Many of the cornstalks dominating the introduction to my last letter have now dried up. Some are still standing, some have been cut to fed by cows, and a few are still green and growing. The finely grained patchwork is much more intricate than in cornfields in the US, as is the connection between the cornfields and the people who depend on them to live. A similar thing has happened with the threats I mentioned. None of the details I presented last month are false, but we are now on our third interpretation about what they mean, I am not sure that a nice tidy explanation is what I should be looking for in my remaining time down here.
This essay contains a lot of numbers. I often convert between dollars in Quetzals. Although I use the official exchange rate of 1:this does not tell the whole story. Computers and gasoline cost slightly more in Guatemala, but living expenses and food other than meat are much less. I confronted this disconnect when I went to El Salvador (which now has a dollar economy) and had to change 160Q to buy a twenty dollar bill. Thinking about how long I could live with 160 Quetzals in Guatemala, it felt like a horrible deal. You can eat out for 3-5Q in the market, though restaurants cost more. Rice is 2Q a pound, tomatoes 1-3Q, many rolls are 25 centavos (about 3 cents). In rural areas you could probably live fairly well (hotels, restaurants, a few beers) for two or three days on 160 Quetzals. Since my lodging is paid for, and I have a kitchen, I could live for weeks. Living for weeks on twenty dollars would be slightly harder. So although I generally convert between dollars and Quetzals, you should remember that other systems forconverting between the currencies (how many pounds of tomatoes you could buy, how much work you would have to do) would produce a different comparison.
A Difficult Job
My mother and I spent some time in Lago Atitlan, a beautiful lake in a volcanic crater, now edged by three volcanic peaks. One hotel offers a view with the three cones perfectly framed and rising above the swimming pool for $140 a night. We stayed in a more modest room, still lakeside for Q140, one-eighth the price.
Of course there are many tourists: vendors make their pitch in English. But if you walk five minutes uphill, the throngs of tourists become lone individuals, and the beggars and vendors disappear. My mother and I were walking on a narrow footpath about seventy feet above the lake when we came upon a man sitting on the side of the path, staring at the tall grass in front of him. He was also sweating profusely from the 8 cinderblocks on his back. He was carrying them from the boat dock, where the tourist hotels are, to a village about an hour away. He said he made about 5Q (62c) a trip. Most cinderblocks I’ve seen weigh about 15 pounds, so his load would have been about 120 pounds, which explained why he was resting alongside the path and sweating profusely. Lake Atitlan is far from Rabinal and when I asked a man here, he said that the going rate for hauling cinderblocks in Rabinal would be 15Q per substantial trip or 35Q a day. I don’t know if labor is cheaper at Lago Atitlan, if the man was trying to make us feel sorry for him, or if he was being taken advantage of. Even at the Rabinal rate, to spend one night in the $140 hotel, he would have to make 75 trips, enough to build a 500 square foot house. Even to spend a night in our modest room would mean hauling half a ton of cinderblocks on his back.
A Good Job
At one point several months ago I met a young man who seemed to be doing fairly well—he had a job with a development organization which paid 2200 Q a month, enough to buy a motorcycle for the nights he had to work in town until 10 o’clock, long past the hour he could find a pickup truck back to his village. His work involved pairing rich country donors with children in communities. Part of his job involved taking photos of the children—posed so donors could see that the things they had given: backpacks, pencils, or food were being put to good use. I was impressed by his energy and insight into \the reality of his work, and was looking forward to seeing him again when I returned to Chimaltenango.
As it turned out he, like many enterprising young men, had left. He wanted to build a house, and provide for the family he hoped to have. In the United States education is the “ticket” people save and borrow money for. Here in Guatemala, this young man used his salary and money borrowed from relatives to pay his passage for the 30 day trip across the border to the United States.
The money you pay for this trip usually includes two to three attempts—like the chance to shoot the target at a carnival, but for much bigger stakes. If you get stopped once, you can try again at no additional cost, but not forever. And the reason it takes 30 days is that the obstacles don’t start at the US border. In one case a truckload of migrants was deported after one guy with a headache wandered into a pharmacy and asked for some pills.
Mexican’s use a different word for pills, so the druggist tipped off the police (too many illegal Central Americans in the US means competition for the illegal Mexicans) who roughed them up and sent them south. Gangs often targets migrants, forced to carry large amounts of cash for expenses and bribes. And the journey itself, hidden in suffocating trucks, hanging onto freight trains for hours, crawling through the desert—is filled with non-human dangers as well. Newspapers are filled with stories of people who die, or lose their limbs chasing their “American Dream.” But you also meet some who made it. I met a man who worked for a decade in restaurants in Connecticut, saved up for a small plot of land and works 14 hour days driving a taxi he bought with his earnings.
Especially in the case of the young man I met case, I wonder about the math. The 40,000Q ($5,000) he had to come up with to travel in that style would have built a decent house without the risk, though it might be hard to pay off the loans on $275 a month. I have also heard several reports that employment in the US is harder to find and less regular than it used to be. I sometimes wonder whether I should offer sobering statistics about how people suffer on the journey, or in the US, throwing cold water when people confide about their “American dream.” Nonetheless, remembering our conversation in March, I doubt it was an ignorant or sudden decision on his part. It was an investment, and I suspect he understands the tradeoffs for his life far better than some one born in the United States could. Guatemalan migrants sending money home are a larger section of the economy than coffee or tourism—industries dominated by the already rich. And my ancestors spent their weeks on that crowded, death-filled, and for some illegal trip decades and centuries ago.
A Job close to home
The cash source for many of the mountain communities is wood. Where one mountain path meets the road I once saw four different men guarding individual piles of timber: 1x12 planks, 4x4 studs, and firewood loose and tied in bundles waiting for a pickup driver to haul their wood to town. Freight charges can be as much as 40% the value of the wood, but the much larger and more affluent market forty-five minute truck ride (five miles) away makes it worthwhile for both buyer and seller.
My first chance to see where this wood comes from came when Tomas offered to take us to see his father. We left the road and walked above one steeply sloped cornfield to a rocky outrcropping. The view across the valley was clear, and there was a sheer drop to the tall pine trees two hundred feet below. Then we walked to where his father was working. This slope was not as sheer as as the cliff face, but the vertical drop was greater than the horizontal, and my Irish companion stayed decided not to descend. Below Tomas’ father was using a chainsaw on an 8 foot long pine log 14-16 inches in diameter. To hold the log flat there was a platform supported on the downhill side by forked poles stuck in the ground. Tomas’ father was cutting the bark-covered sides to make the round log into something square.
Not long after I arrived, one of the supports collapsed; the log tumbled downhill, and the father had to scramble to avoid falling with his chainsaw. It took forty-five minutes to construct a new work platform and use ropes to pull the log into place. The squared off side was marked with a chalkline (actually a string dipped in burnt engine oil) at one inch
intervals to guide the chainsaw so it could be sawn into boards. This operation explains why chainsaws here have longer blades than the ones I remember from the states—it helps keep the cut straight when cutting timber into planks. So with only the chalkline to guide him, Tomas’ father went at it freehand, slicing a 1x12 off the side of the log the way we might slice a piece of cheese. He finished the first board in a little over half an hour. After watching this process for a while, Tomas and his brothers gathered some boards already cut and situated them in the forehead harness that is the standard way of carting heavy loads in Guatemala. Then, three boards to a brother, they started up the hill.
According to a friend of mine who works in forestry, each board probably weighed 20-30 pounds. So that was a lot of weight to carry UP a slope most westerners would balk at descending unburdened. Half of that weight is water, and evaporates if you leave the wood out to dry awhile. That may explain why the next time I saw Tomas’ father at work, there were dozens of boards laid out to dry before their long and arduous journey uphill. This worksite was along a much easier path, but was also along a path it had taken me
forty-five minutes to descend.
Cutting lumber this way is hard work. Each board brings about $1.25, and some of that must be used to pay for transport, and fuel, and maintenance of the chainsaw. Nonetheless the going agricultural wage in the community is about $2.50 a day, so some one with a chainsaw can do fairly well. And when he runs out of trees on his own land, he can also work for others. People pay $3 for as much as you can cut down on a tank of gas. Not every family owns a chainsaw, but almost every one owns an axe, so the tree owner can then split and haul the firewood to sell for his own profit. It seems a pretty good microenterprise, though there is probably an upper limit to the number of chainsaws that can be at work in a single village—especially given how scarce land is.
I can’t resist comparing it to situations in the US where I knew people cutting their own boards. At the farm where I work in Pennsylvania the farmer sometimes cuts down trees and loads the trunks on a wagon to haul to a sawmill to be cut into boards. In Guatemala neither people nor horses could haul entire trunks up the narrow mountain paths, so any lumber taken out of the woods has to be cut in place, and hauled out by human labor. I have never heard anyone mention a sawmill. In Alaska the old sourdoughs claimed to be able to cut logs flat using only a chalkline, but that was to make the edges flat for log cabins. Even there, however, I doubt anyone made a habit of using a chainsaw to cut one inch thick boards.
The journey of the boards illustrates the way in which technology has reached Guatemala in uneven ways. Trees are felled and sawn with a chainsaw—then hauled by people using a centuries old forehead harness. At roadside they reenter the world of twentieth century technology and are loaded to a pickup truck to town. Many are used for concrete forms for construction. When these buildings are built, you may find people cooking with firewood but using computers, teaching typing on manual typewriters while they talk on cellphones.
Sunday, 5 September 2004
Tuesday, 4 May 2004
Arriving in Rabinal
Rabinal is the name of a town of about 10,000 people, and of the land surrounding it, an administrative district analogous to a county in the US, albeit smaller in size. Winding up the steep red dirt roads into the hills looming over the town you get a view of dusty hillside pastures marked by waist-high stone walls. As you continue you can look back on the green of irrigated cornfields and banana trees near the streams, the grid of town dominated by the white cathedral, a few clusters of adobe houses in villages outside town, and a few patches of trees. As you rise towards the clouds, the hills which loomed at the edge of town shrink into insignificance far below you, and you can look across the bowl of the valley to the mountains which enclose it on all sides. Five centuries ago, this valley was the land of a people called Achi. Their battles with surrounding kingdoms before the
arrival of the Spaniards are documented in the Rabinal Achi, a collection of speeches by warriors and kings from warring kingdoms that has been called the preColumbian Beowulf.
Because of the change in altitude the communities in the “county” are very different. The valley is much warmer, many plants like cotton, papaya, and mangos grow in the valley, but in the mountains they grow they are limited to things like broccoli, peaches, as well as many interesting fruits like matazans, granadillas, and jocote that I had never heard of before. I haven’t seen official statistics, but I know that I have gone from trying to
sleep in as little as possible in the valley, to putting a blanket over my sleeping bag and flannel pajamas next night in the mountains. Of course, I do not have a winter-ready sleeping bag, but it also illustrates the substantial differential in climate which can occur in six miles, when one rises almost 2000 feet.
It has also been interesting to compare the two areas I have worked in. The distance, 30 miles as the crow flies, belies clear differences in the way of life. The conflict in the Rabinal Achi is not with the Kakchiquels of Chimaltenango, but they were a rival group. Nowadays a visitor is likely to be struck by the smaller number cement houses in the villages of Rabinal. In Chimaltenango in the past few years, many families have built new houses of grey cinderblock, usually with money sent home by men working in the
United States. In Rabinal many young men express interest in going to the United States, but few have actually gone. I am much more aware of people struggling to participate in the local economy. Young fathers like those who go to the US if they lived in Chimaltenango, stack firewood or construction timber at roadside, negotiating with passing pickup drivers to carry it into town. Some journey to jobs in the capital, which allow them to see their family perhaps 2-3 days a month. One man worked on a large
construction project there to buy supplies so his brother could build him an adobe house in his hometown, and his family of seven could move from a house about 120 square feet to one of 450 square feet.
Adobe construction is still going on in Rabinal. In Chimaltenango, however, very few recently constructed houses are built wholly out of adobe: one of the few adobe house I remember had survived the 1976 earthquake. In contrast three of the two dozen families we work with in Rabinal built adobe houses this spring. In Chimaltenango there are many houses which incorporate knee-high adobe walls with cornstalks as “siding” up to the roof line. There, cornstalks tied together are a very common building material
and are also used for fences, or to protect young plants from chickens. In Rabinal cornstalks may be fed to animals, but I never saw anything built with them. This may reflect a different precolumbian tradition, or it may be an adaptation to poorer soils. I had few opportunities to compare them scientifically, but the few remaining cornstalks I standing when I arrived in Rabinal seemed thin, scarcely worth the trouble to cut, collect, and bind together. People in both communities proudly hang their seed corn from
the ceilings, but the cobs in Rabinal seem to average 8-10 inches, while they were nearly twice as long in Chimaltenango.
While the men in Rabinal still build with adobe bricks and red roof tiles as opposed to cinderblocks and corrugated aluminum, the women of Chimaltenango have conserved other traditions. There it is common to see mothers and daughters, or even three generations of women, seated around the house with the threads of a loom attached to a belt around their waist to weave the traditional top, called a huipil. In Rabinal few women know how to weave. Many wear machine-made blouses, and those with handwoven tradional tops have usually bought them.
One experience which most Guatemalan villages do share is planting corn. A few places with irrigation already have plants as tall as a person, but most of the communities we work with rely on the rains which began in mid May. I have witnessed much of the process of sowing corn, and even participated a little. One Tuesday most of the men in the village had gone to work on the water system: to clean the reservoir and see why the water ran only every four days instead of every other day. I showed up at the house of Don Joaquin to find his sons juggling a soccer ball in the small patio of hardened earth in front of his house. I wondered about our discussion about going to work in his fields as the boys playfully kicked the ball high. Suddenly the two oldest boys left the game, picked up azodons and headed out to the field. The English word for azodon is mattock, but if, like me, you have no idea what that is either, imagine an exremely large hoe. The metal blade was almost a foot wide and eight inches deep. Like a hoe, it is used to remove weeds from around growing plants, unlike a hoe, it is also used to remove weeds before planting.
Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of cutting cornstalks with a machete. The blade cuts the stalks as easily as a jedi lightsabre: once to cut the stalks, once to trim the tops to a uniform length, and you throw them on a pile. That is the type of physical labor it is easy to enjoy. Working with an azodon is not. The azodon was heavy, the movements awkward, dust assaulted my nose, I sweated in the heat, the field was steeply sloped and I kept falling downhill, I wanted to quit. Only the shame of being outworked by two boys who between them had spent fewer than 25 years on the planet kept me going. After an hour the younger boys came by the bring water and joke, then headed downhill toward the stream. After two more hours, we headed in. The nine year old came up from the creek carrying an adult's load of 20-30 pounds of firewood on his back. I thought about the contrast between the way kids seemed with the soccer ball, and now seriously returning from work.
Another experience I got to observe was the dances for the festivities of the Santa Cruz. First I saw it in a village The dancers wore masks of a bull, a monkey, and various human faces colored red, blue, or pink, and enacting scenes to the music of a marimba, the huge wooden xylophone which is traditional to Guatemala. It was enjoyable experience, but it left me unsure of the strength of cultural traditions. There were three dozen people watching the dozen dancers, and an inescapable part of the experience was people taking pictures: both outsiders like me, and members of the community, including one of the dancers. One man explained the names of the masks, how the theme related the conquest, and how people had grown less serious and less willing to participate since his grandfather’s day.
Two days later, we went to another performance, not in a village, but at a crossroads, where four to five hundred people from the various hamlets within four or five miles crowded around to watch three different sets of masked dancers and marimba players. One set did the same dance with the bull, and two enacted a different masked dance involving Spaniards and Moors, Gilbert and Sullivan type hats, and much swordfighting. There were people selling snacks and drinks from baskets, hordes of people milling around four or five thick around the dancers, all enjoying a tradition which here seemed very alive. My camera’s batteries had run out and in a way I’m glad: I didn’t see a single camera, and though I couldn’t help being an outsider it felt good to be experiencing
it rather than frantically recording it so I and other outsiders could gawk
at it later. This was clearly a spectacle, but one which remained an integral and eagerly supported part of the cultural life—so much so that there were people selling snacks from baskets—admittedly some of them were bags of chips.
At the end of the dances two processions set off for the religious component of the festivities carrying the “ark” of the Santa Cruz. Later that afternoon we saw the end of a procession, a room full of people kneeling on a carpet of pine needles were reciting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I was standing near Don Joaquin, and as people made their personal prayers I heard his prayer, that what had happened to him would not happen to his children
I thought about his kids, at work and at play. I also thought about the story he had told us several weeks before. When the army came twenty years ago, they left almost 200 people dead, including most of the women of the town: dumped in ravines or incinerated in their homes. It was a market day and many passing through the village were also killed, including those from many of the hamlets I had seen dancing and celebrating at the festival ofthe Santa Cruz. The details of what happened on the day of the massacre horrifying, but he talked about what he faced for the next few years as a survivor who had evaded the army. His home was destroyed, his crops torched in the fields, his chickens and other animals stolen he was left, “without a half a plate.” They may not have had much by our standards, but they had worked hard to obtain what they needed to live like human beings. Now instead of the roof in the houses they had built, they had to sleep in a cave or under a leaky sheet of plastic. Instead of eating their own store of corn and beans, wrung through weeks of the work which broke my back that day, they had to scrounge the woods, or send a child to town, to beg from monks, or a sympathetic townsperson. If the child wrangled a tortilla the food had to stretch a long way. They woke before dawn to sneak back to replant their burned fields. Lookouts wouldn’t do much good with the roads which bring pickups through the villages today, but in those years there were only narrow mountain trails and lookouts could warn of the approach of a platoon on foot. After three years the survivors did come out of the mountains, and Don Joaquin turned himself in for compulsory military service. After being beaten because his name was on a list of suspected guerillas, he was eventually sent to the coast to complete his term of service, and he returned to rebuild his life five and a half years after everything went up in flames. He married, his first child died. One row of adobe at a time, he saved to build a house that wasn’t full of draughts. He and the other villagers worked to get back what they had had before: they built houses, they planted fields, they found pasture for their cows, they saved money to buy plates, and chairs, and beds. A long struggle to stand still any parent would hope to spare their children
Ironically one justification for the destruction of their minimal possessions was was the protection of private property. In Central America giving poor campesinos the rights they needed to participate in capitalist society as anything other than serfs has always been called communism, beginning with struggles to end obligatory unpaid labor for landowners. It is interesting to observe that in both regions I have been, the village that suffered the most because of the touted communist presence is the one which has organized to provide secondary education for their children, paying the teachers when the government won’t. The fight against communism in the eighties involved speeches with moral clarity in against the brutal communist governments in Eastern Europe. But it also involved eliminating Carter’s restrictions on sending arms to the brutal non-communist governments in Central America. It also involved massacres of women and children, rapes, assassination, forced disappearances, and wanton disrespect for the private property of poor people. The guerrillas did receive support from Cuba, but the guerrillas numbered a few thousand and the dead almost 200,000, with fewer than 10% of the massacres and similar crimes committed by the guerrillas. The bloodletting that followed Communist victories in Russia, or Cambodia, are always cited by those seeking to justify Washington's policy in Central America. In Guatemala, however, massacres committed by our adversaries in the Cold War are hypothetical, the violence and brutality which actually occurred was committed by military forces allied with Washington DC. Of course brutalization of peasants has a long history, and scorched earth tactics and all that goes along with it have been taking place since long before the Cold War.
But for now, may the dead rest in peace—and there is hope that Don Joaquin’s children will face only the burden of hard work and few resources rather than watching the results of that work go up in flames. The corn is growing, traditional Dances and Mayan language are easy to find, and kids are free-spirited kids when they have a soccer ball to kick around. Thank those of you who helped me be here, and I hope you have a productive growing season up north.
arrival of the Spaniards are documented in the Rabinal Achi, a collection of speeches by warriors and kings from warring kingdoms that has been called the preColumbian Beowulf.
Because of the change in altitude the communities in the “county” are very different. The valley is much warmer, many plants like cotton, papaya, and mangos grow in the valley, but in the mountains they grow they are limited to things like broccoli, peaches, as well as many interesting fruits like matazans, granadillas, and jocote that I had never heard of before. I haven’t seen official statistics, but I know that I have gone from trying to
sleep in as little as possible in the valley, to putting a blanket over my sleeping bag and flannel pajamas next night in the mountains. Of course, I do not have a winter-ready sleeping bag, but it also illustrates the substantial differential in climate which can occur in six miles, when one rises almost 2000 feet.
It has also been interesting to compare the two areas I have worked in. The distance, 30 miles as the crow flies, belies clear differences in the way of life. The conflict in the Rabinal Achi is not with the Kakchiquels of Chimaltenango, but they were a rival group. Nowadays a visitor is likely to be struck by the smaller number cement houses in the villages of Rabinal. In Chimaltenango in the past few years, many families have built new houses of grey cinderblock, usually with money sent home by men working in the
United States. In Rabinal many young men express interest in going to the United States, but few have actually gone. I am much more aware of people struggling to participate in the local economy. Young fathers like those who go to the US if they lived in Chimaltenango, stack firewood or construction timber at roadside, negotiating with passing pickup drivers to carry it into town. Some journey to jobs in the capital, which allow them to see their family perhaps 2-3 days a month. One man worked on a large
construction project there to buy supplies so his brother could build him an adobe house in his hometown, and his family of seven could move from a house about 120 square feet to one of 450 square feet.
Adobe construction is still going on in Rabinal. In Chimaltenango, however, very few recently constructed houses are built wholly out of adobe: one of the few adobe house I remember had survived the 1976 earthquake. In contrast three of the two dozen families we work with in Rabinal built adobe houses this spring. In Chimaltenango there are many houses which incorporate knee-high adobe walls with cornstalks as “siding” up to the roof line. There, cornstalks tied together are a very common building material
and are also used for fences, or to protect young plants from chickens. In Rabinal cornstalks may be fed to animals, but I never saw anything built with them. This may reflect a different precolumbian tradition, or it may be an adaptation to poorer soils. I had few opportunities to compare them scientifically, but the few remaining cornstalks I standing when I arrived in Rabinal seemed thin, scarcely worth the trouble to cut, collect, and bind together. People in both communities proudly hang their seed corn from
the ceilings, but the cobs in Rabinal seem to average 8-10 inches, while they were nearly twice as long in Chimaltenango.
While the men in Rabinal still build with adobe bricks and red roof tiles as opposed to cinderblocks and corrugated aluminum, the women of Chimaltenango have conserved other traditions. There it is common to see mothers and daughters, or even three generations of women, seated around the house with the threads of a loom attached to a belt around their waist to weave the traditional top, called a huipil. In Rabinal few women know how to weave. Many wear machine-made blouses, and those with handwoven tradional tops have usually bought them.
One experience which most Guatemalan villages do share is planting corn. A few places with irrigation already have plants as tall as a person, but most of the communities we work with rely on the rains which began in mid May. I have witnessed much of the process of sowing corn, and even participated a little. One Tuesday most of the men in the village had gone to work on the water system: to clean the reservoir and see why the water ran only every four days instead of every other day. I showed up at the house of Don Joaquin to find his sons juggling a soccer ball in the small patio of hardened earth in front of his house. I wondered about our discussion about going to work in his fields as the boys playfully kicked the ball high. Suddenly the two oldest boys left the game, picked up azodons and headed out to the field. The English word for azodon is mattock, but if, like me, you have no idea what that is either, imagine an exremely large hoe. The metal blade was almost a foot wide and eight inches deep. Like a hoe, it is used to remove weeds from around growing plants, unlike a hoe, it is also used to remove weeds before planting.
Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of cutting cornstalks with a machete. The blade cuts the stalks as easily as a jedi lightsabre: once to cut the stalks, once to trim the tops to a uniform length, and you throw them on a pile. That is the type of physical labor it is easy to enjoy. Working with an azodon is not. The azodon was heavy, the movements awkward, dust assaulted my nose, I sweated in the heat, the field was steeply sloped and I kept falling downhill, I wanted to quit. Only the shame of being outworked by two boys who between them had spent fewer than 25 years on the planet kept me going. After an hour the younger boys came by the bring water and joke, then headed downhill toward the stream. After two more hours, we headed in. The nine year old came up from the creek carrying an adult's load of 20-30 pounds of firewood on his back. I thought about the contrast between the way kids seemed with the soccer ball, and now seriously returning from work.
Another experience I got to observe was the dances for the festivities of the Santa Cruz. First I saw it in a village The dancers wore masks of a bull, a monkey, and various human faces colored red, blue, or pink, and enacting scenes to the music of a marimba, the huge wooden xylophone which is traditional to Guatemala. It was enjoyable experience, but it left me unsure of the strength of cultural traditions. There were three dozen people watching the dozen dancers, and an inescapable part of the experience was people taking pictures: both outsiders like me, and members of the community, including one of the dancers. One man explained the names of the masks, how the theme related the conquest, and how people had grown less serious and less willing to participate since his grandfather’s day.
Two days later, we went to another performance, not in a village, but at a crossroads, where four to five hundred people from the various hamlets within four or five miles crowded around to watch three different sets of masked dancers and marimba players. One set did the same dance with the bull, and two enacted a different masked dance involving Spaniards and Moors, Gilbert and Sullivan type hats, and much swordfighting. There were people selling snacks and drinks from baskets, hordes of people milling around four or five thick around the dancers, all enjoying a tradition which here seemed very alive. My camera’s batteries had run out and in a way I’m glad: I didn’t see a single camera, and though I couldn’t help being an outsider it felt good to be experiencing
it rather than frantically recording it so I and other outsiders could gawk
at it later. This was clearly a spectacle, but one which remained an integral and eagerly supported part of the cultural life—so much so that there were people selling snacks from baskets—admittedly some of them were bags of chips.
At the end of the dances two processions set off for the religious component of the festivities carrying the “ark” of the Santa Cruz. Later that afternoon we saw the end of a procession, a room full of people kneeling on a carpet of pine needles were reciting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers. I was standing near Don Joaquin, and as people made their personal prayers I heard his prayer, that what had happened to him would not happen to his children
I thought about his kids, at work and at play. I also thought about the story he had told us several weeks before. When the army came twenty years ago, they left almost 200 people dead, including most of the women of the town: dumped in ravines or incinerated in their homes. It was a market day and many passing through the village were also killed, including those from many of the hamlets I had seen dancing and celebrating at the festival ofthe Santa Cruz. The details of what happened on the day of the massacre horrifying, but he talked about what he faced for the next few years as a survivor who had evaded the army. His home was destroyed, his crops torched in the fields, his chickens and other animals stolen he was left, “without a half a plate.” They may not have had much by our standards, but they had worked hard to obtain what they needed to live like human beings. Now instead of the roof in the houses they had built, they had to sleep in a cave or under a leaky sheet of plastic. Instead of eating their own store of corn and beans, wrung through weeks of the work which broke my back that day, they had to scrounge the woods, or send a child to town, to beg from monks, or a sympathetic townsperson. If the child wrangled a tortilla the food had to stretch a long way. They woke before dawn to sneak back to replant their burned fields. Lookouts wouldn’t do much good with the roads which bring pickups through the villages today, but in those years there were only narrow mountain trails and lookouts could warn of the approach of a platoon on foot. After three years the survivors did come out of the mountains, and Don Joaquin turned himself in for compulsory military service. After being beaten because his name was on a list of suspected guerillas, he was eventually sent to the coast to complete his term of service, and he returned to rebuild his life five and a half years after everything went up in flames. He married, his first child died. One row of adobe at a time, he saved to build a house that wasn’t full of draughts. He and the other villagers worked to get back what they had had before: they built houses, they planted fields, they found pasture for their cows, they saved money to buy plates, and chairs, and beds. A long struggle to stand still any parent would hope to spare their children
Ironically one justification for the destruction of their minimal possessions was was the protection of private property. In Central America giving poor campesinos the rights they needed to participate in capitalist society as anything other than serfs has always been called communism, beginning with struggles to end obligatory unpaid labor for landowners. It is interesting to observe that in both regions I have been, the village that suffered the most because of the touted communist presence is the one which has organized to provide secondary education for their children, paying the teachers when the government won’t. The fight against communism in the eighties involved speeches with moral clarity in against the brutal communist governments in Eastern Europe. But it also involved eliminating Carter’s restrictions on sending arms to the brutal non-communist governments in Central America. It also involved massacres of women and children, rapes, assassination, forced disappearances, and wanton disrespect for the private property of poor people. The guerrillas did receive support from Cuba, but the guerrillas numbered a few thousand and the dead almost 200,000, with fewer than 10% of the massacres and similar crimes committed by the guerrillas. The bloodletting that followed Communist victories in Russia, or Cambodia, are always cited by those seeking to justify Washington's policy in Central America. In Guatemala, however, massacres committed by our adversaries in the Cold War are hypothetical, the violence and brutality which actually occurred was committed by military forces allied with Washington DC. Of course brutalization of peasants has a long history, and scorched earth tactics and all that goes along with it have been taking place since long before the Cold War.
But for now, may the dead rest in peace—and there is hope that Don Joaquin’s children will face only the burden of hard work and few resources rather than watching the results of that work go up in flames. The corn is growing, traditional Dances and Mayan language are easy to find, and kids are free-spirited kids when they have a soccer ball to kick around. Thank those of you who helped me be here, and I hope you have a productive growing season up north.
Saturday, 3 April 2004
Postcard from Chimaltenango
I spent six years working as a professional transportation planner and in 2000 I took stock and decided that something was missing. I did not know exactly what I wanted to do with my life, but I was certain that there were certain experiences I wanted to have in the world beyond the cubicle. One was to work on a farm, and another was to experience life in Central America. After two years at Village Acres Organic Farm in Pennsylvania, I am spending this year in Guatemala. I am working with an I will be working in rural areas with people affected by the violence of the 1980s.
Guatemala is divided into different administrative districts. There are 22 departments, each of which contains 5-30 municipios, just as states in the US contain varying numbers of counties. For simplicity I will refer to these as counties, because they are the second governmental division, though smaller than in the US. For most of my time here I will be working in the county of Rabinal, in the Department of Baja Verapaz. I spent my first month, however, in the county of San Martin Jilotepeque in the Department of Chimaltenango, 40 miles from the Capital of Guatemala city. The County seats are only about 30 miles apart as the crow flies. The distance on the dirt roads which wind around the mountainsides is more than twice as long, and it would take almost four hours to travel the distance on a direct bus. Actual bus routes are focused on more central destinations and makng the journey would require transferring at least three times.Despite the proximity, the Chaucus the intervening mountain range, is an imposing barrier: traversing the distance was much more difficult in former times. Consequently in the two areas the descendents of the indigenous Maya, who are the clear majority in these highland areas, have maintained different languages and traditions. They have been influenced by five centuries of Spanish rule, but even so, they have maintained some of their own traditions, and the ones they absorbed from their overlods have not always been the same.
San Martin is smaller than a US county. It contains 60,000 people, as many as the suburban Virginia county I grew up in, into an area 1/5 the size (97 square miles). This is according to the official statistics, which almost certainly underestimate the population. Though it has a population density ten times the county I farmed in in Pennsylvania it feels similarly rural. Except where the hilltops provide open vistas, in most places none, or only a handful of houses can be seen from the road. A few miles outside the county seat?most roads see fewer than a dozen vehicles pass during a busy hour. Although we passed through the county seat?fairly regularly, most of our time was spent in these rural areas, in five of the more than 100 communities, of which I will concentrate on describing one. Here, the dusty road through town almost certainly has more traffic from four-legged animals than four-wheeled vehicles. A horse carries firewood, blue water tanks, or a load of washing, two or three cows walk to pasture.The places we went have all received electrical service over the past five years. In comparison the city of Xela (Quetzaltenango) Guatemala's second-largest city, where I studied Spanish, boasts that electrical service was instituted in 1886. This is emblematic of the huge inequity which exists in this country. The shock of traveling from the villages to the city is much greater than I felt going from the US to the Guatemalan cities where I began my journeys. In villages, people have electricity for a few light bulbs, a blender, a radio, and maybe a television. They may have a single spigot that provides water a few hours every day. Some have built two-three room structures of naked concrete block in addition to the older caña (trimmed bundles of corn stalk) houses topped with corrugated aluminum sheeting. But even with the new infrastructure there is a stark contrast with the middle class urban families I stayed with while studying Spanish. They had showers, toilets, refrigerators, stoves, cars, and private bedrooms. And the communities I have seen undoubtedly have more amenities than many parts of Guatemala much further from the capital.
Even the families with cement block houses usually keep a kitchen of caña.Few people have chimneys for their cooking fires, and the ones I saw didn't work well, so the gaps under the roof and the ventilation between the stalks become an advantage though the rooms are smoky and most women complain about their lungs. My first night in the village we ate with an older man I will call Don Ebenezer. Like most families he and his family had a pile of bricks which allowed them to bring the cooking fire to the more comfortable working height of a stovetop, but Don Ebenezer preferred to have the fire on the ground so more heat went into the room, we could sit around it while we ate, and he could relight the cigarette of tobacco he had fashioned from a corn leaf which kept going out. We talked about surveying: most fields in Guatemala are measured not in acres or hectares, but in units based on the vara, just less than 33 inches and roughly the distance between your outstretched fingers and the center of your chest. The vara is also used to measure firewood and the depth of wells. We talked about the Guatemalan history textbook he had studied in school, including lessons about the conquest he remembered vividly across fifty years. He showed me the two-tone machete handle he had fashioned from scrap plastic after his first one broke from 12 years of use. We talked about politics in Guatemala and elsewhere, he brought up events in Afghanistan and Bolivia. It is a clich?to talk about how intelligent and knowledgeable peasants with second grade educations can be, but as we talked around the fire that first night I felt the reality of the admiration which can only sound clichéd when put into inevitably inadequate words.
That week Don Ebenezer was doing carpentry work for a new community building. My companion complemented him on his craftsmanship. She had seen caskets he made. He smiled and said that the difficulty was the where the angled parts of the lid fit together, but that the really skillful carpenter was his older brother. He talked with pride of the church doors his brother had worked on. His brother had apprenticed to a carpenter in town and had picked up skills through years of practice, while Don Ebenezer had only been able to take occasional days away from working in his fields. And that is how easy it is to come upon the scars of the conflict of the eighties. When people warned the village that the army was coming, his brother was one of the ones who argued that they were villagers not guerillas and had no reason to be afraid. So while some fled, the carpenter remained—he was rounded up and shot with fourteen others in Ebenezer's house alone. The tools of the carpentry craft, the planes, the drills, the lathes, were looted or burned when the army set fire to the caña houses. Cows, chickens and livestock were slaughtered or taken, and the harvest torched in the fields.
And the coffins my companion had mentioned had been a small attempt to heal these scars. After twenty years, three of the mass graves in town had been opened and some people had been exhumed to be reburied with dignity and names. Don Ebenezer's coffins had been a part of that. Some bodies remain in the mass graves, their relatives uncomfortable with disturbing them, or still fearful that public acknowledgement of the violence might bring retribution in the present. The violence in Guatemala left an estimated 200,000 dead and over a million fleeing with the country or outside. Here in a community which even today has fewer than five hundred residents, more than one hundred died in February 1982. Although there were ostensibly two sides, the leftist insurgency was much smaller than the military response which often leveled indigenous villages with no discernible military objectives. Investigations by the UN and the Catholic Church showed that more than 90% of the massacres and other crimes were committed by the military or other state actors. Shortly after the Catholic Church report was released in 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, the director of the project was himself assassinated. Of course none of this is unique to Guatemala. We are all too familiar with similar acts of brutality perpetrated throughout the world. Some of those who perished have survivors who can express the unique loss which each death constituted, some do not. In Guatemala, however, there is now an attempt to put some of the people responsible on trial. For me there is the added factor that in this case my government wasn't simply sitting on the sidelines when the machetes were drawn, but actively engaged with the government planning this scorched earth campaign: rewarding the latest in a decades long succession of military leaders with guns and money for what our president characterized as their commitment to democracy. And some people in the villages still remember those statements from more than twenty years ago.
But though the community has been scarred by violence, like Don Ebenezer, it has many other things going on in the present. It is one of the few in the area to have not just an elementary school, but a high school. In the county overall, most residents are 4-15 miles from the schools in the county seatand students must pay for either transport or lodging to study beyond sixth grade. This village had a high school built, and even paid for teachers salaries for a while before the government took over.
The village has an ongoing relationship with one of the Spanish provinces, and has used the aid for infrastructure. Because this community lacks running water, the Spaniards provided matching funds for some in the community to construct cisterns to collect water during the rainy season to use in the dry season, when the only water sources are unreliable springs in the valley below. They also provided money to buy a communal farm to provide another source of employment. Unfortunately, like many aid projects in Guatemala, the requirements of the donors ended up being more important than the needs of the recipients. After allocating the money, the Spaniards wanted it spent rather than sitting in a bank account, and the only farm on the market was 15 miles away, without a water source, and with very rocky soil. Nevertheless the community has set up a dairy herd, hoping to improve the stock even of family cows and is looking into planting fruit trees. So far however, it hasn't provided many jobs.
In addition to traveling to the farm, I did small jobs in the rest of the community, using my machete to cut firewood, or the cornstalks which make caña siding. Because our house lacked a cistern, I also experienced the burden of carrying water from the spring in the valley. After a thirty minute journey with a 42 pounds water supported by my forehead and my back as I climbed the slope I had almost enough water to flush a toilet twice—or for two people to drink for several days. I learned about the economics of cornfields, the sharply rising cost of fertilizer and falling value of corn. Last year, fertilizer for a given area cost more than half of the market value of the corn from a good harvest. Although many people have animals they don't have enough to fertilize large plots, and people said organic fertilizer was even more expensive, something I'm hoping to look into in the coming months. Based on the numbers they gave me, six weeks of work might net $60 from an acre (which is all the cropland most people have), and then you have to buy fertilizer for next year. I did the math and realized why I saw almost so few men under 40 growing corn, and why so many willingly faced the risks and distance from their family entailed in working in the capital, or sneaking into the United States.
During Lent, I saw several processions. Much smaller than what takes place in the big cities: a few dozen pilgrims stopping by the clay banks alongside the roads where pine needles, purple flowers, and a few candles have made a small hollow into a place of beauty and grace. A catechist leads a prayer while a picture of Jesus stumbling for the second time is placed in the hollow carved out of the hillside, resting on the needles. All the elements are simple, but these simple elements have converted the dirt of the hillside into a place of worship, and beauty, one deserving the reverence of the villagers—as I too feel reverence for their simple act of communal celebration.
Guatemala is divided into different administrative districts. There are 22 departments, each of which contains 5-30 municipios, just as states in the US contain varying numbers of counties. For simplicity I will refer to these as counties, because they are the second governmental division, though smaller than in the US. For most of my time here I will be working in the county of Rabinal, in the Department of Baja Verapaz. I spent my first month, however, in the county of San Martin Jilotepeque in the Department of Chimaltenango, 40 miles from the Capital of Guatemala city. The County seats are only about 30 miles apart as the crow flies. The distance on the dirt roads which wind around the mountainsides is more than twice as long, and it would take almost four hours to travel the distance on a direct bus. Actual bus routes are focused on more central destinations and makng the journey would require transferring at least three times.Despite the proximity, the Chaucus the intervening mountain range, is an imposing barrier: traversing the distance was much more difficult in former times. Consequently in the two areas the descendents of the indigenous Maya, who are the clear majority in these highland areas, have maintained different languages and traditions. They have been influenced by five centuries of Spanish rule, but even so, they have maintained some of their own traditions, and the ones they absorbed from their overlods have not always been the same.
San Martin is smaller than a US county. It contains 60,000 people, as many as the suburban Virginia county I grew up in, into an area 1/5 the size (97 square miles). This is according to the official statistics, which almost certainly underestimate the population. Though it has a population density ten times the county I farmed in in Pennsylvania it feels similarly rural. Except where the hilltops provide open vistas, in most places none, or only a handful of houses can be seen from the road. A few miles outside the county seat?most roads see fewer than a dozen vehicles pass during a busy hour. Although we passed through the county seat?fairly regularly, most of our time was spent in these rural areas, in five of the more than 100 communities, of which I will concentrate on describing one. Here, the dusty road through town almost certainly has more traffic from four-legged animals than four-wheeled vehicles. A horse carries firewood, blue water tanks, or a load of washing, two or three cows walk to pasture.The places we went have all received electrical service over the past five years. In comparison the city of Xela (Quetzaltenango) Guatemala's second-largest city, where I studied Spanish, boasts that electrical service was instituted in 1886. This is emblematic of the huge inequity which exists in this country. The shock of traveling from the villages to the city is much greater than I felt going from the US to the Guatemalan cities where I began my journeys. In villages, people have electricity for a few light bulbs, a blender, a radio, and maybe a television. They may have a single spigot that provides water a few hours every day. Some have built two-three room structures of naked concrete block in addition to the older caña (trimmed bundles of corn stalk) houses topped with corrugated aluminum sheeting. But even with the new infrastructure there is a stark contrast with the middle class urban families I stayed with while studying Spanish. They had showers, toilets, refrigerators, stoves, cars, and private bedrooms. And the communities I have seen undoubtedly have more amenities than many parts of Guatemala much further from the capital.
Even the families with cement block houses usually keep a kitchen of caña.Few people have chimneys for their cooking fires, and the ones I saw didn't work well, so the gaps under the roof and the ventilation between the stalks become an advantage though the rooms are smoky and most women complain about their lungs. My first night in the village we ate with an older man I will call Don Ebenezer. Like most families he and his family had a pile of bricks which allowed them to bring the cooking fire to the more comfortable working height of a stovetop, but Don Ebenezer preferred to have the fire on the ground so more heat went into the room, we could sit around it while we ate, and he could relight the cigarette of tobacco he had fashioned from a corn leaf which kept going out. We talked about surveying: most fields in Guatemala are measured not in acres or hectares, but in units based on the vara, just less than 33 inches and roughly the distance between your outstretched fingers and the center of your chest. The vara is also used to measure firewood and the depth of wells. We talked about the Guatemalan history textbook he had studied in school, including lessons about the conquest he remembered vividly across fifty years. He showed me the two-tone machete handle he had fashioned from scrap plastic after his first one broke from 12 years of use. We talked about politics in Guatemala and elsewhere, he brought up events in Afghanistan and Bolivia. It is a clich?to talk about how intelligent and knowledgeable peasants with second grade educations can be, but as we talked around the fire that first night I felt the reality of the admiration which can only sound clichéd when put into inevitably inadequate words.
That week Don Ebenezer was doing carpentry work for a new community building. My companion complemented him on his craftsmanship. She had seen caskets he made. He smiled and said that the difficulty was the where the angled parts of the lid fit together, but that the really skillful carpenter was his older brother. He talked with pride of the church doors his brother had worked on. His brother had apprenticed to a carpenter in town and had picked up skills through years of practice, while Don Ebenezer had only been able to take occasional days away from working in his fields. And that is how easy it is to come upon the scars of the conflict of the eighties. When people warned the village that the army was coming, his brother was one of the ones who argued that they were villagers not guerillas and had no reason to be afraid. So while some fled, the carpenter remained—he was rounded up and shot with fourteen others in Ebenezer's house alone. The tools of the carpentry craft, the planes, the drills, the lathes, were looted or burned when the army set fire to the caña houses. Cows, chickens and livestock were slaughtered or taken, and the harvest torched in the fields.
And the coffins my companion had mentioned had been a small attempt to heal these scars. After twenty years, three of the mass graves in town had been opened and some people had been exhumed to be reburied with dignity and names. Don Ebenezer's coffins had been a part of that. Some bodies remain in the mass graves, their relatives uncomfortable with disturbing them, or still fearful that public acknowledgement of the violence might bring retribution in the present. The violence in Guatemala left an estimated 200,000 dead and over a million fleeing with the country or outside. Here in a community which even today has fewer than five hundred residents, more than one hundred died in February 1982. Although there were ostensibly two sides, the leftist insurgency was much smaller than the military response which often leveled indigenous villages with no discernible military objectives. Investigations by the UN and the Catholic Church showed that more than 90% of the massacres and other crimes were committed by the military or other state actors. Shortly after the Catholic Church report was released in 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, the director of the project was himself assassinated. Of course none of this is unique to Guatemala. We are all too familiar with similar acts of brutality perpetrated throughout the world. Some of those who perished have survivors who can express the unique loss which each death constituted, some do not. In Guatemala, however, there is now an attempt to put some of the people responsible on trial. For me there is the added factor that in this case my government wasn't simply sitting on the sidelines when the machetes were drawn, but actively engaged with the government planning this scorched earth campaign: rewarding the latest in a decades long succession of military leaders with guns and money for what our president characterized as their commitment to democracy. And some people in the villages still remember those statements from more than twenty years ago.
But though the community has been scarred by violence, like Don Ebenezer, it has many other things going on in the present. It is one of the few in the area to have not just an elementary school, but a high school. In the county overall, most residents are 4-15 miles from the schools in the county seatand students must pay for either transport or lodging to study beyond sixth grade. This village had a high school built, and even paid for teachers salaries for a while before the government took over.
The village has an ongoing relationship with one of the Spanish provinces, and has used the aid for infrastructure. Because this community lacks running water, the Spaniards provided matching funds for some in the community to construct cisterns to collect water during the rainy season to use in the dry season, when the only water sources are unreliable springs in the valley below. They also provided money to buy a communal farm to provide another source of employment. Unfortunately, like many aid projects in Guatemala, the requirements of the donors ended up being more important than the needs of the recipients. After allocating the money, the Spaniards wanted it spent rather than sitting in a bank account, and the only farm on the market was 15 miles away, without a water source, and with very rocky soil. Nevertheless the community has set up a dairy herd, hoping to improve the stock even of family cows and is looking into planting fruit trees. So far however, it hasn't provided many jobs.
In addition to traveling to the farm, I did small jobs in the rest of the community, using my machete to cut firewood, or the cornstalks which make caña siding. Because our house lacked a cistern, I also experienced the burden of carrying water from the spring in the valley. After a thirty minute journey with a 42 pounds water supported by my forehead and my back as I climbed the slope I had almost enough water to flush a toilet twice—or for two people to drink for several days. I learned about the economics of cornfields, the sharply rising cost of fertilizer and falling value of corn. Last year, fertilizer for a given area cost more than half of the market value of the corn from a good harvest. Although many people have animals they don't have enough to fertilize large plots, and people said organic fertilizer was even more expensive, something I'm hoping to look into in the coming months. Based on the numbers they gave me, six weeks of work might net $60 from an acre (which is all the cropland most people have), and then you have to buy fertilizer for next year. I did the math and realized why I saw almost so few men under 40 growing corn, and why so many willingly faced the risks and distance from their family entailed in working in the capital, or sneaking into the United States.
During Lent, I saw several processions. Much smaller than what takes place in the big cities: a few dozen pilgrims stopping by the clay banks alongside the roads where pine needles, purple flowers, and a few candles have made a small hollow into a place of beauty and grace. A catechist leads a prayer while a picture of Jesus stumbling for the second time is placed in the hollow carved out of the hillside, resting on the needles. All the elements are simple, but these simple elements have converted the dirt of the hillside into a place of worship, and beauty, one deserving the reverence of the villagers—as I too feel reverence for their simple act of communal celebration.
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