I am sitting in a movie theater watching a black and white animated girl march around her living room. The theater is in Tacheles, a much-graffiti'd old warehouse that used to be an anarchist hangout in East Berlin. Thanks to the effort of millions of people, the building is no longer in East Berlin, but the little girl is still shouting in German "Weg mit dem Shah!" In the English version of the movie Persepolis which has been redubbed she shouted "Down with the Shah!" The book upon which it was based was written in French. And of course when Marjane Satrapi was marching around a real living room she was shouting in Persian But though the sounds are different in the different language, the cri de coeur is the same. Persepolis is an intense story; mixing revolution and exile and puberty. When the teenage Satrapi plays air guitar to a bootleg Iron Maiden album, what is the "objective" meaning of her actions, is it: ordinary teenage rebellion, a blow for freedom against authority, Western decadence tempting pure Islamic youth? And while I identify with her, there is also a lesson about the limits of my contemporaneous search for an alternative identity in record bins in the 1980s. In Tehran Michael Jackson and Kim Wilde are just as subversive as Black Flag or the Dead Kennedy's—and top-40 hits are much more subversive than anything shaven head anarchists can get up to in a Vienna prep school.
I am drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon discussing Good Will Hunting with an Irishman. We are sitting on plastic stools in a small restaurant off a street where people sell sugar cane and oranges from the back of bicycles. The image on the label is the same, but the rest of the words are in Chinese. The beer costs $0.40 and the Irishman is from Melbourne Australia. He talks about guys he used to weld with before he got a chance to go to University in his mid-twenties, and how much they liked the scene where Matt Damon harangues the Harvard Student for paying tens of thousands of dollars for "an education you could have gotten for a buck fifty in late fees at the local library." It helped them to find more value in the life they lived and take ownership of it in the face of people who might look down on them. Of course Matt and Ben were seeking the goodwill of a different tribe of Irishmen on the other side of the world in South Boston—hoping that the community would be known for something other than riots over busing. Some one else I knew, a working class Italian, saw the story as a sham because Matt and Ben came from educated backgrounds, and contrary to the attitude the janitor has in the movie, the real Matt Damon paid for to go to Harvard (only two years, so he got it for half price). His cynical attitude made his life harder, but the attitude of the Melbourne welders helped them keep their self-respect.
I am in a Karaoke Bar—a medium sized room with a large TV. There are dozens of these rooms in the night club. people like to sing Karaoke here—but each clique of friends has a room to sing to each other, rather than getting on stage for an audience of strangers. I catch a familiar tune and look at the Chinese characters. I read very little Chinese, but I know that 巴比伦 means Babylon. I sing along: Chinese characters, English words, Jamaican tune and rhythm. But the sentiments come from 25 centuries ago. Although China is my ancestral homeland, the language and songs of this land have not been part of my life. Like Marjane or a Melbourne welder my heart stirs to something crafted by people no blood kin to me. The ones crying in captivity would find only meaningless babble in my song, even those who translated their words into English would probably find it unrecognizable. Only the Jamaicans who translated their words into song might find what I am doing in the Karaoke bar comprehensible. All of us remember different Zions in contrast to a different Babylons. But it is what happens within our hearts, rather than the sounds from our mouths, which creates the continuity across the centuries.
In the dusty Guatemalan town of Rabinal I like to drink Atol in the marketplace. The hot corn mush is served in a guacal: a hollowed out half gourd painted with red and yellow and black designs. I learned enough of the local Achi language to be able to ask for white atol with Chili: "hooch saq ruuk ik" I brought a guacal with me to China to use as bowls: to store hot peppers and garlic. The guacal is yet another cultural element: handmade, specific, and a centuries old local tradition I have carried across the globe.
Here in Southern China I see so many mechanically reproduced items which are elements of a shared global vocabulary: DVDs, flat screen TVs, jeans, cellphones, cars. I have a visual dictionary listing their names in Spanish, English, and Chinese. Will the circulation of these commodities sweep us into a single engulfing cultural matrix of Franchises and Freeway Exits—will they be repeated elements in millions of local and independent matrices governed by idiosyncratic rules like a neighborhood full of one-way streets?
I am teaching English and think sometimes about what makes a language: vocabulary of course, but also grammar, the system for how we put these elements together. You could make a visual dictionary for all the globalized elements in this essay: "Michael Jackson pin, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Karaoke." But language is more than vocabulary, and culture is more than these elements—there are also the rules which tell you how to put the elements together so that a group of people can find shared meaning in it. Like many of the sentences I grade, the warning "When people aware, the damages has been done," contains meaning. But even without consciously referring to the rules, I want to change it. There is something uncomfortable about the sentence. Where does our sense of grammar come from?
In Rabinal I drank atol from my Guacal—a hot beverage made from corn, with deep resonance for the Maya. Here in Foshan I fill it with tea, a hot beverage with deep cultural significance for the Chinese. I raise the guacal to my lips. The hot liquid passes my lips and warms my heart.
Wednesday, 23 April 2008
Sunday, 11 November 2007
My first semester teaching in Foshan
I am sitting in a chair of burnished steel looking at a black and white photograph of Paris. I am drinking tea while soft music full of uplifting major chords plays in the background. I have sat in many similar cafes with black and white photos of Paris. The last one was in Guatemala, in Santa Cruz de Quiche where I ate granola. It was the Maya heart of Central America, but the town was named for a religion brought five centuries ago from Andalucia. This cafe is in the Cantonese part of China, in a City called Foshan. This is a Chinese word, but it means Mountain of Buddha, named for a foreign religion brought eighteen centuries ago by missionaries from India.
My first week here, I went for a health check up. Doctors in white coats sitting behind grey desks looked at clipboards, had me close one eye and observe E's in various positions on a wall chart, tapped my knee, and gave me a plastic specimen cup. Everything seemed very familiar in all respects except the language. The words out of their mouth and the things written on the clipboard were Chinese, which I hardly understand. But the objects and the motions were almost instantly recognizable.
The writing is the obvious marker here. Western Europe, the Americas, and Australia all use the alphabet developed 20 centuries ago by the Roman Empire. The regular lines and curves of the letters are visible here as well—all the city trash cans are labeled in English and Chinese, as are many bus stops. But while not difficult to find, the English letters are smaller, and uncommon. Stores, soft drinks, and ingredients are labeled in the older writing system developed even earlier here in China.
I am trying to teach students here at Foshan University to speak English—which they do. Of course, to make their words, they often string together the sounds they are familiar with from Chinese. This is why their diction seems imprecise on words like "because" or "work". Like anyone speaking a new language, their first instinct is to build the new words out of the sounds they are already familiar with. When I try to describe my surroundings, I also string together images familiar with from other places I have been. So perhaps my attempts to reproduce and describe what I see are a little distorted by the accent of my previous cultural environments, an accent I hope I will lose.
Foshan is a very large town, 2 million people: larger than any city in Central America, but it is only a suburb of Guangzhou. The area I live in is on the edge of downtown, full of skyscrapers, and wide boulevards traveled by cars, motorcycles, bicycles. Children shop for clothes and ipods in fashionable boutiques conducting themselves much like Southern California kids in malls. But not everything has been brought over. Among the kids browsing the endless malls, there are no skateboarders or long-haired hippies. I bought a guitar at a music store featuring large black flags with Anarchy symbols and pictures of Che Guevara, but everyone working there looked clean-cut and semi-preppy. Occasionally I see beggars, often with very visible disabilities. And I am sure there are parts of town where people ar every unhappy. Much of Western culture has been imported, but in Foshan at least, one significant part of Western culture has not been imported: the Western sub-culture of Rebellion against the mainstream: there are none of the signs of middle class angst in urban zones, or working class gang-membership I saw in Guatemala. In High School when we went to pep rallies—I was always a little uncomfortable. And in college I met people who actively made fun of them. But here in China, everyone seems like the type ready to cheer for the home team, despite how similar the hallways and lockers and class schedules seem.
My first week here, I went for a health check up. Doctors in white coats sitting behind grey desks looked at clipboards, had me close one eye and observe E's in various positions on a wall chart, tapped my knee, and gave me a plastic specimen cup. Everything seemed very familiar in all respects except the language. The words out of their mouth and the things written on the clipboard were Chinese, which I hardly understand. But the objects and the motions were almost instantly recognizable.
The writing is the obvious marker here. Western Europe, the Americas, and Australia all use the alphabet developed 20 centuries ago by the Roman Empire. The regular lines and curves of the letters are visible here as well—all the city trash cans are labeled in English and Chinese, as are many bus stops. But while not difficult to find, the English letters are smaller, and uncommon. Stores, soft drinks, and ingredients are labeled in the older writing system developed even earlier here in China.
I am trying to teach students here at Foshan University to speak English—which they do. Of course, to make their words, they often string together the sounds they are familiar with from Chinese. This is why their diction seems imprecise on words like "because" or "work". Like anyone speaking a new language, their first instinct is to build the new words out of the sounds they are already familiar with. When I try to describe my surroundings, I also string together images familiar with from other places I have been. So perhaps my attempts to reproduce and describe what I see are a little distorted by the accent of my previous cultural environments, an accent I hope I will lose.
Foshan is a very large town, 2 million people: larger than any city in Central America, but it is only a suburb of Guangzhou. The area I live in is on the edge of downtown, full of skyscrapers, and wide boulevards traveled by cars, motorcycles, bicycles. Children shop for clothes and ipods in fashionable boutiques conducting themselves much like Southern California kids in malls. But not everything has been brought over. Among the kids browsing the endless malls, there are no skateboarders or long-haired hippies. I bought a guitar at a music store featuring large black flags with Anarchy symbols and pictures of Che Guevara, but everyone working there looked clean-cut and semi-preppy. Occasionally I see beggars, often with very visible disabilities. And I am sure there are parts of town where people ar every unhappy. Much of Western culture has been imported, but in Foshan at least, one significant part of Western culture has not been imported: the Western sub-culture of Rebellion against the mainstream: there are none of the signs of middle class angst in urban zones, or working class gang-membership I saw in Guatemala. In High School when we went to pep rallies—I was always a little uncomfortable. And in college I met people who actively made fun of them. But here in China, everyone seems like the type ready to cheer for the home team, despite how similar the hallways and lockers and class schedules seem.
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.
Wednesday, 30 August 2006
Postcard from Huehuetenango
In the Northwestern part of the Guatemalan highlands is the province of Huehuetenango. It is one of the few places in Guatemala where men as well as women have preserved the unique Traje, or clothing. In several places the mens’ traje consists of a sort of black wool poncho cut so men can travel in the cool mountain air. In other cases it is a jacket with beautiful red purple and white stripes. It is a region of spectacular, soaring mountains, and narrow valleys, and the geography means that several mutually unintelligible languages are spoken by the indigenous residents of the rural areas. A Guatemalan who went to an indigenous residential school where children were required to learn other Maya languages said that Mam, the language most widely spoken in Huehuetenango, was always the most difficult to learn. Here you might travel ten miles to another valley and find people speaking a different language. It seems backwards and far from the Spanish-speaking centers of power in Guatemala City. But the linguistic fragmentation and relative paucity of archaelogical sites suggest that it may have seemed backwards and far from the centers of power even before the conquest in the days when the most powerful people in the region were other Maya speaking languages like Kakchiquel and K'iche.
I was in Huehue to observe a referendum on mining concessions. Guatemala is party to an international convention granting indigenous communities the right to be consulted about the use of natural resources in their territories. In 2005 a series of referenda in another western province rejected concessions granted to a Canadian company to mine for gold. Despite these rejections on the local level, the national government and the companies are proceeding apace. The mining concessions in Huehue are nowhere near as far along—but the issues, including the destruction of landscape, poisoned streams and wells from runoff and the small share of the revenue generated by the mine which stays in the community—or even in Guatemala, are issues shared.
We awoke in the town at four in the morning to trek out to some of the 50 villages involved in the referenda. We took a bus partway, then my group of about thirty crossed a bridge in the dark, and began climbing a roadway which was blocked to put down paving stones. At one point we saw a man with a horse outlined against the dark navy sky. We mumbled greetings as the horse´s breath made slight steam. The sky continued to lighten as we ascended past cornfields, the sun slowly revealing the contours of the sheer mountainside opposite, the sparkling river below, and the rooftops of the town we had left on the opposite valley. Trekking with this group of thirty, made up of local people, Guatemalans from other provinces, and international observers as we climbed the mountain with the dawn was an experience I will always take with me.
The trekkers split up to go to five villages. In ours we received filling breakfast of soup and tortillas with a local family, then went to the local school, where a man with a megaphone started talking to a slowly gathering crowd of men in sombreros and women with colorful headbands and traje. He wasn´t speaking Spanish. Eventually some four hundred people were gathered and began registering their names for the vote. It was interesting to look out at this crowd of people with individual faces, but very similar clothing: men clustered on one side and women on the other. The man with the megaphone continued discoursing in Popti. A generation ago, even a small gathering of people speaking an indigenous language would have been greeted with suspicion and possibly bullets. Here hundreds were participating in a political rally almost no one in Guatemala city could understand (there are always a few words: “cents”, “poison”, “environment” where they use the Spanish terms).
Then there was the time for the vote, for or against the awarding of mining contracts without consulting the community. And suddenly hundreds of people were waving their arms in the air, shouting, as was the man with the microphone, triumphant. It was a scene I would see repeated multiple times, in various locations in the three municipios (county-level political unit) I observed. The unity of opinion was reinforced by the visual unity of clothing: two dozen women in long black skirts and red tops with a shared color scheme and pattern despite individual touches make quite an impression when working together. The visual unity of traje is something I noticed many times during the referendum, or when they faced the visual unity of police in uniform in the capital.
There are criticisms which could be made. The organizers of the referenda do not feign neutrality, and posters urging people to come to the “consultation against mining” make it clear which side they are on. While there may be some intimidated into keeping silent by the size of the majority view, the enthusiasm of people to defend their way of life is not fake. Both the turnout and the enthusiasm with which people respond to their local leaders is impressive compared with other meetings I have seen organized by people from the capital. If it is a little bit like a pep rally, it is about something which will affect their lives much longer than who will win a football game, or even who will win a congressional seat. The mayors and other elected officials who organized these referenda are representing an indigenous and community perspective absent in the meetings between Canadian businessmen and government officials from Guatemala City making decisions about land where neither has children, family, or roots.
It is interesting talking to the other observers. One night I bunk with a Swiss University student. He indulges my attempt to practice my German. He comes from another mountainous country with scattered dialects—though he says these Guatemalan mountainsides are much more thickly populated than the Swiss ones. He also talks about the effects email and text messaging are having on Swiss: for the first time people are having to write down, and figure out how to spell dialect words not found in any dictionary. Watching people with cellphones chattering in the various dialects here I wonder about the effects of technology. Will these technologies lead to a homogenization like BBC standard or midwest standard in broadcasting, or help people with shared language background keep in touch even as they scatter geographically?
Another night, in a bar in the provincial capital, I watch an argument between an observer from Guatemala city—an ardent socialist—and two neo-liberal economic students. Their conversation fairly quickly degenerates into insults. The neoliberals assume the North American is a potential ally: won´t mines bring jobs? and how can I believe the Maya peasants are the same race who built the stone temples and made such accurate calculations about the solar year? I try to get them to ask similar questions about Europe: are the Italians the same race as the Romans? How could soccer hooligans and blue-blood toffs be the same race as Tolkien and Lord Kelvin? And in any event it's not surprising that people denied education for centuries and only just recovering from the latest in a long history of massacres haven't been able to give rise to scientists and architects. But I´m disappointed in the lack of comity: I´m not sure either the Spanish-speakers on the left or right were interested in doing anything other than debate whether socialism is a good thing and confirm the stereotypes each already had of the other: that the other guys just don´t understand the larger repercussions of mining, or care about what Guatemala really needs.
The unwillingness to listen strikes me again on a larger stage. A few weeks later we travel to the capital where leaders of the consultation present their results to the congress, the human rights office, and finally the ministry of mines. The last is the least successful, or perhaps the most honest. At the end of the presentation one of the officials dismisses the delegation, saying “You just need to go to school to understand what mining is.” And its not too surprising that these college educated men in suits and ties with fancy computers on their desks would look askance at the peasants who would usually be working in cornfields with nary a computer or filing cabinet in sight. Though the peasants are here to talk about things being done in their own back yard and which could affect the land for generations.
We end up getting a ride with a minor ministry official, who tells us how mining has an improved ecological footprint, that the land is obtained through legal purchases, how everyone in these communities is impoverished, how the jobs will make it less necessary for people to go work in coffee plantations. His story isn´t implausible and is probably consistent with everything he has seen in word-processed reports, and when he steps out of his air conditioned pickup for an hour-long site visit. Even among educated Guatemalans concerned about human rights there is sometimes a tendency to see peasant life as a black box described by the word “poverty.”
But if the people at the ministry of mines think the peasants need to “go to school to learn about mining” and the things they deal with every day, I would suggest that the people at the ministry likewise need to learn how “economic development plans“ have historically worked in rural Guatemala. And perhaps the Yes, people seek cash working on coffee plantations, or even in the United States because of difficulty finding jobs close to home. But they value their homes, send money back, build houses in their home villages to try to keep some semblance of a way of life which strip mining and chemical runoff could destroy forever. And even if the technology exists to minimize the environmental dangers, development projects throughout the world have a history of making promises. They make promises to the powerful and well-connected and also to the poor. And they do keep some promises, but promises made to the poor and poorly connected are almost always the first ones broken. When its time for an accounting, I doubt any business will budget for state of the art environmental technology for the peasants of Huehuetenango if they believe they can save the money to pay better-connected creditors. And if they intended to treat the land an the people on it with respect, they didn't show much evidence of that respect today.
I studied urban planning in Boston, and even in the US the demolition of low-income housing to build highways or high rises destroyed communities and small businesses dependent on them, and threw people onto the street. Even forty years later the people have never been compensated. The highways and high-rises were built, and people who were already rich and well connected got richer. But the communities were destroyed, small business owners and tenants were displaced, and promises made were never kept. In Guatemala projects which don´t merely fail to deliver on promises made to people affected, but in some areas where I worked people were killed to ensure there was no one to complain about the broken promises. And the dismissive attitude at the ministry, is not a good sign that they really intend to treat people from these areas with respect, especially since they never consulted with them in the first place.
But organizing is a multi-step struggle, and even if the ministry ignores the meeting, it is officially registered, and the people are organized, and unified, and are building a network. And the logistical effort itself is impressive: computers to count and summarize results, hundreds of local and outside observers coordinated and fed. Whether mining eventually takes place or not, it is in the community´s interest to be treated as stakeholders, rather than relying on the “good will” of patronizing ministry officials. And watching the rousing meetings in Mam, and Popti I am struck by something else. A generation ago the technological divide between indigenous and Spanish-speaking Guatemalans was huge--and these villages still have many people living in wooden shacks, cooking on open fires, and sleeping on boards. But they also have a few people living in two story tile houses with cellphones, computers and pickup trucks: even videotaping the meetings with camcorders—still speaking the language, wearing the clothing and attending church services which tie them to their neighbors in the shacks. And a child in these meetings listening to the language of his or her grandparents used by hundreds to discuss life changing issues might grow up with a very different idea of the balance of power between the indigenous and Spanish-speaking world than some one living in a village with no roads, electricity, or running water and only a hoe and a machete who watched soldiers with machine guns jump from helicopters to torch houses, round up women, and shoot indiscriminately during the civil war twenty-five years ago.
I was in Huehue to observe a referendum on mining concessions. Guatemala is party to an international convention granting indigenous communities the right to be consulted about the use of natural resources in their territories. In 2005 a series of referenda in another western province rejected concessions granted to a Canadian company to mine for gold. Despite these rejections on the local level, the national government and the companies are proceeding apace. The mining concessions in Huehue are nowhere near as far along—but the issues, including the destruction of landscape, poisoned streams and wells from runoff and the small share of the revenue generated by the mine which stays in the community—or even in Guatemala, are issues shared.
We awoke in the town at four in the morning to trek out to some of the 50 villages involved in the referenda. We took a bus partway, then my group of about thirty crossed a bridge in the dark, and began climbing a roadway which was blocked to put down paving stones. At one point we saw a man with a horse outlined against the dark navy sky. We mumbled greetings as the horse´s breath made slight steam. The sky continued to lighten as we ascended past cornfields, the sun slowly revealing the contours of the sheer mountainside opposite, the sparkling river below, and the rooftops of the town we had left on the opposite valley. Trekking with this group of thirty, made up of local people, Guatemalans from other provinces, and international observers as we climbed the mountain with the dawn was an experience I will always take with me.
The trekkers split up to go to five villages. In ours we received filling breakfast of soup and tortillas with a local family, then went to the local school, where a man with a megaphone started talking to a slowly gathering crowd of men in sombreros and women with colorful headbands and traje. He wasn´t speaking Spanish. Eventually some four hundred people were gathered and began registering their names for the vote. It was interesting to look out at this crowd of people with individual faces, but very similar clothing: men clustered on one side and women on the other. The man with the megaphone continued discoursing in Popti. A generation ago, even a small gathering of people speaking an indigenous language would have been greeted with suspicion and possibly bullets. Here hundreds were participating in a political rally almost no one in Guatemala city could understand (there are always a few words: “cents”, “poison”, “environment” where they use the Spanish terms).
Then there was the time for the vote, for or against the awarding of mining contracts without consulting the community. And suddenly hundreds of people were waving their arms in the air, shouting, as was the man with the microphone, triumphant. It was a scene I would see repeated multiple times, in various locations in the three municipios (county-level political unit) I observed. The unity of opinion was reinforced by the visual unity of clothing: two dozen women in long black skirts and red tops with a shared color scheme and pattern despite individual touches make quite an impression when working together. The visual unity of traje is something I noticed many times during the referendum, or when they faced the visual unity of police in uniform in the capital.
There are criticisms which could be made. The organizers of the referenda do not feign neutrality, and posters urging people to come to the “consultation against mining” make it clear which side they are on. While there may be some intimidated into keeping silent by the size of the majority view, the enthusiasm of people to defend their way of life is not fake. Both the turnout and the enthusiasm with which people respond to their local leaders is impressive compared with other meetings I have seen organized by people from the capital. If it is a little bit like a pep rally, it is about something which will affect their lives much longer than who will win a football game, or even who will win a congressional seat. The mayors and other elected officials who organized these referenda are representing an indigenous and community perspective absent in the meetings between Canadian businessmen and government officials from Guatemala City making decisions about land where neither has children, family, or roots.
It is interesting talking to the other observers. One night I bunk with a Swiss University student. He indulges my attempt to practice my German. He comes from another mountainous country with scattered dialects—though he says these Guatemalan mountainsides are much more thickly populated than the Swiss ones. He also talks about the effects email and text messaging are having on Swiss: for the first time people are having to write down, and figure out how to spell dialect words not found in any dictionary. Watching people with cellphones chattering in the various dialects here I wonder about the effects of technology. Will these technologies lead to a homogenization like BBC standard or midwest standard in broadcasting, or help people with shared language background keep in touch even as they scatter geographically?
Another night, in a bar in the provincial capital, I watch an argument between an observer from Guatemala city—an ardent socialist—and two neo-liberal economic students. Their conversation fairly quickly degenerates into insults. The neoliberals assume the North American is a potential ally: won´t mines bring jobs? and how can I believe the Maya peasants are the same race who built the stone temples and made such accurate calculations about the solar year? I try to get them to ask similar questions about Europe: are the Italians the same race as the Romans? How could soccer hooligans and blue-blood toffs be the same race as Tolkien and Lord Kelvin? And in any event it's not surprising that people denied education for centuries and only just recovering from the latest in a long history of massacres haven't been able to give rise to scientists and architects. But I´m disappointed in the lack of comity: I´m not sure either the Spanish-speakers on the left or right were interested in doing anything other than debate whether socialism is a good thing and confirm the stereotypes each already had of the other: that the other guys just don´t understand the larger repercussions of mining, or care about what Guatemala really needs.
The unwillingness to listen strikes me again on a larger stage. A few weeks later we travel to the capital where leaders of the consultation present their results to the congress, the human rights office, and finally the ministry of mines. The last is the least successful, or perhaps the most honest. At the end of the presentation one of the officials dismisses the delegation, saying “You just need to go to school to understand what mining is.” And its not too surprising that these college educated men in suits and ties with fancy computers on their desks would look askance at the peasants who would usually be working in cornfields with nary a computer or filing cabinet in sight. Though the peasants are here to talk about things being done in their own back yard and which could affect the land for generations.
We end up getting a ride with a minor ministry official, who tells us how mining has an improved ecological footprint, that the land is obtained through legal purchases, how everyone in these communities is impoverished, how the jobs will make it less necessary for people to go work in coffee plantations. His story isn´t implausible and is probably consistent with everything he has seen in word-processed reports, and when he steps out of his air conditioned pickup for an hour-long site visit. Even among educated Guatemalans concerned about human rights there is sometimes a tendency to see peasant life as a black box described by the word “poverty.”
But if the people at the ministry of mines think the peasants need to “go to school to learn about mining” and the things they deal with every day, I would suggest that the people at the ministry likewise need to learn how “economic development plans“ have historically worked in rural Guatemala. And perhaps the Yes, people seek cash working on coffee plantations, or even in the United States because of difficulty finding jobs close to home. But they value their homes, send money back, build houses in their home villages to try to keep some semblance of a way of life which strip mining and chemical runoff could destroy forever. And even if the technology exists to minimize the environmental dangers, development projects throughout the world have a history of making promises. They make promises to the powerful and well-connected and also to the poor. And they do keep some promises, but promises made to the poor and poorly connected are almost always the first ones broken. When its time for an accounting, I doubt any business will budget for state of the art environmental technology for the peasants of Huehuetenango if they believe they can save the money to pay better-connected creditors. And if they intended to treat the land an the people on it with respect, they didn't show much evidence of that respect today.
I studied urban planning in Boston, and even in the US the demolition of low-income housing to build highways or high rises destroyed communities and small businesses dependent on them, and threw people onto the street. Even forty years later the people have never been compensated. The highways and high-rises were built, and people who were already rich and well connected got richer. But the communities were destroyed, small business owners and tenants were displaced, and promises made were never kept. In Guatemala projects which don´t merely fail to deliver on promises made to people affected, but in some areas where I worked people were killed to ensure there was no one to complain about the broken promises. And the dismissive attitude at the ministry, is not a good sign that they really intend to treat people from these areas with respect, especially since they never consulted with them in the first place.
But organizing is a multi-step struggle, and even if the ministry ignores the meeting, it is officially registered, and the people are organized, and unified, and are building a network. And the logistical effort itself is impressive: computers to count and summarize results, hundreds of local and outside observers coordinated and fed. Whether mining eventually takes place or not, it is in the community´s interest to be treated as stakeholders, rather than relying on the “good will” of patronizing ministry officials. And watching the rousing meetings in Mam, and Popti I am struck by something else. A generation ago the technological divide between indigenous and Spanish-speaking Guatemalans was huge--and these villages still have many people living in wooden shacks, cooking on open fires, and sleeping on boards. But they also have a few people living in two story tile houses with cellphones, computers and pickup trucks: even videotaping the meetings with camcorders—still speaking the language, wearing the clothing and attending church services which tie them to their neighbors in the shacks. And a child in these meetings listening to the language of his or her grandparents used by hundreds to discuss life changing issues might grow up with a very different idea of the balance of power between the indigenous and Spanish-speaking world than some one living in a village with no roads, electricity, or running water and only a hoe and a machete who watched soldiers with machine guns jump from helicopters to torch houses, round up women, and shoot indiscriminately during the civil war twenty-five years ago.
Sunday, 30 July 2006
Postcard from a mountain graveyard
I have returned to the highlands of Guatemala. The whys will be explained in their proper place. One of the most affecting experiences since I’ve Eben back took place in a small mountain village. We were staying with a man I’ll call Saturnino.
This was a peaceful day. A variety of processions from a half-dozen homes around town converged in the field in front of the school. There were a few hundred people, carrying about twenty wooden caskets between them. We marched out of town and about a mile downhill, past cornfields and grazing land. The cemetery was a few acres, with overgrown grass and hydrangea bushes obscuring the pastel cement monuments. We stood under a pole shed while people offered candles, sugar, and guaro (homemade whiskey) according to pre-Columbian traditions. After the flames died, they concluded with Catholic prayers. Looking at the weathered trunks holding up the roof that sheltered us, and past them to the mountains in the distance, the mixed signs of careful tending and wildness in the cemetery, it reminded me a little of backwoods Appalachia in the States.
People sometimes ask if our time in Guatemala has given us impressive Spanish skills. It does, but in villages with shacks and clapboard Pentecostal churches, where people grow most of their own food and brew homemade whiskey, peoples speech patterns are noticeably different than they are in the big cities. As one of my coworkers put it, the language we pickup is “hick” Spanish: sing-song and slow, with a limited vocabulary and non-standard word order, along with some interjections “si, pues,ah...pobre” very different from the rapid and dismissive speech of the capital.
But if the town in 2006 recalls Appalachia, it had a very different quality a quarter-century ago. Saturnino and most of the residents of what was then a town of several thousand (it is considerably smaller now) fled into the mountains in advance of attacking soldiers who raged through burning houses, slaughtering animals and villagers. Guerrillas in neighboring areas had scored a few successes, and the government’s plan was to ensure that the villagers were too terrified and destitute to care for themselves, let alone help anyone else. People were not targeted because of what they had done but because for the army, killing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and making millions refugees had no downside and a possible tactical benefit. Saturnino’s family fled higher into the mountains where they lived for several years, subject to continual government attacks. His wife and several other family members were among those killed.
There are a number of NGOs working on different fronts regarding the massacres. I have worked most closely with legal organizations seeking legal accountability. There are others working at documenting the events, at psychological counseling, at attempts to rebuild. On a later trip I also observed a team of forensic anthropologists, excavating the shallow graves where many victims of the violence ended up: tossed in piles at the edge of town, or even buried in what today are the middle of people’s front yards. At the bottom of the shallow pits they find skeletons and torn clothes. Clothing generally decomposes more slowly than flesh and is often the best way to identify the dead. Even in cases where survivors are not seeking legal redress, they are still fearful of arousing the anger of those responsible, or of those who want to make sure that the victims and the events are never discussed.
One place these anthropologists were working was in the mountains where Saturnino’s family fled, and their most recent excavation uncovered the remains of his family, along with about fifteen from that village, and more who had fled from nearby towns. After scientific analysis and documentation, the remains were given to survivors for burial. In the church, the bones were transferred from anthropologists’ boxes to wooden coffins, wrapped in blankets, and bowls and other grave offerings were added. Family members took the coffins home that night, and the next day we walked slowly down to the cemetery.
Saturnino is a catechist for the community. For this ceremony he presented the last chapters from the gospel of Luke, reading from the text in Spanish, then translating into the Mayan language K'iche for the many people who understand things better that way. The story has resonance with the events we are remembering today, the humiliation and wrongful death at the hands of soldiers, dying alone, the survivors’ search for the body and difficulty encountering it. I grew up listening to bluegrass—poor mountain folk who interwove the events of their lives with Bible stories to bring them new meanings. There is much reaction in the world today to the Christianity which speaks of the angry prophet enthroned to judge the world. But another Christian message: the transcendent worth of the man of sorrows--that twenty centuries an unjust execution on a lonely hillside in a remote province of the great empire remains more important than anything that happened in Rome.
We came back to Guatemala because of new developments in the legal case against those who ruled during the worst massacres of the 1980s. After years without progress in the domestic courts, a Spanish tribunal—the same one that heard evidence against Chilean dictator Pinochet a few years back—came to investigate things here. A number of Spanish citizens died in the 1980s, priests working in rural areas, and others who perished in the burning of the Spanish embassy. But the plan was to go beyond that to use the concept of universal jurisdiction over cases of genocide and crimes against humanity to resolve issues which had languished domestically for years.
The judge arrived to a fair amount of press coverage, focusing both on his arrival and the massacres. Even Nuestro Diario, a graphics-heavy tabloid whose specialty is bus crashes, shootings, and bikinis, (along with surprisingly good maps and computer-generated reconstructions of events) had front page coverage on the trial. Because it is widely read in rural communities where literacy levels are low, some people cited this as an important way of getting information out.
Of course the defendants did not sit still. Legal and media maneuvers were deployed to thwart the Spanish case, or portray it as a colonial power meddling in the affairs of a sovereign and independent nation. While lawyers filed motions, editorial writers wrote pieces trying to confuse the issue with praise of the accused and ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Many of these were multi-part (thirteen installments in one case) but the ones I read never discussed events. Not only did it not discuss the real events, it did not even bother to discuss fabricated ones. Mostly they condensed to innuendo: the government was fighting terrorists in the 1980s and these terrorists are behind these legal cases now. It should be pointed out that investigations by the Catholic Church and other third parties found that 90% of the 600 plus massacres were committed by the army, and only 3% by the guerrillas, and that the government was creating fear and terror as part of a deliberate strategy. These matters of public record were never brought up by the editorial writers—even in an attempt to refute or devalue them. But this pattern was also used in advance of a march by military veterans, whose leader warned of “grave consequences” should people interfere with them.
Another day I was working on a different case: events which occurred in 2003, not 1983. Someone asked me “Do you believe we will see justice?” I am never sure how to answer such a question honestly, especially after the reversals in the course of this case: apparent advances followed by regression. And if justice is done, what will it mean, so long delayed?
One of the accused was interviewed when the tribunal first arrived. Asked about the legal case, the eighty-something former security chief facing charges at the end of a long and comfortable life laughed and said “yeah, I could spend the last years of my life in jail, why not?”
The legal process may be too slow to offer much more than such hollow victories against individuals. But it can be part of setting the record straight: to ensure that the next generation of editorial writers will find it harder to pass off glib distortions about who practiced terrorism in the nineteen eighties. And the process proceeds on many fronts, including small triumphs like the fifteen human beings whose surviving family members can now visit their resting place, and the noble endurance of Saturnino and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. After returning from wandering in the mountains, they rebuilt a life. Saturnino has three fine horses, and an almost completed five room cement house paid for by a son working in the United States. And that endurance is not dependent of the vagaries of Judges in the Capital.
This was a peaceful day. A variety of processions from a half-dozen homes around town converged in the field in front of the school. There were a few hundred people, carrying about twenty wooden caskets between them. We marched out of town and about a mile downhill, past cornfields and grazing land. The cemetery was a few acres, with overgrown grass and hydrangea bushes obscuring the pastel cement monuments. We stood under a pole shed while people offered candles, sugar, and guaro (homemade whiskey) according to pre-Columbian traditions. After the flames died, they concluded with Catholic prayers. Looking at the weathered trunks holding up the roof that sheltered us, and past them to the mountains in the distance, the mixed signs of careful tending and wildness in the cemetery, it reminded me a little of backwoods Appalachia in the States.
People sometimes ask if our time in Guatemala has given us impressive Spanish skills. It does, but in villages with shacks and clapboard Pentecostal churches, where people grow most of their own food and brew homemade whiskey, peoples speech patterns are noticeably different than they are in the big cities. As one of my coworkers put it, the language we pickup is “hick” Spanish: sing-song and slow, with a limited vocabulary and non-standard word order, along with some interjections “si, pues,ah...pobre” very different from the rapid and dismissive speech of the capital.
But if the town in 2006 recalls Appalachia, it had a very different quality a quarter-century ago. Saturnino and most of the residents of what was then a town of several thousand (it is considerably smaller now) fled into the mountains in advance of attacking soldiers who raged through burning houses, slaughtering animals and villagers. Guerrillas in neighboring areas had scored a few successes, and the government’s plan was to ensure that the villagers were too terrified and destitute to care for themselves, let alone help anyone else. People were not targeted because of what they had done but because for the army, killing hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and making millions refugees had no downside and a possible tactical benefit. Saturnino’s family fled higher into the mountains where they lived for several years, subject to continual government attacks. His wife and several other family members were among those killed.
There are a number of NGOs working on different fronts regarding the massacres. I have worked most closely with legal organizations seeking legal accountability. There are others working at documenting the events, at psychological counseling, at attempts to rebuild. On a later trip I also observed a team of forensic anthropologists, excavating the shallow graves where many victims of the violence ended up: tossed in piles at the edge of town, or even buried in what today are the middle of people’s front yards. At the bottom of the shallow pits they find skeletons and torn clothes. Clothing generally decomposes more slowly than flesh and is often the best way to identify the dead. Even in cases where survivors are not seeking legal redress, they are still fearful of arousing the anger of those responsible, or of those who want to make sure that the victims and the events are never discussed.
One place these anthropologists were working was in the mountains where Saturnino’s family fled, and their most recent excavation uncovered the remains of his family, along with about fifteen from that village, and more who had fled from nearby towns. After scientific analysis and documentation, the remains were given to survivors for burial. In the church, the bones were transferred from anthropologists’ boxes to wooden coffins, wrapped in blankets, and bowls and other grave offerings were added. Family members took the coffins home that night, and the next day we walked slowly down to the cemetery.
Saturnino is a catechist for the community. For this ceremony he presented the last chapters from the gospel of Luke, reading from the text in Spanish, then translating into the Mayan language K'iche for the many people who understand things better that way. The story has resonance with the events we are remembering today, the humiliation and wrongful death at the hands of soldiers, dying alone, the survivors’ search for the body and difficulty encountering it. I grew up listening to bluegrass—poor mountain folk who interwove the events of their lives with Bible stories to bring them new meanings. There is much reaction in the world today to the Christianity which speaks of the angry prophet enthroned to judge the world. But another Christian message: the transcendent worth of the man of sorrows--that twenty centuries an unjust execution on a lonely hillside in a remote province of the great empire remains more important than anything that happened in Rome.
We came back to Guatemala because of new developments in the legal case against those who ruled during the worst massacres of the 1980s. After years without progress in the domestic courts, a Spanish tribunal—the same one that heard evidence against Chilean dictator Pinochet a few years back—came to investigate things here. A number of Spanish citizens died in the 1980s, priests working in rural areas, and others who perished in the burning of the Spanish embassy. But the plan was to go beyond that to use the concept of universal jurisdiction over cases of genocide and crimes against humanity to resolve issues which had languished domestically for years.
The judge arrived to a fair amount of press coverage, focusing both on his arrival and the massacres. Even Nuestro Diario, a graphics-heavy tabloid whose specialty is bus crashes, shootings, and bikinis, (along with surprisingly good maps and computer-generated reconstructions of events) had front page coverage on the trial. Because it is widely read in rural communities where literacy levels are low, some people cited this as an important way of getting information out.
Of course the defendants did not sit still. Legal and media maneuvers were deployed to thwart the Spanish case, or portray it as a colonial power meddling in the affairs of a sovereign and independent nation. While lawyers filed motions, editorial writers wrote pieces trying to confuse the issue with praise of the accused and ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Many of these were multi-part (thirteen installments in one case) but the ones I read never discussed events. Not only did it not discuss the real events, it did not even bother to discuss fabricated ones. Mostly they condensed to innuendo: the government was fighting terrorists in the 1980s and these terrorists are behind these legal cases now. It should be pointed out that investigations by the Catholic Church and other third parties found that 90% of the 600 plus massacres were committed by the army, and only 3% by the guerrillas, and that the government was creating fear and terror as part of a deliberate strategy. These matters of public record were never brought up by the editorial writers—even in an attempt to refute or devalue them. But this pattern was also used in advance of a march by military veterans, whose leader warned of “grave consequences” should people interfere with them.
Another day I was working on a different case: events which occurred in 2003, not 1983. Someone asked me “Do you believe we will see justice?” I am never sure how to answer such a question honestly, especially after the reversals in the course of this case: apparent advances followed by regression. And if justice is done, what will it mean, so long delayed?
One of the accused was interviewed when the tribunal first arrived. Asked about the legal case, the eighty-something former security chief facing charges at the end of a long and comfortable life laughed and said “yeah, I could spend the last years of my life in jail, why not?”
The legal process may be too slow to offer much more than such hollow victories against individuals. But it can be part of setting the record straight: to ensure that the next generation of editorial writers will find it harder to pass off glib distortions about who practiced terrorism in the nineteen eighties. And the process proceeds on many fronts, including small triumphs like the fifteen human beings whose surviving family members can now visit their resting place, and the noble endurance of Saturnino and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. After returning from wandering in the mountains, they rebuilt a life. Saturnino has three fine horses, and an almost completed five room cement house paid for by a son working in the United States. And that endurance is not dependent of the vagaries of Judges in the Capital.
Wednesday, 22 June 2005
On returning to Pennsylvania
I have returned to the farm where I lived before I went to Latin America. I had hoped to have the experience of living in a house without electricity but rural electrification has proceeded far enough in Guatemala that that was never possible. Here in Pennsylvania, however, near Amish country, I have been able to sleep in an 8 by 8 cabin alongside the woods. I do my nighttime reading by gas lamp and while I sleep the electrical synapses in my brain are unaffected by the magnetic fields unavoidably created when electrical currents flow through wires.
In an earlier letter I said using the giant hoe, azodon, so common to Central American peasants was the type of physical labor one couldn’t enjoy. After a few more experiences I was able to understand its utility—and the experience of being instructed in its use by men who had used it for decades, and passed along techniques filtered through generations. Holding an azodon now has different connotations for me. So I bought one. I have used it mostly to tend a few dozen corn plants I planted in the Central American style, with beans to coil up the stalks and squash around the base. I have also found
the azodon useful for tidying up at the edges of fields cultivated by our tractors.
The farm season is now in earnest—tomatoes—one of our major crops—are still a few weeks a way. But strawberries are over, beans have begun, and blueberries are about to begin. I am helping to supervise some college ageinterns. Because we live together we often talk about music. I asked one kid, born in the 1980s, what his favorite band is—he says Jethro Tull, especially Aqualung. This surprised me, but then again I have been
introducing them to songs from Jonathan Richman his group the Modern Lovers began recording the year I was born. They have been passing around a copy of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, discussing Edward Abbey, and various Hollywood movies. We work tying up tomatoes, pounding metal stakes into the ground, or riding around on tractors from the 1950s. I try to gently pass on a few insights: philosophical, and practical from my experience working on the farm, and the life I have lived after college. We pile into the van, then jump out the side door to round up lettuce, squash, or zucchini. As we chatter back and forth over walkie-talkies the choppers pass overhead from the landing strip over the hill. I think about other college age kids, with other machines, in much more dangerous environments. I wish them courage, wisdom, and luck. (“God has a special place in His heart for drunks, children, and the United States of America.”)
A mile away as the crow flies there is an exit from the four lane. Four-lane highways are modeled on the Autobahns designed in Germany under the National Socialists, and brought to our shores by Eisenhower who hoped that they would help us develop some of the efficiencies he witnessed in that system. Here as elsewhere, where it meets the regular roads the limited access highway has coughed up a huge gas station, franchise restaurants. They are all built according to blueprints, in accord with zoning specifications—and very reminiscent of those I have seen along four lane roads in El Salvador, Germany, Alaska, or Utah. From Alaska to Germany to Nicaragua, I have witnessed the same franchises sprouting up along the edges of roads like this, and the same weeds sprouting up in the disturbed and compact soil at the edges of their parking lots. But, if you drive a different direction—down winding country roads still untouched by what a civil engineer calls progress—you see hedgerows, stone farm houses, decaying white or red barns, mobile homes with lovingly tended gardens. There are towns you will miss if you blink. But if you don’t blink you see white two story houses with porches, simple churches, and a commercial district that may be a few country stores, a gas station with two pumps a “dairy mart” for ice cream or in the case of one—a single coke machine. This is the land before bulldozers—still shaped by local necessity and in with some remembrance of nature. The contours of the land are respected and the four-lane has not swept through to messianically abolish the landscape: “every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain.” These towns and these fields have drawn me to Central Pennsylvania for three years. Looking at them, I feel, as I did in Guatemala, that in the rural farming communities of America, there is a wonder that has not completely vanished from this earth.
In an earlier letter I said using the giant hoe, azodon, so common to Central American peasants was the type of physical labor one couldn’t enjoy. After a few more experiences I was able to understand its utility—and the experience of being instructed in its use by men who had used it for decades, and passed along techniques filtered through generations. Holding an azodon now has different connotations for me. So I bought one. I have used it mostly to tend a few dozen corn plants I planted in the Central American style, with beans to coil up the stalks and squash around the base. I have also found
the azodon useful for tidying up at the edges of fields cultivated by our tractors.
The farm season is now in earnest—tomatoes—one of our major crops—are still a few weeks a way. But strawberries are over, beans have begun, and blueberries are about to begin. I am helping to supervise some college ageinterns. Because we live together we often talk about music. I asked one kid, born in the 1980s, what his favorite band is—he says Jethro Tull, especially Aqualung. This surprised me, but then again I have been
introducing them to songs from Jonathan Richman his group the Modern Lovers began recording the year I was born. They have been passing around a copy of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, discussing Edward Abbey, and various Hollywood movies. We work tying up tomatoes, pounding metal stakes into the ground, or riding around on tractors from the 1950s. I try to gently pass on a few insights: philosophical, and practical from my experience working on the farm, and the life I have lived after college. We pile into the van, then jump out the side door to round up lettuce, squash, or zucchini. As we chatter back and forth over walkie-talkies the choppers pass overhead from the landing strip over the hill. I think about other college age kids, with other machines, in much more dangerous environments. I wish them courage, wisdom, and luck. (“God has a special place in His heart for drunks, children, and the United States of America.”)
A mile away as the crow flies there is an exit from the four lane. Four-lane highways are modeled on the Autobahns designed in Germany under the National Socialists, and brought to our shores by Eisenhower who hoped that they would help us develop some of the efficiencies he witnessed in that system. Here as elsewhere, where it meets the regular roads the limited access highway has coughed up a huge gas station, franchise restaurants. They are all built according to blueprints, in accord with zoning specifications—and very reminiscent of those I have seen along four lane roads in El Salvador, Germany, Alaska, or Utah. From Alaska to Germany to Nicaragua, I have witnessed the same franchises sprouting up along the edges of roads like this, and the same weeds sprouting up in the disturbed and compact soil at the edges of their parking lots. But, if you drive a different direction—down winding country roads still untouched by what a civil engineer calls progress—you see hedgerows, stone farm houses, decaying white or red barns, mobile homes with lovingly tended gardens. There are towns you will miss if you blink. But if you don’t blink you see white two story houses with porches, simple churches, and a commercial district that may be a few country stores, a gas station with two pumps a “dairy mart” for ice cream or in the case of one—a single coke machine. This is the land before bulldozers—still shaped by local necessity and in with some remembrance of nature. The contours of the land are respected and the four-lane has not swept through to messianically abolish the landscape: “every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain.” These towns and these fields have drawn me to Central Pennsylvania for three years. Looking at them, I feel, as I did in Guatemala, that in the rural farming communities of America, there is a wonder that has not completely vanished from this earth.
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