shoe stores and other upscale shops, as well as a food court and video arcade. There is a movie theatre showing the Motorcycle Diaries, about a 23 year old Ernesto Guevara. I decide that taking a fifteen year old Nicaraguan to see a movie about Che actually would be an appropriate tourist experience. Of course, he seems more interestied in the video fight games we play while waiting for the opening time. I watch the two protagonists on their odyssey visiting the rich and poor of Latin America, staying with rich doctors and poor mine workers, and what they learn on the journey. When Moses again invites me to stay with his family, I accept.
Like most intercity transport in Central America, the forty minute trip from Managua is on an old school bus. In Guatemala they are usually painted with colorful designs, in El Salvador they are shiny, almost like a graffiti mural. Here in Nicaragua, however, they are usually still yellow, with “Murraysville School District” or a similar indicator of who they belonged to in the states still visible. As we hang from the rails on the ceiling like New York City straphangers, Carmen, the mother, tells me, as has been said so many times since Baucis and Philemon and before; “Our house is humble, but you are welcome.” Of course, she doesn’t know about Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As it was for our grandparents and many others in the much less materially wealthy United States during the Great Depression. Her reason was much simpler “We’re Christians.”
The house is painted light blue and organized: with a cement floor and indoor plumbing. The outside walls are made of aluminum sheeting nailed to two by fours and the interior walls are made of blue plastic sheets a little thicker than a garbage bag. The house is a few steps up from the dirt floor shacks with light peeking through the boards in Guatemala. They also have shelves and things to put on them, like clothes, a collection of stuffed animals, and an encyclopedia of Nicaraguan history. We eat dinner and watch a dubbed version of WWF. The thirteen year old daughter has been doing housework for a neighbor, but there have been some complaints about her attitude. The father tries to give a motivational speech, drawing on his years spent fighting against the Somoza dictatorship and the US-backed contras as well as stories from the Bible.
Afterwards he inflates an air mattress. They mention other guests: a Peruvian couple heading towards the United States, abused children placed for a few days or weeks by a local social service agency. They bought their house for $1,000 but I suspect their house has done more to serve the human needs of people other those who spent that money than many houses worth several hundred times as much.
In the morning Carmen takes me to the Eastern market. We push past stalls of vegetables, four-foot wide miniature stores filled floor to ceiling with TVs or hanging clothes, music videos blaring from occasional TVs. A few people sell bell peppers from shopping carts. We also pass a man preaching over a loudspeaker and few people standing nearby with collection baskets. Carmen mutters something about the word of the Lord being made into a business. We stop at a comedor where a huge aluminum basin rests over a grill made from an old wheel rim. A man unwraps the banana leaves to reveal a steaming mixture of beef and yucca, and admonishes me that I should look at him rather than his cooking. The flavors of the beef and yucca taste wonderful together. As we eat it the woman explains what the man meant and mentions “He lives in a room back there—with another man.” There is neither surprise nor judgment in her tone.
Later we take a bus to Metrocentre—a white two-storey mall very reminiscent of California. We go to the food court: with McDonalds, Burger King, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants around a mass of identical formica tables. It is morning so the stainless steel grilles are still block the counters, but you can see the spotless work surfaces, the plastic display cases. I ask her if she’s jealous of the people who get to work in such shiny surroundings. Last evening I helped stack the chairs and cooking supplies inside the red wooden phone booth and chain the tables outside. To wash up, we drug water in buckets from a public faucet two blocks away. But of course the teenagers working here probably don’t make much more than she does. They don’t make as much as they did when her husband drove the cab they sold to buy their house, which is why they’re hoping to save enough to buy another one.
To me the contrast between this world and their open air comedor is stark. But to Carmen and Moses, both are part of the world they live in. They just enjoy coming for the ambience “We almost never buy anything, too expensive.” Just as they enjoy a great view over Lake Managua, a ten minute walk from a house where the walls are made of plastic sheets.
I met Moses and his family this morning. Wandering around Managua’s old center I saw the Cathedral with the collapsed roof, and the old congress building which has been made into a museum. There are rooms about the environment, pre-Columbian artifacts, the national tree and anthem. Except for one mural comparing Sandino and Zapata to Prometheus, however, twentieth century history is strikingly absent. In the second floor meeting hall, my guide does point out that the Sandinistas staged a coup when the congress met here. I wander out, down to the empty waterfront plaza which somehow reminds me of Chicago. I eat dinner at an open-air Comedor: a few wooden tables and plastic stools under a tree, food cooking on a few homemade aluminum grills spraypainted silver, another table where some one cuts up vegetables for a stew. There is a red wooden box slightly larger than a phone booth which advertises Coke and houses the coolers for drinks. I talk to the woman running the comedor about my loneliness and she asks if I want to see where they live. I say no, I should see more of town and get some money, so the son offers to show me where to find an ATM machine.
The only ATM machine is at the edge of downtown, in a three story mall filled with shoe stores and other upscale shops, as well as a food court and video arcade. There is a movie theatre showing the Motorcycle Diaries, about a 23 year old Ernesto Guevara. I decide that taking a fifteen year old Nicaraguan to see a movie about Che actually would be an appropriate tourist experience. Of course, he seems more interestied in the video fight games we play while waiting for the opening time. I watch the two protagonists on their odyssey visiting the rich and poor of Latin America, staying with rich doctors and poor mine workers, and what they learn on the journey. When Moses again invites me to stay with his family, I accept.
Like most intercity transport in Central America, the forty minute trip from Managua is on an old school bus. In Guatemala they are usually painted with colorful designs, in El Salvador they are shiny, almost like a graffiti mural. Here in Nicaragua, however, they are usually still yellow, with “Murraysville School District” or a similar indicator of who they belonged to in the states still visible. As we hang from the rails on the ceiling like New York City straphangers, Carmen, the mother, tells me, as has been said so many times since Baucis and Philemon and before; “Our house is humble, but you are welcome.” Of course, she doesn’t know about Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As it was for our grandparents and many others in the much less materially wealthy United States during the Great Depression. Her reason was much simpler “We’re Christians.”
The house is painted light blue and organized: with a cement floor and indoor plumbing. The outside walls are made of aluminum sheeting nailed to two by fours and the interior walls are made of blue plastic sheets a little thicker than a garbage bag. The house is a few steps up from the dirt floor shacks with light peeking through the boards in Guatemala. They also have shelves and things to put on them, like clothes, a collection of stuffed animals, and an encyclopedia of Nicaraguan history. We eat dinner and watch a dubbed version of WWF. The thirteen year old daughter has been doing housework for a neighbor, but there have been some complaints about her attitude. The father tries to give a motivational speech, drawing on his years spent fighting against the Somoza dictatorship and the US-backed contras as well as stories from the Bible.
Afterwards he inflates an air mattress. They mention other guests: a Peruvian couple heading towards the United States, abused children placed for a few days or weeks by a local social service agency. They bought their house for $1,000 but I suspect their house has done more to serve the human needs of people other those who spent that money than many houses worth several hundred times as much.
In the morning Carmen takes me to the Eastern market. We push past stalls of vegetables, four-foot wide miniature stores filled floor to ceiling with TVs or hanging clothes, music videos blaring from occasional TVs. A few people sell bell peppers from shopping carts. We also pass a man preaching over a loudspeaker and few people standing nearby with collection baskets. Carmen mutters something about the word of the Lord being made into a business. We stop at a comedor where a huge aluminum basin rests over a grill made from an old wheel rim. A man unwraps the banana leaves to reveal a steaming mixture of beef and yucca, and admonishes me that I should look at him rather than his cooking. The flavors of the beef and yucca taste wonderful together. As we eat it the woman explains what the man meant and mentions “He lives in a room back there—with another man.” There is neither surprise nor judgment in her tone.
Later we take a bus to Metrocentre—a white two-storey mall very reminiscent of California. We go to the food court: with McDonalds, Burger King, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants around a mass of identical formica tables. It is morning so the stainless steel grilles are still block the counters, but you can see the spotless work surfaces, the plastic display cases. I ask her if she’s jealous of the people who get to work in such shiny surroundings. Last evening I helped stack the chairs and cooking supplies inside the red wooden phone booth and chain the tables outside. To wash up, we drug water in buckets from a public faucet two blocks away. But of course the teenagers working here probably don’t make much more than she does. They don’t make as much as they did when her husband drove the cab they sold to buy their house, which is why they’re hoping to save enough to buy another one.
To me the contrast between this world and their open air comedor is stark. But to Carmen and Moses, both are part of the world they live in. They just enjoy coming for the ambience “We almost never buy anything, too expensive.” Just as they enjoy a great view over Lake Managua, a ten minute walk from a house where the walls are made of plastic sheets.
Saturday 15 January 2005
Postcard from Boulevard de los Heroes
The movie on the screen is called Voces Inocentes, and deals with the El Salvadoran Civil War through the experience of one young boy in one rural village. He gets his first job shouting out bus stops while hanging out a bus door and watches soldiers brutalize civilians. He flirts with first love and watches other classmates dragged into the army. The boys in the village lie on the tin roofs to watch the stars, and avoid being forcibly recruited into the army. A bearded young man returns to town with a guitar and sings a song written to describe the slums in Venezuela—people silence him because the song is illegal. He also gives the boy a radio tuned to a station which could get him in big trouble. The story and the cinematography tend to be very narrowly focused, no wide angles, but the village is muddy and cramped the houses only a few steps up from the cardboard houses sung about in the Venezuelan song “Casas de Carton.” Later on when the soldiers hear the sound coming from his radio, the boy almost gets shot.
I exit the plush theatre seats into a walkway of semicircular neon tubes and out into a parking lot. The images on screen matched the popular image of Central America, and what I will see in El Salvador when I go out to the mountains. At this mall in San Salvador, however everything in my field of vision could be in the states: the parking spaces, the new cars in them, the streetlamps shining down, the bushes at the edges, even the rounded metal bollards on the sidewalk, seems pasted from the US design book. This was the type of development I helped build when I worked at an engineering firm in New England. In front of the mall is Boulevard de los Heroes, a four lane road full of traffic and lined with a Blockbuster, an Office Max, a Texaco, a Wendy’s and a Toyota dealership. Walking down the sidewalk for these six blocks, it really does feel like California, except that the billboards advertising plane flights are in Spanish.
The other difference is the bus system: there are lots of silvery minivans and minibuses waiting at the mall entrance to whisk you away to the rest of the city. Buses come by every minute, which goes a long way to making service reliable, and drivers duck in and out of traffic like New York taxi drivers. In fifteen minutes you can be in other parts of the city, upscale restaurants in Zona Rosa, 1960s concrete housing projects in Zacumil, or tin roof shacks, and people making a living selling dvds from 3 by 5 foot blankets on the streetcorner in the center. When streetcars were replaced by buses in the United States, the transit companies claimed it was to provide better service, but in the end the automobile companies which owned the transit companies just encouraged people to buy their cars. In Central America there are no consolidated transit companies to be bought out, and in any event the people are too poor to afford cars. In any event, considering the frequency and coverage of transit service, it occurs to me that while the idea of replacing streetcars with buses may have been a trojan horse for the Automobile in places like Los Angeles, it doesn't seem to be the case in the Spanish-speaking world.
I ate most of my dinners at a sidewalk comedor just off the Boulevard. Actually it's just a few plastic tables and gas grills that get unloaded from a pickup truck every night at seven. They set up on the sidewalk in front of an ATM, where the Mariachi musicians wait in their distinctive uniforms in hopes of being hired to play parties. I enjoy the food, and watching the musicians, and it costs about $1.40 for a complete meal. El Salvador now uses dollars as the official currency, and food at the Wendy's or Pizza Hut on the boulevard costs almost as much as in the states. The food costs almost as much, but the people who work there earn much less.
On the bus from Guatemala I met a young Salvadoran muralist who offered to show me around his town. One of my favorite places was the church of the Rosary. From the outside it looked like an ugly concrete stairway. Inside, however, the horizontal parts of the “steps” in the roof contain stained glass panels which made the space feel much lighter and larger than it looked from outside. In one corner is a series of abstract twisted iron sculptures representing the stations of the cross. Unlike most churches, the building is wider than it is long, so that most congregants will be close to the altar. I sit and enjoy the ambience from the rainbow of translucent panels arching above me. As we leave Ivan tells me that army snipers once used the top of the church to fire on demonstrators in an adjacent city square.
Downtown I also visit the tomb of Archbishop Romero, assassinated twenty five years ago March 24. His image is ubiquitous in church murals and bus stops, along with the motto “I will be reborn in the Salvadoran people.” He was assassinated near the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War, as assassination of other priests occurred near its end. I also visit the house where six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were killed. The daughter was a year younger than I would have been when they were shot by a death squad in 1989. On the airline to Guatemala I encountered one of the University students who encountered their bodies, and helped clean blood and brains strewn on the grass where there is now a rose garden. You can read his version of events at
"http://nahualinstitute.com/pdf/io_thesis.pdf"
Many on the right saw the Jesuits as the ideologists of the guerrillas, which is why they were killed. However the Jesuits themselves argued that violent revolution was not the way to reform to El Salvador, and maintained dialog with and critiques of both the left and the right. A Shakespeare character speaking in the time of Caesar says “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” In El Salvador, the deaths of the Jesuits helped complete the work they began in their life. The outcry helped bring international pressure to bear and force the government to negotiate, leading to peace accords, the reduction of the army, and turning the guerrillas into the second largest political party. As in Nicaragua, the United States occasionally has to remind El Salvadorans that, although we believe in democracy, their might be “unfortunate consequences,” should they actually elect the leftists. [since this was written the former guerrillas in both El Salvador and Nicaragua have taken power—through the ballot box instead of the bullet. Meanwhile in Guatemala the left remains fragmented as a nation-wide movement, although individuals have built local power bases.]
Ivan also suggests a couple of places in the countryside I should go. One is Suchitoto, a beautiful colonial city overlooking a lake. There are a few restaurants and a cafe selling handicrafts and sepia-tinted postcards of local scenes, but there aren't many tourists on a Wednesday morning. This and the similar La Palma seem aimed as much at rich Salvadorans on day trips from the capital, as at foreign tourists, which are much less common in El Salvador than elsewhere in Central America. Later I head out to the mountainside. There are coffee plantations, small villages grouped around a town square, dusty shops where it sometimes looks like things have been on the shelf for years. Men walk through the unpaved streets with machetes, coffee beans are set out to dry on plastic tarps. In the short time I am there, all I can really say is that these areas seem a lot like rural Guatemala, but with no indigenous dress, and few indigenous faces.
When I get back to the city, Ivan and I end up meeting at the Texaco station on Boulevard de los Heroes and walking down the boulevard to a local park. We talk about women, and education, and dreams while SUVs rush by the convenience stores. From what we talk about, I feel like I could be back in my hometown haunting Timberlake road with a high school buddy, there is one huge difference. When I was in High School worrying about what music was popular and shopping at the mall for posters to put up, Ivan could be locked up for listening to the wrong radio station (Radio Venceremos), or for publicly supporting what is now the second largest political party in the country.
Obviously that is a huge difference between our experiences. Reflecting on it, however, I wonder if my first reaction “oh that must have been strange growing up in a war zone” isn’t as facile as the people who used to ask me about what it was like growing up Chinese. It is strange to the questioner, but to the person who lived it, it is the only reality they know. Turn the question around and many people throughout the world might ask people from the country I was raised in “Is your view of the world distorted by living in a country which hasn't had a war fought on your soil for five generations?” And it's been even longer north of the Mason-Dixon line.
I exit the plush theatre seats into a walkway of semicircular neon tubes and out into a parking lot. The images on screen matched the popular image of Central America, and what I will see in El Salvador when I go out to the mountains. At this mall in San Salvador, however everything in my field of vision could be in the states: the parking spaces, the new cars in them, the streetlamps shining down, the bushes at the edges, even the rounded metal bollards on the sidewalk, seems pasted from the US design book. This was the type of development I helped build when I worked at an engineering firm in New England. In front of the mall is Boulevard de los Heroes, a four lane road full of traffic and lined with a Blockbuster, an Office Max, a Texaco, a Wendy’s and a Toyota dealership. Walking down the sidewalk for these six blocks, it really does feel like California, except that the billboards advertising plane flights are in Spanish.
The other difference is the bus system: there are lots of silvery minivans and minibuses waiting at the mall entrance to whisk you away to the rest of the city. Buses come by every minute, which goes a long way to making service reliable, and drivers duck in and out of traffic like New York taxi drivers. In fifteen minutes you can be in other parts of the city, upscale restaurants in Zona Rosa, 1960s concrete housing projects in Zacumil, or tin roof shacks, and people making a living selling dvds from 3 by 5 foot blankets on the streetcorner in the center. When streetcars were replaced by buses in the United States, the transit companies claimed it was to provide better service, but in the end the automobile companies which owned the transit companies just encouraged people to buy their cars. In Central America there are no consolidated transit companies to be bought out, and in any event the people are too poor to afford cars. In any event, considering the frequency and coverage of transit service, it occurs to me that while the idea of replacing streetcars with buses may have been a trojan horse for the Automobile in places like Los Angeles, it doesn't seem to be the case in the Spanish-speaking world.
I ate most of my dinners at a sidewalk comedor just off the Boulevard. Actually it's just a few plastic tables and gas grills that get unloaded from a pickup truck every night at seven. They set up on the sidewalk in front of an ATM, where the Mariachi musicians wait in their distinctive uniforms in hopes of being hired to play parties. I enjoy the food, and watching the musicians, and it costs about $1.40 for a complete meal. El Salvador now uses dollars as the official currency, and food at the Wendy's or Pizza Hut on the boulevard costs almost as much as in the states. The food costs almost as much, but the people who work there earn much less.
On the bus from Guatemala I met a young Salvadoran muralist who offered to show me around his town. One of my favorite places was the church of the Rosary. From the outside it looked like an ugly concrete stairway. Inside, however, the horizontal parts of the “steps” in the roof contain stained glass panels which made the space feel much lighter and larger than it looked from outside. In one corner is a series of abstract twisted iron sculptures representing the stations of the cross. Unlike most churches, the building is wider than it is long, so that most congregants will be close to the altar. I sit and enjoy the ambience from the rainbow of translucent panels arching above me. As we leave Ivan tells me that army snipers once used the top of the church to fire on demonstrators in an adjacent city square.
Downtown I also visit the tomb of Archbishop Romero, assassinated twenty five years ago March 24. His image is ubiquitous in church murals and bus stops, along with the motto “I will be reborn in the Salvadoran people.” He was assassinated near the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War, as assassination of other priests occurred near its end. I also visit the house where six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were killed. The daughter was a year younger than I would have been when they were shot by a death squad in 1989. On the airline to Guatemala I encountered one of the University students who encountered their bodies, and helped clean blood and brains strewn on the grass where there is now a rose garden. You can read his version of events at
Many on the right saw the Jesuits as the ideologists of the guerrillas, which is why they were killed. However the Jesuits themselves argued that violent revolution was not the way to reform to El Salvador, and maintained dialog with and critiques of both the left and the right. A Shakespeare character speaking in the time of Caesar says “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.” In El Salvador, the deaths of the Jesuits helped complete the work they began in their life. The outcry helped bring international pressure to bear and force the government to negotiate, leading to peace accords, the reduction of the army, and turning the guerrillas into the second largest political party. As in Nicaragua, the United States occasionally has to remind El Salvadorans that, although we believe in democracy, their might be “unfortunate consequences,” should they actually elect the leftists. [since this was written the former guerrillas in both El Salvador and Nicaragua have taken power—through the ballot box instead of the bullet. Meanwhile in Guatemala the left remains fragmented as a nation-wide movement, although individuals have built local power bases.]
Ivan also suggests a couple of places in the countryside I should go. One is Suchitoto, a beautiful colonial city overlooking a lake. There are a few restaurants and a cafe selling handicrafts and sepia-tinted postcards of local scenes, but there aren't many tourists on a Wednesday morning. This and the similar La Palma seem aimed as much at rich Salvadorans on day trips from the capital, as at foreign tourists, which are much less common in El Salvador than elsewhere in Central America. Later I head out to the mountainside. There are coffee plantations, small villages grouped around a town square, dusty shops where it sometimes looks like things have been on the shelf for years. Men walk through the unpaved streets with machetes, coffee beans are set out to dry on plastic tarps. In the short time I am there, all I can really say is that these areas seem a lot like rural Guatemala, but with no indigenous dress, and few indigenous faces.
When I get back to the city, Ivan and I end up meeting at the Texaco station on Boulevard de los Heroes and walking down the boulevard to a local park. We talk about women, and education, and dreams while SUVs rush by the convenience stores. From what we talk about, I feel like I could be back in my hometown haunting Timberlake road with a high school buddy, there is one huge difference. When I was in High School worrying about what music was popular and shopping at the mall for posters to put up, Ivan could be locked up for listening to the wrong radio station (Radio Venceremos), or for publicly supporting what is now the second largest political party in the country.
Obviously that is a huge difference between our experiences. Reflecting on it, however, I wonder if my first reaction “oh that must have been strange growing up in a war zone” isn’t as facile as the people who used to ask me about what it was like growing up Chinese. It is strange to the questioner, but to the person who lived it, it is the only reality they know. Turn the question around and many people throughout the world might ask people from the country I was raised in “Is your view of the world distorted by living in a country which hasn't had a war fought on your soil for five generations?” And it's been even longer north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
