Upscaling Guatemala

Tme to take a brief pause in my very desultory and delayed attempt to give a chronological narration of my work this trip, and discuss my immediate surroundings -- a brand-new multi-level centro comercial (shopping center) right smack in the middle of Cobán, which is I think the fourth largest city in Guatemala. Cobán is the capital of the department of Alta Verapaz, where there has been a series of conflicts with indigenous communities over land rights. I was here with the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission Emergency Delegation in 2018, and we visited a community not very far away, Chotún Basilá, where a peasant farmer had been killed by the security guards of a company that was trying to force people to sell their land. The 2022 delegation (which I haven't gotten around to writing about) also went to Cobán, very briefly. We met with members of one of the main national organizations representing indigenous people, the Comité Campesino del Altiplano or CCDA (Peasant Committee of the Highlands), as well as people from two communities that had been forcibly displaced from their communities. One community is in the department of Alta Verapaz (Cobán is the capital) and one is in another department. For reasons of security, I am not going to name the communities or the people these are people who have outstanding arrest warrants on what we believe to be spurious charges, and one was the object of an attempted assassination, so this is not an idle precaution.

In any case, we were pretty much in and out of Cobán. We got here at night, had dinner, went to bed, and then had meetings one after the other in the morning, and then we left to head to Rabinal, a town in the department immediately to the south, Baja Verapaz. We didn't really have time to explore much, and although I went for a run in the morning and we must have run right past it, I didn't really take notice of the shopping center until I came back here and was talking with the manager on duty at the hotel where I am staying, just to orient myself. It was a hotel where I hadn't stayed before so I wanted to orient myself in relationship to the Parque Central. He took me up to the roof of the building and pointed out a huge multistory building with a La Torre supermarket sign very visible (La Torre is a national supermarket chain), at opposite end of the Parque  Central from the church. 

After divesting myself of my suitcase, I decided to go out and explore on foot -- only to have the heavens up with a deluge of rain, I made it to the corner across from the mall (about 2-1/2 blocks from my hotel) and decided to venture inside. The first thing I noticed was the ethnographic display cases, one of which is pictured above. There were three or four, all on the first floor. The next thing I noticed was that there were escalators and elevators -- somewhat of a rarity in this part of town, where a lot of the buildings are older. 

The stores in the Centro Comercial are a mixture of typical fast food (Pollo Campero, a national chain that specialized in fried chicken, usually called pollo dorado, which literally means golden chicken; it's not generally called pollo frito or fried chicken) and somewhat newer and more "artisanal" places, like an artisanal fruit-based ice-cream shop, a couple of places where you can get decent espresso drinks. And then there are some very utilitarian businesses, like a dentistry office, an optician, the office of a local cooperative, and of course the supermarket. 

As I've sat here this afternoon, trying to get some work done (there are a lot of tables that are not attached to specific eateries, and decent wifi, and no one seems to bother you if you sit and chat with a group of friends, or sit alone as I am doing, for a good amount of time. The clientele seems to be a mix of people whom I would classify as "professional" (based on their clothing and the fact that they are conversing in Spanish) and those who are dressed in traditional attire (the women, of course -- indigenous men in most parts of Guatemala have long since given up traditional garments). There may be indigenous people among the professionals but they are not dressed in garments that mark them as indigenous. There are some family groups -- women with infants in their arms, both parents shepherding small children around. In most of these families, only the mothers are dressed in traditional garments. Children of both sexes are usually wearing jeans and shirts. You won't see many people in these photos, however, because I didn't have a chance to ask permission, and it would have been hard to explain what I wanted the photos for.  

Why do I take this detour? Because this place seems indicative of how a sector of the national elite (I'm assuming that La Torre is owned by Guatemalans) is inserting itself into urban spaces, as well as the way in which international brands like Taco Bell, McDonald's, Walmart, and Starbucks, are also inserting themselves into the Guatemalan landscape. This isn't an isolated phenomenon -- you can hardly drive along a Guatemalan highway as it passes through one of the major cities without encountering a McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, and their ilk. And there are upscale malls in or near most major cities --some of these have been around for a decade or more (J.T. Way has written about Tikal Futura on Avenida Roosevelt in Guatemala City in his book The Mayan and the Mall ). But there's been a noticeable expansion since I was here last, and in at least one place that is not exactly on the main tourist path -- Santa Cruz del Quiché. 

Returning to Cobán, there is one stretch of the road leading into the city from the south where there have been some upscale shops and U.S. fast food stores for quite a while. But the Plaza del Parque is recent.  I don't know a hell of a lot about Cobán but I do know a few things. In the nineteenth century, German capitalists invested in Guatemala, and developed the coffee industry here. I think they also invested in the commercial production of cardamom (which is often mixed with coffee, and also with chocolate -- several places sell coffee with cardamom, and cardamom-flavored chocolate - both for drinking and eating).  Much of what is grown here is exported, although there are vendors at the market under the arches at the plaza, where I saw plenty of local Maya people shopping for güipiles and other textiles, who sell artisanal chocolate and a few were selling bags of coffee. There are still German-owned coffee companies (Disseldorf is the one that comes to mind). Additionally, Cobán is on the road to some popular tourist destinations in the farther northeast, like Semuc Champey and Tikal, so while it isn't swarming with tourists in the way that la Antigua, Panajachel or Xela are, there are some. 

 

Returning to Santa Cruz del Quiché, when I stopped over briefly a few weeks ago and went out for dinner with a dear old friend, I noticed that the area around the Parque Central, which had always had some commercial establishments, had been somewhat gentrified. Before, there was the church and the traditional covered market on one side, a few banks and pharmacies (well-known national chains that have been there a while), one big store selling housewares (a national chain), a few modest restaurants and one bakery. Now, there is a two-story upscale bakery/café, and a few blocks away, on one of the streets leading off the square heading west, a fancy restaurant where my friend and I ate. The restaurant interior would not have looked out of place in the U.S. -- track lighting, sleek surfaces, one wall covered with a multicolored array of mugs. Nor would a good portion of the menu: panini, salads, fajitas. Guatemalans still haven't gotten around to the idea of side salads, however, in most places. Most of the time if you want a salad you either need to make that the meal, find someone with whom to share it, or if you order a salad and something else, resign yourself to either stuffing yourself, leaving food on the plate, or seeing if the restaurant can wrap up the leftovers. 

There seems to be a new aesthetic afoot, also. I've seen lots of places -- including the hotel where I am staying, which is not the swankiest place around -- that have similar decorations. Old bicycles hung from the ceiling or hung on the wall. Wooden cabinets containing manual typewriters, old-fashioned (i.e. 1940s-era) rotary dial phones. Antique wooden sewing machine tables emblazoned with the Singer logo. The photo alongside this paragraph is from a very unassuming roadside eatery somewhere in northeastern Guatemala. 

Perhaps we might refer to this as the panini-ization of Guatemala. Nearly everywhere you, restaurants offer panini on their menus, even if the rest of the menu contains Guatemalan staples like a desayuno chapín (eggs, plantains, a slice of cheese, some black beans, a dab of crema -- Guatemala's version of sour cream, and tortillas; sausage or some kind of meat if you want) or pepián.  And crepes -- both sweet and savory -- have also become somewhat ubiquitous. I don't know if Chinique (total population of the municipality 13,000 as a generous estimate) has any restaurants that serve panini, but they do have a new pizza restaurant. 

And while there are no bicycles hanging from the wall, there is a similar aesthetic that is tied to the products of twentieth century (early to mid-20th century) consumer culture. 

But in general, from what I've heard and seen, social and economic inequality is worsening in Guatemala, so while there is a small Maya middle and professional class, and somewhat larger non-indigenous economic elites, one wonders who these upscale locales serve.

Traveling to El Quiché

The object of the research part of my trip was to look at the impact of the pandemic, and the relationship between the pandemic and migration, in the three communities from which the vast majority of New Bedford's Guatemalan Maya population come -- Chinique, San Andrés Sajcabajá, and Zacualpa, all in the department of El Quiché. Since 2013, most of my Guatemalan sojourns have been in the department of Huehuetenango, not in El Quiché. Huehuetenango is also in the highlands, and it lies to the west of El Quiché. The population is similar to that of El Quiché in that it is largely indigenous, rural, and poor. Both departments have high levels of extreme poverty, chronic malnutrition (especially of young children), maternal and infant mortality, and chronic neglect by the central government. Both regions "send" a lot of migrants to the U.S., although the migrants from different regions (and different ethno-linguistic groups) generally end up in different areas, as indigenous people tend to go where their relatives, friends, and neighbors have gone before. If you're going to make the long and expensive journey to the US, you want to know that there are people at the other end who speak your language, and who will receive you when you arrive from the long journey across Mexico and then across the deserts of the southwest. 

Quick factoid: the price of the journey -- that is, the standard fee that you pay a pollero or coyote -- has increased dramatically during the pandemic. Although I wasn't specifically looking at migration in most of the pre-pandemic years, I would sometimes casually ask what the price of the journey was. My recollection is that in 2018-2019, it was around 60,000 quetzales (Q60,000). At current exchange rates, that would be around $7,750). It has doubled, and it's now about Q120,000-Q125,000 (over $15,000). People end up taking out loans at extremely high interest rates (as they come from money lenders and not banks), or mortgaging or even selling their land to pay for the journey.

There are also important differences. Huehuetenango's indigenous population includes at least seven distinct ethnic/linguistic groups -  if I can remember them without looking it up: Mam, Q'anjob'al, Chuj, Akateko, Chalchiteko, Awakateko, Jakalteko (also known as Popti), and some K'iche' people. According to Wikipedia there's a 9th ethnic group, Tektik (yes, I did look it up to see if I'd remembered correctly -- so I missed one, but I've never been in that part of Huehue and so I've never come across any Tektik people). 

The department of El Quiché includes the historic homeland of the K'iche' people and most of the majority-Maya population are K'iche' (the largest Maya ethno-linguistic group in Guatemala). There is a region dominated by the Maya Ixil (pronounced Ee-sheel) -- the municipalities of Nebaj. Cotzal, and Chajul. This is where the massacres that resulted in the genocide trial against former dictator Ríos Montt took place -- specifically in Nebaj. This is not because there were more or worse massacres there, but because the prosecutors found enough evidence ot mount a successful prosecution. When I was in Guatemala last, in 2019, I did spend some time in El Quiché, but much of it was in the Ixil region which I'd only visited briefly once before, and I spent a few days in Zacualpa (where I will travel in about a week's time), but otherwise my time was spent elsewhere. So this was going to be a return to some places that I hadn't visited for a decade or more. During my first visit to Guatemala in 2009, I spent time in San Andrés Sajcabajá (SAS) and visited there again in 2010, but I hadn't been back there since. And the two people with whom I'd spent most of my time, and who were, in effect, my hosts (one of them quite literally), have both since migrated to the U..S., so aside from contacts that I'd solicited from within the community in New Bedford (a few recent migrants who are from SAS), I didn't really have anyone "local". Chinique is where I lived during my Fulbright year (if any of you benighted readers have been following my blog since I began it in 2011, you might remember that -- extra points for you, but no shade if you don't), and then I visited again in 2012 when I was an international observer for the consulta comunitaria -- the community consultation (also called "consulta de buena fé" -- consultation in good faith) against mining and mega-projects. But I hadn't been to Chinique since then. When I visited Zacualpa in 2019, the bus passed through Chinique but I didn't get off and look anyone up, although I had an unexpected encounter with some friends from Chinique, Catarino and his wife Sandy, when my hostess in Zacualpa and I went to eat at an outdoor food stall in the market place in the evening. The food served at the Zacualpa food stalls isn't any different from what's available in Chinique (at night, usually grilled meats and sausages, maybe something stewed) but I guess they wanted a change of air so they had ridden over on Catarino's motorcycle.

There is no "good" bus from Guatemala City into the department of El Quiché, except to the market town of Chichicastenango, a popular tourist destination, and then only on market days (Thursdays and Saturdays). Monday, the day I was traveling, is not a market day and therefore there were no "good" buses (i.e. relatively comfortable with reserved seats). There is a direct bus from Guatemala City that passes through Chinique on its way to Joyabaj, which is about an hour east of Chinique, and is actually a fairly major city (the third largest in the department, which I hadn't realized before). But that is a camioneta (converted school bus) and those tend to be very crowded. The ayudantes (helpers) seem to feel that they need to squeeze as many people as possible onto the bus (obviously more passengers means more money in the driver's and ayudante's pockets), and when passengers who are already seated seem reluctant to scrunch themselves in so another person can fit on the seat, the ayudantes often call out "Donde caben dos, caben tres" (where two can fit, three can fit). I didn't want to spend the entire trip in discomfort, and also because there is a raging pandemic, it didn't seem a wise move from a health standpoint.

But there were good buses to Xela, and I would be able to hop off the bus at Los Encuentros, a place where a lot of buses stop on their way to various destinations, and it is the entry point to the one highway in that part of El Quiché -- if you can use that word for a two-lane road with a lot of speed bumps, and steep, winding curves. I decided I would make this a three-stage journey -- good bus to Los Encuentros, camioneta to Santa Cruz del Quiché (SCQ), and then a microbus (a 15-passenger van) from SCQ to Chinique. The microbuses are more comfortable than the camionetas (if you are in the back of the camioneta, every time the bus goes around a curve, hits a pothole or goes over a speed bump, it's a bone-shaking experience). 

I hadn't been able to buy a ticket online for the good bus (seems you can only do that 24 hours or more in advance, not the night before, as the website offered me tickets for Tuesday) but I figured that the bus might not be full on a Monday morning, and so I trusted that I could just show up at the terminal and get on the bus. My figuring turned out to be correct. One of the people in the house where I was staying told me she was driving to work on Monday morning and could give me a lift as her workplace was close to the Alamo terminal (a local bus company, not the auto rental company; I don't think they are related), which I gladly accepted.

I had brought a large suitcase and a smaller carry-on, along with a shoulder bag, for a couple of reasons. I was going to be in Guatemala for a month, and I knew I would be in several different climates, so I would need some clothing options. In the altiplano occidental (western highlands) the nights are often quite chilly, so I knew I'd need long pants, long sleeves and some layers. The human rights delegation with which I would spend a week was going to some places in the northeastern part of the country that are more tropical, and so I would need warm weather clothing as well. And then my running stuff -- shorts, longer tights, tech shirts ranging from singlets to one LS shirt, the necessary undergarments, and shoes. This girl needs two pairs of running shoes since it's a good idea to not wear the same pair of shoes two days in a row if possible so that the foam insole can recover from the pounding. Then the hydration pack in case I were going to be able to get in some longer runs (it squishes down pretty small) and finally the physical therapy/recovery stuff. Which consists of a travel-sized foam roller, a foldable yoga mat, and a travel-sized slant board to stretch out my calf muscles. And then of course my travel coffee-maker (it's about the size of a 12-oz cup and everything fits inside but it's still one more thing). All of which necessitated more than a single carry-on bag. I also knew that I was not always going to be in places long enough where I would have time to wash my clothes and let them dry (especially during the rainy season, it often takes well over 24 hours for a piece of clothing to dry (even underwear which I can normally dry overnight in my bathroom in Brooklyn). 

So I arranged with the people at the collective house to leave a bag with them, so I would only be burdened with a shoulder bag (big enough to fit my laptop, camera, and notebook) and the suitcase. The smaller carry-on bag would be useful when I traveled with the delegation, since we were only going to be out of the city for three nights, and I could then (I hoped) leave the larger suitcase somewhere.

We arrived at the bus terminal with plenty of time to spare. I purchased my ticket and was shown to a waiting room and then more or less on time, onto the bus. There were more tourist-type places along the highway, some new restaurants and gas stations, and new gas stations and restaurants under construction. I was the only person getting off at Los Encuentros, but fortunately I didn't have long to wait before a bus stopped on the fork of the road that led to El Quiché. The road to Chichicastenango and then Santa Cruz was more or less as I remembered it -- lots of speed bumps between Los Encuentros and Chichi, lots of steep ascents and sharp curves on a narrow road without a lot of guard rails. The bus terminal in SCQ was much as I remembered it. As soon as I got off the bus, my white skin meant that several ayudantes (or maybe some of them were drivers) immediately approached me, calling out "A donde vas, señora? Chichi? Xela?", assuming that I would be going to one of the popular tourist sites. I responded that I was going to Chinique and asked where I could find the microbus to Chinique, and someone told me by the bank outside the terminal, so I went to wait.

On all of the buses, about half or more of the passengers were wearing masks (it is supposedly obligatory on public transport in Guatemala but it is not enforced. There was less compliance on the part of drivers and ayudantes. The good bus was only about half full -- I don't know whether that was deliberate or there just didn't seem to be that many people traveling that particular route on a Monday at that particular hour. The camioneta was perhaps not quite as jam packed as some of the camionetas I've ridden previously. All seats were taken, and there were some people standing in the aisle, but I didn't have to struggle to breathe or elbow 10 people in order to be off. The microbus was also somewhat less crowded than I'd feared, and had slightly better mask compliance.

I looked around as the microbus made its way out of SCQ -- there were new stores, new gas stations, new houses, both in the town and on the road. At the entrance to the town proper of Chinique, there was still the sign that always made me smile -- ZONA URBANA (urban zone). This referring to a town with a population of around 2000 or maybe 2500. 

I had arranged to stay at an hospedaje -- a generic term for a lodging house or even a small hotel -- run by a friend of a friend, in the town center. I'd tried to make an arrangement with the landlady beforehand so that I could arrive, drop off my stuff, and then start on my work. I'd been able to get in touch with both her and a few of the people I wanted to interview, so although she was not available to meet me (she was working), her nephew found me (her directions were not quite crystal-clear) and let me in. It was clearly new construction -- not a new building, but a conversion of an existing one into new uses. It was located above the store owned by the family who had rented me the house where I lived in Chinique, and across the street from a store owned by the grandparents of someone I know from New Bedford. They were acquaintances of mine when I lived there -- I wouldn't call them friends, but I would stop by their store every so often during my year in Chinique. They were active in the cofradia which played a key role at the patron saint feast, and at their invitation, I spent the evening of the patron saint feast tromping around the town with the procession, which ended at the headquarters of the cofradia for food and music.

The room was clean, a little sterile (no traditional textiles on the bed or decorations, just regular bedding. And, to my disappointment, no wifi, no kitchen, no place where I could wash clothes. As I walked around a little (the subject of my first interview was coming to pick me up) I regained my sense memory of where things were in the town (although as I started to explore in the next few days, there were things that had changed). The church was obviously in the same place, although there were some new benches in the plaza that hadn't been there before, and a new municipal building was under construction. I walked to my old block and past my house, and peeked in at the garage that was across the street from my house to see if I could find the owner, Willy, who had repaired my pickup on numerous occasions (and had once helped me out at night when I had had a breakdown on the road several miles outside of town). But there was no one in the garage when I poked my head in (I could see a pair of legs underneath a vehicle up the block, and thought that was probably him, but didn't want to disturb his work). 

Well, enough for the journey and arrival....

Pandemic-era Guatemala

A day or two before I left, Guatemala was hit by another wave of COVID-19 and the country's alert system went to "red". It was too late to change plans, and so I loaded up on masks and home tests and got my second booster shot.

The Guatemalan government has done a fairly haphazard job of responding to the pandemic. Like some other Latin American countries, the government imposed a strict lockdown for some months early in the pandemic -- people were restricted to their homes from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. (I think those were the hours).This was called the "toque de queda". Since a large part of the population works through the informal economy, this meant that people in the city (and in towns) who earn their living as street vendors, tending market stalls, couldn't work. It also made life hard for people in rural areas, who often support themselves by taking their produce to the nearest town on market days. Markets were suspended and people were unable to leave their homes if they needed to go to the nearest store (there are a lot of small stores in rural areas) to buy something.  The toque de queda was enforced by the police, who now started to partrol through towns and into the rural communities. Throughout the areas I visited, people told me that many people they knew had been fined by the police for violating the toque de queda. And the fines were not simple slaps on the wrist, the equivalent of a parking ticket. The fine was Q6000, which is nearly $1000. It represents more than a month's salary for a decently paid professional. For purposes of comparison, the official minimum wage in agriculture is Q2,831.77 a month as of January 2022 -- so the fine represents more than 2 months' wages for agricultural workers. However, many people in rural areas do not receive wages. They work on their own land and so they don't pay themselves for their work; they earn money by selling their produce.

It's only only been three years since I was here but so much is different and so much is the same. There is still a corrupt government that seems indifferent to the plight of rural and indigenous populations. And by saying this, I am not expressing an opinion so much as reflecting what the U.S. State Department has concluded about the Guatemalan government. Year after year, the State Department reports on Guatemala (which I read religiously for my work on asylum cases) note that government corruption and impunity continue to plague the country. And the State Department recently released a report on "Corrupt and Undemocratic Actors" in the northern triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) that listed 19 current and former Guatemalan government officials, including the mayor of the town of Joyabaj in El Quiché, and former president Alvaro Colom.

On the surface, some things seemed very familiar. When I arrived at the airport, the process for passing through immigration, grabbing your suitcase from baggage claim, and passing through customs seemed more or less unchanged. When I emerged from the terminal, there were still crowds of people waiting outside the terminal to greet their relatives and friends. Many were indigenous -- women dressed in güipils and cortes, men in jeans. People carry bunches of balloons, armfuls of flowers. There are barriers, but people still wait by the exit. The person who picked me up at the airport told me that there are more restrictions on vehicles entering the airport but I don't quite know what they are. 

I spent the first weekend in the capital, so it wasn't straight from the airport to the small town where I lived in 2011. And in the capital, I've generally stayed in guest houses, not in people's homes, so I have less experience with how people live their everyday lives in the capital, and didn't have much basis of comparison -- that is, to compare now with pre-pandemic. I stayed in a collective house that is occupied by four people (I think). At least, I saw four; three women and one man. But I had not known any of them or the house, before this trip.

From my somewhat limited perspective (I spent two days in the capital, and that was over a weekend), street life was somewhat subdued. The Plaza seemed less crowded. On Sunday, there were people but not a huge number of vendors. In the past, on Sundays, the Plaza was partially filled with a couple of rows of stalls and food carts offering a variety of things -- tamales or chuchitos  (smaller, drier versions of a tamal) reheated over a grill, grilled or boiled corn, tacos, pupusas. Sometimes there would be a large number of vendors with traditional (sorry I can't think of a better word; I know this one is imprecise and also loaded) garments. 

This time, there were only a few food vendors in the Plaza, along with a couple of preachers. Granted, I was there in the daytime and not at night - maybe there are more food vendors at night. However, there was a COVID-19 testing station right in front of the Presidential Palace. The Palace itself was barricaded off on the side that runs along Sexta Avenida (the front of the Palace opens onto the Plaza, but the building occupies a square block). There have been protests periodically against the government -- around corruption, around the government's response (or lack thereof) to the pandemic. 

Sexta Avenida, the central artery of the historic district, is closed off to vehicular traffic for several blocks, and on Sunday late morning/early afternoon, it seemed filled with people. This is a favorite place for capitolinos (residents of the capital) to stroll on the weekend, particularly on Sundays, Families bring their children, walk up and down, buy ice cream or other treats, and window shop (and sometimes actually shop). There was one marimba group and a few other performers, but the crowds seemed a little less full than in the past. The city cracked down a few years ago on ambulatory vendors, so they are not present on La Sexta. 

 Garifuna women were still stationed In front of the MacDonald's a bit farther down on the Sexta, braiding people's hair. However, the Garifuna restaurant that was on the second floor of a building is no longer there, and it has been replaced by a Middle Eastern restaurant. 

One one side of the Plaza, there was a brand new attraction -- a viewing platform that had been erected. I don't know what else to call it - it's called the Portal (doorway). You ascend a staircase, and then can walk along a platform that overlooks the Plaza. There are two "towers" at either end of the platform  -- this is where the staircases are that you have to ascend and descent. 

Down at the other end of the avenida, in Zona 2, where it is called Avenida Simeón Cañas, there was some construction going on -- looked like a monument was going to be installed, because workers were creating a big concrete circle alongside the stadium.

Otherwise, the small part of the capital that I saw seemed more or less the same -- a few businesses closed, a few new ones opened. More American fast food chains and brands visible throughout (and not just in the capital). 

One difference is bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere. Most businesses -- like the cell phone company Tigo - have bottles of sanitizer near the entry, and signs reminding people that masks are required. Compliance with masking is about 50/50. I didn't see a lot of enforcement, however, the few times that I took public transit (where masks are supposedly required). Nor were all police officers wearing them (hey, that's just like NYC). 

The pandemia in one family

Out of respect for people's privacy, I won't use names here but I will tell the story of one family's experience with the pandemic. These are friends of long standing, a family with three adult daughters. The mother runs a family business, and the father was a leader in both local and national indigenous movements. I have known them since 2011 -- I met the father together with some other friends and we've stayed friends ever since. I am very close with the oldest daughter, who was closest to her father in terms of their political leanings. They were both activists and very committed to the indigenous movement and oppositional politics in general; I had always viewed Doña C., the mother, as more or less apolitical. She is a member of an Evangelical church, and the two younger daughters also attended church; the father, W., and the oldest daughter, E., were not religious at all. I stayed with them often, but during the pandemic we were not in as close communication as we had been. One of the daughters is married but lives in the same town as her parents, and the other (I think the youngest) still lives at home with her parents. This is not uncommon in Guatemala, for unmarried children to live in their parents' home (and sometimes even to live in their parents' home after marriage or on the same piece of land in rural areas). 

E., the oldest daughter, has been an advocate and educator around sexual and reproductive rights -- a touchy subject in a socially conservative country where abortion is still illegal and where, in indigenous communities, people are reticent to talk about issues concerning the body, sex, and sexuality. E. had taken a job in Santa Cruz del Quiché, a few hours away from her family's home, starting in early 2021, and was traveling back and forth to her hometown -- something that many Guatemalans do, as they often have to leave their hometowns for work. It is not unusual for someone from Xela, for example, to work in Guatemala City, and return to Xela on weekends, returning to the capital on Sunday night or Monday morning for work. 

I don't quite know who in the family first contracted COVID, but the entire household, except the father, who travels a lot to the capital and elsewhere pursuant to his involvement in the indigenous movement, came down with COVID sometime in February 2021. That is to say Dona C., and the two daughters at home, E. and D. 

E told me that she almost never went out. The government imposed lockdowns (toque de queda) but even when that was lifted, she rarely went out. In fact, as we ate dinner tonight at an upscale restaurant in Santa Cruz del Quiché (SCQ), she told me that she still rarely went out except for work. "But at some point I had let my guard down and wasn't taking all the precautions and that's how I got infected."

At first they quarantined at home, but then all three were all hospitalized. They were afraid to go into the hospital because they'd heard bad things about the care that one received there. And as E. explained to me, the government set up special hospitals for COVID patients. These were usually housed in facilities that had not been designed as hospitals, according to E. In Xela (the nearest large city), the COVID hospital was set up in a big field near the local airport, in a building that was used for the fiesta patronal (the patron saint feast, colloquially know as la feria (the fair). The three women were all hospitalized, and to E's surprise, the treatment they received was excellent. "I really respect the health workers." But the facility had a high roof and since it hadn't been designed as a hospital, it was very airy -- and it gets quite chilly in Xela at night, as it is one of the highest-altitude cities in Central America. While they were there, the father, W., became infected with COVID -- they think from a meeting he attended in Guatemala City -- and was also sent to the same hospital. As Doña C. told me, "Just as we were leaving, he entered." 

But the three women recovered, and so they thought that W., the father, would also recover. E. told me that during the first several days that her father was in the hospital, he remained very active and engaged, using his cell phone to communicate with people on Facebook and WhatsApp, attending meetings and workshops and training sessions (capacitaciones) on Zoom. "People didn't realize that he was attending meetings from the hospital." 

But instead of getting better, like the rest of the family, he worsened, and was put on oxygen (not an intubation but non-invasively, through an oxygen mask). He didn't want to be in the hospital, and E. thinks that his resistance might have been part of the reason that he died. I won't go through the entire story of what happened from a medical perspective, but after three days on oxygen, he had a hemorrhage (I think cerebral) and died. Only one person from the family was allowed to go to the hospital to identify the body, "so that they wouldn't mix the bodies up and give us the wrong one." There were four other people who died the same day, and two of them within the same hour as W. E's younger sister D. went to the hospital to identify the body, and E started making phone calls to other members of the family.

But there was a problem - the family did not have a burial plot in the local cemetery. Doña C. had told me a bit of this. "We had been talking for years about buying a plot in the cemetery, but he always kept putting it off, saying, 'later, later.'" The hospital only gave them 7 hours to arrange the burial (something to do with the COVID protocols). Doña C's parents had purchased a burial plot, and they had erected a monument with 4 spaces -- two for the parents, and the two on top for Doña C and her sister. According to E, "But my father never got along with my mother's family. My mother's mother never liked my father, and my father never liked my mother's mother. So if they didn't like each other when they were alive, why would we put him to rest with them?" But they still had to find somewhere to bury him. E called some of the cousins on her father's side of the family, and one of the cousins had purchased several burial plots in this cemetery, and gave one of them to the family so that W could be buried. 

E also decided that it was important to let W's other children know about this. He had had a few children outside of his marriage, but E was the only one in his "official" family who kept in touch with her hermanitos -- the ones she knew about (she thinks there were probably others). This part of W's life wasn't something that I knew about until my last trip to Guatemala in 2019, when E told me that her father had another family (not entirely uncommon in Latin America). After her father died, E simply told her mother that she was going to let the other children know, "because he was their father." And so they all came together for the burial (or maybe this was after the actual burial).

Ironically, Doña C's bakery did very well during the pandemic, according to E, because bread was something easy for people to consume; they could come into the bakery and buy bread for the family and then would have food for a while.

W's death left a big gap, however, in the local community where the family lived. He had been a member of the alcaldía indígena (indigenous mayoralty) in the municipality -- I remember attending his initial installation some years back (maybe 2013 or 2014). And even before I sat down to eat and chat with E, another mutual friend had told me that when W died, the alcaldia indígena had kind of fallen apart.  E is trying to continue in her father's footsteps. As she told me, "Each of us [the three daughters] is carrying on a part of what he did." One daughter, D., is a lawyer and works with groups on human rights. The third daughter, A, is a teacher. E works around sexual and reproductive rights and is also involved in the indigenous rights movement. 

According to E, "My father wasn't just a national leader, he had a presence in the local community." She is very concerned about the gap that his death left in the indigenous mayoralty in their town. But, as she told me, "I have my own trajectory."  Nonetheless, she says that she tried to participate in some of the meetings, more or less in her father's place, when they were held by Zoom. But, she told me, there is one person in the mayoralty, a woman, who was opposed to E's participation. "Every time I attended a meeting and tried to speak, she kept blocking me."  

But E is thinking of trying to find a job closer or in her hometown, so she can live at home and try to play more of a role in the local community.  

Pandemic-era Guatemala: planning and arriving

 Well, time for true confessions. I didn't do the best job in the world of planning for this trip. Although I'd had it in my mind for a few months, and had more or less figured out the time frame (early July to early August, timing it so I could get back in time for a friend's wedding), I hadn't done anything concrete like make research contacts, or flight arrangements, and figure out what to do with my cats (don't worry, I won't bore you with those details).

Thus, in mid-June I began to sketch out plans. I hadn't kept track of who were the recent arrivals during my weekly stints at Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), so I had to start asking around. Luckily, one of the people I'd remembered was someone who had jumped right in to volunteer nearly as soon as he had arrived. Ken, as I will call him, was in some ways not the typical Maya K'iche' immigrant to New Bedford as he had achieved a higher degree of education than most and had been trained as a bilingual (K'iche' and Spanish) educator. He came to CCT in the summer of 2021 and, together with two other immigrants who had been in New Bedford somewhat longer, started teaching K'iche' classes for the children of Maya immigrants. Ken had also received some training in photography and videography, and began to help with documentation of many of CCT's activities starting in the summer of 2021 -- material aid distribution, vaccine education and promotion, vaccine clinics. 

Another recent arrival who had become a steadfast volunteer was a young woman whom I'll call Mary. She was a constant presence during the weekly educational talks, and always came to help out for aid distribution and vaccine-related events. I knew Mary was from San Andrés Sajcabajá because she often came to events wearing the style of güipil that is specific to San Andrés, but since very few Maya men in Guatemala wear traditional garments (and basically none in the immigrant community) I didn't know where Ken was from without asking.

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A sidebar here: during the 15 years that I've been observing the immigrant community in New Bedford, in the last few years more women and girls are wearing traditional garments. Indumentaria is the preferred word in Spanish- it's a generic term for clothing or attire and Mayan activists argue for its use instead of traje típico -- "typical" clothing, or "folk costume", which smacks of folklorization. I don't really know how else to refer to this clothing in English without a long-winded explanation. We can argue about the term "traditional", but suffice it to say that there are styles of clothing that are specific to Mayan communities in Guatemala. In most parts of the country, Maya women and girls wrap long lengths of patterned cloth (mostly woven on foot-powered looms or machine looms these days) around their waists (this is called a corte), fastened with a woven or embroidered belt called a faja (fah-hah), and a woven and/or embroidered tunic called a huipil (wee-peel) -- in Guatemala it's usually spelled güipil. In some areas (San Andrés is one) these are not handwoven but instead sewn from pieces of store-bought fabric and decorated with ribbons and/or lace and sometimes other adornments. Of course these garments all have names in the various Maya languages but these are the most common Spanish names. 

When I first started to work with and in the immigrant community, women rarely wore indumentaria except on very special occasions. Because the journey to the U.S. takes a long time, migrants carry very little with them, and the indumentaria is relatively expensive compared to, say, jeans and a t-shirt purchased from a used-clothing store or Paca. So migrants wouldn't want to carry that much bulk or weight (the cortes are usually several yards long and handwoven güipils can be pretty heavy), or to run the risk of losing costly and valuable items. But as people became more established in the U.S., they asked relatives in Guatemala to send them, and (this is my hypothesis) they began to feel more secure in making visible their indigenous identity and their presence in the town. In other words, claiming space in the variegated ethnoscape of New Bedford.  Okay, end of sidebar.

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However, I was able to get in touch with him and learned that he was from Chinique, the town where I had lived during my Fulbright year, and more specifically from an aldea (village) called La Puerta, which I had visited in 2012 on my first return visit to Guatemala after my Fulbright ended when I had been recruited as an observer for the community consultation about mining (consulta de buena fe or consulta comunitaria). He told me that his father was a member of the COCODE (Consejo Comunitario de Desarrollo -- Community Development Council) and would be able to speak to me. As we talked, I learned that we knew some people in common in Guatemala. As Ken had been a teacher, he knew my friend Catarino, who was also a teacher. Chinique is a small municipality in terms of population. The 2018 census counted 11,382 inhabitants in the municipality, and over 9000 were counted as Maya. This makes it the third smallest in the department of El Quiché, ahead of Pachalúm, which is on the eastern end of El Quiché, and Patzité. One of the alcaldes indígenas -- indigenous mayors -- told me it was the second smallest, and that there were 13,000 inhabitants, so maybe he has access to more recent figures than the census from 4 years ago. Nonetheless, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that everyone knows everyone. 

Ken gave me his father's phone number, and also that of his girlfriend, (I'll call her Jenny), who had migrated to the U.S. together with him. Jenny is also from Chinique, and she gave me the phone number for her sister "Carmen" (I usually use real names when permitted but I haven't had a chance to ask everyone). The other contact I had for Chinique was a man named "Andy", who had come to the U.S. with his son, leaving his wife and two daughters behind, and he gave me the phone number of his wife, who lived in a different village in Chinique. 

And then Ken told me about a man named Al also from Chinique, whose mother had recently come to New Bedford with Al's young son. Al gave me the number of his aunt, Flora. Ken gave me the name and number of one of his cousins, also from La Puerta, but I didn't have time to contact him before I left. I figured naively that I would be able to contact his family through Ken's father but I ended up not trying.

Turning to San Andrés, I had two contacts of pandemic-era migrants: Mary, who is still in her teens, needed to consult with her parents before providing me with a name and phone number of a relative, but eventually she gave it to me. And there was one other person who had been a consistent volunteer at CCT, Zee. Zee gave me contact information for a cousin in San Andres.

There was another recent migrant whom I met by coincidence when he came into the CCT office about a week before my departure, and I explained my project to him. He gave me his phone number but never responded to my messages so I had to leave that aside.

Ken had given me a few other names, thinking they were from Zacualpa (which is the next town over from Chinique heading east), but they were from more distant municipalities. One was from Joyabaj, which is the next municipality to the east of Zacualpa, but he told me that his family lived in a distant village three hour from the town of Joyabaj, and I doubted that I would be able to travel there. The other was from Pachalúm, which is even farther away. Since these were not municipalities that had sent a lot of migrants to New Bedford, I wasn't sure it would be worth the time and effort to get there. 

Then I set about trying to reach people in Guatemala. I had asked all the recent migrants to whom I'd spoken to call their relatives first and explain who I was and tell them I would be contacting them. People in Guatemala are often hesitant to answer calls from unknown numbers. This has been the case for many years because extortion, scams, and fraud are widespread, and people fear that an unknown caller might be trying to extort, scam, or defraud them. So this was an important precaution because otherwise, friends and relatives of migrants would probably not have accepted my messages or calls. 

Many people in Guatemala -- at least, the relatives of migrants -- have smartphones and use WhatsApp (a lot of the local phone companies will throw in some free access Facebook or WhatsApp when you purchase some airtime -- most people use prepaid phones, not monthly plans -- and so it's often more economical to make calls via WhatsApp than just dialing), so I was able to chat with most of the people I wanted to see in Guatemala before I left.

Pandemic-era Guatemala -- the decision to travel

Three years have passed since my last visit to Guatemala. It seems a lifetime ago. When the pandemic began in early 2020, I knew that I wouldn't be traveling for a while. I often go to Guatemala during the winter break, and it's stretching back too far to remember when - well before the pandemic had really entered with force -- I decided that I wouldn't go to Guatemala during late 2019/early 2020. Perhaps I thought I would work on the interviews I'd conducted in the summer (I didn't really work on them). I'm not sure what the thought process was, but sometime in fall 2019, I had decided to postpone a trip until the following summer. And then, of course, that didn't happen.

For the first few months of the pandemic I wasn't traveling to Massachusetts, where I've worked with the Central American community in New Bedford for over a decade. My university had gone virtual and I was teaching remotely, and for a short while, Rhode Island wasn't allowing out-of-state travelers (or maybe it was specifically from New York, as during the early stages of the pandemic New York was the epicenter) and there was no easy way to get to New Bedford without passing through Rhode Island. 

However, sometime in May 2020, I think, I started to travel to New Bedford to work with the immigrant community. That is worth another couple of blog entries, but the TLDR version is that the organization I've worked with for well over a decade, Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), which is in essence focused on labor rights, had to pivot as did so many immigrant-serving organizations and start looking for resources to provide material aid to the local immigrant community, which was hit hard by the pandemic. Immigrant workers in New Bedford are clustered in several key industries -- principally seafood processing, recycling, garment/textile, and construction. These are not the kinds of jobs that lend themselves to working remotely (no one is going to drop off 100 lbs. of scallops in the shell at your apartment so you can shell them and classify them by size), and at least initially the company owners or supervisors weren't taking many sanitary measures (social distancing, thorough disinfecting, and providing masks and sanitizer for their employees). Many became sick; others had their hours cut as production dropped (the restaurants that purchased the finished product closed at least temporarily); others stayed home to care for their children when schools closed. So we began to look for funds to purchase food, gift cards, and provide some housing assistance. 

I started to formulate a research project about the impact of COVID on the immigrant community, and traveling to Guatemala was always part of the plan. But it had to be put on hold as the pandemic continued to rage through the U.S. and soon afterwards, in Guatemala. Although people I know from the U.S. did travel to Guatemala during this time (the first two years of the pandemic), I held off, feeling that prudence was the better part of valor. 

One thing I began to notice, several months into the pandemic, was that we were continuing to get new arrivals, principally from Guatemala. It might have been in the second summer, 2021, when we started to do vaccine awareness and promotion. When people came to get food bags, gift cards, and/or checks, we had a simple intake form. Although there was no question on the form that asked how long people had been in the U.S., we did ask people if they had been vaccinated, and a few people who said yes told me that they had been vaccinated at the border. I didn't get around to interviewing these new arrivals (I took a few phone numbers but never managed to follow up) but filed the information away -- not specific names, but the fact that New Bedford was continuing to receive new arrivals.

It seemed to me that in addition to conducting research in the community in New Bedford, I should look at the way that the pandemic was affecting the communities from which the immigrants had originally come -- and also to try and explore some of the dynamics that were prompting migration during the pandemic (spoiler alert: many people are leaving now for the same sorts of reasons that people migrated in earlier periods -- poverty, lack of job opportunities, violence, crop failures due in large part to global warming, lack of arable land due to the land grabs and other activities of mining, palm oil and other extractive industries). 

Finally, I decided that the time had come. Clearly the pandemic wasn't going away, either in the U.S. or in Guatemala. And although I haven't been reckless during the pandemic -- I've mostly masked when going into indoor locations and in crowds, and once we started having in-person classes in the 2021-2022 academic year, I taught with a mask most of the time (I very occasionally lowered it when I was well away from students and needed to emphasize something). But I know people who literally almost never went outside their homes and that wasn't me. I kept running (with a mask for the first several months but mostly alone), went to museums and movies once they opened, went to the opera, started running with groups again, participated in non-virtual races once those started happening again, participated in Black Lives Matter protests, did mutual aid food deliveries and so forth. So I had spent a fair amount of time with other people during the two years-plus of the pandemic. I had been fully vaccinated (two shots plus a booster -- and now the second booster shortly before my departure). And although I knew that Guatemala still had a lot of infections and a fairly low vaccination rate, I made up my mind to travel, thinking that it was important to look at the conditions in the communities from which most of the immigrants to New Bedford have come. The vast majority of the Central American population in New Bedford is from Guatemala, and most of the Guatemalans are indigenous Maya K'iche' people from the department of El Quiché -- a mostly rural, mountains, and extremely poor region in the northwest of the country. It's part of what is generally referred to as the altiplano occidental (western highlands), and the population is over 90% indigenous in most areas. 

To narrow it down even further, most of the Maya K'iche' migrants in New Bedford come from three specific municipalities (a municipality is the equivalent of a township): San Andrés Sajcabajá, Chinique de las Flores, and Zacualpa. There are a few from other municipalities but that's where the bulk of the migrants come from. People tend to migrate to places where they know someone -- a relative, a spouse, a friend, a neighbor. Someone who can put them up for a while, and who can help them find a job. Most of the jobs in the low-wage sector of the local economy are not advertised through any formal means but through word of mouth (or the temporary employment agencies that most immigrants work through -- "temporary" is kind of a joke as I know immigrants who have been at the same workplace for 15 or more years but are still employed through a temp agency). So, since this is a relatively short trip, I've limited myself to those three municipalities.

And so here I am.