Having lived in both Guatemala and China one thing which interests me is comparing the prices. The Guatemalan Quetzal fluctuates between 7 and 8 to the dollar, which is also the range of the Renminbi. So the value of the currency internationally is somewhat similar. A Quetzal (Q) and the Renminbi are very close to equivalent value. On the other wages are somewhat different. Median income in Canton province is much higher than Guatemala. But base wages for a security guard in Guatemala city are about 2,000 Quetzals, whereas baseline wages for say a housecleaner are 1,000 RMB. I don't know the situation for equal types of employment.
What is interesting in light of this is how much less expensive things are here than in Guatemala. Taxis here start at 7 RMB. In Guatemala City a taxi ride is minimum 3 times as much 25Q, 40 after dark. You can eat a meal with variety off of stainless steel plates in a restaurant for 5 RMB, and off styrofoam in the street for 1-2. A restaurant meal in Guatemala starts at twice as much (10-12 Q) and variety, cleanliness, and the attitude of the staff are generally lower. The restaurant I eat at in China offers a buffet including vegetables, mushrooms, fish, chicken, for 5RMB ($0.75) In Guatemala City 10Q restaurants have very little variety, no vegetables, and handmade tortillas are the only culinary artistry. Chinese street food includes dumplings, porridge, stir-fried tofu, sugar cane often sold from the back of three-wheeled bicycles owned by the vendors. And you can eat fairly well for 1-4 RMB. You can eat for 1-4 Q in some Guatemalan villages, but in Guatemala City street food is usually large bulky taco stands where people work on contract and most of the revenue goes to the company which provides the equipment. Consequently prices are higher (10Q), but less of that money ends up in the hand of the person working. Even fried corn, which in Guatemala City costs 3-5 Q is only 1 RMB here. Again prices are lower in Guatemalan villages, but Foshan, and Guatemala City both have about 2 million people, so it is interesting how much more pleasant and affordable things like taxis, restaurants, and beer are here.
Unlike Guatemala I don't speak the language, so with a lot of people here my interaction consists mainly of smiles and laughter. So I don't know much about the economics: rent, supplies, take-home. But the street vendors generally seem happier than those in Guatemala city—and the vibe and friendliness seem to suggest an town much smaller and more intimate.
Another noticeable fact is the absence of guns. In Guatemala City many stores have an armed security guard, and police patrols are a common sight in markets, or on city buses. Buses and taxis are often held up in Guatemala City. My relatives introduced me to a couple who run a successful Chinese restaurant in Guatemala City. They have two armed guards patrolling their parking lot, and usually are driven around by a chauffeur with a gun. My cousin here in China has over the past 8 years built a successful steel business and just finished building a modern 4 story house with antique furniture and flat screen televisions in each room. It isn't as nice as the house in Guatemala City, but he drives by himself and never uses a bodyguard. A student of mine also commented on the lack of guns, saying that while youth gangs exist here, they do their fighting with knives, not guns—which greatly reduces the problem of innocent bystanders dying in drive-by shootings.
Nightlife is variable. Guatemala has a big distillery and beers in restaurants start at 12 Q, though sometimes you may have to pay up to 40Q. Here you can drink on the street for 3 RMB. When I go out with my cousin he may drop 1000s of Renminbi for a fancy karaoke nightclub full of elegantly dressed wait staff and fancy decoration—or I may sit on plastic stools on the sidewalk with my friends and spend 10 RMB. There are lots of people with jobs in fancy nightclubs which would not exist without the disposable income of people like my cousin. In old China probably less than 1% of the people could enjoy the aristocratic pleasures of Chinese cooking in elegant surroundings. In the current economic system perhaps 5-10% of people can enjoy aristocratic pleasures regularly and higher percentage can enjoy them on special occasions. I worked three years in fancy restaurants—it's not a bad job, and more soothing surroundings than a factory—and once the paying customers went home we help sometimes got to pretend like we owned the place.
Compared to Guatemala China seems to be a better place to be on the bottom of the economic ladder: you can eat cheap, sell things from the back of bicycles. It is more conceivable that you will occasionally be able to splurge on a taxi ride or a cellphone. Also being held up, accidentally shot, or dying in a boss crash seems to be less of a problem—though that may also be because there are no tabloid newspapers to drum up those fears. It also seems like a better place to be rich—my cousin doesn't have to pay for bodyguards. In Guatemala City, there are many security guards, and many people from the provinces make a basic living standing around holding a shotgun. But it strikes me that it might be better for the economy if the system demanded jobs which might give them more marketable skills afterward.
Many people forget that the foundation of Bolshevik Communism was contrary to Marx's theory of history. Marx believed that capitalism would first become a world-wide system encompassing all the nations of the world—so that bourgeois management would create the wealth and technology which could be used for the common good after the revolution. "Communist" revolutions have never actually occurred in countries with large proletariats, but rather places like Russia, China, and Cuba, which were agrarian, feudal and pre-capitalist. The Bolshevik idea was that it was possible to bypass capitalism and go from peasants to socialism, whereas Marx did not necessarily see the two as mutually exclusive. Socialism is something which builds on capitalism—not which suppresses capitalism.
Many people now believe that Marxism is a dead end. Neo-Liberals have designed capitalist economies in Russia and Guatemala, and the Chinese Communist party has designed a capitalist economy in China. Asked about the "change" Deng Xiaoping said "It does not matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." But it is interesting to compare how the different-colored cats do at catching mice. The capitalism imposed by the neo-Liberals in Russia is dominated by mafiosi, alcoholism, and a fall in life-expectancy of ten years. Crime and violence are also endemic in Guatemala. It strikes me as interesting that in China rich people ride around without bodyguards and poor people can make a living selling things off the back of bicycles. There are many other factors involved—some of the violence in Guatemala is a side-effect of the civil war, and in China most of the new millionaires were on the same level as the poor people 20 years ago, whereas rich people in Guatemala are often the same families who have been ruling the country for centuries. But I think there is some evidence that the Chinese Communist party has designed a better capitalist system for the Chinese people than Neo-Liberals from the US have in Central America and the former Soviet Union.
Happy May Day!
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 May 2008
Saturday, 7 July 2007
Postcard from the Achisphere
The computer screen shows the sharp green peaks of a sound file, with five seconds highlighted. The man in front of the screen turns to the man in front of the microphone. "Ronohey?" he asks. The first man nods. We have been recording excerpts from the Rabinal Achi, an epic poem passed down orally from more than 3 centuries before Columbus, older than the Canterbury tales. The poem is in the Maya language Achi, as is the word "Ronohey" all of it. In addition to the green sound squiggle, the display contains a controller with universal recording icons ("Red Triangle, Black Square") familiar from tape and CD players. The computer operator occasionally uses pull-down menus written in Spanish, but mostly uses icons and wave highlighting, which are independent of language. Much of what he does could be done by some one illiterate, or illiterate in Spanish. And when the two men discuss operating the computer, many of their words are in the same language as the 800 year-old poem we are recording.
Another day I travel in the back of a pickup with a friend to a rural village forty-five minutes from town, where he teaches first grade. All but three of the students speak only Achi and he teaches them in that language: teaches the alphabet, simple words and a few nursery rhymes "Katzenoj we lik katkikotik, ha ha ha!" It occurs to me that although the words are foreign, much of the non-verbal content of the class: the pictures, the activity, even the tune of the song ("if you're happy and you know it") would be recognizable to a teacher in the United States. Like the computerized recordings, these social technologies can be transplanted into all sorts of cultures without separating children from the voices of their grandparents. Of course the classroom is much more basic than anything in the United States and the morning refreshment (a cup of atol cooled over an open fire and served in cups students store and wash themselves) reflects a school system where there was a telethon a few years ago so students would have pencils.
The question of bilingual education in this valley is reminiscent of the issue in the United States. In the US the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Spanish to master English, the language which dominates culture and business. In Guatemala the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Achi, or other Maya languages, to master Spanish, the language which dominates culture and business. And my friend says, most of the peasant farmers recognize the importance of Spanish for life beyond their valley and want their children to be fluent. Much of the pressure for bilingual education comes from more urbanized people who live very differently from their parents and for whom language is one of the few things connecting different generations. But in places like this, theories about bilingual education matter less than teaching staff. Although most students start off with no Spanish, the fourth grade teacher only speaks Spanish, so all the class takes place in Spanish. Some time is set aside for learning Achi names of plants, but she cannot direct or inspire them having anything beyond a third-grade conversation in the language of their ancestors.
The Rabinal Achi drama is still performed, by people wearing masks and elaborate feathered costumes, and the man we recorded is one of the ones who helped keep the oral tradition alive. During January a few dozen people watched the drama in any single performance, one morning it seemed half the people watching were foreign. At the same festival the mayor sponsored another "Dance" with a huge sound system, roped off and a dozen or so people in Halloween style masks and Costumes moving to booming techno beats. Thousands of people pressed against the ropes to see that performance, without quite so much traditional significance. Of course that is much more in line with modern ideas of spectacle, and in the US as well more people watch the spectacle of WWF and Monster Truck rallies than Shakespeare or recitations of the Canterbury Tales. And even in Shakespeare's time the loudest applause was probably not for the things people study in literature classes.
Throughout the Rabinal Achi, both peoples speak often of nuhuyubal, nutaqahal: my mountain, my valley, to denote where they are from. The play tells the story of how the Achi people won their independence from the much larger K'iche people of several western valleys, who had dominated them for several centuries. The story focuses on a single symbolic event in that battle: the capture of a K'iche warrior by a local warrior, the Rabinal Achi, and the K'iche Achi's execution as a prisoner of War. This is a reminder that war and conquest were not European invention—and would have played a role in the last five centuries of history on this continent even if Columbus had stayed home. But it is significant to compare how different peoples speak of war and battle. The K'iche prisoner of war who dies at the end has many more lines than the Achi characters... as if Beowulf had been devoted more to the words of Grendel and his mother, rather than the eponymous hero, or the Song of Roland had talked about the glory and faith of the Muslims rather than caricaturing them as vicious idolaters. Here the captured prisoner speaks, is killed, and his words are recorded by those who kill him. Unlike European War stories, those who preserve the words of the foreign warrior do not need to describe their enemy as a sub-human monster in order to assuage their guilt about killing him.
The way in which the traditional languages and folkways have survived despite the influx of globalized technology is visible throughout the valley. There is a new supermarket, owned by the Walmart Chain, well-integrated into the streetscape, a metal-roofed two story yellow building between older one-story tile roofed buildings housing a doctor's office and an internet cafe. No sea of parking, just a mass of bicycle and motor cycle taxis (tuc tucs) in front of the entrance. Inside you see women in traditional clothing and headgear looking at the plastic-wrapped frozen foods in the freezers and tall shelves, the way other women examine salted fish in wicker baskets in the centuries old market two blocks away. I take a minibus out to one of the outlying communities, and listen to people chattering in Achi as the Korean-made minibus speeds the dirt roads past adobe houses and cattle pastures with too many plastic bags. Many items from beyond Guatemala make it into this valley, the market is full of CDs from Mexico, t-shirts with WWF figures like John Cena, the Marine, even the Argentinian Che Guevara. But to the people who make a livelihood selling these things, like the minibus drivers, or the man who runs the internet cafe, these items by themselves are not necessarily evidence of cultural erosion. I am sure that when the Rabinal Achi first celebrated the defeat of the K'iche army the markets of this valley were filled with trade goods such as weavings, cooking pots, maybe even songs, from the many valleys of the K'iche nation. Some of these no doubt out-competed the products of this valley, but a Rabinal musician playing a K'iche song is still a Rabinal musician. A Rabinal vendor selling CDs from Mexico or cellphones from Norway is still a Rabinal vendor. The products come from many valleys: some Achi, some K'iche, some Yankee. Some patterns of commerce enrich the residents of this valley, others do not. I suspect some one driving a minivan earns more than some one working for Walmart, some one selling internet time more some one than selling John Cena t-shirts. And if I am wrong in those specifics, it is questions like that which matter more for the economic health of the valley than the origins.
Another day I travel in the back of a pickup with a friend to a rural village forty-five minutes from town, where he teaches first grade. All but three of the students speak only Achi and he teaches them in that language: teaches the alphabet, simple words and a few nursery rhymes "Katzenoj we lik katkikotik, ha ha ha!" It occurs to me that although the words are foreign, much of the non-verbal content of the class: the pictures, the activity, even the tune of the song ("if you're happy and you know it") would be recognizable to a teacher in the United States. Like the computerized recordings, these social technologies can be transplanted into all sorts of cultures without separating children from the voices of their grandparents. Of course the classroom is much more basic than anything in the United States and the morning refreshment (a cup of atol cooled over an open fire and served in cups students store and wash themselves) reflects a school system where there was a telethon a few years ago so students would have pencils.
The question of bilingual education in this valley is reminiscent of the issue in the United States. In the US the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Spanish to master English, the language which dominates culture and business. In Guatemala the question is to what extent it is necessary for brown people who speak Achi, or other Maya languages, to master Spanish, the language which dominates culture and business. And my friend says, most of the peasant farmers recognize the importance of Spanish for life beyond their valley and want their children to be fluent. Much of the pressure for bilingual education comes from more urbanized people who live very differently from their parents and for whom language is one of the few things connecting different generations. But in places like this, theories about bilingual education matter less than teaching staff. Although most students start off with no Spanish, the fourth grade teacher only speaks Spanish, so all the class takes place in Spanish. Some time is set aside for learning Achi names of plants, but she cannot direct or inspire them having anything beyond a third-grade conversation in the language of their ancestors.
The Rabinal Achi drama is still performed, by people wearing masks and elaborate feathered costumes, and the man we recorded is one of the ones who helped keep the oral tradition alive. During January a few dozen people watched the drama in any single performance, one morning it seemed half the people watching were foreign. At the same festival the mayor sponsored another "Dance" with a huge sound system, roped off and a dozen or so people in Halloween style masks and Costumes moving to booming techno beats. Thousands of people pressed against the ropes to see that performance, without quite so much traditional significance. Of course that is much more in line with modern ideas of spectacle, and in the US as well more people watch the spectacle of WWF and Monster Truck rallies than Shakespeare or recitations of the Canterbury Tales. And even in Shakespeare's time the loudest applause was probably not for the things people study in literature classes.
Throughout the Rabinal Achi, both peoples speak often of nuhuyubal, nutaqahal: my mountain, my valley, to denote where they are from. The play tells the story of how the Achi people won their independence from the much larger K'iche people of several western valleys, who had dominated them for several centuries. The story focuses on a single symbolic event in that battle: the capture of a K'iche warrior by a local warrior, the Rabinal Achi, and the K'iche Achi's execution as a prisoner of War. This is a reminder that war and conquest were not European invention—and would have played a role in the last five centuries of history on this continent even if Columbus had stayed home. But it is significant to compare how different peoples speak of war and battle. The K'iche prisoner of war who dies at the end has many more lines than the Achi characters... as if Beowulf had been devoted more to the words of Grendel and his mother, rather than the eponymous hero, or the Song of Roland had talked about the glory and faith of the Muslims rather than caricaturing them as vicious idolaters. Here the captured prisoner speaks, is killed, and his words are recorded by those who kill him. Unlike European War stories, those who preserve the words of the foreign warrior do not need to describe their enemy as a sub-human monster in order to assuage their guilt about killing him.
The way in which the traditional languages and folkways have survived despite the influx of globalized technology is visible throughout the valley. There is a new supermarket, owned by the Walmart Chain, well-integrated into the streetscape, a metal-roofed two story yellow building between older one-story tile roofed buildings housing a doctor's office and an internet cafe. No sea of parking, just a mass of bicycle and motor cycle taxis (tuc tucs) in front of the entrance. Inside you see women in traditional clothing and headgear looking at the plastic-wrapped frozen foods in the freezers and tall shelves, the way other women examine salted fish in wicker baskets in the centuries old market two blocks away. I take a minibus out to one of the outlying communities, and listen to people chattering in Achi as the Korean-made minibus speeds the dirt roads past adobe houses and cattle pastures with too many plastic bags. Many items from beyond Guatemala make it into this valley, the market is full of CDs from Mexico, t-shirts with WWF figures like John Cena, the Marine, even the Argentinian Che Guevara. But to the people who make a livelihood selling these things, like the minibus drivers, or the man who runs the internet cafe, these items by themselves are not necessarily evidence of cultural erosion. I am sure that when the Rabinal Achi first celebrated the defeat of the K'iche army the markets of this valley were filled with trade goods such as weavings, cooking pots, maybe even songs, from the many valleys of the K'iche nation. Some of these no doubt out-competed the products of this valley, but a Rabinal musician playing a K'iche song is still a Rabinal musician. A Rabinal vendor selling CDs from Mexico or cellphones from Norway is still a Rabinal vendor. The products come from many valleys: some Achi, some K'iche, some Yankee. Some patterns of commerce enrich the residents of this valley, others do not. I suspect some one driving a minivan earns more than some one working for Walmart, some one selling internet time more some one than selling John Cena t-shirts. And if I am wrong in those specifics, it is questions like that which matter more for the economic health of the valley than the origins.
Saturday, 11 November 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, 30 December 2004
Encounters with the Guerrilla
On the plane down to Guatemala I sat next to a man with cropped hair and an oxford shirt. My single serving friend had grown up in eastern Guatemala, worked as a Jesuit priest in the highlands and Mexico, studied in Boston, and now taught in San Diego. He gave me his card and I ended up sleeping at a house he was in the process of turning into a dormitory for people connected with his movement. He also introduced me to some one he had known growing up, some one who had seen his life take a different course.
The commandante told me “When they ask why I became a guerrilla I say. If not for the coup in ’54 I would have become a Mormon priest, if not from the suppression of the officer’s revolt in ’68 I would have become a doctor.” These events galvanized him, as the execution of the nihilists in Russia galvanized Emma Goldman, or the haymarket affair in Chicago created a new generation of US revolutionaries. So the Commandante fought alongside peasants in the mud with guns in the jungle, trying to win land for landless peasants. When the peace accords were signed, he put down his guns. The struggle continued, but in an environment more open to political change, he chaned his way of fighting.
The day I met him, he was signing an agreement to get the land he had begun fighting for so long ago. His lawyers had achieved what his soldiers had not, and the men who signed up with him had had their faith rewarded with title to land. Now he, like some former Marxists in the US, seems to have become a neo-liberal. Now he shakes his head at the peasants, like some I knew, who are hesitant to get on board with development plans for a revolutionary new neo-liberal economy based on agricultural exports from US-model large collectivized farms which the professors at the University say is the solution. I suspect in the 60s he shook his head at peasants hesitant to get on board with plans for a revolution and communist economy (probably involving Soviet model large collectivized farms) which the students at the University said was the solution. But whatever he thinks of those who didn’t join up with his program, after three decades he delivered the goods for those who did.
My uncle has spent much of his life working with Wycliffe, an organization named after a man very nearly burnt at the stake for translating the bible into the language of the common people so they could decide for themselves what it meant rather than depending on the educated priests who had learned Latin. A friend of mine once commented: “Muslims say ‘we have taught these people Arabic so they can read the Qu’ran in the original.’ Christians say ‘We have translated the Bible so they can read it in their own language.’” But prior to the Reformation, Christendom often showed as little interest in Barbarian languages and cultures as the present-day Umma. And it was unarmed prophets like Wycliffe who helped change how the faith community related to its component cultures. Organizations like Wycliffe catch a lot of flack from secular leftists who see missionaries as cultural imperialists allied to the conservative business class.
My uncle introduced me to a team of Bible translators working in Guatemala. The wife was from the US, the husband was a Mexican of Zapotec Indian ancestry. They were not big fans of godless communism. The critiqued one of the leading icons of the Guatemalan left. At the same time talking about what they had witnessed on the small Guatemalan town where they had lived since the eighties they said “It sometimes seemed the government policies were designed to drive people to join the guerillas.”
The husband also told a story that stayed with me. He had business to do in a nearby village but was warned not to travel. “Those guerrillas are crazy and will kill you.” Sure enough, along a deserted road, a guerrilla stopped his car, rifle in hand.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. You’re a human being, just like me.”
The guerrilla waved him through.
The missionary called what protected his life in that situation God. A materialist might use a different name. But the missionary’s faith in the Galilean, like the peasants’ faith in the Commandante was more than superstition, it was a way of speaking about something which motivated action in the real world and achieved real-world results.
One woman I met in Guatemala remarked on how her Guatemalan husband’s father and her own, had remarkably similar ideas about child-rearing and the importance of family. However the Guatemalan father was a Marxist guerrilla and the US father a Republican businessman. It reminded me that Karl Marx justified the elimination of private property in Europe on the grounds that so few people had access to it, but pointed out elsewhere that access to private property might forestall revolution in the United States. In the US the diffusion of private property, education, voting rights, and access to credit meant that a majority of those interested in improving the lot of their family and community become Republicans or Reagan Democrats to preserve their economic enfranchisement. In the very different socioeconomic environment of Central America in the 1960s lack of access to those same things led people with the same aspirations to communism to obtain economic enfranchisement.
Latin America had Simon Bolivar, it’s George Washington. But it never had it’s Andrew Jackson, or its Homestead Act. The founders of the US hoped that land (expropriated from native Americans) could serve as a means to give new immigrants a stake in the system and serve as a bulwark against revolution. Access to land granted in the Homestead Act and its successors ensured, as Karl Marx and the founders of the United States foresaw, that the US did not develop a European proletariat and at least in the North, never had a feudal peasant class. Access to land meant that in a small way, US conservatism included not just a conservatism of repression, but also a conservatism of cooptation. Through homesteading, home ownership, or the GI bill, they sought to give the laboring class some reason to identify with the dominant system—something in common with the wealthy. In Guatemala, some people I met had begun their lives as serfs, forced to work without pay for large landowners. In some cases peasants were even forbidden from planting corn for their own use, to prevent them from becoming in any way independent of the landowners. Barriers of blood, language overlapped with economic barriers.
In the 1950s Guatemala attempted to implement its own variation on the homestead act, granting peasants the right to small pieces of property from unused land. However while the homestead act granted people in the US “unused” land taken from powerless Native Americans, the Guatemalan plan took unused land from the much better connected United Fruit Company. Here as elsewhere US business interests were allied with feudal landowning interests who fell back on a conservatism of repression, with tragic results in 1954.
I traveled a little with the Commandante. He went to speak at the castle where Guatemalan military is headquartered—helping to design a training program for soldiers in the army he had fought against before the peace accords. (For the record many guerrilla leaders had trained in the same facility, switching sides when the time of revolution arrived). He seemed to take pride in the fact that he was the only former commandante allowed to travel in the US after September 11. He attributed this to the fact that he had never killed or kidnapped US army personnel. It did not sound like a deliberate policy, but apparently both he and Washington had kept track. As some one who had sent men to their deaths, he was probably noticed how the Pentagon felt about the men they sent to their deaths. He also seemed proud of his links to regimes opposed to Yankee foreign policy. He met with the powerful at the military headquarters. He also met with a group of poor peasants who wanted his help to resolve a property dispute.
It was interesting to me—comparing perspective of a man who fought with guns, and then put down his weapons when the war was over—to people who fight by saying nasty things—and have not put down their weapons. When I thought about the land he won for his soldiers, I thought to myself “We remembered our boys, the Commandante remembered his boys.” The culture of an NGO is different from the culture of a soldier's camp. No one ever says “yes, sir” no one ever says “hasta siempre, commandante.”
The last time I saw him was at a Christmas party at the Department of Agriculture. He was invited because of his success obtaining land for the peasants he had taken up arms for three decades earlier. Several more bourgeois people seemed very tickled to be talking to the famous Commandante. My Jesuit friend had warned me that I should not be put off by his way of being a Latin American man with women. Later on he was joined by his current girlfriend, whom he described as being from a higher social class than people he usually knew. They danced and he motioned to me to dance with his girlfriends young but very pretty daughter. Later we all had tacos at a roadside stand opposite a gas station
The commandante told me “When they ask why I became a guerrilla I say. If not for the coup in ’54 I would have become a Mormon priest, if not from the suppression of the officer’s revolt in ’68 I would have become a doctor.” These events galvanized him, as the execution of the nihilists in Russia galvanized Emma Goldman, or the haymarket affair in Chicago created a new generation of US revolutionaries. So the Commandante fought alongside peasants in the mud with guns in the jungle, trying to win land for landless peasants. When the peace accords were signed, he put down his guns. The struggle continued, but in an environment more open to political change, he chaned his way of fighting.
The day I met him, he was signing an agreement to get the land he had begun fighting for so long ago. His lawyers had achieved what his soldiers had not, and the men who signed up with him had had their faith rewarded with title to land. Now he, like some former Marxists in the US, seems to have become a neo-liberal. Now he shakes his head at the peasants, like some I knew, who are hesitant to get on board with development plans for a revolutionary new neo-liberal economy based on agricultural exports from US-model large collectivized farms which the professors at the University say is the solution. I suspect in the 60s he shook his head at peasants hesitant to get on board with plans for a revolution and communist economy (probably involving Soviet model large collectivized farms) which the students at the University said was the solution. But whatever he thinks of those who didn’t join up with his program, after three decades he delivered the goods for those who did.
My uncle has spent much of his life working with Wycliffe, an organization named after a man very nearly burnt at the stake for translating the bible into the language of the common people so they could decide for themselves what it meant rather than depending on the educated priests who had learned Latin. A friend of mine once commented: “Muslims say ‘we have taught these people Arabic so they can read the Qu’ran in the original.’ Christians say ‘We have translated the Bible so they can read it in their own language.’” But prior to the Reformation, Christendom often showed as little interest in Barbarian languages and cultures as the present-day Umma. And it was unarmed prophets like Wycliffe who helped change how the faith community related to its component cultures. Organizations like Wycliffe catch a lot of flack from secular leftists who see missionaries as cultural imperialists allied to the conservative business class.
My uncle introduced me to a team of Bible translators working in Guatemala. The wife was from the US, the husband was a Mexican of Zapotec Indian ancestry. They were not big fans of godless communism. The critiqued one of the leading icons of the Guatemalan left. At the same time talking about what they had witnessed on the small Guatemalan town where they had lived since the eighties they said “It sometimes seemed the government policies were designed to drive people to join the guerillas.”
The husband also told a story that stayed with me. He had business to do in a nearby village but was warned not to travel. “Those guerrillas are crazy and will kill you.” Sure enough, along a deserted road, a guerrilla stopped his car, rifle in hand.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. You’re a human being, just like me.”
The guerrilla waved him through.
The missionary called what protected his life in that situation God. A materialist might use a different name. But the missionary’s faith in the Galilean, like the peasants’ faith in the Commandante was more than superstition, it was a way of speaking about something which motivated action in the real world and achieved real-world results.
One woman I met in Guatemala remarked on how her Guatemalan husband’s father and her own, had remarkably similar ideas about child-rearing and the importance of family. However the Guatemalan father was a Marxist guerrilla and the US father a Republican businessman. It reminded me that Karl Marx justified the elimination of private property in Europe on the grounds that so few people had access to it, but pointed out elsewhere that access to private property might forestall revolution in the United States. In the US the diffusion of private property, education, voting rights, and access to credit meant that a majority of those interested in improving the lot of their family and community become Republicans or Reagan Democrats to preserve their economic enfranchisement. In the very different socioeconomic environment of Central America in the 1960s lack of access to those same things led people with the same aspirations to communism to obtain economic enfranchisement.
Latin America had Simon Bolivar, it’s George Washington. But it never had it’s Andrew Jackson, or its Homestead Act. The founders of the US hoped that land (expropriated from native Americans) could serve as a means to give new immigrants a stake in the system and serve as a bulwark against revolution. Access to land granted in the Homestead Act and its successors ensured, as Karl Marx and the founders of the United States foresaw, that the US did not develop a European proletariat and at least in the North, never had a feudal peasant class. Access to land meant that in a small way, US conservatism included not just a conservatism of repression, but also a conservatism of cooptation. Through homesteading, home ownership, or the GI bill, they sought to give the laboring class some reason to identify with the dominant system—something in common with the wealthy. In Guatemala, some people I met had begun their lives as serfs, forced to work without pay for large landowners. In some cases peasants were even forbidden from planting corn for their own use, to prevent them from becoming in any way independent of the landowners. Barriers of blood, language overlapped with economic barriers.
In the 1950s Guatemala attempted to implement its own variation on the homestead act, granting peasants the right to small pieces of property from unused land. However while the homestead act granted people in the US “unused” land taken from powerless Native Americans, the Guatemalan plan took unused land from the much better connected United Fruit Company. Here as elsewhere US business interests were allied with feudal landowning interests who fell back on a conservatism of repression, with tragic results in 1954.
I traveled a little with the Commandante. He went to speak at the castle where Guatemalan military is headquartered—helping to design a training program for soldiers in the army he had fought against before the peace accords. (For the record many guerrilla leaders had trained in the same facility, switching sides when the time of revolution arrived). He seemed to take pride in the fact that he was the only former commandante allowed to travel in the US after September 11. He attributed this to the fact that he had never killed or kidnapped US army personnel. It did not sound like a deliberate policy, but apparently both he and Washington had kept track. As some one who had sent men to their deaths, he was probably noticed how the Pentagon felt about the men they sent to their deaths. He also seemed proud of his links to regimes opposed to Yankee foreign policy. He met with the powerful at the military headquarters. He also met with a group of poor peasants who wanted his help to resolve a property dispute.
It was interesting to me—comparing perspective of a man who fought with guns, and then put down his weapons when the war was over—to people who fight by saying nasty things—and have not put down their weapons. When I thought about the land he won for his soldiers, I thought to myself “We remembered our boys, the Commandante remembered his boys.” The culture of an NGO is different from the culture of a soldier's camp. No one ever says “yes, sir” no one ever says “hasta siempre, commandante.”
The last time I saw him was at a Christmas party at the Department of Agriculture. He was invited because of his success obtaining land for the peasants he had taken up arms for three decades earlier. Several more bourgeois people seemed very tickled to be talking to the famous Commandante. My Jesuit friend had warned me that I should not be put off by his way of being a Latin American man with women. Later on he was joined by his current girlfriend, whom he described as being from a higher social class than people he usually knew. They danced and he motioned to me to dance with his girlfriends young but very pretty daughter. Later we all had tacos at a roadside stand opposite a gas station
Tuesday, 16 November 2004
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.
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.
Sunday, 5 September 2004
Jobs in Guatemala
Many of the cornstalks dominating the introduction to my last letter have now dried up. Some are still standing, some have been cut to fed by cows, and a few are still green and growing. The finely grained patchwork is much more intricate than in cornfields in the US, as is the connection between the cornfields and the people who depend on them to live. A similar thing has happened with the threats I mentioned. None of the details I presented last month are false, but we are now on our third interpretation about what they mean, I am not sure that a nice tidy explanation is what I should be looking for in my remaining time down here.
This essay contains a lot of numbers. I often convert between dollars in Quetzals. Although I use the official exchange rate of 1:this does not tell the whole story. Computers and gasoline cost slightly more in Guatemala, but living expenses and food other than meat are much less. I confronted this disconnect when I went to El Salvador (which now has a dollar economy) and had to change 160Q to buy a twenty dollar bill. Thinking about how long I could live with 160 Quetzals in Guatemala, it felt like a horrible deal. You can eat out for 3-5Q in the market, though restaurants cost more. Rice is 2Q a pound, tomatoes 1-3Q, many rolls are 25 centavos (about 3 cents). In rural areas you could probably live fairly well (hotels, restaurants, a few beers) for two or three days on 160 Quetzals. Since my lodging is paid for, and I have a kitchen, I could live for weeks. Living for weeks on twenty dollars would be slightly harder. So although I generally convert between dollars and Quetzals, you should remember that other systems forconverting between the currencies (how many pounds of tomatoes you could buy, how much work you would have to do) would produce a different comparison.
A Difficult Job
My mother and I spent some time in Lago Atitlan, a beautiful lake in a volcanic crater, now edged by three volcanic peaks. One hotel offers a view with the three cones perfectly framed and rising above the swimming pool for $140 a night. We stayed in a more modest room, still lakeside for Q140, one-eighth the price.
Of course there are many tourists: vendors make their pitch in English. But if you walk five minutes uphill, the throngs of tourists become lone individuals, and the beggars and vendors disappear. My mother and I were walking on a narrow footpath about seventy feet above the lake when we came upon a man sitting on the side of the path, staring at the tall grass in front of him. He was also sweating profusely from the 8 cinderblocks on his back. He was carrying them from the boat dock, where the tourist hotels are, to a village about an hour away. He said he made about 5Q (62c) a trip. Most cinderblocks I’ve seen weigh about 15 pounds, so his load would have been about 120 pounds, which explained why he was resting alongside the path and sweating profusely. Lake Atitlan is far from Rabinal and when I asked a man here, he said that the going rate for hauling cinderblocks in Rabinal would be 15Q per substantial trip or 35Q a day. I don’t know if labor is cheaper at Lago Atitlan, if the man was trying to make us feel sorry for him, or if he was being taken advantage of. Even at the Rabinal rate, to spend one night in the $140 hotel, he would have to make 75 trips, enough to build a 500 square foot house. Even to spend a night in our modest room would mean hauling half a ton of cinderblocks on his back.
A Good Job
At one point several months ago I met a young man who seemed to be doing fairly well—he had a job with a development organization which paid 2200 Q a month, enough to buy a motorcycle for the nights he had to work in town until 10 o’clock, long past the hour he could find a pickup truck back to his village. His work involved pairing rich country donors with children in communities. Part of his job involved taking photos of the children—posed so donors could see that the things they had given: backpacks, pencils, or food were being put to good use. I was impressed by his energy and insight into \the reality of his work, and was looking forward to seeing him again when I returned to Chimaltenango.
As it turned out he, like many enterprising young men, had left. He wanted to build a house, and provide for the family he hoped to have. In the United States education is the “ticket” people save and borrow money for. Here in Guatemala, this young man used his salary and money borrowed from relatives to pay his passage for the 30 day trip across the border to the United States.
The money you pay for this trip usually includes two to three attempts—like the chance to shoot the target at a carnival, but for much bigger stakes. If you get stopped once, you can try again at no additional cost, but not forever. And the reason it takes 30 days is that the obstacles don’t start at the US border. In one case a truckload of migrants was deported after one guy with a headache wandered into a pharmacy and asked for some pills.
Mexican’s use a different word for pills, so the druggist tipped off the police (too many illegal Central Americans in the US means competition for the illegal Mexicans) who roughed them up and sent them south. Gangs often targets migrants, forced to carry large amounts of cash for expenses and bribes. And the journey itself, hidden in suffocating trucks, hanging onto freight trains for hours, crawling through the desert—is filled with non-human dangers as well. Newspapers are filled with stories of people who die, or lose their limbs chasing their “American Dream.” But you also meet some who made it. I met a man who worked for a decade in restaurants in Connecticut, saved up for a small plot of land and works 14 hour days driving a taxi he bought with his earnings.
Especially in the case of the young man I met case, I wonder about the math. The 40,000Q ($5,000) he had to come up with to travel in that style would have built a decent house without the risk, though it might be hard to pay off the loans on $275 a month. I have also heard several reports that employment in the US is harder to find and less regular than it used to be. I sometimes wonder whether I should offer sobering statistics about how people suffer on the journey, or in the US, throwing cold water when people confide about their “American dream.” Nonetheless, remembering our conversation in March, I doubt it was an ignorant or sudden decision on his part. It was an investment, and I suspect he understands the tradeoffs for his life far better than some one born in the United States could. Guatemalan migrants sending money home are a larger section of the economy than coffee or tourism—industries dominated by the already rich. And my ancestors spent their weeks on that crowded, death-filled, and for some illegal trip decades and centuries ago.
A Job close to home
The cash source for many of the mountain communities is wood. Where one mountain path meets the road I once saw four different men guarding individual piles of timber: 1x12 planks, 4x4 studs, and firewood loose and tied in bundles waiting for a pickup driver to haul their wood to town. Freight charges can be as much as 40% the value of the wood, but the much larger and more affluent market forty-five minute truck ride (five miles) away makes it worthwhile for both buyer and seller.
My first chance to see where this wood comes from came when Tomas offered to take us to see his father. We left the road and walked above one steeply sloped cornfield to a rocky outrcropping. The view across the valley was clear, and there was a sheer drop to the tall pine trees two hundred feet below. Then we walked to where his father was working. This slope was not as sheer as as the cliff face, but the vertical drop was greater than the horizontal, and my Irish companion stayed decided not to descend. Below Tomas’ father was using a chainsaw on an 8 foot long pine log 14-16 inches in diameter. To hold the log flat there was a platform supported on the downhill side by forked poles stuck in the ground. Tomas’ father was cutting the bark-covered sides to make the round log into something square.
Not long after I arrived, one of the supports collapsed; the log tumbled downhill, and the father had to scramble to avoid falling with his chainsaw. It took forty-five minutes to construct a new work platform and use ropes to pull the log into place. The squared off side was marked with a chalkline (actually a string dipped in burnt engine oil) at one inch
intervals to guide the chainsaw so it could be sawn into boards. This operation explains why chainsaws here have longer blades than the ones I remember from the states—it helps keep the cut straight when cutting timber into planks. So with only the chalkline to guide him, Tomas’ father went at it freehand, slicing a 1x12 off the side of the log the way we might slice a piece of cheese. He finished the first board in a little over half an hour. After watching this process for a while, Tomas and his brothers gathered some boards already cut and situated them in the forehead harness that is the standard way of carting heavy loads in Guatemala. Then, three boards to a brother, they started up the hill.
According to a friend of mine who works in forestry, each board probably weighed 20-30 pounds. So that was a lot of weight to carry UP a slope most westerners would balk at descending unburdened. Half of that weight is water, and evaporates if you leave the wood out to dry awhile. That may explain why the next time I saw Tomas’ father at work, there were dozens of boards laid out to dry before their long and arduous journey uphill. This worksite was along a much easier path, but was also along a path it had taken me
forty-five minutes to descend.
Cutting lumber this way is hard work. Each board brings about $1.25, and some of that must be used to pay for transport, and fuel, and maintenance of the chainsaw. Nonetheless the going agricultural wage in the community is about $2.50 a day, so some one with a chainsaw can do fairly well. And when he runs out of trees on his own land, he can also work for others. People pay $3 for as much as you can cut down on a tank of gas. Not every family owns a chainsaw, but almost every one owns an axe, so the tree owner can then split and haul the firewood to sell for his own profit. It seems a pretty good microenterprise, though there is probably an upper limit to the number of chainsaws that can be at work in a single village—especially given how scarce land is.
I can’t resist comparing it to situations in the US where I knew people cutting their own boards. At the farm where I work in Pennsylvania the farmer sometimes cuts down trees and loads the trunks on a wagon to haul to a sawmill to be cut into boards. In Guatemala neither people nor horses could haul entire trunks up the narrow mountain paths, so any lumber taken out of the woods has to be cut in place, and hauled out by human labor. I have never heard anyone mention a sawmill. In Alaska the old sourdoughs claimed to be able to cut logs flat using only a chalkline, but that was to make the edges flat for log cabins. Even there, however, I doubt anyone made a habit of using a chainsaw to cut one inch thick boards.
The journey of the boards illustrates the way in which technology has reached Guatemala in uneven ways. Trees are felled and sawn with a chainsaw—then hauled by people using a centuries old forehead harness. At roadside they reenter the world of twentieth century technology and are loaded to a pickup truck to town. Many are used for concrete forms for construction. When these buildings are built, you may find people cooking with firewood but using computers, teaching typing on manual typewriters while they talk on cellphones.
This essay contains a lot of numbers. I often convert between dollars in Quetzals. Although I use the official exchange rate of 1:this does not tell the whole story. Computers and gasoline cost slightly more in Guatemala, but living expenses and food other than meat are much less. I confronted this disconnect when I went to El Salvador (which now has a dollar economy) and had to change 160Q to buy a twenty dollar bill. Thinking about how long I could live with 160 Quetzals in Guatemala, it felt like a horrible deal. You can eat out for 3-5Q in the market, though restaurants cost more. Rice is 2Q a pound, tomatoes 1-3Q, many rolls are 25 centavos (about 3 cents). In rural areas you could probably live fairly well (hotels, restaurants, a few beers) for two or three days on 160 Quetzals. Since my lodging is paid for, and I have a kitchen, I could live for weeks. Living for weeks on twenty dollars would be slightly harder. So although I generally convert between dollars and Quetzals, you should remember that other systems forconverting between the currencies (how many pounds of tomatoes you could buy, how much work you would have to do) would produce a different comparison.
A Difficult Job
My mother and I spent some time in Lago Atitlan, a beautiful lake in a volcanic crater, now edged by three volcanic peaks. One hotel offers a view with the three cones perfectly framed and rising above the swimming pool for $140 a night. We stayed in a more modest room, still lakeside for Q140, one-eighth the price.
Of course there are many tourists: vendors make their pitch in English. But if you walk five minutes uphill, the throngs of tourists become lone individuals, and the beggars and vendors disappear. My mother and I were walking on a narrow footpath about seventy feet above the lake when we came upon a man sitting on the side of the path, staring at the tall grass in front of him. He was also sweating profusely from the 8 cinderblocks on his back. He was carrying them from the boat dock, where the tourist hotels are, to a village about an hour away. He said he made about 5Q (62c) a trip. Most cinderblocks I’ve seen weigh about 15 pounds, so his load would have been about 120 pounds, which explained why he was resting alongside the path and sweating profusely. Lake Atitlan is far from Rabinal and when I asked a man here, he said that the going rate for hauling cinderblocks in Rabinal would be 15Q per substantial trip or 35Q a day. I don’t know if labor is cheaper at Lago Atitlan, if the man was trying to make us feel sorry for him, or if he was being taken advantage of. Even at the Rabinal rate, to spend one night in the $140 hotel, he would have to make 75 trips, enough to build a 500 square foot house. Even to spend a night in our modest room would mean hauling half a ton of cinderblocks on his back.
A Good Job
At one point several months ago I met a young man who seemed to be doing fairly well—he had a job with a development organization which paid 2200 Q a month, enough to buy a motorcycle for the nights he had to work in town until 10 o’clock, long past the hour he could find a pickup truck back to his village. His work involved pairing rich country donors with children in communities. Part of his job involved taking photos of the children—posed so donors could see that the things they had given: backpacks, pencils, or food were being put to good use. I was impressed by his energy and insight into \the reality of his work, and was looking forward to seeing him again when I returned to Chimaltenango.
As it turned out he, like many enterprising young men, had left. He wanted to build a house, and provide for the family he hoped to have. In the United States education is the “ticket” people save and borrow money for. Here in Guatemala, this young man used his salary and money borrowed from relatives to pay his passage for the 30 day trip across the border to the United States.
The money you pay for this trip usually includes two to three attempts—like the chance to shoot the target at a carnival, but for much bigger stakes. If you get stopped once, you can try again at no additional cost, but not forever. And the reason it takes 30 days is that the obstacles don’t start at the US border. In one case a truckload of migrants was deported after one guy with a headache wandered into a pharmacy and asked for some pills.
Mexican’s use a different word for pills, so the druggist tipped off the police (too many illegal Central Americans in the US means competition for the illegal Mexicans) who roughed them up and sent them south. Gangs often targets migrants, forced to carry large amounts of cash for expenses and bribes. And the journey itself, hidden in suffocating trucks, hanging onto freight trains for hours, crawling through the desert—is filled with non-human dangers as well. Newspapers are filled with stories of people who die, or lose their limbs chasing their “American Dream.” But you also meet some who made it. I met a man who worked for a decade in restaurants in Connecticut, saved up for a small plot of land and works 14 hour days driving a taxi he bought with his earnings.
Especially in the case of the young man I met case, I wonder about the math. The 40,000Q ($5,000) he had to come up with to travel in that style would have built a decent house without the risk, though it might be hard to pay off the loans on $275 a month. I have also heard several reports that employment in the US is harder to find and less regular than it used to be. I sometimes wonder whether I should offer sobering statistics about how people suffer on the journey, or in the US, throwing cold water when people confide about their “American dream.” Nonetheless, remembering our conversation in March, I doubt it was an ignorant or sudden decision on his part. It was an investment, and I suspect he understands the tradeoffs for his life far better than some one born in the United States could. Guatemalan migrants sending money home are a larger section of the economy than coffee or tourism—industries dominated by the already rich. And my ancestors spent their weeks on that crowded, death-filled, and for some illegal trip decades and centuries ago.
A Job close to home
The cash source for many of the mountain communities is wood. Where one mountain path meets the road I once saw four different men guarding individual piles of timber: 1x12 planks, 4x4 studs, and firewood loose and tied in bundles waiting for a pickup driver to haul their wood to town. Freight charges can be as much as 40% the value of the wood, but the much larger and more affluent market forty-five minute truck ride (five miles) away makes it worthwhile for both buyer and seller.
My first chance to see where this wood comes from came when Tomas offered to take us to see his father. We left the road and walked above one steeply sloped cornfield to a rocky outrcropping. The view across the valley was clear, and there was a sheer drop to the tall pine trees two hundred feet below. Then we walked to where his father was working. This slope was not as sheer as as the cliff face, but the vertical drop was greater than the horizontal, and my Irish companion stayed decided not to descend. Below Tomas’ father was using a chainsaw on an 8 foot long pine log 14-16 inches in diameter. To hold the log flat there was a platform supported on the downhill side by forked poles stuck in the ground. Tomas’ father was cutting the bark-covered sides to make the round log into something square.
Not long after I arrived, one of the supports collapsed; the log tumbled downhill, and the father had to scramble to avoid falling with his chainsaw. It took forty-five minutes to construct a new work platform and use ropes to pull the log into place. The squared off side was marked with a chalkline (actually a string dipped in burnt engine oil) at one inch
intervals to guide the chainsaw so it could be sawn into boards. This operation explains why chainsaws here have longer blades than the ones I remember from the states—it helps keep the cut straight when cutting timber into planks. So with only the chalkline to guide him, Tomas’ father went at it freehand, slicing a 1x12 off the side of the log the way we might slice a piece of cheese. He finished the first board in a little over half an hour. After watching this process for a while, Tomas and his brothers gathered some boards already cut and situated them in the forehead harness that is the standard way of carting heavy loads in Guatemala. Then, three boards to a brother, they started up the hill.
According to a friend of mine who works in forestry, each board probably weighed 20-30 pounds. So that was a lot of weight to carry UP a slope most westerners would balk at descending unburdened. Half of that weight is water, and evaporates if you leave the wood out to dry awhile. That may explain why the next time I saw Tomas’ father at work, there were dozens of boards laid out to dry before their long and arduous journey uphill. This worksite was along a much easier path, but was also along a path it had taken me
forty-five minutes to descend.
Cutting lumber this way is hard work. Each board brings about $1.25, and some of that must be used to pay for transport, and fuel, and maintenance of the chainsaw. Nonetheless the going agricultural wage in the community is about $2.50 a day, so some one with a chainsaw can do fairly well. And when he runs out of trees on his own land, he can also work for others. People pay $3 for as much as you can cut down on a tank of gas. Not every family owns a chainsaw, but almost every one owns an axe, so the tree owner can then split and haul the firewood to sell for his own profit. It seems a pretty good microenterprise, though there is probably an upper limit to the number of chainsaws that can be at work in a single village—especially given how scarce land is.
I can’t resist comparing it to situations in the US where I knew people cutting their own boards. At the farm where I work in Pennsylvania the farmer sometimes cuts down trees and loads the trunks on a wagon to haul to a sawmill to be cut into boards. In Guatemala neither people nor horses could haul entire trunks up the narrow mountain paths, so any lumber taken out of the woods has to be cut in place, and hauled out by human labor. I have never heard anyone mention a sawmill. In Alaska the old sourdoughs claimed to be able to cut logs flat using only a chalkline, but that was to make the edges flat for log cabins. Even there, however, I doubt anyone made a habit of using a chainsaw to cut one inch thick boards.
The journey of the boards illustrates the way in which technology has reached Guatemala in uneven ways. Trees are felled and sawn with a chainsaw—then hauled by people using a centuries old forehead harness. At roadside they reenter the world of twentieth century technology and are loaded to a pickup truck to town. Many are used for concrete forms for construction. When these buildings are built, you may find people cooking with firewood but using computers, teaching typing on manual typewriters while they talk on cellphones.
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