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.