Ya somos de la colonia

As some of you may know, Elena and I moved recently. I have been staying with a family in Colonia Pampojilá (or “la colonia,” as it is referred to by community members and the attendants on the pickups that serve as local public transportation), a hamlet that is about 15 minutes from San Lucas by pickup. This community is inhabited primarily by descendants of plantation workers laboring under a system of debt peonage on an adjacent finca. I found the family when, asking around about places I could stay to be immersed in Kaqchikel, I was introduced by a friend of a friend to Lorenzo Cuj, a very active local community organizer who incidentally had an extra room and whose family speaks no Spanish in the home. After a few weeks of hearing about my evenings and mornings with the family, Elena started asking about the possibility of both of us staying with them, and about a week later, we packed up all our things and moved down to Lorenzo’s.

This move has elicited quite a variety of reactions. Initially, a good deal of concern and incredulity from Vicente, warning us that the “environment is different down here” (“pero, el ámbito es muy distinto aquí”). Then, more concern from our groundsman in San Lucas, who, as a semi-urban Ladino, barely hides his uneasiness about indigenous, rural folks. Peals of laughter from Petrona and Rosalina, the giggly health promoters from Pampojilá, amidst jokes that they are going to visit our house to make sure we don’t have tuberculosis, since we are now in their catchment area (“¡ya son de la colonia!”). Speechless, open-mouthed stares from children poking their heads in the kitchen window to watch the gringos eat. And tough love from Dominga, who has begun speaking to me almost exclusively in Kaqchikel and waiting to see how much I understood before translating into Spanish.

Our digs are a bit more rustic. Day-old newspaper serves as toilet paper in the outhouse latrine. At the moment, an astonishingly large pig is tied up next to the outhouse—Miss Piggy is getting greedy (her grunts and squeals can be heard all over the neighborhood if she has not been fed), and she will likely be sold in the next month as pork is called for in recipes traditionally prepared during the Christmas season. Until last week, outdoor bucket baths in very cold water straight from the pila (see the photo below) were the only option for bathing. A recent upgrade was made in our bathing situation—we now enjoy a bathing station fashioned by pinning three tall pieces of tarp to form three curtains; the fourth wall is a piece of sheet metal that serves as a fence between the yard and a steep ravine. These arrangements were made when Elena inquired about what measures the women of the house took to maintain modesty while bathing; we have been told repeatedly that this was a welcome change for the other women, as well, and even one of the sons has expressed his appreciation of the wind cover that the tarp bathing station provides. Hot water is apparently available, but, for now, we are not requesting this because it would require burning precious firewood for something other than food. We shall see how far into “verano” (“summer,” which is apparently the season we are entering, although it is far colder than the preceding rainy months of “invierno,” or “winter”) we make it with unheated pila water.

The food is wonderfully different from the pseudo-North American fare served at the parish—dozens of tortillas are served hot off the woodburning stove at every meal, and I have found myself becoming unable to eat until a stack of them are within reach. Beans, eggs, roasted tomato sauce and the occasional piece of chicken or slice of soft white cheese are the usual, with a few egg noodle dishes and soups thrown in here and there.

Also, we have been informed by Lorenzo that the water coming from the tap itself has held up to multiple studies by Centro de Salud (the local government health center), even though the water stored in the pila is full of coliforms. In general, after a few conversations with employess from the Centro de Salud, I don’t really trust that very much of what they say or do is of the highest standard, but Lorenzo’s sincerity and insistence made a trial of tap water obligatory. The trial is still continuing, and our GI tracts have not yet mounted a full-scale revolt against this act of solidarity. In any case, our backup plan is to begin disinfecting the tap water with a few drops of bleach if we find that we are getting too sick, too often.

The most important thing, however, is that the family is a delight, and being in a house full of people and commotion is a welcome change from the beautiful but cavernous and empty chalet-style building where we had been staying.

Lorenzo, the father of the family, is a small but fiery and outspoken man in his early forties. He taught himself to read and write at the age of 8 using books and listening to a literacy class transmitted by a local radio station; by the time he was 9, he had gained sufficient proficiency to be named a literacy promoter, charged with teaching his fellow community members. He proudly relates that he and two other boys taught every male in the community and that people still call him, “professor,” even though he has never had any formal training in pedagogy. At 13, he was appointed secretary by the community’s junta directiva, or administrative council, for his written communication skills in Spanish, a language that few of the community elders understood or spoke (much less read), but that was nonetheless the medium required for all government legal proceedings.

It was from his grandfather, who was a member of the junta directiva and an important proponent of local land reform, that Lorenzo learned to channel his personal experience of the racism, poverty and violence suffered by indigenous finca workers into a life of service and struggle for social justice. He relates how his “popular education” evolved through a series of stages, beginning with a short stint in seminary and continuing with workshops on community organizing, Marxism and liberation theology. He has worked for land reform and an end to impunity all over Guatemala, from the K’iche’ to Cobán to the Petén, and he relates that during the worst of the overt violence in the early 1980s, he rarely stayed at home and never told his family the truth about where he was going so as to protect them from harm. As a result of his work throughout the country, Lorenzo now speaks three Mayan languages in addition to his native Kaqchikel: Q’eqchi’, K’iche’ and Tz’utujil.

He was once taken from his house by soldiers, bound, gagged and thrown in the back of a pick-up to be questioned at the local barracks for three days. He left the country on numerous occasions, ostensibly to attend workshops and conferences, in reality to get out when it seemed that he might be in danger. In 2002, he helped to exhume and publicize a mass grave in the K’iche’, and his group was able to provide convincing evidence that the army was responsible for the murders; when legal proceedings began, he and others began to get signs that they might be targeted, and he was urged by colleagues to flee. A U.S. American attorney, who had befriended Lorenzo many years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer, returned to Guatemala to accompany him and keep him safe while working to get papers in order to bring him to California.

Lorenzo spent four years in the United States (“I got a tourist visa, then I bought a green card,” he says), and has many stories of the racism and xenophobia he encountered there. He came home last December, and he says that he wants to stay around home as much as possible now—his children tell him that he missed their childhood, between all his work in other parts of the country and his stint in the U.S.—but he has not lost sight of his compromiso (obligation) to continue what he considers important work. In 2000, he graduated with a degree in social work and is now working with other active community leaders from the surrounding rural areas to conduct needs-assessments and to initiate grass-roots community development projects.

Although he has only been back for about a year, he has already been elected president of the community’s junta directiva. One of his plans for the coming year is to fight for legal acknowledgment of a neighboring hamlet’s natural springs as public domain. When the community’s land was purchased by the parish from Miramar, the wealthy finca owner reserved the right to the water on that land, using the river to generate energy and the natural spring water for the foodstuffs produced by his dairy factory Parma, all at the expense of the community members’ own water supply. All in all, Lorenzo might embellish a little bit, but he only does so because he knows that he has had an amazing life and is a tremendously inspiring person, and I am glad to have met him and look forward to getting to know him better.

Lorenzo’s wife, Doña Candelaria, is a similarly amazing person. Unfortunately, we have not learned as much about her life because she speaks little “Castilla,” or Spanish, and my Kaqchikel, though improving, is still hardly good enough to engage in real conversation. She is up before the sun every morning, shuffling around to get a start on the day before anyone else is awake. She does all her duties as the matriarch of a Mayan family, cooking, cleaning and making beds, but, probably in part due to Lorenzo’s frequent absence for many years, she also does work that is usually delegated to men: digging ditches, tending to and harvesting coffee and maize up in the mountain. She is an amazing, graceful and humble woman, and I look forward to learning from her—not just how to speak Kaqchikel, but also how to give much more to one’s world than one has received.

The children in the family are, in order: Lesvia, 24, married and with her first infant, she lives with her husband in another part of town; Rubin, 21, a seminary student in the department capital of Sololá; Werner, 19, studying in San Lucas to be a bilingual school teacher in Spanish and Kaqchikel; Mariela, 15, an adorably chatty and playful girl; Greysi, 13, also pleasant but painfully shy, and an astoundingly good weaver; and Rosbin, 7, (above) the cutest, sprightliest little boy I have ever met!

We have enjoyed our life thus far in Colonia Pampojilá, and we look forward to sharing more about our experiences here in the future!