20 January 2012 -- Antigua, Guatemala
Here I am, about to leave Antigua having lived here for a year. God how I wish I could bottle my life: my experience of here, the knowledge I've gained of here, my relationships with people here, the seemingly insignificant pleasures like walking down the stone streets as sharp shadows are cast against the bougainvillea-draped multi-coloured walls of here.
But this blog <writing> is the only bottle I have, and I've neglected to fill it regularly. So here I am, with a year's accumulation of Life Lived in One Place and all the insights that come with that, distressed at the thought of Losing It All (because that is what happens, when there's nobody to share memories with and hence nourish them) as I move on to new places (and perhaps people), occupying my mind with new New Discoveries that will seem like revelations. See my Itinerary blog-page, and you'll see what I mean: my first month in Antigua was full of "Discovered X, Discovered Y"; every day brought something New.
What I discovered would have been new to any tourist fresh of the plane, but also to quite a number of expats who have lived here for a while. Like the fact that La Casaca has an awesome rooftop terrace overlooking the Parque Central, or that a more private place to watch the sunset than Cafe Sky is El Mirador just up the street a few blocks. And then I discovered that some of my discoveries were new to locals, to people born and bred here. Like the fact that the Spanish Consulate has the best library in town, and anybody can become a member. For free.
This gave me pause, highlighting for me as it did the great divide in Guatemalan society between the extravagantly wealthy and US-educated who drive around town in SUVs (and with whom I've had little contact), and the (supposedly) "middle"-class surviving on part-time work at an hourly wage of $2-3 and living in a multi-generational family home. My Spanish teachers belong to the latter class, and to the extent they cross the threshold of any of the restaurants in town, it is on the invitation of one of their students. "My" Antigua of bars and restaurants and "free" movies (at cafes where you are expected to purchase a beverage that costs a teacher's hourly pay) and poorly advertised but truly free concerts at various of the ruins around town -- all this is a foreign country to my single-mother teacher who lives at home with her ten-year-old daughter, her parents, and her two brothers who between them have another four kids.
One teacher, Gloria, teaching me the word for "mud" in Spanish, tells of making "dolls" by mixing water with the dirt of the house floor when she was a little girl. At 17, she was almost abducted into a life of prostitution. A man came by the house with an offer of secretarial work for an appropriately motivated young person, and Gloria's mother's eyes lit up at the prospect. Gloria went with the man to get measured for a uniform and sign certain papers at an office supposedly in Antigua -- an errand which changed direction mid-stream. Gloria found herself on a bus to the capital more than an hour away with a man she didn't know and whose story, she soon found, changed every time she dared ask a question. Mercifully her suspicions and sense of self-preservation outweighed her terror at finding herself in a sketchy part of Guatemala City with no money, and when she got a chance she made a run for it and managed to navigate the public buses back home. At 33, her husband of 9 years died from an electric shock when he was working on the roof and got too close to a high-power cable strung too close to the house. The family was told they could take the matter to court, but decided not too as what money did they have to pay a lawyer, and what chance did any lawyer they could afford to hire have against the highly-paid lawyers of the oligopolistic electricity company? Now 35, she is increasingly concerned about the health of her parents, both 56, who both ended up in the emergency room recently: her father with nose-bleeds that wouldn't stop; her mother with a mild heart attack.
Gloria's response? "Everything happens for a reason." She laughs and adds that she may not know what that reason is; but it exists. She doesn't throw her faith in your face, but if you ask her, she'll tell you it's what keeps her going, it's what makes her who she is. God has a purpose for her, and though she may not see it, it's there and everything that happens in her life shapes her and makes her that being who will fulfil that purpose. "If my husband had been by my side, I wouldn't have been able to care for my parents in their emergencies so fully; I would have been paying attention to him and my daughter," she comments. Or, "My husband couldn't stand being incapacitated. Once, he lost the tip of his little finger, and it took him two years to come to terms with it. I've heard stories of people getting electrocuted and losing an arm or a leg, or not being completely 'there' mentally. He wouldn't have been able to cope."
She's taking university classes every Saturday, working towards the equivalent of a US Bachelor's in Education. Yet when we touch on the role of reading and writing in our respective lives, she flutters her hands and says she can count the books she's read on her ten fingers -- "While you, you 'extranjeros' (foreigners), you read hundreds and hundreds of books!" And to what end, I wonder to myself, regarding this young woman who teaches me Spanish so expertly and about Forgiveness and Patience and Faith with such humility.
Another aspect of what I discovered here was Guatemala's history and how -- within the country -- it remains dusky, unexamined, unexposed to the light of Truth and Reconciliation that seems to have offered a country like South Africa a hope of overcoming decades of discrimination, injustice, and violence. Here the socio-economic discrimination and violence that fueled 36 years of internal conflict continues unmitigated under the fig-leaf of a democratically elected government, the head of which currently is an ex-general who at the very least oversaw, but more likely ordered, massacres of the Mayan poplulation of highland villages in the 1980s. I stumbled across films like "When the Mountains Tremble", Rigoberta Menchu's testimonial of disappearances and repression from the late 1980s; and "Las Cruces", addressing the politics of a village massacre at the height of the Violence. I was recommended books like "Bitter Fruit" which gives a blow-by-blow account of the CIA-backed coup in 1954; and "The Art of Political Murder" detailing the long drawn out -- and only partially successful -- struggle to bring the men who murdered Bishop Gerardi in 1998 (two years after the Peace Accords were signed) to justice.
I tried to cross-reference academic accounts with my host-mother Chiqui's experience of Antigua in those years, only to encounter sincere admiration for pre-coup teacher-scholar President Aravelo but disdain for the toppled President Arbenz and his Communists who brought drunkenness and debauchery to the police force and made the streets unsafe. She took me to the Cemetery to show me a memorial to a handful of generals executed by the Communists in the mid-1950s, who according to the plaque had given their lives for their countrymen's freedom from tyranny. The father of another of my teachers told me with great admiration of the liberation army that swept away the Communist regime of Arbenz -- an army that was, according to "Bitter Fruit", a rag-tag collection of opportunists paid by the CIA in an attempt to "legitimize" in the public eye their support for the United Fruit Company. Apparently the obfuscation worked then, and to this day the largely non-reading public continues to believe the story. To this day, reforms proposed in Congress dealing with land-reform are dismissed by critics for being "Communist," a label which to this day in Guatemala appears to hold the same weight the US first lent to it in the 1950s.
On a different note: a walk around town with my friend Axel makes me understand that Antigua is a tight-knit community, where people have lived for generations and families know each others' histories. Several times during each block he'll call out "Orale!" or "Que le vaya bien" to replies of "Pilas" or "Nos vemos" as he catches sight of an acquaintance. They are of all ages, some of his parents' generation, some young enough to be his offspring. Axel's paternal grandfather was a tailor in the Escuela de Cristo neighborhood, and I've been with him when he's mentioned this fact to a fresh acquaintance who then immediately responded, "Ah yes, I remember my father had a suit made by him!" Axel's maternal grandfather was a black-smith, pounding out ornamental wrought-iron decorated with the most life-like leaves and flowers -- candelabras, tables, beds, and forms purely decorative. His work can still be found in households around Antigua and farther afield, including chic hotels. Axel's father is part of the Hermandad (organizing committee) of La Merced, the largest of Antigua's churches, whose duties include raising money for the processions during Easter Week, hiring (and paying) the artists who design and construct the anda decorations, planning the route and selling the tickets and grouping participants into "turnos" (teams) where each person knows his "brazo" (position at the anda), accompanying the procession for the full 8 or 10 or 12 hours of its duration, removing and replacing the religious images before and after the procession from and to their place in the church, etc. It's a position of responsibility within the community.
Axel himself is a pillar of the "porra", the cheering section supporting Antigua Football Club, that lets off fireworks and hot-air balloons and throws confetti and plays drums and blows whistles as well as singing and hurling insults throughout every match. He has the match schedules of all the leagues memorized and always knows the latest about every player and every game, contributing comments regularly to Antigua FC's Facebook page. Also, he is a stalwart participant in the processions of the Cuaresma (Lent) and Semana Santa (Easter Week), carrying the Anda (platform with Jesus) every chance he can (the only time he can't is when there are two processions scheduled at the same time). On this topic too he is a font of information, knowing every route of every procession like the back of his hand, the first to secure his spot as soon as the turnos go on sale, and counting down the days to next year's Semana Santa even before the last notes of the last processional march have dyed on the wind.
And then there are people Axel knows from school, of course, having completed all his primary and secondary schooling in Antigua: "primaria" (through 6th grade) at Santa Famila; "basico" (3 years of middle school) at three different places (Colegio La Salle, Liceo Antigueño, and Colegio Evangelico Centroamericano) and "diversificado" or "bachillerato" (in Axel's case, 2 years of specialization in "hoteleria y turismo") at the Instituto Tecnico Diversificado. After that he started working as a Spanish teacher, and in a total of 14 years in the job has worked at # different schools -- including the final two years at the school where I met him. After XXX a year or two he decided to go to university to get a degree in Communications, and for 6 years taught in the mornings and attended the University of San Carlos an hour away in Guatemala City in the afternoons. He didn't (and still hasn't) quite finished all the requirements for what they call a "maestro" degree; he still needs to write a thesis or complete a year's worth of unpaid apprenticeship in the field. After doing his university course work, he worked for a brief stints at a radio station in Antigua (but it didn't pay??), and a foreign-owned wine store (but the boss was a jerk), before settling back into teaching Spanish to foreigners. All to say Axel has studied and worked in the same town his parents grew up in, a town of say 40,000 inhabitants, for a sum total of close to 30 years -- so I guess it's not entirely surprising he knows a lot of people. Though it must be said that his polite yet exuberant personality mean that people are bound to remember him, and his photographic memory means he picks faces he's seen but once out of a crowd of strangers.
Hector's family story is even more linked to place. His grandfather built one of the first houses in what is now the village of San Bartolomeo, on the outskirts of Antigua. In the early 1900s a handful of people established fincas in the area, mostly growing coffee, and neighbors pitched in to pave a main road through town and a square in front of the church, as well as to bring in the first power lines. Today there is just one finca remaining within the town limits; the rest have been sold and houses constructed on the land. Hector's father was mayor of San Bartolomeo something like five times, in an era when the post was one you were nominated to rather than elected to, and seems to have consisted mainly in recording deaths in the community. The day I visited Hector's home for the first time was the day of the annual mayoral elections; the next day we heard that his brother-in-law had won the contest.
Other stuff:
* Machista culture -- Catholic + Machista = lots of kids and lots of single moms, husbands with 2nd families on the side; Gloria (salsa) on how mothers are the worst offenders
* Seasons: dry (and cold and windy and dusty) season (verano, nov-apr) & wet (rains in the afternoons, streets flood in Antigua, usually sunny and warm in the mornings) season (invierno, mayo-octubre)
* Maybe something on Natural Disasters over the years: earthquakes and hurricanes... land of volcanoes
* Petit Prince & Antigua
* What's Behind the Door? Entering into courtyard homes-schools-hotels-restaurants-gardens... You never know what's behind the wall and what the door will open onto
Here I am, about to leave Antigua having lived here for a year. God how I wish I could bottle my life: my experience of here, the knowledge I've gained of here, my relationships with people here, the seemingly insignificant pleasures like walking down the stone streets as sharp shadows are cast against the bougainvillea-draped multi-coloured walls of here.
But this blog <writing> is the only bottle I have, and I've neglected to fill it regularly. So here I am, with a year's accumulation of Life Lived in One Place and all the insights that come with that, distressed at the thought of Losing It All (because that is what happens, when there's nobody to share memories with and hence nourish them) as I move on to new places (and perhaps people), occupying my mind with new New Discoveries that will seem like revelations. See my Itinerary blog-page, and you'll see what I mean: my first month in Antigua was full of "Discovered X, Discovered Y"; every day brought something New.
What I discovered would have been new to any tourist fresh of the plane, but also to quite a number of expats who have lived here for a while. Like the fact that La Casaca has an awesome rooftop terrace overlooking the Parque Central, or that a more private place to watch the sunset than Cafe Sky is El Mirador just up the street a few blocks. And then I discovered that some of my discoveries were new to locals, to people born and bred here. Like the fact that the Spanish Consulate has the best library in town, and anybody can become a member. For free.
This gave me pause, highlighting for me as it did the great divide in Guatemalan society between the extravagantly wealthy and US-educated who drive around town in SUVs (and with whom I've had little contact), and the (supposedly) "middle"-class surviving on part-time work at an hourly wage of $2-3 and living in a multi-generational family home. My Spanish teachers belong to the latter class, and to the extent they cross the threshold of any of the restaurants in town, it is on the invitation of one of their students. "My" Antigua of bars and restaurants and "free" movies (at cafes where you are expected to purchase a beverage that costs a teacher's hourly pay) and poorly advertised but truly free concerts at various of the ruins around town -- all this is a foreign country to my single-mother teacher who lives at home with her ten-year-old daughter, her parents, and her two brothers who between them have another four kids.
One teacher, Gloria, teaching me the word for "mud" in Spanish, tells of making "dolls" by mixing water with the dirt of the house floor when she was a little girl. At 17, she was almost abducted into a life of prostitution. A man came by the house with an offer of secretarial work for an appropriately motivated young person, and Gloria's mother's eyes lit up at the prospect. Gloria went with the man to get measured for a uniform and sign certain papers at an office supposedly in Antigua -- an errand which changed direction mid-stream. Gloria found herself on a bus to the capital more than an hour away with a man she didn't know and whose story, she soon found, changed every time she dared ask a question. Mercifully her suspicions and sense of self-preservation outweighed her terror at finding herself in a sketchy part of Guatemala City with no money, and when she got a chance she made a run for it and managed to navigate the public buses back home. At 33, her husband of 9 years died from an electric shock when he was working on the roof and got too close to a high-power cable strung too close to the house. The family was told they could take the matter to court, but decided not too as what money did they have to pay a lawyer, and what chance did any lawyer they could afford to hire have against the highly-paid lawyers of the oligopolistic electricity company? Now 35, she is increasingly concerned about the health of her parents, both 56, who both ended up in the emergency room recently: her father with nose-bleeds that wouldn't stop; her mother with a mild heart attack.
Gloria's response? "Everything happens for a reason." She laughs and adds that she may not know what that reason is; but it exists. She doesn't throw her faith in your face, but if you ask her, she'll tell you it's what keeps her going, it's what makes her who she is. God has a purpose for her, and though she may not see it, it's there and everything that happens in her life shapes her and makes her that being who will fulfil that purpose. "If my husband had been by my side, I wouldn't have been able to care for my parents in their emergencies so fully; I would have been paying attention to him and my daughter," she comments. Or, "My husband couldn't stand being incapacitated. Once, he lost the tip of his little finger, and it took him two years to come to terms with it. I've heard stories of people getting electrocuted and losing an arm or a leg, or not being completely 'there' mentally. He wouldn't have been able to cope."
She's taking university classes every Saturday, working towards the equivalent of a US Bachelor's in Education. Yet when we touch on the role of reading and writing in our respective lives, she flutters her hands and says she can count the books she's read on her ten fingers -- "While you, you 'extranjeros' (foreigners), you read hundreds and hundreds of books!" And to what end, I wonder to myself, regarding this young woman who teaches me Spanish so expertly and about Forgiveness and Patience and Faith with such humility.
Another aspect of what I discovered here was Guatemala's history and how -- within the country -- it remains dusky, unexamined, unexposed to the light of Truth and Reconciliation that seems to have offered a country like South Africa a hope of overcoming decades of discrimination, injustice, and violence. Here the socio-economic discrimination and violence that fueled 36 years of internal conflict continues unmitigated under the fig-leaf of a democratically elected government, the head of which currently is an ex-general who at the very least oversaw, but more likely ordered, massacres of the Mayan poplulation of highland villages in the 1980s. I stumbled across films like "When the Mountains Tremble", Rigoberta Menchu's testimonial of disappearances and repression from the late 1980s; and "Las Cruces", addressing the politics of a village massacre at the height of the Violence. I was recommended books like "Bitter Fruit" which gives a blow-by-blow account of the CIA-backed coup in 1954; and "The Art of Political Murder" detailing the long drawn out -- and only partially successful -- struggle to bring the men who murdered Bishop Gerardi in 1998 (two years after the Peace Accords were signed) to justice.
I tried to cross-reference academic accounts with my host-mother Chiqui's experience of Antigua in those years, only to encounter sincere admiration for pre-coup teacher-scholar President Aravelo but disdain for the toppled President Arbenz and his Communists who brought drunkenness and debauchery to the police force and made the streets unsafe. She took me to the Cemetery to show me a memorial to a handful of generals executed by the Communists in the mid-1950s, who according to the plaque had given their lives for their countrymen's freedom from tyranny. The father of another of my teachers told me with great admiration of the liberation army that swept away the Communist regime of Arbenz -- an army that was, according to "Bitter Fruit", a rag-tag collection of opportunists paid by the CIA in an attempt to "legitimize" in the public eye their support for the United Fruit Company. Apparently the obfuscation worked then, and to this day the largely non-reading public continues to believe the story. To this day, reforms proposed in Congress dealing with land-reform are dismissed by critics for being "Communist," a label which to this day in Guatemala appears to hold the same weight the US first lent to it in the 1950s.
On a different note: a walk around town with my friend Axel makes me understand that Antigua is a tight-knit community, where people have lived for generations and families know each others' histories. Several times during each block he'll call out "Orale!" or "Que le vaya bien" to replies of "Pilas" or "Nos vemos" as he catches sight of an acquaintance. They are of all ages, some of his parents' generation, some young enough to be his offspring. Axel's paternal grandfather was a tailor in the Escuela de Cristo neighborhood, and I've been with him when he's mentioned this fact to a fresh acquaintance who then immediately responded, "Ah yes, I remember my father had a suit made by him!" Axel's maternal grandfather was a black-smith, pounding out ornamental wrought-iron decorated with the most life-like leaves and flowers -- candelabras, tables, beds, and forms purely decorative. His work can still be found in households around Antigua and farther afield, including chic hotels. Axel's father is part of the Hermandad (organizing committee) of La Merced, the largest of Antigua's churches, whose duties include raising money for the processions during Easter Week, hiring (and paying) the artists who design and construct the anda decorations, planning the route and selling the tickets and grouping participants into "turnos" (teams) where each person knows his "brazo" (position at the anda), accompanying the procession for the full 8 or 10 or 12 hours of its duration, removing and replacing the religious images before and after the procession from and to their place in the church, etc. It's a position of responsibility within the community.
Axel himself is a pillar of the "porra", the cheering section supporting Antigua Football Club, that lets off fireworks and hot-air balloons and throws confetti and plays drums and blows whistles as well as singing and hurling insults throughout every match. He has the match schedules of all the leagues memorized and always knows the latest about every player and every game, contributing comments regularly to Antigua FC's Facebook page. Also, he is a stalwart participant in the processions of the Cuaresma (Lent) and Semana Santa (Easter Week), carrying the Anda (platform with Jesus) every chance he can (the only time he can't is when there are two processions scheduled at the same time). On this topic too he is a font of information, knowing every route of every procession like the back of his hand, the first to secure his spot as soon as the turnos go on sale, and counting down the days to next year's Semana Santa even before the last notes of the last processional march have dyed on the wind.
And then there are people Axel knows from school, of course, having completed all his primary and secondary schooling in Antigua: "primaria" (through 6th grade) at Santa Famila; "basico" (3 years of middle school) at three different places (Colegio La Salle, Liceo Antigueño, and Colegio Evangelico Centroamericano) and "diversificado" or "bachillerato" (in Axel's case, 2 years of specialization in "hoteleria y turismo") at the Instituto Tecnico Diversificado. After that he started working as a Spanish teacher, and in a total of 14 years in the job has worked at # different schools -- including the final two years at the school where I met him. After XXX a year or two he decided to go to university to get a degree in Communications, and for 6 years taught in the mornings and attended the University of San Carlos an hour away in Guatemala City in the afternoons. He didn't (and still hasn't) quite finished all the requirements for what they call a "maestro" degree; he still needs to write a thesis or complete a year's worth of unpaid apprenticeship in the field. After doing his university course work, he worked for a brief stints at a radio station in Antigua (but it didn't pay??), and a foreign-owned wine store (but the boss was a jerk), before settling back into teaching Spanish to foreigners. All to say Axel has studied and worked in the same town his parents grew up in, a town of say 40,000 inhabitants, for a sum total of close to 30 years -- so I guess it's not entirely surprising he knows a lot of people. Though it must be said that his polite yet exuberant personality mean that people are bound to remember him, and his photographic memory means he picks faces he's seen but once out of a crowd of strangers.
Hector's family story is even more linked to place. His grandfather built one of the first houses in what is now the village of San Bartolomeo, on the outskirts of Antigua. In the early 1900s a handful of people established fincas in the area, mostly growing coffee, and neighbors pitched in to pave a main road through town and a square in front of the church, as well as to bring in the first power lines. Today there is just one finca remaining within the town limits; the rest have been sold and houses constructed on the land. Hector's father was mayor of San Bartolomeo something like five times, in an era when the post was one you were nominated to rather than elected to, and seems to have consisted mainly in recording deaths in the community. The day I visited Hector's home for the first time was the day of the annual mayoral elections; the next day we heard that his brother-in-law had won the contest.
Other stuff:
* Machista culture -- Catholic + Machista = lots of kids and lots of single moms, husbands with 2nd families on the side; Gloria (salsa) on how mothers are the worst offenders
* Seasons: dry (and cold and windy and dusty) season (verano, nov-apr) & wet (rains in the afternoons, streets flood in Antigua, usually sunny and warm in the mornings) season (invierno, mayo-octubre)
* Maybe something on Natural Disasters over the years: earthquakes and hurricanes... land of volcanoes
* Petit Prince & Antigua
* What's Behind the Door? Entering into courtyard homes-schools-hotels-restaurants-gardens... You never know what's behind the wall and what the door will open onto
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