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)