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.
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