Stories from Guatemala

Studying Abroad

Claudette Silva, 23, was born and raised in Guatemala and speaks four languages: Russian, Turkish, English and Spanish. (She hopes to one day learn German and Hebrew as well.) Below is her story, which reveals an unusual childhood and how, as a young adult, violence and a lack of resources affected her experience as a student.

When I was born, my father was schizophrenic and was unable to get loose from his detention. My mother bore me alone at home, and later that day they took us to the hospital.

For the first three years of my life, though, I lived with both my parents in zone 1 in Guatemala City. Then my mother separated from my father and left him. She met my step-father later and had two children with him.

We were continually moving because my father was perpetually looking for me so he could be with me, but my mother did not want him to have custody. I went to nine different elementary schools in different parts of Guatemala. Just when I made friends I would have to go somewhere else, so it was complicated. We lived in places like San Antonio Suchitepéquez, San Benito in Petén, and in Santa Rosa Oratorio, where my family is from on my mother’s side. My mother is the daughter of Brazilian immigrants, who migrated there in a big group. There are a lot of Silvas there.

Later we returned to Guatemala City when my father had calmed down and wasn’t looking for me any more. When I was sixteen, though, I looked for him, and I found him, but it wasn’t a normal situation. He was constantly changing personalities.

I believe that I had a happy childhood despite all of that. Not to have your parents together happens a lot in Guatemala. The majority of children go through that, so it did not feel out of the ordinary. In fact, when we lived in Petén, we lived on a farm and I had horses, and everything was great.

I spent middle school and high school in the capital in a school run by nuns. Then I went to the University of San Carlos, having managed to enter there to study medicine, and I studied there a year.

To get around, I had to take a lot of camionetas (a flatbed truck used for transport), and one day in one of them I was assaulted. A guy, backed by two others, asked everyone for their cell phones. I hid mine in my shoe and told him “no.” It makes me angry when I think about it because it’s not like I had a lot of money to buy one. It cost me a lot. I did not want to give up my phone so this guy jabbed me with his fist. He hit me in the chest and they grabbed my backpack, but they did not get my cell phone.

Also, one time, when I was coming back home on a bus from the university through a new route through Villa Nueva, some people started shooting at the bus I was in, just when I was about home. And someone was killed right behind me. It was horrible. I think the shooting may have been because some of the cab drivers were upset that a bus was starting to operate in that area in competition with them. It’s not clear why, but the bus took these gunshots.

After that I made the decision to find a way to get out of this country. I wanted to leave. I wanted to find a new way to live, I wanted peace. I wanted to be able to walk in a country where I did not have to worry about getting robbed.

I went to various embassies and knocked on their doors, trying to figure out how I could get a scholarship abroad to keep studying. They do have scholarships for Guatemalan students at these embassies, but the scholarships are not easy to get because they are usually given to people with influence, say, to a politician’s son or daughter.

Russia opened the doors for me. It was the only country that guided me through the application process and then accepted me. You do have to have good grades and I always had them, but the people at the consul supported me a lot. The process took about a year and I got my scholarship to go to Moscow in 2015.

I think these scholarships represent a way to unite the two countries, to promote good will between the people on both sides. For example, there are two Russians in Antigua (a town in Guatemala where she currently lives), and I help them in any way I can. If they want to go the market, I go with them so they feel comfortable here. I do this because there were many Russians who treated me well, who helped me when I was in Moscow.

I was in Russia almost two years studying medicine. For someone who is Latino, it is difficult because of the snow and the extreme cold they have there. I had never experienced snow and those types of temperatures. I would ask them, “why do you live here? It’s freezing.” In January, you can’t even leave your house.

I lived in a very small apartment that was just one room, along with three other women who were from different countries: Albania, the Ivory Coast, and Kazakhstan. We had bunk beds under which we would put our luggage, and there were four closets and a stand to put dishes on. There were just two desks and they were almost on top of the beds, because they really didn’t fit. I always grabbed half of a desk to study. It was tough. The woman from the Ivory Coast would make food, these giant soups, for all of her African friends, and they would all come to our place to eat on the weekends, in that little room of ours. I had to be careful what I wore around the apartment since they would all be there, from Friday to Sunday. We had to be very tolerant of each other.

Over there it was really important to speak Russian, because if you didn’t, they wouldn’t respect you, and learning it was difficult. You open the books and you begin to read, and you don’t understand anything. You had to grab a dictionary or an app on your phone to translate it to Spanish. You constantly had to be getting the translation to understand what the book was saying. All of us foreigners had to study twice as much as everyone else. But these things change you and make you stronger.

In the first six months, they teach you grammar and writing, and the next six months you learn subjects like math, chemistry, and biology. Although the professors were good, it was hard. I was able to understand and speak Russian within 6 months, but it took me a full year to master it.

I remember that one Russian professor in anatomy would make you feel so bad if you made a mistake, and in that class, there were so many things to memorize. There are so many cavities in the skull, the bones in the temporal, all the connections, what vein is there and what organ communicates with it, and we had to learn all of it in Russian and Latin. The professor would arrive, give us a bone and say, “what is this?” If you made one mistake, she would not forgive you, she would just say “well, just come back next week and do the exam all over again.” It was horrible, really. She made a student cry for one error. She said, “you are not fit to be a doctor. Go back to your country. You can’t speak Russian well enough.”

I tried to avoid all of that. I would study and then make drawings of everything I studied, and when the exam arrived, I would put the drawings in front of the professor so she would know that I knew the material. You had to find a way to win them over. (laughs)

Silva had to stop studying when she was no longer able to cover her expenses.

My parents started to have economic problems, more so than usual, and they began to send me just 250 dollars a month. With this I had to eat, and in a city so expensive like Moscow, I really had to spend money only on food, and it had to be the most basic type of food. At times, I just didn’t have enough. The scholarship paid for academics, the courses, the labs, but it did not pay for your housing or your food. They may have provided you the books, but not the notebooks or pens. I stopped my studies in the second semester of my second year.

I would have stayed if I had the money. The scholarship would have taken me through the program to become a doctor, but I couldn’t get the work in Russia that would have allowed me to afford living there. There were, however, allowances for time off. You could take a year off and still come back and study, so I decided to go to Turkey to earn enough money to return. But if you don’t return within a year, you lose your scholarship.

I went to Turkey with a guy I got engaged to who was Muslim, and I earned 1,500 dollars a month in tourism. First, though, I went to the Ukraine to study massage, relaxing forms of massage, like Thai, Balinese, shiatsu, styles from India. I did this so I could go back to Turkey and implement what I had learned. My fiancé had a business to sell massages to tourists at a hotel, and my job was to explain the types he provided, and to sell customers the massages, I would give a small demonstration and explain how the technique was. If they liked it, they would buy some and we would assign them a masseuse.

We had local clients, but 80 percent of them at that hotel were Russians. Since I could speak their language, I could sell to them. All the time, I thought I would go back to the university in Moscow. And while I was there I learned Turkish. It wasn’t hard like Russian.

When the time came to go back, my husband-to-be told me to stay. He said, “you are my woman. Stay with me.” Since I believed that I was gong to make my life with him, I didn’t return to Moscow. We continued to see each other for another year, but I found out he had been married to another woman and hadn’t told me. I found pictures of them together in India after he told me he was going there alone on a business trip. How can I marry someone who already has a wife, and didn’t tell me? How stupid. He wanted me to be his second woman. After that I didn’t want to be with him any more, and I returned to my country.

When you go back, everything is different, the traffic, the people, and the climate, nothing is the same. But you remember who you are and where you are from, because sometimes you forget, no? So much time passes when you are abroad and you begin to think in another language, you forget to think in Spanish. But you also change. You don’t see things the same, you don’t see things like your culture has taught you. You open your mind.

People work very hard over there. In Turkey, you only have three days of rest during an entire month, just three. And that is very tiring. And in Russia, we studied from Monday to Saturday. We only had Sundays off, and on that day you had to buy things, go to the market, clean the apartment, everything had to be taken care of. So you can’t do anything else. It’s not like that here in Guatemala.

If I had the chance, I would return to Russia to study but I would have to have the capital to do it. I would have to apply for a scholarship all over again, and I would have to have a job over there to sustain me, and that is something I don’t have. It’s just not possible now. I can’t have my parents maintain me either, and they haven’t since I was 20. So I’m never going to go back and study there.

I want to be here in Antigua a year, because maybe I will have a future here and could put up a business. I want to study and understand how everything works and start something. I have to work, I have to eat, and no one is going to rain money down on me. I have to think about my future.

I feel like Antigua is a very happy place, more so than in Moscow, more so than in Turkey, more so than in Guatemala City. Here I don’t feel judged, the people are nice and sociable, and I feel supported by my friends. I also like the architecture.

And it is peaceful here. It’s my country and it isn’t so dangerous in this part of it.

That’s what I like the most.

The above story was told in our interview on June 25, 2019, in Antigua, Guatemala. The translation is my own.

Claudette Silva, Antigua, Guatemala, June 25, 2019.

A PhD with Dyslexia

In the second and final part of his testimony, 40-year old Edwin Román-Ramírez talks about his dyslexia and the problems it posed for him, and his personal journey toward becoming an archeologist.

In his narrative, he refers to Antigua, one of Spain’s early colonial settlements in the New world, known today for its remaining colonial structures, as well as to Iximché, the capital of the Kaqchikel Maya kingdom from 1470 to 1524 and later a Spanish colonial capital. He also talks of Tikal, a Mayan archeological site which lies in the Petén region of northern Guatemala, one of the largest and most well known.

How did I become an archeologist? First, I had very supportive parents and they were able to see the things I was good at and that I was interested in, and they always encouraged me to pursue those interests. Growing up in Chimaltenango, we went very often to Iximché. We also came to Antigua almost every Sunday and we always went to mass there. These places represent so much. For instance, for the indigenous people, Iximché represents a place of resistance. For the state, it represents the first capital. Memories are in conflict and you have a different view of what happened based on who you are. But getting exposed to these places early in life really ignited my desire to know more. Many archeologists say, “well as a kid I saw “Indiana Jones” (the movie) and that’s why I started thinking about archeology.” For me, I grew up in all this history.

My mom had a picture that she showed me of her at Tikal in the 1970s and that fascinated me. I was a really bad kid for traveling, but my dad brought my oldest brother to Tikal, and they came back with all their stories of the experience, and I became very interested in what they were saying. It was a process but it started to grow on me, this interest in the past, and my parents started to recognize my fascination with it and supported me. I always wanted to know why we were doing something. I always wanted to know, “why do we eat this food, why do we use the words we do?”

I think my parents were really smart to encourage me, but it wasn’t easy for me because at that time I had dyslexia and did not know it. I was terrible in school, like really bad, and I really hated it. I was a terrible student.

I did not believe I was good enough in anything I did. Books were hard to read, my spelling was atrocious, and everybody was making fun of me. I couldn’t write, either. I always had to have someone check on my writing, so my mom and dad would often read the stuff I wrote and monitor it. They were middle school teachers.

I did not know that I had this condition, and my parents did not even know what dyslexia was. In Guatemala in the 1980s, in my hometown, nobody talked about dyslexia. So everything I did was not good enough. I always felt like, “oh man, I spent the entire year trying hard, and it didn’t work out.” And here, at that time, the schools were very militaristic. It was a time of war in the 1980s and ’90s, and the authorities were strict and would place a great deal of emphasis on memorization, and that didn’t work for me.

But I always liked adventure, and something I also had was that I actually get crazy when I don’t know something, because if I don’t know something I’m going to go and research it and figure it out. And I think now, I was able to pursue archeology because people along the way discovered that about me. Professors would say, “we don’t know this or that,” and I would go nuts and put together a lot of data about whatever it was. But expressing my findings was hard.

Here in Guatemala, before you finish high school, you have to go and work for a company for a month, to give you some experience. My field in this regard was in hotels and tourism, and most of my teachers thought I would go to Antigua, which was close by, but I said no, I wanted to go far away. My parents made an effort to send me to Panajachel (a town on the edge of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala), and for us it was really far in 1995, and we were at the end of the war.

Over there I loved it. I spent two months there working in a hotel, and when I came back I told my mom and dad that I was going to travel around the world because I met all of these foreign people who were traveling. My plan was to go by bus to Argentina, that was my dream. But my parents said, “come on, try one year of archeology, and you will be fine.” And I told them I would try.

Román-Ramírez attended the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City, the largest and oldest university in Guatemala.

I went for a year, and I did really bad at the university The second year went really really bad (laughs). Finally, my parents asked me what I was going to do and I told them that maybe I needed some responsibilities outside of studying and my mom and dad agreed. My parents said, “Maybe you need a structure and that will help you at the university.”

My mom found out that they had created a TV news show in town and suggested I go there to see if there was something I could do. I said “sure” and I got an interview with this guy, and he was wearing all these gold rings; he was really exotic. I said that I was interested in being a camera man because there was an opening for it, and after the interview, he said, “you’ve got the job.” He told me to come the next day wearing a formal, long sleeve shirt. “But you are not a camerman,” he said. “You are going to interview guests.” I told him I could not do it because I was too shy. I was a really shy kid. But he said, “I’m your boss,” so I agreed to do it.

My dad gave me a formal shirt and when I got to work I realized that I was going to interview the president of Guatemala, Álvaro Arzú! This was in 1998, two days after Girardi had been shot. (Roman Catholic Archbishop and human rights advocate Juan José Gerardi was murdered in his home following an effort to expose those responsible for atrocities committed during Guatemala’s 36-year old civil conflict. The murder caused public outrage.)

I was 18 years old, imagine that. I had no training and there I was with my long hair, I was so intimidated. I knew the president was really hard on journalists, and I never sweated more in my life, but I interviewed Arzú for 10 minutes.

Since then, I started not to have any fear of talking to people. I went back to the university and my grades got better, and then I met José Paredes, the director of the Proyecto Arqueologico del Motagua Medio and a ceramics professor. He told me to apply to work with a group of archeologists, which would be my first field experience. They just accept the best students into this program, but my grades, they sucked (laughs), you know. I had terrible grades. I told him about that but he said, “I know that, but I see something in you that I don’t see in the rest. Please apply.” Again, he saw that I had this thirst for knowledge. A passion for it. I was accepted.

When I am curious about something or I start to think about ancient times, everything around me disappears, I have nothing to do with the present-day material world. I don’t know how to describe it. The tomb of a king, a murial, but sometimes the tiny things are even more important. There is nothing like discovery and having an idea about it.

We went to a site in Zacapa called La Vega del Cobán with a small team of archeologists from my university on a small project. After I went there, I started to do better at the university. I still had problems with exams, writing and all of that, but I think I started to push myself a little bit farther without knowing that I had dyslexia yet. But these professors began to see that I had something different, and began to take me to excavations.

I didn’t know much about it but in the first years of this program you had to go do reconnaissance, you had to go and look for new sites. That was my first job, but during that time, one of our friends who was excavating got sick, and they told me to fill in for him and excavate, and I said “yeah sure.” I went there and told my friend, a Guatemalan student at San Carlos, that I was terrified, because I knew nothing about excavations, but she had more experience and told me not to worry and that she would help me. I remember that we got lost on our way there, and arrived late, and that most of the workers that we needed were gone, all but a couple. And the other people had left, so, oh man, I had to excavate on my own quite a bit. Zacapa is really dry and hot, and there was not a single tree there, and we had to excavate. But we did it.

While I did my excavations, I once found a very small piece of obsidian, and I knew obsidian did not come from that area. It could’ve been trash, but when I found it, my brain was exploding; I was wondering what was going on. It is the same feeling I get today.

The last year at my university in Guatemala, I remember reading the newspaper and I saw an article that was talking about dyslexia and I read it. I told my parents about it and they said “yeah, we think you have that.” So I started to read more about it, to see what the problem was.

Before graduating, Edwin was invited to the US by a peace corps volunteer and stayed with his family while learning English. He spent six months there before returning to Guatemala.

I had been trying to learn English in Guatemala and it was hard. I understood that for dyslexic people, there are certain languages that are difficult, and English was one of them. This family paid a tutor for me, so, with that help, and from talking to people and watching movies, I learned English.

While I was there, one of the directors back in Guatemala told me that I should finish my thesis and graduate, and he offered to fund me while I worked on it. He gave me a month to write my thesis. For four years I didn’t want to do it, but he pushed me to do it, and I finished it. I wrote the entire thesis in 1 month: 116 pages. I finished it and I graduated.

Edwin was able to meet PhD students and professors from the US and elsewhere through his archeological studies and research, and he received help and encouragement from them to keep going and pursue his studies. He made his way to the University of Texas, where he received a PhD.

One of the problems with dyslexia is that it destroys your confidence. I have to say that everything goes back to this dyslexia and I am still trying to understand my life in this context.

There was this PhD student and she told me then that I was a really good leader and she told me that I should pursue a PhD. And of course she was really good looking, so I was like, “yeah.” Two years before I had met a prominent archeologist from the US and I talked with him and told him I would like to study with him, and he said, finish your degree and you can come. So I already had the idea. But In 2008, this PhD student really made me believe that I could do it. Also, when I was on a project and I didn’t have my licenciatura (bachelors) yet, I would be working with people with a PhD, and then I thought “well I could do that.”

My score for the GRE, the examination taken for graduate school, wasn’t any good, it was terrible, but they kept encouraging me. They saw something in me. I applied, and they accepted me. When I arrived I was able to read more about dyslexia and I started to take notes on how I could improve, and I started to have more confidence that I could get the PhD.

I think being in the USA, in higher education, they never asked me specific questions about information. They would ask me, “what do you think?” Since then, I was the nerdiest person you could meet. I was in the library working, working, working. I knew I had to work harder, but also I think the professors there gave me the opportunity to think and show my ideas. That’s what really helped. It was a great experience. You know, PhD programs can be terrible. They are hard and can destroy a lot of your heart. But when I look back, many people helped me.

I think getting the PhD more than anything was a way to prove to myself that I wasn’t dumb. Since I was a kid, I thought that when I was born, the cables in my brain weren’t connected because I had all of these good ideas that I could not express. I would dream of having an accident that would re-unite those cables in my mind so I could prove that I was smart. So I was driven to prove myself. Also, people believed in me and gave me opportunities, and this country (Guatemala) does not give you a lot of opportunities. But when there is a wall there, if the wall has a small crack, I will try to pass through that crack. I think that’s how I got to the University of Texas and to this day, I really still don’t believe I have a PhD. You know, I tell people that I have a PhD and am from a home town that doesn’t even have a library (laughs). That is crazy, you know.

And now I can enjoy life. I can enjoy archeology. Now I think I am back to that kid who finds a small piece of obsidian on his first excavation. I am still that kid, with more experience, more knowledge, and am more secure. I don’t have to prove anything to that old Edwin. And I still can’t believe I went to such a top university. I was really lucky. I had a lot of people who believed in me. We never had money in my family, but I had encouragement.

I don’t know the statistics, but I think we are between 2000 and 3000 people with a PhD in Guatemala. People don’t realize how difficult it is to get this. I met a lot of Guatemalans that come from really difficult backgrounds, and I am lucky. My parents, being teachers, had secure money coming in. I know people who have parents who are poor, small farmers, indigenous, and I have friends who are female and indigenous and they had it much harder, a million times more difficult, than I did. It inspires me a lot to see that they were able to get a PhD with everything against them.

I appeared in a documentary produced by National Geographic regarding the new discoveries on the Maya. There were four episodes, and I was in two of them. People from here were so happy, they were saying how great it was that I, a Guatemalan, was in the documentary speaking on these findings. I was happy also because in my opinion they don’t like to put people in these documentaries who have an accent. In terms of public attention, this documentary put me on the same level as experts in the USA. I didn’t expect it because I was not looking for it. But what I like most is that I don’t have to prove myself to anybody anymore. It feels weird because most of my life I felt like I was dumb and now everyone is complimenting me on my work and I just say, “well, thank you” (laughs). I’m just not used to it.

Dr. Edwin Román-Ramírez at an excavation site in New Mexico.

The Archeologist

Forty-year old Edwin Román-Ramírez is an archeologist who grew up in Chimaltenango, a town of about 75,000 people that lies 30 miles west of the capital, Guatemala City. In the first part of this two-part series, Dr. Román-Ramirez discusses his ideas on Mesoamerican archeology: his work in Zacapa, the public’s impressions of the Maya and his own, and the new technology that is being used to uncover gigantic settlements here-to-fore unknown. He also comments on how funding is difficult to come by for the enormous excavation projects he and others carry out.

Working in Zacapa

Zacapa has a lot of archeological sites, but this area is not well known to many people. We call the people who lived there the Motagua people since the society was near the Motagua River. They are not Mayas, and that is something really interesting to us because when people talk about jade they only talk about Mayas, but these people were extracting jade. They were from another culture apart from the Mayas and they had huge communities, like La Vega del Cobán, which has 800 sites. The Motagua people seem to have been insulated, and they were able to survive for so long. We need to know the relationship between these places, how this culture was able to sustain itself without any interference from the Mayas. We need to think more about which strategies they deployed to communicate and negotiate the politics with the rest of the Maya region.

The earliest evidence we have of the Motagua culture is from 800 BC, and they were there until 900 AD, a really long occupation. When I finished my thesis in 2006, we had discovered 100 sites, and I wrote on the sociopolitical organization that these sites reflected. For me, it was the first experience as an archeologist, being in the field.

I think that now that we have more time and there are more people researching different sites, we can start to understand how complex this society was, but it’s hard to know everything about a culture; there are many unanswered questions.

Impressions of ancient Maya culture

As a culture in general, I love it. Every time I look at some of the pieces of art that they were able to create, I am amazed. From the past to the present, I think they were unusual in their creativity. The way they secured food was so smart also. Many of the things that we enjoy today came from their efforts, like chocolate. Other foods can be associated with Maya innovation in agriculture: tamales, avocados, maiz, tomatoes.

They also were able to adapt to a very difficult environment. I work more in the lowlands, in the Petén region, but all the regions were difficult to live in. When you read a lot of history about Egypt, why were they so successful? Where did they place their cities? They are next to rivers where they can get water to drink and grow crops. But the Maya had to sustain their big cities depending only on the rain during the rainy season.

We have different types of jungles, and in them there are some small islands where the cities were, and there are swamps around the cities we call “bajos” and for some communities, lakes were nearby. So there was water in these bajos during the rainy season, and we know that they were able to create channels in those bajos, and that’s where they were farming. And that’s where they could get their water to sustain the larger communities.

The problem is that for four months you are going to have the dry season, and the rain goes not to the swamps or lakes, it goes to those places that are driest. So it is fascinating to research how they managed to secure water for such large populations during those times.

Take El Mirador, which was one of the largest cities around 300 BC to 200 AD; it’s huge. We don’t see a city that big again during the ancient Maya period. It is so grand and ostentatious. This city had maybe between 60,000 to 100,000 people living there during the year. Tikal is small compared to it. We can see from our measurements of the lakes, how the climate became drier in the year 100 AD, and that is when you see a decline. You see a lot of wars between cities. Maybe it’s harder to get water, and there is fighting. The problem with this period of time is that we don’t have a lot of writing, and the writing that exists doesn’t have those types of narratives about war. The writing we have is “tagging,” tagging people, deities, or objects. They started to write about it later.

The public portrayal of the ancient Maya

Of course, there are a lot of things wrong about how people see Maya culture. We can talk about movies, which will always reflect what the director wants to show. For example, Apocalypto, a film on the ancient Maya. Much of the history was wrong, but I think some of it was cool. You have this huge movie, a Hollywood production, where you can hear Yucatec Maya throughout the entire film. I think that’s good. When we look at some of the ways that the movie portrayed the kings, they are how we imagine them. I liked that part; the director did that well. And there are also documentaries that are good.

What I don’t like is that a lot of the movie (and other productions) focused on the theme of sacrifice, and every culture has had some type of sacrifice. Even Christian cultures did. For Mayas, we know a lot of sacrifices happened, but the problem is that sometimes we only show that. It’s discouraging because it will reinforce the stereotype that some people are less civilized and people will use that feeling to continue to discriminate against indigenous people today. But the popular media are never going to show that western cultures engaged in sacrifices. It has been part of human evolution, the history of mankind.

Archeologists have to be careful about this subject. For example, once we were working and we found the tomb of the founder of the dynasty at my site, and seven children had been sacrificed beside the king. We had to issue this press release in the National Palace, and we had to report it because it was true, but we were trying to be careful about how we were going to say it. I remember the directors (like myself), we were trying to position the information so that it would not get the attention. We did the press release and we didn’t mention a lot about it. Some of the news came on an hour later — and we have social media now that makes the news even more immediate — and the media reported that seven kids were scarified with the royal king! We tried to play it down so the media would not go there, but they went there.

Innovations in Mesoamerican archeology

Our understanding of these civilizations is constantly evolving. We thought we knew a lot, but there are always developments that create a new paradigm and shifts our understanding of what happened. For example, there was a big break in archeology when we were able to date people and events using carbon 14. That was a big change around the world.

In Maya history, there was a great shift in the 1980s, when, after a long process, we were able to read glyphs. Now we could read the history and were able to make new assumptions. That changed a lot of our understanding of Maya culture.

Carbon-14 dating is a technique that provides age estimates for carbon-based material that originated from living organisms. First developed in the late 1940s, the method revolutionized knowledge of the past. The glyphs, or Mayan writing, are made up of symbols that represent syllables and words. These glyphs are often found on walls, bark paper, and ceramics, and they were sometimes carved into wood and stone.

Today there is a new change: the technology to map sites. Now we have LiDAR (short for Light Detection and Ranging), a system of deploying lasers from an airplane to create images of what is below the jungle. It’s like an MRI, when you go to a doctor and they can scan your entire body to see what is inside. That is what is happening with LiDAR.

In the Petén, the jungle is really thick and structures that are 10 meters tall can be lost. Before LiDAR, we were not able to see everything because the jungle masked it, like areas where they were farming. We know that the Maya were farmers, and at some sites we can see the areas where they engaged in agriculture, but we only knew that because we were excavating there. It was by luck.

With LiDAR we can penetrate the different layers of the jungle: the top, middle and bottom. We are able to recognize two phenomena that we were unable to see previously. First, we can hone in and view the smallest structures and modifications and the exact locations of where they were farming. We can see terraces and things like that. Second, we can scope out and see really large structures. Maybe we could see a part of something before, but we could not see the whole. The area would be so large that we could not see it from our perspective on the ground. Now we can see structures like defensive walls or channels to conduct water that can be two kilometers long.

What LiDAR can do is to remove digitally all the jungle, and then you have all the surface and any and every change that occurred. And this technology is still being developed. In the future we will have better LiDAR. But it is a very important technology because we can see entire cities. We can see not just monuments or some group of houses. Now we can see some 60 structures at once. Where I work at El Palmar on the Yucatán peninsula, findings from LiDAR made us change a lot in a book we were writing. For instance, we used to say this site was very small compared to Tikal, but now we know that El Palmar has 920 more structures to it than we thought. It was about the same size as Tikal, but we were not able to see it before.

The funding challenge

Archeology is really expensive. It cannot be done by one person, like in other fields, say history. It requires a greater investment. We need to pay workers for the excavation process. We need excavators, helpers, cooks, drivers, and the number we need changes year to year. Sometimes we need 45 to 50 people.

We know funding has to come from the government, something that we don’t have much of here. There is a Ministry of Sports and Culture that receives less than one percent of the national budget, and that one percent has to be divided among dance, painting, the symphony, everything that is culturally related, and sports as well, which takes up 60 percent of that amount that is already less than 1 percent.

We do have money coming in from private donors in Guatemala as well as international sources. We have private donors from the USA and others parts of the world, and also you have people that get grants from foundations. In the USA you can get grants from the NEH (the National Endowment of the Humanities), and the NSF (National Science Foundation), and from Europe they have their own places to get money.

The Guatemalan state does help, but it is not very much. I think the institution in charge of archeology is doing everything it can, but it has to pay a lot of guards to protect the sites. So most of the money does not go to research, but rather to pay the salaries of people who are taking care of the archeological locations in different regions of Guatemala. I think the president should raise the budget to maybe two percent.

The archeology being carried out by Guatemalans is very new; we started in the 1970s. Here in Guatemala we have two universities dedicated to archeological research: San Carlos and Del Valle. Before that, there were archeologists, but they were from the outside. Actually, most Guatemalans think archeologists come only from a foreign country and they cannot conceive of a Guatemalan archeologist. They simply cannot believe it. But now there are about 250 of us, and we are learning more and more about our ancient past.

Edwin Román Ramirez, Antigua, Guatemala, June 10, 2019.

The Legacy of Pesticides

In the 1950s and ’60s, the South Coast of Central America experienced a boom in the cotton industry. The climate and soil of the area was highly favorable for growing copious amounts of cotton, and world demand for the crop to make textiles and other products like cotton seed oil had expanded tremendously since the end of World War II. The town of Tiquisate, Guatemala lies along the South Coast and previously had been known for its prodigious banana plantations that dotted the landscape in the 1930s and ’40s. In fact the United Fruit Company set up a large division there called the Compañía Agrícola, which established a vast network of large banana farms. As the company’s preeminence declined in the early 1960s, and the cotton boom was raging, much of Tiquisate’s fields and woods were converted to cotton plantations. Along with this transition to a new and warmly welcomed export commodity came an era in which plantation owners deployed large doses of pesticides to protect their valuable crops. This craze in the use of chemicals was caused by a plague of “chinchonas,” an insect similar to boll weevils that threatened cotton cultivation and the attractive profits it could garner. While reports of the hazardous effects of cotton production trickled in and a number of illnesses were reported, concerns over the environment and worker health were largely ignored. In fact, in the 1960s, it became dangerous to express objections to cotton cultivation, as the Guatemalan government, a major proponent of export agriculture and supported by landowners, became mired in a civil war against leftist rebels, and viewed reform movements of all types with suspicion.

Today in Tiquisate, the effects of this chemical deluge is showing up in the ill health of a number of small children, who are beset by a variety of physical ailments.

Forty-five year old Marvin Giovanni Peña, a former city planner in Tiquisate, pointed out this connection to me in an interview on February 20, 2018. Peña’s own daughter had been suffering from a renal disease that Peña believed was linked to activities from the cotton era. Peña himself founded an organization to help the local community deal with kidney ailments, and his efforts included helping more than 150 families from the municipality of Tiquisate transport loved ones to a hospital where they could receive dialysis.

As he recently began campaigning for the mayoralty of Tiquisate, Peña was assassinated. Upon leaving an evening political meeting, held by his party, La Fuerza, Peña was shot in the back while driving away on his motorcycle.

Peña was known for his “don,” a willingness to help others, and he extended this graciousness to me by granting this interview, and through spending the day introducing me to other people who could help me understand the town’s rich history. Peña himself had extensive knowledge of Tiquisate, having worked in city planning and having access to the municipality’s archives and records. He also had a lifetime of listening to the stories of earlier generations; his own father had worked at Tiquisate both in the banana and cotton eras.

The chemicals that were made during the cotton era were very strong. In those times they fumigated by air: they would use planes to apply the pesticides. The chemicals they dropped were too powerful, and those who prepared or sprayed them can tell you that, and their children can relay the stories about it that their fathers told them. The chemicals they dumped would completely contaminate the ground below. Cotton had pests, insects that would damage the cotton plant, and they were trying to kill those pests. They used the chemicals in such fierce doses to preserve the cotton. It was the only way they believed they could do it.

When they sprayed the chemicals onto the cotton they would say that no one was down below, but on the farms there were always workers and employees there. In any case, the soil would absorb the chemicals and the chemicals would get trapped there. The pesticides would start to sink into the subsoil. What we can see today in this region, not only in Tiquisate but other towns nearby like Nueva Concepción and Río Bravo, is that certain illnesses like kidney disease have become common. These illnesses are here and not in other places.

Kidney disease is normally related to diabetes and aging, in people over 60 years old. But in this region, the majority of cases are children or young people. They are not elderly people nor diabetics. They are born with this disease. Some would think it might be genetic, but when they do studies on the patient’s family history, there is no precedent for it, not in the mother nor the father. They’re clean for some 3 or 4 generations. But the cases do have something in common. And what is common to the patients is that their fathers, grandfathers, or great grandfathers worked in the cotton era: they cut cotton or were in some way connected to cotton. Now you see the problems three generations afterwards, principally with kidney disease, in all its phases. Also, you see children with an expanded heart and high blood pressure. Then you see encephalitic problems, problems with the brain. Kids have a brain that is very large. They sometimes have hydrocephalus, another type of complication (a condition in which fluid accumulates in the brain, enlarging the head and sometimes causing brain damage). And you also see problems with the lungs. Babies are born with a lung that doesn’t function.

So three generations afterwards, we get these problems. So, why is it that the only connection is to cotton? Academics have done studies on this and research shows that there is much more contamination in the air, in the water, and in the soil here than they have in other places in Guatemala or even in the department capital of Esquintla (about 90 kilometers away). It shouldn’t be like that, but they’ve demonstrated this.

We have an aquifer here and should have enough water to supply massive populations, but it hasn’t been easy to make our water potable (drinkable). There is contamination in the water, and the rivers are also polluted. When they extract water from the subsoil, there is contamination and it’s not that easy to cleanse.

This is the most powerful theory about why our children are afflicted with chronic illnesses: the contamination of the subsoil. Over time, the chemicals have formed into elements that are now harming our children. The only way for the body to filtrate the chemicals is in the blood through the kidneys. So it damages the kidneys. The contamination gets captured in the kidneys and it degrades them. It generates a bodily deformity, and the deformity is chronic.

And remember, the majority of the cases, unlike in other places, are made up of children and teenagers. And we don’t have the funds necessary from the state to be able to investigate this further. And if the money is raised, it is spent on the patients, but we need money to understand more about the causes of this problem and its source, to be able to combat it.

The late Marvin Giovanni Peña, Feb. 20, 2018.

Poverty and Racism

“Kike” Yantuche is a 30-year old man who hails from Mixco, Guatemala, a municipality of close to 500,000 people some 10 miles from the country’s capital, Guatemala City. Its indigenous past is long and rich, as Spanish colonists were only figure heads in nominal government positions. Today, Mixco is densely populated, absorbed by the capital and residents there face the travails of modernization and contemporary Guatemalan life. Kike works as a sales executive for Banco Industrial, one of the largest banks in Central America, selling products like credit cards to bank customers. He spoke to me on May 11, 2019.

My life in Guatemala was a little difficult because I come from a very poor family. I know a lot of people who grew up in a house with a living room and a kitchen and everything else. I did not have any of that. Everyone in my family lived in the exact same space. It was really crazy; we were six persons in one small room: my parents, my brother and two sisters, and myself. It had nothing, it was just a room with a stove in the middle, and we slept in three beds near it that took up half of the room. We made one part of it into a kitchen near the stove, and on the other side there was a table. The bathroom was outside. The whole room was only 10 by 5 meters. It was really small. I don’t know why, but this is the first time I have talked about this because there are many things that I don’t like to remember. It’s really hard for me to talk about it. Everyone assumes I have had everything, and it’s not true.

Even in such conditions, I did not go hungry. My parents were able to bring us food, but taking a shower was really difficult because we had no water in our place, so all the time we used water from community washing areas (called Tanques). It was pretty tough from December through February because it could get really cold, and we did not have water heaters.

Luckily, I received money from a nun, like 50 US dollars a month, which was a lot of money for me because I was a student and it was a great help. But I stopped going to school after high school. In Guatemala, you can get a job if you have a high school degree, and if you have a good aptitude you can earn some money, so I was able to get a job at the bank, where I have been working for ten years.

At work my colleagues refer to me as an “Indian,” because my last name (Yantuche) is probably Mayan. I don’t really care. It’s just their ignorance. I consider myself mestizo. I speak only Spanish, no other language. I dress in a western way and I am Catholic. I don’t carry the religious beliefs of some of the Mayan people. In the beginning it was really hard for me because I don’t have their tradition and I don’t know why my friends and colleagues, my people, called me “Indian.” I just don’t know. They would call it to me right to my face. It’s like a nickname, you know. For example, they call me “Tatita,” which is a way for a Mayan person to refer to his or her grandfather. “Pech,” “Indio,” and they also say “Jacinto,” “Chino,” everything like that. In Guatemala, it’s really offensive, it’s an insult. But it’s part of the culture because everyone here wants to come from families that are European or American; they want to be white.

For example, when you buy something in a store, if you go buy like a beer in a local store, they call the people working there Chinos. “Chino, give me a beer.” Everybody thinks you can call them Chinos. “Indio” is the most common. If someone says the beer is good, and I say it’s not, and I keep insisting on my point of view, they say “you are an Indian.” This is code for someone who is stubborn, who won’t change their mind.

We don’t have national pride. For example, I went to Peru two years ago and they are very proud because they are Incan. In the central park of Cuzco, they have dances and music about Incan culture. Here, there is nothing. The presidents’ names are from Europe. The names are Berger, Arzu, names from Germany, Austria, Spain. We don’t have our own president.

Once I had these friends from Spain who were here in Guatemala doing volunteer work, I met them at a bar because I can talk with the girls, and the other guys don’t have the same ability, you know? I know them because they wanted to speak to a girl, and they couldn’t so I arranged things for them to talk to her and they became my friends. So once I was giving them a ride and they started calling me “Indio,” and it was really offensive. They thought they were better than me, and so they started calling me those names. But after this guy called me an “Indio” I told him to fuck off. I told them all to get out of my car. I told them to “fucking get out right now” and they said “no way,” and I said “get out.” Everyone has a limit. They call you those names because of how you appear. I am small, my skin is dark, I don’t have a lot of hair on my face. I don’t care. But they can’t mess with me because of it. and I am pretty good in mathematics, in writing. I know where I’m good. They can’t tell me they are better because I know it’s not true. I’ve been looking for new job opportunities where I can put my writing skills to use, and I think I am good enough, but the racism works against me. There is an author who has written about racism and how everybody here in Guatemala wants to belong to a rich family from Spain. It’s really weird, but it’s a part of our culture. I know I can’t change anything.

Kike plans to leave Guatemala to find a better life. He intends to go to Europe, perhaps France, perhaps Poland, where he has friends, and eventually emigrate to Australia, find work and write a novel.

Right now I live in a town (Mixco) where it’s really dangerous. I live with my parents there and rent a house. Even though my job is boring, I thought that with the money I made at the bank my family could be better off, but it’s not completely true. Some two years ago three men entered my home and robbed me of everything. So from that time on, I’ve been thinking that it’s just not possible to have anything here. I bought everything for the house, and right now I have nothing. But it’s my town, my grandparents and parents grew up there, and they don’t want to leave Mixco.

We have our demons, like violence and indifference. For example, where I live, last weekend, a man was murdered in the central park in my town. It was really ugly. The most incredible thing is the indifference of the people, because next to the murder there was a party being thrown for the public in the town square, to celebrate the conclusion of some elections. But just next to the party, one man was killed, he was murdered, and no one cared. The party kept going until one a.m., and nobody said “stop the music, we have a guy murdered here.” You know, the indifference, It’s amazing. You can’t believe it. The deep indifference, it’s incredible.

Five months ago I was sleeping, maybe six in the morning, when I heard “pah pah pah pah” (bullet sounds). So I said to myself, “shit, that was a shooting.” But when I got up my mom came into my room and said “stop, don’t go out,” but I needed to go out and see, and I went out and found a woman maybe 20 or 25 years old, she was still alive but she was dying, and her mother was trying to revive her and she was pleading for people to help.

But this is our reality and our government does nothing. They say that there comes a time here when it becomes too much. “We can’t take it any more. When will I be next?” In any moment, it can be you who is shot. So you ask yourself, “when will I be taken out?”

I do believe I could learn another language like French. I could stay in France for two or three years and then go to Australia. I have friends in Poland also. As for the US, I think for Latin people there are better destinations. In the US there is racism and the only work I would find would be at a farm or in construction. I’m looking for something else. My dream really is to go to Australia. I am going to turn 31 years old and one of my goals is to meet a girl, get married and have children. I am sure in Guatemala it is not possible to support a family the way I want, but in Australia and other places there are so many more opportunities.

But you never know what is waiting for you.

Juan-Enrique Yantuche at the Wawel Castle in Krakow, Poland. June 23, 2019

Life in the 1970s

Domingo Boche Estrada, 61 years of age, grew up in Antigua, Guatemala during the country’s civil war (1962-1996) and lives just outside of town today. While he did not participate in the war, Domingo lived in fear of being dragooned into the Guatemalan Military when he was young, which was a common concern among men living in Guatemala around the age of 18. He describes the process of forced recruitment and how he was able to avoid it in his youth. I interviewed him on September 29, 2018. Below are excerpts from his testimony, edited and translated.

There was a man, they called him Chita, like in Tarzan, and he shined shoes in the central square and had a permanent place there. He was always at his workshop, and there were always people around him talking to him. But when he wasn’t there, that was the signal that soldiers would soon arrive to Antigua and work with the local comisionados militares (military commissioners) to capture people for the army.

[These comisionados militares originally formed in 1938 to recruit people into the military. Prominent members of a particular community would usually be chosen to perform this role, and they later aided in gathering counterinsurgency intelligence during the war.]

Chita was part of it, part of the recruiting. Generally, we always monitored Chita, because when he wasn’t there that was the indication that the military was coming to grab guys, so we all communicated among each other, among us young guys, to inform each other so as not to leave our homes, because if we went out we might have back luck and be captured.

No one wanted to go into the army because there was a lot of bad talk about military service. There was a fear of it. There were so many stories of guys being taken to the military encampment and beaten. They would be denigrated. For example, the army would take a guy, strip him down and throw him into freezing water, or they would make him eat bad things, to degrade him. If a soldier of a higher rank wanted to punish his subordinate for not doing his job well, the punishment would be severe. I never experienced it, but the stories were legion. So many things that were not correct. Maybe it was a way to harden them, so when they went into the field of battle, they would apply the same attitude that had been applied to them.

In reality, there was nothing in the mind of the people about the conflict, they just heard of the suffering that the soldiers had to endure, so they tried to avoid the military. The people had no concept of communism or capitalism. They heard about it but did not understand what the ideas represented. It was only when I went to the university in Guatemala City that I came into contact with these ideas. But the people did not have any interest in being part of any one group. They really did not know why they were fighting.

The military commissioners in town were part of the military, or close to it. They had a lot of privileges, benefits like access to the comisiariato, a store for the military, exclusively for them, where they could go and buy boots, shoes, clothes, whiskey, a lot of imported goods at really cheap prices.

The military commissioners did the recruiting in their own pickup trucks, and they would usually operate with one or two soldiers that came from the city. There would be as many as ten commissioners total, and they would take up strategic positions in town, where young men would pass, so when they saw potential recruits, they would attack them. Maybe they would place themselves in the central square, or at other strategic areas, and usually they would come around the time when people went to work, because they knew people would have to go to their jobs. The recruiters would hide, chase the young guys, and capture them. And then they would take them to the pick-up, and there would be an armed soldier waiting. And if the recruits tried to get away, they would pursue them and beat them with hoses that had blades tied to them.

All of my life that was happening, but when I was almost 18, I really had to hide from the military commissioners, so as not to go into the army, because that was a fear we all had, as a youth, to be captured and taken away to the barracks.

There once was a procession [a parade with strong community involvement, most often carried out for religious purposes]. Usually processions would be respected, but one day we were going along with the procession and the commissioners appeared behind it, so, because I was with two older brothers and some friends who also could be recruited, we started to walk little by little away from the procession, and then we started to run. Unfortunately, one of our friends was captured.

But that turned out to be a funny situation. At that time, our friend lived near the recruiting office, the office of military reserves. It was at this office that they would take and look at the recruits, review their documents and everything, and then see if there was some defect to them, or if they could be exempted because they were married, or if they were butchers, worked in hospitals or health clinics. Because he lived close to him, my friend knew the official there and was a friend of his. So the official invited him to sit down and have some coffee, and then let him go. The soldiers were mad but the official said, “ah, he’s my friend.”

Domingo’s Background

Domingo was part of a large family, being one of ten children, with three sisters and six brothers. His father ran a bakery with his mother’s assistance.

My mom never studied. She was from a very poor family that worked on a coffee plantation. Later, she left, but my grandparents continued working there. My mother, when she was playing with other children, got struck in the eye with a branch, and after that accident, she didn’t go back to school, so she could not read or write. Also, my grandmother had trouble taking her to the school on time, and would get scolded by the teacher and my mother didn’t like it.

My father’s parents worked on a coffee plantation also, but they had a piece of land and had some cows. My father would help his dad and take them out to pasture.

When my father was like seven or eight years of age, he was in the street playing when the police passed and asked where his parents were, and then they took him and some others to school. The police told the teacher that they had found these kids playing in the street, so they asked the teacher to take them in and teach them, so my father learned to read and write and learned how to add and subtract.

My father stopped school when he burned his hand around the age of nine. Because his family was poor, they cooked over the floor on stones, and he was sitting near the fire at night, and he began to nod off, and all of a sudden, he started to fall forward and burned part of his hand. That’s when he stopped studying.

I never knew my grandparents because they died when my parents were young. I think my dad’s parents spoke Kachiquel, because we had an aunt who spoke Kachiquel. But since my dad moved from his home in Chimaltenango to Antigua early in life, he changed part of his customs because the culture here is different. We really all have indigenous roots, but we lost contact with the culture.

Domingo went on to study at the University of San Carlos in architecture, but later took up the humanities to teach high school. His brother also studied at the university, in economics.

At the university you learned about capitalism and marxism. We could not completely embrace marxism because of our catholicism. I was in the middle. I was what they call a radish, red on the outside but white on the inside. I used to argue with my brother at home because he studied economics and tended to defend capitalism more. My mother got worried about the arguments and thought we were going to come to blows, so we had to convince her that we were not going to attack each other, that we were just having a discussion. But most people had no idea about these ideologies. The guys who were recruited into the military were just told that communists were bent on destroying democracy, so they would go out and kill the guerrillas.

The Journey Begins

I am an historian currently living in Antigua, Guatemala and New Haven, Connecticut. This site is designed to offer insight into the lives of Guatemalans and others who live in the country through a compilation of oral testimony accrued from personal interviews. By publishing excerpts from a number of my conversations (and in most cases translating them to English), I hope to highlight the varied experiences of individuals under particular historical conditions: their challenges, struggles, and forms of perseverance.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

At the Cantina

Joe, who works at a cantina in Tiquisate on the South Coast of Guatemala, spoke to me on the night of Feb. 20, 2018, along with his friend, James Jason. Both were eager to speak in English.

I don’t know who I am. My parents were killed in Guatemala when I was a baby, so some people brought me to the United Stats and I grew up as a chicano. I lived in Tucson. I still have no papers from anywhere, not from the United States, not from Guatemala. I got deported from the US and now I am here in Tiquisate, working in this cantina. We only have one girl here because a bunch of the others left. There were like five here. You never know when the money comes in. There is always money around, but who knows when it comes your way.

I got deported after serving 15 years in prison in the US. It was about drugs. I originally got 30 years but served 15. This all happened when I was 13 years old. I served in the minors (a juvenile detention center) and then in the majors (a federal penitentiary). I also spent time in jail in Guatemala because I got into a fight. In Guatemala, you have to pay to be in jail. It’s not that way in the US. There is no pressure to pay anyone. But it’s different in Guatemala. And if you’ve got money, you don’t even go to jail. People with money can buy their way out, because it’s all about the money.

The hardest thing when I got here was the language. I didn’t speak Spanish so I had to learn it. But now it’s fine. And I have settled down. I am not like what I used to be. That’s all done. I’m 40 years old and don’t want to go back to those places. I stay out of trouble. I have a two-year old daughter and I am a very good father. But still, I have no idea what to do. I’m just here. I may try to get back into the United States in a few months.

James Jason, a young Guatemalan man who was hanging out at the cantina where Joe works.

I lived in Texas, but I was thrown in jail here in Guatemala not long ago, and I spent six months there. A friend of mine murdered a woman not too far from where we are sitting. She was a lesbian and my friend thought she was too involved with his wife. The police know he killed her, but they dragged me into it because I was his friend and I had been with him that night. I had nothing to do with it. It was bullshit. I told them I wasn’t even there. Anyway, I spent time in a Guatemalan jail. That sucked.