Rîo Negro: Being there

 

The boat ride down the river, which is also called Río Negro, was almost like a journey to the land before time, or to a land before human habitation. I realize that this is a highly culturally and historically specific observation. I can't remember whether it was in the work of Carolyn Merchant or another scholar of environmental history who argued that what the English settlers viewed as "wilderness" when they landed in New England, was actually the result of thousands of years of Native habitation and, in many instances, deliberate cultivation. And so, with my critical thinking brain activated, I realize that the landscapes on both sides of the river, as wild, rugged, and uninhabited as they mostly seemed, undoubtedly bore the signs of thousands of years of settlement by Maya Achi people. And the course of the river itself had changed significantly since the construction of the Chixoy Dam, which had produced the displacement of most of the inhabitants of Río Negro, the massacres of over 400 people. 

The river was surrounded by mountains and cliffs, thickly covered with trees and other vegetation. It was easy to see that the river was well below its normal level -- that is, what has passed for normal in the four decades since the dam was constructed. There were occasionally flat areas close to water level, temporary pastures, including a few where I saw animals (a horse in one location, a lone cow in another and in an alcove off to one side where there was a more extensive pasture area, several cows). Sorry, I have no photos of the animals; you'll have to take my word.

There were a very small number of homesteads visible from the river (maybe 3, over the course of 13 kilometers -- that's what Don Julián told me was the distance). We saw a few boats moored along the river, and perhaps 4 other boats with people in them. It reminded me of a long-ago kayak trip in the Dordogne region of France,  where the famous Lascaux and Les Eyzies caves are located. Although the topography was not very similar, the sense of passing through a landscape that looked, to the untutored eye, like it had changed little in the last few millennia, was similar. 

Don Julián, the boatman, had lived much of his life in this river valley (he told me a lot of his personal biography later) and clearly knew the river intimately. After we had moved far enough from the landing area so that the water was deep enough to turn on the motor, it provided a constant, or almost constant, hum. I sat looking ahead; Don Julián was behind me in the sterm, but we could converse as the boat was small. From time to time Don Julián cut the motor and pulled it up  when we came to an area where the water was too shallow, or there were too many grasses and reeds that would catch in the motor. and there were islands of grasses and reeds that we needed to navigate around. Without a word when I heard him pull out his paddle I grabbed mine and helped steer the boat around the danger zones.

We were on the river for about an hour and a half, perhaps a little more. I left the charging cable for my GPS watch in Zacualpa and while my phone certainly serves as a timepiece, I have to make an effort to pull it out an look at it, as opposed to just glancing down at my wrist. 

One disappointing but not entirely surprised observation was the quantity of garbage in the river - specifically, the quantity of bottles.  Soft drink, bottled water, Gatorade, and undoubtedly other beverages.  These were mostly, but not all, plastic single serving bottle, although some glass beer bottles here and there. There were entire floating islands, almost barriers, composed of bottles that had drifted together. Obviously, there is no municipal garbage collection along the river -- this sparsely populated area is poorly served by governmental institutions of all sorts. And I have no way of knowing whether most of the bottles wound up in the river because people simply tossed them from the sides of boats as they traveled up and down the river (not inconceivable -- many times on buses I've seen people open the windows and toss all kinds of trash out onto the shoulders or roadway. 

I toyed with the idea of taking a photo of the garbage but decided against it, in part to avoid creating or reproducing stereotypes of rural people in places like Guatemala, that they are somehow uniquely careless about their trash. There are larger social, economic, and political forces that are responsible for our culture of disposability, for the export to places like Guatemala of soft drinks, junk food, fast food, and other consumer items (and the culture of disposability), and for the desire to consume modernity (hence the global popularity of McDonald's -- it's not only because of how the stuff tastes, but because it represents rubbing elbows with the world of global capitalism). 

At a certain point Don Julián told me that we were getting close, and pointed out a building on the right hand side of the river, up on a hillside. That was the school, he told me. A little while later, we came upon a floating wooden dock, in front of a steep cliff, and Don Julián hopped out of the boat, admonishing me to stay and wait. First he fastened the boat, and then he stepped over a pretty wide gap between the dock and the shore and tightened the rope that tethered the dock to the shore. It was still bobbing around, but I put my bags on the dock, got off the boat, and then handed the larger bag to Don Julián and strapped myself into the backpack and the shoulder bag. I was so glad that I hadn't brought the suitcase, because no one had told me that in order to get to the Centro, one had to walk nearly half a mile up a very narrow rock, gravel, and dirt path, full of switchbacks. I was grateful that Don Julián volunteered to carry my heavier bag (and at the same time immensely guilty because I had learned that he was two years older than me). You can see the beginning of the path in the photo to your left. 

It was slow going, as the gravel and rocks were loose in places. I paused several times to give my lungs and quads a break. So I didn't feel bad about not having gone for a run in the morning.

When I got to the top (finally!) I was grateful that I wouldn't have to traverse it again with that much baggage until the day I left (which was either going to be the next day, or the day after). 

At the top, we were greeted by Cupertino, the man who was in charge of the locale and the reception of visitors. Don Julián had served in that position for a few years, and then Cupertino had assumed that role (I later learned that there was an election process, but I didn't know it at the time).

I don't have a photograph of the center -- the entrance is pretty close to the edge of the cliff. Not dangerously close, but close enough that one could not step back far enough to get a shot of the whole building. It was a two-story wooden frame building with a wraparound porch on two sides of the building. I never went up to the second floor so I don't know what is up there, but I think probably space that could be used for sleeping or meetings. There was a standard 6-foot long white folding table of the kind you would see at Lowe's or Ikea, and a couple of rubber armchairs. 

Cupertino was also a survivor of the massacre, as is his wife, Ventura, whom I met a bit later on when she brought lunch for us. A bit later on we had a long chat and he told me his life story. But first he showed me the facilities -- first room was a relatively spacious kitchen, with a gas stove and a fridge. Apologetically, he told me that the power was off -- it was a nationwide blackout, some problem with the grid, which of course I hadn't known about since I had been in transit for over three hours. I worried, of course, about charging my phone and laptop, but the power did come back on later, and I never used the fridge as I had not brought any perishable food with me.

There was a bathroom off to one side. He proudly told me that it had hot water -- but of course that was connected to the electrical grid as nearly every shower that I have seen in Guatemala has a shower head that is attached to a small apparatus that heats the water. By the time I needed a shower, it was working. Straight ahead was a library/office. One shelf full of books, some other items on tables and tucked into corners. A small hallway led to the main, large room, with several large windows, curtained with the fabric used to for cortes (the long pieces of cloth that women wrap around their midsections and fasten with a woven belt). There was a large stack of thin mattresses covered with striped ticking along the back wall, a couple of stacks of those ubiquitous plastic chairs, and a shelf with a lot of sports trophies. Cupertino explained that some of the local kids had won or placed in various tournaments. There was another folding table along one of the walls, with a chair, that I could use as a writing surface, and perpendicular to the opposite wall, a single mattress on the floor, with a pillow, sheets, blanket and towel neatly stacked at the foot. 

I arranged my bags on the table, put my food items on the kitchen counter, excused myself to use the bathroom, and then we sat down to talk, and plan out the next day and a half. Don Julián was still there, and we discussed the two major items: visiting the site of the dam, which would require Don Julián's services as boatman, and walking along the path of the massacres, up to the top of the mountain, where there was a memorial. They asked if I wanted to rest (people always seem to think that gringas need a lot of rest after traveling or any kind of exertion -- people are continually bidding me "Que descanses") but I said that I wanted to go to the dam that afternoon after lunch if it were possible, and then we could do the walk up the mountain the next day, leaving very early to beat the heat. 

That settled Don Julián went off down the path to return to him own home, about 10 or 15 minutes away by boat, for lunch, and Doña Ventura, Cupertino's wife, came bearing some pots and containers which she set down in the kitchen and then prepared our plates. It felt a little awkward to eat with Cupertino (he kept me company for lunch and dinner, which were the meals that Doña Ventura prepared for me -- I made my own breakfasts) while Doña Ventura did not join us, but I generally don't question people on their own turf about such things. I won't bore readers with details about the food other than to say that her tortillas were excellent and much to my liking -- made of yellow corn (not as common as white), relatively thick and large (there is a wide range of sizes and thicknesses of tortillas) and quite fresh and hot (another key criteria in my book). I had to stop myself from gobbling down a whole stack of them; I try to limit myself to three or at most four, depending upon the size.

Then just at the moment expected we heard the motor of Don Julián's boat, and I went down the zig-zag trails to the landing so we could set off to the Chixoy Dam (next installment). 

Río Negro, Rabinal: Getting to El Centro Histórico y Educativo (part 1)

 The sun beat down on us as Luis, the young man who had driven me from the town of Rabinal to the banks of the Río Negro, and I followed Don Julián, the boatman, along a marshy, muddy path to the water's edge. Don Julián, who turned out to be two years older than me, moved rapidly and surely. Luis and I reached the river bank but Don Julián was moving quickly along another path. I wasn't sure whether we were supposed to follow him, but I realized that he had moored his boat a little farther down the shore and was going to bring it back to us by water, so we waited. Luis had carried the heavier of my bags, while I carried my laptop bag and small backpack. Don Julián was taking me to the Centro Histórico y Educativo Riij Ib'ooy -- the Río Negro Historical and Educational Center, which was established by survivors of the massacre (with some help from a German organization).

Río Negro is the name of a river that snakes its way through several departments in Guatemala, and it is also the name of a Maya Achi' village belonging to the municipality of Rabinal, in the department of Baja Verapaz, where there were four massacres over a short period of time in 1982. I'd known about the Río Negro massacres as they are well-documented; there are still many survivors (the boatman, Don Julián, is one; Luis is the son of another). But I hadn't known about the Centro Histórico until fairly recently. When I first visited Rabinal in 2019, I had come to the town of Rabinal to visit a community museum that was devoted to documenting the armed conflict in the region. I also visited the cemetery, where there were some small memorials -- paintings on grave stones, and also small monuments. On the external walls of the cemetery, there were vinyl "posters" - I don't really know what else to call them. They had blue lettering and designs on a white background. There were, I think, four panels -- I'd have to go back and look for my photos from 2019 to be sure. Each panel documented one of the massacres, with the date, location, and the names of the victims. Altogether, between the four massacres, there were over 400 people killed -- in one instance, exclusively women and children (about 200 in that one massacre). The total of the 4 massacres represented nearly half the population of Rio Negro.

When I visited Rabinal in 2019, the posters had been ripped so that only part of their text and images were visible. When I visited Rabinal again last year -- this time very briefly, as part of a human rights delegation -- the posters were in even worse shape. It seemed clear that there were forces in the town who did not want the history to be recorded and made public. This year, when I met someone from Rabinal at the Guatemala Scholars Network conference, he told me that the mayor had removed the panels completely, and that is what I saw -- the cemetery's exterior walls had been freshly painted yellow, there was a newly-paved road along one side of the cemetery (not the side facing the main road but the side street), and no posters about the massacres. I did not go inside the cemetery, however, to check on the state of the paintings and monuments.

I knew about the Río Negro massacres, and last summer when I was with the human rights delegation, we'd had a long conversation with Jesús Tecú Osorio, a survivor of the massacre. Jesús had watched his younger brother get brutally killed by the soldiers, and then he was kidnapped by one of them and taken virtually as a slave for the next two years until one of his older sisters, who had also survived the massacre, was able to locate him and free him from his captors. He wrote a memoir of his story and I read it in pretty much a single sitting. 

The same person who told me about the removal of the posters on the cemetery walls in Rabinal also told me that there were groups that arranged visits to the Río Negro Site. He spoke about one of the Canadian anti-mining and solidarity organizations bringing groups to visit Río Negro. I asked if it was all organized by the foreigners or whether the folks who lived there had any role to play. He said that he thought it was community-based, but he didn't give a lot of details. He promised to send me information, but never did (I also didn't follow up to remind him). However, I was able to search online and found the information about the Centro Histórico y Educativo. It's one thing to read about a massacre, or talk with a survivor, or look at an exhibit in a museum, but another entirely to visit the site, so I decided to do that. It's one thing to hear a story or read a book about a massacre, and another to visit the actual site where it occurred. I was also interested in how this community-based historical memory tourism worked.

I'd never traveled directly from Guatemala City to Rabinal. Both times, I'd reached Rabinal from Cobán, a larger city in the neighboring department of Alta Verapaz. I assumed that there were direct buses from the capital, but wasn't sure where they left from. One of the idiosyncrasies of public transportation in Guatemala is that there is no central bus terminal -- no equivalent to Port Authority. If you want a bus to Xela, you have to go to a certain location. If you want a bus to Santa Cruz del Quiché you have to go to a different location. If you want a tourist bus to Antigua, you have to go somewhere else. So I needed to find out where to get a bus to Rabinal. I tried looking online, and there was no really straightforward answer. So I contacted a friend whom I knew had done fieldwork in Rabinal (and had a longstanding relationship with an NGO he had helped found there). He told me to get a bus from Centra Norte - I had a vague idea where that was. I tried to get information about schedules from couple of bus companies that seemed to have buses going to Rabinal but there wasn't much available, and I tried calling, but with little success. Michael told me that he thought that the Pullman buses (the Guatemalan term for a "good" bus -- something other than a converted school bus) left in the afternoon and that I should get there sometime around noon or 12:30 to check things out. 

I got a driver to take me there -- one of the essentials of travel in Guatemala, especially if you are a woman traveling alone, is to know a few reliable drivers. This is not simply for foreign researchers and travelers, but all of my professional women friends in Guatemala -- the ones who do not know own cars themselves -- rely upon known and trusted drivers (or Uber for getting around in Guatemala City if a trusted driver is not available). I learned this back in 2014 or 2015, when I first began to travel to visit the political prisoners at the preventive detention center (which is actually close to Centra Norte) -- I met my friends Momis, Jovita, and Simón at a designated location in Zona 1 and we loaded into the car of a driver they all knew). Before I arrived in Guatemala this time, Momis had given me the name of her trusted driver, Hugo, and so Hugo came to pick me up and take me to Centra Norte. It turned out to be a huge somewhat upscale shopping mall with some bus loading areas on the outside, and a range of stores ranging from Pierre Cardin to more local brands, on the inside. 

And a Barbie photo station, of course.

I arrived in Rabinal in the late afternoon and spent a while trying to find lodging -- the hotel that Jesús had recommended to me was full. That hotel recommended another hotel and that second hotel was also full, so I went with a place that the tuc-tuc driver recommended, which turned out to be the place I had stayed the previous summer with the human rights delegation. 

Jesús had told me that he had to be in Guatemala City and therefore couldn't accompany me to Río Negro but that his son would drive me to the place where a boat would pick me up. I had to arrange for the hotel to make me an early breakfast because although the sign on the wall of the dining room said they started serving at 7, when I had asked at dinner, they told me 9. I explained that I had an early departure and that I wouldn't really have anywhere else to get a meal (not entirely true, but I figured they would prefer to have the business as breakfast was not included and so I would be paying for the meal). They agreed I took a quick stroll in the morning down towards the cemetery and where I remembered there was a semi-protected pedestrian and bike path near a field, and then returned to eat and got ready to leave.

Jesús' son Luis was an amiable young man, probably in his early 20s (I didn't ask). I did ask if he was working, studying, or both, and he said both. He was studying agronomy, but in a course that met on the weekends, and worked during the week. I was familiar with the weekend-only college courses -- it's the way that many people I knew took or were taking their degrees. Very people can afford a college education, and the satellite campuses of the main universities which are located in smaller towns like Rabinal generally only offer a limited number of degree programs -- usually a teaching certification, social work, and agronomy. If you want a more specialized degree such as law, engineering, or architecture, you would have to travel to a main campus of one of the universities in a larger city.

After stopping for gas (for which I paid -- that was part of the arrangement) in the next town, Cubulco, we continued on for a bit on paved roads, and then took a turn off onto dirt. After a short while, we came to a point where there was a narrow road forking off down a slope while the main dirt road continued. There was a pickup stopped on the side of the road and Luis got out and spoke to the men to ask directions. The conversation was in Achi so I couldn't understand most of it, but there was a lot of gesticulating and it seemed that they were discussing two possible routes, one to San José and one to somewhere else. It sounded like they were saying that the car we were in wouldn't be able to manage the kind of sketchy-looking harrow road, but after about 5 minutes of conversation, Luis got back in the vehicle and we headed off down that narrow lane.

It seemed impossibly narrow at times, with barely enough space for one vehicle. The road (I guess I have to call it that, although it really looked and felt more like a lane) was overgrown, winding through trees, skirting at the very edge of rock walls, under small cliffs, and occasionally opening out onto a vista with a drop on the left-hand side. There were steep climbs and equaly steep declines. I was glad that I was not the one driving. There were very few dwellings -- we might have passed one or two in nearly half an hour of driving. Maybe it was longer. But eventually we came to an area where the road widened a little and there was a small clearing; there was a house and some outbuildings on the left hand side and Luis pulled the car into the clearing and got out and shouted, and after a few minutes, a few people emerged from one of the buildings and one man walked towards us. Dressed in jeans, boots, and a straw hat -- of the kind that we would call a "cowboy hat" -- and with a weather-beaten face, this was the lanchero or boatman. He said good-bye to the people in the house, obviously known to him, and got into the vehicle with us. We drove a bit more, crossed over a shallow part of the river, and then Luis parked the car, and we got out and walked. 

I had three bags - my carry-on bag, which is a small soft-sided suitcase with a shoulder strapped, my purse/laptop bag, and a small backpack holding my food items. Yes, I'm a bit of an obsessive when it comes to making sure that when I travel, I can at least have a breakfast to my own liking. I have a small travel coffee maker (Aeropress brand) so all I need is a source of hot water to have good strong coffee. I buy good coffee when I get a chance. usually in one of the major cities or a tourist town like Antigua -- I had stocked up on some coffee from Fernando's Kaffee, one of my favorite places -- because it's not usually possible to get dark roast coffee in most parts of the country. I buy powdered whole milk, which is available everywhere in Guatemala -- I don't know why it's so hard to get in the U.S. I've only ever seen it in South Asian groceries, never in a regular grocery store, or online. And then I have my oatmeal - avena integral is the closest thing to old-fashioned oats. Most Guatemalans use something called avena mosh, which is quick-cooking oats, and they make it like a beverage, basically hot milk with a little bit of oatmeal, some cinnamon, and of course sugar. Avena integral is also not always available outside of the big cities or Antigua. And I usually buy a jar of ground flax seed to mix with my oatmeal. On top of that, I had some packets of roasted almonds (emergency rations) and some roasted peanuts that someone on my panel at the conference had given me as they came from the community where she had done her research. 

One of the men carried my larger bag and I took the two smaller ones. We had to walk on a rocky path and then through some marshy ground to get to the river, so I was glad for the help, although I felt a bit guilty about having so much (first world problem). My big suitcase was in the car -- Luis was going to drop it off at the office where Jesús worked, because I was only going to Río Negro for two days and didn't need everything I'd brought for 4-1/2 weeks.

When we finally got to the edge of the water, Julián, who had been ahead of us the entire time, walking very surely and swiftly, turned off and walked across the marsh, leaving Luis and I on the muddy bank, and then returned with the boat. It was a good thing I hadn't brought a large suitcase, because the lancha turned out to be a small wooden rowboat with a couple of wooden slats for seats and an aging motor on the back. I had been misled by the word lancha into expecting something bigger -- in Cuba, a lancha is a ferry-boat.  I realize that I don't have any full photos of Julián's boat, nor of Julián in the boat. But this is the closest I have -- the tip of the boat as we headed down the river.

We loaded my bags and me into the boat, and I said goodbye to Luis as he headed back to the vehicle. Julián told me to sit on the wooden slat in the middle of the boat and he took an oar and started to paddle, explaining that he couldn't use the motor until we had gotten into deeper water. There was a second oar, and although I am not an expert boatwoman, I do know how to row a boat and paddle a canoe. Although the boat was shaped like a rowboat, there were no oarlocks, and so we used the oars like canoe paddles, dipping them in and trying to get the boat into the middle of the river. As you can see from the photos, the water was very low, and the river was very muddy. I'll leave this here, and continue the journey in the next blog.

Quiché to San Andrés Sajcabajá

 I started my sojourn in the altiplano in Santa Cruz del Quiché, in part because it is a convenient staging ground for forays in different directions. The three communities I planned to visit are not all in a straight line. While Chinique and Zacualpa are on the same highway, San Andrés Sajcabajá is off in a different direction. There are some back roads that connect San Andrés to other municipalities, but not recommended. So I planned to start in Santa Cruz del Quiché, where I also wanted to visit the mother of two friends active in the Pescando Justicia (Fishing for Justice) campaign, and also some old friends from my time in 2011, with whom I've kept in touch intermittently. 

As I noted in an earlier post, Doña F. had virtually accosted me at the door of my hotel and dragged me to her home half a block away. The next day, Tuesday, I met with an NGO called the Observatorio Indígena (Indigenous Observatory), which had been recommended to me by a friend and colleague who researches migration. I'd first asked a friend who works in the health department at the departmental level if she knew of any NGOs or organizations working on immigration-related issues but she did not (I hadn't really expected that she would -- her scope is pretty narrowly related to the health workers' union). But my research colleague suggested the Observatorio Indígena so I contacted them and very soon set up a meeting with them.

I explained my project and my interest, and they told about their work. They had conducted a study of 10 municipalities with large migrant populations -- Zacualpa and San Andrés Saj. (SAS) were on the list, but not Chinique. Funding came from USAID - which immediately raised a question mark in my mind, but I didn't ask them about whether the funder had set any constraints on their work. Their angle was not looking at causes of migration but at the way families made use of remittances, which  are perhaps the largest source of funds in the Guatemalan economy. And in looking at how remittances could be used more productively -- for social and community purposes, not simply for personal consumption (I'm just reporting what they told me, not particularly taking a stand on it). We chatted for a while, and then the director, Mario, got very excited when I explained what I was doing with immigrant workers in the U.S. and invited me to give a talk on Friday when they would be presenting their project at the local campus of San Carlos (the state university -- the students at the main campus have been on strike for over a year but I guess the strike hasn't reached the highlands). 

So I planned to head to San Andrés - now only about an hour away since the road has been paved (when I first traveled there in 2009, the road was only paved about 500 meters outside of Santa Cruz del Quiché and the trip took closer to 2 hours) - the following day and start interviewing the family members I'd managed to contact in advance.

The first person I was going to talk with was the father of a young man who was part of the "deferred action" program. In most of these cases, I haven't yet interviewed the migrants, but had only explained my project and asked for their permission to contact their relatives in Guatemala. I'd also taken the precaution of their contacting their relatives first, since people in Guatemala don't usually answer phone calls or messages from numbers that they do not recognize (this is not universally true, but more true than not). 

The father, Don Antonio, met me in the central plaza or parque of San Andrés. While I was waiting for him I watched a vigorous game of basketball on the public court on one side of the square. There are a couple of statues (I didn't bother to see who the figures were) and also a monument to victims of the massacre in San Andrés during the armed conflict. 

I only waited a few minutes for Don Antonio. He works as a mason, and his work is mostly in and around the town center, although he lives in an aldea a bit farther off.  There are plenty of benches and seating areas so we just perched ourselves on a low wall and talked. Since I hadn't interviewed his son, but only knew him through the Deferred Action project, I hadn't realized that he had other children in the U.S. He told me that he and his two daughters had attempted to go to the U.S. some months ago. As is often the case when adults and minors travel together, they separated at the border. The girls had presented themselves to immigration and were sent to a shelter for juveniles and then were released. He was not so lucky, and ended deported back to Guatemala, where he now lives alone. He told me that he was very lonely with his children away (his wife died some years ago, leaving him alone with the children). Yes, he talks to them frequently, they call every day, but it's not the same. He told me "There's no one to make tortillas." I suggested gently that he could buy them -- there are tortillerias all over every town I've ever visited in Guatemala, advertising "los tres tiempos" (the three times -- breakfast, lunch, dinner). He responded, "But it's not the same as having people to sit down and share a meal with."

Several days later, after I had left San Andrés, I got a text message from him, and then some phone calls, asking my advice about a supposed job offer he had received. I say "supposed" because when I finally was able to understand what he was talking about, it sounded like a scam. Someone had called him saying that they were from the U.S. Consulate, and told him that he had been selected for a program that would bring him to the U.S. for a specified period of time for a job - but he had to pay Q2500 in order to "apply". I tried to have him send me the PDFs that the person claiming to work for the consulate had sent him, but he only sent me screen shots of the messages containing the PDFs, not the PDFs themselves. The whole thing seemed fishy to me, and I told him so. I texted his son in the US and briefly told him about this, because I wanted him to be alerted. He said his father hadn't told him anything about it.

I gently explained that the U.S. Consulate would not be likely to call a Guatemalan citizen and that the consulate did not arrange for jobs. I told him that I thought it was fake, and that when a U.S. employer wanted to hire someone from another country it was the employer's responsibility to do all the paperwork. I hope I managed to dissuade him.

But this incident points out the vulnerability and gullibility of people in Guatemala, especially those with less education and less familiarity with the world outside their local community. I could sense how much Don Antonio wanted this to be real, wanted an opportunity to go to the U.S. legally, to be able to earn a decent living and to see his children (although the job was in California). The desire is so strong that people want to believe.  

Observations: signs of el "desarrollo" ("development")

 Every time I come to Guatemala, there seems to be more and more commercialization, what would in many contexts be called "development". Several years ago, I began to notice the emergence of "auto-hotels" (closer to what we would call in the U.S. "motels") along the highways near Xela. Judging by their names (Paraiso -- Paradise), and the fact that many were painted pink or red, they seemed to be designed for sexual encounters. They shared a common architectural style: ground floor garages and atop each garage, a room. 

But that was in a different part of the country and along major transit routes -- the Interamerican Highway, and one of the main roads leading into Xela. This time, as the bus I was riding from Los Encuentros to Santa Cruz del Quiché, I saw a few along the road, and then as I was leaving Chinique, a very small town in the department of El Quiché, there was an auto-hotel under construction on outskirts of Chinique, on the road leading to Santa Cruz del Quiché. There is also a new gas station (well, it was there last year) on the outskirts of Chinique, pretty much across the road from the house of my friends Catarino and Sandy. There are more gas stations on the road between Chichicastenango and Santa Cruz del Quiché, and more luxury-type hotels on the outskirts of Santa Cruz del Quiché -- as one would say here, on the exit to Chichicastenango. One wonders who is going to be staying at these luxury hotels, and why so many gas stations. The tourist traffic to Chichicastenango is mostly in the form of day trips on market days. Tourists from outside Guatemala generally don't stay overnight. They hop on a shuttle in Antigua, come to Chichi for the market, and return to Antigua the same day (market days are the only days that there are shuttles from Antigua to Chichi; if you want to get there on a non-market day, you have to take a chicken bus. 

My very informal observations in Santa Cruz del Quiché are that the hotels in town are not full. Here's my evidence. The hotel I stayed at, Hotel Rey Kiche, chosen for its proximity to the bus terminal, was not full. And when I decided to treat myself to a somewhat luxurious meal at a more upscale hotel that boasts a good restaurant, I was the only patron in the restaurant (which doubles as a gift shop). I asked the server, and he told me that the hotel was empty (this was a Friday night, mind you) and therefore they didn't expect many people at the restaurant.  I can't imagine that the more luxurious places on the outskirts are getting more business. So one wonders about all the money being spent on these developments. 

And then there are the fast food restaurants, the Starbuckses and Dunkin' Donuts and the Taco Bells. Those have long been in Guatemala City and environs, and also Antigua (and possibly other tourist locations that I am not aware of) but they are creeping into the rural areas. One thing I noticed when I arrived in the Parque Central of Santa Cruz del Quiché was a huge McDonald's sign looming over the cityscape. Obviously there is a middle class in the rural areas, and more so in towns like Santa Cruz del Quiché, where there is more of a concentration of people with more money (not necessarily wealthy in any absolute sense, but wealthier than those who live in adobe houses with corrugated metal roofs and dirt floors, only reachable by walking long distances on dirt footpaths). 

Mixed signals - July 21

 Well, I'm going out of order here because I'm going to start with today, instead of last week, because it's fresh in my mind, so I'll be working backwards.

My plan for today was to visit the mother of a young man, Alex, who is a recent arrival and is one of a group of workers who have qualified for a new federal program called "deferred action", which allows non-authorized immigrants who are involved in a labor dispute to apply for a 2-year work permit and a social security number. I'd been in touch with Alex's mother, Doña C., and we'd arranged for me to visit her today. I knew the name of her aldea (village) but many of the village names are repeated -- there are Aguascalientes (literally, hot waters) in several different municipalities, and more than one Potrero Viejo. So I asked what municipality, so that I would end up in the right place..She told me that the aldea where she lived was in the municipality of Chiché. I have a reasonably good grasp of the geography of the department of El Quiché -- but obviously not good enough, as today's episode will demonstrate. The cabecera (the main town of the municipality -- municipalities are the equivalent of townships) of the municipality of Chiché is located along the highway that runs between Santa Cruz del Quiché and Joyabaj. The town of Chiché is more or less midway between Chinique (where I had been staying for the last two days) and Santa Cruz del Quiché (SCQ), so I thought I should take a bus heading towards SCQ and get off somewhere in Chiché. I asked her where I should get off the bus and she told me "el Rincón" and assured me that the driver would know.

I didn't get as early a start as I had wanted -- I was having some internet issues, and needed to straighten those out. My eSIM card had run out and the internet connection at the house where I was staying was on the fritz so I needed to use the hotspot of my host's phone before she went to work so I could re-charge my eSIM card. I'm reliant upon the eSIM card because I decided not to bring my old Guatemalan smart phone to use here but instead to use my US iPhone, which means that I need a cellular data plan that works here so I can use WhatsApp to contact people here. Most people I know use WhatsApp -- from migrants' mothers in remote villages to tuc-tuc (motortaxi) drivers),  so I can call and message folks here fairly easily.

So I got a late start on my run. And then I wanted to stop by the Centro de Salud in the town, both to say goodbye to my host, who works there (she'd been in bed when I left for my run, but had already left for work by the time I'd returned) and also to see if I could do a quick update interview with the director of the health center, whom I'd interview last summer (some discussion of this in a separate post). I then grabbed my bags and waddled down the street to the intersection where I knew the buses heading in the direction of SCQ  would stop. Since my plan was to spend the night in Santa Cruz del Quiché after the interview, I figured I wouldn't be passing through Chinique again, so I packed everything to take with me. I had a carry-on bag - not a rollerboard but a shoulder bag - stuffed with a week's work of clothing, plus another bag carrying my laptop and camera, and a small backpack with my food (I have to have my oatmeal, flax seed, my own coffee and travel coffee maker, plus dried whole milk for my coffee) and a few sundries. So I was pretty loaded down. Little did I know....

I only had to wait a little while before a camioneta (repainted school bus) rumbled by and I hopped on. I told the ayudante (assistant) that I needed to get off at El Rincón. He looked puzzled. I said it was part of Chiché. He said there was a place called El Rinconado, was that what I meant? I said I didn't know anything about El Rinconado, but that I was told to get off at El Rincón. The bus wasn't too crowded and so I sat and waited to be told where to get off. We passed the new gas station that is across the road from the house of some friends, and I noticed a new construction for an Auto Hotel -- a first for Chinique (the second smallest municipality in the department of El Quiché) -- right along the road. We entered the town of Chiché, made a few stops, and then out the other end towards Santa Cruz del Quiché. Not far along, the ayudante told me we'd arrived at El Rinconado and so I got off. Doña C. had told me there would be tuc-tucs at El Rincón and the ayudante spotted a tuc-tuc across the road and tried to flag it down but the driver took off. On the side of the road where I had gotten off, there was a new Evangelical Church with big bold letters announcing itself, and on the other side, a housing development called El Campo and a few stores. 

 I stood in the driveway and tried flagging down the empty tuc-tucs but none would stop for me. That seemed odd and wrong. I called Doña C. and explained that the ayudante on the bus seemed not to know what El Rincón was but that I'd gotten off where he told me. She asked me to describe where I was and I told her. It didn't seem to register with her so she asked me to shoot some video. I didn't know how to shoot video in the WhatsApp application, so I took several photographs and sent them. She apparently showed them to one of her sons because when I called her again, a male voice was on the phone. I explained that I was on the road between Chiché and Santa Cruz del Quiché. Between the two of them, they explained that I had gone in the wrong direction and that I had to head back "abajito" (down a little bit). In other words, go back the way I'd come, and then some. Past Chinique, and towards Zacualpa (which is to the east of Chinique), and somewhere along there was El Rincón.

A linguistic aside: one of the most frustrating linguistic quirks of Guatemalan Spanish is when people tell you that a certain location is "abajo" (down, or below) or "arriba" (above or up), because these terms seem to be very situational and not really geographical. Zacualpa is farther down the road from Chinique if you're heading east, and Chinique is farther down the road if you're heading west. 

Back to my journey. The ayudante on bus #2 seemed to know where El Rincón was. He wanted to know where I was headed from there (I guess to make sure I was getting off at the right place). I told him "La Trinidad" and he looked puzzled. I told him that the people I was visiting had told me to get off at El Rincón and that there would be tuc-tucs there and I should tell the driver to take me to "la terminal de la Trinidad" (the terminal of La Trinidad). I called Doña C. and handed the phone to him so she (or her son) could explain to him and he seemed satisfied and so we continued on. After a while he indicated to me that my stop was coming up and so I gathered my bags and readied myself to hop off. The tuc-tucs were on the other side of the road, so I waited for the bus to leave and for a safe moment to cross, and found the first one and told him I was going to la terminal de la Trinidad. He turned around and we started on our way. The road was bumpy and rocky, with deep ruts. There steep winding turns heading down, and then back up. The tuc-tuc puttered along, the driver skillfully avoiding the worst holes and bumps. 

During this time he asked me who the family was that I was planning to visit. I told him it was a Doña C, who had a son in the United States. That didn't seem to give him much information. After about 15 or 20 minutes, we came to a house where there were some people out on the porch and in front and he stopped and asked them if they knew a Doña C who had a son named Alex who was in the United States. At least I think that's what he asked since it was all in K'iche' except the names and the words "Estados Unidos". They seemed to draw a blank but we proceeded on. I decided to call Doña C and give the phone to the driver so he could ask them more specifically where to leave me. She (or her son) told him by the new Evangelical church.  So we bumped along some more and then I saw a brightly painted church off to the right and there we stopped. "I don't see the kid," the driver said. "They were supposed to send a kid to meet you." A moment later a small, slight boy who looked to be about 10 or 11 walked down the road towards us, coming around a curve. He turned out to be 14, but a lot of the children in rural areas are small for their age -- at least to U.S. eyes -- and look to be younger than they are.

We started up the gravel road, me with my three bags (carry-on, bag with my laptop and camera, and backpack) and he said, "Let me help you." I didn't know how far we had to go so I agreed. He grabbed the largest bag and put it on his head and we proceeded. We didn't go far on the gravel road but turned off soon onto a narrow, red-earth footpath, that wound up and down hills, through cornfields, across several small streams (mostly really trickles of water). I followed along as best I could, trying to watch my step so that I didn't turn or roll an ankle or hurt my knees. The last time I hiked anywhere in Guatemala, back in 2019, I ended up with a sprained ankle and was on crutches for a couple of weeks, so I was not eager to repeat the experience.

My guide, whose name I later learned was Jairo, sped ahead, nimbly moving along the path. I felt extremely guilty for having lugged all of my luggage. Had I been clear about the actual location of the aldea where the family lived, I would have understood that I could have left my bags in Chinique, because once I left the village and returned to the main road, I would have to pass through Chinique on my way to Quiché. And I could easily have hopped off the bus, gone up to my friend Naty's house, grabbed my bags, and then waited for another bus.  People in the area refer to the departmental capital as Quiché, although that is also the name of the department. It might seem a bit confusing, but if you are inside the department of Quiché and in one of the small towns or villages and someone says they are "going to Quiché", everyone understands that they mean the town of Santa Cruz del Quiché.

But here I was, forcing a child (or so he seemed) to carry a heavy bag on his head while I plodded along behind him, with a backpack and my laptop bag. On and on, or so it seemed, and I had to call ahead and ask him to stop a few times so I wouldn't lose sight of him -- although in most places the path was pretty clear, and there was only one path. In several places we came across barbed wire fencing, the wire strung between wooden poles, but in each place there either was a narrow, U-shaped passage, small enough for a slim person, or a kind of "bridge" made of four or five logs laid down at an angle, so people (and presumably not animals) could step up and over the barbed wire. 

A bit abashedly, I ventured to ask if we were close. Specifically, I asked "falta mucho?" (literally, "does it lack much?" but taken to mean, "is there a lot more left to go?"). Jairo answered that there was still a bit to go ("todavía falta un poco") but knowing what I do about how Guatemalans speak, and specifically in rural areas, "un poco" can mean anything from 200 yards to 2 kilometers, or even 20 kilometers if you are in a vehicle. 

So we marched on. I saw a house on a distant hillside. No, I thought with an inward groan. I bet that's where we're going. It seemed so far. And so it was -- far away, and our destination. 

Part of my intention in writing this, however, is not to pat myself on the back for being such an intrepid researcher that I will scale tall mountains in order to talk to people. I only had to do this one time, out and back. But Jairo, my "guide", did it twice -- he came out to meet me, returned with me, and then made the journey out and back a second time -- accompanying me back to the spot where his mother had told a tuc-tuc to meet me, and then returning home.

One of my favorite meals:
tortillas and cheese

Alex, the young man who recently arrived in New Bedford -- the older brother of Jairo -- undoubtedly had to make this trip frequently, maybe daily. And maybe even farther -- I could afford the Q30-Q40 for the tuc-tuc from the church down to the main road. But as the tuc-tuc made its way back to the road, we came across plenty of people on foot, undoubtedly walking from the main road up to their homes. Maybe they didn't have to walk along a narrow footpath. Maybe their homes were closer to the dusty, rocky, rutted road. But still they were walking a long distance under a blazing sun. A tuc-tuc ride one way is probably as much as many people earn in a day -- that is, if they have a job that pays wages and are not simply working on their own land. As I was waiting for the tuc-tuc on the way back down, three people walked wearily up to where I was standing -- a young woman, an older woman with a humped spine, hunched over nearly double, and an older man who may have been her husband (hard to tell people's ages; the man looked somewhat younger than her, but it may have been the deformity that made her seem older).They stopped, inquired what I was doing there (a natural curiosity since I imagine very few foreigners make their way up to that rural village), and where I was from. We chatted a moment, and then they continued their slow course up the hill.

Two of Alex's three younger brothers

Making trips like this -- there was another family that I visited earlier in my research, in San Andrés Sajcabajá, that lived some distance from a road, but not quite as far as this family-- causes me to reflect. These hikes to visit family members of migrants fills me with admiration for the migrants and their families, the amount of effort they put into everyday living. In this particular instance, the nearest store is a 30-minute hike away, somewhere in the vicinity of the church. People who live in cities or town or communities that are at least served by roads can take so much for granted -- you can walk out your door and find a store nearby so you can buy rice or oil or salt if you run out. Alex's mother Doña C., whom I imagine rarely makes the trip along the path down to the church and even less frequently to the main road, still less frequently to Zacualpa (the nearest actual tow), had a large store of staple supplies on a shelf in her kitchen. As she was preparing lunch for her family (she was kind enough to give me some queso fresco and freshly made tortillas with some chirmol -- a sauce made of roasted or blanched tomatoes, sometimes with chile), she asked one of her sons to get a bag of salt from the shelf. He stood on a rickety wooden chair (on an uneven dirt floor) and pulled down a black plastic shopping bag that was filled with several bags of salt, removed one, and then tried to replace the black plastic bag (it fell down again). I said that I would put it up since I was a bit taller, and once I was able to reach the shelf, I saw that there were probably a dozen packets of pasta, along with the salt and other items in black plastic bags. I surmised from this that Doña C. probably bought her staples in bulk to minimize the number of trips to the store.

On the way back, we stopped at Alex's grandmother's house to pick up my carry-on bag, and also to talk to the mother of Alex's 15-year-old cousin Kevyn, who had been in immigration custody until Alex was able to sign all the necessary paperwork and get fingerprinted so that ICE or the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) -- not sure which agency is in charge of minors who present themselves to immigration at the border -- would release Kevyn into Alex's care. Alex is 22, but he was the only relative who was willing to take responsibility for Kevyn. Apparently there is an uncle in New Bedford, but the uncle didn't want to sign for Kevyn, so it was left to Alex. 

Just one other personal note: not only did I schlep along all my bags, I also did not wear the appropriate footwear since I did not know that I was going to be hiking on a narrow and rocky dirt path. I wore my "good" sandals - which are actually flat, and quite comfortable (no blisters, I'm glad to say). I did actually bring hiking sneakers and sturdier sandals to Guatemala but I left a lot of stuff in a large suitcase in Santa Cruz del Quiché in the home of the mother of some friends, and traveled to smaller towns in the department with my smaller shoulder bag stuffed with a week's work of clothing. I took running shoes and my good sandals (in case I had to look nice). And since I was wearing my running shoes every day for running, and I wanted to look nice to meet families, I wore my sandals for this visit. They did hold up pretty well, I had to say. 

Time after time

 Although it's only been a week, it feels like longer, as though time has stretched itself out and now I'm trying to recall what happened when. I left Antigua last Monday, having given myself a full day and a half after the conference ended. Getting to Santa Cruz del Quiché, which was going to be my starting point -- although I didn't have any "fieldwork" planned, since it is not one of the main sources of migrants to New Bedford -- is not so simple from Antigua. Antigua is a tourist town (as well as a place where regular people live), and there isn't any direct bus from Antigua to Santa Cruz del Quiché.  Unless you are traveling between the capital, Guatemala City, and certain other major cities, there aren't a lot of direct inter-city bus routes. Antigua is not on one of the two main highways, and in order to get from Antigua to Santa Cruz del Quiché, I would have to take a "chicken bus" (a converted old-fashioned yellow school bus) to the main highway, and then stand on the highway and wait for a bus going to Quiché, or I could take a chicken bus  to the "terminal" in Chimaltenango (in most places, the "terminal" is not a building but an open lot where the buses park and wait for passengers) and wait for a bus going from Guatemala City to Joyabaj to pass through. Although Santa Cruz del Quiché is the capital city of the department, it is not the final destination for the buses leaving from Guatemala City. Instead, buses travel through Santa Cruz del Quiché (SCQ) to finish up in Joyabaj, a much smaller town. And when I say "converted" school bus, don't think that they have been spruced up on the inside. The buses have just been painted bright colors, adorned with religious sayings ("Dios es mi guía" - God is my guide), and often a sound system has been rigged up so the driver and assistant can blast music. But they are otherwise just plain old yellow school buses.

There are shuttles from Antigua -- nicer passenger vans that charge higher prices -- usually only payable in dollars -- and that don't overcrowd but instead only take the legal number of passengers. But those only go to other tourist locations and to the airport. There is one tourist location in the department of el Quiché -- the city of Chichicastenango. But the shuttle only goes there on market days, when the main plaza is crowded with sales of art and artisanry, and Monday isn't a market day. But in talking to one of the shuttle companies, as I was wandering around on Sunday (in between pedicure and massage), I realized that the shuttles that were heading to Lake Atitlán would have to pass a place called Los Encuentros -- a highway crossing where there is a bus terminal (i.e. a place where a lot of buses gather) and where one can catch the buses that go into the department of El Quiché. So I asked if I took a seat on a bus going to one of the towns on the lake, could the driver drop me off at Los Encuentros so I could catch a bus to Santa Cruz del Quiché? The young woman said yes, and so I intended to come back later. I didn't, but Monday morning found another shuttle company down the block from my AirBnb, got a ticket on a 12:30 bus, and then set off to view a collection of photographs of Santa Eulalia, a town where I'd done research, at the Mesoamerican Research Center (CIRMA). And then I scooted over to the south end of town to get a sandwich at a bakery that made sourdough bread (a bit of an extravagance in terms of walking halfway across town for a sandwich, but I didn't want to bother cooking or eating out). But when I got back to the AirBnb at 11 so I could finish packing and eat my sandwich, a young woman from the travel agency came by to tell me that there was no seat on the 12:30 shuttle, but they would put me on a shuttle leaving at 2. 

There wasn't really anything much I could do with the extra 90 minutes -- not enough time to go anywhere. But it was closer to three when the shuttle finally came -- they pick everyone up at their lodging, and they start at the southern end of town and work their way up, and I was in the northern part of town, so I was the next to last pickup. The ride was uneventful and fortunately when they let me off at Los Encuentros, there was a bus leaving for Quiché, so I lost very little time. I looked longingly at the women grilling fresh corn alongside the road, but decided against buying some. As we waited a few minutes for the bus to fill, a small parade of vendors and hawkers entered the bus, including a young woman bearing some ears of corn. This happens on all non-tourist buses in Guatemala at bus terminals. Someone gets on to beg for money. Someone gets on with a spiel about some kind of miracle cure for 15 diseases or a special vitamin that prevents hair loss and helps treat indigestion. A woman gets on with a straw basket full of chuchitos (small tamale-like snacks -- cornmeal dough stuffed with some kind of meat, usually chicken, wrapped in a corn husk and steamed; they are firmer and less liquid-y than Guatemalan tamales). A child gets on selling candy or roasted nuts. Sometimes the vendors just stand at the front of the bus but usually they walk down the aisle and back up again. Sometimes one stays on as the bus pulls out and then gets off the next time the bus stops. Another idiosyncrasy of Guatemalan buses is that with the exception of the terminals and a few other pre-determined stops in towns, the buses stop wherever someone flags them down or wherever a passenger asks to get off. So you might have a group of people standing on the shoulder flagging the bus down, and then another group of people 100 yards up the road doing the same thing. 

Drivers are fond of talking on their phones while they drive, including on steep and curving 2-lane mountain roads with only the vaguest of guardrails. They are fond of passing other slower vehicles, including on the afore-mentioned 2-lane road steep and curving roads. They are not fond of slowing down for speed bumps, of which there are 60 between Los Encuentros and the next major town, Chichicastenango.

The road between Los Encuentros and Santa Cruz del Quiché (SCQ) is one I've traversed dozens of times, but I'm always interested to see what's new alongside the road. Not so much between Los Encuentros and Chichi -- a few new roadside restaurants -- but definitely quite a bit between Chichi and SCQ. There were some new fancy gas stations complete with slightly upscale stores, and a couple of hotel/motel/resort type places on the outskirts of SCQ. SCQ has never been much of a tourist destination but it seems that some developers think that it should be.

On the way up, I'd been texting the mother of two friends in the immigrant worker community -- brothers who have been active with Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores and have really emerged as leaders in the Pescando Justicia (Fishing for Justice) campaign. Once they heard that I was going to pass through SCQ they wanted me to stop and see their mother, and when I told them I was probably going to stay at the Hotel Rey Kiche, which is close to the bus station, the older of the brothers, A, drew me a little map and showed me that his mother's house was half a block from the hotel. So I planned to drop off my bags and then go to see her. I had barely gotten to the hotel when she met me at the doorstep, and was ready to carry me off, except I told her I had to leave my suitcases (I had one really large one). She then marched me down the street and I was quickly enfolded into the family circle. A daughter was visiting from New Bedford with her husband and three children. I hadn't known her, but it didn't surprise me that there were other migrant relatives in this family. The daughter, S, apparently had been in the U.S. longer and had received permanent resident status, otherwise she wouldn't have been visiting. A migrant lacking permanent residency or citizenship who traveled to their home country would only be able to re-enter the US by crossing the border without inspection -- that is, as a mojado (wet one). 

Doña F.  introduced me to everyone (I didn't get all the names right away) -- daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren, and showed me around the house a little, crediting the two sons in the U.S. with having provided the funds to improve and furnish ("This is what they have done," she told me). She then sat me down and served dinner. The son I know best, A, had told her I was a vegetarian (I'm not strictly one but it's easiest to say that I am) and so she and her daughters had prepared me some cooked vegetables and a vegetable soup. That, together with tortillas and fresh chiles, was plenty. 

Into the highlands - returning to mi querido Quiché

 I've now been in the altiplano (highlands) for nearly a week, and it's a good time to reflect back on how I got here, specifically here to the department of El Quiché.  My research in Guatemala has taken many twists and turns. If you've followed this blog since 2011, then you know much of this already and can skip the next couple of paragraphs, but it's useful for me to reorient myself, as well as any new readers. 

In 2011, I lived in the department of El Quiché because this was where the migrants who lived in New Bedford came from. My research ended up not really focusing on migration but instead on community radio. That expanded into a broader interrogation of the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state, and while I followed a lot of different indigenous rights struggles -- the resistance to mining in San Marcos and other areas -- I ended up focusing on the town of Santa Eulalia in Huehuetenango, a Q'anjob'al community where there was (and still is) a community radio station that was criminalized and shut down for a while by the town's Mayor, and where in 2014 two indigenous leaders (the term of art here is "human rights defenders" or defensores de los derechos humanos, abbreviated as DDHH), Rigoberto Juárez and Domingo Baltazar, were arrested on bogus charges. Altogether 9 Q'anjob'al human rights defenders from Santa Eulalia and Santa Cruz Barillas -- another majority Q'anjob'al town -- were unjustly imprisoned, and many other activists were facing a variety of criminal charges. That occupied me for several years, although most of the charges were eventually found to be baseless and in 2016 Rigo and Mingo, along with some of the others, were released from the Preventivo (the pre-trial detention center in Guatemala City's Zona 18).

In 2019 I shifted focus a bit and started a project on memory sites about the armed internal conflict (i.e. the Guatemalan genocide or the civil war -- el conflicto armado interno is how most of the people with whom I associate refer to it). I'd co-edited two books about public history and controversial memory sites, and had created a class on controversial monuments and memorials, so it seemed logical. The history of the armed conflict is still very much unsettled. When former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in an historic trial in 2013, the right wing took to the streets under the slogan "No hubo genocidio" (there was no genocide), despite the fact that 250,000 or more people were killed, over 80% of them indigenous and 93% of the deaths attributed to the military or the "armed civilian patrols" (often indigenous men and boys who were forced  -- threatened with death -- to patrol and inform upon their neighbors and relatives who might be suspected of siding with the guerrillas). 

And then ... the pandemic put a stop to my travels to Guatemala for a few years. However, all this time, I'd never stopped working with the immigrant community in New Bedford, Massachusetts - a few miles from the university where I teach. In 2009, I helped found an immigrant workers' center, the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores (CCT), and since that time have regularly volunteered with the organization (usually during the academic year I would put in a full day at CCT's offices every week, and made myself available by phone and email for other consultations). One of the areas that I drifted into was writing grants for the organization. I've written grants for other organizations (and occasionally for myself) for years, so it was a skill that I was glad to contribute to the organization. I also do a lot of translation when workers need to meet with non-Spanish-speaking company owners and supervisors, or the police, or the Mayor, or ... well, you get the idea. Additionally, in 2014 I helped found an industry-wide campaign called Pescando Justicia (fishing for justice), which focused on the seafood and fish processing industry -- in economic terms, the largest industry in New Bedford and the major employer of Central American, and specifically Guatemalan Mayan, workers.

When the pandemic started in 2020 (that is, when it hit the US), my university had just gone remote -- we had left on March 5 for spring break and didn't go back to in-person classes for a year and a half. I didn't travel back to Southeastern Massachusetts until maybe May or June, as at one point, because of the high rate of infection in New York, the state of Rhode Island wasn't letting people with NY license plates travel through the state. But I kept in touch with CCT via phone and email, and helped secure funds - once they became available - for food relief and other forms of cash assistance. Once it was okay to travel, I started going to New Bedford every week and helping set up the food and cash assistance program -- arranging with United Way for food boxes, and representing CCT in a coalition called the Massachusetts Immigrant Collaborative (originally the Boston Immigrant COVID Collaborative -- started by three Boston-based immigrant-serving non-profits, but they eventually invited a handful of organizations outside Boston to join, including CCT). While MIC (now MiCollaborativa -- my collaborative) eventually started offering translation services for what were initially weekly Zoom meetings, I figured representing CCT was one way I could help out, since the Executive Director (who was at that time the only paid staff person at the organization) was busy dealing with the situation on the ground (and eventually once in-person schooling started up again, he had to pick up some of his kids from school in the afternoon, often at the time the meetings were held). 

Once the vaccine became available, I also helped lobby for vaccine equity (I do need to write about all this, I can see) -- having vaccine locations that were accessible to Central American immigrants, most of whom did not have cars (southeastern MA is very poorly served by public transit) and making I remember the first vaccine clinic that was set up along the waterfront in the North End of New Bedford I also obtained funds for a vaccine program, that we launched because it was clear that people in the immigrant community often felt uncomfortable going to other locations to get the vaccine

After a while, it occurred to me that the impact of the pandemic on the immigrant community was something that I should research -- although I have to say that I spent more time just working with the community and supporting the organization's work than doing anything that resembled formal research (I guess I could call all of that "participant observation" but I mostly didn't take notes so I don't have a clear record). I did help develop and conduct a survey that was administered by all of the organizations that were part of MIC, about the impact of the pandemic in terms of jobs, food security, schooling, the vaccine, and so forth -- and worked to ensure that CCT collected around 100 surveys -- but this was back in 2021, and it's painful to admit that we haven't fully analyzed or published the results. 

Finally, in the summer of 2022, I was able to travel again to Guatemala, and I devoted most of my trip to looking at the impact of the pandemic on the three municipalities of interest, and also interviewing families of pandemic-era migrants. You can look back at last year's blog posts if you haven't read them previously. I also participated in a human rights delegation for a week, so that broke up the fieldwork (I did some before, and some after, the human rights delegation's activities). 

Then back to the U.S. in August, and back to my routine of working with CCT. However, people were still arriving from Guatemala. In late January of this year, we began to work on a new program called Deferred Action, which allows immigrants without work authorization who are involved in a labor dispute to apply for work authorization and a Social Security number. The work authorization is only valid for 2 years and there is no clear indication of whether it will be renewable. But CCT had been organizing in a couple of workplaces where the workers had filed complaints with a governmental agency, and so we decided to start helping people fill out the fairly lengthy and cumbersome applications for deferred action. Supposedly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had agreed that they would not take action against workers who were participating in the program even if they had outstanding deportation orders - which is the case for about 20% or more of the people we would be dealing with (I haven't counted up the numbers but that's my best estimate based on the reviewing some of the spreadsheets we created as we started to help people). 

The entire process of helping workers apply for deferred action is worth its own blog post or posts. When we started with the workers at Bob's Tires - the ones who were dismissed in 2021 for participating in a brief work stoppage to try and engage the owner in discussing a case of sexual assault -- we worked with them one by one, and took down all the necessary information as a lot of them do not read and write easily, or at all. Often they did not have some of the information at hand, such as their wives' birthdays, or the date of their marriage. It struck me that in the rural areas where most of them came from, those dates were not especially important, or perhaps they did not focus so much on the Gregorian calendar but instead their lives were governed by other notions of time -- when it was time to plant or harvest, when the rains came and stopped. This is not to say that no one in rural Guatemala celebrates birthdays, but undoubtedly some of these men had been in the U.S. for many years and their lives did not lend themselves to, or leave much room for, celebration. So I sat with worker after worker who called his wife in Guatemala and asked for her birthday and/or the date and location of their marriage. I teased them afterwards and told them to put the date in their calendar and make sure to send flowers, and we laughed together.  We brought in people to take finger prints so that the men could request a CORI report (Criminal Offender Record Information -- a background of any criminal charges), which was necessary before proceeding.

Afterwards, we began with a much larger group of workers from a seafood company where workers had been dismissed, also for organizing -- Eastern Seafoods (I'll have to write about that in more detail at some point). So we organized legal clinics -- bringing in volunteer lawyers, law students, and other volunteers so that we could process the paperwork for around 40 people at a time. We held five of them, and I participated in 4, I think. As we took down everyone's information, which included the date of their arrival in the U.S., I realized that there were a lot of recent arrivals -- people who had come in 2021 or 2022. That encouraged me to pick up the threads of the somewhat-back-burnered project I'd worked on last summer, of looking at the impact of migration  from both the perspective of the migrants themselves and the perspective of their families. 

So, somewhat hurriedly, I started compiling a list of people who had arrived since 2020 and was able to contact a few of them -- not all, unfortunately -- to see if I could interview their relatives in Guatemala. I asked those whom I was able to contact and who agreed to make sure they asked their relatives if it was okay for me to contact them, and to provide the contact information, so they (the Guatemala-based relatives) would be likely to answer my calls.

In several cases, I contacted the relatives before leaving the U.S. Nearly everyone in Guatemala uses WhatsApp, so it was easy for me to send text messages -- although I came to realize that it might be better to call since some of the relatives did not read or write. That is now something that I ask migrants. "Does your XXXX speak Spanish? Does he or she read and write?" 

Armed with this handful of contacts, I set out to pack my bags. 

Heading into the field - but first, the bureaucracy

 The project I am most avidly pursuing is the one I wrote about last year -- the impact of the pandemic on the immigrant community in New Bedford and their communities of origin (the three towns from which most of the Guatemalan Mayan immigrants come-- Zacualpa, Chinique and San Andrés Sajcabajá), and migration during the pandemic (from the perspective of both the migrants and the family members they left behind). 

During the last several months most of my work in the immigrant community has been focused on helping out with a new program called Deferred Action. This program grants immigrants who are involved in a labor dispute the opportunity to apply for work authorization (only good for two years) and a social security number (good for all eternity) if they meet certain conditions (for one thing, the Department of Labor has to weigh in on the labor dispute. CCT, the organization I work with in New Bedford, was one of the first organizations to take on this new opportunity, and we started out helping workers from two companies where we have supported organizing efforts for several years to apply. I'll write about the deferred action program and our work separately, but here will only note that the process has been very time consuming. Each applicant has to fill out a lot of forms and present a lot of evidence, and we had to guide people through the process. So I was focused on that and not on preparing for my then-upcoming trip.

At the same time the university created a new procedure for approving international travel, which I needed to follow if I were to be able to use university funds. Last year I started on the process too late (I didn't actually know what it was) and so I was denied permission to use university funds and paid for the entire trip out of pocket. This year, there was a new procedure, especially for countries that the State Department categorizes as Tier 3 -- dangerous, travel not recommended. One needs to request an exemption to travel to a Tier 3 country. So I gave myself plenty of time - or so I thought -- and provided the information that was requested. However, there was one stumbling block -- the university wanted permission from community leaders to conduct research. Guatemala was in the middle of an election cycle, and the thought of trying to reach out to the town mayors seemed like a futile endeavor. First of all, I haven't had any contact with them, and I also thought that they would not respond in a timely matter because of the elections. But I did have contact with the indigenous authorities in all three towns - although I hadn't kept contact information for the indigenous authorities in Zacualpa. I tried to find out if there was some specific level of "authority" that the university wanted me to consult, but they were pretty vague. They wanted written consent -- but I explained that the indigenous authorities were not all fully literate and that a formal letter might be hard to obtain (and it would have been unless I wrote the letter myself and asked people to sign off on it). But I convinced the university that copies of WhatsApp messages should be sufficient. They also wanted me to obtain advance consent from immigrants based in New Bedford to interview their families. I explained that I wasn't going to be able to get consent from everyone in time to give the travel registry 21 days advance notice but that i would get as much as possible, So again, I made screenshots of WhatsApp messages, and was able to get one immigrant to sign a letter, and submitted all of that.

The Institutional Review Board also wanted me to update my application, and the consent form that I would use, and I had to get re-certified with the required Human Subjects training, so all of that took a fair amount of time. 

I had to book my travel since I needed to be in Guatemala for the GSN conference, and I needed to submit a travel authorization form to use university funds. But I was hesitant to submit the travel authorization until I'd heard back from the Provost about whether they would grant my exemption. I did attempt to fill out the travel authorization in late June -- but since our fiscal year ends June 30, all the financial reporting forms were closed down for the last two weeks of June, and wouldn't open again until July 1. I didn't get the approval from the Provost's office until June 30 -- although I had submitted my original request on May 10. So it was a nail biter. I was scheduled to leave on July 4. July 1 was Saturday. I figured no one was going to look at my travel authorization or approve it on the weekend so I submitted it on the night of July 2. And of course it was sent back for revisions on July 3. I revised and resubmitted. More revisions requested (there are things that are not clearly outlined on the form and so I hadn't done them because they weren't spelled out as necessary). Finally I submitted the revised version after COB on July 3. I was worried if I didn't get approval of the travel authorization before I left, that i wouldn't be able to use university funds -- again. I was having trouble adding certain attachments to the online form -- and it seems I will have to submit a paper authorization (it turns out that I can submit the authorization late). 

But all of this meant less time for doing the actual preparation for field work -- identifying recent migrants, explaining my project, securing their consent to contact their relatives in Guatemala, and having them prepare their relatives for my contact (people in Guatemala don't answer phone calls or messages from unknown numbers, so I needed people to contact their relatives and explain that someone named Lisa from the U.S. was going to be in Guatemala and was going to contact them). 

I wasn't able to line up as many people to interview as I had hoped -- but in the next installment I'll talk about the interviews that I have been able to complete so far, and more to come (I hope).