San Pedro La Laguna, Week 1 (7/9-7/15)

I’ve just spent over a week in San Pedro La Laguna, a town perched on beautiful Lake Atitlan--called the umbilicus of the world by the local Maya. It is a fathomless lake, thought by geologists to be a collapsed, dormant caldera. San Pedro is a strange place. Walking down its poorly cobbled or plain dirt roads you are as likely to hear Tz’utujil Mayan as German, French, or Spanish. It is a crossroads for down-and-outers, backpacking hippies, small time druggies who have fled jail time, high class turistas, and loads of Ladinos from Guatemala City. The local population, the Tz’utujil, seem as content to allow their home to be this outland destination as they were to suffer under the Spanish for the last 500 years. In the face of overwhelming forces, you just smile, make what business you can, and keep to your own. The women still wear their traditional handwoven huipiles (blouses) and cortes (wrap dresses). Old men wear short white pants, handwoven shirts, and large hats to keep the sun off their faces. Younger men and most children wear American clothes and baseball caps. In spite of the transient backpacker population there is a certain small town gravity that holds you here and folds you into the local habits and rhythms. It is a rhythm, and a slow one at that. After a few days here you start to notice which mangy dogs belong on which side of town, what time a certain old man will be strolling down a certain street carrying a bag full of unknown supplies, and you begin to utter a lazy, half-formed “buenas tardes” to each passerby after they do the same to you. After a while you’re just part of the weird carnival and people accept your stay here as they have accepted the stay of the other backpackers, gringos, and Spaniards.

My school, Corazon Maya, lies on the far south side of town, the outskirts. This location was important to me. I knew well enough from my brief stay here four years ago and from reading various blogs and reviews that to land oneself on the other side of town, in the middle of “Gringolandia,” was to suffer terrible music played terribly loud and long nights of interrupted sleep. This dormant side of town, like the dormancy of the numerous volcanoes which tower above us here, suits me fine. The school specializes, as do all of the schools here, in teaching Spanish to foreigners. There is an irony here lost on most of the tourists, namely that Spanish is foreign to their Spanish teachers. Everyone here is Tz’utujil. The language they were raised to speak is Tz’utujil. The language they speak with their friends is Tz’utujil and the language they speak during teaching breaks and when they go home is Tz’utujil. That being said, most speak quite good Spanish. The Guatemalan government, which until only the last few years has been notoriously racist against the Maya, required everyone to speak Spanish. And though their education system is terrible—most do not make it past 3rd or 4th grade here—all legal, political, and other issues of power are arbitrated in Spanish so it has been needful for the Maya to learn this language as well as they could. This bit of colonialism is probably one of the few blessings of a repressive regime since they now use this foreign language as a means to make their living as well as to communicate with other Maya; there are 22 distinct Mayan languages in Guatemala after all! Like English in India, there are a few benefits to Empire.

Corazon Maya found me a superb teacher for Tz’utujil, Juan, a local San Pedrano in his late thirties who lives in the center of town with his wife and two children. I really couldn’t imagine coming across a better teacher for Tz’utujil. Juan has spent a number of years scraping by, spending the better part of his time and energy in various cultural studies and projects. He is quite dedicated to doing what he can to preserve Mayan tradition. Though he has little formal education, he has mastered Spanish grammar and helped to write the most current text on Tz’utujil grammar, studying its varied usage in the six communities of the Tz’utujil Maya for a number of years. He knows most of the Mayan glyphs which look somewhat like the cross sections of those extrusions of Play-Doh most of us used to mold as children. Juan effortlessly illustrates these wild organic forms on a small marker board for me, and explains various levels of their significance. And they have quite a few levels of significance! He’ll often teach me a Tz’utujil word for something and then recall the word for the same item in K’iche’, Kaqchiqkel, Ma’am, and proto-Mayan to illustrate the relationship between various sounds across time and place in Guatemala.

We meet each morning at a small table in front of my one room cabana. Juan makes use of small marker board and I proceed to take 3-5 pages of dense notes from 8am until 1pm. We break for 15 minutes at 10am and head up to a gathering place where I urgently speak and listen to English in an effort to calm my Tz’utujil buzzed neurons and sip a bit of bad instant coffee, the good beans from places like this are to be found in Starbuck’s and Peet’s, anywhere but here in these peoples’ kitchens. In a week, Juan’s proceeded to introduce me to the Tz’utujil sounds (a difficult combination of glottals and tones that seem an awkward conjunction of German, Mandarin, and !Kung), a handful of the most common phrases (which I’ve begun to use amid much laughter), verbs and their basic conjugations, articles, adjectives, the ancient Mayan number system, and the use of various suffixes to indicate possession, pluralization, and so forth. The language is utterly different from any I’ve studied before but Juan’s attempt to use Spanish grammar as a structure to map onto, as well as his systematic approach, makes this formidable challenge seem quite accessible. We’ll see in six more weeks whether this is a bit of shamanic trickery or not.

In addition to five hours of personal tutorials in Tz’utujil I spend another couple of hours in the afternoon or evening reviewing, working on an Excel spreadsheet of various words and their usage notes, and attempting to read bits from my Tz’utujil dictionary and a collection of traditional stories in Tz’utujil and Spanish. In total, I’m spending approximately 7 hours of intense study per day which I figure is earning my pay from the U.S. Department of State and Department of Education who have generously funded this adventure through UCSD’s CILAS (Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies).

Each afternoon, I’ve tried to get in the lake for a long swim. The water is ideal, just about 72 degrees I would guess. After an initial chill you get accustomed to it. I swim far into the lake, though I’m careful to be circumspect so as to avoid being run over by one the sporadic launches that shuttles tourists and locals from town to town—each with its own stretch of lakefront, all well-spaced from one another. Occasionally, I’ll stop swimming, remove my goggles, and peer around the lake, quietly taking in the exotic green beauty of this place. Besides these swims, I’ve been reading a fair bit and walking around town listening to snippets of Tz’utujil and Spanish. My Spanish was rough the first couple of days but has picked up quickly the last couple. It’s mainly a task of practicing the pronunciation that I once owned in the language.

My cabana is a sturdy shack of brick and tile. It is cleanly built and a little dark in spite of its two windows. I was more than pleased to find plenty of electrical outlets which has enabled full access to my computer and control of the lights. I have a bathroom two cabanas up from me that I use. It is anything but glamorous, a toilet without a toilet seat, a sink crawling with ants, and an on-demand electrical shower (electrical shower? This can’t be good). Having suffered many months without electricity or running water before, I count my blessings here. I am really quite comfortable; it’s a much improved version of a Medieval monastic cell, good for study and meditation on God or Godlessness.

I woke up my first Saturday here to a terrible bout of the revenge which proceeded to exact its vengeance upon me in just five or six hours. This prevented me from hiking the looming San Pedro volcano, which I had wanted to do over the weekend. The volcano is a geometrically perfect triangle, the sure inspiration of Chichen Itza, Tikal, Copan, El Mirador, and unnamed pyramids still hidden beneath canopy or dirt. Sunday I felt improved enough to take a launch over to Panajachel, the entry to the Lake Atitlan area and far more touristy than San Pedro. The Mayas refer to it as Gringotenango (Gringoville). I enjoyed walking up the main street, Calle Santander, and looking in at the stalls of weavings, hammocks, and jade artifacts. After a few hours of strolling and a light lunch, I returned across a bumpy lake to San Pedro. I hope to take more adventurous excursions into Guatemala in future weekends.

Walking on San Pedro’s dirty, ramshackle streets with the variety of toddler, adult, and ancient folks going to and fro as well as a full complement of collarless strolling dogs has made me feel very nostalgic for my times with Amigos de las Americas. It’s been about twelve years since I worked with them. I worked with Amigos in rural parts of Ecuador, Mexico, and Paraguay back in the early 90s. Weird as it sounds, the dirtiness and visible poverty brings me warm memories of deep friendships fastly formed and a period of youth and transition which I am both pleased and saddened to have gotten through. But whatever warmth these sights, sounds, and smells bring to my limbic sensibilities, my cortex criticizes the whole mess. Trash is strewn in every cornfield and effluence pours into the same lake from which the locals fish out their pescaditos and in which I enjoy my sublime swim each afternoon mindful not to swallow any lakewater. The beaches along the lake feature more trash than shells. Diesel smoke belches from vehicles that would have been sidelined years ago in the states and static-filled music blares at illegal decibels from every crappy radio. Sometime, not so long ago, this place was a village without electricity, tourists, or much metal. Sometime, not so far in the future, this place will be a Cancun or a Puerto Vellarta, decked with high rise hotels (all amenities included) and police officers to enforce civic codes and litter laws. Right now, it lies somewhere in between, still resonant in its own identity but fully infiltrated by colonials, tourists, and moody anthropologists.