A Gallo Christmas
(Or, The Beautiful and the Ridiculous)
Standing in the center of Parque Independencia, the city’s most picturesque obelisk where the main veins converge—Avenida Las Americas, Boulevard Liberacion, and La Reforma—, stands a massive green cone glittering with Christmas tinsel, candy canes, snowmen, and crowned with, of all things, the ubiquitous Gallo Cerveza logo. The sight embodies so much of what I’ve found to be a balancing act between the beautiful and the ridiculous here.
Not far from the Obelisco, and just a block over from La Reforma, Guatemala City’s grandest avenue (to our consternation, they close it every Sunday for public access—dog-walkers, joggers, bike rides, and the like, so it’s nearly impossible to get from one side of the city to the other), the most obnoxious replica of the Eiffel Tower you could imagine stradles a dirty intersection of a run down business district of Zona 9. We pass by El Torre del Reformador every Sunday on the way home from Church.
El Torre was erected in honor of president Justo Rufino Barrios’ “reforms” of the 1880s, which amounted to putting Guatemala on the capitalist map with the introduction of coffee as a large-scale cash crop (finally Guatemala had something to offer the world besides cochineal, a dye made from cactus worms, and formerly Guatemala’s chief export. Never heard of it, right?) But to pull this off, Barrios needed both land and a sizeable workforce. Like so much bad history before him, he looked to the indiginous Indians to fill both needs. Barrios seized Indians lands and auctioned them off to the highest bidders. Since the Indians could not afford to buy their own land back, they lost it to wealthy landowers or foreigners, mostly Germans. Not willing to work for the pathetically low wages offered them, the Indians were content to live in self-sustaining simplicity off their own corn plots. Good enough. But Barrios solved this problem by instituting a system of forced labor called mandamientos, giving local police authority to round up the males of every household to be used as landowners saw fit. A convenient system of debt bondage was adapted to put the Indians to “good use” helping Guatemala become another champion of “capitalism.”
El Torre del Reformador, then, with all its junk metal, celebrates the junk reforms of a junk president; yet another example of a beautiful country blurred by an obnoxious monument.
A prominent though more subtle form of the same thing is Guatemala’s social class system. Guatemalan’s are beautiful people, both on and under the surface, rich or poor, it doesn’t matter. Not to us anyway. Class in Guatemala, and maybe everywhere it holds sway, is defined in large part by education, which is defined by birth (usually), which is defined by fate or if you’re religious, by God. Ultimately then, if you follow me, class comes back to a source outside of ourselves. We can do very little to control it. There are exceptions, of course, but you must turn stones to find them. There is little use boasting in one’s birth, since one can’t lift a finger to influence it.
If you engage a ladino (generally mid- to upper-class mix of Indian and Spanish blood) on the subject of the “help,” education is cited as the dominant divider between rich and poor, upper and working class, the haves and the have nots, or however you want to put it. It most cases, it is taken for granted that the “uneducated” cannot be trusted, befriended, or given any decent measure of outward respect. The “help,” as they prefer to be called (not 'maid' or 'muchacha', which are more common), don’t eat at the same table, in some cases don’t use the same utinsils, and are often reduced to a humble table in the garage. The “help,” if they’re lucky enough to get a ride in a car, climb in the backseat without a word, even if they’re the only passenger.
I realize this is not the United States, and I know this country and others like it have long and complex cultural histories, but at the risk of sounding naïve to these realities, I cannot buy into this kind of supercilious nonsense. I may be beating a dead horse, but here’s why: First, “education” is only got by proximity, or luck, or, to use the language of Christianity, by grace. If you are born into a family of means, you get educated. You get to have maids. You get what you want. You drive shiny SUV’s with tinted windows and uniformed guards with shotguns man your house front, and subservient muchachas wipe your toddlers plump asses for you.
Second, “education” is overrated. Regardless of education, life happens to you. Nobody is spared. Both get ill, both have mediocre sex, and both chew the same chiclets bubble gum under the same ultraviolet sun. They both fall in love in the same old ways, die the same tragic deaths, and get buried in the same soil as their fathers and mothers before them. Both eat rice and beans, cry at births and weddings and funerals, and dream of betters lives in a time of peace.
Aside from all that, and perhaps more importantly, we’ve found the “lower” class to be much warmer and friendlier—the kind of folk, rooted in community, we came in part to find. The class makeup of this culture is the most ridiculous—no, the most obnoxious—thing we’ve seen yet, worse by far than the Gallo Christmas tree.
And here we are, oddball and obnoxious lower-middle class Americans living amongst a private, buttoned up, and elite diplomat community in a part of the city so removed from the real Guatemala it begins to resemble the materialistic commericism we thought we had left behind. No such luck.
Not far from the Obelisco, and just a block over from La Reforma, Guatemala City’s grandest avenue (to our consternation, they close it every Sunday for public access—dog-walkers, joggers, bike rides, and the like, so it’s nearly impossible to get from one side of the city to the other), the most obnoxious replica of the Eiffel Tower you could imagine stradles a dirty intersection of a run down business district of Zona 9. We pass by El Torre del Reformador every Sunday on the way home from Church.
El Torre was erected in honor of president Justo Rufino Barrios’ “reforms” of the 1880s, which amounted to putting Guatemala on the capitalist map with the introduction of coffee as a large-scale cash crop (finally Guatemala had something to offer the world besides cochineal, a dye made from cactus worms, and formerly Guatemala’s chief export. Never heard of it, right?) But to pull this off, Barrios needed both land and a sizeable workforce. Like so much bad history before him, he looked to the indiginous Indians to fill both needs. Barrios seized Indians lands and auctioned them off to the highest bidders. Since the Indians could not afford to buy their own land back, they lost it to wealthy landowers or foreigners, mostly Germans. Not willing to work for the pathetically low wages offered them, the Indians were content to live in self-sustaining simplicity off their own corn plots. Good enough. But Barrios solved this problem by instituting a system of forced labor called mandamientos, giving local police authority to round up the males of every household to be used as landowners saw fit. A convenient system of debt bondage was adapted to put the Indians to “good use” helping Guatemala become another champion of “capitalism.”
El Torre del Reformador, then, with all its junk metal, celebrates the junk reforms of a junk president; yet another example of a beautiful country blurred by an obnoxious monument.
A prominent though more subtle form of the same thing is Guatemala’s social class system. Guatemalan’s are beautiful people, both on and under the surface, rich or poor, it doesn’t matter. Not to us anyway. Class in Guatemala, and maybe everywhere it holds sway, is defined in large part by education, which is defined by birth (usually), which is defined by fate or if you’re religious, by God. Ultimately then, if you follow me, class comes back to a source outside of ourselves. We can do very little to control it. There are exceptions, of course, but you must turn stones to find them. There is little use boasting in one’s birth, since one can’t lift a finger to influence it.
If you engage a ladino (generally mid- to upper-class mix of Indian and Spanish blood) on the subject of the “help,” education is cited as the dominant divider between rich and poor, upper and working class, the haves and the have nots, or however you want to put it. It most cases, it is taken for granted that the “uneducated” cannot be trusted, befriended, or given any decent measure of outward respect. The “help,” as they prefer to be called (not 'maid' or 'muchacha', which are more common), don’t eat at the same table, in some cases don’t use the same utinsils, and are often reduced to a humble table in the garage. The “help,” if they’re lucky enough to get a ride in a car, climb in the backseat without a word, even if they’re the only passenger.
I realize this is not the United States, and I know this country and others like it have long and complex cultural histories, but at the risk of sounding naïve to these realities, I cannot buy into this kind of supercilious nonsense. I may be beating a dead horse, but here’s why: First, “education” is only got by proximity, or luck, or, to use the language of Christianity, by grace. If you are born into a family of means, you get educated. You get to have maids. You get what you want. You drive shiny SUV’s with tinted windows and uniformed guards with shotguns man your house front, and subservient muchachas wipe your toddlers plump asses for you.
Second, “education” is overrated. Regardless of education, life happens to you. Nobody is spared. Both get ill, both have mediocre sex, and both chew the same chiclets bubble gum under the same ultraviolet sun. They both fall in love in the same old ways, die the same tragic deaths, and get buried in the same soil as their fathers and mothers before them. Both eat rice and beans, cry at births and weddings and funerals, and dream of betters lives in a time of peace.
Aside from all that, and perhaps more importantly, we’ve found the “lower” class to be much warmer and friendlier—the kind of folk, rooted in community, we came in part to find. The class makeup of this culture is the most ridiculous—no, the most obnoxious—thing we’ve seen yet, worse by far than the Gallo Christmas tree.
And here we are, oddball and obnoxious lower-middle class Americans living amongst a private, buttoned up, and elite diplomat community in a part of the city so removed from the real Guatemala it begins to resemble the materialistic commericism we thought we had left behind. No such luck.
posted by Daniel Todd at 1:22 PM
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