Thursday, November 17, 2011

Stress and Snails

I have been incredibly stressed these past few months for a variety of the usual reasons--conflict at work, worries about family, aging, blah, blah, blah. . .


I had a routine stress test with my cardiologist last August, and she said, looking at the pictures of my heart at work, that she wouldn't have known from the evidence that I had suffered a heart attack.  Good news, she said, but added that I had to learn how to manage stress better--though I'd said little about that to her.  I guess she reads minds as well as hearts.


So I've been doing a few things to try to reduce stress.  Conveniently, reconstructive knee surgery in late July means I've been going to rehab twice a week, where the PTs work me over pretty well--the exercise has felt good.  And I try to get in for a massage session once a week.  My wife tells me that recent reports show that massage lowers blood pressure, and that, combined with increased exercise and quitting smoking (umm, well until last week), must explain the lowest blood pressure reading I've had in a long time at my recent doctor's visit, 118/60 (by the way, my family doctor, John Duhn, is the greatest; he listens well, explains well, and is fellow fan of universal, single payer healthcare).


Another thing I've started just recently is to sit down with a book of poetry while I eat breakfast.  I read this one a couple of days ago, in a collection that might make the more sophisticated poetry readers cringe, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times.  It's called "For a Five-Year-Old," by Fleur Adock, a New Zealander who ended up in England.  Turns out she was born the same year as my father, 1934.  Knowing that makes me read it as both the child and the parent.
A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor, we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil. 
I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.
I had those snail moments, too, as a child: We are not the kind that hits others.  We are people for whom silliness is a virtue.  We are not to cheat at games, or throw tantrums when we lose.  We believe music to be beautiful and essential, along with wandering through forests, climbing mountains, and sleeping by rivers.  We absolutely do not, whether angry or not, call our best friend, a Japanese-American, a nip.


As a parent and grandparent, and watching my daughter raise two of her own, I am fully aware of the baggage we bring to raising children, and the detritus of daily life that swirls around our answers to a child's question, worry, or upset.  Lord knows I have had, and have, my inconsistencies--the little rages hovering around my moments of gentleness--and that I have betrayed and displayed my harsh edge, yet "that is how things are."  Or as Bruce Cockburn sings, "that's the burden of the angel-beast."


I treasure those childhood lessons, and that gives me hope that some of that treasure has been passed on despite myself.





Saturday, November 12, 2011

WWJD? Bully a gay kid?

The anti-bullying law now under consideration in the Michigan statehouse includes language that "prohibits the law from being used to take action against people for a statement based on a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction."  Apparently, for some Michigan Republicans, God doesn't seem to mind bullies who pick on homosexuals.


Tea Party activist Rich Swier doesn't even think physical and emotional abuse of homosexual youth is bullying.  "It is peer pressure and is healthy."

It's all so bizarre.  Think about it.  If religious belief or moral conviction transform an abusive act into acceptable behavior, do agnostic and atheist kids get to shove fervent evangelical heads into toilets?  Does it free Green activists to shout belittling jibes at littering louses?  Do Jehovah Witnesses, when no one's looking, get to smash the sack lunches of good Christians who dutifully say the Pledge of Allegiance?


And as for Swier, who apparently also has it in for Muslims, what twisted prism is he looking through that transforms a sick bully into picture of health?


Thankfully, the Republican Speaker of the House opposes this clause, and hopefully will get it stricken from the text.



[Source: Buckfire and Buckfire.com]

Friday, September 9, 2011

A modest proposal for reducing unemployment


Obama's fiscal infusion approach to reducing unemployment is simply too little, too late.  I have a better idea.  Reduce unemployment by reducing the number of job seekers--present and future--through what we can call "enhanced natural attrition."  There are already some proposals out there that can we can use to accomplish this.





1) Enhanced natural attrition through liberating the environment for entrepreneurs.  Governor Rick Perry is a big advocate of this, arguing that onerous federal environmental regulations raise the cost of production to such a point that employers can't increase production and hire more workers.  He's right, but what we also get from ending those oppressive protections of the environment is the side benefit of increased externalities--companies pass on the cost of production (the cost of say, air or water pollution) to the public space, where workers live.  Studies show that typically it's the poor and marginalized workers who end up living in the more toxic spaces, so we can enhance the natural attrition of this population by increasing the toxicity of places where they live.  With shorter life spans and greater infant mortality rates, we reduce the number of present and future job seekers, with the added benefit of reducing applicants for this or that social and welfare service.  And our brave, risk-taking entreprenuers, with lower costs of production, will make more money so they can once again own that second, third, or fourth home, thus boosting the real estate and home construction sectors.  Just one of many possible multiplier effects!


2) Enhanced natural attrition through more efficient healthcare delivery.  Some of you liberal naysayers out there will likely point out that increased toxicity will lead to greater public healthcare costs.  I'm a step ahead of you.  It won't if we, as Michelle Bachman so wisely advocates, dump Obamacare.  We need to liberate health care insurance companies, drug companies, and all for-profit entrepreneurs in healthcare provision from onerous rules that make them offer services to populations that can't afford them.  We can enhance the natural attrition of this population of job-seekers that can't take care of themselves, thereby reducing the number of job-seekers, and those who probably can't even work anyway.  What a plus!




3) Enhanced natural attrition through improving national security.  The neocons, like those at The Project for a New American Century, had it right.  We are a benevolent hegemon, and need to stop apologizing for unilateral intervention where needed to protect the picket lines of empire, and nip evil regimes in the bud before they flower into real threats.  We've done Afghanistan and Iraq; it's time for Iran (and damn, we missed our chance in Libya, though Syria's still a possibility).  We can enhance the natural attrition of working class folks who happen to be in the armed forces through expanding the scope of armed action in the Near East.  What liberals might sneeringly dismiss as a quagmire is really a wonderful opportunity to reduce the number of job-seekers (and future ones they might produce), and, get this, with all the privatization of security-related operations, we simultaneously create more jobs.  It's perfect!


Write your Congressperson today!  Let's abandon the fantasy of increasing the number of jobs available and instead demand enhanced natural attrition of job-seekers!

Friday, August 12, 2011

Perry's Pre-Presidental Prayer Rally


Picture from NPR

Texas Governor Rick Perry's decision to attend "The Response," a prayer rally held yesterday at Reliant Stadium in Houston, has provoked another round of debate over the role of Christian evangelicals in politics. Perry and rally organizers maintain the event's "entirely religious."
I know there are people, critics, that say this is just some political event," Perry said. "Well it's not that. This event is not about supporting some organization...It's going to be very simple...It's just a time to call out to [God] and that's it and lift Jesus’ name up on high."
Event organizers on the call stressed that the event is designed to be entirely religious. They said attendees will be encouraged not to wear political shirts or bring political signs to the event.
"This is not an issue of who's going to be our president...It absolutely has nothing to do with that at all. it's about making Jesus king...," said Jim Garlow, a California Pastor.
But the absence of campaign material or speech hardly renders the rally apolitical. Governor Perry is using his political position and stature to encourage attendance to a large public event, in the context of his possible run for the GOP presidential nomination. Also, the full title of the rally has obvious if vague political ramifications--"A call to prayer for a nation in crisis--as does Perry's video invitation to attend the rally:
. . .As an elected leader, I'm all too aware of government's limitations when it comes to fixin' things that are spiritual in nature. That's where prayer comes in, and we need it more than ever. With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis, people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help. . .
To assert that government cannot do anything about certain economic, social, and moral problems is a political claim, as is the diagnosis of those problems--that their source is spiritual. Moreover, as NPR reports, the homophobic American Family Association (AFA) is paying for the event, and is bringing in some evangelical heavyweights with big political chops--James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family), Richard Land (principal lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention), and Tony Perkins (president of the Family Research Council). The AFA has also invited a small cast of luminaries of the fringe Christian right:
--John Hagee, a San Antonio evangelist whose endorsement was rejected by John McCain in 2008 because of Hagee's anti-Catholic statements.
--Mike Bickle, a founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., who has called Oprah Winfrey a "pastor of the harlot of Babylon.
--Alice Patterson, founder of Justice at the Gate, in San Antonio, who has written that there is a "demonic structure behind the Democratic Party."
--And then there's John Benefiel, head of the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, who once said this about the Statue of Liberty: "You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor.
So arguing that the event is all religion and zero politics is, at best, disingenuous, and predictably, critics of the religious right are all over this--the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS), Right Wing Watch, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, or watch Stephen Colbert's send-up here.
Colbert wryly notes that the prayer rally "doesn't cross the line between church and state; it erases it," echoing the ACLU's worry that taxpayer money might be contributing to the event and, or the AUSCS's argument that Governor Perry is using his office to promote a particular religion. Really, though, the criticism is about the policies and people Perry associates with by sponsoring the rally, such as the Right Wing Watch's reference to prayer rally speakers as Perry's "extremist allies. . .who are dedicated to bringing far-right religious views, including degrading views of gays and lesbians and non-Christians, into American politics."
Is this prayer rally really a big deal? I doubt the ACLU's Freedom of Information request for rally records will reveal use of taxpayer funds, and it really amounts to a kind of nuisance suit. Whether Perry is throwing his governorship behind a particular religion is a stronger point. He did make his invitation as "an elected leader," and did invite all other 49 state governors. And if you check out what The Response states as its core beliefs, this event promotes a standard orthodox evangelical Christian position. That is, it's sectarian.
But does Perry's sponsorship of and participation in the prayer rally mean that he put the weight of the government of Texas behind a particular religion? Did he violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment, or the "Freedom of Worship" section of the Texas Bill of Rights?
Supreme Court "incorporation" decisions since the 1947 Emerson v Board of Education case have made state and local governments subject to First Amendment religion clauses, though disagreement remains over whether the Establishment clause means no government involvement with religion (an ironclad wall between church and state), or whether it means government can be involved in some way as long as it does not promote a particular religion (a porous wall). In practice, clearly the latter interpretation has held sway, with government activities beginning with prayers and monies going to Congressional and military chaplains. Perry didn't do all that much different than from our presidents have done since Eisenhower--preside over an annual prayer breakfast, except, granted, The Response was hardly ecumenical in comparison.
Texas language is a little more explicit:

No human authority ought, in an case whatever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.
So the question goes back to whether Perry's action constituted a Texas government preference for a particular "religious society or mode of worship." I'm no constitutional expert, and am even less familiar with Texas constitutional issues, but it seems to me that Perry violated the spirit of law, but not the letter. He sponsored and participated in The Response as an individual, not as the state of Texas. Still, he didn't seem to make an effort to make it clear he was going as an individual, and not as a governor with presidential ambitions. And inviting all other governors to attend a public event associated with religious leaders that have an obvious political agenda makes his "what's-the-big-deal" position rather dubious. Perry's either obtuse, or just simply dishonest (thank goodness obtuseness and dishonesty aren't unconstitutional, or a lot of us would be in trouble).
Still, I think the critics were too strident. They only strengthen the seeming new norm of vindictive politics--we win the argument by either shouting louder, or telling opponents to shut up, that they do not get to assemble, speak, or practice their religion if it contradicts our policy positions. The critics also confirm what some Christian fundamentalists have complained about--that they are victims of marginalization.
So, critics should have simply reported on Perry's pre-presidenital-bid prayer gig, and not said 'you can't do that.' The reporting's enough. He has clearly shown his cards: he's siding with the militantly anti-gay crowd; he doesn't get the pluralism of the US religious landscape, evidently thinking our crisis is the result of not enough Americans sharing his particular fundamentalist faith; and he apparently thinks public piety will make up for economic and social policies that have left so many lives in disarray.
Shamelessly paraphrasing Proverbs 29: 18, his campaign will perish not for a lack of a vision, but because of it.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Gentrification, Grifters, and Graffiti


Me with wife, Margo, and cat, Raymundo, in our first Peace Corps site, San Carlos Alzatate, Guatemala, 1985
When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala some twenty-five years ago (1984-1988), Sexta Avenida in Guatemala City's Zona 1 was my main route on foot to anything I needed or wanted to do in the capital. I'd usually stay at the Chalet Suizo on 14th street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, kitty-corner from the Parque Concordia, and right across the street from another one of Ubico’s medievalist fantasies, the Palacio de la Policia Nacional, a castle of crenellated walls, bastions, and bartizans, apparently awaiting the onslaught of commie catapults. I remember the twelve blocks on Sexta Avenida from 18th Street to the Parque Central as a river of bumper-to-bumper traffic and sidewalks streaming with pedestrians picking their way through vendors selling newspapers, used textbooks, trinkets, porn rags, candy, and fruit slices. And there was that heady mix of exhaust, piña and piss, with small splashes of women's perfume and men's cologne.

The picture on the left was taken in 1987, early in the morning before the normal traffic arrived. You can see the cigarette/candy vendor rolling his wares to wherever he’s going to open up shop. The Lux was the place to go for second-run movies—and (I shake my head at the memory), a place where you could still smoke inside the theater while watching the movie. Up the street was the then swankier Capitol theaters mall. The other way, The Pan American for breakfast, when flush with cash and willing to deal with the dour servers who resented scruffy Peace Corps volunteers asking for umpteen coffee refills. For dinner, Picadilly’s or maybe the Fu Lu Sho (I felt a pang of kinship with Francisco Goldman’s character, Roger Graetz, from Long Night of White Chickens, who also hung out in those places in the 1980s). There might be Kandy’s or Pops afterward for ice cream. But usually I was on this road to get to the Peace Corps office several blocks beyond the National Palace, or hit my favorite librerías and ferreterías in the area for office supplies and hardware. And Café León on 8th Avenue was mandatory, one of the few places downtown back then to find export-quality coffee.

La Sexta wasn’t much different during my research stints in 1992 and 1994, but now, as you can see in the picture on the right, it has been transformed. As I reported last year (Goats in Guate), the city decided to turn the avenue into a pedestrian mall with a bike lane and route for a rapid transit bus (the bus service was not yet running as of early July). The Lux now features soft porn flicks, and the Cine Capitol (below left) is now a megapaca—basically a thrift store selling used clothing imported from the US and elsewhere. There are pacas all along the way, odd notes in an urban renovation designed to make an area more upscale (the missing letter in Capitol hits that note again). If you want to catch movies worth watching now in Guate, you have to head out to zone 10. The restaurants and ice cream shops of my past are still there for the most part, except for the German place where I used to get my periodic dose of potato pancakes; it burned down years ago. But now there are a lot more US fast food joints and spendy coffee shops and restaurants. Café León held on too, but now is a pleasant Starbucky’s kind of café instead of a no-frills store.

The city cleared the streets of vendors, shunting them up in a long row of stalls on the already crowded and competitive 18th Street—I don’t know what happened to those who couldn’t afford the rents. Gentrification has its price—and as is the case everywhere it seems, it’s the poor that pay a chunk of it (you can find a brief story about La Sexta and its renovation here).
There are still many office supply and bookstores on adjacent streets, with dusty, faded window displays that may not have been changed since Ubico’s time, though sadly, far fewer used bookstores where I made some great finds in the 1990s. My favorite hardware store, El Globo, is still there. During my Peace Corps days, I’d walk in, eye all the sultry steel and glittering aluminum hanging from floor to ceiling in this huge room, and feel for a moment that I really was handy with a spade, a master of the hammer, a wonder with the machete--I might just need that wood plane, or a roll of barbed wire. For something, I was sure. Then I’d start the four-step process of getting what I really came for, like a little box of nails, and receive another of my many lessons in Guatemala on how to get over my often unreasonable impatience (Worker 1: helped me locate product, if I could remember the Spanish term; Worker 2: took my order at the counter; Worker 3: took my money and carefully, slowly made out the receipt; Worker 4: upon proof of purchase, handed me the product after carefully and slowly wrapping it in brown paper).
Curiously, during my visits to Guate these past three summers, I've felt a vague urge to enter a ferretería and shop for I don't know what. It wasn't nostalgia. It was like what I imagine a phantom limb may feel like, an itch in empty space that needs scratching. I'd joke with my research assistant, Heidi, slowing down in front of a hardware shop and wondering if we needed a blowtorch or a pickaxe, and I guess that was my way of scratching the itch of memory. And there were lots of other itches, and though I tried ot keep it in check, Heidi had to live with quite a bit of reminiscing, poor woman.

For a few weeks, I worked at the Guatemalan Supreme Court’s Archivo de Tribunales where there was a depository of military tribunal records. That meant dropping off Heidi at the Archivo General near the Parque Central, and walking another mile (see map to the right). I’d cut through the Parque, and take La Sexta up to 14th street, cut left, passing below the battlements of the Palacio de la Policía Nacional (below) and, depending on my mood, hook a right on either 7th or 8th Avenues.

One day right by the Palacio, a 30-something man in a suit greeted me and wondered how I was finding Guatemala. We ended up talking about my Peace Corps past and present research, and his days in Ohio and his current work as a school teacher.
Four blocks later, at the 18 Calle, I realized what this was about. I stopped and asked him if he wanted money. He said no and asked me to sit with him on a bench. He had something important to say to me. I sighed and we sat, and while I kicked myself I heard about his sick father, his troubles with the Education Ministry, his empty pockets. I slipped him what I had in my pocket, around fifteen quetzales. While he looked nervously over my shoulder, he told me God would bless me, and then scurried off. I got up and turned to see a group of young men eyeing me cooly. One of them mimed a kiss at me and suggested the next time it would be his turn. Thusly blessed, I moved away at what I hoped was a dignified pace, and buried myself in a sidewalk crowd.
But happily there were very few days where I felt like prey, and was free to observe the life of the street. If I chose 8th Avenue, I'd run into more noisy traffic, and a growing number of people as I neared the Supreme Court. It ended at 20th Street in a crowded block of little diners, sidewalk stands, and vendors wandering about selling umbrellas, watches, pens, cell phones, and sunglasses--the necessary accessories of the clerks and lawyers, most of whom already seemed to have cell phones pinned to their ears (I even saw security guards and military police chatting away on them while on duty).
And there was the incessant cry of "Tramites, tramites!" When I worked at the Supreme Court archive in 1994, there were orderly rows of suited men in and around the Supreme Court plaza, each with a chair, a little table, and a portable typewriter. They were there to help people do their "tramites," literally 'procedures,' but in this context this meant selling the service of composing and filling out the required legal documents. Now men and women hawked this service on the street, stopping likely customers, and I assumed they worked out of offices nearby, using computers instead of typewriters.
To the right you can see the Supreme Court and its largely empty plaza. I'd enter through that dark space at the lower right of the picture. The Archivo de Tribunales had a staff of five when I worked there in '94, and a nearly soporific atmosphere. Evidently there were few investigating past judicial proceedings in a country where violence had trumped the law for so long. I was often the only one there toiling away through military tribunal records.
The 1996 Peace Accords ending a 30 year civil war opened the way for the 2009 Ley de Acceso (akin to our Freedom of Information Act, but much more liberal). The archive now has maybe fifteen staff, all of them on the move, taking requests for copies, making copies, preparing documents for the archive (which involved slamming bundles of paper on a table to tighten them), while also managing to make snack or lunch orders, get their shoes done by a shoe-shine boy, share shopping finds, and discuss the World Cup. No falling asleep here.
I'd come here a year ago and was told that no one knew offhand where the military tribunal records were, and the index for the collection was missing. But they said try again with a formal request some other time. So I returned this year, a bit more insistent, and made it beyond the front window to the office manager. She looked at me steadily with her light green-brown eyes, with a slight smile on her face, as if she were waiting for an answer to a question she had asked. When I just simply smiled in return, a little mystified, she handed me a piece of paper. I saw dot-matrix print and my signature at the bottom--my request for permission in 1994 to examine the Tribunal records. "Fijase," she said, a Guatemalan word that often precedes bad news, the index was indeed gone, and the collection was stored in a distant warehouse. But, luckily, I had written down parts of the index, and it turned out those case files were on hand. And the the following day I could finally answer her question. "I'm sorry it took me so long, but I remember you." She had been the receptionist back then, this chatty, vivacious twenty-something who was always tossing her curly hair. Now she was reserved, all business, and appeared embarrassed that I hadn't recognized her. I wanted to tell her, "Sister, we all got old," contemplating all the ways my body had begun to break down in the past seventeen years, but didn't think that would help.
Memory is a tricky thing, of course, and is often the occasion for misunderstanding, argument, and pain. I'm not just talking about questions of accuracy, but of what we decide to remember, and how we remember it. This is true for both individual and collective memory. Hence we have our vitriolic debates over the history curriculum in schools, the disagreements over who or what to commemorate with monuments, street signs, or holidays, or fights over access to private and public records. Guatemalans have more dire decisions to make regarding what goes into their public memory. Talk about real phantom limbs: over 200,000 Guatemalans killed or disappeared during the civil war.
Some--probably university students--have made their arguments with graffiti on 7th Avenue. They want someone to pay for the grievous sins of the state. They want the public to remember the civil war as an act of genocide against Guatemala's Mayan population (see pictures below). And there's some nostalgia there, too, for the revolutionary past: "Turcios Lives" is a reference to Luís Turcios Lima, a graduate of US Special Forces training, and one of the leaders of the 1960 military uprising that would be crushed, and then return as a guerrilla movement. And there are the newer voices trying to be heard in the public square--from the feminist scrawling "Women in Resistance" to the marches and demonstrations I witnessed around the Parque Central, sponsored by the GLBT community, AIDS activists, and sex trade workers.
Clearly, La Sexta is not the only thing in Guate undergoing wrenching change, but it would be a mistake to reduce Guatemala City to my inevitably selective memories, skewed anyway by my disposition and predilections, and perhaps the sweat dripping into my eyes as I walked to work. Hopefully, though, the anecdotes and images here complicate the story we usually get in the US news, equating the country with rampant crime, political intrigue, and social conflict. Guatemalans lives are more mundane and richer than that.
"JUSTICIA POR GENOCIDIO" (Justice for genocide)
"JUSTICIA DONDE ESTAN?" (Justice, where are you?)
"AQUI SI HUBO GENOCIDIO" (Here, yes, there was genocide)
"JUSTICIA" (Justice)
"JUSTICIA" (Justice)
"NO MAS IMPUNIDAD. BASTA" (No more impunity. Enough)
"NO OLVIDAMOS NI PERDONEMOS" (We don't forget nor forgive)
"TURCIOS VIVE" (Turcios lives)
"MUJERES EN RESISTENCIA" (Women in resistance)

Friday, July 22, 2011

A Day in the Life. . .in Guatemala

Map of our typical walk to work in Guatemala City

Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head . . .

I suppose it's a stretch to connect my experience in Guatemala to a Beatles song, and it's not like "I'd love to turn you on," but my recent two months down there on a research trip was something like stream-of-consciousness song. A jumble of loosely connected images and events. A juxtaposition of the ordinary and the strange.

We can, like Lennon, choose to look at strangeness in our ordinary lives, but living in another country can give us the inverse, seeing the ordinary in what seems strange to us, and allowing that seeming strangeness to get us to think more carefully about what we take for ordinary, as right, as common sense. I suppose in consultant-speak this is "cultural competency." I'd rather think of this as a way of seeing a different country without resorting to the simplistic categories of 'exotic' (Guatemala is a "Land of Magic and Color"), 'weird' (sinkholes apparently are "weird news"), or 'messed up' (according to both neocons and the left-leaning).

So's here my first attempt to impose some order on the daily jumbles and juxtapositions of my experiences over two months in Guatemala. First, though, some quick context. I was down there from May 15 to July 10 on a research stint with an undergraduate "student summer scholar" (S3), Heidi Fegel. Grand Valley State University's S3 program is a competitive scholarship awarded to twenty or so students each summer, funding their work with a faculty mentor in a collaborative research project. Our project involved researching the institutional and ideological origins of Guatemalan military interventionism in politics, and that project included researching recently declassified Guatemalan military documents housed at the Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) in Guatemala City.

We found two rooms to rent at a house not too far from the Archive. Like many larger Guatemalan houses, ours was a series of rooms wrapped around a courtyard (above). We shared the house with with our dueña, Patricia, her cat, Tito, and two other renters, Beberley and Laura. Beberley worked for CONAP, sort of like the US's EPA, (though she left that job to finish up her thesis), and Laura is an artist and a DJ. Patricia is a homeopathic therapist, just starting a practice after several years of working with returning Guatemalan emigres.

So, I guess it's already a little strange. I shared a house with four women from their early twenties to late forties, in a foreign country, researching a topic that is still politically sensitive--though nowhere near as volatile as it was before the 1996 Peace Accords that ended a 30 year civil war. There were days where I'd hear Heidi's indy music wafting into one ear, the thump of Laura's technopop in the other, while Beberly and Paty held animated discussions about the healing virtues of this diet, or that meditative practice. Quite a change from the Grand Rapids ranch-style house life with my wife, mother-in-law, and fellow middle-aged and neurotic male, KC the wonder dog, working away in the solitude of my basement.

But Heidi and I quickly fashioned a kind of routine for the work week, waking up, falling out of bed, and dragging combs across our heads (so to speak; Heidi's hair would likely devour combs). There was a clock in our kitchen (right), but punctuality was not a priority at the Archive, so we followed suit, and one of us would get around to making breakfast, the other doing the dishes, and then we'd pack up our laptops and drinking water, and usually by 8am we would let ourselves out through the front door, security gate, and the driveway's steel portón. The house is in Guate's Zona 2, a pretty safe neighborhood, but all the doors, locks, and concertina wire were reminders that we were living in a country with one of the highest violent crime rates in Latin America. Still, were we to take the US State Department's travel advisory as gospel, we should have been holed up in a swanky hotel in the Zona Viva, and traveling to the Archivo in Zone One in a bullet-proof SUV with an armed escort. I appreciate the State Department's concern for its citizens, but like any country, crime is concentrated in particular places and situations. Avoiding them and ostentatious displays of wealth (like flashing our laptops in public) made life in downtown Guate more than doable. And I believe just not acting like fearful targets helped, too. Of course, it helped that I was already pretty familiar with the city. I lived here for three months in 1988, another ten months in 1994, and had done some quick research trips here the last two summers. Familiarity reduced that flight-or-fight instinct that can pop up in any new or challenging environment (I find driving in, say, Chicago a lot more scary than walking the streets of Guatemala City).

While I was used to navigating Guate, it was all new to Heidi. Though she had spent a couple of weeks in Costa Rica on a high school environmental trip, daily life in Guate and the archival research were different matters. And as her faculty mentor, I was responsible not only for her learning, but for her health and safety. So research abroad with a student assistant added wrinkles to routines I had developed for working in Guatemala. And things like sharing a bathroom, or coming to an agreement over how to cook potatoes or wash the clothes, added new dimensions to the teacher-student relationship, to put it mildly.

But this collaboration was not nearly as complicated as I feared it might be, probably because we're both fairly easy-going, and because Heidi proved capable of handling the various stresses with patience and humor. Oh, we both had our less-than-stellar moments: my conniption when I was unable to find a restaurant while circling the same blocks in the pouring rain, or my incredible stupidity in handing over our passports to a man to handle the customs duties at the Salvadoran-Guatemalan border (though all ended well, I'm still upset with myself over that); Heidi's frustration boiling over a few times due to all the unwanted male attention, or just tiredness coming out as anger at a Greek salad that was not at all Greek. However, these were blips in an otherwise rather angst-free research trip.

So, anyway, we would start off the typical workday with a two-kilometer (1.2 miles) walk to the Archivo. We'd walk the short distance up our street, 10a Calle, to the Avenida Simeon Cañas (see map above). At this corner, if we looked right, we'd see our source of freshly-squeezed orange juice, a stand run by a woman and presumably her daughter, who always dressed to kill and nonchalantly ignored the young men calling out from the packed city buses passing by. Beyond the stand, we could see the edge of the Parque Hipódromo, a complex of baseball stadiums, an amusement park, and the famous Mapa en relieve--a large three dimensional topographical map of Guatemala built to scale (below).

But we would turn left and head south on Simeón Cañas, a wide, fairly quiet boulevard that the city closes on Sundays for bike and pedestrian traffic (on the right, Heidi, at the beginning of our walk down Cañas). With the shaded wide sidewalks, this was the most pleasant part of the walk. Just before the roundabout circling Parque Jocotenango, we'd pass what I took to be a family--a man, woman, and a little girl. The man seemed to be managing a small parking strip, or maybe just offering to wash the parked cars. The little girl might be lounging in a makeshift hammock, or seated on an overturned bucket, eating breakfast with her mom, or having her hair combed. If we returned early enough in the afternoon, we'd see another girl there, perhaps eight or nine, sometimes doing her homework. Their calmness always struck me--the little girl quietly playing, while her older sister sat there next to the noisy traffic, her head bowed over a workbook.



At the roundabout (above), we initially tried just sneaking through during momentary traffic breaks. We ended up using the pasarela—a pedestrian bridge (right, and another below of me, with Jocotenango behind)—instead of braving the drivers who apparently believed they had the duty to teach pedestrians how
‘survival of the fittest’ works in the urban landscape. But we saw lots of Guatemalans ignore the pasarela, which may explain why on average, according to one report, six people die each day crossing Guate streets, even though pedestrian bridges were close by in a majority of the cases. I suppose this is not all that surprising in a city whose population of both people and vehicles has exploded in recent decades.


After crossing the pasarela, we'd loop around the Parque Jocotenango, passing food stands and El Torre, a grocery store where we often shopped, and an Education Ministry building, where there always seemed to be a long line of people waiting out front, and most everyone along the way would give us a quick look of curiosity, even ones we saw every morning. I always wondered what they thought of us. Were we just an interesting distraction in an otherwise tedious day? Did they think "Hold on a sec, this isn't a tourist area--they must be missionaries"? Or maybe some of those human rights workers? Or maybe, like we can idly watch passing traffic, we were just another element in the shifting scenery for them? Perhaps what I took to be their interest was really my self-consciousness. I suppose all of these guesses could be true.

Whatever they thought, they would have probably seen me in a sweat. By this point in the walk, in the humidity of Guatemala's rainy season, and keeping up with Heidi's blitzkrieg pace (one of the very few times in my life when someone has walked faster than me, but maybe I'm just getting old), I'd begin to feel damp. One benefit, I suppose, was that if Heidi wasn't leading, I knew she wasn't feeling well. Fortunately, this was rare, and usually I was just cursing myself for once again forgetting to bring a small towel to mop my brow once we'd reached the Archivo, and I'd know I was in for an hour of worrying about sweat dripping on my documents and keyboard.

After Jocotenango Simeón Cañas turns into Sixth Avenue, but the city was tearing up a huge length of that street, so we'd cut up to Fifth, and continue south. Until reaching the Parque Central, the route now had a lot less traffic, allowing us to focus on avoiding stumbling over upturned pavement, or stepping into one of Lennon's four thousand Blackburn, Lancashire holes that had apparently migrated to Guatemala City (I didn't keep a strict count, but I believe we tripped equally often, and though I had more close encounters with vehicles, I had fewer mishaps than Heidi with food and drink).


So after twenty to thirty minutes since leaving the house, we'd reach the Parque Central, the heart of Guate's Centro Histórico. It's a two block plaza. On the north side of the eastern half sits the old National Palace (above, Heidi checks out an election rally in front of the Palace)--a hulking Ubico era (1931-1944) greenish-grey building that has been recast as the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura. Instead of housing despots, it now serves Guatemala's ongoing nation-building project--a difficult one given the age-old and overlapping divisions between la gente indigena and ladinos (mestizos), the poor and the rich, and rural and urban folks, and perhaps now Catholics and the rapidly growing Evangelical population. If you ever get a chance to visit the Palacio, it's quite stunning inside (you can see pictures here). The Catedral Metropolitana sits on the eastern edge of the plaza (below, Andy, in front of the Cathedral and food vendors that fill the plaza on weekends).


To the south is a large swath of commercial and apartment buildings. The western half of the park is a lovely green space, filled with trees, benches, and food vendors. The National Library faces it's western side, and on the backside of the Library is our ultimate destination, the Archivo General de Centro América (above). The entire time we were there the city was refurbishing the walks in front and on a side of the Archive. Construction site rules are far more relaxed than they are in the US, which made things easier in some ways, but also more risky. We could just walk through like everyone else did, and weave around workers jackhammering cement or laying stones, but we also might walk through string guidelines, step into wet concrete, or get in the way of a mini-bulldozer. It was always a lively way to start our work day.

Heidi, in the Archivo's reading room.

And if you're still with me, within a few days I'll post more on this day in the life in Guatemala, and my encounters with gentrification, graffiti, and grifters as I made my way to the Supreme Court archives another mile away.