Postcard from San Antonio Aguascalientes

I climb the dusty road uphill from town with a man named Candido. Among the tin roofs below he points out a well-built house with a swimming pool for daytrippers from the capital. As the road reaches the mountain, he points out a few plants. One is square stemmed and when thrown sideways, makes a hissing sound. Another has a broad leaf with a forked stem. He cuts a stalk off and makes a slit, showing me how to use it as a trumpet. Our destination is two hours away and these lessons give us something to do when he stops to allow me to rest. The third plant is Tunay, with a hollow cane divided into compartments every nine inches. He shows me how to cut it to extract the water within. It is slightly bitter, no match for a nalgene, but good for emergencies hydration. Along the way, he points out other plants: trees which are good for firewood, house posts, herbal remedies.
It makes me think about literacy. I have been taught how to work with words and ideas, to read Chaucer, census charts, and electric bills, to use a library or the internet to search for a solution to a problem. But here in these woods, I am the illiterate, the one who doesn't notice the obvious, the one who could in hours would never realize things they Candido would notice immediately. There is a huge richness of experience, both practical like firewood, and diversionary like the trumpets—which is only accessible to me through my guide's explanation.
After two hours we reach Candido's plot. We walk for a few minutes through larger area which belonged to his father-some of it has since been sold-to a man he describes as a millionaire. It is wooded, but there are several piles of large logs piled at various intervals-hundreds of dollars of firewood which the millionaire has left-perhaps to rot, perhaps because he hasn't looked into paying some one to haul them market.
Candido's destination is a broad meadow, a half acre filled with a plant with wide leaves, 16 incehes by 6, sort of like a lily. Once a week he comes to harvest the leaves in a half-acre filled with these plants. He collects several bundles of 100 leaves and sells the bundles for $2. The thick, waterproof leaves are used for various purposes, chiefly to wrap and cook tamales.
Today I help pick the leaves, ripping them from the stalk. Later he uses a knife to make a clean cut and trim the stalks. At lunch he descends to a stream running through the center of the plot. He uses his knife to harvest vero, a cress-like plant growing in a pool. He puts the harvested vero on a plate with lemon and salt. We wrap the salad in tortillas. It tastes slightly sharp, crunchy, and complements the slightly bland taste of the tortillas well. We sit in the shade of an avocado tree, eating lunch, surrounded by thousands of Cacayus plants.
Candido is about 60 years old-most of the younger men no longer work in agriculture. Many commute 2 hours to the capital to work in factories. Instead of harvesting Cacayus leaves, they may work for a Korean company whose factories make candy or tools. One man about my age talked of working for 12 years making plastic bags. It is interesting to contrast the two experiences of working in packaging materials. Candido works for himself, providing product tied into traditional food and culture—both the product and its production involve 0 pollution. Cesar works in a factory with environmental costs in transporting and transforming the raw materials, to make a product which litters hundreds of roadsides and clog drainage ditches. People have discovered how to make money selling useful plastic bags, but there is no money to be had collecting the used ones. The plastic that people wrap food in now is different from the leaves people used before, but in much of Guatemala it all gets thrown on the ground: unsightly at a minimum and sometimes contributing to flooding and poisoned soils.
Picking the leaves is not hard work, though I suspect there was work involved in creating a field full of the species. But now that the field exists, harvesting it is actually much easier than the "commute" of walking to the field in the first place. Candido probably earns as much per hour as some one working in a factory, however unless he buys more land, he can only work a few hours a week—that is all the leaves he can pick without damaging his long-term production. And land is one difficulty: prices for land, especially agricultural land are often several thousand dollars per acre, comparable to prices in the US, for people who earn 15 times less. Candido may earn a comparable wage per hour, but Cesar in the plastic bag factory almost certainly earned more per week. And riding two hours in a bus may be preferred to walking two hours down a solitary road.
The shift from cacayus to plastic is understandable for the worker, and the people who buy them from the factory as well. Vendors at bus stops sell drinks and coconut juice wrapped in cheap plastic bags. And in small villages a family with a refrigerator can sell frozen juice treats, if they price them right they can earn more than when they sell mass-produced packets of chips in foil packets. Once in a market I bought a cacayus packet of fish and tomatoes. The leakage when I got home reminded me the functionality of plastic.
After 12 years making plastic bags Cesar is taking a vacation. I worked with him on his father's bean harvest, and sat on the hillside with the other workers at lunch, eating tomatoes, greens, and local vegetables, and sharing a bit of whiskey as a respite from the dusty work. Other afternoons I see him on the porch of his concrete block house, one of the few Guatemalan men who learned how to weave in the backstrap style usually done by women. One of the things he did during his vacation was weave his wife the traditional "corte" blouse women usually weave for themselves.
His father worked a salaried job for the town for many years in order to build the two story concrete house, without having to sell off the half-dozen small widely scattered plots he uses to grow corn, beans and bananas. San Antonio has a big variety of houses—shacks with cornstalks for walls right next to four story houses with expensive tiles and satellite dishes. In rural Guatemalan villages concrete houses usually mean there are relatives in the US sending money. Here in this town in commuting distance of Antigua and Guatemala city there are lots of people who have managed to earn the money to build their houses while living in them.
This is another difference from the US. Here people with enough money for a larger house often improve the complex they have, putting up a new wing with a two new bedrooms, building a second story, or improving the walls and floors. Their house changes but their neighbors and neighbourhood remain the same. In the US people do remodel, but seldom enough to change the amount and quality of living space as drastically as in Guatemala. When people want a different house, they often change neighbors and neighborhoods—just as they do for a different job.

I cannot argue with the economics of manufacturing plastic bags, or people with half an acre who do not rely on it for monetary income. But there was something about sitting under the avocado tree, eating cress—or similar lunches I have had when working in the fields with others. And while plastic beats cacayus for many uses, even people with automobiles, TVs and refrigerators still use them to make Tamales, something I can't imagine eating from plastic. I think this would be a poorer world if no one kept on doing what Candido does, and am glad that Cesar and his father, despite their salaried jobs, are still keeping some traditions alive.